Endless Knots

Advice to Hillary; thankfully never sent #imwithher

I have six things in common with Hillary. Both our husbands studied at Oxford where each lived at 46 Leckford Road, a house mine originally rented (and moved out of when hers moved in). We’re both 69 (I’m a few months older). We both loved the teen idol Fabian (I met him in person and he kissed me on the cheek). We both spoke at our college graduations (she was filmed; there’s merely a still photo of me). We both have worked all our adult lives. And we both are grandmothers.

When she was still thinking about running (or at least that was the public position), her first grandchild, Charlotte, was born. I felt impelled to give advice about her impending political decision, which in a moment for me of “the world [being] too much with us,” was simply this: Don’t. My argument against her running for president was based on my (and many others’) opinion and experience as to where the deepest satisfactions in life originate—in accomplishments or in love. They shouldn’t be such binary choices but for women they are.

I never sent the advice or published the piece; she ran; and now we’re in the range of double-digit hours until we know whether indeed she will be the next/first-woman/first-former-First-Lady President of this continuous experiment in democracy called the United States of America.

For her sake, I wish she hadn’t run. Far and away the most abusive campaign in our history; far and away the most shocking, so appalling in its turns that we writers find ourselves saying that a novel following the plot of this election would never find a publisher due to its unbelievability; and far and away the most dangerous for what it could mean if she does not win (not to mention mounting fears if she does, c.f., the threats of armed insurrection).

For her sake, I wish I’d sent this advice and that she’d followed it, which my fourth-generation feminist daughters were shocked to see coming from this granddaughter of a suffragist (she marched until 1920), born to a feminist mother (who didn't change her name when first married and always worked outside the home), I, who was lucky enough to turn 21 in 1968 at the height of the second-wave of feminism, which I embraced.

But for our sake, I’m very glad she ran. Her example is straightening the spines of little girls, young women, and even women my age; her grit is as incomparable as any of our peers, male or female; her ability to think of her feet is as good as anyone’s; and her skill at throwing off the insults, dismissals, and now the very threats to her life is, how do I say this, incredible.

Having followed her more closely these past two years, I’m betting that she’s found a way to take those calls from Chelsea anyway (see below).

And I’m sure she’s going to win.

Here’s what I wrote--but never sent--on September 24, 2014:

Rock, Grandma, Don’t Run

In the constellation of unwelcome advice, none is less desirable than re: family. Young mothers are the unwitting recipients of bounteous bromides as per the passerby, who, touching your baby, which, first of all, why are you touching my baby, catalogues a registry of rebukes:

• Don’t you think you should have a hat on her?
• Why are you feeding him avocado?
• Shouldn’t she be in bed by now?
• What? She’s in your bed?
• You changed him where? On the hood of your car?
• Your three-year-old still has a bottle?
• Your four-year-old boy wears pink?
• Your five-year-old girl refuses to wear pink?

It’s endless and annoying and so, with this in mind, I offer the following unsolicited advice to a friend of a friend, a woman I have never met, one so famous that she’s in the single-name league of Madonna and Beyoncé, the rock star of politics and world’s most famous new grandmother, Hillary.

“I’m baaaack,” you sang to the steak-fry crowd in Iowa. ReadyforHillary—not to mention 656 pages of Hard Choices—seems to answer the question of whether you’re running. But all of that was pre-Charlotte.

Today you are now like me (sorta kinda: mine had preemie twins; no one can spell my last name while yours is all but a verb), Hillary, grandmother to the child of your daughter, who is setting off into the rainforest of parenting—unexpected showers, strange storms of illness, odd creatures (which is how first-time parents often feel about their quirky newborns)—with abundant resources but no experience, because you are not a mom or dad until you really are one.

Until you’ve done it a hundred times, you don’t really know how to change a diaper without really waking up, or how to swaddle a baby, or whether to call the doctor for the millionth time because this one might really be the really real thing and what if you don’t, who knows, your baby might be really dead before they call back?

