Eli Wallach

I read in the NY Times that Eli Wallach, at 95, just got an Oscar! How gratifying to find he is still alive and acting! I remember the excitement of that first Broadway show when we arrived in New York, Teahouse of th August Moon. Eli was the poignant and funny star, a combination that was his forte. I don't recall the story, but a gracefully slow and turning dance by a Geisha sticks out in memory. Eli must have been in hundreds of things since then, some of which I have had the luck to see in movies or on television. Salut to Eli!
Half a century ago, after selling our Seattle house, our little family moved east and quickly spent the entire profit on tickets to on and Off-Broadway plays. Sometimes, when we felt flush, there were even meals at popular restaurants. Four years later, returning west, we were required to rent for a time and money was tight. But we never regretted those trips from New Jersey to Manhattan. Musicals were the thing; we saw them all, even My Fair Lady -- $50 for two tickets. And dramas, comedies, an opera now and then, a Myra Hess concert at Carnegie Hall, Three-Penny Opera in a run-down building with two fire trucks parked at the curb . . . Who wouldn't trade practical for the wealth of such memories?
Machvaia believe that what goes around comes around. Have these experiences anything to do with the passion of my grandson, Marcus Ho, who is a marvelous, if not yet Eli famous, actor in New York?

Suzzallo -- a fond goodbye

SUZALLO LIBRARY

As acolyte at the University,
I am entranced by the long shelves
that reach unending around corners,
flooding floors and buildings,
a bounty of accumulating wealth
bound into books,
worlds upon worlds,
all mine.

Here I'll find the fabled golden fleece
in a fever of fresh ideas and the
questions that pose new questions,
giving birth to dreams,
possibilities,
the significance of worlds,
some now gone forever,
but still quick on the pages
of books

Endings

I have packed my Gypsy books into two boxes, folded and taped the cardboard down into a manageable size, and then with some difficulty, delivered them to the local post office. The books are headed for Professor Anne Sutherland's office in Houston; she has a student inerested in Roma.
Looking at my 3 half-empty bookshelves, I wonder how I feel? Mostly relieved, I guess. The hardest part was the packing; I tried not to read anything but book titles and the chapter headings of journals. Books are, for me, ideas and ideas are not people Nearly all my Machvaia friends have left for the Other Side. None of their descendants live in Seattle where I live. Forty years of studying and writing are over. Two books, six articles are published. Releasing makes room for the new and yet to be experienced. But, in this moment, I feel the passing of time and a fragile emptiness of loss.
Once, years ago, I met a young New Yorker considering Roma as her fieldwork topic and she asked me, Gypsies being notoriously hostile, if I knew how she might gain entry and acceptance. I suggested she find a Gypsy kind she liked a lot -- liking and caring provide incontestable rights. Of course, that was Machvaia, one group, the only kind I know, and there are many kinds of Gypsies.
I bought most of those on-their-way-to-Houston books in 2009, when I was writing The Church of Cheese. Also, for the first time in years I was near a university library, the University of Washington's Suzzallo. In California, where I formerly lived, it was one bus, BART, a wait, another bus, and a walk to the Berkeley library. I didn't go often, but once, when writing about folktales, I made friends with Alan Dundes, a generous mensch of a person. Later, I hear that a former grateful student gave him and his Folklore Department a million dollars -- yes that's true!
Yesterday, Red Square was crowded with students eating lunch and, after returning several books, I stood at the top of the stairs, facing west, and said goodbye to Suzzallo. The blessing of the Seattle sun was out. I remembered how, after my divorce and during graduate school, Suzzallo had been my safe haven home and exactly where I wanted to be. But that was before I met Lola, Stevo, Katy, Zoni, and the rest. I thanked the Universe for everything, the whole shebang. I believe in formal endings.
Despite buying books and reading all those books, I found no overriding theory of anthropology that impressed me as relevant and can only hope that The Church of Cheese is sufficiently detailed for other scholars to use as a theoretical springboard -- or whatever. I believe my book saves the people's once vital rituals and beliefs for posterity, for their great-great grandchildren to come, for the good luck of honoring the India connection, for a future none of us can know.
Lola's is the family I miss most. Her granddaughter called last spring with a welcome gift. She said that after reading my book, she feels proud to be a Gypsy. She said she now tells everyone she is Machvanka and she shows them her book, our book, my book, Lola's Luck, and the pictures of her family. How grateful she says she is that she now has a history, like other people, like Outsiders. Little Sonia gave me the reward of writing her a history and it was more than I ever expected to accomplish in this life.

Dream:The favor of Gypsies

Mornings, waking up, the dreams of the night usually burst like fugitive and fragile soap bubbles. But not always.

I am at a gathering and dear Katy sits beside me. As we have done so many times before, we make plans for the clothes we might wear to the next Machvaia party. But dream transitions are fluid and, look, Gypsies are arriving! We are already at a Machvaia party!
The people are ready: they bring their best party look, their good will, good thoughts, and the intent for celebration. Frissons of excitement as I realize they are asking who I am. More frissons as I am reminded that I am an Outsider and, by Machvaia law, am not supposed to be here.
But the nearness of Katy reassures me. Katy is my benefactor, protector, friend through many years of parties. In my dream I can't really see her clearly. But I can feel her warmth, the comfort of sharing; we are joined in the joy of innumerable experiences like these. Now dead a decade, she is, to me, more compellingly alive than ever. So alive that Katyness greets me on awakening. Katyness follows me through the day and into the week, making me invincible.

