All the usual questions: Do I have something festive to wear? Can I make a vegetable dish everyone will love or pretend to love? Will I survive the evening?

Will I quarrel with my younger daughter? Will I be embarrassed by my adult grandchildren’s free and easy modern bold sexuality? Will I feel excluded and shut out?  Will I end up crying?

I will be happy to be licked and kissed by the dogs. The dogs seem to adore me. The miniature dachshund will sit my feet during the whole Christmas dinner, because he knows eventually, I will give in and throw him delicious scraps from my plate.

At Christmas dinner, I will eat and drink too much, I am too happy for the pleasures of our family’s excellent cooking. I will take what I can get…hugs, kisses, and admiration from the dogs.

By New Year’s I am glad to be alone in my quiet house.

There is still a monster lurking in the corner, hidden dangers in public places and an uneasy sense that the future will be more difficult.

As we emerge from the full-blown Pandemic I am saddened by the reality people I know have aged, changed or left the planet. I have this queasy feeling that there is more bad news ahead.

Yet, I continue to preform all my ordinary household tasks, plan for the future, think about new jewelry designs and contemplate an ambitious art project. I am even exercising the much older body I inhabit …this last year did strange things to this “temple” I inhabit.

Some of the current challenges for me are some very vital people in my life are not vaccinated. They could get ill and become incapacitated or even die. I not only fear for the unvaccinated friends; I fear for myself…will they become super spreaders of some mutant variation that I will not be immune to?

There is so much I cannot control and this has not changed it just is so much more obvious. Isn’t it?

Welcome to the unmasked summer here in New Mexico.

Best Wishes,
Claire Haye

Looking back at the horrible year 2020…can I now look forward to relief and repair?

I will never be young again.  I know now that I am an “elderly person”.  I hope to make it to vaccination without experiencing Covid-19 or its miserable after effects.

I have so learned to stay home (how comfortable and safe it is) that I am unsure if I will ever again take an exercise class in person, go to a Movie Theater, have a massage or enjoy dinner in a restaurant. I would like to hug my grandchildren.

I have learned to hate my own cooking.  I was once known as a fine cook, but these awful tired messes I make myself have disqualified me. My daughter, Melissa sometimes delivers the extras from her home cooked meals…this is my most beloved treat. Simple.

I will never again speak to or see:  Anice Joy, Jennifer Ryan, Jim Papas, or Sally Wasowksi for they have all died.  RIP.  I may never be reconciled to their loss.

President Biden recognizing the virus’s terrible cost asked for a moment of silent prayer.  More tears. Amen.

I am sitting on the edge, on the verge, on the precipice of falling into an old lady’s lap. Mine.

My thoughts are solemn: Did my life have meaning?  Does It? Was I a failure? Was I successful?  Was I kind? Was I cruel? Do I get a passing grade?  Could you say I was a good mother? I will say with more certainty that I was a good wife. Did my art say anything to anybody? It seems my jewelry designs made people happy. Was I ever happy? Did I ever learn to be content? Will I?

Is it even necessary or wise to grade your own life? 

Can’t I accept and conclude and continue.

Now a huge pile of years is collecting behind me and there are a few scant years ahead… what really mattered.  Don’t say love… who you loved and who loved you… one of the great uncertainties of my life. Was I too wounded to really love… was I loved? Am I loved? I self-observe that I have been inadequate in the human interchange game… …who cared about me and so on… all open for conjecture and gloomy mulling over.

 Was it a decent life or awful… did the moments of joy out weigh the moments of sadness, despair, anger… even terror.(?)

 And the most interesting question of all… did it really matter what actually happen to me… I might have had the same personality and emotional cloud no matter what the script, no matter what the circumstances had been.

I was a wanted child. Yet most of my childhood I was neglected. Ironic…

I had interesting parents (my girl friends especially were charmed by my father when he took us to lunch in my early adulthood)… each that is both my mother and my father were very charismatic.  They separated when I was three… so they are very discrete… distinct individuals not one parental unit.

 I have no memories of myself having my father in our home… or do I.  Dreams, a nightmare… the truth or fantasy or wishful thinking.

