Gone but not forgotten

Bishop Christopher Senyonjo has passed. Rest in peace.

He was that rare priest in the Anglican Church in Uganda who understood that LGBTQ folks were just yet more suffering humans, in need of knowing God's love. He was booted out, denied his pension, and harassed for his stand.

I had the privilege of spending several days with him at Seabury-Western Seminary in 2009.

Here he preached in San Francisco.

His life and story taught many of us that there are so many people all over the world -- people we might never hear of -- doing what they think is right and what they understand Love to demand.

Liz Specht –1929-2026

There was a lot of life in those long years: wife and partner to Eddie Specht for over 70 of them, mother to three children in the 1950s, doting on many grandchildren and a great grandchild, faithfully seeking to encounter a living God through an Episcopal path, and abiding as a "deacon of the earth" always.

Emerging from Grosse Pointe, Michigan and Wellesley College, she gave so much in that life: founding a tutoring program for San Francisco Mission District kids that grew up to be Mission Graduates and also an international aid nonprofit, El Porvenir, which works with Nicaraguans to bring clean water to rural Nicaragua. To the last, she was engaged in civic activism with her Mill Valley community.

For many years, Liz and Ed lived on a boat in Alameda, California. You might notice that water was a theme in this life.

Working a winch on a catamaran off Belize in 2004

  

Riding a pony across a Nicaraguan stream in 2018

Pensive alongside the Mill Valley Cascade in 2025

Out for a short walk at the beginning of March 2026

She was gentle, curious, thoughtful, determined and sometimes fierce. Many loved her; she gave love to many.

Pioneers remembered

Obituaries marking the passing of runner and entrepreneur Jeff Galloway reminded me again of how much I owe to the generation of accomplished athletes, who, in the 1970s, popularized road and trail running for the untalented masses. That includes me.

Galloway promoted a run-a-little, walk-a-little system for enabling us to complete races and distances we never might have imagined. I never took to his system, preferring to develop a long, slow, distance habit of running that enhanced my fitness. But people like Galloway and Dr. Joan Ullyot made it acceptable for we, the slow pokes, to stumble out there in a way that had been unimaginable before. Movement was no longer confined to "real" athletes; it was encouraged for everyone.

I observe the trend they started is still with us, because I see it outside my San Francisco front window. Before the pandemic, I was the very rare older person who ventured for a trot on the local Mission city streets, usually at dawn. Reduced traffic during the shutdown months brought out a new generation of runners; many are still continuing an urban running practice today.

For the last few years, infirmities have reduced me to long, slow walking using trekking poles, but I still keep up the regularity I long ago learned from the first running boom. Twenty to twenty-five miles a week, however slow and whether I like it or sometimes not. 

I remain grateful to the generation pioneering mass athletic participation of whom Galloway was an important leader!

Jesse Jackson remembered

It poured and poured cold rain as the crowd waited for the Presidential candidate. And then he finally showed up, hours late. Based on the response of the waiting people, it had all been worth the pain.

The last rally of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1988 run for the Democratic  presidential nomination took place in San Francisco's Castro District in front of the AIDS Hospice called Coming Home. We knew Jackson wasn't going to win the big prize -- this had become obvious weeks previously, though he kept winning more of the vote than orthodox commentators expected. 

That spring, wearing a Jackson button had brought knowing smiles from strangers on the street. It felt as if one had joined a secret society. He did come in first in the San Francisco vote; Michael Dukakis did not inspire.

But we all knew that last rally was an end of one phase of struggle. (Struggle never ends, after all.)

And somebody had to do the physical advance work for the event -- set up volunteers, place barricades, ensure traffic flow, alerts to neighbors about parking, etc., etc. etc. Somehow Erudite Partner and I ended up the site coordinators tasked with making sure all that worked. And that's a tale.

Because it was already obvious that the Jackson campaign was not going to lead to political jobs or perhaps anywhere, the infighting between various little lefty sects who had glommed on to the campaign only became more acute in the last days. They all wanted a piece. They generated position papers. Their idea of political heft was to ensure that their slogans or banners were front and center; not for them the question of how many and where there should be porta potties!

