Nancy Schimmel, photo by Sandy Morris
Welcome to my blog. I have been writing a biography of my mother, songwriter/activist Malvina Reynolds, but I keep getting interrupted—first by Occupy, and Occupella, a song-leading group that grew out of it, blogging at occupella.org, making a book out of the blog, Occupella: Singing in the Lifeboats. Then came The Former Guy, and now the pandemic he assisted. Both the guy and the virus are distracting, scary, and exasperating.
So on this blog I will be posting about my family (my father, William “Bud” Reynolds was an organizer of the Ford Hunger March of 1932 and other disruptions), about the process of writing the bio, and also writing about these weird times and about my own life, writing songs, walking my neighborhood, working on a fantasy novel for children. It’s a good time to be hanging out with witches, dragons and trolls. The other kind of troll.
My old blog, Writing Malvina, got interrupted too. You can find it by clicking 2007-2010 Blog at the upper left.
Friday, Mar 11, 2022: Prompt Write
The writing group I'm in had the poem, In Those Years,
as a prompt tonight. The narrator is at the other end of the telescope from me.
Here's what I wrote in response:
Prompt:I want to go down in history
in a chapter marked miscellaneous
From “In Those Years” by Staceyann Chinin a chapter marked miscellaneous
not in a footnote to my mother’s chapter
not even one of those great long footnotes
like in that early feminist history book
Whose name and author I can’t remember
but could recognizewhat I can’t recognize
are the photos with traffic
lights in them
my eyes are not that good any more
surely they have robots
with better eyesI am that old woman now
though until covid
being old didn’t affect me that much
now my dear partner and I
get into arguments about
what we thought the other one said
because neither of us hear wellyesterday and the day before
we went walking in the world
beyond our deck for the first time
since omicron
we went to Live Oak Park
and there were those gnarled roots
spidering over the creek
where I thought, as a child,
Rumpelstiltskin livednow I know the creek’s name
is Codornices, doves
and the poor dove of peace
as threatened now as when
I was the young activist
turning the handle of
the mimeograph machine
marching, singingall my grown-up life
marching, singing
turning on the switch
and watching the leaflets
fly out of the electric mimeograph machine
then going to the copy store
now I click the song sheet
on my computer with my wrinkled
spotted hand on the mouse
and the printer on my desk
offers its generous pile
of paperyes, file me under miscellaneous
peace, women’s rights, pride marches
anti-fracking, and now peace again
but always singingComment from Nancy posted 3-12-2022:
Sorry for the triple notice to subscribers. I'm still getting the hang of this thing.Comment from Sandy Pliskin posted 3-12-2022:
Wow. I love the stream of consciousness-like presentation of images and storiesComment from Renee posted 3-12-2022:
Love this piece :)
in it's entirety but also in particular this:
"we went to Live Oak Park
and there were those gnarled roots
spidering over the creek
where I thought, as a child,
Rumpelstiltskin lived"
spidering over the creek!!!Comment from Jean Tepperman posted 3-14-2022:
we have the same thing -- not being able to hear each other.
This is a lovely poemComment from Hali Hammer posted 3-14-2022:
Wonderful, Nancy!
Comment from Nancy Schimmel posted 3-18-2022:
Oops, actually codornices are quails.
Monday, Feb 28, 2022: My Russians
Everybody is posting on Facebook about standing in solidarity with the Ukranians, as we should, but I also stand with those Russians who are, at great peril, protesting the invasion. Here is something I wrote a good while ago about the Russians I knew as a child.I had taken ballet lessons at a neighborhood dance studio in Berkeley, and took them again in Long Beach at home. The home lessons started when my mother was teaching English to the Russians working in the lend-lease office for the Los Angeles harbor area during World War II. The Russian couple working there got pay increases when their English improved so they paid my mom for lessons. The secretary, Shura, was a Russian-American immigrant, a former ballet dancer. She also wanted to improve her English so she gave ballet lessons for me in exchange for English lessons from my mother. My father made holders for a barre which he fastened to the jambs of the sliding door between the living room and the dining room. My mother played the usual classical piano pieces that accompany ballet practice. Shura had her straight dark hair in a bun, but on her this did not look frumpy. My parents invited two sisters to take lessons with me. They were the daughters of my mother’s first husband with his second wife. We girls felt like we were related though we knew no word for what we were to each other. I was the one with the tip of my tongue sticking out of the corner of my mouth. “With the feet, Nancy,” Shura would say, “not with the tongue.”
