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| Larry Wolf, Merwin on 5th Avenue (1977) |
Showing posts with label Family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Family. Show all posts
Monday, June 22, 2026
Thursday, April 2, 2026
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Family
Sonya at Sixteen
Surrounded - Heshel, Miriam, Ruthie, Harold, Abe -
no Anita
headaches, dizzy, bewildered, dead
just before Pesach
we moved on
like always
running
running from
Europe
North Atlantic
vast Canada
Brooklyn
enough already
Observant, keeping the old ways, though papa keeps his yarmulke under his hat
Ruthie and I navigate - Yiddish, Russian, English - their guides in this new world
I’m ready to break out and find my way
observant of me
still I see Benji
he helped me pick out this coat
stylish
mama says I’m too ready to leave
I should take my time
Time!
Anita was so vibrant - now gone
shvester I miss you
We are gathered before the camera
smile but don’t smile
relax but not too much
show the people in Kyiv we’ve arrived
we have warm coats
shined shoes (well, not papa)
a professional photographer
Ruthie is ready to dance
I just want this to be over.
-- Larry Wolf, 24 June 2025
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| Unknown Photographer, My Great Grandparents and their Children (1917?) |
Tuesday, August 8, 2023
Thursday, December 1, 2022
Thursday, October 20, 2022
Friday, May 27, 2022
Sunday, May 1, 2022
Saturday, April 9, 2022
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Four Musings on Grief
My Body
Freeze … my default reaction … don’t breathe… hold it in my gut.. be still, be invisible, don’t attract attention. The storm will blow over. The monster will get bored and move on. The sun and the moon will still rise and set even when I can’t see them.
Quiet tears … most often on reading when people stretch beyond their abilities to protect others. I was proud of myself that I sobbed and had to catch my breath while reading a eulogy at my father’s grave side.
Early messages to not show emotion, to not be a cry baby, to not be so sensitive, to stop having my feelings hurt. Grow up. Get over it. Be a man.
Learning, training, to be present. Decades of meditation, coach training, meditation instructor training… to be present for others pain, for my own pain. Learning the curse of spiritual bypass, of “everything is impermanent” and yet, some things are deeply moving and it’s necessary to honor that depth and profundity, not imagine it away. Being present without manipulation, without a desired outcome, without tilting the scales. Allowing the decades, generations, of shielding to gently, slowly, gradually fall away… or not.
An aging body. Sometimes nurtured. Sometimes ignored. Sometimes cursed. The only one I have. Mostly we're friends with each other.
Birth Family - New York City Second and Third Generation Child of Jewish Immigrants
My father’s parents' deaths.. his mother died when he was away at college, his father died when he was away in the Navy with his wife and infant children… his last discussion with his father was a fight over presidential politics … the betrayal of his father’s business partner uncles who didn’t include my father or his brother in the business going forward nor give them their fair share. My mother’s own loss when my father’s/her husband’s father died. He was the only adult male who supported her unconditionally. All of that loss was pushed aside, pushed down, in service to functioning in the world. Not a week of shiva. Not a year of morning minyan. I was two when this grandfather died. The shadow around that time still lingers.
There is a bigger cultural story in the disappearance of ancestral/extended family during the genocide of WW2 The pogroms of a generation earlier had sent my grandparents and their parents, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins, in search of safety in Canada and the US. They rarely spoke of being refugees, and never of the gaping holes left in the web of a family, of a community, of a race (yes, being Jewish was then, and is sometimes now, a race, a “people'' with a language and for millennia only the folklore of a country, and now that country is an oppressive police state). Antisemitism continued in their new countries, in my country, though generally more subtly than a mob riot or a military attack. Insidiously internalized, there was an overriding desire for safety - through assimilation for one branch of the family or living in the past of orthodoxy for another branch - neither approach has ever provided real safety. More than a shadow, a vast dark never-ending night.
Of course these attacks are not limited to any one group or race or time or place. Many sacred spaces have been invaded - synagogues, churches, mosques have all been scenes of terrorizing attack, descecration and murder. Trauma both strengthens and destroys family and community.
Lived Community - A Gay Male Out Since Shortly After Stonewall
Going to a smoky gay bar was a refuge from pervasive inner and outer homophobia. It was also scary, stepping into the lion’s den, confronting my own sexual desires, fearing the stereotypes, finding tricks and friends and lovers… making a life.