However at least one or two of this fractious bunch who had constituted themselves the local Jackson campaign knew that somebody was going to have to do the menial work of making the rally actually happen -- so they did something smart: they deputized a couple of lesbians (not left-sectarian affiliated, I should mention). There we were, a week before the event, drawing site plans and wondering where we could get enough folding chairs for VIPs in attendance. 

We rapidly ran into an unexpected obstacle. Reverend Jackson was a legit presidential candidate, so he came with Secret Service protection. As site coordinators, we had to be vetted. And we'd just returned from a trip to Castro's Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, back in the day when that was at least somewhat radical. We wondered ... but by this time in the Jackson campaign, the Secret Service had gotten used to non-standard resumes among campaign workers. And they were very competent and professional to work with; they were not going to let anyone kill Reverend Jackson!

Click to enlarge.

And so, we prepped as best we could and finally the big day came. A crowd of perhaps 1000 gathered in Collingwood Street, behind our barricade. Reverend Jackson had broken with the entire political establishment by speaking compassionately about AIDS/HIV. The LGBT+ community was coming out of six years in which science and medicine had no answer for "the gay plague." Hundreds sickened and died; no one really knew why for years. Far too much of straight society thought queers had brought this on themselves. Ronald Reagan, to his eternal shame, wouldn't speak the disease's name when his friend Rock Hudson succumbed in 1985. Eventually the disease got a name, but the first palliative drug, AZT, only became available in March 1988. 

Only such a traumatized community would have thought to hold a political rally outside a hospice where their people were dying.

On the day, it rained some more. As is typical of political candidates, Reverend Jackson was hours late. When he finally arrived, he was rushed inside to meet patients and those local pols who had enough pull to get away from the rain. Outside, the crowd waited. Then, finally, he came out the front door.

My friend Kathleen Duffy who served as the sign-language interpreter that day has been kind enough to share the San Francisco Chronicle's photo of Jackson's gesture to the crowd. His very appearance at such a place and time spoke his message to all those who found themselves involuntary outsiders to their own country: "Keep hope alive!" 

The crowd roared. Jackson caught the wave of emotion. And then he did exactly what the Secret Service had hoped to prevent. He charged down the stairs of Coming Home, started gripping hands along the barricade -- and then threw his 6'3" body over the low fence and plunged into the crowd, grasping hands and giving hugs.

The Secret Service patiently pulled him back; the people screamed. 

The queers had been seen. And given their hearts ...

When it was all over, we made sure the porta potties were returned. 

Remembering the Reverend Dr. Vicki Gray: a ministry of presence

Yesterday St. Aidan's Episcopal Church in San Francisco hosted a memorial Eucharist for Vicki, one of the most versatile humans I've ever encountered. From the Naval Academy at Annapolis, through service in Vietnam, later in the US Foreign Service, then a transition, and finally the Episcopal Diaconate and building Transepiscopal, she was one caring, funny, brilliant and humane woman. 

As those who frequent this blog know, I make a practice of photographing little public political demonstrations whenever I can. I literally know of no one who I encountered more regularly at these events over the last 15 years in the San Francisco Bay Area than Vicki. Like me, even though the particular cause might seem hopeless, she believed in showing up, in witnessing, never knowing exactly what might come of it.

Here are few of these:

In 2010, standing with the hotel workers of Local 2 UniteHERE

 

At an interfaith gathering in Berkeley in 2010 on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks

 

On Vicki's home turf in the North Bay in 2015, speaking out against a risky plan to move crude oil by train through the 'hood.

Reminding the Bay Area of the needs of unhoused people as San Francisco upended itself for the Super Bowl in 2016.

Calling out Israeli atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza -- in 2018

 

There have been few like her.

My friend Kim Fellner has left us

 

If you were lucky enough to have known Kim, you know she spent her life struggling for justice with joy and grace. That's all anyone can do in whatever way is their own. 

Through the labor movement, through community organizing, through too many elections, she made the rounds, trying to make us better at our work. And making us laugh, often at ourselves.