I liked Shura a lot. Her husband, Kostya, was also a former dancer. He had worked as an animator for Warner Bros. cartoons, and could make his face look like Bugs Bunny. A few years ago I saw Frank and Ollie, a documentary about a couple of Walt Disney animators, and they routinely made faces to help them get the expression right on their characters. Shura and Kostya came to parties at our house (my parents threw lots of fund-raising parties for various causes) and when everybody danced, I got to watch them dance with each other. Their daughter introduced me to Spike Jones records, which I loved. The Russians from Russia went home after the war, but Shura and Kostya remained our friends until my parents moved back to Berkeley in 1953.
The only time I ever saw my father drunk was at a dinner at Shura and Kostya’s house, during the war. The Russia Russians were there with their kids, the vodka was flowing freely, and people kept proposing toasts to Roosevelt, to Stalin, and to victory over Hitler. It would have been an international incident to refuse to toast, so my father kept drinking.
Comment from Nancy Schimmel posted 6-5-2022:
Years and years later I went to Vashon Island to see a musical someone had made out of my mother's songs, and one of the girls I took ballet with was in it! What a treat that was.
Monday, Feb 21, 2022: Hooting the President
A Story for President's Day
My father, William Reynolds, ran for governor of Michigan on the Communist party ticket in 1932. Here’s a story that he liked to tell about those days. Luckily, he also wrote it down in a letter to labor lawyer and songwriter Maurice Sugar.“When Herbert Hoover came to Detroit in 1932, he was met by about 20,000 people at the station at Third and Fort. The unemployed, who just loved Herbert, were concentrated right at the corner where he emerged from the station, and set up a really effective anti-demonstration. The cops tried to break it up, and my friend Walter Eicher climbed an iron light pole to better command his audience. A cop started up after Eicher, and I grabbed the cop by the leg so he couldn’t climb. The result was that the whole demonstration was turned into a protest, as the attitude of our strategically situated thousand or so quickly communicated itself to the rest of the demonstration. Another result was that Walter Eicher, Willie Goetz, another member of the Young Communist League and I were thrown into jail. We were sent up to the 9th floor and put into a cell where we could observe the elevator and the command post of the floor, and Walter began making demands, ‘Bring us toilet paper, you sons of bitches,’ and everything else you could think of, with the result that, after an hour of this, we were taken down to the first floor and thrown into the bull pen, which contained about 30 to 40 inmates, more or less changing as people were called out for questioning, sent to cells, and new people arrived. About the first question asked in a situation like this when one sits down next to another prisoner is, ‘What are you in for?’ True to form, the prisoner next to Walter said, ‘What are you in for?’ and Walter replied, ‘Non-support.’ The other guy said, ‘Who, your wife?’ and Walter replied, ‘No, the President.’
“That was a singing period, and Walter and the leaguers were in good voice. Walter started out singing with some of the old American standards that everybody knew, and gradually nearly everybody joined in. Then he shifted to the work songs, such as ‘Solidarity,’ ‘Hold the Fort’ and others, and ended up with Walter and the leaguers singing the ‘Internationale’ and every prisoner marching around between the benches with his fist in the air.
