Happy Birthday

When I was in college I was lucky enough to have an English professor whose curriculum seemed as broad and wide as the world; novels, poems and plays, short fiction and nonfiction. We read at a clip and still she'd pass more on to us, a haiku, an intro to a book she was reading and yellowed newspaper clippings. "Read everything," she exhorted. Sports, science, art, politics, within and outside your interests, all!

Watch what the writers are doing, she said, like a ball player might study another's at-bats. It's a free education, right there for the taking, so take it, she said.

That was how Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem ended up in my hands and how, later, at a used book sale, I found Gloria Steinem's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. That night I read "Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It)" about Steinem's mother who was a journalist in a small town. Her mother loved her work but left it to help with a fledgling resort her husband was running. Soon after, her vital mother began to change; she retreated, heard voices, could no longer care for her family. Her father left; her sister was away at college. So from the age of 11, Steinem tried to keep a house, make meals and keep her mother's fears and worries at bay. She wrote about how for years she tried to get help from doctors but couldn't get any. Her older sister insisted that she get away and go to college, so Steinem did and went to Smith College. She and her sister were finally able to get mental health care for their mother.

As soon as she got to college, Steinem knew she wanted to write about women whose voices - because of so many different circumstances - were not heard.

A piece by Barbara Lovenheim in NYCityWoman.com, brought that story back. When Steinem won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Silurians, a group of veteran journalists, she accepted it on behalf of her mother, who showed her how to create her own reporter's notebook out of folded paper when she was a little girl, who had so loved her short career telling stories.
http://nycitywoman.com/features/gloria-steinem-award-my-mother?page=0,0

This weekend I saw a piece in The Times that said Gloria Steinem turns 80 today and she looks, I don't know, 40? Maybe 45? It said she plans to celebrate by riding elephants in Botswana. At 80 she travels the world, speaks out and writes, as she has all her life, most often about people who live on the margins.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/collins-this-is-what-80-looks-like.html