100 Things I Want to Tell My Children and Grandchildren, #32

Books have significantly written my life.

The past two months have been hard. My husband, Crouse, who has a congenital heart condition, has undergone three dangerous but life-saving surgeries, and has suffered three Transient Ischemic Attacks (TIAs, mini-strokes), costing him heart-breaking losses in his capacity to articulate, and some difficulty keeping his balance. For the 30 years Crouse and I have been mates we’ve professed we’d rather die than live diminished physical or mental quality of life. But there’s a powerful will to live default in the human psyche. With each new health challenge, we find ourselves desperately clinging to life, in any form, and being thankful for it.  

We all have life challenges on an almost daily basis, but facing death so closely will make you especially introspective. This week, when not conducting the astoundingly demanding job of advocating for my husband’s hospital care, and keeping up with my work schedule, which is intense, I’ve been reading a book about the Los Angeles Central Library arson in 1986 (see my below review of The Library Book by Susan Orlean), which has made me think a lot about my mom and her books, my books, and how books have been a constant in my life.

Another recent incident inspiring memories of my mother and her love affair with reading was the death of a mother of a childhood friend.  The last time I saw Helen Wright, she and Marie Smithson, mother of another childhood friend were at my mother's funeral, and told me a lovely story about my mom that I’d never heard. My family lived in a small west Texas town surrounded by “oil camps”, which were clusters of homes out in the more remote areas provided to the families of men working in the oil fields. Helen and Marie told me that in the early 1940’s, years before my mother successfully led efforts to get the county to establish a library in our community, she maintained an informal lending library in our home, and loaned books to the oil camp wives who came into town every two weeks to buy groceries.

That triggered other book-related memories. In my childhood home, unlike my friends, I was surrounded by books newspapers and magazines, but I never thought of it as anything extraordinary. Then, when my high school sweetheart took me to his family’s ranch to meet his mom, I fell a little more in love with him when I saw his mom too was living in a home library – books cluttering practically every surface.  

I also recall, as a young bride living on that ranch, seeing an article about Jacqueline Kennedy, post-White House, when she was a consulting editor for Viking Press. There was a photo of her in her Manhattan living room, surrounded by stacks of books. I remember wanting both my beautiful country life and the innately smart people I shared my life with there, AND the Jacqueline Kennedy cosmopolitan lifestyle, surrounded by books and “the intelligentsia” of New York. Although life doesn’t always take you down the path you imagine, and indeed, mine has been circuitous, in a way I have achieved that ideal. My children all live on their family ranches, where I can visit and enjoy the many unique benefits associated with the country lifestyle, in addition to the urbane lifestyle Crouse and I enjoy here in Austin.

The retirement and legacy I hope to live and leave is significantly about books as well. I’ve been buying books for about 20 years, and my plan is to read every one of them again when I retire, and then donate them to my hometown library in honor of my mother. It is also gratifying to know that all three of my children are readers – and doubtless they will pass that on to their children, who will pass it along to theirs. And that is my mother’s legacy, and mine.

In May 1994, John Kennedy Jr. announced his mother’s death to the press, saying she had died, “surrounded by her friends and her family and her books, the people and the things that she loved". Hopefully, someday my children will say that about me too. 

Cluster Critiques

In Pieces by Sally Field

I though Sally Field was possibly the happiest person in the world. She was the girl we all wanted to be. Pretty, funny, happy, a cheerleader.  But in Field’s well-written, yet heart-wrenching autobiography, In Pieces, we are reminded that even famous people are occasionally forced to traipse through the cesspool of life.

Sally and her siblings grew up in a broken home until her semi-famous actress mother married semi-famous stuntman, Jock Mahoney, and Sally, like too many children, had to face a childhood unsuitable for a child. When she became a teen her assent to fame was quick and final, putting her on an unstoppable and treacherous treadmill to maintain celebrity and to vie for better roles. She seemed to always be desperate for money and stability, which is not something I would have imagined for such a famous actress. Maybe actors are just better at acting like they’re doing better than they really are. 