“In the morning, after daylight, Walter outlined a big sign on one of the walls, the one that had the entrance door and couldn’t be watched from the outside. They hadn’t taken our possessions away from us, and there were quite a number of pencils in the crowd. Walter quickly blocked out the letters and words, and the inmates all fell to work blacking them in. The sign read: Vote Communist--For Unemployment Insurance, and then followed all of the slogans that were current in the campaign. Some time later, a sergeant, I think, came in, faced around to the wall and the sign, and read the whole thing through aloud, and then said to Walter, ‘Yes, but vote for who?’ Walter said, ‘Comrade, that’s a very good criticism,’ and proceeded to add, ‘For President--William Z. Foster. For Governor--William Reynolds. For Congress--Walter Eicher.’
“. . .About 4:00 that afternoon, we were brought into court on a writ filed by you [Sugar], and after some very puzzled and informal questioning of the prosecutor by the judge, the judge asked, ‘Just what are these men charged with?’ And the prosecutor answered, ‘Hooting the President.’ The old judge answered, ‘If that is a crime, there are about 15 million of us guilty.’ We were released forthwith.”
Comment from Carole Leita posted 2-21-2022:
Great story!
Thursday, Feb 17, 2022: Do the Days Chase You Down?
I said in my first post that it’s easier to write online than to sing. A few of us get together with a leader who gives prompts—a few words, a whole poem, a photograph—and we write whatever that evokes, or whatever is on our minds and wants to be written. Then we can read our writing to each other or pass. I never know what will come out, a story, a poem, or garbage. Here is one from the olden days when I went regularly to a writers and artists retreat at the lovely retreat center just outside of Occidental, St. Dorothy’s Rest. I was closer to eighty then than I am now.The prompt: What is your relationship to time? Your character’s? Do the days chase you down or do you have those moments that seem to stretch into longer than they should, like when you are in the dentists chair. Does time ever bend for you?
Do the days chase you down?
I felt such nostalgia for the California landscape—the oak savanna and the dairy farms coming up through Marin County the back way here on Friday, as though I were saying goodbye to it. Even though I looked up the average life expctancy of white women in the US and it is eighty years so chances are I won’t be saying goodbye just yet.
Same thing this morning, walking on the old railroad right-of-way through the redwoods, middle-aged ones standing tall, young ones circling around the stump of an old one. This is second growth, all the old ones are gone. That makes it an everyday landscape, not a place set aside to be awestruck in.
The California coast range, north and south, is the landscape I grew up with. I am a city girl, Berkeley and Long Beach and San Francisco, but these oaks and bays and vanilla pines are the landscape of my connection with nature beyond empty lots, the scene of my summer camp days as a camper and counselor—except for that summer on Vashon in Puget Sound.
Later, hiking with my husband and friends on Mt.Tam. Going to a wedding on it, the bride in a white lace pantsuit, guests holding branches over the path for the couple to walk under. And that rock-climbing lesson, was that on Tam? Yes. Wild work in view of the city with...can’t think of her odd name, wrote a book about...all blank...starts with a C...story of my life these days. Without google I could never find what I already know. Time for dinner.
After dinner I read this and the name falls into my consciousness: China Galland. I had to go to google for the title of the book, though. Women in the Wilderness. At least I got "starts with a C.”
Here’s another.
The prompt was:
A sister--colorblind
her parents--the moon is dangerous
Here’s my writing
She was the big sister, the protector. She had to be strong. She loved her little sister but she envied her, the little sister who could see all the colors of the world as she could not. Why did she not have that right?
Both sisters had been taught that it was dangerous to look at the moon, but the elder loved to go out on moonlit nights when all colors were one, and she could see as well as anybody.
One night, as she was sneaking back into the house, her father caught her.
“Where have you been?” he said. His voice was quiet but angry. She could not tell him she had been looking at the beauty of the night. What would he understand of beauty? He was all about binding her in, telling her the world was too big for her, making her small.
“I have looked at the moon,” she said, “and the moon is bigger than you are. It is stronger. And one day I will be too. The moon is dangerous, but to you, not to me”
Her father put her in a closet where there was no moon, no light at all, but she had seen the moon, and he could not put that light out.
