(Above: The piece as it appeared in The Boston Globe’s Ideas section on May 10.)

1. I was worried that looking at the journals would make me miss my mom more. Turns out, yes. Although I miss her at a significant level all the time and often keenly and I live in denial a good bit, so it’s hard to say if this is really “more.”

2. My mom quoted my dad at one point in her 1977 journal and the quote began with his saying “Good grief!” I now recall (How could I have forgotten? But I had, entirely.) him saying that a LOT. I am convinced that my dad, who read “the funnies” (comics pages in the newspaper) every day, adopted “good grief” via his exposure to Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts” cartoons (there’s a nod to them in one panel of my drawing).

   

   Note: I heard “Good grief!” so often as a kid and *never* thought of it as connected to actual grief. Now it is very connected. Good grief. Am I doing it, the good type of grief? Isn’t there a better type out there somewhere?

3. It is somewhat bizarre to read a journal in which you are identifying strongly with the very likable narrator (my mom) and you remember many of the incidents described, BUT you are a mere minor side character yourself. There’s a day, for instance, where my mom briefly notes that she took us kids to a go-cart place. This is a lasting somewhat traumatic ridiculous memory for me and kind of an involved story. In her account, it gets two sentences: “Missed the exit twice on the way there. Beth went flying off the track!” Indeed I did, and was unharmed. But it seems like we need more narrative here. Do we not wonder where I flew to, or even if my little startled body was still located in the go-cart when I flew? (It was.) Again, though, side character. It is a mark of my mom’s magic that I almost never felt like a minor character in real life around her.

4. Though I remembered all this in a vague way, it’s crazy to see via my mom’s journals how life was before answering machines and cell phones. A friend can report calling you for days and not having been able to reach you. The phone is ringing all the dang time, though, it seems, and people develop pretty good ESP about who might be calling when. In order to draw the phones for this piece, I looked up rotary wall phones and desk phones of the era on ebay. Some of these listings include video that allows you to listen to how the phones sound. Here is one from YouTube. Yikes! Terrifying bell noises! So harsh. And yet . . . so familiar. A ringing phone used to sound like the promise of good things. Excitement. Now this ringing sounds to me like the call that comes in the middle of the night to tell you someone has died. Did not age well. Which is ironic, given that today’s phones are not exactly a healthy force for good.

5. I do not understand how the brain works. I had decided that many of the things I do not remember had been scuttled from my cranial space by the need to stock that area instead with information crucial to the survival of my own children once I became a mother of one, of two, of three. BUT my mom can write one word in this journal and whole objects I had forgotten entirely about — I really thought no information about them existed in my inner card catalogues — will materialize like a photo in my head. Mommy was sweetly excited about gifts for us, or clothes she bought us, and she notes these things in her journal. When I read these brief mentions, BAM, I see the clothes and gifts again. I can even smell the Avon Sweet Honesty perfume in the little doe-shaped bottle. Where was this info living in my head before it resurfaced with a big splash like Shamu at Sea World? What else is in there??

6. My mother was tormented by headaches. I knew this, but it was more of a daily problem when I was young than I thought. And she’s taking aspirin, to little avail. Can I please please travel back in time to her with a bottle of Advil, which did not yet exist? Please? No. I cannot.

7. I had forgotten that the dog I wished for on every birthday-cake candle between the ages of probably four and 11 (when we finally got a dog, at the Humane Society) would not eat her food unless we first pretended to eat the food ourselves and then left the spoon in her dish.

8. Because my mom treasured my dad’s compliments, she tended to write them down. This has given me a new window on their dynamic. I thought she was the one who said most of the appreciative things. Turns out I just wasn’t always around and eavesdropping (a skill I picked up from her). Again, side character. But it is really good to know that she got all that love. There was one scene when she was sitting in the garage telling him about some of her frustrations while he worked on a broken toilet, a job with numerous frustrations of its own, and she realized that while she was talking he had stopped working and was just smiling at her, enjoying the moment. It brings tears to my eyes, this little ordinary but extraordinary scene between my parents, captured in ballpoint pen ink, in Mommy’s perfect cursive.

Is this the good grief yet?

I think maybe, sometimes, in countless fragments that leave me feeling so rich in love though also bereft, it kind of is.

Those sound like humble-pie questions but, journalistically, I think they are helpful and I invite them to haunt me whenever they care to. Which is often.

Ghostly doubts or not, though, I knew my next chance to have something printed in the Globe would be the day after the massive (I hoped!) Saturday NO KINGS rallies across the country. And I knew from past experience that I was going to wake up annoyed that even my own newspaper that I love and respect was not going to cover the protest sufficiently on Sunday (sadly an accurate prediction; there were a reported 180,000 of us swarming and stomping and dancing around in Boston in chilly weather!). But here I was, weeks ahead of time, with a semi-reserved half-page parking space for my own content in that very post-event-day issue.

So, you know, draw up or shut up.

I had been rolling an idea about in the rock-tumbler of my head for weeks. Would it be possible to convey a recent true-life experience? Here is how it came out.

