I found my hook for the memoir, inadvertently. I was going to put an entry on this blog about this Christmas, which was over the top in every wonderful way I could imagine. As I wrote it I began to think of my mom again and of this magical world she created for us, which I took to more than the others. I began thinking of our relationship through the years and it was hitting me in waves that I experienced the rain forest qualities of this extraordinary woman more than the rest.
I did not sugar coat her drinking and psychosis. She did not sugar coat her words to describe me, most especially, when she was drunk. I had the very best of her, when I was four through when I was about nine. Then I experienced her very worst.
And my mother was her worst at Thanksgiving, but her best at Christmas. Our spiritual celebration was secular, but we did not ignore our Christian roots entirely. I have had to defend my excesses at Christmas, when I was criticized as materialistic, silly, supersticious, or just completely impractical. I was tolerated sometimes by those who felt above such childishness. I shut up when other adults around me wanted to discontinue all adult gift-giving because, as we all know, Christmas is for children. I have listened to ministers advise us to think of others less fortunate, to remember "Christ's humble beginnings" and to put away crass materialism.
And inside, all along, a voice in me was clear and strong that told me to ignore those other voices. A voice that told me to celebrate to my soul's content, to enjoy, to give, to love, to decorate, to keep my head up without apology.
And there it was ... the hook that grabs me about my mom, about the gifts she gave and the pain she endured and spread sometimes, despite her sweeter voices. to understand my mother and me, to understand my family, one has to understand that my mother irrevokably proved the existence of elves. You cannot write our story without knowing this and without knowing that Santa was not even a jump from that, since he was no more than a really BIG elf himself. One has to understand that life in our home really was a rain forest: lush or rotting, with nothing in between ... and that the lushness did not exist without the rotting, no matter how much I might have wished that the rotten had not been quite so painful, nor quite so sick.
It was my family. When I look at those two holidays and the intervening times. ... when I look at the time between Christmas and our escape to our lake island, it is simply more of the same. Those summers were the vacation version of Christmas.
ANYWAY, I am excited because I have my framework. Perhaps I've not explained it well, but that isn't the point. You know how it feels when all the bits and pieces and flotsam and jetsam of stories fall together in a moment? That's how I feel.
So I had to run into my room here, and sit down and tell you all how excited I am! I have been working on the memoir, but it has been hard to find the stem, the TRUNK from which all branches stem. I know it was my mom at the center, but what about my mom? Her magic was at its core all along. And I was the one who received the most of that magic, or who was most tuned into it. I'm not sure which. Perhaps I will learn as I go along; more likely it really does not matter at all.
But I am back. And I'll be writing entries again more regularly. I've lost a few followers, which makes me a little sad, but it can't be helped. And I'm not in here for the numbers, after all. I am in here to practice my craft, to share it, to share my art ... and to have the fun of drinking in all of yours!
May we all have a wonderful 2012, and if we do not, may we continue to find comfort with the support that never seems to falter in this general area of the blogosphere!
Accidental Spring
"Accidental Spring" This began as the background for painting other papers, but became something else!
Friday, December 30, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Have a wonderful Holiday week
I have been beyond busy, which is fine. I remembered another story about my mom. I had forgotten this for many, many years.
My childhood home had a backyard which ended at "the woods," a narrow strip of woods with a brook running through it. When I scampered up the small bank at the back end of the yard, it was perhaps fifty yards to the brook, which, very conveniently had a fallen tree across it. I could scamper across, then climb up a steep bank for another fifty feet or so, to the corner of two streets. In the winter you could see that corner from my bedroom window. I ran up there year round, and was three houses from my best friend's house.
It was also the convenient path across town for what we then called "hobos." Mom would not call them bums, and we did not talk about "the homeless" back then. A few times in my early-ish childhood, I came out from under the willow tree canopy when I heard my mother loudly yelling at some man at the edge of the woods who seemed to be approaching Nancy and me, playing in our ground-tree house. I do not remember being afraid, however.
Mom had a social conscience. I was with her on the steps of the library for the town's "sympathy march" for the big Washington Civil Rights march. We all sort of had a to-do there, with speeches and food. But we all listened together to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. because about five people had radios tuned in to the same stations. I don't know whether there were transistors or what. I was too busy looking at the people's faces. Mom made us look at the hosings by the police, and the attack dogs. She felt we should know what other children had to endure. I remember crying and she said, "Honey, you SHOULD cry for them. It is a terrible thing." I was crying because they seemed to MAKE the dogs bite people, but I felt it wise not to say anything. Besides, I DID know she was right.
Which leads me to Christmas. There were three of them--three men with slick-combed hair and chinos and shiny belt buckles. Men who looked, as some Beatrix Potter book said, I think, as if they had dusty corners. I remember one dark green shirt with frayed edges, but it was very smooth. The other men were generally wrinkled. That's what I remember--wrinkled faces, wrinkled shirts, wrinkled trousers. But shiny buckles. Smooth, shiny hair. And clean.
They came together to the back kitchen door from the first Christmas when I was five, and two more after that. My mother handed out cookies and a $5 bill to these "hobos." I remember it vividly because my parents felt we should see people who were not doing well. We should know about it and understand. We ourselves were one minor catastrophe from poverty, but my mother would point out "That catastrophe hasn't happened for us. And we're having a wonderful Christmas. And we have a home with a bath and a half, and they have none."
That was a lot of money to my parents, and the men knew it. They were respectful to her and they did not come around at other times--at least not when I saw. They stopped coming, though, by the time I was nine--the town had done a "sweep" in the fall, and did another one in November so they would not bother people any more. My parents talked about that one morning when they didn't know I had been up before they sat down to breakfast before Daddy went to work. Sometimes I didn't go in and bother them; I sat on the couch, still half asleep, listening to their voices, catching bits and pieces of conversations that swirled far above the head of a child.
"They don't hurt anyone. I don't CARE what they say. Those men were never anything but kind. I ASKED them to come up so I could help, Jim."
"I know, dear. But times are changing. It isn't like when we were kids. Some of these men are dangerous."
"I know, I know. But not our hobos. They were just down on their luck." And that's all I remember.
A year later my mother got a letter from one "to the Lady at 274 Parker Street" and she cried. He had a job and lived in an apartment, but he'd wanted to thank her. All she said was, "See? I was right. He was a perfectly find man."
My parents invited strangers to our home on Christmas Day sometimes. There was a single mom who was a waitress at their favorite restaurant. She brought her little girl one time when I was about eleven, and we gave her a doll. And my dad sat down with some young man from the shoe store, and they worked on something one Christmas afternoon in his den.
My parents wanted us to celebrate, to party, to revel on Christmas. We all did, but it was not out of greed. I think for them it was out of some enormous sense of gratitude and a recognition that so far we had been lucky. Mom hated the word "blessed" because she felt it sounded as if we might think we were specially chosen or something. No, she and dad felt we were simply lucky. And our Christmas was the family's Thanksgiving.
To tell the truth, she was never quite sure about where Jesus the Christ fell into things. She was candid about that, but on Christmas Eve, she would read the story, and we would put the "star in the east that led us" in the scene last thing. Her set had the baby in the manger already, so we decided to put the star up last
When I was a teenager, she would stand there looking at the Créche and say, "Well. I just don't know about God's only begotten son. You may be right, Jetty, that he tried some begotten daughters but they were killed at birth. You are right, honey. People didn't care much about daughters. They didn't when I was a girl, either. But I don't know. There is something about this magical time. I think I would rather believe the story than not. Doesn't it seem wonderful to think that God sent us a BABY to straighten us out? Maybe we can try believing anyway, just the way we believe in other things." And she would sing "God so loved the world..."
She would ask if I believed in Santa and I would smile and say yes. I LIKED believing in elves and fairies and Santa.
"Well, then," she'd say. "Jesus the Christ it is. Where the HELL did I put that North Star?"
***
My friend and I were talking about how to celebrate when we see so many people in need around. She can't and I understand that completely. For me, though, I am celebrating how lucky I have been in the past three years to have people who reached out to me to help me feel grounded, who actually supported me while I waited eighteen months for Social Security Disability, who linked hands beneath me, a living net of love to keep me from falling. I honor the beauty that was in both my parents. I honor the gift of love, I guess, hokey as that may sound. Our minister mentioned that revelry is part of our heritage as a species, and perhaps setting aside what amounts to survivors' guilt is okay. That doesn't make us greedy or insensitive.
I have much to think about; much to be grateful for. Without these people who will be here Saturday night, I could very easily have been one of those "hobos" by now. Literally. And without some of you, as well, who sent messages, sometimes gifts, who read what I wrote and made me feel that it was worth going on.
(And, well, besides ... there are cookies. And best of all? there are wind up toys. How can I NOT revel?)
I hope you ALL have a healthy and wonderful holiday season. I will be back in the New Year.
My childhood home had a backyard which ended at "the woods," a narrow strip of woods with a brook running through it. When I scampered up the small bank at the back end of the yard, it was perhaps fifty yards to the brook, which, very conveniently had a fallen tree across it. I could scamper across, then climb up a steep bank for another fifty feet or so, to the corner of two streets. In the winter you could see that corner from my bedroom window. I ran up there year round, and was three houses from my best friend's house.
It was also the convenient path across town for what we then called "hobos." Mom would not call them bums, and we did not talk about "the homeless" back then. A few times in my early-ish childhood, I came out from under the willow tree canopy when I heard my mother loudly yelling at some man at the edge of the woods who seemed to be approaching Nancy and me, playing in our ground-tree house. I do not remember being afraid, however.
Mom had a social conscience. I was with her on the steps of the library for the town's "sympathy march" for the big Washington Civil Rights march. We all sort of had a to-do there, with speeches and food. But we all listened together to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. because about five people had radios tuned in to the same stations. I don't know whether there were transistors or what. I was too busy looking at the people's faces. Mom made us look at the hosings by the police, and the attack dogs. She felt we should know what other children had to endure. I remember crying and she said, "Honey, you SHOULD cry for them. It is a terrible thing." I was crying because they seemed to MAKE the dogs bite people, but I felt it wise not to say anything. Besides, I DID know she was right.
Which leads me to Christmas. There were three of them--three men with slick-combed hair and chinos and shiny belt buckles. Men who looked, as some Beatrix Potter book said, I think, as if they had dusty corners. I remember one dark green shirt with frayed edges, but it was very smooth. The other men were generally wrinkled. That's what I remember--wrinkled faces, wrinkled shirts, wrinkled trousers. But shiny buckles. Smooth, shiny hair. And clean.
They came together to the back kitchen door from the first Christmas when I was five, and two more after that. My mother handed out cookies and a $5 bill to these "hobos." I remember it vividly because my parents felt we should see people who were not doing well. We should know about it and understand. We ourselves were one minor catastrophe from poverty, but my mother would point out "That catastrophe hasn't happened for us. And we're having a wonderful Christmas. And we have a home with a bath and a half, and they have none."