Comment from Renee posted 2-21-2022:
"She could not tell him she had been looking at the beauty of the night. What would he understand of beauty? He was all about binding her in, telling her the world was too big for her, making her small.
“I have looked at the moon,” she said, “and the moon is bigger than you are. It is stronger. And one day I will be too. The moon is dangerous, but to you, not to me” "
****
Lovely writing. I like the wander early on and the story here of the moon and it's strength and the strong voice of the protagonist standing up to her father. So glad you are blogging.
Tuesday, Feb 15, 2022: Are They Going to Kill Me?
Prompted by a Frieda Berrigan article
I wrote this back in 2015, but the sabres are rattling again.Frieda Berrigan’s Tomgram piece on talking to her kindergartener about lockdown drills in his school, which happen monthly and have him frightened for days each time, makes me wonder again why I remember so little fear during WWII, which started (for us) when I was about two months shy of my seventh birthday. We had blackout curtains, air-raid drills, nightly news on the radio--not television, which would have been more scary--rationing, soldiers hitch-hiking (my parents always picked them up), so I knew we were at war but I don’t remember fear. My friend Sandy Boucher does, and she lived in the Midwest where air raids were much less likely. I don’t remember air raid drills at school but we may have had them. I remember fire drills, and nobody was frightened by those.
I do remember going to the Newsreel Theater with my folks, or a seeing newsreel along with the feature and the cartoon at a regular movie, so I did see war scenes every few weeks, but not every night. "The eyes and ears of the world!"
I never heard anybody express any doubt that we would win the war. My parents were both working “for the war effort,” my mother in a bomb casing factory and my father in the shipyards, so I suppose I could feel they were protecting me without being far away from me as soldier fathers were--that would have been scarier.
Even the Cold War, which started when I had just turned eleven (with Churchill’s Fulton, Missouri speech) didn’t scare me when I was a kid. We didn’t have duck-and-cover drills that I remember--I was already in high school when they started, and I think our school just didn’t do them. I think we would have made fun of them.
I remembered clearly when the Russians were our allies, and my mother worked teaching English to the people who worked at the Russian Purchasing Agency for Lend-Lease, and we partied with them and bought Russian folk crafts at the Russian War Relief store. Plus, I was a red diaper baby, and knew the Russian people didn’t want war. I had more faith in their government than was perhaps warranted.
There was always the possibility of accident, of course, and I finally did get scared, when I was a grown-up of twenty-two, watching On the Beach, and more so a couple of years later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But by then I was old enough to do something about it, and threw myself into organizing peace marches.
What Frieda Berrigan is wondering is how you talk to your kid about people shooting a school full of kids, or a church prayer meeting. This is not some far-away war. This is people you might pass in the supermarket and then they suddenly invade a school or a Planned Parenthood office.
Then her kid asks why police shoot people and will they shoot me? And she has to explain that no, they probably won’t, because he is white. And how do you explain that to a five-year-old, what will he understand of it?
My father didn't seem to be afraid of anything. He enjoyed political discussions, arguments, confrontation. Strikes. Marches. He had faced company gun thugs. My mother had faced the Ku Klux Klan, but she said afterward she had been scared. But neither of them, when I was a kid, told me about being scared. I heard that later. So maybe I wasn’t raised to be scared of the big public dangers. I was scared of bees and being late for school and the big roller-coaster, but not of political engagement. Not of being outed as a communist. My parents did their jail time before I was born, not during the McCarthy era. They weren’t high enough up in the Party structure. And they didn’t have vulnerable jobs, so they weren’t scared for that. So I was lucky that way.
In high school I had Republican boyfriends. I suppose we each might have been rebelling by getting together. But we were the smart nonconformist kids who would have hung out together whatever our politics.