Seeking to counter the mainstream narrative with my own life, being as visible as I felt was safe. Taking control of the cultural message, with my immediate family, as part of the speaker bureau for LGBT student groups, as co-chair of Out in the Mountains (the Vermont LGBT monthly newsletter/magazine), interviewed by newspapers, testifying at state legislative hearings, attending local/regional Pride events and the Marches on Washington.
And then, during and through that, the overwhelming tragedy of AIDS. The panic of an emerging pandemic, the vitriolic attacks by the Catholic church (and others), the turning away of the government (local, state, federal), … and the emerging community of activists fighting for our lives … Gay Men’s Health Crisis, ACT-UP, Gran Fury, Queer Nation … those groups defined an edge while others of us were working from the middle. I hunkered down in a dysfunctional, largely monogamous and always safer-sex relationship.
It wasn’t all bleak.. there were doctors, nurses, hospitals, friends, family and neighbors who stepped through their fears to help… early confrontations led to lasting friendships… like that of Larry Kramer and Anthony Fauci… and eventually drugs, very very expensive drugs, that hold the virus in check (another soapbox for another time).
During that time, it was the plays - Larry Kramer’s Normal Heart, David Drake’s The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, Tony Kushner’s blockbuster Angels in America that really spoke to me, in the communal space of a theater, in reading them out loud to myself. A place to cry in public without having to explain or interact or accept unwanted consolation. A way to cry in the sanctuary of my home. A catharsis.
There is a long tradition of communities creating quilts. The Names Project/AIDS Quil was a way to grieve together. I never made panels for friends who died, attended few funerals, keeping much of the details in the abstract, keeping much of the dying at a distance - while also visibly advocating for safer sex, for public health, for broader understanding, wearing a red rhinestone ribbon (we are FABULOUS).
The unveiling of the AIDS Quilt on the national mall in 1987 was heart wrenching and grounding - a sea of weeping people as we walked among the panels, a vast field of loss and love and remembering. It was near the Vietnam Memorial with its polished black granite wall of names, descending into the earth, another place of communal mourning, another naming of the dead.
Moments of “Enough!” Stonewall was one moment of “we’re not going to take this any more”. Matthew Shepard’s brutal beating death was another “we’re too good at this public mourning and protest, this has to be a turning point for real change” (it would be another 20 years before the Federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act became law). And then mass murder at Pulse (lost in a wave of mass killings, in magazine offices in Paris, in synagogues in the US, in churches, in mosques, in schools, at concerts, …).
There was a brief time of delusion between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers when global peace seemed imminent (let’s ignore Bosnia, let’s ignore Rwanda, let’s ignore police killing of blacks and the mass incarceration of multiple generations).
Breathe.
The music.. of the bar, the disco, the concert hall, to be danced to, sung in the shower, … the music of gay and lesbian bands, of ballard singers creating a new oral history, the Men’s and Women’s (and sometimes broadly LGBTQ) Choruses in cities large and small. Celebrating all of life.
Making Art
In the past year or two, I have worked on a few art projects that address my many heritages, many losses, seeking deeper understanding, personal healing, and keeping a history alive.
They include:
Pink Triangle Portraits - drawings of the men in the signature photograph of homosexuals lined up in a concentration camp.. to see them as individuals.. to imagine their life before.. and how they became a symbol for future generations to rally around.Rough Raw Reclaimed - a zine of personal archival photographs (and a couple from public archives) with accompanying text to tell my story of a personal and cultural journey.To Hold Infinity - the grief of a friend at the sudden death of his beloved wife led to a folded paper altar.Picasso’s Guernica - not my art making, but Picasso’s. The progression of his response to the mass killings at Guernica is chronicled in the series of dated drawings and photographs of the work in progress, offering insights into the artistic process, one human's response to the actions of other humans. The effort and evolution of finding form to convey ideas and emotions.
Queering Death - An Anthology of Questions
These musings were written for a reading group led by Kean O'Brien, Exploring Grief, Death and Trauma. They came from considering this anthology of questions:
QUEERING DEATH: An Anthology of Questions is a workbook featuring questions compiled from the first Queering Death cohort. Use this anthology of questions as prompts for journaling, in conversations with loved ones, as an edgy ice-breaker, as demands to elected officials, in affinity groups, or however you see fit.