That was a lot of money to my parents, and the men knew it. They were respectful to her and they did not come around at other times--at least not when I saw. They stopped coming, though, by the time I was nine--the town had done a "sweep" in the fall, and did another one in November so they would not bother people any more. My parents talked about that one morning when they didn't know I had been up before they sat down to breakfast before Daddy went to work. Sometimes I didn't go in and bother them; I sat on the couch, still half asleep, listening to their voices, catching bits and pieces of conversations that swirled far above the head of a child.
"They don't hurt anyone. I don't CARE what they say. Those men were never anything but kind. I ASKED them to come up so I could help, Jim."
"I know, dear. But times are changing. It isn't like when we were kids. Some of these men are dangerous."
"I know, I know. But not our hobos. They were just down on their luck." And that's all I remember.
A year later my mother got a letter from one "to the Lady at 274 Parker Street" and she cried. He had a job and lived in an apartment, but he'd wanted to thank her. All she said was, "See? I was right. He was a perfectly find man."
My parents invited strangers to our home on Christmas Day sometimes. There was a single mom who was a waitress at their favorite restaurant. She brought her little girl one time when I was about eleven, and we gave her a doll. And my dad sat down with some young man from the shoe store, and they worked on something one Christmas afternoon in his den.
My parents wanted us to celebrate, to party, to revel on Christmas. We all did, but it was not out of greed. I think for them it was out of some enormous sense of gratitude and a recognition that so far we had been lucky. Mom hated the word "blessed" because she felt it sounded as if we might think we were specially chosen or something. No, she and dad felt we were simply lucky. And our Christmas was the family's Thanksgiving.
To tell the truth, she was never quite sure about where Jesus the Christ fell into things. She was candid about that, but on Christmas Eve, she would read the story, and we would put the "star in the east that led us" in the scene last thing. Her set had the baby in the manger already, so we decided to put the star up last
When I was a teenager, she would stand there looking at the Créche and say, "Well. I just don't know about God's only begotten son. You may be right, Jetty, that he tried some begotten daughters but they were killed at birth. You are right, honey. People didn't care much about daughters. They didn't when I was a girl, either. But I don't know. There is something about this magical time. I think I would rather believe the story than not. Doesn't it seem wonderful to think that God sent us a BABY to straighten us out? Maybe we can try believing anyway, just the way we believe in other things." And she would sing "God so loved the world..."
She would ask if I believed in Santa and I would smile and say yes. I LIKED believing in elves and fairies and Santa.
"Well, then," she'd say. "Jesus the Christ it is. Where the HELL did I put that North Star?"
***
My friend and I were talking about how to celebrate when we see so many people in need around. She can't and I understand that completely. For me, though, I am celebrating how lucky I have been in the past three years to have people who reached out to me to help me feel grounded, who actually supported me while I waited eighteen months for Social Security Disability, who linked hands beneath me, a living net of love to keep me from falling. I honor the beauty that was in both my parents. I honor the gift of love, I guess, hokey as that may sound. Our minister mentioned that revelry is part of our heritage as a species, and perhaps setting aside what amounts to survivors' guilt is okay. That doesn't make us greedy or insensitive.
I have much to think about; much to be grateful for. Without these people who will be here Saturday night, I could very easily have been one of those "hobos" by now. Literally. And without some of you, as well, who sent messages, sometimes gifts, who read what I wrote and made me feel that it was worth going on.
(And, well, besides ... there are cookies. And best of all? there are wind up toys. How can I NOT revel?)
I hope you ALL have a healthy and wonderful holiday season. I will be back in the New Year.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Christmas as A Child: YES, Norman Rockwell for Real
I am busy actually STARTING my Christmas Eve preparations and I am also painting. I'm hoping to get back into my blog world before Christmas--I have several pieces started--but I am not really sure I will. But it is NOT for any bad reasons. I miss writing and I miss reading! Still, sometimes I have to oh, go ahead and LIVE my life so I fill the well, so to speak.
I first published this one in 2009, and it explains why I really am an all out, absolute, completely wacko Christmas nut. Not in the sense of buying new decorations or oodles of presents; I love the peace, the music, the silliness, the love that has always been mine for the giving and receiving. My family did it right. Sorry to bore those who read this, but I enjoyed reading it again because all of it flooded back and put me into the mood again.
I also know I referred to this in October--I think I published this again now for my own sake! A relative who was less than kind to me sometimes, but very kind at others, has died... and it has brought up some, well, disturbing memories. They may find their way into another entry, but I think I wanted to focus on something joyous... on a time when I got to be nothing more or less than an excited, happy child.
It is not meant to replace my entries--I realized tonight, as I revisited this post, that it was "birthing" a new one. The hour is late now, as I add these last two paragraphs, but reviewing and editing this piece did the trick. Joy is the woman who died, and I like visualizing her here, at Christmas, with my mom.
Lately I have been returning to this blog myself, just to bring that feeling back--how lucky I am to have such memories! So, have a wonderful holiday season! I'll READ some blogs, but somehow, even though I mean to write, I get side-tracked.
Here goes... no pictures, no more apologies... just my family at its very best!
Norman Rockwell Ain't Got Nuthin' On Our Christmases
It's hard for me to choose a Christmas from childhood. Two or three may be mixed together here, but I don't care. To me, it was idyllic. Jim did not torment us. Jacky and I were small children together, even up until he was about eleven. Jean Ellen was a keeper of magic and secrets to rival our mother. And Dad and Mom? Well, they had to be experienced.
So the Roots of my Love for the Season Grew Deep and Immortal Here...
My mother not only looked like Mrs. Claus, she acted like her. And it always began the day after Thanksgiving.
Jacky and I, and sometimes even Jimmy, Would race downstairs on Friday morning to see five presents perched on the top shelf of the extra tall white bookcase in the dining room. The Five Foot Shelf fit on one shelf, that bookcase was so wide... And the books on the top shelf reached the top of Daddy's head, so it was six feet tall. I grew up in a home with a bookcase in every room. It was just not a room without books, even in the bathrooms. And we had a BATH AND A HALF!
At this point, the books were still on that shelf, too, so the presents were annoyingly out of reach. We would climb on chairs, wondering how it was that Mommy had managed to pile the presents so that just enough of each tag was visible, so we could read the name, but we could not move a single package without the whole pile's tumbling to the floor. Inevitably we'd blow it and the pile would fall.
Mom would come from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her first of seven Christmas aprons, and say, simply, "Good thing nothing was breakable. Go ahead and open them and ruin your surprise. I don't much care..."
Then, as she was heading for the kitchen, she would toss back, "Not quite sure how Santa would feel, but that's your problem." We would feign our disappointment and put each one back, rattling them, squishing, doing our best to know what was inside, but Mom was too smart. We never could figure it out. It took until I was about twelve to be bothered that there never was something for Mommy there. Jean Ellen and I took to wrapping something for HER the morning after Thanksgiving, because it just felt all wrong. She was in college and it was a ritual we enjoyed together. I think it was the first of many she and I developed around the holiday together.
Let me reinforce this; until I was about 20, my mother never drank between Thanksgiving and Christmas. NOTHING. She would empty the huge "Silver Satin" port jug and there were never stray rum and cokes around. In fact, she didn't buy Coca Cola® at all until just before the holiday.
From then on, every day held a surprise. She didn't do a lot that Thanksgiving weekend, but wrap a new present or five each day, and the pile would grow more precarious until, by Sunday, Daddy took the books from that shelf and put them in a box tucked in the footwell of his desk. "GAWD knows none of you will let me have any peace between now and that day. MY life is over now. Nothing but shelling out money, having to run around to get GAWD knows what. Bah."
Tiny Tim in Scrooge Clothing
He never said humbug until the day. He also was the least convincing Scrooge alive, since he read us the Christmas Carol and checked with Mother every single night, asking her whether maybe ONCE she might come up with something on her own list that didn't involve her doing more work around the house. The truth was, my dad spent more on Christmas presents than anyone else, and would get scolded at by my mother constantly, often punctuated by a wet dishtowel on his head, which sat there for at least fifteen minutes, at whatever angle it had landed.
My parents were in love. That was the miracle of them. For all his womanizing, for all her drinking, for the myriad fights in between? They loved one another with a passion that would have been embarrassing if it had not been so wonderful to see. They liked to talk late into the evening, just about books, about politics, about philosophy. About their days. My father said that Mom was the most highly educated person he'd ever known and she never went to college. He would walk up behind her in the kitchen and simply put his arms around her sometimes, and they would stand there, singing softly, saying nothing.
(That's what I wanted in my life, and knew I could never settle for less than that, that alone would be better than less. I do not regret that choice at all.) I will not spoil this by moving into the present, though. I will return safely to that time, as a child, through my early teens, when I saw that my parents were clearly lovers at every age. I felt, though would never have said so, that I was lucky to witness those private moments, and that my parents did not find it wrong to let us see them.
Their love was palpable at Christmas. And the house was full of the good kinds of secrets. This Christmas brought us the birth of the "Christmas Spider," As Mom and Jean Ellen dubbed it. A hanging thingy made of glitter gold paper, on a large hook. When you draped it from a chandelier, pointy tentacle/leg things draped in many layers from the center and it seemed alive in a particularly grotesque way.
It moved around the house, from dining room, to kitchen, to a curtain rod, to the lamp next to Mom' chair--wherever Jean Ellen or Mom chose. the damned thing lasted for 25 years! And there was the wrapping of the "spoon rest" if it was Mom's turn. She and Grandma LeSure, Dad's mom, had an ongoing exchange with that. Granny'd gotten it for her donation to the Navaho Indian Tribe (back then). It was pale pea green, with three spoon rest depressions. Made of plastic, it was a "French" artiste in the center with his paintbrush, surrounded by his palette spoon rests. Half his moustached was missing from the get-go. The ugliest thing I ever saw. Granny gave it to Mom, then Mom gave it back for Mother's Day, then Granny gave it back on Mom's birthday, and here it was being re-wrapped in the same box, same interior tissue, same tag with all the cross-outs, for her.
We had traditions coming out our ears in our family. Most of them had to do with laughing.
But some had to do with the season. In late September, for instance, when I was little, Mom took me for a walk and we brought a pillow case. We'd go into the wildflower field and fill it with drying grass. Then Mommy would hang it in the attic and, along around December 20th, there was hay for the manger. She and Jean Ellen would put the crèche (nativity--we are French) together on the little table by the front door. We did not do the British custom of leaving the baby Jesus for Christmas morning, but that's okay. Mommy wanted us to have one thing that would remind us of the day's origin. When I was big enough, she let me sound out the words of the story--we were born reading, so that was fine. We knew it by heart anyway. So Jack or I would tell the story while they put the crèche together. Jean Ellen always made a star that covered the normal painting there. Sometimes silver, abstract on black paper. You never knew. Sometimes a big star in a cluster of smaller ones in a field of blue.