I just thought of the Orange County deputy sheriffs who were among the Ku Klux Klan men raiding my grandparents house, which made me think of:
There once was a union maid Who never was afraid Of goons and ginks and company finks And the deputy sheriffs who made the raid
I never made that connection before
Which is why I write
Comment from Candy Forest posted 2-19-2022:
This piece reminded me of being about 8-10 during all the bomb scare stuff. They made us get under our desks to practice in the event of an atom bomb...I remember clearly how completely stupid I thought that was. My mom and I even discussed how stupid it was. As if crawling under your desk was going to somehow magically provide cover. We had those equally stupid signs hanging in the hallways to indicate that if you stood in JUST that spot, you would be sheltered. Our neighbors up the street actually built a bomb shelter! Their last name was Sauer which was pronounced Sour. It seemed to me that it was the perfect thing for a sour person to do, build a horrible block cube in the backyard and then prepare to lock all your neighbors out, as if anyone would really want to share that tiny little space...oh my, stupid stupid, stupid. Then as now, seems to me that fear brings to the surface and enhances all the "stupid" that lies inside each and every one of us.Comment from Nancy Schimmel posted 2-20-2022:
Nobody in my neighborhood, or among my friends or family, had a bomb shelter. I remember reading about a teacher who asked her class if they were afraid of nuclear bombs. All but one raised their hands. The teacher told the girl she was brave to stick to her own opinion when everyone disagreed, and asked why she felt the way she did. The girl said, "My mom and dad are working for peace."
Sunday, Jan 2, 2022: Goodbye 2021
I am writing this on New Year’s Eve, 2021, at home in Berkeley. It’s been a hell of a year. A big hunk of Boulder, Colorado just burned, and it’s not fire season. Except I guess it’s always fire season in a time of climate chaos. White supremacists storm the Capitol. Then there’s omicron. Since it hit, we are not going indoors with anyone, and we are wearing our KN95 masks outdoors. We are vaxxed (spellcheck suggested “vexed” and we are certainly that too) and boostered, but that doesn’t work if half the world is too poor to get patent-protected vaccines and is therefore incubating new variants. Our history of imperialism has come back to bite us in the butt.Besides bringing more global warming and a renewed pandemic, 2021 took from us our dear Molly, in August. It was easier to get out and walk every day when Molly, my personal trainer, was on the job. She was also the class clown. Here she is about fourteen years ago, when we first got her from a rescue group near Sacramento.
On the bright side, we are a we, my spouse Claudia and I, and we have lived in this neighborhood for over thirty years and have great neighbors, so we are getting along in the pandemic better than many. I’m also lucky that I am a writer as well as a singer, because it is much easier to write together online than to sing together. Here’s a sample of my songwriting: Wolf Party , lyrics by me, tune by Candy Forest
One more link before I go: A terrific speech by the Sikh activist & lawyer Valarie Kaur. She gave this address on New Year's Eve 2016, after Trump's election & before his inauguration. Still rings true. Someone posted it on the Atelier, a new social media site, about which more later.
Comment from Sue VanHattum posted 1-24-2022:
Good to see you outside of fb!Comment from Margret RoadKnight posted 1-25-2022:
Always enjoy your anecdotes, etc, Nancy (including those of Parker St and environs, of course), so looking forward greatly to future postings! Keep smiling and safe in 2022.Comment from Ira X posted 1-25-2022:
So sorry about dear Molly.
I can hear your voice speaking each word of the blog. Love to see this here and looking forward to the next installment.Comment from RUTH POHLMAN posted 1-25-2022:
Thanks, Nancy. I'm happy you're blogging again. I agree, 2021 was quite a year.Comment from Margaret Jackson posted 1-25-2022:
Two folks from Mrs. Carney's 4th grade class I have seen
In recent times. You, in Hollowville, N. Y., and Bonnie
Belle (aka Hampton, chellist), she at a summer music festival
playing one of the Bach Cello Suites. I remember playing
trombone next to her under the director Mr. Caldwell at Emerson
School in 1945.Comment from JoEllen Arnold posted 1-26-2022:
I’m so sorry to read that Molly is gone. Such a sweetheart. 💔