RIP: Kathryn Wages Douglass

"Thursday, July 16, 2009

A memorial service for Kathryn Wages Douglass will be held at 5 p.m. at the Storey County Senior Center on Friday, July 17, 2009.

Pot luck finger food donations are requested.

Kathryn, 62, of Virginia City, passed away peacefully at her residence on Tuesday, June 30, 2009.

Kathryn was born on Feb. 1, 1947 in Fayetteville, Ark., to Olin and Roberta Wages, and was their only child.

She is survived by cousins Cindy Kaiser of Austin, Texas, and Renee DeRossitt of Memphis, Tenn., numerous friends in Virginia City, the United States and England, her much-loved cat, Whitbey, and former husband Larry Douglass.

Kathryn attended the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, obtaining degrees in history, archival research and graphic design.

She and former husband Larry traveled extensively throughout Panama, Central America and Great Britain, including an archeological dig of an ancient Scottish site that was highly recognized in the field of archaeology.

Kathryn moved to Virginia City in 2001 from her home in Sacramento, after living in Leeds, England for three years.

While living in Virginia City, Kathryn served as the director of the Storey County Senior Center for four years, St. Mary’s in the Mountains museum guide, performed in several productions at the Gold Hill Hotel and Piper’s Opera House, and held several retail positions at various shops in town.

In addition to her cat, Whitbey, Kathryn had several interests including travel, books, movies, reading and music, and was ready to share her passions and interests with those that she knew.

She would always be there to help others, even at her own sacrifices. May she rest in peace."

Kathryn was my pen pal for over a decade; and I only now heard about her death. I had been sending her small notes and cards (none were returned) and had started to worry keenly. She loved sending me and my cats Hallowe'en cards and stickers.

Some of my best and closest relationships are with pen pals--yet it is hard to know when they are in distress; when they need help; when they are incapacitated, and when there is no hope any longer of ever receiving a missive again. And what happened to Whitbey? Did somebody step in to take care of her? I am sure that Kathryn had a web of relationships via correspondence, but it's the nature of private correspondence that we rarely know who else was important, who else signified, with whom else to grieve and share stories and hope for solace.

What would you do?

What would you do if you knew that a child molester was out there, walking around, free, celebrated, almost famous? Would it make any difference if the child was 13 and not 6? Would it make any difference if he had taken this teenager and set up an apartment for her and established her as his mistress? Would it make any difference that she was his baby-sitter and not a girl he grabbed off the street?

What if his colleagues were complicit. "She seemed young," one said, "but certainly did not talk like a 14 year old. I just assumed she was an undergraduate."

What if you spent decades -- really decades -- trying to get people to listen to you. And the child molester's wife continued to bitterly insist that the babysitter, the 13 year old, has been the seductress, the one to blame, the one that had stolen her husband?

What if many of the eyewitnesses were dead? These eyewitnesses would be professors in the History of Art Department at Yale University during the late 1960's and very early 1970's?

And would if matter if the wench were dead?

Go ahead and look him up: Professor Donald Preziosi. He's had a distinguished career at Yale, MIT, SUNY/Binghamtom, UCLA--he's won many prizes. He's written a slew of books. Born January 12, 1941.

How many other girls has he seduced? What about since he became a so-called "feminist"?

Who would you defend? The powerful and famous professor or the teen-aged girl who killed herself because her "Poozie" abandoned her?

Would it make any difference if this crime was attributed to the "swinging sixties" and its excesses by Professor Preziosi?

I've been seeking justice for 35 years. Seeking to get the laurels off the head of this child-abuser and rapist.

Sometimes name and so-called reputation can cover up a multitude of crimes.

Who are you going to believe?

Sciatica City

Sciatica City is a bleak and solipsistic place. It reminds me of Billy Joel's "Allentown" or Mrs. Gaskell's Manchester. Sciatica sounds more intriguing than it is. Images of forsythia or the scion of a wealthy family come to mind. But it is more like sciolism.