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Friday, March 18, 2022
Voices Transformed
When I was in college, my friends loved my parents, thought them so supportive. I, on the other hand, felt like they were always in me, offering their uninvited opinions, that I was constantly navigating my desire to be my own person, to discover who I was, free of their comments, free of needing their acceptance. They represented the social norms. I was harboring an inner queer boy needing a place to revel in.
On the drive home from helping empty out my mother's apartment, in the bleak woods of western Pennsylvania along I-80, I had a glimpse that my parents, now both deceased, were newly a font of truly unconditional love. What a relief. What a blessing!
It is also true that each of them, in their final days, said things that were outside the push-pull of parents and children. My father told me that my work in the world was important. My mother told me how wonderful my latest zine was. Each from their perspective, an elder seeing me whole.
The parental voices in my head, that have haunted me since childhood, are transformed. They are now angelic, harps at a distance, not harpies attacking me, eating my liver. Like the woods along the road, they are the passing scenery, the non-specific mummer of a river, the stream of life. Mixed metaphors are about right.
The future awaits.
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| Larry Wolf, Love (1992, linoleum block print on Valentine card) |
Sunday, March 13, 2022
Lost and Found
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| Larry Wolf, Treasure Box (2022) |
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| Larry Wolf, Treasure Box (2022) |
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| Larry Wolf, Treasure Box (2022) |
This box of slides was believed lost. It was found while emptying out my mother's apartment. Soon they will be scanned. Family history reclaimed.
Friday, March 4, 2022
Mom's Books
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| Larry Wolf, Mom's Books at My Home (2022) |
From Mom's Apartment - Now at My Home
Franck - To Be Human Against All Odds
Handzeichnungen des Michelangelo (Michelangelo's Drawings)
Calder - Animal Sketching
Emil Nolde - Unpainted Pictures
A Collection of Drawings and Watercolors by Charles Demuth - Sotherby Parke Bernet - October 28, 1976
Burlingham - Twins, A Study of Three Pairs of Identical Twins with 30 Charts
Monday, February 28, 2022
Mothers
Sang Young Park
| Sang Young Park, Love int the Big City |
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When I was nineteen, I won a literary prize given out by a college newspaper. ... so I wrote about a woman in her fifties who'd always had an inferiority complex about her education, who went on to get two bachelor's degrees at an online university and threw everything she had into her son's education; it was the only story I could write at that time, and the judges declared it the winner ... Umma heard the news ... got a copy of the paper, and read the story. Then she cried for four days straight. I could hear her sobs and lamentations through her bedroom door. "I can't believe I hurt you so much, I can't believe I exploited you like that!" "Umma, for God's sake, fiction is just fiction! It's all made up!" She refused to listen to me and from then on avoided anything I wrote ...
- - -
Umma looked as hard and beautiful as ever as she gazed into the sunset. As I watched her, it suddenly occurred to me that she may indeed have read every one of my published stories and writings. Not that this would've changed anything, really. She spoke in a sentimental voice.
- I used to feel that I'd been given the whole world when I held you.
- - -
Umma was now lying on the grass and staring up at the sky. She looked incredibly calm. At peace. I wondered if that ninety-nine-pound, fifty-eight-year-old woman staring at the fading firmament was feeling the same way I was feeling. That my life could not be summed up like the neat columns of numbers on a chart, that it could swerve in an unpredictable direction at any time. That the person I thought I knew best just because we had blood ties could actually be the most mysterious and unknown. That there were times in life when you just have to stop holding on. And that was why the only thing I could do now was to cease all thinking, to simply watch her as she smiled and attached meanings to silly things like the rising and setting of the sun. All I could do was await her death.
Sang Young Park, Love in the Big City, A Bite of Rockfish, Taste the Universe
Anton Hur - Translator from Korean to English
The traffic began getting bad at Hannam-dong. I hopped out in front of the CJ Building and ran the rest of the way to G—.
* * *
I screamed when I first read those two sentences, in pure delight of recognition. What club-going gay in Seoul hasn’t done this: ridden a taxi into Itaewon, abandoned the taxi at this exact bottleneck in Hannam-dong, and ran the rest of the way to G—? As a Korean gay man in Seoul just a little bit older than Sang Young himself, I can even tell you the letters obscured by the em-dash in G—. ...
