Post 222 - October 19, 2020

Day 222…

Even though Michael has stopped baking sourdough bread, I have to say that I am finding that shaking the extra COVID weight I’ve put on is proving to be more challenging than dropping some pounds might have been in the past.

I’ve been trying to drop ten pounds seemingly ever since I can remember. I get there, but then it creeps back up. The last time I was down where I wanted to be was last summer when Michael and I got back from working in Japan. The Japanese eat far better than we do. Even their junk food is better and more nutritious. I’m only about four or five pounds above the point where I’d like to lose ten, but still.

Part of what’s happening, I think, is that the anxiety surrounding the election is making stress-eating more and more difficult to avoid. I can be good all day and then catch wind of something from a newspaper headline or from a newscaster and then all bets are off.

Neither of my car trips have been good in terms of weight and exercise. Sitting in a car all day doesn’t compare to walking around the city. Sitting in quarantine for two weeks? Forget it.

The anxiety I am feeling these days seems to be mirrored in almost every single person I come in contact with - whether I am talking to them directly or just reading their social media posts.

Even the people who have made a point of only posting the positive seem to be posting more and more positive things each day. I think that must reflect how much they are trying to compensate for how they are really feeling.

I have a whole routine to mentally prepare to go to sleep each night. If I’ve watched something stress-inducing, I then need to read a book for a while to clear my head or even take a hot bath to chill out before I get into bed.

Last night, just before we went to sleep, Michael wondered what was going on, on Fox news. We’ve been re-watching Stranger Things because Michael never watched it before, so I didn’t think that it could be any worse than the supernatural carnage we had just seen.

Whoever the anchor was on Fox, he was talking quietly and calmly about his views on the election.

Almost nothing out of his mouth was true. Some of the things he said that were true were taken so far out of context that he made them sound as if they supported his argument. In reality, if you placed those arguments in their proper context, they would actually argue against everything he was saying.

That said, he was so reasonable sounding that I could see how he might be believed. My chest started tightening. I lasted less than a minute before I had to flee. I read my book for another hour to distract myself before I could go to sleep. Note to self: no more Fox News after lunch.

At this point in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton was polling ahead of the President with almost the exact same margins that Biden is currently leading him with. If that doesn’t send ice-water through a Democrat’s veins, then nothing will.

To get away from it all and try and burn some of the stress (and weight) off, I took a bike ride downtown yesterday. I rode all the way down to Union Square and then continued further downtown on foot.

The Lower East Side of Manhattan sometimes feels like it is a whole different country. There are some ethnic neighborhoods that really make you feel that, but even the varied neighborhoods give you the feeling of being somewhere else.

Orchard Street, and the area surrounding the Tenement Museum used to be the hub of wholesale clothing distributers. Even in the days when I first went to school here in New York, it was heavily Eastern-European and Jewish. Today, it is a trendy restaurant and boutique laden area populated with a whole group of disparate people who seem to be only connected by their ages - young.

Chinatown’s touristy area is still concentrated near eastern Canal Street on Mott and Mulberry Streets. Further downtown, though, underneath the access ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge is where Chinatown really is these days. There are no souvenir shops down there. Instead, the streets are lined with grocery stores and fresh fish and produce markets.

On the sidewalks, sellers have set up crates of live crabs and freshly caught fish. Shoppers throng the streets and bargain with them in Chinese. Walking down there, you feel like you could be anywhere in the world where Chinese is spoken.

And that could be almost anywhere.

English is the most spoken language world-wide. Roughly 15% of people on earth can communicate using it. But, in terms of native speakers, it’s not even second.

There are about 379 million native speakers of English on earth.

For 460 million people, Spanish is their native language.

Mandarin Chinese has more native speakers than both of those groups put together. 918 million people identify Mandarin Chinese as their native language.

Overall, Mandarin Chinese is only a fraction of a percentage point behind English in terms of its actual speakers throughout the world. And that gap is narrowing.

My aim, yesterday, was to get to Battery Park to see the new statue of Mother Cabrini that the Governor unveiled last week.

Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini was an Italian American Roman Catholic nun. In 1946, she became the first US citizen to be canonized as a Saint by the Roman Catholic Church.

She was born in 1850 in Italy. She, along with seven other women who had all taken their vows together, founded an orphanage and a day school. Her success came to the attention of Pope Leo XIII who urged her to travel to the US to offer aid to the masses of Italian immigrants who were arriving here every day.