Both my mother and father were extremely intelligent, intellectual, au current and jiving with the most Avant-garde ideas. Both of them were painfully ahead of their time… their concerns and quirks would be familiar to any modern person.

My mother the dancer had two husbands (including a Viennese Baron) before marrying my father. She was an active labor organizer, became an expert in Pilates and Yoga, all by the1950’s, a seeker (think early scientology among other doctrines) and understood the power of diet and organic food. On and on, hip and cool and sexy and … I have splendid photographs of my mother in full Spanish Dancer regalia impossibly slender her back arched, her arms lifted… gorgeous

My father, a deeply educated Jew born in Munich, Germany to a wealthy family in 1902, was so active against early Nazism in 1920’s (we are talking street fights and more) that he had to leave Germany in 1925. He came to America in his early twenties when he was the world expert on 15-century Latin manuscripts. Soon he was the private librarian of the richest man in New York City, playing poker with the Rockefellers. Erudite and sophisticated, sternly handsome and wildly intelligent, but so crippled by his many emotional wounds that he created failure when he could have had success.

Both mother and father, Beatrice and Heinz, seem way more fascinating than me. Don’t they? Perhaps more worthy of writing about than trying to communicate to anyone the projectory of my much more subdued plainer life. Yes, their histories are noteworthy and make a great read but my life is my own story… if I am surveying the years I have spent alive… then I must consider my own journey.

None of their intelligence, erudition, liberal thinking, ahead of their cultureness, sexual magnetism, political activism, vivaciousness, language acuteness, extensive reading of literature and philosophy would make them good parents. In fact, they were terrible and careless parents.

I was a wanted child. Yet most of my childhood I was neglected. Ironic…

So you do you think that we exist in some form before our birth as human children?

Are we wandering souls waiting to be called into physical beings?

I believe that my mother called me, lured me, pleaded with me and made me many promises so I would join her on earth and be her long awaited daughter. So persuaded, I was conceived, I grew in her womb well tended to, I went through a terrible birth, yet I was whole and beautiful. I was all she asked for and yet once I was in her arms too soon it was obvious that she had lied to me and I was stuck in a life that was hard. Often have I regretted my presence on this Earth.  Sometimes I have tried to leave.

Yet, here I am an old artist financially sufficient, alone in a beautiful adobe house in New Mexico, with a bossy ancient cat, a large pond complete with begging greedy koi, and many many wild birds that gather drawn by my plants, the water and a well filled feeder. Isn’t this enough? Really why isn’t this enough?

Can I decide to be happy?

Choices: when Beatrice was done with her marriage to Albert the Baron, she decided she wanted a Jewish husband and see wanted to procreate. My father, Heinz, the bookish German refuge, was her next husband.

Beatrice, although descendent from Jews, grew up in an extremely secular household… I say that with great seriousness.  My grandfather was born in Moscow, Russia as Constantine Nicolai Bellachokoski. He was legally renamed “ Make It Mills” when he entered America. This took place in a verbal exchange with the immigration authorities at Ellis Island. Don’t even ask.

Make I. Mills (a six foot blond blue eyed outdoors man, so much for your Jewboy cliché) was a veteran of the Spanish American war, a proud American, and a famous Chicago policeman. Detective Mills meant to and did pass for Gentile. He would not allow the shadow of Jewishness to taint his children. This meant Christmas Trees, Easter eggs, his famous pork roasts, obviously no temple going, and only English spoken in the home.

He named his sons George Dewey (the U.S. naval commander who defeated the Spanish Fleet) Mills and Theodore Roosevelt Mills.

My mother’s decision to make her third marriage with a Jewish man was like many of her inclinations and enthusiasms… a thought process swayed by current reading, odd influences and her feelings of that moment. Do you hold much credence with astrology?

My mother was a Gemini and ran her life by mental slants held onto against any logic or counter information which could be suddenly and without any notice be radically changed, then rigidly adhered to and made into doctrine until…

Living in Vienna with Albert, she brushed against anti Semitism subdued but still there.  As an informed political liberal, she was aghast at the rise of fascism and the Nazi war against the Jews. She had never actually practiced any form of Judaism, but she knew all her ancestors were Jews. She very deliberately claimed this part of herself, by marrying my father and demanding they have a child together.