And the baking. I would sit cross-legged on the counter and "help" with the doughs, hand mixing in the chocolate chips. Or I would sprinkle the sugar cookie stars. Mostly I licked the bowl because it made it easier for Mom to clean. I think that Jean Ellen and I learned to bake through osmosis. I don't measure much, to this day. Mommy baked by feel, she said. We had six kinds of cookies, and the butter cookies without leavening were made two weeks in advance, and other doughs were frozen. She never froze cookies.
"They never taste quite the same," she said. I think she was right. And we NEVER used margarine. Margarine was a sin in our house.
We went shopping for presents for Mommy on their double bed, Jack and I. Daddy would have a miraculous display of things my mother wanted all around the perimeter, with price tags on every item--price tags he had made himself, to suit our budget. He as fair, though, because he had certain items out of our range--they were his presents. And he trusted US NOT TO TELL, and we never did. Through the year Mom thought of ways we could earn money for Christmas. We'd get paid and she had little jars with our names on them, NOT TO BE TOUCHED. Some things were practical, and some pretty, but there was always enough so that Jack and I could truly choose up until we were around nine. There were often twenty items there--all bought by Daddy, all re-marked. And then he helped us wrap them in tissue papers, and he had a stash of glitter and star stickers and ribbon so that we could make them "special." My Scroogey Dad.
****
I am the youngest. The miracle for me? Christmas Eve. By then, there was a ham coming out of the oven by 1:00 and a turkey going IN, for a late buffet at night. The trimming party was that night! While Jack and Jim were rooting around for a missed present or whether or not Santa REALLY was out there, I sat cross-legged on the living room floor with my dad. I wish I had a picture. I was not more than five or six. I was tiny. He six one. And we tested the bulbs, consulting over how he might plan which should have reflectors. Counting sockets and bulbs. Sometimes the count was wrong and he'd say, "Road trip, Jetty, get your coat." We'd run to Wallach's grocer and get some bulbs of the color we needed adn somehow or other, Daddy's find something that someone just HAD to have, just to even things out you know.
But I would hand Daddy the bulbs or reflectors and he would string the tree, from the bottom up. He didn't even bothe with the spire until the end. We knew it would get tipped. We worked quietly and fast, for guests arrived by 4:00 and we had to also unpack the ornaments, so people could decorate when they came. I loved unwrapping the blown glass ornaments. Mommy never hid breakable things from us. If we broke and item, she's say, "Did you mean to? Will you be more careful next time?" And that was that. We didn't mean to, and we WERE more careful and very little got broken.
That Christmas, when I think I was six, Grandma and Grandpa LeSure were there for BOTH days and were staying in a hotel! And Aunt Joy was coming. She wasn't married then, and was ten years younger than Mommy and was GLAMOROUS. The tree-trimming party mostly had friends of my parents when I was little. I loved sitting in a corner and hearing the adult conversation. Grandma LeSure told me I could go INTO her purse and try her lipstick. When I did though, Grandpa SLAPPED me and I yelled at him for it.
When Grandma explained, he had the oddest smirk on his face and said, "Well, Missy, I guess no one will push you around in this life. Excuse me." I found it a wholly unsatsifactory apology and avoided him all night.
Slowly the beauty of the tree emerged, amidst the singing and the laughing and the stories, the ham, the turkey, the spilled drinks--not Mom's, other people's ... she had me TASTE hers even--the boys nearly tipping the tree over from an over-rambunctious game of throw the dish towel around...
As the night lengthened, it all blurred for me. It seemed to me that our tree glittered more than anyone's. Then Mom and Joy had the obligatory fight over not having garland tinsel. We had the long, leaded icicles then. And Mom and Jean Ellen would not let ANYONE help with that. Every piece had to drape free. Grandma LeSure got that, too, and so did I, but when I started to help, suddenly, Daddy said, "Santa comes soon, Jetty! You have to run to bed!"
Run I did, and so did Jack. Jim and Jean Ellen stayed up later, but I didn't mind. I never saw the thing done. For me? For me, the last glimpse of Christmas Eve was a room full of people laughing, JE draping tinsel over Daddy's head, the boys NOT fighting, but playing cards, Mommy talking with Grandma, Grandpa standing back, holding his stomach, smoking his pipe, but looking happy. Joy working on the tree and clucking at the lack of garland, and two to six other adults laughing, singing, or talking. We always sang "Lullay thou Little Tiny Child" when I went to bed.
***
That early Christmas I leaped out of my bed though, pretty late and looked at the roof below our window. It was the roof to the den and there were HOOFPRINTS. "JEAN ELLEN!"
Now, my sister HATED to be wakened. We were not allowed to rouse her OR Jim until 7 for stockings, but I JUMPED ON HER. She opened one eye and grunted, but she got up and came to the window and said, "Oh, Jetty. Honey. Santa must be HERE right now. Quick. Back to bed." She went to bed, I flew into the hall, STRAIGHT into my dad.
"WhAT ARE YOU DOING?"
"Santashereisawtheprintsontehroofandiwanttosayhiand go---"
He had a huge turkey platter in his hand. It was NOT one of the presents we'd seen."DADDY?"
He simply squatted down and said, "Jetty. Santa is so frazzled this year, he's asked ME to wrap this for your mom. See? He already had me put the stockings at the top of the stair. Now, don't you think he might be a little upset to have to carry on polite conversation with a little snigglefritz who is supposed to be in bed NOW?"
"YOU are helping SANTA?"
He looked so solemn with the weight of this honor. "Yes. And I need to do a good job, so off to bed."
No problem.
***
The morning between 7 and about 8:30 was a cacophony of stocking openings and playing games until Daddy allowed us to get him up. On this ONE day, he insisted on showering first, just to torture us. Jim would dig out his slippers--again worn once a year--and his robe and we'd wait. UGH.
Then HE woulds schlump downstairs, grumbling and turn on the lights and this was MY FIRST look. Presents from one wall all the way to the front window, presents as high as my chest, and the most beautiful Christmas tree EVER. And we were allowed ONE PRESENT before breakfast. Only one. It was okay. We learned very early that our Christmases lasted longer than anyone's because we took turns and we took breaks. We had to PLAY with our toys. WE read our books. We watched the grown ups. We all shared the jokes.
If it sounds like Heaven, it's because it was. Sheer Heaven. This Christmas was all about trains, though. JACK GOT his Lionel trains from Grandpa, and five billion miles of track and little houses and trees and, well EVERYTHING. I had good stuff too, but it was the trains.
When Daddy's last present was opened, along around TWO--he HOARDED them under his chair and we had to watch him open his all at the end. Rotten man. And he won at the can you unwrap tissue without ripping it game. Excruciating. Mommy was festooned in bows and she and Grandma and Jean Ellen were busy with dinner plans. Jim wanted to listen to his record albums and call his friends.
Jack, Grandpa and I went into the basement and built a city. We had hills and had to measure the angles--Grandpa was a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And engineer... WITH A REAL ENGINEER'S CAP! He put it on and he we built our railroad route, complete with a mountain, a skyscraper we could drive it THROUGH and a cave and tunnel. We only had four crashes before it was complete at Five.
And Grandpa looked like a little boy, when we threw the switch and the train began to run. He ran around the tables with us as every obstacle was successfully managed. I threw the switch correctly--we had TWO trains--and they avoided one another neat as can be.
When it was done, He threw his cap in the air and DANCED. It was the only time I remember seeing him smile, let alone dance. My grandpa, my brother, and me, we danced a jig and sang a railroad song on Christmas.
***
There were no pictures taken or home movies. Grandpa died the following summer. But I see him in his cap, I hear him and I remember forgiving him the slap for the call, of "GREAT JOB THERE, LITTLE ONE" when I threw the switch for engine number two.
Grandpa was a railroad man. And for one Christmas morning, so was Jack and so was I. Three guys on the tracks, just doing our job.
On one magic Christmas when I was only six, and the world was new, and Santa landed on my roof.
***
The tree held presents and gave them up at night, after we were all in our nightclothes again. Mommy doled them out and all were labeled from the tree. They were always special--jewelry, a matchbox car, something special to the particular child. That year, mine was Santa in a Snow globe, only it was about three inches tall, with a tiny note affixed that said, "Thank you for not bothering me. It was a busy night. You are such a good girl. Love, Santa"
***
There is no one left from that time but me. Even Grandpa's hat is gone. But I hear him still. the magic of that Christmas, of many others, remains with me still. But that one Christmas, Grandpa let us see his back yard, the boy, the man who loved trains, the man who loved us. And I see the tree shimmering as I glanced at it over my daddy's shoulder as he carried me to bed, humming so that his chest rumbled and tickled me. I see the tinsel on his head, and Jean Ellen slapping Jimmy's hand as he looped the stuff in a clump. I feel my heart speeding up at the memory of almost seeing Santa.
I see it as clearly as any movie could bring it. It shines there for me to run whenever I need it; there, just by my heart, with Mommy close by, laughing.
So forgive me if I indulge myself in festooning and laughing and singing my way around my new home, making cookie dough to freeze, ordering some gifts, putting up my tree, repeating the story of every ornament. And planning my own Christmas Eve celebration with nine of my family, here. In my home. And there will be stockings from TWO Santas under my tree Christmas morning. And there will be toys. There will be singing deliberately off key.
And there will be more love than any one woman could possibly hope for. Here. In my home. You all are invited. Just let me know by the end of next week, so I know how big a turkey to order!
I first published this one in 2009, and it explains why I really am an all out, absolute, completely wacko Christmas nut. Not in the sense of buying new decorations or oodles of presents; I love the peace, the music, the silliness, the love that has always been mine for the giving and receiving. My family did it right. Sorry to bore those who read this, but I enjoyed reading it again because all of it flooded back and put me into the mood again.
I also know I referred to this in October--I think I published this again now for my own sake! A relative who was less than kind to me sometimes, but very kind at others, has died... and it has brought up some, well, disturbing memories. They may find their way into another entry, but I think I wanted to focus on something joyous... on a time when I got to be nothing more or less than an excited, happy child.
It is not meant to replace my entries--I realized tonight, as I revisited this post, that it was "birthing" a new one. The hour is late now, as I add these last two paragraphs, but reviewing and editing this piece did the trick. Joy is the woman who died, and I like visualizing her here, at Christmas, with my mom.
Lately I have been returning to this blog myself, just to bring that feeling back--how lucky I am to have such memories! So, have a wonderful holiday season! I'll READ some blogs, but somehow, even though I mean to write, I get side-tracked.
Here goes... no pictures, no more apologies... just my family at its very best!
Norman Rockwell Ain't Got Nuthin' On Our Christmases
It's hard for me to choose a Christmas from childhood. Two or three may be mixed together here, but I don't care. To me, it was idyllic. Jim did not torment us. Jacky and I were small children together, even up until he was about eleven. Jean Ellen was a keeper of magic and secrets to rival our mother. And Dad and Mom? Well, they had to be experienced.
So the Roots of my Love for the Season Grew Deep and Immortal Here...
My mother not only looked like Mrs. Claus, she acted like her. And it always began the day after Thanksgiving.
