Sing song birds, crashing waves and hyperlocal gossip: these are the sounds that typically greet me when I arrive in Wellfleet in the summer time.
But this year mom has her ears out elsewhere, as she is on dispatch, gathering reports on ICE activity on the outer Cape and then directing groups of two or three volunteers to the scene to peacefully engage and videotape ICE officers.
“I don’t really think ICE is coming out to Wellfleet,” I said, but she said they’d gone to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket and had already been seen on the Cape as far as Dennis.
“They’ve got their quotas,” she said. “They’re trying to round up 3000 people a day.”
There are a lot of other grandmothers involved, she said, and in training they’ve all been warned that ICE might snatch their phones or have them arrested. Some elderly volunteers, understandably, balk, and others back up their pictures of their grandkids to the cloud and get their kids to assure them that they will be bailed out. Nobody is ever dispatched to a location alone.
Me and my brothers, we’ve kept mom busy in the summer time. She’s almost eighty but she can carry a toddler, a beach bag, two beach chairs and a cooler up and down a dune and look chic doing so. And she’s been sticking her neck out for people who are having their lives wrecked for a very long time. There were the cheerleaders she took to get contraception when she was a public school French teacher in Syracuse in the 60s; there were the rape survivors she advocated for as an associate Dean at Brown in the 90s. There were dozens of other wounded beings in the intervening years who she and my dad brought in under their wings. In the past decade I’ve seen her mostly helping out me, my siblings and our kids - but the world has other roles for her than grandma and it’s not surprising that now that we’re all getting a little older, and the world more than a little grimmer, that these other roles are finding her and she them.
If you’re in Massachusetts and you see ICE, you can call the hotline at 617-370-5023. And if you would like to get involved, mom found LUCE, the Immigrant Justice Network, through her volunteering with Indivisible Massachusetts, which has chapters all over the country.
A refreshing take on aging this week in this essay by my former student Lisa Cowan, who writes so well.
I am LOVING the Mariska Hargitay doc on MAX.
And in a subdued quest to make seafood in new ways I tried this fish with peppers and this mussels with cauliflower and they both were big hits.
All artworks by Shirley Gorelick, whose artworks are on view at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum through September 1.
Thank you for reading - I know that there are a thousand things you could be paying attention to and I’m honored to have your eyeballs here. If you’re able to pay for a subscription, I hope that you will.
I will leave you with this gem.
xo Lizzie