Nights are long
Hours in bed
A book, notebooks, solitaire
Maybe someone writes me,
Usually not
Maybe someone tells me,
“Boy, you used to be so hot.
But how’d you go to school so long & still turn out so dumb?
How’d you have a mother like that & still need someone’s love?
How’d you do that thing you did that time?
Man, how are you even still alive?”
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Fragment
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Nothing Left to Chance
She said, “Pardon me, may I have this dance?”
I said, “Yes, ’cause there’s nothing left to chance.”
She said, “Why you looking at me sideways, all askance?”
I said, “Well, I just think it’s kinda funny–there’s nothing left to chance.”
We went to a park, we were ready for romance
She said, “Well, I guess there’s nothing left to chance.”
Grandpa’d died that day, he was such a handsome man
I know he’d have said, “Son, there’s nothing left to chance.”
I’d never been there if it weren’t his day to pass
Guess that’s how I know there’s nothing left to chance
I left her in the morning, I had to go on west
She just smiled and said . . . “Yeah, I think that’s for the best.”Nothing left to chance, no, nothing left to chance
You can say it’s all just, happenstance, but I know, I know,
There’s nothing to chance -
Careful With Me
Be careful with me
I’ve set a bad example
Be careful with me
I might tear out your heart
Be careful with me
I may rip down your temple
Be careful with me
I’ll stop before I start
The things I’ve done
I wouldn’t recommend ’em
The things I’ve done
Are advisable to no one
The things I’ve done
Are from the lion’s den
The things I’ve done
Make me the prodigal son
In that old tale
They welcome him with kisses
In that old tale
They killed the fatted calf
In that old tale
They gave him loaves and fishes
In that old tale
They cut the kid in half
So be careful with me
I really don’t know nothin’
Be careful with me
I live by sleight of hand
Be careful with me
My words are really somethin’
Be careful with me
I’ll fill your eyes with sand -
You Can’t Make ‘Em Love You
You can have great thoughts
But no one cares
You can dance around the house
In your underwear
You can write rhymes & poems too
You can do anything you want to do
But you can’t make ’em love you
No you can’t make ’em love you
You can’t make ’em love you
Not like you used to doYou can talk about the good old days
Gonna talk about ’em anyways
You can let a soft teardrop fill your jaundiced eye
You can tell ’em that you’ll never say goodbye
And you can roll up a paper and swat at a fly
You can slip off to sleep with an easy sigh
But you can’t make ’em love you
No you can’t make ’em love you
You can’t make ’em love you
Not like you used to do -
Big Sonia Comes to St. Louis
Sonia Warshawski was only 17 when she watched her mother being marched to the gas chamber at the Majdanek death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
She hadn’t seen her brother or father since the Nazis rounded up her family and put them on cattle cars, and she would never see any of them again. Her sister escaped and eventually settled in Israel.
Warshawski’s story is told in the award-winning documentary Big Sonia. Directed by her niece, Leah, and featuring the voices of her children, Regina, Bill, and Debbie, the film was part of Maryville University’s Medart Lecture Series in February 2020. Maryville Hillel and the College of Arts and Sciences collaborated on the screening.
Leah and Sonia Germaine Murray, Ph.D., Director of the Medart Lecture Series, and Erin Schreiber, Hillel’s founding manager, believe that Sonia’s message of tenacity and triumph not only educates about the Holocaust, but also helps today’s students feel empowered to bring good into the world.
“When I read about the film, I thought it was the perfect way to bring this important story to the audience,” Murray says. “Of course it’s tragic, but it’s not overly graphic. It handles the material well, especially for younger people.”
“It also puts a personal spin on something that can seem very impersonal,” Schreiber adds. “Like Sonia, many survivors have an optimistic outlook, but it can be hard to hear their stories.”
Sonia met her future husband, John, at Bergen Belsen, her third and final camp. Despite being nearly shot to death by a stray bullet as Soviet soldiers liberated the camp, she survived. As Sonia says in the film, “There is hell. I was in that hell.”
After the war, Sonia and John settled in a Kansas City suburb, opened a tailor shop, and raised their family. One day she heard about skinheads who denied that the Holocaust had happened, and she realized her mission: sharing her story with school children, prisoners, and anyone else who would listen.
“This is the reason I survived,” she says. “I have to tell it for them. My biggest accomplishment is to reach into their hearts and take out hate.”
These are the bare facts of Sonia’s story, but as she notes in the film, “I can tell you facts. But facts are barely any of it. Facts are not even the beginning.”
Indefatigable. Unfortunately, today many students do not even know the facts about the Holocaust. Only 12 states require Holocaust education, and survivors—and their stories—are dying daily. That made Big Sonia a perfect joint project for Murray and Schreiber.