Chosen.  My father was enchanted by my mother.

Heinz seemingly loved Beatrice, and my mother what did she feel?  Did she feel?  Often a question I asked myself later. To me (the captured audience of one) Heinz would say (many times for many decades) in his male I am here to be pleased way, ”unlike any other woman I ever knew, Beatrice never bored me.”  As if…

How did they perceive each other? Did he understand her deepest inferiorities, her severe emotional voids, her longings for growth and truth?

During most of my childhood, she despised him, and then when I was a married adult she seemed to regard him with affection, and then astonishing me when he died she cried and mourned.

 I know that he did not show up when she need him most.  I, too, experienced his blindness to the crucial moment when another human being required him to stop his own selfness and focus, focus and be there and arrive as a caring person. He gravely failed my mother, his mother (a tragedy) and me his only child.

Chosen. Heinz agreed to be my father. He agreed because, she so wanted me.

Their first try at conceiving a child went amiss… a tubal pregnancy. One evening “out on the town” the urbane couple are dancing together… can we imagine it… for me almost impossible. And (my father’s story) suddenly my mother’s is bleeding heavily drenching the floor with her blood (ruining his new expensive shoes)… she faints… an ambulance, serious problems and an operation resulting in less female hardware to work with.

Beatrice heals and I am implanted in the correct place.  My mother enjoys a healthy pregnancy. Heinz insists she needs extra protein and he (there is post-war scarcity) buys her pricey black market steaks. I guess she eats her steaks with good appetite.  She continues to smoke… it is 1945/1946. What can we expect? 

All goes well until it doesn’t.

Pregnant Beatrice suffers from neither morning sickness, nor excessive weight gain nor swollen ankles nor stretch marks.  I will inherit this benevolence perhaps both my mother and I are like my mad grandmother who had six children… there will never be a discussion about this topic.

Chicago, Illinois. Early spring.  Light on her highly arched feet, wearing a loose dress and a shawl (I am imagining this) Beatrice and Heinz enter Michael Reese Hospital on the morning of March 24th 1946. 

Both Beatrice and Heinz are confident and expect my imminent arrival. I can assume that they would feel this way… why not?

This is the script of the day, the way things were done in that era: the parents are kept quite separate; she will be expected to do her maternal duty efficiently and relatively quietly producing a child preferable male.

 And he will not witness his child’s birth. He does not participate at all. He will be sent to the reception area where he will wait. He sits in the waiting room. She suffers on the maternity floor.  Information is not exchanged between the parents and/or the medical staff. He resides (reading the paper/smoking?) waiting for the News. This will be told to him in this manner… a nurse (or if he is important by the doctor himself) “Mr._______. You are the proud father of _______ or a _______. Mother and child are healthy.”

All goes well until it doesn’t.

Heinz is waiting and Beatrice is laboring. But something is wrong, but nobody is talking. 

Heinz spends the first day waiting and goes home for dinner and comes back the next day. Heinz spends the next day waiting goes home for dinner and to rest. Heinz spends the next day waiting goes home for dinner and comes back the next day after breakfast. Beatrice labors and labors.  Alone.

 No one tells them that I am traverse stuck sideways inside her and she should have a Caesarian. She somehow (her story) stays calm and brave, never to “show the white flag” certain that I will be born alive and well.

On the morning of the fourth day, March 27th 1946, Dr. Rubovitz reaches inside Beatrice turns me head down and I am born. Whew.  The beginning of my life and the beginning of the end of their marriage.

The three of us begin our brief sojourn together as a family.

Heinz gets to name me: Claire Lisbeth… after his favorite Aunts. Claire Lisbeth Maienthau. He is now enchanted by me.  When I am grown he tells me: “ For the very first time in my life… I learned… you taught me what love was.”

My mother has to recover from my birth. I have to recover from being born.

Beatrice had decided to breast feed me… this is not what modern well off mothers did in the 40”s… she has made one of her “eccentric” choices.    Beatrice will breast feed her baby. Her three weeks stay in the hospital involved pumping her breasts and bottle-feeding. However, once she was home… she fed me naturally often while taking a cigarette break… she told me… she said it was soothing.

