Woman on the Moon

MLK had words about "wait" and "patience". But unlike Woolf, women with rooms of their own have fought hard for them these days, not expecting any particular recognition for having come up with the minimum bet to be at the first tier of tables. No one goes back to dwell in their father's house anymore.

There is no tea to go with the biscuits and desperation, but there might be cooking sherry in the spinster's larder. At the bar I'd ask if she'd be willing to spend time over a beer, or an Irish whisky and soda. The men we idolize drank it by pints - the navigators and poets, the organizers and radicals. Ain't that the way. Yes, yes it is. Bring your desperation to the public house, meet the people like yourself, find common cause across town, across genders, across color lines. Find the beauty at the edge of things we are forbidden or dissuaded from talking about.

I met a remarkable woman of a certain age in NY. The sly reveals of left-leaning politics pervaded the conversation, like card players teaming up on the house. It's better if one of us wins. So wrapping-up chit chat turned to a sort of social revelation as we waited for the dean to return from her womanly business in the women's room. Quaker school and Richard Wright from me led to her showing me a picture of her father on the wall near the door - a spot most visitors would miss, but clearly a place of rememberance for her. This was special. Then the dean returned and we were cut short.

This was the revelation, the kind of thing, I like to honor. Who was he? I asked in correspondence. He left high school and read from Aristotle and Boccacio through Marx and Zapata on his own. He fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He landed clandestinely an hour ahead of the D-Day invasion on the beaches of Normandy. He organized for the unions. He marched on Washington. His daughter picked up the flag he carried as his strength ebbed. She carries it now down corridors he would never have expected to be invited to, corridors he would likely have been cursed in.

And her mother graduated college at the age of 19 with a dual degree in the sciences. She became a teacher. College at 19 in the sciences as a woman in any era is much like storming the beach at Normandy an hour ahead of your backup. Where was her story? It lacks the guns, bombs and late night strike calling votes. It is late night correcting papers and quizzes by electric light. Ain't that the way, too.

What I say, in admiration and great interest, is
beauty
half in one world, half in the other