There will be many obituaries, most from people who had worked more closely with Kim than I in recent years. And she wrote her own story of her coming death in her hometown paper, the Washington Post [gift links]: Field notes from the end of life: My thoughts on living while dying and Living with dying: A breathtaking collapse in the writer’s health.

How like Kim to have managed this one last task ... the world is a much sadder place without her. May the memory of Kim spur us to do the work of justice and compassion that she never stopped doing.

An apology: I have a vast archive of photos that I've taken of people I've known and sometimes loved. But when I looked for an image of Kim, all I found was this one from 2005. She avoided my camera, apparently. I scanned the web for the source noted on the photo, but it seems to have gone away ... 

All Saints, All Souls, Dia De Los Muertos 2024

Remembering this year, two who've gone before:

Cliff Lichter was a friend from my years as part of the Catholic Worker movement in New York City and San Francisco. 

Cliff wandered the country for decades as an itinerant pilgrim, without fixed home or property, as the Spirit took him. He turned up with little warning at Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, monasteries and various intentional communities. He always helped out with whatever menial work needed doing. He was almost ostentatiously humble, but as you got to know him, you realized his intense piety was not for show; the guy really lived within a mystical universe that somehow sustained his unlikely existence. 

His Catholic Worker friend Brian Terrell wrote of Cliff and provided an epitaph:

Our dear friend and brother Cliff Lichter died on July 11, to continue his pilgrimage on another plane. Cliff had been a soldier and a Jesuit brother and a hospital orderly before finding his vocation as a wanderer. 

... He carried with him a note of introduction from Dorothy Day, dated Sept. 1, ’71, calling Cliff a “dear friend.” “I hope that he finds Catholic Worker friends and receives hospitality wherever he goes.”

In recent years, some of those good Catholic Worker friends in Worcester, Massachusetts, saw that he was well taken care of.  ...

This was Cliff.

“By the grace of God I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer of the humblest birth who roams from place to place. My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back, and in my breast pocket a Bible. And that is all.” The Way of the Pilgrim, 19th century Russia

• • •

In 2000, doing his thing at some conference

Unexpectedly, Hunter Cutting died in September from pulmonary hypertension. He had trained legions of justice organizers and climate campaigners in the Bay and beyond on how to interact with media. He was my neighbor in the Mission; he was working down the block from the homeless encampment where the SFPD shot Luis Gongoro Pat in 2016. I would see him at vigils where Luis's family demanded justice from the city. Hunter leaves a shocked family; he left us all too soon.

In memory of Trevor

 

For whatever reason, when we knew him, Trevor didn't have a home. We gave him a little community and a little sustenance for a few seasons. He gave us cheer and willing labor. He was a good man, whatever demons wracked him. 

Michael Reardon from the community of St. John the Evangelist wrote about our brother and friend whose memorial service is today. 

Trevor Andrew Watson was born on April 7, 1966, in San Mateo, and died on October 31, 2023, in San Francisco, at the age of 57. He graduated from Sequoia High School in Redwood City in 1985. Most of his life was spent on the Peninsula and in The City, perhaps aptly reflecting his name, as the name ‘Trevor’ is derived from the Gaelic or Welsh, meaning a land area, a settlement, a habitation, a name given to people to describe the place where they lived. He was a true son of California, and he was a true son of the Beloved Community of St John the Evangelist.

In a way, we took him for granted. He was with us on most Sundays and special events, always responding with a greeting, always receiving our coffee hour items to present beautifully on the garden tables, always eager to do something for us. We gave him the space to let him be, to let him serve us, to let him have his own habitation with us.

In his own way, he was Herculean at tasks, compassionate with others, steadfast with all of us as we became his family. In his inimitable way, he made me feel important. I saw his sweetness, I admired his enthusiasm, I sometimes thought of him as being from somewhere in the streets, like one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, and I loved the fact that he came back to us frequently, as he was not only one of us, but crucial to the fabric of our fragile community.

He received what he needed from St John’s. He gave me ideas on the nitty gritty work and cleanup of receptions; he gave Rory the idea of exhibiting portraits in the library; he gave Leah a sense of comfort as he was always under the care of her wings. All of us have something for which to be grateful to him. ...