Your daughter will be a natural, of course, because that’s what we all say—and feel— about our daughters because in the end it is a very natural human thing to give birth—i.e. how could 100 billion have made it out of the womb in the past 50,000 years unless it were relatively ordinary? But the data is incontrovertible: until you’ve done it, you don’t know jack—or Charlotte.

Which is why your daughter will be calling you every twenty minutes or so for the next several years, asking you questions that begin, “Did I…” at which point you will spiral down into The Abyss of Guilt Just Over the Cliff of Forgotten Memories. I’m sure you, unlike me, kept a daily baby book recording every one of your daughter’s projectile vomits and major accomplishments: first time sleeping more than two consecutive hours, first time unclenching her fists, first time rolling over. And you, being a strong global figure and role model extraordinaire, won’t be hurt when she yells at you for not remembering.

Even with a staff to help her because what new mother doesn’t need an overnight baby nurse, a daytime nanny, a cook, a housekeeper, and a personal secretary (if only! if only!), she will still need one particular person who can’t be hired: you.

Which brings me to the point of this unsolicited advice: You need not to miss this. You need not to miss the tiny advances, the first time Baby Charlotte does this, that, and the other thing, the first time your back aches from holding her because nothing hurts so good.

Yes, you can be president of the most powerful country the world has ever known. Yes, you can sit at the big desk and put Putin in his place. Yes, you can out-Kissinger Kissinger but you won’t be there for those first kisses. Might it be a tad awkward as president to take Baby Charlotte’s first phone call, which is not that long from now because just as you can’t comprehend that your baby has just had a baby, you will not believe how quickly the little twitchling goes from blob to blogger, if you’re in the Situation Room watching ISIS cowards being taken out?

Trust me: I want a woman in The White House. And I want you to have the same freedom to make the choice to run that your husband had. You do. And if that’s what you choose, you’ll probably win but what you’ll lose may well be far more profound.

Rock that baby, Hillary. Don’t run. It will make you all much happier.

General Shinseki, a wargame, and the networks of hierarchy

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki is in the news and it's not the first time he's been center stage.

Students of the Iraq War may recall that at the start of the war, Shinseki, a four-star general, was the Chief of Staff of the Army who got into a public row with then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over troop strength. Shinseki said the US needed on the order of 250,000 troops in Iraq once the war wound down. In a clear rebuke, Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz made it known that they disagreed and Shinseki was forced out of his post.

Ultimately, Shinseki's view was vindicated and supported across the aisle and in The White House.

It was precisely when this was happening in the spring of 2003 that Jeff Stamps and I came into contact with General Shinseki, something we neither planned nor ever imagined. We pulled that story together for an unpublished book, "Leading Networks," and, given Shinseki's prominence at the moment, I think it's worth retelling here.

 

General Shinseki, right, with Admiral Vern Clark, left, also mentioned below,
and Marine General Michael Hagee; photo from NY Times, 1/12/07

 

 

On February 10, 2003, I answered the phone and found an unlikely caller. "I'm calling on behalf of (then-) Major General Jim Dubik," he said. "He'd like you to come to a wargame."

Unified Quest 03, the aide explained, would be the first Joint Forces-US Army Wargame, a weeklong simulation that would take place at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. We would be among a small group of outsiders; the other 700 people would be from military forces both in the U.S. and among American allies and from defense contracting firms.

I said that I'd never heard of General Dubik. "Well, he’s heard of you", the aide replied, explaining that Dubik had read and been interested in The Age of the Network, a book we’d written ten years earlier.

Lt. Gen. Jim Dubik, now retired, photo from Penn State Dickinson School of Law site,
where he holds the Gen. Omar N. Bradley Chair in Strategic Leadership

Jeff was as flabbergasted as I when I went into his study to tell him.

We had met as anti-Vietnam War activists in 1968 while students at Oxford University.

In contrast to some of our friends in 2003 who argued with us, we strongly opposed the then-looming Iraq War.

We decided to attend.

And then we told our friends what we were planning to do. Invariably we got the same reply: “You’re going to be doing what?” Then quickly, nearly all followed with, “Thank God. I’m so glad you’re going.”