And of course I have to include here a link to the famous scene referenced, possibly my favorite movie scene ever. Oh, Yvonne! Oh, Ilsa with the heaving breaths. Oh, Rick with that nod. That nod, Rick! That nod.

I bet if I were picturing how someone puts a cartoon like mine together, I’d assume that they came up with a concept, had at least 80% confidence that it would work, and then mapped out a rough draft and went at it. For me, it doesn’t work like that at all.

Instead, it’s more like, Hmm, vague sense of a concept and one encouraging phrase or factor. In this case, I was encouraged that the actual song we sang on the day I was trying to depict, “America the Beautiful,” was short enough that it could be sectioned into the limited number of panels I can fit in my little Ideas section space. Also very encouraging to me: the word “brotherhood” in that song. That’s what the drawing is all about. People pulling together.

But I had no confidence that I could figure out a way to weave together my narration, the events that happened at my protest, and the Casablanca scene’s main elements all in 12 panels. So I just did what I often do: I leapt and prayed hard for divine help and tried to have joyful attitude that the help would be provided if I stayed at my drawing board a-workin’ and if I trusted. Also I accepted that part of this process would involve feeling a lot of sadness during the struggle to make it work. That’s just part of it for me; I don’t know why. But it helps to know that that is normal for me as I pour in the hours and make all the mistakes. And if you stop at the sadness part, the drawing never gets done.

You know what’s cool, though? From what I’ve read, “Casablanca” was assembled in a similar manner. Its makers sure didn’t have a full plan when they started. They didn’t even know which fella Ilsa would end up with, and neither did Ingrid Bergman playing her. They also didn’t know, and this keeps astonishing me, how World War II would play out. I’m sure there was sadness involved. They leapt anyway.

And really, if you think about it, that’s what the Americans protesting now are doing, too. We don’t know if things will all work out. We leap and we feel the sorrow of loss and uncertainty and we move forward inch by inch, some of us praying for divine assistance.

Trivia: While I fictionalized the faces of the protest people in my drawing, I used real sign messages from real protest signs at these weekly gatherings on the signs that I drew. Except one, which I made up myself and which might become a real sign I carry at some point.

See it in there? Deliver US/us from evil. That’s the one part of my daily prayers that I say out loud every day. I think it’s a powerful chunk of a much-memorized prayer. And I hope God sheds his grace as requested, while many, many, many ordinary people work — in small steps and leaps, with no guarantee of an outcome — for the common goodness and rule of law that has made this country a beloved (and beautiful!) place in which to live and love.

Need an old Brownie camera, a bandana with a horse on it, a tiara, a foot-long toothbrush, a sheet of poster paper? The house provides. Some yo-yo string, an ancient typewriter, actual cassette tapes, Elvis sunglasses, a Yoda mask, a Victrola? I can tell you where to find them. From basement to attic, our house is a museum of things. And, more accurately, since creative projects are constantly in motion here, our house is a museum of things that look obsolete but often surprise us by proving useful. Thank you, dusty vintage set of DIY encyclopedias, for instance. I got a whole drawing out of them during a very tough moment for our country last year when I didn’t know what I could possibly compose for my Boston Globe deadline.

The year after my youngest left for college, or maybe even the year after that, I forced myself to tackle, at long last, “the toy room,” a small attic space where all the artifacts of their many raucous childhood playdates had accumulated. This was a difficult and painful emotional task for me and I had avoided it for many a moon. But off to Savers I trotted, disassociating mightily, with Hefty bag after Hefty bag of playthings.

Still, there’s a closet in the former toy room. And good luck to you if you want to close its weird little irregular polygon of a door. Ya can’t. Because it’s bursting with toys and games I kept.

This week, like all weeks lately, I was thinking about what’s happening to our country and trying to make sense of it. To phrase our current situation as “what’s happening to our country” is too passive a wording, though. Let me rewrite. This week I was thinking about what the uber-rich predator Americans are doing to our country, from the president to the craven creepers in the Epstein files, to RFK Jr. (uber-rich in political name fame) flexing about in his jeans, and definitely Elon Musk and Stephen Miller (I neither know nor care whether he is uber-rich; he has puppeteer-of-the presidency power). Lots of us sounded the alarm about Project 2025, but reality since the beginning of this presidency has been so much worse than what we warned of. I had just read about these tech bros who were sketchily slipped right into uniforms. And I started thinking, Huh, GI Joe = GI Tech Bro. This week’s Globe drawing grew from there (and from having read about the new American Girl dolls).

I needed some models for the art. We never had any American Girl dolls, but we did still have on hand our old Clue game.

Memories! All those little pencils at the ready.

And Hungry Hungry Hippos. Just look at them snuggled up in that battered box. They seem startled to see the light of day after years of rest.