Fr. Louis Vitale, presente!

There are people who were always there.

Friar Louie Vitale OFM (1932-2023) was one of them, for decades he was a tireless campaigner for more love, more justice, more peace. Here he's handcuffed before being led away from the old Federal Building where he was part of a group that lay down in front of the doors to protest the U.S. war on Iraq in 2006.

Non-violent activist Ken Butigan catalogued some of Fr. Louie's works of justice and peace:

... a Franciscan priest, past provincial of the St. Barbara Province of the Franciscan order, co-founder of the Nevada Desert Experience, which worked with other organizations to successfully end U.S. nuclear weapons testing, founder of the Gubbio Project ... and a co-founder of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.

... He spent long stints in prison for nonviolent resistance to torture and war-making.  For thirteen years he was the pastor of St. Boniface Catholic Church in a low-income neighborhood in San Francisco, where he was actively involved with Religious Witness with Homeless People, an interfaith campaign challenging poverty and government policies of harassment against poor and homeless people. All of this and much more found its way into a graduate course entitled “Liberating Nonviolence” we team-taught a dozen times at the Franciscan School of Theology, mentoring the next generation of peacemakers.

... In the wake of the heady days of the Second Vatican Council, Vitale was seized by the conviction that the work for peace and justice was central to the identity of Christians. This in itself was not unique.  In the wake of Vatican II a growing number of Catholic clergy, women religious, and laity drew a similar conclusion and began to transform an insular church that had often supported social structures that reinforced injustice and war into a community prophetically seeking change.  What set Vitale and a relative handful of others apart were not their theological conversion but how they put it into practice. 

Louie lent himself to more mundane progressive causes -- though perhaps preserving Social Security might be a profound work of mercy in the US context. Here he stands with the then-head of the San Francisco Labor Council in 2010.

We might not see his like again.

Big shoes for the next generations

 

Civil rights leader and lawyer Charles Ogletree (pictured here at a book talk in 2010) was a regular summer resident on Martha's Vineyard, one of an array of Black luminaries who make the island off Massachusetts their own place. No wonder the Obamas bought a residence there.

From the New York Times:

A son of California tenant farmers and the first in his family to graduate from high school, Professor Ogletree rose from poverty to become one of the most prominent civil rights lawyers in the country, leaving a mark on the courtroom and the classroom.

As a litigator, he defended clients both famous and unknown, including Tupac Shakur and the survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, whom he helped to sue the city and the state of Oklahoma for restitution in 2003.

“He was determined to see that Black people were treated fairly in the courts, whether they were an Anita Hill or a Tupac or an indigent person in the streets of Boston,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., a close friend and fellow scholar at Harvard, said in a phone interview.

The island remembers Ogletree for his fishing prowess.

In 2011, he took in the largest bluefish — at 15-and-a-half pounds — during the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby.

That generation of civil rights luminaries will be missed.

Patricia (Pat) Sousa: 1929 – 2022

Way back in 2010, writing at age 80, my friend Pat Sousa wrote an autobiographic account of her long working-class, lesbian life -- and I published a sort of dialogue between her times and mine in a Gay and Gray essay at Ronni Bennett's Time Goes By.

Pat was nowhere near done with life; she lived to be 93, leaving us last October. Today we are attending a memorial in her honor. 

And so I want to bring forward again her own account of her remarkable life. She was brave, inquisitive, and patient with younger friends scurrying about. Here's Pat's life, in her own words.

"I was born at home, with the help of a midwife, near Hayward, California, on July 12, 1929. That's exactly what my birth certificate says, "near Hayward...”

“I would call the neighborhood 'city lots' but in those days, that meant quarter acre lots...and everyone had vegetable gardens, chickens, rabbits...everyone. It was the depression!

“...We were low class. Now I guess the word is working class. Everyone was poor, but everyone got by. Like many others in the neighborhood, my mother and her sisters worked at Hunt Brothers Cannery, which was only a block away.”