Life at home: Heinz is profitably employed, Beatrice is tending me, the maid is cleaning the house; gifts for this unexpected late in life child flood the house. I am growing and seem quite easily bathed and diapered and soothed. 

Things are going smoothly for all concerned until they do not.

When I am six months, Beatrice (she is becoming restless) makes the decision to stop breast-feeding. Slam that door. Sudden and final.  I am upset by the abrupt change. I become despondent and stubborn.

My mother told me: I wouldn’t allow her to give me a bottle; only my father or the maid could. I remember the revolting smell of the milk in the bottle. I remember throwing bottles out of my crib. You don’t have to believe me.

As a toddler I refuse to drink milk.  As a growing child, I find it repulsive and it disgusts me. My parents must have been concerned, I remember being given daily calcium supplements which did result in strong teeth and bones… some gain there.

More to the bones of it, I still live with my anger… my rank anger. I can blame this inner fury on my mother, my father or my stepfather or my 6th grade teacher or I can say this is just part of who I am.

I can become furious and inconsolable… a fierce dark state of intense frustration if I am excluded or if I am rejected or if I do not get what I want… An anger that is also an uncomforted grief.  An anger that grips me and pushes on me… a hideous disturbance… as a grown women even in my seventies with certain stimulus I can weep with rage and wallow in pathetic self-pity.  Not so pretty ahhh.  This is my story. I am Claire Lisbeth… all that my mother asked for and more.

She was born on March 15, 1933, the daughter of Celia and Nathan Bader, in Brooklyn, New York. Nathan Bader was a furrier and came to the United States from Russia when he was 13. Her mother, Celia, was born in the United States and had a strong passion for reading, language and the love of books. Ruth Bader was one of two daughters; her older sister, Marilyn, died of meningitis and she was reared as an only child. Although Bader was raised in a Jewish home, she became non-observant when she was excluded from the minyan for mourners after the death of her mother.

She was an excellent student in school, graduating at the top of her class in grammar school and proving herself an academic leader in high school. She was confirmed with honors from the East Midwood Jewish Center. Ginsburg was very active in high school where she played the cello in the orchestra, was a member of Arista, was a cheerleader and a baton twirler and the editor of her high school newspaper. Her mother died the day before she was to graduate from James Madison High School.

Following high school, she received a New York State scholarship and studied at Cornell University where she worked as a research assistant for Professor Robert E. Cushman, which was where she first became interested in law. She also credits Professor Vladimir Nabokov for continuing her interest in words and writing; skills that would later be useful as a lawyer. After earning her B.A. degree in government from Cornell in 1954, she married Martin D. Ginsburg, who had graduated Cornell the year before. He was called for military service the same year and they lived at Fort Sill, Oklahoma for two years. It was during this period that Ruth Ginsburg experienced sex discrimination.

She applied for a job with the local social security office while she was pregnant. She was appointed to a position and when she told them that she was pregnant, they demoted her three levels in pay. Another woman, who was appointed and never told them of her pregnancy, received no pay reduction.

After her husband completed his military service, they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they both enrolled in Harvard Law School. She transferred to Columbia Law School after her husband graduated Harvard Law School. In 1959, she earned her law degree and tied for first in her class.

Following her graduation, she experienced gender discrimination but, in part due to the recommendations of male lawyers, she was hired as a clerk for Federal District Judge Edward L. Palmieri after being rejected for a position with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. From 1961 to 1963, Ginsburg was a research associate and then an associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure; she learned Swedish to co-author a book with Anders Bruzelius on civil procedure in Sweden.

In 1963, Ginsburg became the second woman to join the faculty of Rutgers Law School and was told she would be paid less than her male colleagues because she had a husband with a well-paid job. At the time Ginsburg entered academia, she was one of fewer than 20 female law professors in the United States. She taught from1963 to 1972, receiving tenure in 1969.

In 1970, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal in the U.S. to focus exclusively on women’s rights. From 1972 to 1980, she taught at Columbia, where she became the first tenured woman and co-authored the first law school casebook on sex discrimination. She also spent a year as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 1977 to 1978.