“The Medart series’ primary goal is education,” says Murray, who has brought hundreds of films, lectures and panels about numerous topics to campus as part of the series. “One challenge of using film to educate about the Holocaust is that many of them are overwhelming. This is a great educational tool because Sonia herself is so human and accessible.”
Schreiber agrees. “The exposure and familiarity the film provides is so important,” she says. “It can be easy to say, ‘The Holocaust doesn’t matter to me because I am not a survivor,’ but you can’t forget Sonia.”
Murray especially appreciated the film’s focus on the Holocaust’s effects on Sonia’s family. In fact, Sonia’s daughter Debbie attended the screening. Murray was surprised to learn that Debbie had been her upstairs neighbor for nearly 30 years, but she did not know that Sonia was Debbie’s mother until she recognized the last name while reading about the film.
“Growing up as kids of a survivor is different,” Debbie says. “You have a different outlook. You know things can happen to you and your family. When you know it has happened to your parents, you feel it firsthand.”
Following the film, Debbie took questions from the audience, which included other children of Holocaust survivors.
“They came to understand why their parents were the way they were,” Murray says. “Families have to talk about these things.”
Murray plans to begin showing the film in her classes, and she is already receiving requests from other faculty members to show it. Schreiber believes it will be a great complement to the Holocaust survivor speaker series Hillel hosts each October. It draws about 450 people on a campus with around 250 Jewish students.
“Students today have a lot of anxiety because they feel powerless in a flood of constant bad news,” Murray says. “Stories like Sonia’s show that there really are good things happening, and that you do have the power to make even more good things happen.”
The was founded by the late Josephine Medart, Trustee Emeritus of Maryville University and former member of the Alumni Association Board of Directors and the University Board of Trustees.
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Home Because of You
Nashville is 1,000 years away
And Kansas City seems like yesterday
And everyone we know must have better things to do
But this place feels like home because of you
Yes, this place feels like home because of youAnd all the money that we spent on rent
And all the places it’d be better spent
Like fixing up a basement, or tearing off a roof
But this place fees like home because of you
Yes, this place feels like home because of youI like to spend my days out on the lawn
I like to think about the days that now are gone
I like to talk to puppies, and little babies too
’Cause this place fees like home because of you
Yes, this place feels like home because of you -
Lonely
I am so lonely
I am by myself
I got nobody here
Just me on this shelfWalked downtown today
People just turn away
Every store that I go to
Nothing to buy & nothing to doI say, “Man, ain’t my money green?”
He looks at me like he’s never seen
A man as lonely as I could be
Then he just takes my money from meCome back home again—light’s down low
People all got someplace to go
I just sit in my chair & cry
I just watch the night go byWhen I’m drifting off to sleep
I count myself as I’m counting sheep
That’s one sheep more with nowhere to go
That’s one sheep more than I’ll ever knowI am so lonely
I am by myself
I got nobody here
Just me on this shelf -
Journalism
Like most writers, I keep a journal. And like most people who keep journals, I’m not sure why.
My earliest journals are from my seventh-grade religion class. Our teacher, Brother Tom, had us keep them. For most of my friends it was a chore, but the promise of performance and praise touched me. Brother Tom was my captive audience, and my journals were his favorite. I knew this because he would often say so in his comments, which I looked forward to like nothing else every week.
I haven’t gotten rid of many of my journals, though I have gotten rid of some. I remember cutting pages and pages of them up into thin strips in high school. Then mixing up the strips and putting them in separate trash cans. Too embarrassing, I guess, though I’m not sure what could have been so embarrassing at that age. Or how it could be more embarrassing than anything I’ve done or thought since.
But I’ve kept more than I’ve destroyed, and it’s a fairly unbroken record from 1978 to . . . well, to last week, I guess. And again, I’m not sure why I do this. I’m not sure why I carefully note not only the date but also the time of day. I’m not sure who, if anyone, will ever read them. I rarely do.
Sometimes I go back and look in specific journals if I’m trying to reconstruct a fading memory. Remembering who that girl was I did that thing with that time by that place, stuff like that. But usually they just sit in a filing cabinet.
The other day, out of curiosity, I randomly picked one out and started reading it. And it may be the beginning of understanding why I keep a journal.
ome excerpts from the fall of 2013:
9-30-13, 1:41 p.m. How I am feeling: icky. I feel violated by the carpet guy & his mystery 100 ft2. I feel stupid because I said “Nutmeg” instead of “Gingerbread.” I am tired. I am always tired; I could always sleep. What is wrong with me?
10-3-13, 5ish. Starbucks, Webster Groves, ballet night. I did go to work & get Law Daily out but then went home to sleep. I was so tired. Woke up around 11:30 or so, feeling guilty for not being at work—so I started doing laundry & did laundry all day.
10-8-13, 10:39 a.m. Why am I so tired every day. Depression? I sleep fine, go to bed around 10:30, up at 5:30, drink coffee. Today I also splurged on a cup @ McDonald’s so I’ve had 3 & still barely holding my pen up as my mind starts to drift again. So tired.