”I never did very well at school. I had a very hard time with learning to read. Looking back, I wonder if I had some hearing loss even then, or some kind of learning disability. Who knows? But I really struggled. By the time I was 16, just starting 10th grade, I was impatient to go to work, earn a living, have some money in my pocket. So that's what I did, I quit school and went to work in the canneries. Within a year, I'd settled into line work at Owens Illinois glass factory, although I'd had to fudge my age a little in order to get hired...

“No one would believe me if I told you how shy and quiet and serious I was when I started at Owens. I was a 'mind your own business' kind of person. It took quite a few years before I began to speak out and express myself...it was a slow process. But gradually I got more confident. I became active in the union, I was a shop steward, and even union president. Part of that 'growing up' included going back and earning my GED. Owens encouraged people to be educated and was very supportive about that.”

”Owens was a community in itself - there were almost 2000 employees altogether and we did shift work, one week on days, one week on swing, then a week working graveyard; that's how they did it in those days, and that was my life for the next 30+ years. Owens had a women's softball team, and Owens had women like me! I made friends, buddies; I didn't feel so alone...

“In those early days at Owens my hair was short - they all knew...but the word "lesbian" was never used. You were 'butch.'

“I remember reading The Well of Loneliness...I thought, 'wow, they write books about it!' There was so much I was in the dark about...

“My social life centered at Owens. There were gay bars that you could go to, Last Chance, Pearl's, but I was cautious, not wanting to get caught in a pick-up, a raid, which were frequent particularly in the 40s and 50s. Owens had a policy that what you did away from work was a reflection on your work...so if you weren't 'a good citizen' you could get yourself fired.

“My buddies and I were attracted to straight women. That's all that we knew; that's just how it was. We always hoped they would stay with us 'forever,' and some were lucky; my buddy Mick and her partner Erla were together about 30 years until Erla's death. Most of us, though, would end up with broken hearts. We all did the best we could.”

”I knew from my experiences at Owens that there was no reason a woman could not be a crew leader or even a manager. We were training the men, and they got the promotions. There had never been a woman in management at the Owens Oakland plant.

“In the early 70s, with Equal Opportunity, I filed a grievance to become crew leader. There was a lot of haggling back and forth, management would come up with reasons against, and I'd respond; it kept on and on and finally they said, 'OK, Pat, we give up,' and I became the first woman crew leader at that Oakland plant.

“A few years later I was finally promoted to management - no more shift work, no more hourly pay! My final position at Owens before retirement in 1984, was as a 'service engineer,' visiting our customers' facilities, mostly at that time wineries all over northern California, and trouble shooting whatever problems they might be having with the manufacture of our various commercial containers.”

... “And every day I give thanks to the Creator; I give thanks for everything. I walk in my garden and every little growing thing is a miracle. There has to be something larger than a man or a woman, larger than 'God' to create all this! It's a shame we don't spend more time in awe about what's all around us, and appreciating it rather than destroying it. So I give thanks for life, for the life of every one and everything around me.”

Pat is survived by hundreds of friends, including special friend, Laura Tow.

Memories for Decoration Day

My childhood memory of what is now called Memorial Day is of accompanying my slightly distressed mother to the cemetery to make sure some veterans' organization had placed flower urns next to the correct extended family graves. Whoever did this each year, they couldn't be relied upon to get it right. Mother, as the caretaker of family history and of good order, wanted to be sure all was flawless. 

Most of the veteran graves were pretty obvious -- a sergeant who served in France in WWI; an airman lost over the Pacific in the run up to WWII. But a couple of overgrown 19th century stones were obscure to me -- marked with standards reading G.A.R.

Curious child that I was, I asked "what's G.A.R.?" "Why, the Grand Army of the Republic" she told me, "from the Civil War." She said it as if this was something everyone knew. I don't think I pursued the question at the time.

Writing about more contemporary matters, E.J. Dionne explained the origin of the G.A.R. markers in a Memorial Day column.

... the holiday — first held on May 5, 1868 — was called “Decoration Day” because it was an occasion to adorn the graves of fallen Union soldiers with flowers. It was initiated by the Grand Army of the Republic, the vast and politically influential organization of Union veterans, at a time when North/South divisions were still raw and the two parties decidedly polarized.

