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Canary on a College Campus

April 8, 2025 by mountainmornings

The news is seeping into my dreamy grandmotherly days.

Yes, I’m washing baby bottles, cuddling babies, and pitching in with household chores because twins… and every now and then I catch a glimpse of the rest of the world. I know there was a Hands Off protest in almost every major city around the world this past weekend. And I’m glad to see so many groups coalesce around the fight against totalitarianism.

But what really got to me was seeing Jewish and Palestinian students at Columbia University chain themselves to a fence in opposition to the school’s funding of Israel.

Don’t let the T administration fool you – they are twisting a biblical feud into a supposed fight against antisemitism. But by arresting, deporting and basically disappearing hundreds of valid college students studying here, in this country, legally btw, Mr T has shown his true colors. What has been happening on college campuses lately is truly Orwellian.

What were their crimes? Speaking freely about their opposition to bombing women and children in Gaza? Signing a petition equating the Israeli government with an apartheid system?

It may be hard to believe, for some MAGA Americans to believe, but Jewish Americans can love the state of Israel and still disagree with Netanyahu and his government’s policies. Just like we can love our country and wish with all our hearts that Harris was elected. Mr T is not doing us Jews any favors!

And this morning I read about a covert group, Canary Mission, that has been tracking activists in university settings all around the country for years:

“The group, which says its mission is to single out those who promote “hatred of the U.S.A., Israel and Jews on North American college campuses,” listed the names of seven students and academics, including three current and former professors at Columbia University.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/israel-gaza-student-protests-canary-mission.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

And a play about the McCarthy commission and Walter Winchell just opened on Broadway starring George Clooney, along with my neighbor Ann’s son, Mac Brandt. Ann escaped the Altadena fire and attended the opening night in NYC. I wonder, can we learn from our history?

Seventy years go, in Hollywood many Jewish artists made McCarthy’s black list. Today, our government is making another list in the guise of antisemitism. The canary is not only singing, it’s screaming.

Dinner on the deck with the twins in their Moses baskets.

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Plus ca Change

April 1, 2025 by mountainmornings

The more things change, the less I like it.

But I am not like my Nana, who refused to give up her “ice box” for a newfangled refrigerator. When the ice man stopped delivering, she reluctantly accepted the new contraption with a round condenser sitting like a pill box hat on top. It’s ironic that it was my sister Kay who had the Frigidaire delivered to our Nana, but later refused a microwave from me!

Today it’s more complicated. It’s not as if I’d like to return to the days when a milkman came to our little house in Victory Gardens… or my Daddy Jim had to climb up on the roof to adjust the TV antenna. But milk IS the driving force of our lives now that the twins are home! The Rocker had to install a small freezer in the garage for the overflow of breast milk Aunt Kiki is delivering. It’s actually Amazonian.

The Flapper told me very little about our lives before that Year of Living Dangerously. But I did know that her doctor took her aside one day and told her she didn’t have to sanitize my baby bottles – which meant in 1948 she didn’t need to boil them. The doctor knew my Father was dying of a brain tumor in the dining room of our home, and he figured she had enough to worry about, what with three other children in the house.

And so when the Bride was born, the Flapper helped me in many ways but she knew next to nothing about breastfeeding. Ditto for Grandma Ada. Their generation was expected to bottle feed, only poor women who couldn’t afford formula would nurse. And yet, the culture changed so dramatically by the 70s – we women read “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” we had consciousness raising groups, we had Gloria Steinem!

And the La Leche League of course. It was considered a badge of honor to nurse your baby anywhere and everywhere. And like most things, we went too far. I suffered through the flu and a mastitis and kept on going, determined to make a success of it. When in fact, training your baby to take a bottle along with nursing makes sense for your family’s sanity.

Especially with TWINS!

My son and his wife had a crash course on caring for preemies in the NICU. They had a lactation specialist and an occupational therapist! Best of all were the nurses, who each shared the tricks of their trade; including the last night nurse who hugged me and said I looked like a mystery writer!

So now I am my Mother, knowing very little about bottles. The baby girls are excellent nursers, but the bottles at first were not getting the job done in the NICU. And Kiki came up with the idea to change the bottles from one brand to another, and voila! They started meeting their “shift minimums.” So yesterday, we brought the girls home to meet Leo the Protector and his two resident cats.

