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.
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. 💔