Jacky and I, and sometimes even Jimmy, Would race downstairs on Friday morning to see five presents perched on the top shelf of the extra tall white bookcase in the dining room. The Five Foot Shelf fit on one shelf, that bookcase was so wide... And the books on the top shelf reached the top of Daddy's head, so it was six feet tall. I grew up in a home with a bookcase in every room. It was just not a room without books, even in the bathrooms. And we had a BATH AND A HALF!
At this point, the books were still on that shelf, too, so the presents were annoyingly out of reach. We would climb on chairs, wondering how it was that Mommy had managed to pile the presents so that just enough of each tag was visible, so we could read the name, but we could not move a single package without the whole pile's tumbling to the floor. Inevitably we'd blow it and the pile would fall.
Mom would come from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her first of seven Christmas aprons, and say, simply, "Good thing nothing was breakable. Go ahead and open them and ruin your surprise. I don't much care..."
Then, as she was heading for the kitchen, she would toss back, "Not quite sure how Santa would feel, but that's your problem." We would feign our disappointment and put each one back, rattling them, squishing, doing our best to know what was inside, but Mom was too smart. We never could figure it out. It took until I was about twelve to be bothered that there never was something for Mommy there. Jean Ellen and I took to wrapping something for HER the morning after Thanksgiving, because it just felt all wrong. She was in college and it was a ritual we enjoyed together. I think it was the first of many she and I developed around the holiday together.
Let me reinforce this; until I was about 20, my mother never drank between Thanksgiving and Christmas. NOTHING. She would empty the huge "Silver Satin" port jug and there were never stray rum and cokes around. In fact, she didn't buy Coca Cola® at all until just before the holiday.
From then on, every day held a surprise. She didn't do a lot that Thanksgiving weekend, but wrap a new present or five each day, and the pile would grow more precarious until, by Sunday, Daddy took the books from that shelf and put them in a box tucked in the footwell of his desk. "GAWD knows none of you will let me have any peace between now and that day. MY life is over now. Nothing but shelling out money, having to run around to get GAWD knows what. Bah."
Tiny Tim in Scrooge Clothing
He never said humbug until the day. He also was the least convincing Scrooge alive, since he read us the Christmas Carol and checked with Mother every single night, asking her whether maybe ONCE she might come up with something on her own list that didn't involve her doing more work around the house. The truth was, my dad spent more on Christmas presents than anyone else, and would get scolded at by my mother constantly, often punctuated by a wet dishtowel on his head, which sat there for at least fifteen minutes, at whatever angle it had landed.
My parents were in love. That was the miracle of them. For all his womanizing, for all her drinking, for the myriad fights in between? They loved one another with a passion that would have been embarrassing if it had not been so wonderful to see. They liked to talk late into the evening, just about books, about politics, about philosophy. About their days. My father said that Mom was the most highly educated person he'd ever known and she never went to college. He would walk up behind her in the kitchen and simply put his arms around her sometimes, and they would stand there, singing softly, saying nothing.
(That's what I wanted in my life, and knew I could never settle for less than that, that alone would be better than less. I do not regret that choice at all.) I will not spoil this by moving into the present, though. I will return safely to that time, as a child, through my early teens, when I saw that my parents were clearly lovers at every age. I felt, though would never have said so, that I was lucky to witness those private moments, and that my parents did not find it wrong to let us see them.
Their love was palpable at Christmas. And the house was full of the good kinds of secrets. This Christmas brought us the birth of the "Christmas Spider," As Mom and Jean Ellen dubbed it. A hanging thingy made of glitter gold paper, on a large hook. When you draped it from a chandelier, pointy tentacle/leg things draped in many layers from the center and it seemed alive in a particularly grotesque way.
It moved around the house, from dining room, to kitchen, to a curtain rod, to the lamp next to Mom' chair--wherever Jean Ellen or Mom chose. the damned thing lasted for 25 years! And there was the wrapping of the "spoon rest" if it was Mom's turn. She and Grandma LeSure, Dad's mom, had an ongoing exchange with that. Granny'd gotten it for her donation to the Navaho Indian Tribe (back then). It was pale pea green, with three spoon rest depressions. Made of plastic, it was a "French" artiste in the center with his paintbrush, surrounded by his palette spoon rests. Half his moustached was missing from the get-go. The ugliest thing I ever saw. Granny gave it to Mom, then Mom gave it back for Mother's Day, then Granny gave it back on Mom's birthday, and here it was being re-wrapped in the same box, same interior tissue, same tag with all the cross-outs, for her.
We had traditions coming out our ears in our family. Most of them had to do with laughing.
But some had to do with the season. In late September, for instance, when I was little, Mom took me for a walk and we brought a pillow case. We'd go into the wildflower field and fill it with drying grass. Then Mommy would hang it in the attic and, along around December 20th, there was hay for the manger. She and Jean Ellen would put the crèche (nativity--we are French) together on the little table by the front door. We did not do the British custom of leaving the baby Jesus for Christmas morning, but that's okay. Mommy wanted us to have one thing that would remind us of the day's origin. When I was big enough, she let me sound out the words of the story--we were born reading, so that was fine. We knew it by heart anyway. So Jack or I would tell the story while they put the crèche together. Jean Ellen always made a star that covered the normal painting there. Sometimes silver, abstract on black paper. You never knew. Sometimes a big star in a cluster of smaller ones in a field of blue.
And the baking. I would sit cross-legged on the counter and "help" with the doughs, hand mixing in the chocolate chips. Or I would sprinkle the sugar cookie stars. Mostly I licked the bowl because it made it easier for Mom to clean. I think that Jean Ellen and I learned to bake through osmosis. I don't measure much, to this day. Mommy baked by feel, she said. We had six kinds of cookies, and the butter cookies without leavening were made two weeks in advance, and other doughs were frozen. She never froze cookies.
"They never taste quite the same," she said. I think she was right. And we NEVER used margarine. Margarine was a sin in our house.
We went shopping for presents for Mommy on their double bed, Jack and I. Daddy would have a miraculous display of things my mother wanted all around the perimeter, with price tags on every item--price tags he had made himself, to suit our budget. He as fair, though, because he had certain items out of our range--they were his presents. And he trusted US NOT TO TELL, and we never did. Through the year Mom thought of ways we could earn money for Christmas. We'd get paid and she had little jars with our names on them, NOT TO BE TOUCHED. Some things were practical, and some pretty, but there was always enough so that Jack and I could truly choose up until we were around nine. There were often twenty items there--all bought by Daddy, all re-marked. And then he helped us wrap them in tissue papers, and he had a stash of glitter and star stickers and ribbon so that we could make them "special." My Scroogey Dad.
****
I am the youngest. The miracle for me? Christmas Eve. By then, there was a ham coming out of the oven by 1:00 and a turkey going IN, for a late buffet at night. The trimming party was that night! While Jack and Jim were rooting around for a missed present or whether or not Santa REALLY was out there, I sat cross-legged on the living room floor with my dad. I wish I had a picture. I was not more than five or six. I was tiny. He six one. And we tested the bulbs, consulting over how he might plan which should have reflectors. Counting sockets and bulbs. Sometimes the count was wrong and he'd say, "Road trip, Jetty, get your coat." We'd run to Wallach's grocer and get some bulbs of the color we needed adn somehow or other, Daddy's find something that someone just HAD to have, just to even things out you know.
But I would hand Daddy the bulbs or reflectors and he would string the tree, from the bottom up. He didn't even bothe with the spire until the end. We knew it would get tipped. We worked quietly and fast, for guests arrived by 4:00 and we had to also unpack the ornaments, so people could decorate when they came. I loved unwrapping the blown glass ornaments. Mommy never hid breakable things from us. If we broke and item, she's say, "Did you mean to? Will you be more careful next time?" And that was that. We didn't mean to, and we WERE more careful and very little got broken.
That Christmas, when I think I was six, Grandma and Grandpa LeSure were there for BOTH days and were staying in a hotel! And Aunt Joy was coming. She wasn't married then, and was ten years younger than Mommy and was GLAMOROUS. The tree-trimming party mostly had friends of my parents when I was little. I loved sitting in a corner and hearing the adult conversation. Grandma LeSure told me I could go INTO her purse and try her lipstick. When I did though, Grandpa SLAPPED me and I yelled at him for it.
When Grandma explained, he had the oddest smirk on his face and said, "Well, Missy, I guess no one will push you around in this life. Excuse me." I found it a wholly unsatsifactory apology and avoided him all night.
Slowly the beauty of the tree emerged, amidst the singing and the laughing and the stories, the ham, the turkey, the spilled drinks--not Mom's, other people's ... she had me TASTE hers even--the boys nearly tipping the tree over from an over-rambunctious game of throw the dish towel around...
As the night lengthened, it all blurred for me. It seemed to me that our tree glittered more than anyone's. Then Mom and Joy had the obligatory fight over not having garland tinsel. We had the long, leaded icicles then. And Mom and Jean Ellen would not let ANYONE help with that. Every piece had to drape free. Grandma LeSure got that, too, and so did I, but when I started to help, suddenly, Daddy said, "Santa comes soon, Jetty! You have to run to bed!"
Run I did, and so did Jack. Jim and Jean Ellen stayed up later, but I didn't mind. I never saw the thing done. For me? For me, the last glimpse of Christmas Eve was a room full of people laughing, JE draping tinsel over Daddy's head, the boys NOT fighting, but playing cards, Mommy talking with Grandma, Grandpa standing back, holding his stomach, smoking his pipe, but looking happy. Joy working on the tree and clucking at the lack of garland, and two to six other adults laughing, singing, or talking. We always sang "Lullay thou Little Tiny Child" when I went to bed.
***
That early Christmas I leaped out of my bed though, pretty late and looked at the roof below our window. It was the roof to the den and there were HOOFPRINTS. "JEAN ELLEN!"
Now, my sister HATED to be wakened. We were not allowed to rouse her OR Jim until 7 for stockings, but I JUMPED ON HER. She opened one eye and grunted, but she got up and came to the window and said, "Oh, Jetty. Honey. Santa must be HERE right now. Quick. Back to bed." She went to bed, I flew into the hall, STRAIGHT into my dad.
"WhAT ARE YOU DOING?"
"Santashereisawtheprintsontehroofandiwanttosayhiand go---"
He had a huge turkey platter in his hand. It was NOT one of the presents we'd seen."DADDY?"
He simply squatted down and said, "Jetty. Santa is so frazzled this year, he's asked ME to wrap this for your mom. See? He already had me put the stockings at the top of the stair. Now, don't you think he might be a little upset to have to carry on polite conversation with a little snigglefritz who is supposed to be in bed NOW?"
"YOU are helping SANTA?"
He looked so solemn with the weight of this honor. "Yes. And I need to do a good job, so off to bed."
No problem.
***
The morning between 7 and about 8:30 was a cacophony of stocking openings and playing games until Daddy allowed us to get him up. On this ONE day, he insisted on showering first, just to torture us. Jim would dig out his slippers--again worn once a year--and his robe and we'd wait. UGH.
