A Kind of Reckoning in Everyday Ramblings

Mr. Finch was raised as the youngest golden boy of 9 living children in a rich conservative household. He was brilliant and oh so handsome and charming as many of you know as you traveled along on our journey together here. He played tennis at country clubs when he was young and only did moderately well in school even though he was very smart.

His one ambitious as a child was to read, well… everything.

But he was also a patriot. He was closely related to and resembled a very famous American General and in a romantic gesture, much to the chagrin of his family, he joined the army infantry, not as an officer but as a grunt. He was stationed in Germany and never saw combat.

When he came back he went off on his own in a way, worked in an orange juice canning factory, as a short order cook, and for a funeral home. He wanted experiences he could write about as well as to get as far away from his family as possible and sadly because he drank away his livelihood. It was clear early on, in the family tradition, that he had pernicious alcoholism.

When I met him he had been sober for a year. We met because we were both very interested in poetry. And as many of you know, we did that. Oh did we do that!

But one thing my family and close friends knew but I rarely talked about in public was that Mr. Finch spoke like a racist and a misogynist. He called women “Bird Brains” and made unbelievably derogatory remarks about people who were not like him.

He was a “modelizer”. Only interested in beautiful women that he felt he deserved to be around. He thought I was overweight an unattractive and was often crude and cruel about all of these things in his speech.

I cried all the time for the first three years or so I knew him. But he had something I wanted, the ability to be a companion in poetry. And a fabulous editor and he knew everything and had been everywhere. The one place on earth he hadn’t been he thought was Gibraltar. He traveled a great deal as a kid.

The weird thing about all this is that he wasn’t actually a racist. In practice. He just spoke like one. He was compassionate in a way that few people I know are. He adored the folks he worked with washing dishes at the Hawaiian restaurant the year before he became ill. They adored him too.

And over time he understood that I was doing everything possible to maintain a healthy weight and he believed in me as an artist and once I began being interested in birds and he followed suit “Bird Brains” was a private joke we had.

He even asked me to marry him a number of times. Ha!

I am sure though, well I know, he said crude hurtful things about me to other folks and particularly other men. But I don’t think he would have ever said that he could grab a women’s crotch and laugh about it. He was not an aggressive man.

Just for the record I have had my crotch grabbed by a complete stranger (a big man with a big grin on his face) as I was walking down a street in San Francisco in broad daylight on my way to jury duty. And it was an awful assaultive horrible indignity.

There is a culture, a dominant paradigm of men in power being able to say and act in crude and cruel ways on the subject of women and race.

They thought they were going to be able to be that way forever.

I don’t think so.

In my Mythos class this week the facilitator (a very skilled one I might add, if somewhat ditzy) asked the group to speak to what influences Greek Mythology have had on us and this one woman, in her 70’s, spoke up and said sternly…”Plato was a misogynist.”

Well, yeah…

Maybe, just maybe this whole crass debacle with Mr. Trump will open a dialogue actually with privileged men about how they speak about women, and with everyone about how they speak about “the other”.

I am so glad I was able to stick with Mr. Finch in spite of the horrid things he often spouted because we found a very special kind of love and it took each of us meeting in a space with vulnerable open hearts to do that.

May our hearts stay open during this difficult tumultuous reckoning.

Last updated October 08, 2016