The Crooked Mirror l Louise Steinman’s Blog
Journeys within and beyond
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The Verb To Inquire
Every Friday afternoon, I have been tutoring a fourth grader named Delilah, whom I view through a screen on Zoom. During the pandemic, Delilah’s school is the bedroom she shares with her two brothers. Her desk is her bunk bed. The family rarely goes out. Her mother quit her job to monitor the three kids’ schooling. Last December, they all got Covid. Her little brother bounces on the bed behind her, desperate for attention. Her older brother is playing a video game, with volume on high. After our first meeting, I cried. Delilah had no books. Everything was on the screen. She told me her eyes hurt after so many school hours on Zoom.
Unclaimed, Unforgotten
Pouring rain this morning, as I set out for the Los Angeles County Crematory and Cemetery , next to Evergreen Cemetery in East L.A. for the annual ceremony honoring the unclaimed dead. Some of the 1457 unclaimed have no names; others have family too poor to afford the mortuary fees. Some of them have no family. Veterans. Stillborn babies. Homeless women and homeless men. Elderly. Young. I’d imagined there would only be a few people at the ceremony, but it was crowded under the blue awning, and water came through the cracks.
Resister in Sanctuary: We Won't Go
But what sends my memory into overdrive is RESISTER IN SANCTUARY, in bold black letters across a legal size flyer. It’s a manifesto written by Gregory Nelson, then nineteen years old and briefly my high school sweetheart. Greg had openly refused to register a year earlier, as required by law, when he turned eighteen. In the fall of 1968, he asked the minister and congregation of Grace Episcopal Church in South Los Angeles to grant him sanctuary, a medieval tradition, for an act of conscience.
"Happiness is Bullshit" Celebration of the Life of Judge Harry Pregerson
When asked once what guided his decisions, Judge Pregerson explained: “My conscience is a product of the Ten Commandments, the Bill of Rights, the Boy Scout Oath and the Marine Corps Hymn. If I had to follow my conscience or the law, I would follow my conscience.”
A Translator Remains Faithful
Imagine a world without the benefit of translation--the Bible is available only in Greek, Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" only in Spanish. You could read Dante's "Inferno" if you knew Italian, or Kafka's "The Trial" with a sure command of German.