Thus began our involvement with the American military, particularly the Army, where we’ve discovered that some of its ideas, particularly in regard to leadership, are ahead of those we've encountered as consultants in the commercial and non-profit sectors.

To attend a wargame was beyond our ken. So it was with apprehension, curiosity, and a little discomfort that we went to the Carlisle Barracks, reflected in a summary I wrote after the event:

"My coming-in-picture of a 'wargame?' I thought it would be fought in a space the size of at least a basketball court, maybe even as large as the hangar I once toured at Douglas Aircraft where the MD-11 was being built.

"And, I wasn’t sure precisely what would transpire on this 'battlefield.' I thought it was unlikely that we'd find people playing laser tag or paintball, but I wasn’t even certain of that. I was unprepared for the wargame to be 'fought' in crowded conference rooms, where it was hard to hear what people were saying and where the commander’s back was usually turned toward most of those in the room."

The wargame that (now-retired Lieutenant General) Dubik invited us to—in this case, a thinly disguised confrontation with a country called “Nair” (unscramble the letters)—included our attending the daily debriefings for the “flag officer” (read highest-ranking officers) at the end of each day. There, the senior military strategists, many retired, would deconstruct the day’s wargame results.

Following the opening session at the War College’s Bliss Hall, which I remember as being very loud and filled with promotional videos for various weapons and tanks, Bill Rittenhouse, then a career staffer for the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command and an organizer of the event, found us stumbling around, unsure of what to do next or where to go. He welcomed us, indicating that he wasn’t quite certain what we were supposed to be doing either, but immediately introduced us to Clint Ancker, a retired colonel doing research on the Army’s structure and director of the famed Center for Army Lessons Learned.

We knew who Ancker was because one of his aides had been corresponding with us over the prior few months on “echelonment.” The word, from the French, literally means rungs on a ladder, and is the term the military uses to describe its levels of hierarchy.

Ancker and his group had been tasked with responding to a “request” from the then-Secretary of Defense. Now that the forces were “joint,” meaning that they all had to play nice together, Rumsfeld wanted the Army to remove a level, an echelon, from its traditional command structure, a rung near the top. Over lunch, Ancker drew some pictures about options for the Army’s reorganization, which reassured us that our expertise in networks had some relevance to what they were working on.

From that informative lunch, Ancker moved us along to meet then-Brigadier General (later Lieutenant General) Mike Vane, a self-described California beach boy in his youth, and one of the conference co-chairs.

Lieutenant General Mike Vane, now retired, photo from US Army site

Vane, in turn, took us into a small room to wait for General Dubik. “Hi, I’m Jim Dubik,” said the informally dressed general, extending his hand as he walked in.

After the usual pleasantries, we asked the central questions: “Why are we here and what do you want us to do?” Dubik responded in a way that we’ve become accustomed to in working with senior executives.

“I don’t know precisely,” he said. “I read your book about networks. We’re fighting a networked enemy. We have a net-centric warfare strategy in place. And we’re responding to the SecDef’s request for material on echelonment.”

Dubik told us to “wander around” and to try to absorb as much as we could as quickly as possible, and to reflect back what we noticed. He asked that we pay attention to “jointness” (how the separate forces worked together) and “echelonment,” in particular, but cautioned us not to artificially limit our scope.

These intriguingly broad terms of reference allowed us to follow an unscripted flow. After a tour of the wargame premises by one of Vane’s aides, we were, for the most part, left on our own.

Over the following week, we talked with dozens of people both formally and informally. We sat in on sessions where specific maneuvers were debated in snatches and at length. We shared meals with generals and admirals, trading health tips and nutrition theories with a four-star. We exchanged references with analysts, media, and advisors.

And, we attended the highest-level meeting of our lives, an “out-brief,” military-speak for what business refers to as a post-mortem, with the Joint Chiefs.

On the last day of the wargame, General Shinseki arrived to hear the conclusions of the exercises. It was one of the rare events that we weren't invited to but when it was over, the ground crew involved with putting on the event—the schleppers, the logistics people, and the sponsoring senior military officers, including Dubik and Vane—stood in a line as Shinseki spoke to them, thanking each individually.