Republicans were for racial progress, pushing Reconstruction in the South to democratize the region and guarantee full political rights for Black Americans. Formerly enslaved people were winning elections and enacting more egalitarian policies. Democrats were the party of the Confederate South, reaction and outright racism. ...

(Yes -- the political parties have subsequently switched constituencies and consequently policies on racial matters.)

It turns out that Union Civil War veterans, under the banner of the G.A.R., kept up a decades long political struggle to remind the nation that the Confederate soldiers they fought had been pursuing a traitorous cause. 

The Angry Staff Officer provides a catalogue of G.A.R. stalwarts trying to keep alive the national understanding that their cause had been righteous and their opponents had been illegitimate rebels. An prescient example:

Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, himself a Virginian who had remained loyal, summed up the swift change that was occurring in a letter to Grant in 1868: “[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them.” ...

These Union soldiers provided little organized opposition to the South's revival of white supremacy after military occupation ended, but they did understand that what they had fought for was being erased.

Click to enlarge.

U.S. veterans tended not to care what the former rebels were doing in the south – as evidenced by the nation’s apathy when it came to Jim Crow, lynching, and general disenfranchisement of African-Americans. But as time went on, and as the Lost Cause narrative grew in power, the GAR began to realize that it had been silent for too long.

In 1885, the Indiana GAR attempted to remind the nation of what they had fought for: “The Union soldier stood embattled on the side of right and truth. The Confederate soldier was arrayed on the side of wrong and error. Under the blessing of God, the right and truth prevailed. There can be no compromise upon that. Right and wrong cannot be reconciled. Right is right and wrong is wrong to the end of the world’s reckoning.” ...

When the debate about Confederate monuments at Gettysburg began, the Patterson, Pennsylvania GAR Post had some very choice words: “As soldiers and citizens we have no apologies to make for calling words by their proper names, ‘traitor’ a traitor and ‘rebel’ a rebel…,” the Post wrote in an 1889 editorial. “We reiterate that we are opposed to the erection of monuments by the great or small upon the battlefields of Gettysburg or any other place that will in the slightest degree make glorious the deeds of those who trampled under foot the national ensign. We believe in making treason odious.” ...

In 1922, the National GAR decried the use of the phrase “The War Between the States” – invented by the former vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens – rather than the War of the Rebellion, as it had been termed for decades: “The designation the ‘war between the States’ is to us peculiarly hateful and insulting. It is false in fact. There never has been a war between the States. While there have been causes of dispute and even threats of conflict, the American people have always found a way of peaceful settlement within the law and under the Constitution which was formed with that very end in view. We as participants did not go to war at the behest of a State or against a State but under the flag of the Federal Union and for its preservation.”

And as the Library of Congress photo shows, apparently the G.A.R. was open to veterans of color -- as well it should have been, since by the end of the war, nearly 200,000 men of African descent were in the Union forces.

My mother came of age in the 1920s in a family that had been prominent Union supporters 70 years previously. No wonder she thought the G.A.R. was just part of the landscape, an obvious reference ...

Friday cat blogging

We're back to our normal home habits, so today I've added Janeway's morning posture to the blog header. Yes, that's how we start the day -- I read the news, she naps.

Most cats seem to have a thing about computers. Are the machines a source of warmth or competition for our attention? Perhaps both. Here are a couple of cats gone but not forgotten:

Frisker knew whose needs deserved regard. It wasn't that hunk of plastic.

Morty was more the napping sort.

Giants for whom nonviolence was no game

I skim a daily email of headlines from the Los Angeles Times (a surprisingly good newspaper which I would recommend to anyone interested in California doings.) Today this picture and squib occupied the section that publication calls "From the archives."

James Peck of New York who was on one of the two Freedom Rider buses is attacked at the bus station in Birmingham, Ala. ...The other bus was burned in Anniston, Ala., en route to Birmingham. (Underwood Archives / Getty Images)

On May 4, 1961, the first Freedom Ride—a political protest against the segregation of interstate bus travel in the South—began as a group of white and Black Americans departed Washington, D.C., on buses bound for New Orleans.