Bob and I will stick around to help in any way we can. Ive learned how to defrost breastmilk and use the new bottles and their special cleaning appliance. The rest is like riding a bike, right? I hope they got some sleep last night.

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Lockdown

March 25, 2025 by mountainmornings

Last weekend my stepbrother Eric and his wife Bev, from St Louis, were visiting their daughter’s family here in California. We have a history of missed opportunities to see each other whenever we overlap on the West Coast but this time I was determined to make it happen. We made a reservation at a French restaurant near the hospital, we would sit out on the terrace to avoid germs.

Then this happened:

Aunt Kiki and I left Bob and our son in the hospital’s cafeteria – they were headed into the Starbucks cafe near the gift shop while we wanted to get back to the NICU. Only when we got to the locked door leading into the maternity ward, a spot where I would pick up the wall mounted phone and announce myself and the name of the babies I was visiting, we met an armed policewoman.

She said the hospital was on LOCKDOWN and we couldn’t get back into the NICU and we couldn’t go outside! We made her say it again.

All of a sudden a fairy godmother holding her dinner plate looked at us and said, “She’s one of our mothers, follow me!” It was the NICU charge nurse sweeping us through maternity’s locked doors and into the nursery where we learned there’d been an incident in the ER. I asked our fairy/nurse if this was a drill, she said no. Kiki quickly texted the Rocker to tell him he should abandon his coffee run and meet us in the NICU pronto.

Without knowing anything – was there an armed shooter in the building, had a car crashed into the ER, or was the next plague contained behind locked doors – we settled into our little room with the twins. I told Kiki we were in the safest place imaginable, behind multiple layers of security. The Rocker texted back he heard helicopters outside while Bob was using his doctor bona fides to reach us.

We were the only visitors in our “twin room.” At one time we had three sets of twins with three nurses each but on that day we were down to two sets and the remaining two nurses were trying to put us at ease. “There’s plenty of breast milk to keep us hydrated,” one said. The baby girls slept peacefully all swaddled up in their bassinets and I hugged Kiki. The boys arrived.

For over three hours it was business as usual, kind of – Kiki was nursing the twins and I was tentatively texting with Bev. They were at the restaurant holding our table and enjoying some French onion soup. We learned that someone had left the ER unhappy with their treatment, threatening to return and, “Shoot up the place.” The LAPD were looking for him (I’m assuming their gender) and until he was arrested we were held captive, obliged to miss yet another attempt to see Eric and Bev!

Once the threat was over and we were driving back to our AirBnB, I was slowly aware of my suppressed rage. When Bob worked in a hospital, there were no metal detectors. Today we must present our drivers license, stand in front of a camera and have a badge made every day we visit the twins. Every baby has some sort of security band on their foot. And yet

These babies, my brand new grandbabies, have already experienced their first distinctly American terrorist threat… their first active shooter drill. They were not even a month old. Even if this disgruntled patient was at home having his dinner, we were watching the NICU door, listening for gunfire. I was terrified. He was arrested, we got the all clear and picked up dinner – cookies – from the hospital’s vending machine.

But do I want my grandchildren to grow up in a country with 125 guns for every 100 people? Here is a screen shot of that night.

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Work Life Balance

March 18, 2025 by mountainmornings

Another week, another day of physical therapy. I’m working hard to not only turn my head, but bend it at an angle so I can look into the eyes of my brand new grandbabies. That is the goal. That and not falling, so I’m working on balance exercises too. Isometrics is also part of the plan.

And once a week, I’m tuning into Apple TV to watch “Severance.”

If you’re not a fan, Severance is a series about people who are suffering so much in their personal lives, they undergo a surgical procedure on their brains so that they are entirely different people in their work life. At home they are “outies,” and at work they are “innies.” Their memories are kaput!

The series was shot at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ. Long white corridors leading to strange rooms punctuate the dystopian landscape. Its four main characters have no work life balance; instead they have two different identities.

Whenever I heard anyone talk about work life balance, I felt it was code for a more traditional, sexist point of view. After all, men never uttered those words when I was joining the work force in the 70s. Their work was their life. But for women, well we were expected to look like a Virginia Slims ad – a baby on one hip and a briefcase in the other hand.

We could bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan!