Everyone knew what was happening—indeed, Shinseki's disagreement with the Bush administration over troop strength required in Iraq, an estimate that later proved to be entirely accurate, had been broadcast on television—and sadness seeped across the floor just beneath the evident respect that seemed to pour from people's eyes. Shinseki then walked down the line, pressing a medal commemorating the wargame into the hand of each person who'd worked the event. After the meet-and-greet, Dubik pressed one into each of our hands.

The next day, we drove south from Carlisle to Fort McNair in Washington for the “Senior Leaders Seminar,” the last event of this historic wargame. There, the generals and admirals who orchestrated the wargame, along with a handful of participants from the Carlisle exercises, met with the military's top brass, including the Chief of Naval Operations, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and the Supreme Allied Commander of Atlantic, along with their peers—as well as the then-Deputy Secretary of Defense, Wolfowitz. Of the ninety guests, as best we could determine we were the only true civilians, and I was the only woman. We were seated just behind Wolfowitz and the Army Chief of Staff.

This gathering at the National Defense University took place the very day after then-President Bush landed on the USS Lincoln to proclaim “Mission Accomplished."

General Shinseki led the proceedings. Seated to his left was Wolfowitz, who arrived late and left barely ten minutes later, just moments after the briefing began. (An aide came in, handed him a note, and he said that he had to leave because "the Secretary needs me.")

Surely Wolfowitz could not have wanted to hear the words of one retired four-star Air Force general who said plainly, “Preemption does not work.” Preemption, the Bush administration policy employed in the Iraq War, the general said, violated the principles of war, left the enemy no choice but to respond with unconventional methods (meaning weapons of mass destruction), and placed the preempting forces without any of their conventional means of applying pressure incrementally.

This “After Action Review,” the systematic method the Army developed for reviewing its “actions,” included a ten-minute video positioning the history and chronology of this particular wargame, emerging issues identified by the wargame teams, and feedback from those participating.

We were told that this meeting was historic: It was the first time the highest levels of US military had convened as a network of peers for a wargame debriefing. Hot on the heels of the initial and what then appeared to have been the stunningly successful invasion of Iraq—reportedly the most "joint" operation in history—was “a not-to-be-missed opportunity,” which is how Admiral Vern Clark, then the Chief Naval Officer, described it to us as we were leaving.

The meeting lasted for a few hours; our involvement with the military lasted for another five years until the last of the crop of senior officers whom we knew retired.

What we took away was that while the “joint” approach to military affairs as practiced at this wargame is still being worked out, it is evident that the complexity of global relations in the 21st century demands it.

The immediate, mind-boggling dilemma of security in a pre-emptive, time-warped world with unpredictable enemies who have access to unthinkable weapons no longer allows individual and separate hierarchies to march forward.

 

Ben Taylor's Vietnam Rising

As a reporter, my friend Ben Taylor traveled around the world, picking up on the nuances of geopolitics, among other heady pursuits. Now he's written an insightful piece about Vietnam, to which he recently traveled. He took very good notes and his article in this morning's Boston Globe, "Vietnam Rising," is a must read for all of us who lived through what the Vietnamese call "the American War." I first heard that reference from a Vietnamese ex-pat some years ago and that alone tells its own story. When I visited Laos 15 years ago on a "mission" for the UN Development Program, we went to a cafe along the Mekong River. I couldn't reconcile sitting along its banks without expecting strafe bombing and "Viet Cong" to rise from its waters, this after the war had been over for more than two decades. Vietnam's indelible mark on all of us from that era remains -- thank you, Ben, for bringing it into focus in a new way.

Occupying leadership #occupy

Without making the media the story here since the media has this recursive, repetitive pattern when it can't make sense of a story... a few words about leadership and Occupy.

Google "leadership occupy Wall Street" and you'll find thousands (6814 as of this moment) of articles like this pretty good one in the Washington Post, attempting to describe a phenomenon where something elusive is wrongly explained by its opposite.

If it's not in the article's headline, it's in its lede--and if not there, it's certainly not more than a few grafs down: The Occupy movement is leaderless ((e.g., the Post story, "What is Occupy Wall Street? The history of leaderless movements").