Then HE woulds schlump downstairs, grumbling and turn on the lights and this was MY FIRST look. Presents from one wall all the way to the front window, presents as high as my chest, and the most beautiful Christmas tree EVER. And we were allowed ONE PRESENT before breakfast. Only one. It was okay. We learned very early that our Christmases lasted longer than anyone's because we took turns and we took breaks. We had to PLAY with our toys. WE read our books. We watched the grown ups. We all shared the jokes.
If it sounds like Heaven, it's because it was. Sheer Heaven. This Christmas was all about trains, though. JACK GOT his Lionel trains from Grandpa, and five billion miles of track and little houses and trees and, well EVERYTHING. I had good stuff too, but it was the trains.
When Daddy's last present was opened, along around TWO--he HOARDED them under his chair and we had to watch him open his all at the end. Rotten man. And he won at the can you unwrap tissue without ripping it game. Excruciating. Mommy was festooned in bows and she and Grandma and Jean Ellen were busy with dinner plans. Jim wanted to listen to his record albums and call his friends.
Jack, Grandpa and I went into the basement and built a city. We had hills and had to measure the angles--Grandpa was a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And engineer... WITH A REAL ENGINEER'S CAP! He put it on and he we built our railroad route, complete with a mountain, a skyscraper we could drive it THROUGH and a cave and tunnel. We only had four crashes before it was complete at Five.
And Grandpa looked like a little boy, when we threw the switch and the train began to run. He ran around the tables with us as every obstacle was successfully managed. I threw the switch correctly--we had TWO trains--and they avoided one another neat as can be.
When it was done, He threw his cap in the air and DANCED. It was the only time I remember seeing him smile, let alone dance. My grandpa, my brother, and me, we danced a jig and sang a railroad song on Christmas.
***
There were no pictures taken or home movies. Grandpa died the following summer. But I see him in his cap, I hear him and I remember forgiving him the slap for the call, of "GREAT JOB THERE, LITTLE ONE" when I threw the switch for engine number two.
Grandpa was a railroad man. And for one Christmas morning, so was Jack and so was I. Three guys on the tracks, just doing our job.
On one magic Christmas when I was only six, and the world was new, and Santa landed on my roof.
***
The tree held presents and gave them up at night, after we were all in our nightclothes again. Mommy doled them out and all were labeled from the tree. They were always special--jewelry, a matchbox car, something special to the particular child. That year, mine was Santa in a Snow globe, only it was about three inches tall, with a tiny note affixed that said, "Thank you for not bothering me. It was a busy night. You are such a good girl. Love, Santa"
***
There is no one left from that time but me. Even Grandpa's hat is gone. But I hear him still. the magic of that Christmas, of many others, remains with me still. But that one Christmas, Grandpa let us see his back yard, the boy, the man who loved trains, the man who loved us. And I see the tree shimmering as I glanced at it over my daddy's shoulder as he carried me to bed, humming so that his chest rumbled and tickled me. I see the tinsel on his head, and Jean Ellen slapping Jimmy's hand as he looped the stuff in a clump. I feel my heart speeding up at the memory of almost seeing Santa.
I see it as clearly as any movie could bring it. It shines there for me to run whenever I need it; there, just by my heart, with Mommy close by, laughing.
So forgive me if I indulge myself in festooning and laughing and singing my way around my new home, making cookie dough to freeze, ordering some gifts, putting up my tree, repeating the story of every ornament. And planning my own Christmas Eve celebration with nine of my family, here. In my home. And there will be stockings from TWO Santas under my tree Christmas morning. And there will be toys. There will be singing deliberately off key.
And there will be more love than any one woman could possibly hope for. Here. In my home. You all are invited. Just let me know by the end of next week, so I know how big a turkey to order!
Friday, November 25, 2011
Just popping in for a... quickie? (That doesn't sound right)
I had what was, for me, a perfect Thanksgiving. (Those of you who do not know how I feel about that day, there's an early entry that has the words "Norman Rockwell Redux?"in the title.) I fixed a regular Thanksgiving dinner while I had the day entirely to myself until 4:00, when a friend who had nowhere to go managed to TELL me this on Wednesday night and I told her to get her butt here. She brought the Monty Python Holy Grail movie with her. All we did was laugh together until about 9:00 pm.
Was I thankful and mindful of blessings throughout the day? Far more than I have been in a long, long time. Now I am rested. Everything waiting for me in the freezer for me to make homemade soup after I get home on Sunday.
I am off to be with the friend who is more a sister and my "niece and nephew" for their annual Saturday after Thanksgiving tree trimming party. Since I am a Christmas nut, it kicks off the season. Gail absorbed my parents' tree-trimming party as her tradition, only having it early specifically TO kick off the season. Mostly her friends and the kids' friends pick on Gail for the day. And Gail throws things at us. And she moves all the ornaments we place; and we pick on her more. We eventually get pizza, and then Gail, one other friend, and I are there, usually alone, after supper to adorn the final touch of 250 glass icicles. It is spectacular. We have a silly kids' movie on and everything is dark except the tree.
Yup. It's wonderful.
I will have another writing when I come home. I hope all of you are having a good American Thanksgiving weekend.
I have a lot of catching up on all your blogs, too, to do when I come home. The painting is truly coming along now, once I got through the "mean people" voices.
I count my blogging friends as blessings, too. All of you.
Was I thankful and mindful of blessings throughout the day? Far more than I have been in a long, long time. Now I am rested. Everything waiting for me in the freezer for me to make homemade soup after I get home on Sunday.
I am off to be with the friend who is more a sister and my "niece and nephew" for their annual Saturday after Thanksgiving tree trimming party. Since I am a Christmas nut, it kicks off the season. Gail absorbed my parents' tree-trimming party as her tradition, only having it early specifically TO kick off the season. Mostly her friends and the kids' friends pick on Gail for the day. And Gail throws things at us. And she moves all the ornaments we place; and we pick on her more. We eventually get pizza, and then Gail, one other friend, and I are there, usually alone, after supper to adorn the final touch of 250 glass icicles. It is spectacular. We have a silly kids' movie on and everything is dark except the tree.
Yup. It's wonderful.
I will have another writing when I come home. I hope all of you are having a good American Thanksgiving weekend.
I have a lot of catching up on all your blogs, too, to do when I come home. The painting is truly coming along now, once I got through the "mean people" voices.
I count my blogging friends as blessings, too. All of you.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Finally! Translating inspiration into a Painting
Again, this won't be a long entry. Well. For me, it's not that long. Oh, who am I kidding? It's long.
Writer's Block Is Painter's Block
I have been blocked at the painting table this last week. I have been dreaming paintings for weeks, but the moment I sat down to paint after the week of storm chaos, nothing.
I sat with my taped down paper, all my beautiful brushes, my tissue papers, everything out for me to use and... nothing.
The demon voices from childhood clamored instead, in their original forms and in the "grown up" permutations.
"You? An artist? Your sister was the artist, not you." This voice is the counterpart to the "You? A writer? Daddy wrote the book. You haven't published a goddamned word, except for that Stanford stuff. Advertising, really. Just schlock."
Clever voices, those. You all know enough of my family to be able to figure out how those got there. And here is one of my favorites, interchangeable for singing, song-writing, regular writing AND painting. I call her Mom's 'Demon for All Seasons.'
"You just like the sound of it. I am an Artist. A Writer. I am apart from the rest of you somehow. Who do you think you are? You're not such a much, any more than anyone else. Do something real with your life. Something practical. If you won't be a teacher, get into banking, or something that will pay the bills. An artist. Save that for the weekends."
That one is the age old WASP voice of New England. Modesty is THE virtue above all virtues, followed closely by practicality.
And there is the one that goes, "You know you'll screw it up. You haven't really screwed something up in a while, so this one is going to fail. Really. Why even bother?" And I sit there, with a loaded brush, poised, terrified to put it onto the paper.
Yes. Terrified. And what will happen anyway if I "screw it up?" Yes. The earth WILL swallow me whole and spit me out as unfit. Even the earth will find me objectionable. Yup. And the painting will be so awful it will confirm the other demon voices and I will never paint anything someone will want; I will never paint another painting I like; I will run out of money because I never paint another painting that is anything; I will have a shopping cart and sleep in a cardboard box and wind up having to use a surf board with wheels to get around.
And I get so engrossed with that bizarre image that the paint dries on the brush and I start laughing and give up for the day.
That was a game Jessie and I used to play when she got into her own "I'm a loser because I cannot write this paper perfectly" mode. We'd play, "What's the worst that can happen?"
And Jessie and I would build this elaborately ridiculous story of how her life would be over, she'd lose her friends, all of her family would reject her and--Jessie liked this--we would spit at her when she entered the room, and she would become homeless and die. This usually got her writing just so she could "Get it over with and be homeless and done with it all." (And she rarely got lower than a B+, much to her brother's disgust.)
Only with me, I would simply start laughing and then remember Jess and tear up and then walk away.
We also have the "Your ideas suck and who the HELL wants to read your drivel or see your torn paper scribbles?"
Any of these voices sound familiarly inane? And toxic?
Okay, so I do know that you simply have to keep showing up at the blank paper, no matter what. I have done that with my writing--whether it's with the work I do offline or my blog. I have looked at the blinking cursor for so long that I've written songs to its beat. Bad songs, but songs, nonetheless. In my head, where I cannot possibly see them as productive work. God forbid I should actually admit to myself that writing songs, good or bad, is showing up at the page! After all, my intent was to work on that poem I thought of when I was cleaning the kitchen, NOT some song that no one will ever sing because it is so pathetic.
Finally, we get to "You are almost sixty. Who on this EARTH will care what a sixty year old, overweight woman who walks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame has to say or paint? Where on earth do you get OFF even trying at this late stage? You are no one." Yeah. That one is my favorite.
Light through the Wall of Voices
Only finally, I hear Julia Cameron talking to me. I was lucky enough to do a workshop with her several years back. I see her and hear her voice. "If you wait to start, then you'll be even older than you are now, so why not start?" Sometimes she words it differently, but always the point is the same. So you feel you are too old to start now, so you are going to wait even longer to do what you love? And is the only reason you do this to make money? NO. I have no idea whether I can make a dime more. And I'll certainly have no idea if I do not produce anything.
I write because it is the only way I can process my life EVER. I started my first journal when I was twelve. It wasn't a diary. It was a journal, and it's where I first wrote that poem about the old man and his shack, with the eagle. Since that time, I filled more than forty journals. I tend not to have journals per se any more. I have random musings in a folder on my desk top, and a beautiful handmade "journal" by my bed for snippets when I awaken in the morning. But writing was a habit I developed long ago. And when I peek into a really old journal I see drawings, too...
When I get to the voices I've acquired through the years that are NOT demons, I feel the change inside. I feel something fomenting. First it is anger and all those pathetic tapes that run no matter how hard I try to silence them. And I start telling each one off. You may laugh at me in this, but it is the only way I know how to ditch them. They will never shut up permanently--they are ingrained. However, I have learned how to get them to shut up long enough for me to find my groove again. And once I start, I am very glad I live alone, because I do it aloud.