Things haven’t changed much since then. American women still shoulder much more of the housekeeping and child rearing. As the Bride likes to point out, our country is the ONLY G7 country that doesn’t offer PARENTAL leave after the birth of a baby for six months to a year! We also abandon our new parents to a for-profit childcare system that can eat up half their income.

My son has his studio at home, and Aunt Kiki has a pretty flexible designer’s schedule where she can work from home as needed. But still, having twins will require an open-door policy at their house! Getting those babies home and on the same schedule is the order of the day. They are fast approaching six pounds!

While the only severed woman, or should I say women, on Severance is Helly R aka Helena Eagan, and the only baby is outie Mark’s niece, the science fiction series is a welcome relief from the actual cesspool of MAGA policies that have been littering our news outlets. Like DOGE people bringing armed ‘Marshalls’ into government agencies – I wonder if they were wearing brown shirts.

Breaking news. I’ve graduated to two pound hand weights and my goal is six plus. My work is all about balance.

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Love is Blind, and also dumb

March 11, 2025 by mountainmornings

Last night my son decided to take his dog to the dog park.

The Rocker and Aunt Kiki have two cats and a very good dog named Leo. They know that their fur babies will be in for a rude awakening when the twins come home, so they’ve been trying to give them a little extra attention. They bring home baby blankets from the NICU to smell, and we give them special treats. Since I was tired, I parked myself in front of a Bravo reality show while Kiki pumped.

The only reality show I’ve ever watched was the first incarnation of Real Housewives. Wait, I may have watched an Apprentice or two. Isn’t it strange that two previous reality show stars are battling on the world stage?

When the Bride started nursing the Love Bug in Nashville we watched Downton Abbey on PBS. That was almost 13 years ago, there was no streaming.

I’m not sure why “Love is Blind” was the main attraction last night, but I fell right into its spell. I get why we might crave mind-numbing TV right now, who wants to hear about the latest orange julius meltdown? The market is sliding downhill and Kennedy thinks the measles is due to a poor diet. What else is new?

Anyway, a guy and a gal meet and talk behind a wall. It’s like Cyrano, only without the intermediary and the beautiful language. You only get to meet your actual person once you’ve decided to marry them! And I just happened to watch the episode where a nice white woman asks a white guy what he thinks about Black Lives Matter.

She should have run the other way. Instead she thought he might evolve. He told her he never gave BLM much thought. Ladies, listen to your intuition- it seems these two made it all the way to the altar before she backed out. Oh the drama.

So the question is, can a Republican marry a Democrat? What would be the deal breaker? A long time ago I sang “Marry the Man Today and Change His Ways Tomorrow.” It’s still a pretty funny premise.

I’m holding Baby A, and telling her boys can be tricky.


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Moving Day

March 4, 2025 by mountainmornings

We moved over the weekend to a new AirBnB.

The first place was a last minute booking because our new grandbabies couldn’t wait to arrive earthside. This spot with a garden was the original plan; two bedrooms in a quaint carriage house within walking distance of shops and cafes. I settled right in and made sweet potato lentil soup for the new parents. We’re only a little over a mile away from the hospital where the twins are thriving and growing stronger each day. They will be moving home soon enough, best friends for life.

But did you know that once upon a time people packed up all their belongings and moved every year? I happened to bring Atlantic magazine’s March issue with me for the plane, and I was intrigued by Yoni Appelbaum’s essay, “Stuck in Place.”

”The great holiday of American society at its most nomadic was Moving Day, observed by renters and landlords throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th with a giant game of musical houses. Moving Day was a festival of new hopes and new beginnings of shattered dreams and shattered crockery – quite as recognized a day as Christmas or the Fouth of July!”

Of course I played musical houses growing up between Nell in Victory Gardens, and the Flapper in Scranton. All my memories are glued to a dilapidated leather album – dressed up for Easter, hiding between appliances in the kitchen, sitting on the hood of an old car in a frilly bathing suit. And there’s my favorite, I’m about five years old and posed like Shirley Temple in front of a poster at the circus. I was wearing a pair of oxfords, my “circus shoes.”

I’ve been blissfully unaware of the political circus happening all around us at breakneck speed. My priority is moving between this carriage house and the hospital, supporting the new parents as best I can, and beginning a course of physical therapy. Balance and equilibrium are the order of the day.