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and, in 1973, became the Project’s general counsel. She argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five. Rather than asking the court to end all gender discrimination at once, Ginsburg charted a strategic course, taking aim at specific discriminatory statutes and building on each successive victory. She chose plaintiffs carefully, at times picking male plaintiffs to demonstrate that gender discrimination was harmful to both men and women.

During a Senate hearing, she explained her own experience with discrimination:

Ginsburg was nominated by President Jimmy Carter to the United States Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia. She was sworn in on June 30, 1980, and served for thirteen years.

President Bill Clinton was confronted with a vacancy on the Supreme Court after Judge Byron R. White resigned. After three months of searching for a candidate, he nominated Ginsburg. Her nomination was approved by the Senate 96-3 and was sworn in on August 10, 1993.

Legal scholar Cass Sunstein has characterized Ginsburg as a “rational minimalist,” a jurist who seeks to build cautiously on precedent rather than pushing the Constitution towards her own vision. She is also considered one of four liberal justices. On the controversial issue of abortion, for example, she has argued that “the government has no business making that choice for a woman.”

Despite having profound ideological difference, Ginsburg became good friends with her more conservative colleague, Antonin Scalia, with whom she shared a love of opera.

In 2016, she published, My Own Words, which became a best seller.

Ginsburg has been referred to as a “pop culture icon.” Her profile began to rise after Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement in 2006 left Ginsburg as the only serving female justice. Her fiery dissents led to the creation of the Notorious R.B.G. Tumblr and Internet meme comparing the justice to rapper The Notorious B.I.G.

Additionally, Ginsburg’s pop culture appeal has inspired nail art, Halloween costumes, a bobblehead doll, tattoos, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and a children’s coloring book among other things. She appears in both a comic opera and a workout book. Ginsburg has admitted to having a “large supply” of Notorious R.B.G. t-shirts, which she distributes as gifts.

Since 2015, Ginsburg has been portrayed by Kate McKinnon on Saturday Night Live. The segments typically feature McKinnon (as Ginsburg) lobbing insults she calls “Ginsburns” and doing a celebratory dance.

Filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen created a documentary about Ginsburg, titled “RBG,” for CNN Films. In the film “Deadpool 2” (2018), a photo of her is shown as Deadpool considers her for his X-Force, a team of superheroes. The legal drama, “On the Basis of Sex,” (2018) focused on Ginsburg’s early career struggles fighting for equal rights, which culminated in a landmark victory for gender equality.

 When John Paul Stevens retired in 2010, Ginsburg became the oldest justice on the court at age 77. Despite rumors that she would retire because of advancing age, poor health, and the death of her husband that year, she remained on the bench.

She has continued to astound the public with her intellectual and physical vigor despite serious health issues. In 1999, Ginsburg was diagnosed with colon cancer; she underwent surgery that was followed by chemotherapy and radiation therapy. During the process, she did not miss a day on the bench. Ginsburg was physically weakened by the cancer treatment, and she began working with a personal trainer. Since 1999, Bryant Johnson, a former Army reservist attached to the Special Forces, has trained Ginsburg twice weekly in the justices-only gym at the Supreme Court. Scenes of her working out in RBG further enhanced her image as both smart and tough.

Nearly a decade after her first bout with cancer, she again underwent surgery on February 5, 2009, this time for pancreatic cancer. After experiencing discomfort while exercising in the Supreme Court gym in November 2014, she had a stent placed in her right coronary artery.

On November 8, 2018, Ginsburg fell in her office at the Supreme Court, fracturing three ribs, for which she was hospitalized. A CT scan of her ribs showed cancerous nodules in her lungs and she underwent a left-lung lobectomy to remove the nodules. For the first time since joining the Court more than 25 years earlier, Ginsburg missed an oral argument while she recuperated. She returned to the Court a few weeks later. In 2019, Ginsburg underwent radiation treatment for a tumor found in her pancreas. In May 2020, Ginsburg was treated for a recurrence of cancer. 

Liberals feared the possibility that she would retire or die and President Trump would have the opportunity to fill her seat with another conservative justice that would give the court a 6-3 conservative majority that could, in their view, have harmful repercussions for years to come. To reassure them, she has reiterated that she “would remain a member of the court as long as I can do the job full steam.”