I scream at them. "Jean Ellen would be HAPPY that I am painting! And Dad would LOVE it that I wrote for Stanford. How DARE you tell me that was schlock. It was good work. It was wonderful work and IT WAS WRITING MY BEST! I can be an artist if I want to be!"
Oh, yes. God forbid I do anything quietly or rationally. Did I ever mention that when I went off to college, I thought I would be an actress? Big surprise there, right? I address them all. That happened Friday morning. I was just plain ANGRY.
The Transformation begins
And Friday night I lugged a formless, nameless painting --the one I began on my retreat -- upstairs. I did not work on the one I thought I would begin. I worked on one where all I knew is that it kind of looks like choppy water. I said aloud, "PLAY with it, for God's sake. Don't worry about what it is, what it may be, just play with it. Screw the voices. To hell with anything but the process. JUST PLAY." I stomped my foot, which, of course, hurt, but when you are six, you don't care whether or not it hurts. If you are mad, you're mad. Stomping is what you do, at least, if you are six-year-old Jetty.
So I played. And then it began to look like the Lake on a choppy day, the way it did when I'd gaze, unfocused, down from the picture window in the cottage, the one by the giant field stone fireplace my grandpa built--on the daybed, tucked there under the window, with the enormous wood box at its head, the old record player in its beautiful wood encasing at the foot. The room always smelled like pine. Sometimes I would open the wood box top and just smell. I'd climb onto the wood box, crouching, and leap from the box onto the daybed, making sure my feet never touched the floor so that the alligator under the bed could not get me; a cheetah pouncing. Then I'd lie on my stomach and slither up to the window, lean on my elbows that rested on the sill, push my nose against the glass and stare. I was a hissing cobra, and my elbows and head were the hood. But finally I would simply lose myself, seeing nothing but the water, dancing. White caps and sparkles and every shade of blue. Sometimes a maple leaf would drift in my line of sight, and I would blink.
And Grandpa would bring me back home with his laugh, having witnessed my transmutations.
And so I began painting nothing but water. I collaged long lengths of tissue with the flat side down, curves and bumps on top, in every shade of blue I could make.
When I was done for the evening, I stood my lake against the oak desk that was at the cottage, too. The one Grandpa did his paper work at, by the one light, in the evenings. If I peeked in after bedtime, opening the swinging door from the bedroom hall, I would see him bent over papers.
"Jet. Aren't you supposed to be in bed?" I would see an eyebrow raise and I would giggle and run to my room again.
I played last night, too. And again, for just a little while this morning--long enough to get that darker blue just so, there, toward the top, to balance something or other that I cannot name.
But now I have to shower and get ready to go tutor my nephew. He is working on an essay about the difference between Lao Tzu and Confucius. And then he needs help understanding Mendel's Principles and how to make and use a Punnett Square. And he wants to get the jump on mitosis...
My brain will hurt by the time I get home on Monday, so I will leave my playground upstairs for now, so that I can use it and recover.
But here's my point. I am working on a painting for real again! And I like it. And maybe no one else in the world will like it, too, when I am done, but it does not matter. And that's the point, isn't it? Today I will be doing something that matters for and WITH my nephew. We manage to have fun in the misery of it all! I love science, which is why I loved my work for Stanford. All of it is real.
Life's a gamble most of the time, isn't it? Every day it is a 30-70 shot whether or not my legs will work. The odds are in my favor, but as the day progresses, the odds shift drastically. Yet I get up. I show up and I make them work. I'm not so sure that my painting and my writing are so very different. I have a friend who asked me why I bother trying so hard to keep walking, since I cannot do the things that are FUN--hiking, going to art shows and museums, taking a trip to New York and things like that.
I walk because I can. I walk because I can still take care of myself as long as I keep on walking. I'll do other things for fun and take the trips inside my head. And I don't know what I might miss if I STOPPED walking just because it's hard.
What will I miss if I stop writing just because I don't know whether or not other people will want to read what I write, let alone pay money for it? And what will I miss if I stop painting? I remembered my grandpa again. He lived for me as I painted. I had not thought of those days in a long, long time. I can smell the cottage again. All from playing with my papers and paint. What will I be missing if I do not try to paint the autumn leaf that will drift into my view, there, over the blues of that water? What will I remember when I paint a few sparkles there, among the white caps?
I don't know. It isn't worth the risk, the not trying. Isn't that why we do what we do? Isn't that why we search for the picture to snap? The painting to create? The story to tell? Is that why the Stanford professors just had to start another business when the first, second, and third didn't quite work? Are they afraid they will miss something important if they do not take the risk?
Somewhere or other, with people who are driven to create, to explore, the risks of missing something outweigh safety. I don't think that would necessarily be the right thing for every person to do, but perhaps it is what drives some of us. I don't get a rush from the risk itself; I get the rush from the process and then something indescribable when it works. I don't like the uncertainty, actually. I hate it; but I need to do it anyway. It has little to do with courage, though. I simply love to fly.
Not an original thought among any I wrote today, but they are the thoughts that get in my way, and the thoughts that take me home ... and the thoughts that allow me to fly.
What about you? what are your demons and what thoughts are the sails that catch the wind for you?
Oops. I had best at least get my shower taken! Have a wonderful couple of days? (well. More than that, but it will be tomorrow night before I get back.) Editing will not do for today, and I hope that I read about your demons and what you do to shut them the hell up.
Showered, dressed, and studying my Mendel. I had to turn my painting to the wall, so that I am not distracted. Bye for now.
Writer's Block Is Painter's Block
I have been blocked at the painting table this last week. I have been dreaming paintings for weeks, but the moment I sat down to paint after the week of storm chaos, nothing.
I sat with my taped down paper, all my beautiful brushes, my tissue papers, everything out for me to use and... nothing.
The demon voices from childhood clamored instead, in their original forms and in the "grown up" permutations.
"You? An artist? Your sister was the artist, not you." This voice is the counterpart to the "You? A writer? Daddy wrote the book. You haven't published a goddamned word, except for that Stanford stuff. Advertising, really. Just schlock."
Clever voices, those. You all know enough of my family to be able to figure out how those got there. And here is one of my favorites, interchangeable for singing, song-writing, regular writing AND painting. I call her Mom's 'Demon for All Seasons.'
"You just like the sound of it. I am an Artist. A Writer. I am apart from the rest of you somehow. Who do you think you are? You're not such a much, any more than anyone else. Do something real with your life. Something practical. If you won't be a teacher, get into banking, or something that will pay the bills. An artist. Save that for the weekends."
That one is the age old WASP voice of New England. Modesty is THE virtue above all virtues, followed closely by practicality.
And there is the one that goes, "You know you'll screw it up. You haven't really screwed something up in a while, so this one is going to fail. Really. Why even bother?" And I sit there, with a loaded brush, poised, terrified to put it onto the paper.
Yes. Terrified. And what will happen anyway if I "screw it up?" Yes. The earth WILL swallow me whole and spit me out as unfit. Even the earth will find me objectionable. Yup. And the painting will be so awful it will confirm the other demon voices and I will never paint anything someone will want; I will never paint another painting I like; I will run out of money because I never paint another painting that is anything; I will have a shopping cart and sleep in a cardboard box and wind up having to use a surf board with wheels to get around.
And I get so engrossed with that bizarre image that the paint dries on the brush and I start laughing and give up for the day.
That was a game Jessie and I used to play when she got into her own "I'm a loser because I cannot write this paper perfectly" mode. We'd play, "What's the worst that can happen?"
And Jessie and I would build this elaborately ridiculous story of how her life would be over, she'd lose her friends, all of her family would reject her and--Jessie liked this--we would spit at her when she entered the room, and she would become homeless and die. This usually got her writing just so she could "Get it over with and be homeless and done with it all." (And she rarely got lower than a B+, much to her brother's disgust.)
Only with me, I would simply start laughing and then remember Jess and tear up and then walk away.
We also have the "Your ideas suck and who the HELL wants to read your drivel or see your torn paper scribbles?"
Any of these voices sound familiarly inane? And toxic?
Okay, so I do know that you simply have to keep showing up at the blank paper, no matter what. I have done that with my writing--whether it's with the work I do offline or my blog. I have looked at the blinking cursor for so long that I've written songs to its beat. Bad songs, but songs, nonetheless. In my head, where I cannot possibly see them as productive work. God forbid I should actually admit to myself that writing songs, good or bad, is showing up at the page! After all, my intent was to work on that poem I thought of when I was cleaning the kitchen, NOT some song that no one will ever sing because it is so pathetic.
Finally, we get to "You are almost sixty. Who on this EARTH will care what a sixty year old, overweight woman who walks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame has to say or paint? Where on earth do you get OFF even trying at this late stage? You are no one." Yeah. That one is my favorite.
Light through the Wall of Voices
Only finally, I hear Julia Cameron talking to me. I was lucky enough to do a workshop with her several years back. I see her and hear her voice. "If you wait to start, then you'll be even older than you are now, so why not start?" Sometimes she words it differently, but always the point is the same. So you feel you are too old to start now, so you are going to wait even longer to do what you love? And is the only reason you do this to make money? NO. I have no idea whether I can make a dime more. And I'll certainly have no idea if I do not produce anything.
I write because it is the only way I can process my life EVER. I started my first journal when I was twelve. It wasn't a diary. It was a journal, and it's where I first wrote that poem about the old man and his shack, with the eagle. Since that time, I filled more than forty journals. I tend not to have journals per se any more. I have random musings in a folder on my desk top, and a beautiful handmade "journal" by my bed for snippets when I awaken in the morning. But writing was a habit I developed long ago. And when I peek into a really old journal I see drawings, too...
When I get to the voices I've acquired through the years that are NOT demons, I feel the change inside. I feel something fomenting. First it is anger and all those pathetic tapes that run no matter how hard I try to silence them. And I start telling each one off. You may laugh at me in this, but it is the only way I know how to ditch them. They will never shut up permanently--they are ingrained. However, I have learned how to get them to shut up long enough for me to find my groove again. And once I start, I am very glad I live alone, because I do it aloud.
I scream at them. "Jean Ellen would be HAPPY that I am painting! And Dad would LOVE it that I wrote for Stanford. How DARE you tell me that was schlock. It was good work. It was wonderful work and IT WAS WRITING MY BEST! I can be an artist if I want to be!"
Oh, yes. God forbid I do anything quietly or rationally. Did I ever mention that when I went off to college, I thought I would be an actress? Big surprise there, right? I address them all. That happened Friday morning. I was just plain ANGRY.
The Transformation begins
And Friday night I lugged a formless, nameless painting --the one I began on my retreat -- upstairs. I did not work on the one I thought I would begin. I worked on one where all I knew is that it kind of looks like choppy water. I said aloud, "PLAY with it, for God's sake. Don't worry about what it is, what it may be, just play with it. Screw the voices. To hell with anything but the process. JUST PLAY." I stomped my foot, which, of course, hurt, but when you are six, you don't care whether or not it hurts. If you are mad, you're mad. Stomping is what you do, at least, if you are six-year-old Jetty.
