Big Thoughts and Tiny Creatures: Blog #9 (Week 11)

7:05 pm
                                                   I. Big Thoughts and Tiny Creatures

It’s evening, but it is still light out, and I just can’t get used to the recent time change.  I’ve been out of sorts all week. With more daylight, it seems, comes more responsibility—I feel as though I should be getting more done in my day, somehow.  As though the 24-hour day has actually been expanded to include an extra hour.  So I am a little out of sorts, having trouble focusing these past few days on the micro-level of my life.  Big, philosophical thoughts keep interfering and overshadowing the minutiae.  The sirens parading around my backyard don’t help any; if anything, they reinforce the sense of urgency I’ve been feeling, an urgency to accomplish something, to speed up, to stop reflecting so much.  It is, I suspect, that moment when winter is trying desperately to turn into spring in the air and in the trees, and my brain is trying to catch up with nature.    

My recent unease seems also to have sprung from a recent extra-long phone conversation with a friend.In rehashing my recent adventures, I had to recap my difficult December, in which I lost one relative and discovered that two more were facing serious health issues (which, thankfully, have since been resolved with the necessary biopsies, treatments, and surgeries). With January and February long gone now, I’m finally settling into 2013 in a way I’ve not had a chance to do before, but even so, all of these recent events have left a trace of anxiety with me that I suppose I have not fully shaken off. 

I spot some wildlife tonight while I’m out here, an occurrence that has been a rarity in these winter months—a squirrel and a bird.  The bird flies up in a jolt of speed, too fast for me to catch any identifying marks or colors, but the squirrel lingers a bit, working on a particularly tough nut with his tiny feet and mouth.  He does his squirrel-thing for a while, and then my attention is distracted by a vine climbing in a curvy snake-line up the side of a tree just beyond our backyard fence.  I am intrigued by its presence, which I have never noticed before, and can’t seem to avert my gaze.  When I awake from my mini-trance, Mr. Squirrel has gone.  I am reminded of past encounters, and although I relish the aloneness I feel in this moment, part of me wishes he'd stuck around, come closer, that we'd had some kind of take-away encounter like this one I experienced  last year in Westchester, NY:

                                          just passing by

                                                     Beady eyes glowing

                                                     Emerald green in sunlight's glare

                                                     Squirrel stares me down, wins.

                                                                   
                                                                        *
 

Just as learning of a loved one’s health scare (or several) will change one’s perspective for a while, thinking about the world specifically from the framework of being a woman always gets me thinking of the bigger picture.  Lately, I have been following the disturbing events of the Ohio rape case.  Also, I have had a few run-ins with misogynist characters this past month, including a haughty man at the coffee shop that insulted collectively the intelligence of all women in the Chatham community, clearly (and wrongly) thinking that berating my fellow women would make him look superior and appealing.  Stunned and no longer a very argumentative person in general (or trying hard not to be one), I spoke my piece to the man briefly and didn’t elaborate much, cutting off our conversation as soon as possible. 

Still, this conversation bothered me for weeks.  Why would someone think it is okay to dismiss an entire community of women, based on no proof or experience with those women whatsoever, short of “living near the campus”?  And why would someone think it is okay to transport an unconscious woman from party to party, treating her like a doll and showing no respect toward her, violating her body and her privacy? There are moments when I have to stop reading, listening, even reflecting on such events, or I know full well that one of two things will happen--either my old anger will come bubbling back up, and an old deep sadness will come instead.  Both have something to do with being a woman in this world, and both I've worked hard to keep at bay over the years, with some moderate success.