Of all the sentences in this book, some were relatively easy to translate, while many presented a plethora of conundrums and points of discussion that could easily fill the limit I’ve been given for this note. But the sentences I most wanted to discuss were these two. They took hardly any time to translate, but I spent a few minutes fretting that no one would know how thrilling it was to see them in a novel, this wink to All the Gays of Seoul.
Because until I read these sentences—nay, until I read Sang Young Park—I had no idea how much I’d subconsciously craved for someone to put my experience of my world in my time into print, to give my brief life here and now the sacred consecration of literature.
https://lithub.com/to-all-the-gays-of-seoul-on-translating-sang-young-park/
Edgar Gomez
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| Edgar Gomez, High Risk Homosexual Photo Credit: Joseph Osborne |
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I Dedicated My Book to My Mother, But I Can’t Tell Her I Wrote It
Electric Lit, January 13, 2022
I want to tell her: I wrote about our lives, Mom, and yes, there are some things in this book you might not like, but there is also so much tenderness, like how after you kicked down my door that day and I thought you would kill me for being gay, you climbed into my bed and told me you loved me, te quiero, perdóname.
I want to say: I didn’t write this book to hurt you. I wrote it because I didn’t know what else to do with my hurt. I wrote it because I love you, too. La quiero más. Perdóneme.
https://electricliterature.com/i-dedicated-my-book-to-my-mother-but-i-cant-tell-her-i-wrote-it/
Brandon Taylor
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| Brandon Taylor, All About My Mother Photo Credit: Bill Adams |
The first thing that my father said to me when my mother died was that she had loved me. And at the time, I thought, what a ridiculous thing to say. Not because her love was evident to me—it was not and is not, really, an evident thing—but because he thought it meant so much to me and I felt at the time that it didn’t. I scoffed and made a joke and he said it again, She loved you. You know that, right? She loved you.
- - -
Her name is Mary Jean Speigner. She died young. She worked jobs so hard that the heels of her feet were cracked and gray. She dipped Skoal and spat it into Natural Light cans. She watched every soap opera religiously. Her favorite fish was whitey. She didn’t eat salt. She didn’t eat sugar. She fried her chicken black. She checked her blood sugar in the morning and in the afternoon, her blood purple-red as she pressed it flat on the test slips. She had a tremor in her left hand. She had a pert nose and hooded, dark eyes. Her favorite color was green. Her favorite show was 90210. She loved Hugh Grant. She loved to laugh. Her favorite music was blues. She had a terrible singing voice but loved to sing. A man raped her when she was young, and nobody said anything about it. Nobody did anything about it. She saw him every day. She drank every day. Sometimes, she didn’t eat because her stomach hurt so bad that she wanted to cry. But she didn’t cry. She never cried. Just once. When her sister called her an ugly liar when they were full-grown. She went home and cried on the bed for hours. She hated bugs. Her voice was raspy. She hated to be touched. She hated to be spoken to like she was stupid. She hated secrets. She never told the truth. She danced all the time. She slept late. She stayed up late. She had trouble sleeping. She was afraid to hear about the dreams of other people; it was like a screeching sound to her, to hear about what other people had dreamed. She could make a joke out of anything. She loved to tell stories. She believed in magic. Nobody stood up for her so she had to stand up for herself, and after a while, she got tired of standing.
I wish I had gotten to know her better.
I think we would have been great friends.
I wish I had tried harder. Sooner.
This isn’t enough. It’ll never be enough.
But I have to stop for now.
Monday, February 21, 2022
A Strong Reaction
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| Larry Wolf, Maxi - Why Such A Strong Reaction! (2022) |
The details don't matter but my reaction does. A friend asked whether my artwork is inspired by my mother.
I felt a huge surge of anger, a fight-to-the-death need to defend my art as my own, to defend my independence, to defend my agency, to defend my life. Not of by or for my mother. Hell NO!
It was a momentary flash. I noticed it. He noticed it. Yikes!
Who or what am I protecting? What does that have to do with my mother?
There's some ancient personal shit here... about being my own person... and who knows what else... I know... buried... by me... once upon a time.
Time to do some excavating and some composting. Definitely something valuable here.
Friday, February 18, 2022
Thursday, February 17, 2022
A Sketchbook
The first off the shelf
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| Larry Wolf, Maxi's Sketchbook (2022) |
... beginning
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| Larry Wolf, Maxi's Sketchbook - Front Matter (2022) |
"You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul."
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
Tuesday, February 8, 2022
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