So I played. And then it began to look like the Lake on a choppy day, the way it did when I'd gaze, unfocused, down from the picture window in the cottage, the one by the giant field stone fireplace my grandpa built--on the daybed, tucked there under the window, with the enormous wood box at its head, the old record player in its beautiful wood encasing at the foot. The room always smelled like pine. Sometimes I would open the wood box top and just smell. I'd climb onto the wood box, crouching, and leap from the box onto the daybed, making sure my feet never touched the floor so that the alligator under the bed could not get me; a cheetah pouncing. Then I'd lie on my stomach and slither up to the window, lean on my elbows that rested on the sill, push my nose against the glass and stare. I was a hissing cobra, and my elbows and head were the hood. But finally I would simply lose myself, seeing nothing but the water, dancing. White caps and sparkles and every shade of blue. Sometimes a maple leaf would drift in my line of sight, and I would blink.
And Grandpa would bring me back home with his laugh, having witnessed my transmutations.
And so I began painting nothing but water. I collaged long lengths of tissue with the flat side down, curves and bumps on top, in every shade of blue I could make.
When I was done for the evening, I stood my lake against the oak desk that was at the cottage, too. The one Grandpa did his paper work at, by the one light, in the evenings. If I peeked in after bedtime, opening the swinging door from the bedroom hall, I would see him bent over papers.
"Jet. Aren't you supposed to be in bed?" I would see an eyebrow raise and I would giggle and run to my room again.
I played last night, too. And again, for just a little while this morning--long enough to get that darker blue just so, there, toward the top, to balance something or other that I cannot name.
But now I have to shower and get ready to go tutor my nephew. He is working on an essay about the difference between Lao Tzu and Confucius. And then he needs help understanding Mendel's Principles and how to make and use a Punnett Square. And he wants to get the jump on mitosis...
My brain will hurt by the time I get home on Monday, so I will leave my playground upstairs for now, so that I can use it and recover.
But here's my point. I am working on a painting for real again! And I like it. And maybe no one else in the world will like it, too, when I am done, but it does not matter. And that's the point, isn't it? Today I will be doing something that matters for and WITH my nephew. We manage to have fun in the misery of it all! I love science, which is why I loved my work for Stanford. All of it is real.
Life's a gamble most of the time, isn't it? Every day it is a 30-70 shot whether or not my legs will work. The odds are in my favor, but as the day progresses, the odds shift drastically. Yet I get up. I show up and I make them work. I'm not so sure that my painting and my writing are so very different. I have a friend who asked me why I bother trying so hard to keep walking, since I cannot do the things that are FUN--hiking, going to art shows and museums, taking a trip to New York and things like that.
I walk because I can. I walk because I can still take care of myself as long as I keep on walking. I'll do other things for fun and take the trips inside my head. And I don't know what I might miss if I STOPPED walking just because it's hard.
What will I miss if I stop writing just because I don't know whether or not other people will want to read what I write, let alone pay money for it? And what will I miss if I stop painting? I remembered my grandpa again. He lived for me as I painted. I had not thought of those days in a long, long time. I can smell the cottage again. All from playing with my papers and paint. What will I be missing if I do not try to paint the autumn leaf that will drift into my view, there, over the blues of that water? What will I remember when I paint a few sparkles there, among the white caps?
I don't know. It isn't worth the risk, the not trying. Isn't that why we do what we do? Isn't that why we search for the picture to snap? The painting to create? The story to tell? Is that why the Stanford professors just had to start another business when the first, second, and third didn't quite work? Are they afraid they will miss something important if they do not take the risk?
Somewhere or other, with people who are driven to create, to explore, the risks of missing something outweigh safety. I don't think that would necessarily be the right thing for every person to do, but perhaps it is what drives some of us. I don't get a rush from the risk itself; I get the rush from the process and then something indescribable when it works. I don't like the uncertainty, actually. I hate it; but I need to do it anyway. It has little to do with courage, though. I simply love to fly.
Not an original thought among any I wrote today, but they are the thoughts that get in my way, and the thoughts that take me home ... and the thoughts that allow me to fly.
What about you? what are your demons and what thoughts are the sails that catch the wind for you?
Oops. I had best at least get my shower taken! Have a wonderful couple of days? (well. More than that, but it will be tomorrow night before I get back.) Editing will not do for today, and I hope that I read about your demons and what you do to shut them the hell up.
Showered, dressed, and studying my Mendel. I had to turn my painting to the wall, so that I am not distracted. Bye for now.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Let it Snow... Huh? Nothing at all profound today.
Yes. Well, some of you may know that Connecticut was in the dark for all of last week. I exaggerate. Only about eighty per cent of the state was dark, and I live in one of the towns that was hardest hit. As I write this Monday night, big chunks of my town and two of the towns adjacent are still dark. This is a situation we will have to sort out--negligence and apathy. I live in what some call the "quiet corner," which has often translated into the "Backward pore folk" corner.
In the late 1970's I worked at a university library way across the mighty Amazonian Connecticut River. One must understand that, in Connecticut, if you lived on the west side of the river, my side was seen as some foreign world of nothing but woods and farmlands. No one actually said outright that we must be uncivilized, but they came close. I was in a play and invited my colleagues to come and see me. They arranged an expedition, thinking they could see some quaint old-fashioned stores and perhaps take in the buccolic scenery.
When I saw them after curtain calls, one woman said, "Well you actually have a SageandAllen's store here. And a Stop and Shop!"
"Yes, Clara, and we got us indoor plumbing just t'other day."
"Well, I thought that this was all country out here. I didn't realize you all had..." Her voice trailed as she suddenly realized just how condescending and insulting she was sounding. "No, but you have regular stores and everything and... I'll shut up now."
Thirty years later we still are the forgotten towns when it comes to prioritizing funds or aid. We have the flagship of our university system, but people seem to think that other than that, we are a vast wasteland, except, of course, for our mall. Connecticut is the land of malls. If you do not live within twenty minutes of a large one, you are considered underprivileged. My town has three huge malls within twenty minutes. Truly, just how lucky can one woman be.
I hate malls. Sorry. I just do.
Anyway, my power came on late Saturday, thank goodness. My apartment complex is located in an area that has at least five other large complexes within about 3/4 of a mile, square. It is the most densely populated area in the town, yet we waited six days for the power. I could not get out of the complex for two days. For all six of those days, one of the streets had no exit at all, except by winding through our complex. There are still trees HANGING across roads. Poles partly fallen. Big branches blocking roads. One of my friends could not get out of her street until Friday. Fortunately she and her husband are campers and had a gas stove as well.
In this day and age we expect our electric companies to be able to get us back on the grid in short order, but our company is far behind the times. And if I had had to listen to the president say that the company exists to serve its customers, I was ready to throw a shoe at my tv. It exists to serve its stockholders. The president got a three million dollar bonus--for cutting 20% of our crews, I guess. And not paying bills. And having antiquated lines and transformers.
I am grateful to the Canadian crews who came, some of whom are still here--from Vancouver, Montreal, Quebec. We have crews from Kentucky, Massachusetts, the Carolinas, Tennessee. I don't know what other states sent us help--I think they said it was TWENTY states. I am so grateful to them all.
Last week was a lost week in some ways. In others? I now know my neighbors. We watched out for one another, making sure things were okay for each other. I had FIVE friends show up at my door, panicked because they could not reach me, worried I had fallen. I stayed six days with one of them and not ONCE did she complain. She gave me her room, so I did not have to use the stairs. I made dinner and brunch for a crew of our friends on night and one morning. We played games. I read five books.
Friendships were deepened. Acquaintanceships were solidified.
I am home and never have been more grateful to be here. The management team had generators here by Friday morning, because it was to be cold Friday and Saturday nights. We did not know when we would be on the grid again. I know they all worked well into the evening all week, making sure all the tenants were okay. They listened patiently to tenants SCREAM at them to fix things... as if they could. They showed up every day, working in jackets, sometimes wearing gloves to work in the mornings. Their generators gave them power to work, but not for heat. I stopped in every day, as did two other of the FIVE HUNDRED tenants, to let them know we knew it was not their doing, to acknowledge that it must be a hard time for them, too. They were without power in their homes, too. Two women had to bring their children with them each day.
It has been a hard time, but not without its blessings.
I missed my connections in the blogging world. I missed my connections to friends who live far from me. I missed my studio and my beautiful paintings and photographs on my walls. Just things. But ALL my things are gifts. Every piece of pottery, every picture, every little doodad... gifts from friends, from my sister, my parents, or handed down bits of family history. I have bought very little--the couches, two chairs, two tables. I have antique oak chairs that were my great grandfather's, and my great great grandfather--the traveling quack-- I have his desk. A bit of cut glass from my sister's best friend's grandmother. A dish from my mother's mother.
I missed my things because they live with stories, with the richness of family ties. I see the people, not just the thing.
I am rich beyond measure. I am home.
I won't revise this. I don't particularly care about the quality of writing today. I write simply because I am filled with gratitude today. Never have I felt so keenly the joy of being home. Never have I been more aware of how UNalone I am in this world. I am poor when it comes to income, but that's all. It's NOTHING in the light of the last ten days.
I am home. And tonight I will curl up on my couch, writing and working on my book. And tomorrow I will begin the painting I had just taped down when the power went out. And I will look online for images of snow on fall leaves... it was beautiful. To see yellow and flame maple leaves on snow... a once in a lifetime sight. Thank you Carl for the quick pic you sent!
Thank you all for reading what I write, and thank you to some in particular, who have reminded me that even in this "virtual" world, I am not alone. And I am not forgotten. Neither are all of you, as will be evident as I periodically blog hop to catch up on your lives.
I am such a lucky woman.
In the late 1970's I worked at a university library way across the mighty Amazonian Connecticut River. One must understand that, in Connecticut, if you lived on the west side of the river, my side was seen as some foreign world of nothing but woods and farmlands. No one actually said outright that we must be uncivilized, but they came close. I was in a play and invited my colleagues to come and see me. They arranged an expedition, thinking they could see some quaint old-fashioned stores and perhaps take in the buccolic scenery.
When I saw them after curtain calls, one woman said, "Well you actually have a SageandAllen's store here. And a Stop and Shop!"
"Yes, Clara, and we got us indoor plumbing just t'other day."
"Well, I thought that this was all country out here. I didn't realize you all had..." Her voice trailed as she suddenly realized just how condescending and insulting she was sounding. "No, but you have regular stores and everything and... I'll shut up now."
Thirty years later we still are the forgotten towns when it comes to prioritizing funds or aid. We have the flagship of our university system, but people seem to think that other than that, we are a vast wasteland, except, of course, for our mall. Connecticut is the land of malls. If you do not live within twenty minutes of a large one, you are considered underprivileged. My town has three huge malls within twenty minutes. Truly, just how lucky can one woman be.