Not that Sally Field didn’t do well as an actress. She did. She won three Emmys and two Oscars, and starred in some great movies, including, “Forrest Gump," Norma Rae”, and my personal favorite, “Steel Magnolias”. She was also Burt Reynold’s lover for years, and remained his very close friend and confidant until he died (the story of which Field tells with touching humanity). But it doesn’t seem life was ever easy for Sally Field.

There was a part of me that felt Field’s story was nothing short of a cellular-level shoulder cry, an off-loading of a lifetime of too many sorrows and challenges, and not enough joy. But there was another part of me that felt Field was doing what she does best, acting. It wasn't that I didn’t believe her dramatic life-story of childhood abuse and exploitation, professional struggles, marriage difficulties, and classic mother-daughter conflicts, but at times, especially since I listened to the audio version of the book, which was read by Sally, I felt she was playing the role of her life, and playing it well.

Sally’s story, In Pieces, was interesting, well written, and in the audible format, well performed. I believe Sally Field is as genuine as she seems. I liked her book, and I like her!

Circe by Madeline Miller

Wow! What a soap opera – a Greek one at that.  Circe is the quasi-family saga of an unfavored daughter of a particularly nasty Greek God and Goddess, and who is condemned to an isolated island for mingling with mortals and dabbling in witchcraft. I have vague recollections of a book about the Greek Gods my mom had around the house when I was a kid, and recognized the names of some of the bit role players in Circe, including Zeus, Minotaur, Icarus, Medea, and Odysseus. What I don’t remember was how ridiculously dysfunctional the characters of Greek Mythology were – or at least according to Madeline Miller anyway. If Circe reflects the original writings, I think the adage, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” must have been coined in reference to Greek Gods. 

I also don’t remember there being so much sex, unless I simply didn’t recognize it as such at my young age. Or maybe mom’s book was the “sanitized” version. Anyway, there’s plenty of it in Circe. There’s loveless, passionate sex, there passionate love sex, infidelity sex, rape and more rape, oh and I almost forgot, there’s even bestiality. 

There’s also gobs of misogyny, hate, cruelty, and just plain bullying between the Gods and Goddesses of greater and lesser status, and marterism, and revenge – LOTS! Oh yes, and sea monsters and turning men who are male chauvinist pigs into literal pigs. 

So, this all sounds like I didn’t like Circe, but I did. Not so much the story, which was just mildly amusing, and a bit sluggish at times, but rather Miller’s writing, which was imaginative and lyrical. Also, the narrator, Perdita Weeks, (audible book) has a beautiful voice and did an exceptional job making Circe probably more interesting then she might have seemed on paper. Here are a few of my favorite passages. 

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.” 

“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself. 

 “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open.” 

If you like clever nuanced writing, and don’t mind that the story drags a bit, you’ll like Circe.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

I love it when I pick out an audio book to listen to on a road-trip and my husband says, “I don’t want to listen to that.  It sounds boring.” Then after being forced to listen to it for a while, upon embarking on a subsequent road trip says, “Why don’t you put back on that book about the library fire”. That’s what happened with The Library Book by Susan Orlean, which is about the 1986 arson of the Los Angeles Central library, which took firefighters more than seven hours to extinguish, destroyed more than 400,000 books and damaged more than 700,000 books. 

Sound boring? Maybe you’d be interested in the crime investigation aspect. Who started the fire? Why? How? I won’t spoil it by telling you much more than there’s a good bit of the book dedicated to the investigation, and I found it all mesmerizing. 

Then there’s the history of libraries in general, and in Los Angeles specifically. I can picture your eyes glazing over right now, and in the hands of most, that history could be sleep inducing. But author Susan Orlean has the enviable skill of turning seemingly mundane topics, like library fires and orchid thieves (reference Orleans fab book-to-movie starring Meryl Streep, The Orchid Thief) into heart-racing, tear-inducing, edge-of-your-seat stories. The sordid, crazy history of Los Angeles, even told in the context of the history of libraries in Los Angeles, was surprisingly intriguing. I loved The Library Book and was sad when it ended. 

