March 26, 2009--The Ladies of Forest Trace: The Girls Take Stock

“How long has it been?” It was my nearly 101 year-old mother calling.

I assumed she meant how long since we had come to see her. “I don’t know, maybe two weeks.” I was feeling guilty. After all we had decided to spend the winter in South Florida in part to be near her, and had only managed to visit every two weeks or so.

“What are you talking about? It’s been just a few days more than two months. Months, not weeks.” I then knew of course that she was referring to how long Barack Obama has been in office.

Relieved that I was off the hook for not coming by often enough, I said, “I get you. I thought that . . .” I managed to cut myself off before getting into trouble.

“I am glad to hear that, but from what I am hearing about what you have been writing in that blog of yours, you have been giving him a hard time.”

“Well I . . .”

“No ‘well-I’s,’ thank you. The ladies and I think you’ve been unfair to him and we need to talk with you. Face-to-face. So come here for dinner tomorrow night—at 4:30, you know we have dinner at that time, like earlybirds—so we can have a conversation. And from the looks of you last time you were here—how long ago was that?” she couldn’t resist--“you could use a little brisket on your bones. It’s on the menu for tomorrow. They make a nice version.”

“I’ve only been trying to be fair. When I think he’s done something wrong, I . . .”

“Like I said, face-to-face. And not just with me, but with all the ladies.”

“Have you, have they actually been reading . . .”

“You know I don’t have a computer. I keep asking you to print copies for me.” So as to not feel monitored by her, I hadn’t done that in more than six months. “But Fannie reads it every day. Her son gave her an Orange computer . . .”

“An Apple, mom, and Apple computer.”

“Apple, Orange, you’re missing my point. That we want to talk with you. As I said, tomorrow, for brisket. They also make a nice gravy.”

Thusly summoned, with some trepidation, I drove down to Lauderhill last night to have dinner with, to meet with the Girls.”

Over the salad with Fannie, Bertha, Ruth, Esther, and my mother, the Ladies of Forest Trace, before the political talk, first I heard about how thin I was looking and how important it was to eat (“Look how he picks at his food,” Ruth said to Bertha as if I weren’t there.) To exercise (“Walk on the beach. You’re paying all that money to be right on the ocean. So take advantage. It does wonders for you.” Advice from Bertha.) And to get my sleep (“Have you ever seen such bags under anyone’s eyes,” Esther said to no one in particular, “I haven’t seen bags like that since the last time they took us to Publix to go shopping." Everyone, including my mother, laughed at that.)

But then over the mushroom and barley soup, the conversation, if I can call it that, turned to the subject of Barack Obama’s first 65 days as president (“It’s 65 days,” Fannie was eager to point out, “only if you count Inauguration Day as a day”).

“From what Fannie tells me, from what she reads, you are saying that he needs to fire Tim Ginsberg.”

“Geithner,” I corrected her.

“Whatever. He too looks like he could use a good meal.” Ruth nodded, gesturing to me that I should finish my soup. “This is not a good idea. Here we have a financial crisis almost as bad as when we were young, before the War, and you are recommending doing something that would distract for weeks everyone on CNN, and can you imagine what they would say on Fox, while all the time people would be losing their houses and their jobs. So he doesn’t look good on television. Everyone agrees he’s smart, Geithner, and we should give him the time he needs to think about what we should do. Didn’t he say that he is more concerned about getting things right that doing it quickly? And what was so wrong with what he came up with the other day? Didn’t the boys on Wall Street get all excited? What happened with the Dow Jones.”

“Which, to tell you the truth,” Fannie slipped in, “if they are happy with his plans it makes me a little worried that old people like us who live on our pensions will be ignored.”

“All they care about,” it was Esther, “is making money for themselves. They couldn’t care less about the rest of us.” At that everyone around the table was nodding in unison. I remembered that earlier in life all of them had been very “progressive,” which for some meant that they were what at the time were called “Fellow Travelers.” Ruth and Bertha had been suffragettes and Fannie had helped organize the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

“The rest of you are distracting me. I'm not finished with talking with my son and now you want to talk about your pensions. No one here is missing a meal, thank God.” The ladies returned to their soup, which was getting cold.

“I know you have told me not to pay attention to the Dow Jones every day. It doesn’t measure how Obama is doing. That it can be manipulated and we have to be patient to let his plans work. At least that’s what you were telling me only two weeks ago; and here from what Fannie says, you want to pull the rug out from under that nice man, Geithner. By the way, what kind of name is that? He’s not Jewish is he?” I shook my head. “So if two weeks ago you were telling me to be patient now you are yourself losing your patience. This doesn’t sound very consistent to me.” She paused, peering at me to see how I would defend myself.

I took the risk to put my soupspoon down and said, “Maybe I was a little premature when I wrote that. About Geithner stepping aside. Since he didn’t seem able to build people’s confidence in Obama’s economic plan. But maybe he was right—he needed the time to think through the details of the plan and didn’t want to speak prematurely.”