And so we’re off on a hunt for a small freezer to store breast milk for two babies. I cannot wait to move them into their new nursery.

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Hollywood is Buzzing

February 25, 2025 by mountainmornings

…and not because of the Academy Awards.

I’m back in Southern California where I woke not to birdsong but to a loudspeaker roaming the early morning streets telling people they do not have to open the door if ICE comes to their house. There’s a Town Hall in Malibu to help people dealing with fire debris removal. There are runs and benefits for the displaced victims of the wildfires. Another Fire Aid Benefit concert is being planned with Billie Eilish, No Doubt and Jellyroll performing. There is even a movie prop company donating all of its furniture to people! Imagine receiving the couch from “Friends!”

It is a very different vibe among the lollipop palm trees and the incessant sunshine… but then again a lot has changed. We have a new president, unfortunately, and I’m no longer encircled by a cervical collar.
But most importantly we have two new baby girls that decided to arrive early.

Big congratulations to the Rocker and Aunt Kiki! Weighing in at nearly 5 pounds our brand new baby girls are holding court in the NICU for a few more days They are simply perfect in every way. We are so excited to bring them home, so stay tuned for more updates .

Two Jersey Nanas whispering in their ears.

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Party Planning

February 19, 2025 by mountainmornings

Bob and I have been known to throw a good party over the years. We’ve done a clambake in our Jersey Shore backyard, we did Bob’s infamous 40th “Come as You Were in the 60s” birthday bash, and of course the post-flood homecoming in Rumson, not to mention the Big Chill Thanksgivings and numerous Grandma Ada birthday parties – and the 2000 Millennial New Year’s Eve. There’s nothing I love better than cooking for a crowd, well maybe catering…

I had to laugh when I overheard one political commentator say, “The Democrats have to throw the kind of party you want to go to.” A light went off in my head!

Of course, we don’t want to be all doom and gloom. But I also don’t do raves either, luckily that trend has skipped my generation. Still, turn on Fox News and their anchors are actually having questionable fun. I don’t stay on Fox for long, but everyone is sitting around telling jokes, instead of stating facts or analyzing policy. They are not worried about the end of democracy while their president and his oligarch, tech-bro, side-kick go about trampling everything in their path like two giant Gullivers run amok.

So what kind of party would you want to attend? I hear that Rubrik’s Cube parties are all the rage in Paris. I’m not quite sure how you play, but wearing articles of clothing in the cube’s colors is de rigeur. Or what about a Knives Out mystery party? Maybe we should leave weapons out of the equation. An escape room? I’d love to escape reality, forget this past year, a year of nearly dying from a simple fall that happened the day before our election.

Well, both splints are off my hands and the Aspen collar has been packed away. I look perfectly normal, if not shorter, but that is an illusion. I’m tempered. I’ve had to face mortality and my head still feels like a bowling ball. My right hand doesn’t work the way it used to, but then again, pretty much nothing else does either. Ah, to be seventy again!

Let’s plan on throwing a party for the Dems. Let’s brainstorm all the things we want to happen, like getting egg prices down, controlling bird flu, and not whether or not to buy Greenland. Let’s talk about the positive things we can do to help the climate, and help families with childcare. We need to make our party fun again and build community.

We need to party like it’s 1999! And Happy Anniversary to these two!

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On the Cheap

February 10, 2025 by mountainmornings

I was cheering last night as the Eagles demolished the Chiefs. My feelings have nothing to do with football, it’s simply that my great great grandfather got on a boat from Ireland and settled in Pennsylvania. I may have grown up across the Delaware Water Gap in NJ, but my PA roots run deep. Like Jill Biden, my blood also runs green.

My concentration wavered after the halftime show. The outcome was obvious, so I may have tuned into Celebrity Jeopardy, but I swear I didn’t see the camera cut to Mr T once; I saw Taylor, and Ann Hathaway, and even Sir Paul. He was always my favorite Beatle. And since the one and only time I met our current president was at an NFL game in NY in the 80s, I had to wonder if he had enough attention last night to satisfy his outsized ego?

That morning my brother, Dr Jim, was recounting his experience of attending the Super Bowl with the Minnesota Vikings in 1975. He and his wife Anita flew to New Orleans on a private jet, attended the parties, rode on the team bus and entered the stadium with our brother Mike, the Vikings president and GM. We all knew that Mr T was trying to acquire an NFL franchise, at the same time he was acquiring a new wife, but none of the owners were willing to sell. Or maybe he didn’t have the money?

