Making stories with and for the people.
Late afternoon w last bit of morning coffee heated up, a quarter cut of pear tart, one very large walnut. I squeeze it open between my two palms, pull the inside out. Looking out from this bench, I’m listening to Patti Smith talk about walking up (or down) a Paris street, describing “flashes of recognition.” 🙌🏼
Out of Pandemnity into Movement in the Margin I sit with my coffee at a sidewalk cafe in Philadelphia, listening. Virginia Woolf’s voice mingles with the sound of geese nestling at dusk into the reeds along the Neponset River as I ride past. Movement can help carry us away from fear. Now comes the sound of Mitsuko Uchida playing Mozart as the Ashmont-Milton trolly rolls by. Life. It’s wonders. I’m glad you are here. #listenersview

December 16, 2022. A night walk in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Deb catches me passing across the edge of a light circle into darkness. A beautiful Masary Studio’s Solstice production leading us into these most mysterious days of winter.
This image brings me back to the early pandemic, riding across the city for hours on my bicycle. I spent a lot of time in cemeteries. In fact, I volunteered for a time as a Findagrave.com sleuth. Strangers would sent me a request to look for a long dead relative. I’d jump on my bike and be off with my maps of Forest Hills, Cedar Grove, or Mount Hope….send them pictures of what I found. If I found. lt can be quite difficult to find a grave.
I hesitated to tell anyone about these excursions. It seemed strange, and I couldn’t explain what compelled me. My time in cemeteries, in the midst of a pandemic, brought home the temporal nature of names and epitaphs carved into headstones, of memory, of whatever significance any of us may have in our lifetime. DNA is passed along, yet still, few are remembered by their grandchild’s children.
I ponder further in an essay, Toward a New Poetics of Journalism, commissioned by Nieman’s Journalism Lab.
In 125 years, when someone comes looking for us, what will they find? The hardscape — granite monuments, bridges, even mountains and rivers – eventually dissolve or give way to something unrecognizable, unverifiable. Journalists as anthropologists, social scientists, forensic experts — as with poets — leave a discoverable trace for those wanting to understand where they’ve come from. Let’s be generous with what we leave for them.
Find the full piece here.
Meantime, send me your musings, and join me In the Margin of the Other.
Support for Margin Media is provided by the Red Elm Tree Foundation, the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, Inc., the Waterman II Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, and the Wyncote Foundation