The Importance of Grandmas In Male Supremacist Society

This weekend marks two events that pay homage to the power of women. There is Mothers Day on Sunday. Everybody in the restaurant business shares in honoring the wonderful occasion, as do all of us, maybe their biggest day of the year. The other is a more personal remembrance for me, marking the birthday of my grandmother, Ethel Pedersen Brun, of purebred Norwegian stock who married the son of French Hugonot immigrants at a very young age. She was born in 1895 and lived to over 100 until 1996. She bore my mother, her only child, in 1914.

Ethel (we called her “Mimi,” as I shall henceforth in this column) was almost the exact age as Rose, the heroine played by Kate Winslet in the 1997 film, “Titanic,” and also the same age as the daughter, Katrin, played by Barbara Bel Geddes in the classic 1947 film, “I Remember Mama.” That is a far more vivid reference, being as Mimi grew up in San Francisco in a community of Norwegian immigrants, such that it is hard to imagine that she didn’t know the Hanson family that was the subject of Katrin’s serialized memoir that originally went by the title, “Mama’s Bank Account.” It was a best selling book, a play, a movie and, in the 1960s, a TV series.

Mimi’s parents came right off the boat from Norway in the 1880s, moving to Philadelphia, Valley City, North Dakota, and eventually San Francisco, where Mimi met and married Jean Adolph Brun, my elegant granddad with a big nose, poor hearing and gigantic snoring when sleeping. He was the son of a French immigrant family from Limoge that founded a winery in Napa Valley.

Mimi and Bapa moved in right next door to where our family lived in Southern California in the early 1950s in order to provide the moral and monetary support my struggling parents needed to raise three boys.

Mimi’s birthday was one of the special ones we always celebrated together by firing off a few so-called “Happy Pleasantlies,” little paper canisters whose end you pulled to make it pop thin paper streamers out the other. Among famous family stories was one about the time a streamer that lit on my head had caught fire from the candles on the birthday cake and my hair was mildly singed.

While it was doubtful, I suppose, that we all could have made it without the influence of Mimi and Bapa next door, it was much later that Mimi played her biggest role in my life. That was in the first weeks and months after I launched the Falls Church News-Press as a weekly general interest newspaper inside the D.C. beltway. Based on a paltry line of credit from a new local bank that needed to fulfill its mandate to serve its community, the paper was launched by me in the teeth of a recession, no less. I struggled, and so many others were constantly urging me to bail out.

In that time there was only one person in my life who staunchly encouraged me to keep plugging because she knew doing a newspaper was my dream. I spoke by phone with her at least twice a week just to keep her spirits up as she was in her upper 90s. But it was she who returned the favor a million times over by insisting, I mean insisting, that I hang in there and keep my dream alive. No one, not even my loving mother, was so firm in buoying my spirits. Mom out of love urged me to curb my suffering. Not Mimi. She knew.

On the general theme of the importance of grandmothers, Mother Nature enables women to live far beyond child rearing age because of the wisdom they impart to adult children and grandchildren. “By living longer, women can provide care and wisdom that boosts the physical and emotional health of their descendants,” argues neuropsychiatrist Dilip Jeste in his book, “Wiser: The Scientific Roots of Wisdom, Compassion and What Makes Us Good.”

More proof of the indispensable role for assisters for the survival of our species, ameliorating against the pure, cruel male supremacist procreative and social controlling impulses.

Our Man in Arlington

By Charlie Clark

Spring blossoms came with major adjustments for our county, particularly for the underprivileged. On the upside, we have the region’s lowest unemployment rate (2.1 percent), and I spot quite a few “we’re hiring” signs along Langston Blvd.

But with the declared pandemic officially ending on May 11, certain population sectors have been dealing with the federal cutoff in Covid benefits for months. Virginia’s planned yearlong “unwinding” of Medicaid benefits began on May Day, and the enhanced federal SNAP (food stamps) benefits averaging an extra $90 monthly ended in February. Add in a drop in rent relief and you get the “benefits cliff” that hits Black, Latino and Asian Arlingtonians the hardest.

The Arlington Food Assistance Center in early March provided groceries to “a historic number of families in a single week,” I’m told by its CEO Charlie Meng. During the week ending March 12, it served 3,055 families, “the first time in 35 years that the number of families served surpassed 3,000 in a seven-day period. As inflation continues and families grapple with the end of the pandemic-era boost in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, the need for local food assistance is greater than ever,” added Meng, who recently expanded operations into Alexandria. “Our families cannot get a break. First it was the pandemic, then inflation, and now the loss of SNAP benefits means they are worse off than they were before March of 2020.”

Arlington’s programs to address the unhoused, through a partner- profit PathForward, served 1,070 persons, according to the county’s just-released annual report on Homelessness Continuum of Care. That rate would have been higher without $20 million in state, federal and local money that aided more than 3,400 households during Covid, it calculated.

“The total number of individuals served in fiscal 2022 was almost identical to pre-pandemic levels,” said Human Services Department Director Anita Friedman. “Without strong eviction prevention efforts, we would have seen many more households upended and in crisis. Nonetheless, for those households, it is traumatic, and we remain committed to working alongside them as they return to housing stability. We will also continue to address critical gaps, including in areas of racial equity, immigrant and refugee households, and the aging population.”

Since 2018, there has been an 84 percent increase in providing emergency shelter for survivors of intimate partner violence and their children.

Nonprofits “are seeing really dire things,” said Anne Vor der Bruegge, director of grants initiatives at the Arlington Community Foundation. “Even though the pandemic emergency phase is ending and people are moving on, those benefits are returning to pre-pandemic levels. Those temporary programs, she said, gave “a lot of flexibility to folks, for example, relaxing work requirements for people with housing grants because people were not able to get to work or lacked child care. Combine it with inflation, and the gap between actual and living wages is now even larger.”

Her team also sees new pressure from evictions as state and federal rent relief is scaled back.

“To Arlington’s credit, the county has put as much as it can find into rent relief, but it’s still a serious situation.” With the fiscal 2024 budget providing $4.6 million for eviction prevention, Vor der Bruegge said “Arlington is the only local jurisdiction that stepped up significantly to help renters still in arrears.”

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Get ready for a dust-up between Glencarlyn neighborhood preservationists and Virginia Hospital Center.

The hospital in January signed a letter of intent to purchase 5.8 acres of county land at 601 S. Carlin Springs Rd., where it will construct a behavioral health and rehab facility. But a working group from the civic association is concerned there’s no spelledout plan to preserve the marked spring owned by 18th century landowner Moses Ball, on adjoining land retained by the county. A movement is afoot to seek historical designation so that archaeologists might explore the stream. VHC did not respond to calls. The county Historic Preservation program says it awaits further information.

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The News-Press apologizes for misnaming YIMBYs of NoVa in last week’s print edition.