She came and facing a lot of opposition, she founded the Sacred Heart Orphan Asylum in West Park, NY. It remained in operation until 2011. She also founded a hospital that ultimately became the Cabrini Medical Center that stayed open until 2008. All in all, she founded 67 institutions to help the sick and the poor throughout this country as well as in Latin America and in Europe.

Mother Cabrini died in 1917 and was buried in West Park, NY in the asylum she founded. In 1933, as the process of beatification was underway, they exhumed her body. Her head was removed and is now preserved in a chapel in Rome. Her heart is in Codogno, Italy where she founded her missionary order. One of her arm bones is at her national shrine in Chicago.

The rest of her remains lie here in New York. Her mummified body is actually on display in a shrine up in Washington Heights.

I don’t know if it is open during the pandemic, but when I lived up there, I went in to see it. She is in a glass reliquary casket under the altar. Most of what you can see is a life-like wax representation of her that covers her actual bones.

Between 1975 and 2008 the Vatican reportedly did a whole series of experiments to figure out ways to preserve all of the relics and bodies of its Saints. 

An incorruptible body is supposed to be one of the signs of supreme holiness, but, in reality, none of the bodies or bits and pieces have survived without some sort of help.

The NY Post did a whole exposé on this supposed top-secret operation back in 2014 claiming that all of the people who did the experiments are now dead. Mother Cabrini’s body is reputedly one of the 31 that they worked on.

In 1950 Saint Francis Xavier Cabrini was named the patron saint of immigrants. She is also considered the person that you ask for help in finding a parking space. A priest explained, “She lived in New York City. She understands traffic.”

It’s a beautifully designed statue. Mother Cabrini and two children are standing in a folded-paper boat. The boat represents a story she told of being a girl in Italy and setting paper boats adrift with violets in them. She considered them her missionaries.

The statue of Mother Cabrini in Battery Park brings the sum total of statues erected by the City of New York to honor women up to a rousing 7.

That’s it. In the entire city of New York.

7.

This doesn’t include the many anonymous scantily clad women depicting concepts like liberty and justice. This number represents city memorials to actual flesh and blood women who have made an impact on our society.

Up near us there’s a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt over near Riverside Park. There’s also one of Joan of Arc up here somewhere too. There’s one of Harriet Tubman in Harlem and one of Golda Meir in midtown. In Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library there is a statue of Gertrude Stein.

In August, a statue of women’s rights pioneers depicting Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth was installed in Central Park. The initial design did not include Sojourner Truth, but she was added after the design was criticized for erasing the contributions of women of color to the suffrage movement.

The ‘She Built NYC’ project has been spearheaded by the city’s First Lady, Chirlane McCray. They have plans for several more women to be so represented.

There has been plenty of discussion about statues that honor men who are less than perfect - Christopher Columbus, Confederate Generals and others. The continued presence of those memorials creates tension within communities and has ignited a national debate.

The absence of memorials, however, is every bit as important to address.

Public statues become part of our landscape. After a while we don’t notice them. Their presence, however, can subliminally reinforce basic biases.

We can walk past the statue of Teddy Roosevelt on Central Park West hundreds of times without fully looking at it. Each time we pass by and glance unthinkingly at it, the lower positions of the African American and Native American men in the composition subliminally reinforces the idea that they are “less than”.

Walking throughout the city and only passing statues of men subliminally reinforces the idea that only men have contributed to our society. It plants the idea that women’s accomplishments are not worthy of mention.

I am glad that our First Lady has undertaken this job. It is well beyond about time. Her husband, the Mayor, in contrast, had announced that the City was going to relocate the state of Teddy Roosevelt months ago. It’s still there.

Yesterday was an almost perfect day for riding and walking. Today looks almost as good.

These days leading up to the election seem endless.

The temptation is to start obsessing on polls and panicking. If the polls are too good, then we lull ourselves into a false sense of security. If they are bad, we start to panic.

Ignore the polls. Ignore what the President is saying.

Whether he ultimately loses or not, both the President and those in the Administration around him are starting to believe that they are going to lose. They are not going to go down without a fight and in the next days are going to be trying everything that they can to throw a monkey wrench into the proceedings.

We’ve got this. But only if we stay the course.

It can’t be THEY’ve got this it has to be WE’ve got this. We all have to do what we can. And we all have to let the anxiety go as much as we are able to.

Go outside, enjoy the day and live your life.

You’ll have your chance to vote soon, if you haven’t already, and that’s all that you need to do.

As the t-shirts and stickers now say, “Keep Calm and Vote”.