We also have, of course, a variety of Barbies eager to pose as Kristi Noem. After hurried auditions (sorry, Pet Shop Barbie), the role went to Valentine Hearts and Kisses Barbie from 2004, even though she didn’t have cowgirl boots or a hat and was a blonde and lacks the requisite volume of synthetic eyelashes, and even though she creeps out my spouse.

Maybe it’s the totally unnecessary shoulder slit that bugs him? I think it’s her general vibe, though.

As I was handling these old toys and games I was remembering, with bittersweet nostalgia, my kids playing with them, naturally. And also remembering my having played with versions of them growing up. My heart was full. My head was focused on meeting a deadline and I was praying for God’s help to allow me to write/draw something helpful during a week when our president had — almost as if he just wanted to play with his own shiny military toys — illegally started a war that had already killed 168 schoolgirls, so carelessly. The president didn’t even take off his stupid gaudy baseball/golf cap when receiving our fallen service members the following week. Perhaps it’s just another game to him.

I am heartsick that the dudes in charge here in our country right now — not that they are supported by the majority of Americans — are destroying, on purpose, gleefully, so selfishly, the international rules-based order that allowed generations of American kids to grow up in relative safety. And heartsick that this same sicko crowd is protecting each other from the secrets of the Epstein files — which document the horrific abuse of children — while also weakening our vaccine protections, and regulations that have protected our air and water, etc. — how do I explain this to anyone and have it make sense? It’s so cruel, as are their attacks on trans kids and adults, the purposeful cruelty to immigrant children and adults and anyone who isn’t white, the cutting of healthcare funds and SNAP benefits, and the way these same leaders are dumbing down education via AI and topic restrictions and history deletions. To use the kid language of my day, it’s all so very, very gross I could fully barf. And so could Barbie, right over her shoulder slit. And so could my Hungry, Hungry Hippos, so stand back.

The only way to end the drawing on an “up” note was to focus on the beautiful power of We the People, joining together, the same type of power and beauty I see at protests. Thank God (literally) that Tinkertoys came to mind (I see they’re officially called Tinkertoy, but to me they have always been plural). My kids somehow didn’t have them but I remember the ones I had so vividly. I remember the way the rods and spools felt in the cardboard canister as I rummaged around with my tiny hand. I remember how the Tinkertoys smelled. I also remember how it felt to have a spool partly in my mouth, so I must have nibbled at them. Classy. (In my defense, they do kind of look like cookies.) I remember the colors. I remember feeling perfectly safe — even if I was about to choke on a Tinkertoy spool (which I never did, but I did one time swallow a marble and my attentive engineer dad held me by the ankles and tipped me around and gently shook me until the marble rolled out my mouth) because the grown-ups had me covered. I could just play.

Maybe, if we all pull together, it can someday feel that way again. Or at least remotely close to that way. Feels like a good time to close this post and call my reps.

(Also, I really think Tinkertoy should make these. How hard could it be?)

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Hi, friends-

Here is what happens a LOT. I finish something I have worked on for countless hours — usually it is a piece of art/writing for The Boston Globe — and I blah blah blah to my family about all the things I couldn’t quite stuff in to what I made.

And then, like magic, I forget all that blah blah blah. It’s gone from my head, which is needed for the next drawing I will do. But some of the blah blah blah is kind of interesting, I think. That’s why I am experimenting here with whether a substack is a fitting place to store those apparently expendable extras.

This past week, for instance, I was working on this piece:

(If you can’t see it well here, it’s broken down into more easily readable panels on Instagram @ambitionectomy.)

When I first discovered, via nosing around online, that John Coltrane, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, Miles Davis, AND Chuck Berry were all born in the same year, 1926, 100 years ago, I started wondering if there was any way to illustrate how wide their influence was. Then I did something kind of nuts.

I nosed around more online and typed up the title of every song (I could find) that they had recorded. I used a different typeface for each of the artists and then I cut out each song title and arranged them into categories. I was thinking that maybe, given their extensive output, there would be a way, using only the titles of their songs, to write some poetry that spoke to the moment we are in now.

I played with this idea for a couple days and decided that this was not the right approach for this drawing. I mean, YES, I could write poetry using only their titles. But since many of their titles probably wouldn’t be that well known to most readers, these poems weren’t going to ring the bells I wanted them to ring. Also, my main aim in drawing/writing about these four was to illustrate their history, not some weird craft project of a white lady in 2026 — or the situations of today that the poems would address. Misplaced spotlight! Gross. So I shifted over to the quiz format and set aside the poems.

But for anyone who wants to see what a person can do with just the alphabet of expressions contained in the song titles alone of these four dynamos, here is what I came up with.

1. Consequences, Molester (poem for a racist president)

   

2. For Elon Musk

   

3. How Come the Big Change? (For Jeff Bezos, the week after Washington Post staff layoffs)

   

4. Song of Our Country (a tribute to We the People, in protest mode)

   

   Okay. I have shared this. Thank you for reading it. I tip my little hat again to these amazing Black musicians who helped us understand and express our emotions over generations. I have spent two weeks obsessing over them and will spend more. But now I can clean up my desk. :)