George Harrison, World-Music Catalyst and Great-Souled Man;

Success is important in America. So is fame, or if one cannot manage that, notoriety will do.

George Harrison, who died in December 2001, and his compeers, John, Paul and Ringo, might more readily be associated with the 60s, but Harrison’s obituaries concentrated on his use of his talents in the quieter life he led after the hysterical adulation of the Beatles’ early work together. To me Harrison represents what many of us did in the 70s. We put a life together. It was hard work, not very glamorous, brought few accolades, but a decade of consolidation laid a lot of groundwork for the future and preserved much that had been won in the past.

It was a decade of the Dr. Doolittle pushmipullu. Nixon opened the door to China and nearly brought down his own government. He violated the sovereignty of Cambodia, but ended the Viet Nam war. Ford and Carter were rather ordinary citizen presidents in an office which had become Imperial. We had not had a simple person in office since Harry Truman. We experienced a gasoline shortage and set the stage for both conservation and future exaggerated consumption.

For me personally, it was a time of kicking an addiction. Many countrymen joined me in a quiet revolution. At the time it was gently characterized as the fitness craze or California living. It truth, the habits of tobacco and alcohol consumption, eating patterns and attitudes toward exercise changed drastically in the 70s.

We are still dying of heart disease and lung cancer, obesity is now thought of as a disease, but many of us have recouped years of better living through a lack of chemicals. The simple energy and freedom from the bondage of addiction to any substance has allowed many of us to achieve minor but satisfying personal goals. As a nation we are collectively better off for our cleaner air and safer roads.

It seems to me that the “er” comparative is instructive. The goal is improvement, not a perfection we cannot attain. And I am reminded once more of those human cycles. How long will the preoccupation with fitness last?

©2001, Janet Taliaferro

The 70s Laid a Lot of Groundwork for the Future is a post from: Janet Taliaferro

Richard Parsons will become the chief of AOL Time Warner;

The story about Richard Parsons is emblematic of the 60s. While most commentary about that decade still swirls around the Viet Nam War and its consequences, the real gift of the 60s was justice. Equality, that hallowed American value, became at least partially manifest in the 60s. Mr. Parsons is able, educated, experienced and seems just the man for the job. Mr. Parsons is an African-American, or rather I think he is an Afro-American. No news story I have read mentions his race.

We hear the phrase “American Values” from every politician these days. The values are often couched more like a list of Puritan ethics, a worthy personal goal, but difficult to live up to. Things like long marriages in a country where half the population is divorced–a mother in the home, when most women have to work just to help pay the bills.

To me these things have nothing to do with American values. American values are clearly and decisively set out in the Constitution of the United States and its attendant Bill of Rights. We either believe in, adhere to and act on these principles or we don’t. We either believe in our freedoms and that they are worth safeguarding at all costs or we don’t. We either believe that all people are created free and equal or we don’t.

While the Supreme Court and its writings may be the most obvious intellectual expression of our beliefs, African-Americans carry the conscience of this nation in their bones. How we treat the human soul not housed in an absolutely similar body and culture is the measure of our commitment to American values.

In thinking about the writing I have done over the past twelve years, I realized one day that in the two novels I have completed, the raisoner, the spokesperson for ethical behavior, was in each case an African American.

To me, that is as fitting as Mr. Parson’s new position.

©2001, Janet Taliaferro

The Real Gift of the 60s was Justice is a post from: Janet Taliaferro

Justice Department Decision to Forgo Tribunal Bypasses Pentagon. Top Pentagon officials said today that they were not consulted by Attorney General John Ashcroft in his decision to go to federal court rather than seek a military tribunal to try Zacarias Massaoui…;

Sometimes fear steps decisively in our path and causes a kind of civil war. Mr. Ashcroft, the Attorney General, perhaps represents a more understandable, reasonable if you will, reaction to fear than Senator Joseph McCarthy ever did. After all, in the 50s all McCarthy had for evidence were papers in a pumpkin patch while Ashcroft has the total destruction of the World Trade Center. But many of the arguments and motivations are the same now as they were in the 50s (and the 20s!) with the Big Red Scare. Those fears are with us in times of relative tranquillity, like the fifties, or the chaos of the present century.

