On the other hand, while I was writing a book about Cincinnati food history, I realized that the stubbornness pays off: We have our unique regional menu because the Graeters kept doing things the old way until the rest of the world caught up with them. Grandmothers and neighborhood butchers never stopped making goetta, though no one made it anywhere else. That’s to be treasured.
One recent evening, a woman knocked on my door and asked for money. I could have told her to get lost. Or decided she was scamming me. Or I could have given her a little money to get something to eat, or recommend she go somewhere with more help.
It seems impossible that the progress of women would reverse course, but it already has. And plenty of people still would rather see women dependent on men, to have no sexual agency, to be quiet and have children and conform to male-created ideas of attractiveness.
When my husband and I go to concerts or any performance, of course we look around for anyone we know. With amazing regularity, we spot a woman with a familiar head of long gray-red hair, wearing colorful glasses and a flowy dress, using a cane or maybe a rolling walker. Yep, there’s Amy, we’ve said for years, always with amused pleasure at her sheer omnipresence at the cultural events of the city.
For my father, it was everything. It can take my breath away to think how close he was to never going to college.
Blood is one of the most potent words in the language. We refer to it to talk about family and temperament, about race, about violence and war and disease. But the strongest metaphor is not really a metaphor at all. Blood is life.
It’s rude and annoying to pay for a concert ticket and spend the time yakking, disturbing people who also, by the way, paid for a concert ticket.
So one day, I looked at the Sudoku, which had on baggy khakis and a pocket protector and a lot of numbers and looked really boring.
We drove home across the tinder-dry West with the smoke of forest fires behind us. Shortly after we got back, the Caldor Fire started about 30 miles from the cabin.
I grew up, like many Americans – probably most Americans – surrounded only by members of my own race. Not until after college did I count Black folks as neighbors, co-workers, friends.
