Pride and Prejudice

For the first time in years, I managed to delete the essay I wrote yesterday without first saving it. I could have posted my essay last night, but I didn’t. I shut down my computer, also for the first time in ages, hoping that a reboot would help with connectivity issues here at the Jersey shore. It didn’t. There is not enough bandwidth in the summer. That’s just the way it is. I lost my work, but I am going to take the whole experience as “mystically correct” to use a phrase of one of my poet mentors. Otherwise I will waste a whole bunch of time berating myself and thinking “what was that about, Jessica.”

My now lost post meandered. It began with a long meditation on luck, both good and bad. I recounted late husband saying, in the final days of his life, that he had never believed himself unlucky, and how his statement has continued to haunt me. I reflected on my life’s, otherwise, mostly very good luck. My granddaughter had her bat mitzvah two weeks ago on the same day my grandson, her cousin, was born. But I noted that highlighting my own good luck risked bringing down the evil eye. My grandmother was seriously superstitions. Kinehora, a frequent word in her vocabulary, and pooh, pooh, pooh. I will shut up about me.

Then I chattered on about William Carlos Williams’s poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” as a meditation on luck in everyday life.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

How the natural word, the “rain,” is beyond our control. Just yesterday, earthquakes in Venezuela. Scorching heat across Europe. From Williams I moved to Langston Hughes’s poem, “Luck,” about the role chance plays in love, the pain of its absence. Its last stanza;

To some people
Love is given
To others
Only heaven.

From there I moved to PRIDE, the world awash in rainbows.

Langston Hughes was a gay, Black man living in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. The United States has not been kind to either Black people or LGBTQ people. That unkindness continues unabated. Been following the Supreme Court’s decisions? Today is the 21^st anniversary of the right to marriage equality old today. The age of majority in many places. There are many in Congress who would eliminate that right. What’s it to them? The ability to marry should not be a matter of law not luck.

I live adjacent to Asbury Park which I think of as the center of gay life in the United States, certainly in New Jersey. Pride has been celebrated with Pride in Asbury every day this month. The gay community is responsible for the rebirth and renewal of Asbury Park; though Bruce Springsteen is entitled to credit for centering Asbury Park on the map. How wonderful it would be if the whole country celebrated Pride like Asbury Park.

Next week we celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the establishment of the United States. If “all men (still that uncomfortable word) are created equal”, EVERYONE, and I will use the language of the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination, one of the broadest in the country,

• Race, color, creed, and nationality

• Religion,

• Sex (including pregnancy and related conditions)

• Sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression,

• Disability (including perceived disabilities, HIV/AIDS, and mental/physical limitations)

• Age

• Marital, civil union, or domestic partnership status

• Familial status,

• Genetic information and atypical hereditary cellular or blood traits

• Military service liability

• Source of lawful income or rent payment (in housing context)

should be able to live, to marry, to work, to be without facing discrimination'. Let’s celebrate this 250th anniversary with Pride. Yes, I am getting preachy. I know.

But while I am on the subject of Pride, there is a brilliant poetry collection by the late, great Jack Wiler. Divina is Divina. Get a copy. You will not regret it. Jack died of AIDS. Bad, bad luck. Remember AIDS? Our collective memory is terribly short.

As we end the month, I wish you Happy Pride. Happy 4^th. May all your luck be good luck. And, of course, some music, a band I regret never having seen in person

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Back to me, a reminder, if you are at the Jersey Shore this summer. I will be featured at the Cape May County Library, Sea Isle City, Monday, July 13, 6:00 p.m. Love to see you there. Hope you are regularly going to the ALTE website and checking out the journal. The next issue, “Crossings,” will be coming in the next few weeks.