The New Yorker

Hit start, email, and I am off, fitting puzzle piece to puzzle piece and feeling rather skillful while playing The New Yorker put-the-cover-together game. I do the puzzles often -- there are thousands. That's how I discovered the magazine was born in 1925, only two years before I was, and that we are buddies on the seas of time.
As I complete a cover, I try to remember what was happening in the world and in my life that week, and match it, as best I can, with whatever the artist has depicted. (Bemelmans, Thurber, Steinberg, Sempe' are favorites.) I don't always manage, but I do approve the political bent of recent decades, particularly the pyramid of black sea birds in silhouette after the BP oil disaster. Too much talk about money and too little about the loss of sea life was my opinion of the spill and The New Yorker echoed my take with a cover.
As young woman I remember an older woman in "The Talk of the Town" section who wrote very simply about the mundane events of her life and made me long to be there, in New York, and to write, like she did, about the beauty to be found in ordinary moments, about small details given a fond and careful attention. Who was she? A mentor never thanked and large forgotten until brought to memory during a puzzle game.
Although not a physical anthropologist, I was teaching Human Evolution at several local community colleges during the early seventies and often found what I needed for class in The New Yorker. One time I copied pages of Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring as handouts for my students. Since then, everything I taught seems dated except for my thesis, man shaped by, and shaping, the environment, and the incomparable The Silent Spring.
The New Yorker has followed me everywhere. The years -- decades really -- I was studying and living with the Machvaia Roma Gypsies, I would play hooky on occasion, rent a room at Motel 6, and spend a vacation day or two in America, which what Machvaia call the Outsider's world, collating my fieldnotes and enjoying the latest issue of The New Yorker.
The New Yorker has proved useful in ways that could never have been anticipated. I was only 26 and the mother of two small children when my husband was considered for a transfer from Seattle to New York. No need to describe my excitement when his potential boss, Harry Disston, asked us to dinner. Of course I knew all about the current Broadway shows and recently opened restaurants, and of course my husband Roger got the job. This gave us three and a half marvelous years on the east coast the happiest years of our marriage. At dinner, Harry seemed confused when I assured him I had never actually been to New York.
In the eighties, my fifteen-year-old granddaughter won a scholarship to the School of American Ballet and I chaperoned her to New York. We had too little money and lived most of that difficult year in shared lodgings. My secretary salary at Harper-Row hardly covered our cheap rent and groceries. To cheer myself up, I would take the subway to The New Yorker building, ride up and down on each of the many elevators, pretend I worked there, and enjoy the civil ambiance.
The New Yorker has been like my big brother, the one who went to school at Princeton or Yale. It has introduced me to a world of literate, elegant writing and clear thinking, but mostly to a value system that suits me and that I have incorporated during my years of reading The New Yorker.

Visions of Bahto

I am going through my Machvaia files and looking for something inspiring I might write about. Also, throwing away old material I have no use for anymore. It's a good and freeing feeling to get rid of stuff. Always, in America, one is haunted by stuff, and cajoled to buy more stuff, and having a hard time to find misplaced stuff because there is so much stuff. Now that I have Church of Cheese published, I can toss away many pages of paper stuff.

But this, recorded in 1968, I will keep and share with my bloggers.





When we met, Lola and Bahto, the Machvaia parents of nine grown children, hadn't lived together since Bahto left Lola for another woman many decades earlier. Bahto now lived with his son, and Lola was on her own. Lola admitted he had proposed they get back together some years earlier, but she refused.

Bahto was older than Lola by maybe twenty years and, when he died, she told me about the post-death year when the Dead One comes to visit. Most of the Machvaia are more afraid of ghosts than anything else, but Lola never was, or so she said. "After Dinah (her daughter) died, I was never afraid of ghosts." She seemed quite tranquil about the times she "saw" Bahto, and rather smug that it was the ritually correct number, three.





Lola: Once I saw him (Bahto) in his trunk (coffin) when I was living on Linden Avenue. I was sitting on the sofa, looking out at the traffic, and then I looked at my room and saw him. I felt a little scared -- no don't write that. I was startled, not scared. Then he was gone.





Another time he showed up and I asked him where the money was. He said he couldn't tell me, but I should ask Miller (their son) where it was. Miller told me he wished he knew.





The last time, I was in my ofisa (business office for fortune telling) and someone rolled a big rug in on the floor. Then they tacked another on the outside. That's bad, you know, a rug (where you walk is polluted). Then the Old Man (Bahto) came in and didn't say anything.


So I left and went to town to shop and when I came back, the rugs and the Old Man were gone. That's good. It means he took away all the heaviness, the bad luck, and the sorrow.

Seattle in summer

Seattle, in summer, is a most agreeable city. Sun shadows flicker a changing green through the maples outside and onto the wall of my apartment. The light is long; in the evenings, I sit on the deck and read The New Yorker. Doors and windows open, we all share the music, the cacophony and motion of the passing cars, intriguing bits of conversations. Here, near the University, the parking strips are dotted with "free" furniture that recycles, and comes and goes, as students come and go. Sun warms up smiles, clouds dissolve into puffs, and we are released from the bondage of winter jackets. Fleece could have been invented for the purpose of comfort during the many damp Seattle months. But summers I wear cotton, my California clothes, the flowered pajama bottoms, T-shirts, sunglasses, plastic earrings, shorts, and tan my legs. On blue sky days, driving over the hills, the stark snowy peaks to the west, the Olympics, and the east, the Cascades, cradle the city in fingers of epic proportion. I lived here once before and who would have guessed that featureless and forbidden Sandpoint Naval Air Station would transform into a park with tide pools, a parade of orca sculptures, public boat dock, a field for ground-nesting birds, and a lake clean enough for salmon? Organic blueberries, peaches, and sweetly pale Rainier cherres are in season and then quite quickly gone. Over too soon, that's summer in Seattle.