Along the way, the Freedom Riders encountered violence, most severely in Alabama. On May 14, upon stopping outside Anniston to change a slashed tire, one bus was firebombed and the Freedom Riders were beaten.

After arriving in Birmingham, the second bus was similarly attacked and the passengers were beaten. In both cases, law enforcement was suspiciously late in responding.

Jim Peck never entirely recovered from that beating, though his cracked skull and smashed face never stopped him. I knew him a little in New York City in the early 1970s when he was a fixture at the War Resisters League office, around the corner from the Catholic Worker where I was part of the community. He seemed a quiet man who labored doggedly in a corner, mostly on encouraging resistance to paying taxes for war.

Yet the unassuming Peck was a giant in the broad struggle for justice. In the 1930s, Peck agitated for labor rights; during World War II he was imprisoned for refusing the draft; in the 1950s he campaigned against the Cold War nuclear arms build-up; in the 1960s, he opposed America's Vietnam incursion as well as struggling for civil rights; in the 1970s, he joined campaigns against nuclear energy and militarism in all its forms. Reading his Wikipedia entry is exhausting, but I highly recommend it. His was a life well lived. It is a catalogue of costly witness -- assaults, beatings, jailings and unfailing commitment. The entry says he was arrested some 60 times for acting on his convictions -- I suspect that may be an undercount.

What stands out about Jim and the other giants of the 20th century American nonviolent left who he worked alongside -- AJ Muste, Bayard Rustin, Barbara Deming, Dave Dellinger, Grace Paley, Joan Nestle, David McReynolds -- was that their agitation was not performative. This was no game. Splashy, yes! Theatrical, yes! Aggressive, yes! But above all rooted in a willingness to risk and experience personal material and physical sacrifice to embody principles greater than themselves. They were at odds with their society and country. They could not live any other way.

Friday cat blogging

Long time readers here may remember that in late fall 2019, our old, tired and beloved cat, Morty, survived a cross-country drive with us for a sojourn here in the country on Martha's Vineyard island. Unhappily, Morty slipped out of a slightly open door unnoticed and simply disappeared. We assumed he'd gotten lost in this foreign-to-him environment and could not have survived, despite our desperate efforts to find him. We mourned.

And then one night a magical friend came running in clutching a dirty gray ball of fur -- "is this Morty?" Indeed it was, and more or less alive. For the better part of a month, we nursed him. We re-hydrated him subcuataneously several times a day. Erudite Partner squirted ground up medicine and baby food into his mouth. He slept beside us. 

By the time in December we were ready to drive back across the country, he had perked up, though he still needed some care. So off we all went. He did well riding on the non-driver's lap. When we got home to San Francisco, he settled in. But by early in the 2020 pandemic lockdown, it was clear he was leaving this world. He died in late April.

Erudite Partner's step sister memorialized Morty here in this Vineyard house with this needlepoint pillow. He liked tulips -- especially to snack on. He was a special cat.

Veterans Day

This Veterans Day, I want to raise up the memory of my first cousin Kirby. 

By the time I knew the fellow at all, he was a true deplorable, a drunk whose charm had worn off, kept alive by an abused wife who shared his addiction. Had he lived so long, he would have been a rabid MAGA fan, finding release for his id in the Trumpist grievance cult.

But as a very young man, he served his country and the war effort against Nazi Germany with the terrible heroism of necessity. He was a merchant seaman, plying the Murmansk run -- the Arctic Ocean sea supply voyage from the north Atlantic, skirting Norway and Finland, to the Russian port. In that war, the Atlantic allies, Britain and the U.S., supplied Russia with war materiel until Stalin's regime could bring to bear its vast armies against the invading fascists in eastern Europe. (We forget or never knew that Russian suffering broke the back of Hitler's empire.)

The Arctic sea convoys were terribly dangerous, threatened by both the German navy and awful sea conditions.

About 1,400 merchant ships delivered essential supplies to the Soviet Union under the Anglo-Soviet agreement and US Lend-Lease program, escorted by ships of the Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, and the U.S. Navy. Eighty-five merchant vessels and 16 Royal Navy warships (two cruisers, six destroyers, eight other escort ships) were lost.