“Exactly. Getting it right was most important.”

“And how many days has it been . . .?” It was Fannie again who was keeping track of the count.

“We all know how many, Fannie," my mother shot back, "You keep reminding us every half hour.”

“Well, it’s important to remember that," Fannie said, " With all those people on TV talking about every little thing 24 hours a day, it makes it feel as if it’s been a year. Just the other day they couldn’t stop talking about how on Sixty Minutes he smiled or laughed three times when they asked him a serious question. Can you believe it that while people are losing their jobs they talked all day about if it was appropriate for a president to behave that way. Or to go on the Jay Leno Show.”

“My point exactly,” my mother took over again. “Just before you came tonight, I made a list of everything I could remember about what he has done so far in only 60 days.”

“Sixty-five,” Fannie couldn’t restrain herself from saying, “If you count Inauguration . . .”

“I’m still talking, thank you,” my mother glared at Fannie who was working on buttering her second roll. "First, even before he was president, he got Congress to pass that TARP—that’s what they call it, no? To keep more banks from failing. We can tell you from personal experience what that would have meant. When that happened in the 1930s half the people in Brooklyn lost their jobs and had to eat at soup kitchens.” She pointed at my still half-filled bowl. “And then just a few weeks after taking office, he had Congress pass his stimulus bill, which . . .”

Without looking up, Fannie said, “Twenty-nine days. It was 29 days.”

My mother knew to ignore her, “To create millions of new jobs and to put money into improving our schools, which as a retired teacher I can tell you is most important, and to begin to fix our medical system, which everyone here could use. Look around, everyone is pushing a walker.”

“And that’s just the beginning,” Bertha chimed in again, “On your mother’s list is also his program to help small businesses, to help people refinance their mortgages and help banks get rid of the bad ones, and to do something about gasoline and . . .”

“Remember too,” it was Esther, my mother was smiling as the Girls made the list—she had clearly prepped them—“he also has already announced his new plans for Iraq, closed that awful prison in Cuba, sent Hillary . . .”

“Let’s be honest,” it was my mother correcting Esther in her schoolteacher way, “He announced plans for Guantanamo, he didn’t close it yet.”

“I stand corrected, but he did appoint ambassadors to work on the problems in the Middle East, in North Korea, in Pakistan, and I think later this week he will talk about Afghanistan.”

“And they announced plans,” it was Fannie, “to regulate the banks and hedge funds. Not bad for only, how many days has it been?” She winked at me.

“I think just sixty-five,” I said, winking back at her.

“And then I am hearing that you feel,” It was my mother again, “that Obama might be overloading the system. That he’s put too much on his plate. Not that you’d know about that.” The brisket had arrived and I was picking at it as the gravy began to congeal. “It should be no surprise to you, as a Jewish mother I don’t worry about too much being on anyone’s plate.” Now she was distracting herself. “Obama too, by the way, looks like he could use a good meal. Do you see how thin he is?” I ignored that.

“Here’s how I think about it. You remember how you and your father liked to do jigsaw puzzles?” It was among my favorite childhood things, especially working on them with him. “How on the cover of the box there’s a beautiful picture? I remember once you did one of the Grand Canyon. But then when you open the box there are a thousand pieces all jumbled together, which you can’t imagine will ever fit together; and when you look at what’s printed on each of them, it’s only a tiny piece of the larger picture. But as you work to assemble the puzzle, you have to keep the big picture in mind. Maybe that’s where that expressing comes from—the big picture—from jigsaw puzzles. And when a week or two later you’re all finished, what you’ve put together on the dining room table looks just like what’s on the cover of the box.”

I could see where this was headed. “That’s what I think is happening with Obama. From the beginning he had the whole picture in mind; and then he laid out the pieces, one at a time. And now that he’s almost done doing that they have come together into his big picture for the economy—the jobs, the mortgages, the banks’ toxic assets, help for small businesses—and for health care and education and energy. He is also showing us, at least trying to, how if we want to fix the economy for ten and even twenty years from now we have to do better with energy and education and with medicine. They’re all interconnected. And since they are, and essential to do, he wants us and Congress to work on all of them at the same time.” She smiled at me.

“I understand what you’re saying, and you may be right. I know from his reading of history that he realizes that he probably has only a year to get most of this done. Look at Roosevelt and even Ronald Reagan. They got a lot done quickly, no matter what you think of the details,” she shot a look to Bertha not to say anything about Ronald Reagan. “And by their second and third year in office the both of them had trouble getting anything else done.”

They had lived through FDR’s first hundred days and his subsequent years in office and endured, that’s how they would likely describe it, endured the Reagan years; and it was clear that they agreed with my mother’s analysis, realizing that both of them had been what historians call “transformative presidents.”

“So darling,” my mother was waiting for dessert to arrive, “are you feeling a little better?”

I had to admit that I was. I was even looking forward to my ice cream.