Very Smart Gals in Grantmaking Salon

(pictured, l-r, Lindsey Aylieff, Melanie Cazier, SueAnn Wade-Crouse, Jami Hampton, MariBen Ramsey, Karen Kahan, Katherine Wright, Tracy Firsching, Cindy Raab)

In April, MariBen Ramsey, Karen Kahan and I hosted a salon for Very Smart Gals in Grantmaking to talk about the challenges and joys of grantmaking in family foundations (a few of the attendees are pictured above). The turnout was great and the gals able to attend really enjoyed sharing and learning from each other. Attending were, representatives from The Cain Foundation, Kozmetsky Family Foundation, Lola Wright Foundation, Topfer Family Foundation, Carl C. and Marie Jo Anderson Charitable Foundation, The LIVESTRONG Foundation, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Shield-Ayres Foundation, St. David's Foundation, Wright Family Foundation, and Webber Family Foundation. 

Other representatives of Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Foundation, Austin Community Foundation, Tingari-Silverton Foundation, Still Water Foundation, Sooch Foundation, and Donald D. Hammill Foundation regretted they were not able to attend, and all expressed interest in re-convening the group in the fall.  The food was tasty, the beverages relaxing, and the camaraderie was beyond all expectations. 

A separate group of co-hosts and sponsors will also be convening a fall salon of Very Smart Gals in Corporate Foundations/Corporate Giving Programs. If you know of someone who should receive an invitation to that salon, please let me know.

100th Anniversary of the Ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution

Etymology: Latin suffragium, "vote", "political support", and the right to vote.

“Suffragists knew that women were not a unified bloc, 

and they still aren’t”.

Ellen Carol DuBois, Professor Emeritus, University of California Los Angeles.

When I saw the above quote in a recent The Washington Post article, "What activists today can learn from the women’s suffrage movement", I felt a pain deep in the pit of my stomach – old scars from years of personal failures trying to organize women as a unified voting block – my only “success” being the admittedly minuscule role I played as President of the Texas Women’s Political Caucus when Ann Richards was elected Governor in 1990. There were so many other defeats for me, simply because even the strongest proponents of women placed friendship, political promises, party politics, and sometimes tiny qualification differences above their support to women (endorsing male candidates over equally and sometimes more qualified female candidates). I cannot tell you how many times I stood up in meetings and said women’s perspective matters, and been booed and out-voted – to the point that I, and my stomach, were perpetually angry and in pain. 

I still occasionally stand up and say gender matters, but for the most part I cowardly view the main battlefield from behind the tree of cynicism, with sadness and as little self-recrimination as I can muster. But enough of about me and my guilt.

Thanks to friend Tracey Firsching, for reminding me 2020 marks the 100^th anniversary of the ratification of the 19^thAmendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. Technically the 100^thanniversary is August 17, 1920, when the Tennessee legislature approved the amendment, becoming the last of the necessary 36 states to secure ratification. 

Tracy also recommended Melinda Gates' book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, in which Gates, when overwhelmed with the immensity of the need (violence against women, educating girls, fair pay, equal rights, and more), says she took a step back to look at “intersecting lines”, saying, “as much as any insight we've gained in our work over the last twenty years, understanding the link between women's empowerment and the wealth and health of societies is crucial for humanity”.

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn reached the same conclusion in their exceptional 2010 book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,saying, as they traveled country to country interviewing leaders, they were only successful at gaining audiences when they pointed out that women accounted for more than half of the GNP.

As I looked into Gates’ book, I came across a number of articles talking about the approaching suffrage centenary, and other books about suffrage, including  The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss, which is apparently a riveting account of the Tennessee battle to achieve the final state approval needed to ratify the 19^th Amendment – so riveting  in fact, that Steven Spielberg has purchased the rights for the movie. 

According to this recent, excellent article in The New Yorker, The Imperfect, Unfinished Work of Women's Suffrage, “the Tennessee battle included anti-arguments including, “women’s supposed emotional instability and intellectual deficiencies, the danger to society of anything that distracted them from their domestic duties as wives and mothers, and the threat to the moral order should they sully themselves with politics”. Some argued that most women did not even want the right to vote, others that the expanded electorate would be an expensive burden on municipalities. Still others raised the paradoxical objections that women would vote the way their husbands did, thus doubling their votes, or not vote the way their husbands did, thus cancelling them out, making the whole thing a waste of time”.

How could we be so unintelligent, so illogical? 

Why did the question of women voting ever even exist?

Why is equality even an issue?

Sadly, these are all rhetorical question.