Many articles have grabbed this quote: "We are all leaders." And from there goes the faulty logic that if everyone's a leader, then no one is. Or, its converse by implication: Without a designated, authoritative single leader, then it's just a messy group with... and here we go: no clear purpose, no mission, confusing demands, etc and so on.

Is the Occupy movement leaderless?

Leaderless?

Absolutely not.

It's leaderful.

Many leaders, not none.

Many leaders, not one.

Years ago, University of Minnesota anthropologists Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine (see People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation) studied the social movements of the Sixties, which many writers in the past month have used as the explanatory vehicle for the leadership structure of this current global phenomenon. Most have gotten the interpretation of the Sixties wrong too, rehashing the old saw that there was no leadership in the anti-Vietnam War, women's, civil rights, gay liberation, and suchnot movements in which my generation grew up.

What Gerlach and Hine discovered (and supported with extensive research) is that social movements are networks. And networks have polycephalous--many headed--leadership structures.

Given our prevailing structures where one leader sits atop a stack holding yes/no power, we have a really hard time comprehending organizations where many people are making decisions. In Gautney's Post piece, she describes a completely different way of arriving at action: 

Occupy Wall Street’s organizational presence is the New York General Assembly or “GA,” which convenes numbers in the high hundreds at its squat-site in Zuccotti Park. Daily GA meetings are led by facilitators who rotate on a regular basis, and facilitation training is open to all. Specific issues, such as food, medical, legal, outreach, security and others are handled by working groups—also open and inclusive—that periodically report back to the GA. Instead of issuing top-down directives, Occupy groups use a consensus process in which anyone can join in the decision-making and propose an idea. Proposers must field questions, justify the hows and whys of their ideas, and engage a large-scale group discussion. Votes are then cast via an innovative system of hand signals, and proposals are revised until a nine-tenths majority approves.

How did this unelected, unhired, uncredentialed revolving band of disaffiliated thousands arrive at such a structure?

By dozens, if not hundreds, of articulate people stepping forward at different moments with good ideas about how to engage the commitment and intelligence of their peers. There is only one word for such people: LEADERS.

In the early 1990s, Andy Campbell, then an employee of the CIA who was working on the Clinton Administration's Reinventing Government program, said something to me that I've used in virtually every presentation since:

        "We can't solve 21st-century problems with 19th-century organizations."

Having studied and written about new organizational structures for the past 30 years with Jeff Stamps, I've attached a corollary to this:

    "Nor can we guide 21st-century organizations with 20th-century leaders."

"Solving" the "Wall Street problem" will not happen through traditional bureaucracy or hierarchy. As many a pundit has already said, the bureaucracies charged with curbing the abuses of greed are so tied up in their own knots (and such the beneficiaries either directly or indirectly of that greed) that they cannot disentangle themselves enough to even see solutions, never mind execute them.

We need to grow up. We need to recognize that networks--flexible, constantly-morphing, ever-linking organizations--are the structures we need to solve the phenomenal dilemmas in front of us.

Networks have many leaders. Some networks encase more formal organizations, like the ones we're all familiar with where people have recognizeable titles and clearly understood power structures, i.e. some organized groups are also showing up to "occupy."

Just a few ideas tend to link networks. As is the case with Occupy, a few simple phrases bubble up, even without the help of branding specialists: 99% for example.

Underneath it all is the thing that money can't buy (hello, Wall Street): commitment. Shared commitment was the energy field that Gerlach and Hine wrote about lo those many years ago. It's the gossamer thread that links all the Occupy sites, heaved from one to another by many many many many...

        LEADERS

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 51

Page 51, “The Persuasion”

It was Christmas dinner (four courses) at Papa and Babi’s apartment on West 86th. I was nervous about which spoon was for soup, which knife for fish, whether everyone could see my lip quivering when I spoke. This was my first holiday with his family (I’d gone to Shelter Island with Aunt Julia and Uncle Irving for Thanksgiving) and I hoped our relationship wouldn’t come up.

