Who—Or What—Is Next?

 It’s been said that the deaths of famous people come in threes. Within the past two weeks, we lost two of the most amazing women: Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem.  Some (including me) would count Tim Curry, who died the same day as Dolly. Others might Robin Morgan, who passed yesterday, in the group. Perhaps we should make it four:  In Japanese and other cultures, the number is associated with death.

Strange times we’re in (as if we weren’t before). One of my neighbors, whom I usually encountered while smoking with other neighbors just outside our building, has kicked the habit. That’s a good thing, of course (unless you have stock in Philip-Morris), but the circumstances that brought him to that decision weren’t delightful:  While in a store, he started gasping and was rushed to the emergency room.  Oh, and someone else I know was ordered to the hospital immediately when tests revealed liver damage.

Somehow I knew change was gonna come (apologies to Sam Cooke) as I set out for Point Lookout, a ride I have taken many times. The weather was almost too perfect:  temperature-wise, more like a day later in this month or even next month, preternaturally blue skies and white, puffy clouds. Waves rolled in, echoing streams of flapping egrets’ wings. Perhaps it had to do with hearing, before I set out to ride, about a news item about an event to commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Like almost everybody else who lived through that day, I remember how beautiful it was right before the planes flew toward the towers: much like yesterday.

Movies and TV programs never show disasters happening on days like yesterday or, for that matter, 11 September 2001. But the times before, if not the disaster itself, then the loss of innocence, always seem to be idyllic, even Edenic, shown through a scrim, or perhaps a gauze, of dreamlike haze. Even the sunset, when seen through that mist, wispy clouds drifting about, does not seem to portend the coming of the moment when it all becomes a memory—and nobody in the scene knows what’s coming. The audience does, but they can’t tell.

Gloria Steinem Dies In The Middle Of Her Life, At 92

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

She admits that she didn’t coin the phrase.  But she probably did more to popularize it (and its paraphrase, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”)

I am talking, of course, about the one and only Gloria Steinem.  Please indulge me that one cliche: She was not only one-of-a-kind; I truly believe that it’s simply not possible for this world, let alone the human race, to produce anyone else like her.

Yesterday she passed away, age 92.

I remember my disbelief when hearing that she was 80 years old. She seemed to be as much in the middle of her life as she was decades earlier. Perhaps it came from living and working for the causes she championed  with the knowledge that even when a policy changed, a new law passed or people (some, anyway) changed the way they thought, her work would never end. She clearly never forgot the struggles she faced while growing up (her father died when she was 11) or as a young woman trying to make her way in male-dominated spheres.

Her body has ceased to function. But her legacy hasn’t, in spite of Trump’s (and his allies’) attempts to destroy it. That is why she will always be in the middle of her life: the only possible, let alone proper, way to remember her.

This Light, That Color

 A downpour in the early hours. Rain until late morning. Then this:

I have never seen such a sky early in the afternoon in this part of the world.

I am not Vincent Van Gogh who, I believe, experienced colors as energies and balanced (especially violet and yellow) rather than merely contrasted or complemented them, as someone like me, who can only see colors, would. Nor am I Claude Monet, who sensed light as a tapestry of colors and textures woven into a moment. But I do perceive and remember moments, events and people by the light around them. 

I believe I will recall early this afternoon—an otherwise ordinary time—by the light of that sky, unlike any other I have seen. Does it convey some energy I can’t yet, and perhaps never will be able to, explain?