So the conman realtor bought his way into the rival, fledgling US Football Leasue (USFL) and proceeded to mount a hostile takeover of the NFL. Does this sound like a familiar business plan? His incompetent management was likely one of the reasons the USFL failed. He sued the NFL and was awarded a grand total of three DOLLARS.

In the trial, NFL attorneys framed their case around Trump, arguing that the lawsuit was a charade orchestrated by Trump as a way to get into the NFL on the cheap. The argument worked.

“I thought he was extremely arrogant, and I thought that he was obviously trying to play the game,” juror Patricia Sibilia recalled in a telephone interview last year. “He wanted an NFL franchise. . . . The USFL was a cheap way in.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/donald-trumps-long-stormy-and-unrequited-romance-with-the-nfl/2017/09/23/979264a4-a093-11e7-8ea1-ed975285475e_story.html

I guess the Commish has a short memory!

I think we are witnessing a hostile takeover of our government, a kind of coup from within, and Elon Musk is the General. We should have learned from Mr T’s business tactics, or from his biography. He’s shown his true colors time and time again – in his real estate dealings, in his marital infidelities, in his obsession with the NFL. He once said that if he’d been allowed to purchase the Buffalo Bills, he probably wouldn’t have run for president! When I read that, I nearly choked on my coffee. All he needed back then was 80 Million Dollars.

Maybe Fox gave Mr T pre-game exposure, but I didn’t watch it… besides, I was excited to see a certain ad that the Rocker’s company produced. Ticket sales to this year’s Super Bowl went down for the first time ever, and womens’ sports teams are rising which is a tiny silver lining to the past few weeks. Here is the Bug, on a winning streak.

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Cheerio!

February 4, 2025 by mountainmornings

Today’s the day. It’s been three months since my family room fall. Today I see the spine doctor for X-rays of my neck – extension and flexion or tilting my head up and down. My fracture at C2, sometimes called a hangman’s fracture, has not exactly healed. It’s difficult if not impossible for older people to grow new bone, but the doctor tells me that fibrous tissue has bridged the gap, like a spider’s web of scar tissue. “No more roller coasters for you,” he tells me.

“And no bumper cars!”

I should feel lucky, if not downright jubilant that I’ll be free of the cervical Aspen collar. Goodbye, Ciao, Cheerio! So why do I feel conflicted?

Yesterday I shared a table for lunch with a widow. Her opening question, “What happened to you?” wasn’t new. Most people assume it was surgery that resulted in this head immobilization. But Bob had to leave to take a call, and before long the young widow and I were immersed in a deep conversation about life, our daughters, the choices we make, and her fall (totally alone and without her phone) off a ladder in the small storage unit of her high-rise condo in the Gulch.

INTERMISSION FOR 9 AM DOCTOR APPOINTMENT

I’ve just returned from the doctor collar-free. I had a rendezvous with death, but I tricked the grim reaper. My head is sitting on its axis just fine. Here’s a little anatomy lesson:

“The axis, also known as the epistropheus, is the second cervical vertebra (C2) that has some similarities to a typical cervical vertebra but is categorized as an atypical vertebra because of its unique features. Its most characteristic feature is the prominent superior projection known as the dens axis, or odontoid process. The dens axis plays an important function for the movement of the head, acting as a stable pivot around which the atlas and head rotate.“

It figures that I broke an atypical vertebra. Last week was my last hand therapy appointment, so now what do I do? I’m not allowed to drive for a few months, or play football…. “tackle” football. I started a book in California, “The Last Lecture,” by Randy Pausch, that I’d like to finish. He received a terminal cancer diagnosis and his book is a look back at his exceptional life. If you’ve never heard of him, check this out:

I guess my joy at being cut-loose from doctors and therapy is being blunted by the daily assaults on our democratic process by a president who would be king. The Groom’s critical care funding from NIH may be in jeopardy. One of their friends who works for the government has been asked to sign a “loyalty” pledge. This is real, Mr T’s crazy missives, his crazier “special government employee” Elon’s directives are all engineered to foment fear. Do not lose faith. It’s time to pull out those old pink pussy hats and resist dear readers.

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