Announce may not be the proper verb to describe what Tonin did. “You guys will have to come for dinner,” he said when his grandmother was ladling cream of parsnip soup into my bowl. “We’d like to show you what we’ve done with the place.”

We? What we had done with the place? I bit the inside of my cheek.

“Well, then, Mariana,” Janos said. “I think we need to have a meeting.”

We, now meaning Tonin's father? A meeting? And we weren’t even at the salad course. “I think it’s just wonderful that you and Tonin are living together. We need to give you a proper room of your own. Isn’t that what Virginia Wolfe said women need? I think we should convert the guest room into your study. Just say what you want and we’ll make it like that. Think of it as a down payment on your graduation present.”

Tonin’s father made it sound so simple. A room known as mine in Tonin’s apartment was permanent—and elaborate. Since my mother’s death, I’d been making do with meager surroundings and I liked it. Confined space left less room for sadness to take up residence.

When I moved into the maid’s room off the kitchen in my aunt and uncle’s apartment, I’d compacted my belongings into one trunk, three boxes, and a suitcase. Everything—meaning my childhood and most else associated with my parents—went into storage. A whole room for me, big enough for a desk, books, and some belongings I really wanted to have near me? Disturbing. I reached for the water and knocked over my glass.

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 40

Page 40, “The Persuasion”

That night, I asked Tonin if I could borrow his typewriter.

My darling Birdie—Much as I hate to admit that you could possibly be right about anything, I have to tell you what’s happened with "you’re really going to like him." I’m not getting involved, not at all, but he’s fun for now. What I can’t figure out is why you haven’t gone after him? He’s so cute, Bird, you know that (& by way you never mentioned ces yeux). And he’s smart. Not as smart as The Unmentionable One but he’s got something else, not the kind of thing I’m looking for really. He’s sweet. I’ve never met such a sweet boy. But what good is sweet? Not very practical. But he’s bought me flowers and two silk blouses and we’ve been dancing every night. Crazy, man. Crazy man. This isn’t going anywhere but I have changed plans. Not going back to States until September. Please write to me at this tres cool apartment where he’s staying here in the 16e. Giving up my hotel room. Write immediately and tell me whether you think I’m crazy and whether I should take off before I have to hurt his feelings. I love you forever. M. (this is confused--sorry! Love you!)

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 37

Page 37, “The Persuasion”

Over the next three weeks, Tonin and I used Paris to launch conversations that would take decades to complete.

He waited a few days to ask about my old boyfriends, which given his hair-trigger reaction to my kindergarten beau, Teddy, indicated remarkable restraint, I thought. Many of my guy friends had shown up as characters in stories I’d told him…but there was one whose name had yet to surface.

We’d begun this particular conversation while walking back to his apartment after our first time seeing “Breathless” (we would eventually see it dozens of times), but, to my relief, he’d gotten sidetracked when he noticed wilting flowers in the planter outside his building, which caused him to go up and down the elevator to the apartment, fetching bucket after bucket of water until he was satisfied the blossoms were perking up again.

As it happened, the subject of my romantic attachments didn’t re-emerge at the most appropriate moment. Or perhaps it did.

Against every self-promise, against every aspect of the strong-as-steel plan I’d forged to fend off any further entanglements, I’d found myself not returning to my hotel that first night. We hadn’t parted since the morning after we met at the Breathless café. We were eating together, falling asleep in the same bed, following each other to the bathroom (maintaining some modicum of respect by standing outside the door while continuing to talk).

“This is happening, Mary Jane,” he said from outside the bathroom.

“What?”

“Us. You and me.” He stuck his head through the door and withdrew it quickly. “Tonin and Mariana. Mariana and Tonin.”

I said what I’d said before. “Good friends.”

“Fine. Take your time. It’s nice out here. You’ll like it. I’ll be waiting.”

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 32

Page 32, “The Persuasion”

“I was lucky in a way. If it had happened to, say, Red Bird, she would have had a nervous breakdown. But I wasn’t exactly surprised. Shocked but not surprised if that makes sense. I always figured I'd end up an orphan after my father.”

