Effie Lou
Five Years Old When the Titanic Sank
Memories of an Elder
“I’ll meet you in the morning by the bright river-side”
She was old all my life; 76 when I was born, 87 when I first met her. When she spoke, it sounded like a swarm of bees hovering over a thick patch of clover. She was blind and feeble and had to be led around by the arm. But there was rarely a Sunday that went by for a hundred years that didn’t find Miss Effie Lou standing in the choir loft carrying the altos on her bony shoulders. She’d lost a husband, a daughter, and two sons, but she never lost her song.
I have always been fascinated with old people. All the things they’ve seen and heard and done. When I was a kid, I would go over to Ludbar, the small assisted living apartments where she lived, and sit for hours listening to her tell stories.
“I was 5 years old when the Titanic sank,” she said. “Daddy was a preacher. We prayed for the families of those that sank frozen into eternity as he told us to make sure we were always ready to meet the …
It's a Cruel World
Goths in Ass-Hugging Fishnets Battle Palm Trees and Nostalgia
Gary Numan Brings the Noise
Legendary Siouxsie Sioux Has Lost It
Green and black do not belong together, and the combination of the two brings almost nothing to mind but the queasy specter of sickness and death. It’s the color scheme of the awful alternate jerseys worn by the New York Jets, who are losers; gold cross-bars prudently separate the Jamaican flag’s discordant wedges of verdance and darkness. Summoning a graying army of gloom — clad in funerary black lace, heavy leather, white face-paint, and softer-core varieties of bondage gear — towards the glorious emerald basin behind the Rose Bowl results in a disquieting clash between two different phases of existence. At Cruel World, a one-day music festival held in Pasadena this past May, it felt like an entire mid-sized town’s worth of goths had been banished into a wilderness of blue skies and palm-covered mountains, as if the event were happening in the far background of a medieval depiction of the Last …
Elm for Overwhelm
Unseen magic of flowers is key to calm
Dr. Edward Bach pioneered use
Agonies dissolve
It’s 6pm on a Sunday. You have an imminent deadline and a flight that departs the next morning, and you have yet to pack. You sigh and check your phone, where you see that the culture wars are still ablaze, inflation continues to climb, and the financial system is careening toward imminent collapse. The screen is cracked like a piece of Etruscan pottery; if only you had time to get it fixed. Lost in the weeds of unanswered texts, there’s an old friend in town who wants to meet up, a colleague whose essay you still need to read, your stepson who needs his resume edited, and a CSA vegetable box to cancel before your credit card gets charged. The phone starts bleating like the irritating, inconsolable creature it is. It’s your mother calling in with her regular account of sick or dying friends and relatives. You have laundry to do. Piles of laundry, along with piles of papers to file, piles of bills to pay, …
