I skipped last week’s newsletter because I was learning how to surf (!) in Guatemala (!!) with my sister Kira (!!!) This was originally meant to be her 30th birthday present, but three years and a whole pandemic later, we decided to go halfsies. The whole trip we kept saying we would do a collab edition of the newsletter, but we were too utterly wiped every night to include any screen time.
We came back, battered and bruised, in time for Rihanna’s pregnancy announcement and an unseasonably warm New York blip. It was a soul-invigorating trip where we caught every sunset and nearly every sunrise, like the rightful daughters of Alan Kennedy that we are. Sometimes when I close my eyes before going to bed, I still feel the swell of a wave lifting me up on my board.
I packed two very different books for the trip. I inhaled both and promptly passed on to Kira. Circe by Madeline Miller was Jessie’s birthday present to me and it took me right back to my childhood love of Greek mythology. Told from the point of view of Circe, the half-nymph/half-goddess from the Odyssey who turns sailors into pigs, it reclaims her story from the sidelines of Homer’s narrative. It’s a really compelling read, injecting modern feelings of postpartum and the patriarchy into myths that had faded from my memory. Her centuries of existence are given a feminist slant as she discovers her powers of witchcraft. It almost certainly feels like it’ll be a movie or TV series coming your way soon.
The other book I brought was The Whiteness of Wealth by Dorothy A. Brown, a Black woman who went into tax law to escape racism, only to find as she prepared her parents’ tax return that the system wasn’t as color blind as she’d thought. She unpacks the historical context of the tax code and how breaks that favor white Americans snuck in, largely because a handful of wealthy people were able to successfully sue the government.
Before Henry and Charlotte Seaborn challenged the law in a case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, every person had to file taxes individually . When Henry tried to pass off half his income to his stay-at-home wife Charlotte in order to reduce his tax bill, the IRS disapproved. He went to court and won, leading Congress to create the joint tax return in 1948. The largest marriage penalties fall on couples in which the two people are making similar amounts of money, which Brown discovers is the case of her parents as well as the majority of Black couples.
Brown proposes some real solutions at the end, including a progressive income-tax system with no exclusions. If you are a freelancer or small business looking for a tax preparer in New York, I can’t recommend Treehouse Taxes highly enough. Cailin and I sing their praises every year as they do our company returns and our individual ones. They offer sliding scale based on income and always have the most excellent advice as we stare into the great abyss that is tax season.
Outside of surfing every day, the other highlight of our trip was getting to kayak through the mangroves of El Paredon. They’re the only species of trees in the world that can tolerate saltwater, creating amazing ecosystems of biodiversity. They function as coastal kidneys, filtering the ocean where the water meets the land. To get our tandem kayaking in sync, we started singing every song we could remember from our childhood. One of my all-time favorite French expressions is chanter en yaourt (literally to “yogurt sing”) which is when you sing in gibberish because you don’t know any of the words. I made a kayak-oke playlist when we got back to jog our memories further since we had forgotten so many of the lyrics. If you too were a teenager growing up in France in the early aughts, this will take you right back.
In light of the train derailment in East Palestine two weeks ago and the unfolding environmental disaster, I offer you this interview with Braiding Sweetgrass writer and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer. “What if we were paying attention to the natural world? I’ve often had this fantasy that we should have Fox News, by which I mean news about foxes. What if we had storytelling mechanisms that said it is important that you know about the well-being of wildlife in your neighborhood? That that’s newsworthy? This beautiful gift of attention that we human beings have is being hijacked to pay attention to products and someone else’s political agenda. Whereas if we can reclaim our attention and pay attention to things that really matter, there a revolution starts.”
I came back to some very sad flyers plastered all around the neighborhood. Hector Tejada, the incredible poet and farmer who is behind Conuco Farm, just had his third open heart surgery and is fundraising in the absence of paid medical leave. His stand at the Fort Greene farmers market always has the best vegetables and his hot sauce is out of this world. He has three long months of recovery ahead of him if you’d like to join me in supporting him.
Kishori turned me on to this clip of Eartha Kitt falling in love with herself. It’s from the 1982 documentary “All by Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story” but I am stuck on that laugh (and that bougainvillea background!) Compromise? For what?!
It reminded me of Amelia Earhart’s typed up prenup for her then-fiancé publisher George Putnam, where she writes of her reservations on “the confinement of even an attractive cage.” He supposedly proposed to her six times before she said yes. Her doubts about the institution of marriage were understandable given Putnam was married when they first met and the two had an affair before he divorced his wife.
I would be remiss if I didn’t include my grandfather’s lady friend Mira in this mini Valentines’ Day roundup. They found love in their last act, two widowed Hungarian Jews who had lived through the Holocaust and came together on their own terms. When he moved into her building, they lived two floors apart. Not knowing how much time they would have together, Mira would write him an anniversary card every month. He’s been gone nine months now and Mira left us last week.
Till next time,
ASK
Beautiful last paragraph
Awww Mira & Grandpa🥹🥰