It is not a small question. In order to provide for the public defense, how far do we go in circumscribing Constitutional freedom? In the present case the debate has been pointed, spirited and civil. Even the decision of the Justice Department to forgo a tribunal for the first suspected terrorist in the New York and Washington bombings is a cautious one. The decision makes tacit obeisance to the other side of the argument, while preserving the Department’s ability to hold tribunals if it sees fit and when it decides how those trials should be conducted. The atmosphere of the argument is a world away from McCarthy’s egocentric arena.

It remains to be seen how the Devil will handle the details.

©2001, Janet Taliaferro

Constitution of the United States = American Values is a post from: Janet Taliaferro

One thing about getting older, you live in Yogi Berra’s “déjà vu all over again.”

When people were running around after 9/11 holding their heads and moaning that “nothing will be the same” my reaction was “wrong,” it’s never different. Don’t get me wrong too. It wasn’t that I was untouched. I never see or hear the date I don’t think about the sons of two of my good friends who didn’t make it out of the towers. My first thought is for the two Davids who were slain by the terrible, unseen Goliath.

It’s just that I remember Pearl Harbor vividly, and the dreadful loss of life there, even thought I didn’t know anyone on the Arizona or the Oklahoma. I don’t think the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan have quite yet equaled those lost that day.

Then there are memories of the Great Depression, which lasted most of my early childhood accompanied by the dust storms that sent the Joads to California. I ache for the young people I see around me who have lost their homes. But what I remember are the men showing up at my mother’s door asking for a sandwich, her friends who took in sewing, my friends at school who only had a change of clothes for each season and Bonnie, whose parents sent her to the city to live our families who could afford to keep her if she cooked and cleaned for them.

The French always get it right, “Le plus change…”

©2010, Janet Taliaferro

Déjà Vu All Over Again is a post from: Janet Taliaferro

Fine furniture made in the late years
between World Wars and marked “Germany”
sits on tiny needlepoint rugs
Mother made one summer.

Rearranged first by me
and then by the careful fingertips
of daughter and granddaughters,
miniature dishes and lamps
have lost their tags and stamps
that said “Made in Japan.”

Two weeks after the bombs
fell on Hawaii
Mother and I went downtown
to the small shop
a few steps off Broadway
eager to buy candlesticks
or vases of flowers
from the almond eyed woman
and her slender husband.

Hand in hand we stared
at the empty shop
door with a cross of raw lumber
battered plate glass window
held in place by wide strips of tape.

“Where did thy go?”
She shook her head.
It would be four years before
we realized
the full meaning of the word
“internment.”

©2010, Janet Taliaferro

The Doll House is a post from: Janet Taliaferro

Nuclear Experts in Pakistan May have Links to Al Qaeda. The United States is investigating new intelligence reports of contact between Pakistani nuclear weapons scientists and the Taliban or the terrorist network al Qaeda…;

The story about nuclear weapons, Al Qaeda and Pakistan takes me directly back to memories of Hiroshima. There are times I think I have come to terms with the bomb, but I know I will probably live to see its use again. It is ironic that the nuclear genie and the bottle should end up in the land of Ali Baba.

The historical march in governance from tribe to city state to nation and then to global organization has been an attempt on humanity’s part to understand the uses of power. We are far from being very good at it, but I believe we have made progress.

While that is good news, there is still the bad news that lurks within all of us. The drive for power, dominance or whatever you want to call it, springs from a necessary seed called self-preservation but it breeds a sinister plant.

When I was in the fifth grade, in 1944, I was walking home from school one day. It was spring, a beautiful warm day. I was swinging a stick I had picked up from near the sidewalk, chatting with a friend. Behind us were two boys, one, the class clown, a favorite of mine, named Jimmy. I do not remember the name of the other boy. He was new to school.

For some reason this boy chose to shout insults at me, teasing me in a loud and abusive voice. I ignored him for the first four blocks, and then the anger completely overwhelmed me. Without conscious volition, I grabbed the stick like a baseball bat and in one smooth movement turned and hit him with all my strength on the left side of the head. The stick shattered, and in so doing shattered his left eye. It was a glass eye, a relic from some earlier trauma, and I am sure, if he had had sight in that eye, he would have ducked the blow.

The four of us stood there as he picked bloody glass out of his eye socket. I was horrified. We were all silent. Finally Jimmy said he would see the boy home and call me with a report.

I ran the rest of the way home, threw myself on the couch crying and waited for the phone call. Jimmy finally called and said that he had seen the boy safely to his mother. Nothing was said about notifying my parents or any reprisals against me. It seems strange in these days of lawsuits that nothing more happened, but perhaps the boys lied about the circumstances. Whatever it was, that incident was a secret I kept from my parents.

