Arlene Goldbard's Blog

• (In)Gratitude

  November 26, 2009

  • When I was a kid, Thanksgiving meant tracing your spread-out fingers on construction paper to make a colorful turkey cut-out, and listening to prepackaged accounts of harmony among the early European settlers and the Native Americans who took pity on them, teaching them to grow corn, hunt deer and catch fish. At home, we cooked a turkey to cottony dryness, moistening the meat with slices from a ...
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• Patriotism's Double Edge

  November 18, 2009

  • A kind reader directed me to The Singing Revolution, a film on Estonians' movement to regain their independence from the Soviet Union, highlighting the special role music played in the sustenance of spirit and solidarity. And also, for me, a film on the double meaning of patriotism, both a shining strength—the indispensable key to independence—and a stupefying weakness, the excuse to elide ...
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• Time of Mystery

  November 13, 2009

  • As the days shorten, I like to walk at four o'clock, when the light turns thick and golden. Everything it touches seems suspended in honey: the waterbird puffing out its feathers to keep warm, the egret gliding by, the tight, lonely clump of sky-blue ceanothus clinging bravely to life, the pile of dog poop a previous walker has left in my path. The democracy of light. The tide is low, the ...
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