That was cousin Kirby's war -- though not a member of the U.S. military, he was indeed a veteran of the Allied war against fascism.

All Souls Day

In the Christian tradition, November 2 is All Souls Day, the Day of the Dead, a day to remember those we knew who have died. We believe we are surrounded and supported by a community of souls who have completed their life on earth, a great crowd of witnesses upholding our toil in this plane of existence -- whatever that means.

This year I am particularly remembering two among those witnesses who left us this year.

Raquel was a Roman Catholic sister of the Presentation order who left her native Los Angeles to live among and serve the poor in Peru and Nicaragua. Father David Forbes was quite simply the kindest and holiest man I have ever known, an educator, liturgist, canon of the Episcopal cathedral in San Francisco, and sometime interim parish priest. From different worlds, their memorial services fell on the same day last April.

In this commemoration of saints gone before, I must mention the passing of John Crew who was a warrior for justice in the criminal justice realm and a fierce critic of biassed policing. Gone at age 65 which seems too young, he will be sorely missed among advocates for reform and constraint on the San Francisco Police department. He did not shrink from the good fight.

The Queen passes

While cleaning out my parents' house 20 years ago, I came across this card -- a keepsake from Queen Elizabeth's coronation year of 1952. Mother was an Anglophile and one of the royalist Americans. The British monarchy was defined for her by its steely performance of patriotic perseverance during World War II. Elizabeth II was the teenager who trained as an auto mechanic during that war. Her coronation was the first TV I remember seeing -- my parents' marveling at the grainy live broadcast from Westminster Abbey -- boring processions of people in strange clothes it seemed to me, but still marvelous. As Elizabeth aged, Mother admired her stamina. Mother knew a thing or two about stamina herself. The monarchy doesn't much suit the contemporary world. Will Charles III be able to continue her myth-sustaining performance?

In memory of the Reverend Jeff Donnelly

These photos are from his first celebration of the Holy Eucharist with his community of St. John the Evangelist in San Francisco on December 3, 2006. Jeff died too soon at his home in British Columbia on January 7.

Such a good priest and a sweet, brave man. May you rest in peace, Jeff.

Allhallowtide

After a seemingly unremitting siege of grief and death in these pandemic years, we enter the season of the Día de los Muertos (Oct 31-November 2) and the Christian Allhallowtide, (Halloween, the feast of All Saints, and the feast of All Souls). This moment in "the thin place," during which, in Celtic lore, heaven and earth come closest, feels both fraught and more evident than ever.
 
This year I raise up the memory of two women who were part of my childhood, even if neither was much part of my life when I grew up. Both died this past year.

I find I have childhood pictures of them both.

Her dress here was a Halloween costume, though I think it would be fair to say she delighted in the image she'd assumed. Marjorie Putnam Adams was the only one of my first cousins who was within ten years of my age; all the others were at least 10 years older, pre-WWII babies. The family expected that we should bond. I think we both tried, but each of us found the other incomprehensible and perhaps not much fun.

Marjorie devoted her later life to promoting our great grandfather, Doc Adams, for induction into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame as "One of the True Fathers of Baseball." The New York Times ran a lovely obituary account of that as yet incomplete quest.

• • •

Martha "Marchy" Zietlow Bowden was my closest friend until about age 13. She lived across the street. We shared a nearly insatiable appetite for playing catch with softballs which we threw over the 50 foot high branches of elm trees in the middle of our residential street. Our parents complained that we were going to be run over by cars -- and this was not entirely unreasonable -- but there was no stopping us of a summer evening. We'd go on until we could no longer see.

We attended different elementary schools, but later the same high school. And there we drifted apart. Occasionally we exchanged Christmas cards, but I've never been good at that custom.

She died last week in Beverly, Mass. Here's a sweet obituary.

• • •

The eighteenth century preacher and hymn lyricist Issac Watts' paraphrase of Psalm 90 comes to mind:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
soon bears us all away. ...

When it is one's age peers departing this life in perfectly normal circumstances, it's hard not to contemplate mortality. And why not? We will all go. Think how much more of a clogged mess the planet would be if all the humans ever born hung around, taking up space and resources forever ...