Here's my 8 minute 46 second reflection, suggested by Indira Allegra in the San Francisco Chronicle's July 26, 2020 Sunday Chronicle. .But it's not my "legacy," as suggested. I think Michelle Obama has it right when she says we're becoming.
When I retired from 32 years of teaching at CCSF (following 5 years in the 1970s teaching and/or doing teacher-training in Tonga, Spain, and Algeria), I wrote a verse I still recite:
I put off retirement? That’s shocking and appalling.
Now retired I realized retirement’s my true calling.
I love retirement, but I still feel connected to the college because it’s a part of our community and our world, and it feels natural to be working on a resolution for Black Lives Matter with the retiree chapter of the AFT 2121 Teachers Union and to be joining the African American Task Force to advocate for the AFAM Studies Program and the Black faculty there.
I also belong to OWL, a league of older women who impressed me with their activism and spunk back in 2017, when they were at the SF Public Library as part of a workshop on Redefining Ageing: What It Means to Grow Old in America.
I'm now on their board, and we spent the summer with a focus on racial justice, discussing on Zoom with leaders from SURJ Marin, Showing Up for Racial Justice, and EJI, the Equal Justice Initiative, shown in action with Bryan Stevenson and Eva Ansley in the book and movie Just Mercy
Yesterday I celebrated the birthdays of Social Security (85 years old), Medicare (55), ADA (30) and the US Post Office. (270), and Women's Right to Vote (100). This was sponsored by CARA, the California Alliance for Retired Americans, who had a CAR-A-Van..
I am now a Baby Zoomer, so it was unusual to be out there in real space, where the police came by--two of them without masks. (Should I have made a citizen's arrest?)
My usual way of getting out of the house during the pandemic is in walks. A favorite uncle in the family is now in comfort care, so I made some huge collages of beautiful places I’ve walked in San Francisco in the shape of FAITH, HOPE, and LOVE for him, but I actually started making these collages for a Total SF virtual event back in April, when Heather Knight and Peter Hartlaub led us Chronicle readers in a viewing of "Inside Out" and we participants each made a SF pizza. Mine was of all the beautiful places I'd walked. Because the character JOY (plot spoiler) triumphs over the characters Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear, I used photos of my walks to form JOY too.
So these pictures are of my living room, where my window shows a star representing the only one I knew personally who died of Covid 19 and a picture of an angel she did in pastels back in 1959, when I was her kids' babysitter and she was a beautiful young mother and artist who was kind to me at a time when most people were not. She still shines. I have my sign for Earth Day and the Thank you to Frontline Workers from the day back in April when the city had a sing-along. The Racial Justice symbol is on the window too, where my bear looks out, ready to comfort whoever looks up.
I had her on hand because when my mother died, her partner of 40+ years had bears made from items of her clothing. There's a poignant tale connected to that, but I’m cheating on time
I had that Mama Bear in my bedroom looking out at the garden in back because my mother had said in her Advanced Care Directive that if she had to be in a facility, she wanted to be outdoors as much as possible. But the effect of Alzheimer’s was a paranoia that made her afraid to go outside during the last few months of her life.
When a friend and neighbor told me that her little boy wanted to look for bears in windows, I moved Mama Bear to the living room and propped her on the sofa looking out at Larsen Park and the ocean in the distance. I assumed that she’d soon topple over. But she’s still sitting there, with another beautiful view, after all these months. I like the way she and some of the symbols on the window are reflected on the coffee table..
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