Lydia Likes It

Tenements, Towers & Trash

I heart New York. It's the city of my birth, and the city of my granddaughters, and my husband Ted and I both have deep ties there. So it's especially pleasing to see the city through a different lens. In Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City, illustrator Julia Wertz offers a comic-style black-and-white view of all of the nooks and crannies of New York City. My favorite pages show street views from different time periods: how the markets, shops, music venues, and apartments have changed over the decades. This is a book you'll want to stroll through at a leisurely pace, maybe while nibbling on a bag of roasted chestnuts or sipping an egg cream.

The volunteering life {talking the talk}

One year into my volunteering life, everything feels right, feels focused, feels balanced. It's taken the best part of this Trumpian year to bring all of the pieces together, and in that time, while still howling at the sky every day, I've come to know myself a bit better, and to find optimism in what I thought would be a very bleak time.

I've tried a few different things, from sorting books for prisoners to assembling STEM kits for Boston Public School kids, and from registering new Americans to vote to organizing baby clothes for low-income moms, but my work has consolidated now around refugees and immigrants, and helping them to learn English. At the International Institute of New England, I tutor students (mostly Haitian, at the moment) in the afternoon, and assist more advanced students (immigrants from at least a dozen different countries) in an ESOL classroom one evening a week. I've been volunteering there for a year.

In October, I finally connected with St. Stephen's Youth Programs, which you might recall I've been trying to work with for many months. Part of the St. Stephen's mission involves supporting the parents of students in their afterschool program. It was a lucky piece of timing that I renewed my efforts to make a match at the same time the parents asked for an English conversation group. While I'd never started or run such a group, I'd done English conversation work at Project Hope, and I really wanted to give this new group a try. I recruited a few friends (thanks, Jane and Chris), and we all agreed to a six-week trial. Each week I provide some guiding topics and questions, and our one-hour sessions fly by.

Now, five weeks in, everyone -- parents and volunteers -- wants to continue. Each week we get to know each other better, and we're all having a great time. The parents have requested some help preparing for parent-teacher conferences at the end of the month, so that's up next on our agenda. Using materials developed for English for New Bostonians by the Boston Public Schools, we'll work on vocabulary and preparing questions for the teachers.

Welcome blanket

The women who created the pink pussyhat project just wrapped up Welcome Blanket, which posed this question to knitters, crocheters, and sewing mavens everywhere: "The proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico is almost 2000 miles long. Imagine if the massive distance of this wall was re-conceptualized and re-contextualized not to divide, but to include. Instead of wall, a concrete line, to keep people out, what if lines of yarn became 3,500,640 yards of blankets to welcome people in?" 

As someone whose volunteer work involves helping refugees and immigrants learn or improve their English skills, and who knit a whole lot of pussyhats at the beginning of the year, I couldn't help but be drawn to this project. I decided to re-teach myself to crochet granny squares, which I first learned from my own immigrant grandmother. I made two giant granny square welcome blankets, 40x40 inches, using machine washable wool, and with each I included a note about my family's immigration story as well as some general words of welcome and encouragement. Both blankets, sent to the Smart Museum in Chicago, will be donated to new Americans at the end of the exhibit. For more information and photos of the show at the museum, check out Welcome Blanket.

Okonomiyaki: food as theater

On our third trip to Japan a couple of months ago, we wanted to focus not on shrines and temples and impossibly beautiful scenery, though we did see all of those, but on friends and experiences. In the friends department, we are blessed to have known Rika for more than three decades, and her family -- husband Ichiro, daughters Nagisa and Misaki, son Shumpei (who climbed Mt. Fuji with my husband Ted), and brand new son-in-law Takumi -- are like family to us. They live on the west coast of Japan, which gives us the opportunity to step off the tourist trail whenever we go to visit them, and there are no more generous hosts anywhere in Japan. For experiences, we took classes in shibori dyeing, spice blending, cooking, and painting of the little plastic food models you see everywhere in Japan.

Perhaps our best discovery on this trip, however, was okonomiyaki, a cabbage pancake to the max. Going out for okonomiyaki is more than a meal -- it's a complete entertainment, as the dish is made on griddles, often right at your table. The basic pancake consists of a thin batter, sometimes noodles, always what seems like an entire head of cabbage, and optional mix-ins like shrimp or pork, with special Japanese barbeque-like sauce on top. In our cooking class in Osaka, Ted and I learned to make a "chopstick" version that you can find at a street festival. These photos are from a tiny restaurant in Hiroshima called Hassei. I'd go far out of my way to eat their okonomiyaki again.

The volunteering life {another piece of the puzzle}

When you commit to an issue and open your heart, all sorts of opportunities find their way in. And so, next week, my husband Ted and I will be at Faneuil Hall to help MIRA (Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, of which the International Institute of New England is a member), register newly-naturalized Americans to vote. There's no greater privilege of citizenship than voting, and participation in the political process has never been more important, as the 2016 election demonstrated. Voter registration is a natural extension of the work I've been doing all year with refugees and immigrants, preparing them to live full and fulfilled lives in this country, and I'm excited to help them take this step along the path.