Lacking

I am not sure that I have enough self-discipline for this new life. I am beginning to think that I need a great deal more self control and more will power for this new world I am living in. I know I am failing at controlling my appetite for ice cream.

I don’t think that I am practicing self-control. Yes, I am lazy and slothful. However, I will still straighten the house if I know someone is coming to visit. I am still brushing my teeth.

I am not sure that I have enough self-discipline for this new existence.

I am not doing my shoulders exercises. I am not walking or hiking. I ate ice cream three days in row. I sometimes do my foot exercises. I do not think I have enough discipline to perform well in this new situation.

I am lacking self-discipline.

I will wear pajamas for several days – night and day the same pair…. my record is two nights and one day. However, I will shower and put on a clean attractive outfit if I am going out even just to the Grocery Store.

I do not enjoy going to the Grocery Store, I will go to the grocery store if I am out of coffee or anticipate that I will very shortly be out of coffee or coffee filters. Yes, I still enjoy my one morning cup of coffee. My own cooking for one is really terrible. However, I will make you a nice lunch and we can sit on the porch. What will we do when it gets colder?

Some things that were once easy are now so difficult.

I still have not sorted through my clothes, although, certainly.  I do not wear everything in my closet. Just cannot put on my black clothes, I used to wear black every day, now I am trying to beige it. I am losing the need for dark clothes to hide my thickening body, maybe, I no longer care.

I have new fears.

Sometimes I cannot sleep, and other times I fall asleep on the couch or in a chair.

Sometimes, I wake up from a very bad dream that I cannot quite remember, yet I wake up to escape from.

Hey yesterday, I got a pedicure. Starting from the feet up.

Of course I can count, of course I know how old am…did you think I was senile or forgetful.  After all I remember everybody’s birthday, my wedding anniversary and the date your husband died and…

I just did not know the numbers of years on earth attached to the birthdate March 27, 1946 meant that I was elderly. When the informed people on television said “An elderly man of 70 died of the corona virus alone in the hospital.”…Well, I would have called him a younger man. You know what I mean.When Melissa said; “I am very concerned about you, because you are such a high risk group.”  I thought she meant my bronchial asthma or my type A blood.  No (!) she meant my age.  The risk for death from the virus increases with age, doubling for the 70 plus group and doubling again for those over 80. And now I know, when they refer to a person as elderly that means me, and I should take note.

Oh yes now my hair (having learned that I was old) is turning grey and my skin is wrinkling. Also, I had an insight to my reoccurring dissatisfaction with every haircut I have had in the last ten years. I confess I keep expecting the sincere (and probably quite talented) hairdresser to make me look the me of twenty years ago. I may just grow out the locks. Watching the grey and white come in as time goes by.

Grief’s appetite (a phrase captured from the poet Annah Sobelman)

He possessed my youth.
He held title to my beauty.
He had the keys to my womb.

“The hardest part of change, Claire, is resistance to change”.

I knew that your hold on life was fragile|
a thin thread kept you in your body
your heart pounded and ached.

“Your death has robbed me of sweet deep sleep.”

I cannot escape the sharp edge of grief
I cannot rest since you have gone.
You were my sure place.

“I am haunted by old patterns, tainted moods and the odd curse.”

He has walked across and cannot return.
He may look back, but cannot retake all that was
I am in uncharted waters, navigating alone.

“No one but you can know what you want or why you want.
 Claire, let your heart guide you.”

I am the wild horse running free

I am the caged bear

I am the snake ready to strike

I am the young boy dissolved by the bomb’s blast

I am the mother grieving for her son.

I am also the terrorist that killed your son.

I am the spring grass reaching for the sky

Yes, I am the koi in Claire’s pond

Yes I am the sky

I am dying in a small room on a cruise ship

I am the proud ship

I am the ocean

I am the wallaby saved from the fire

I am the live prey waiting for your appetite

the pangolin

Yes, I am ….

I am the woman you raped

I am the man you robed

I am the thief 

Yes, I ……

I am the mountain

I am the earth

Yes