Tonin put his hand to his mouth, looked off to the left and then to the right, as if he were trying to decide which direction to go.

“So what was the minute-by-minute?”

No one had ever asked.

He wanted to know how I got the news that my mother was dead—the dean had pulled me out of English class, taken me back to her office, and hinted around, using words like “very ill,” “hospital,” and “pack something black” until I figured it out; how I got back to school after the funeral—my mother’s best friend, Rose, rented a car and drove me from Brooklyn, not leaving until we’d unpacked my suitcase, I’d brushed my teeth, and she had actually tucked me into bed; who paid for my education—my mother was such a careful planner that there was enough money, if I could maintain my academic scholarships, for both boarding school and college, after which she figured I’d be able to support myself; and whether I’d lived with Rose after she’d died.

Her will had specified my guardians, her twin sister and brother-in-law, Julia and Irving, Upper West Siders with no children, and that in the event they disagreed—my mother knew them well—over decisions regarding my life, Rose would make the call.

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 31

Page 31, “The Persuasion”

"All good decisions are made over coffee.” He tapped my espresso cup. “It sounds like she treats you like an adult.”

I wanted to let it pass but “treat-ed” fell out of my mouth, just like that.

“'-ed'? Let's expand on this one.”

He wanted me to elaborate? For once, for the only time except for Bird, someone wanted me to make the past tense bigger “on this one.” Most people only got their knees wet in my gloomy waters with a strained “sorry” or “oh, that’s too bad” or “oh, my friend’s cousin’s mother died.” Tonin was plunging in with hip waders, fly rod, fishing net, and a tackle box.

“Tell me.” He turned his palms up on the table as if he could hold anything I had to say, regardless of weight.

Quickly, faster than I could ever remember talking, I spilled out the timeline, how just four weeks into freshman year and on the very day that Bird and I had had our first serious argument about a grandiose remark I’d made...”

“Which was?”

“That I was the most interesting person I’d ever met.”

“Hold it. I’d go along with that.”

His butting in allowed the next words to fall out as neutrally as I’d ever managed…“when my mother died suddenly of a heart attack. She was 53 and I was 14.”

I’d told the story enough times. Repeating that particular string no longer unhinged me when I had to explain why my mother was never around for Parents Day, why I never bought Mother’s Day cards. I’d developed strategies for cutting along the live wire without getting zapped, for explaining without revealing, for reporting and keep moving. I still ached when I thought of her, which was all the time, still woke up crying at three in the morning, but the grief had stopped its sneak attacks in broad daylight. Seven years had gone by and I’d gotten used to it.

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 28

Page 28, “The Persuasion”

“So you are Jewish. You’ve got a Jewish mother.”

“Technically, yes, except I was brought up Episcopalian. My uncle converted and once Erika walked into St. John’s, she never looked back. Too bad for me. No dreidls or Chanukah gelt.”

He undid his collar button and ran his hand along the back of his neck. Hairy just under the Adam’s apple like my father. He might as well have taken off his shirt. “So I’m talking too much. What about you? Parents, grandparents, country of origin?”

I wasn’t used to being the interviewee—“you ask so many questions,” people said—and I was particularly reluctant when it came to family. “When were you born? You first.”

“May 23, 1947. When’s yours?”

I didn’t know what to say. If I spoke too quickly, he’d think I wanted to make something of it. If I didn’t acknowledge it and he  found out later, he might think I actually lied sometimes. Later?

I nodded.

“So? Yours?”

I nodded again.

“You mean...”

I nodded and pushed away a curl that creeping toward my mouth.

“Really. How cool is that? We’ll celebrate together next year.” He pumped my hand. "Deal."

“Stop it.” I pulled back and pointed to the book he’d had under his arm with the Herald Tribune. “What’s with the Chekhov?”

“It’s honest. I didn’t bring it to impress you. Double degree from The Sorbonne, Russian literature and architecture. I started this year at Columbia, by the way—hey, we might have seen each other last summer. Were you there?”

I nodded again. “Can’t you tell a story without interrupting yourself?”

“There’s so much to say, Lois Lane. We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

“Try chronological order.”