Attending a Women’s Studies class this winter and spring has reminded me of an earlier version of myself—a prouder and more argumentative version of me, to be sure, but also a more steadfast one than I can claim to be at the moment.  A version of me that marched around Washington during the Bush years  with a swollen thumb, wearing a black and white tee that read "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" (if you're wondering about the thumb, this was after after a twenty-or more hour bus ride during which I was stung by a wasp on the bus, which had no first aid kit available, but march on, I did).  I walked confidently then, despite the thumb, and heard inspirational women speak that day in the Mall on Washington, and I was more certain then--as teenagers and young twenty-somethings tend to be--that I knew everything I needed to know.  Aging tends to undo this cockiness in some of us, it seems, as we see just how big the world is and begin to sense all that we don’t know, all that we’ll never be able to know.  We have to be content to live with seeing only part of the Big Picture during our time here on earth. 
 

                                         II. A Brief Tour of Swissvale/Pittsburgh Herstory

It seems only natural, as I sit in my backyard considering what I know and whether or not I am still a feminist, that I now live in a borough named for the farmstead of Jane Swisshelm (1815-1884, according to Wikipedia).  She was a super-progressive lady—an abolitionist, journalist and publisher—whose family owned land in Swissvale/Edgewood and who obtained a divorce from her husband and moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota to run a series of newspapers.  She stayed politically active, writing scathing articles directed at politicians she felt were not nearly progressive enough, and later lived in D.C.  She supported Lincoln, becoming a friend of Mary Todd Lincoln's, and even became a nurse in the Civil War, saving many lives with little to no help during some battles.  She died in Swissvale and is buried in Allegheny Cemetery in Lawrenceville.

One can find her resting place not too far from the grave of Henry Kendall Thaw (1871-1947)—a mentally ill, sociopathic playboy, born in Pittsburgh (he attended Pitt before transferring), who murdered architect Stanford White atop Madison Square Garden in 1906 in a dispute over his own wife, Evelyn Nesbit.  (His “Trial of the Century” is a pretty fascinating story in its own right!)  Nesbit, a chorus girl and model raised in and near Pittsburgh, was encouraged as a girl by her father to read books and was treated by him with respect and a distinct lack of sexism.  Later in her life, however, she was mistreated and beaten by her husband Thaw, who was intent on ruining White's life due to his jealousy and dislike of the man’s success as well as the previous liaison Evelyn had had with him.  She had to testify in two of his trials, and it is said that his family bribed her to speak of him in a way that would award him the least punishment possible by the courts.

Though I had not heard of Jane Swisshelm before moving to Swissvale, I have long been intrigued by Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit, since learning their story from the Broadway adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and living in Mount Vernon, NY, where I am told White designed some of the nicest homes.  Thinking of these fascinating historical characters who possessed such strong (and sometimes bizarre, or even criminal) personalities makes me feel out of place in my own time, somehow.

While these are folks who may have stood out as unusual and who did not necessarily “fit” with the norms of their own era, I will admit that I’ve long been obsessed with this era—with the political and social issues of women’s rights and prohibition from that long-ago time, with the culture of speakeasies and jazz music, with the sense that there was so much at stake in the activism and involvement in politics of that time period.  I find myself fascinated with Doctorow’s vision of women and their personal and political struggles in this era, as presented in Ragtime.  (I'm a total Broadway geek--I know the score of the musical bersion of Ragtime by heart, and hearing Doctorow read from his work in Philly several years ago was pretty much the highlight of my year.)  I’m already planning a trip to the Allegheny Cemetery, to see if I can conjure up any ghosts from the past as I wander about.

When I think of Jane Swisshelm herself, I can’t help but be impressed by all that she accomplished in her life.  Jane certainly knew how to get it all done in a day's work.  She wrote while living in Pittsburgh and passionately supported women’s rights, which gives us something in common already.  But beyond these basic commonalities that draw me to her legacy, it seems nearly impossible to me that a woman in her time could achieve as much as she did in so many different fields.  She is certainly a woman, and a human being, to be admired—an example for us to follow, a kind of bright star whose influence has not yet burned out completely.

 

**See the Wikipedia pages for Jane Swisshelm, Evelyn Nesbit, and Henry Kendall Thaw, for more about Swissvale, PA and the Trial of the Century.