Yesterday I took my pretty girl, Mrs. Palmer, to the Vet. She needs to consult her cardiologist in a couple of weeks. The Gen Pop here has been fairly stable.

19th-Century Bachelorettes

The local newspaper just reviewed the new film "Bright Star" referring to:

"19th-century bachelorette Fanny Brawne".

I cringe. I gasp. I fall upon the thorns of this skimpy newspaper and bleed (especially since it's decided that arts coverage should be all Dan Brown almost all the time).

19th century bachelorettes are friends of mine! Think of Jane Austen; Emily Dickinson, Anne and Emily Brontë. George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett were "bachelorettes" for quite a while.

I wonder if the movie depicts one of those rose ceremonies?

The Lost Key Soars

I've been abroad, adding to my collection of cathedrals.

And I saw La Boheme: I am always overwhelmed by the business of the lost key and the burned out candle in Act I. The most mundane exchange of banalities is interrupted by a sudden and passionate soaring of compelling urgency: the characters do not yet have the words to express their passion and longing: so we hear:
Mimì -- Oh! sventata, sventata!
La chiave della stanza
dove l'ho lasciata?

Rodolfo
Non stia sull'uscio; il
lume vacilla al vento.

and so on briefly as Mimi repeats "Importuna è la vicina..."

This little duet appears right before the much more famous "Che Gelida Manina" and "Mi chiamano Mimì" and is quoted again in the final act. It's motif encapsulates much longing and a certain inevitability. Aren't we always talking about candles and keys when the important stuff is also happening...people dying, falling in love, having children.

I think of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts".
I think of the magisterial "Sarabande On Attaining The Age Of Seventy-Seven" by Anthony Hecht. I am younger than Hecht, yet the "cinerous blur and smudge in which we live" will undo me. The only salvation is to return to the garrets of 1860 or the fresh poetry of 1798 or the work of Capability Brown or Grinling Gibbins.

Sympatico people

One of the things I enjoy about blogs and the Internet is that you can find people who might otherwise remain strangers forever. As people lament the proliferation of tweets and twitters and the people who have over 2000 intimate friends on face book, I have found people who keep amazing blogs about topics that please and amuse me.
Before the Internet I didn't personally know anyone who was interested in fountain pens or in knitting. Now I do!

Before the Internet I had limited options for reading about books---book reviews and critical books--now I can read about what many people are reading. The internet has given me more people I care about: some whose blogs I read may not know that I care.

I remember back when Thomas De Quincey wrote the impassioned "The Glory of Motion," from his longer work, "The English Mail Coach". His words are vivid and exciting and I can only quote them only briefly (elipses are my editing):

"These mail-coaches....are entitled to a circumstantial notice from myself–having had so large a share in developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams, an agency which they accomplished, first, through velocity, at that time unprecedented; they first revealed the glory of motion: ....
through the conscious presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances,of storms, of darkness, of night, overruled all obstacles into one steady coöperation in a national result. To my own feeling, this post-office service recalled some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart, veins, and arteries, in a healthy animal organization."

DeQuincey writes about speed and the speed of the Internet is impossible for me to guage. Much as I love tangible and palpable letters, pieces of paper, skeins of yarn--it is through the Internet that I find people with whom I can be both virtual and in some cases tangible.

I cherish my pen collection, but the majority of the people I now write to were people I somehow "met" on the Internet!

Bryn Mawr Book Shop

Synchronous with my mother's death was the closing of the Bryn Mawr Book Shop where we spent many hours together, picking up used books. We found years and years worth of old St. Nicholas magazines there. Our local Bryn Mawr graduates donated vast collections of Victorian and Edwardian children's books--even today I am not certain that is is not 1896 or 1911 or 1873.

My mother took us to libraries and book stores constantly. Our house was filled with good books and she read aloud to us. Poetry could throw her into ecstatic trances and if there was something a bit theatrical and performative about it, she really did love the poetry. I learned early on that poetry mattered; that the stakes were high in books as in life.