The lesson was profound. I realized for the first time in my life the capacity every person carries for destruction. Murder lies in the hearts of us all.

If the thirties taught me something about cycles and fear, the forties were a lesson in rage. On a national or international scale, we call it war.

© 2001 Janet Taliaferro

Memories of Hiroshima is a post from: Janet Taliaferro

At eight years old
she stood in the empty bedroom
of the new house
in Cairo, West Virginia
and said to her six-year-old sister
“This is my room. That one’s yours.”

As her husband drove across the bridge
in Northern Wisconsin she announced,
“I want a house on that lake.”

He didn’t slow the dark blue Packard
with the metal covered spare tires
on the front fenders,
but seven miles up the road
the family stopped for the night
at a white clapboard inn with a green roof.

He never mentioned her remark.
She took notes—
town location,
address of real estate agent,
name of lake,
place to stay the following summer.

It all began like dropping a stone
into the crystal blue of the lake
the ripples gently disturbing
the surface of our lives
now into the fourth generation.

©2010, Janet M. Taliaferro

Always Decisive is a post from: Janet Taliaferro

My daughter says everything in this house
has its own story
from great-grandmother’s quilt
and mother’s ruby depression glass
to things I once unwrapped
from white paper and ribbon
reserved for wedding gifts.

Each spring, when I open the house
to clean and wash and rearrange
I remember the stories
and whisper them away with the dust
to make the ghosts more comfortable.

©2010, Janet Taliaferro

Spring Cleaning is a post from: Janet Taliaferro

Boomers, Not Looking Ahead. Many baby boomers worry about having to depend on other people to care for them in their old age. Yet most boomers have done little to prepare for that possibility, a recent survey suggests;

This quote about the baby boomers made me think of lessons learned from the 30s. I learned about rhythm. Not just about jazz, blues and the beat of my piano teacher’s metronome, but the rhythms of life engraved my soul. Perhaps it is the ceaseless September to May cycle of the school year that imprints us all in childhood, yet as a writer I can see how strongly these circadian themes are played out. My first two books adhere to a strict twelve-month pattern. The third book is time-based, chronicling the final five months of the Second World War, and this book is divided into decades. Only my second collection of short stories is free of these constraints

Gustav Mueller, under whom I studied philosophy, used to say there was no new truth, only rediscovered truth. The image I have of this is the Escher print of the eternal staircase. But truth returns in different disguises, embellished, trimmed or augmented, accepted quietly or loudly rejected.

So the baby boomers are unprepared for financial hardship? They have never known it. These are the people who did not care to listen to anyone older than thirty when they were in their know-it-all twenties. They never saw for themselves the bread lines and soup kitchens, the men like the one eating a meatloaf sandwich on my mother’s front porch, men who would gladly work if they could find a job. They never felt the frustration of “Will this never end?” Of course it ended, but it took 11 years.

Stories of these times held no “relevance” for the boomers.

Today the financial analysts are fond of repeating that the average length of a depression is 11 months. These figures only take into account the years following the Second World War. Of course they are right, but there is no guarantee the present business cycle will last only that long. There are still some of us who remember what can happen, just as my father told me about his father’s recount of the money panics of the late 19th Century. Arrogance sometimes overrides history.

Even the name “The Great Depression” is evocative. Depression has come to mean to us the gloomy state of the psyche familiar to most of us, incapacitating to many and devastating to a few. Although the former refers to an economic crisis, the latter was equally and universally true during those years. John Steinbeck described the era best. The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row were more than just stories. They were drawn from the fabric of the time.

All the talk of a “new economy” in the past few years amused me. I suspected that the “old economy” would come roaring back in a new suit one day.

Life, like a kaleidoscope, is ever shifting and ever different, but the pieces are the same.

© 2001, Janet M. Taliaferro

Boomers, Not Looking Ahead is a post from: Janet Taliaferro

Each fall
I walk the asphalt road
turned to satin
by rain
and search the splatters
of maple leaves
to find one
perfect crimson star
the size of a baby’s hand.

Today I found one
or so I thought
until I saw
some rogue insect
had preceded me
eating a hole–

–a perfect oval.

“Looking for Perfection” appeared in The Northern Virginia Review, Vol. 22.

© 2006, Janet M. Taliaferro

Looking for Perfection is a post from: Janet Taliaferro