Thoughts on Grief
Recently, I became interested in the idea of grief as an inheritance. There is an ongoing conversation about Black Americans carrying the DNA of former slaves. I am a white, second-generation Irish American, whose father was placed in an orphanage for a year as a child, whose grandfather, whom I never met, was described to me, or at least as I can remember through the mysterious prism of childhood, as dying in an alley. He was an alcoholic, his charm reported to be boundless but whose thirst killed him alone and penniless. My father was a brilliant, funny, loving man whose personality was transformed when he drank to excess into a violent, angry, and cruel man. He suffered deep guilt but did not stop drinking and that was our family’s shadow.
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Beaten Into Literacy
I was beaten into literacy by an angry Irish teacher at a school located outside of Dublin called Glengara Park. I was six and had managed very well in an American kindergarten where we carried our chairs for credit. In fact, I had starred as Mother Nature in the Spring play and had learned all my lines by heart because I could not read.
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Do No Harm
This recent scandal at Interlochen involving faculty members and students, as well as the Epstein connection, has reminded me of my own experiences as a teenager. Because I grew up in a household that was suffused in literary sex, not actual sex, I was an idiot savant in terms of relationships between men and women. Having read Women In Love in the back of my parents’ Volvo while we were driving down to southern Spain, I became convinced that men and women were meant to destroy each other, but also they should have lots of sex. I was eleven, and my family discovered my reading choice when I asked from the back seat, “What’s a luminous loin?” This question came from the scene when Gudrun watches Gerald climb out of the water: “The beauty of his dim and luminous loins as he climbed into the boat, his back rounded and soft-ah, this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it, and it was fatal.” There was that, and it was fatal, and in my eleven-year-old brain I thought I understood something, but I did not.
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