11-10-13, 8:53 p.m. A quiet Sunday night. Kate & El are watching a movie in our bed; I will sleep in Kate’s room. I am so lonely. I was alone tonight. Kate had her end of year soccer party. I didn’t go.
11-14-13, 4:02 p.m. Why does she stay with me? I’m not just worthless, I’m a strain, an expense. I should be written off like a bad debt. WORTHLESS.
12-4-13, 3:44 p.m. I need validation. I need to feel good. I need to stop doubting myself.
These entries could have been written three years ago. Or last year. Or this afternoon. Yet even in 2013, amidst all the fatigue and loneliness, I was doing a lot. I had a full-time job. I had a family. I was editing a book. I was learning just enough about Carl Jung to allow me to review a book called Art and the Relic Cult of St. Antoninus in Renaissance Florence for the Jung Journal. I was thinking through my own book project, a memoir of growing up in St. Joseph, Missouri. And I was apparently making a second full-time job of beating myself up for not doing any of this fast enough, well enough, consistently enough.
The value of these journals may be that they illustrate the workings of the productive depressive’s mind. The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual lists nine types of depression. The one that comes closest to mine is persistent depressive disorder, or dysthymia. However, it doesn’t quite fit.
One article states, “People with dysthymia often find it difficult to be ‘upbeat,’ even during good times. They might be perceived as gloomy, pessimistic, or a complainer.”[1] This is not how anyone would describe me, except maybe my closest family members—and anyone who might ever read my journals.
I imagine that someone will read my journals, someday, and they will look at everything I have done, and they will think of how I presented to them, and they will wonder, “How can this be the same person?”
It’s a good question. Even today, I am a hyper achiever. Again, on top of a full-time job, I am writing two books, editing a magazine, editing a book, consulting for a bank, editing for training company, reading Proust, and fantasizing about things I may never do—the Jungian analysis of John Lydon/Johnny Rotten, the memoir project, the lines of poetry lying around . . .
And yet, most days . . . life? Yeah, OK, if I must. Whatever. Then I go about filling my day with lists and activities and presenting myself positively, always ready to cheer someone else or make a joke, often at my own expense—and I work, work, work.
My solace now is that I have the journals to contrast how I feel to what I have done—a physical counter to the ongoing weight of worthlessness and failure. It’s the mystery of me, and of the 3.8 million dysthymiacs in the U.S. I am better than I was in 2013, or 2007, or 1983, and yes, I am in therapy, and I have been since I turned 18. Therapy helps. Exercise helps. Getting older helps. Perspective helps.
Passages like this from the 2013 journal also help. It is one of a handful, scattered here and there, in which I finally break away from the day-to-day recitation of fatigue and loneliness and caffeine—places where the sky cracks open before the clouds roll back in:
10-12-13, 11:35 p.m. OK, so forget all that other shit I’ve written over the past 35 years. Seeing Judy Collins in concert has made me want to dedicate my life & writing to finding the truth—that magical hole that can open in time & space, the perfect moment captured like a fly in amber. The pain, the cold, dark pain,. . . . Transcendence, the fog of your breath shading Orion’s belt on a freezing Christmas Eve night in Ellsworth KS ca. 1970 something. “Everything dies, that’s a fact but maybe everything that dies one day comes back.”
[1] Katie Hurley, LCSW, “Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia),” https://www.psycom.net/depression.central.dysthymia.html
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Parents
Every day I become my mother
Give my last dollar to some stranger on the street
Say hello to everyone I meet
Say to the man with the ugly dog,
“Wow, what a pretty dog!”
Say to the woman with the ugly kid,
“Wow, what a pretty kid!”
Then I keep on walking, smiling all the wayYou think you can make me angry?
You can’t make me mad
You think you can make me grouchy?
You can’t make me sadEvery day I become my father
Take the long way ’round a story
And always full of jokes
See a guy stuck on the road, but I’m running outta time
“It’s all right, buddy, I got time!”
See a guy, down on his luck
“Here buddy, take this one last dime!”
Then I keep on walking, smiling anywayYou think you can make me angry?
You can’t make me mad
You think you can make me grouchy?
Nah, you can’t make me sad -
Woodpeckers
I love the sound of woodpeckers
Pecking at their holes
I love the thought of Jesus
Saving my wretched soul
I love to think of everyone
Who’s ever even been
Waiting at the window, to tell me of my sin
I’m seeking absolution
I’m breaking mother’s heart
I’m pulling people closer
So I can keep them far apart
I’m sleeping late and walking far
Along these barren dunes
Everyone says “Don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon”I love the sound of woodpeckers
Pecking at their holes
I love the thought of Jesus
Saving my wretched soul
I love to think of everyone
Who’s ever even been
Waiting at the window, to tell me of my sin