I hate malls. Sorry. I just do.
Anyway, my power came on late Saturday, thank goodness. My apartment complex is located in an area that has at least five other large complexes within about 3/4 of a mile, square. It is the most densely populated area in the town, yet we waited six days for the power. I could not get out of the complex for two days. For all six of those days, one of the streets had no exit at all, except by winding through our complex. There are still trees HANGING across roads. Poles partly fallen. Big branches blocking roads. One of my friends could not get out of her street until Friday. Fortunately she and her husband are campers and had a gas stove as well.
In this day and age we expect our electric companies to be able to get us back on the grid in short order, but our company is far behind the times. And if I had had to listen to the president say that the company exists to serve its customers, I was ready to throw a shoe at my tv. It exists to serve its stockholders. The president got a three million dollar bonus--for cutting 20% of our crews, I guess. And not paying bills. And having antiquated lines and transformers.
I am grateful to the Canadian crews who came, some of whom are still here--from Vancouver, Montreal, Quebec. We have crews from Kentucky, Massachusetts, the Carolinas, Tennessee. I don't know what other states sent us help--I think they said it was TWENTY states. I am so grateful to them all.
Last week was a lost week in some ways. In others? I now know my neighbors. We watched out for one another, making sure things were okay for each other. I had FIVE friends show up at my door, panicked because they could not reach me, worried I had fallen. I stayed six days with one of them and not ONCE did she complain. She gave me her room, so I did not have to use the stairs. I made dinner and brunch for a crew of our friends on night and one morning. We played games. I read five books.
Friendships were deepened. Acquaintanceships were solidified.
I am home and never have been more grateful to be here. The management team had generators here by Friday morning, because it was to be cold Friday and Saturday nights. We did not know when we would be on the grid again. I know they all worked well into the evening all week, making sure all the tenants were okay. They listened patiently to tenants SCREAM at them to fix things... as if they could. They showed up every day, working in jackets, sometimes wearing gloves to work in the mornings. Their generators gave them power to work, but not for heat. I stopped in every day, as did two other of the FIVE HUNDRED tenants, to let them know we knew it was not their doing, to acknowledge that it must be a hard time for them, too. They were without power in their homes, too. Two women had to bring their children with them each day.
It has been a hard time, but not without its blessings.
I missed my connections in the blogging world. I missed my connections to friends who live far from me. I missed my studio and my beautiful paintings and photographs on my walls. Just things. But ALL my things are gifts. Every piece of pottery, every picture, every little doodad... gifts from friends, from my sister, my parents, or handed down bits of family history. I have bought very little--the couches, two chairs, two tables. I have antique oak chairs that were my great grandfather's, and my great great grandfather--the traveling quack-- I have his desk. A bit of cut glass from my sister's best friend's grandmother. A dish from my mother's mother.
I missed my things because they live with stories, with the richness of family ties. I see the people, not just the thing.
I am rich beyond measure. I am home.
I won't revise this. I don't particularly care about the quality of writing today. I write simply because I am filled with gratitude today. Never have I felt so keenly the joy of being home. Never have I been more aware of how UNalone I am in this world. I am poor when it comes to income, but that's all. It's NOTHING in the light of the last ten days.
I am home. And tonight I will curl up on my couch, writing and working on my book. And tomorrow I will begin the painting I had just taped down when the power went out. And I will look online for images of snow on fall leaves... it was beautiful. To see yellow and flame maple leaves on snow... a once in a lifetime sight. Thank you Carl for the quick pic you sent!
Thank you all for reading what I write, and thank you to some in particular, who have reminded me that even in this "virtual" world, I am not alone. And I am not forgotten. Neither are all of you, as will be evident as I periodically blog hop to catch up on your lives.
I am such a lucky woman.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Headed to the Studio for a Bit ... Some Background Blogs in the Meantime
I actually am working on a book, and trying to figure out the thread of the focus. It won't be a litany of hurts, that's for sure; it won't be Pollyanna Grows Up In Hell but is GLAD, either. I'm not good at perky. I think that essentially it is The Prince of Tides without the tiger. And it may be that I wind up having to fictionalize, for the sake of some innocent relatives, and, well because the sociopath is alive. Then, too, that might be kind of fun. While I would love to write a memoir, it might be that to talk about my personal journey, it should be fictionalized; to talk about my mom, however, might be something I could tackle. We'll see.
Regardless, painting dreams seem to be taking over for now, and it's time I paid attention. Often the two forms--writing and painting--feed off one another.
But I've been so lucky to get about thirty new followers in a short time, and some of my entries might make more sense if you look at earlier ones. They might illustrate more of who I am.
I dance on the edges of things, skating the curve between the yin and the yang, the dark and the light, where life and death touch. But the only way I survived all the pain was to cling to the beauty and try to let go of the horror, swinging toward that rainbow on these slender vines of whatever beauty I could see. Sometimes they broke. Sometimes they took me to somewhere safe for a time. Sometimes they took me directly into a pile of ... not good stuff. I have lived between the extremes, but early on, it taught me to live BY extremes. Too much so often. 'Matt' once told me, "Your love, our love, this love between us was so big it scared me to death. You scared me to death. I had to run away."
SO... I did my best to kill myself off by inches in my twenties, until my broken back saved my life. It was a real, tangible problem to fight, to overcome, to conquer, instead of demons just out of my reach. And conquer it I did, for twenty years longer than they gave me to live or to walk, so far. T I'm here. I walk. I stand. But mostly, I live. And as I have said in previous comments, I use the elves and fairies, the wildflower days and the Lake, the beauty and laughter of Christmas, to cut the demons down.
Blog Entries for While I am Painting, not Writing--for those of you who are so inclined
For any of you newer followers who are interested, I've included some early entries--Losing Dad was the latest and about nine of you were around then, perhaps. I did not remember a thing about the abuse and violence until I lost my dad--Losing dad, finding therapy . This entry talks about him in a little more depth than the Slayer of Monsters under My Bed.
I could not really start the process of having the distance to write about it all until after my mom died. I was far too closely entwined with her, her struggles, her failures, her victory. HER life story. (Hence, I am kicking around tackling a memoir that focuses on her and on our relationship.) I could not separate myself properly. I include the following entry, which shows most clearly so far, the wide swings of feelings about her.
Losing Mom, finding my way
When I had lost both parents, then I opened up and began to write about it all, a bit at a time. But I let no one see. I let very few in that deeply even in talking. It took years to truly have it lose the power to hurt me. But I had my breakthroughs, and life changed. I got new tools to use to actually enjoy pastels in life. Grays even. Balance without boredom was a brand new concept to me at 37, after she died.
I think one such breakthrough came when I stopped blaming Mom for everything, that was a huge step.
Underlying Premise--I cannot blame my mother, dammit.
This next is the beginning of it for me, and it is pretty horrifying, I think... Where the terror and the sociopath were born, but also where the love was born. This was the one story that made my therapist cry, but it is pivotal to the gift I was given to cope, through the Robin Hood Days, and through the days of jumping at the too small sounds in the night, when my other brother came. Bear in mind I was perhaps a year and a half older than the me in the picture of my window box elves entry -- three and a half! I don't know that I had more than two followers when I wrote this one. Grace by Any Other Name
I blocked the incident out entirely until I was about 36, just as I did the sessions with Jack, and the rape that made me start carrying a steak knife to my room at night. No one ever said a word about the knife, a small fact that makes me wonder still. I never tried to hide it. In fact, if Jim was in the living room, I made sure it was very visible... Still, my memories were only of elves, until my father died, and Pandora's box flew open, and the demons were let loose for good.
Out of that little bitty girl came a solution for most traumas, most pain. Love. Agape, not emotion so much as the gift. The gift of love.
It was what I used over and over before each of my nine back operations--I would say the names of the people I love, over and over and over -- it was far more powerful than thinking of people who loved me. After all, who would love a woman like me anyway? They all left so fast, and it was so very hard to believe back then that there was anything in me to love ... But there was nothing hard about my naming the ones that I loved, whether or not they loved me back. It helped me get through many situations which scared me. Cover the fear with love
Funny thing is, most of those people DID love me back, and have loved me ever since. It kept coming as a shock when these women united so often, catching me before I hit the ground, over and over again. The Women
***
I think losing my daughter in 1994, just two years after her father left, broke the final dam of some sort of resistance to share my core with others. I did not think anything could ever be worse than this. (That will undoubtedly be an entry one day--one of the most bizarre experiences, aside from the worst moment of my adult life. Hearing that she was dead.) I moved to Pennsylvania six months later, learned to paint, and simply breathed. Between 1987 and 1994 I lost both my parents, had my ninth back surgery, went through psychotherapy for post traumatic stress, bought a house with my sister, had both kids leave for college, had my husband leave me for his student teacher who was Jessie's age, and finally lost my daughter.
When I wrote the poem to her in 2005 that is in the next entry, I had lost three best friends and my nephew and my brother as well. I was worn out from losing people and starting over, but I also knew I was going to lose my sister, too (I wrote about her in January of this year). (From 2000-2006 I lost my minister -- and dear friend--to suicide, two close friends, my nephew who hanged himself, my brother and finally my sister. I was kinda tired. And I was losing my ability to walk. I was starting over for the sixth time in my adult life, I felt.)
This is just a bit of a tribute to my love for my Jessica. She is inextricably entwined in my path to wanting to write again, in wanting to fly if I cannot walk. My Jess
That's enough of the hard stuff. I understand if you don't want to read any of those. I am so grateful for the support you all give me in writing, in letting me know that you don't think it a crazy idea for me to write a book. Of course, I'd have to write it anyway, because writing is what I do. I could not stop it, one way or another, if I tried. Like breathing. Like praying, singing, painting. Like loving. So if I write a book no one wants to publish or read, I'll keep writing anyway.
If I do not just go down into my studio and get started on those paintings, I will lose my brain altogether, howver. I thought I could create a schedule where I would, oh, paint in the morning, write in the afternoon. Nope. I'll do both in spurts... but as long as I do one or the other every day, then it's fine.
Okay, for those of you newer followers who don't really want to just read the heavy stuff about me, I have other entries that show something else!
NOW About Fairies or Faeries, and other Kinds of Magic
What More you Really Should Oughta Know
For those of you who want the silly and the magic, Birthing Fairies: the Honest Truth, not the Fake truth is self-explanatory. Some of you may have not had this in your education and if you have small children or grandchildren, you might need to pay attention to this factual account. Jo over at Majority of Two can corroborate that this is how they are born. She found this out in Canada, so it isn't just me.
Beyond the magic of my mother, I was also given our summers. Huckleberina Finn is a sample of that. Then of course, there was Christmas....
Those three entries are some of the shiny parts of my life.Hence my comparison of my family environment as a rain forest: lush or rotting, with little in between.
As for me, one of the pictures I've dreamed is birthing fairies... a spot on the lake that shines so clear for me still. I finally think I know how to get what I want on paper--the overbright sparkles that get larger as they come to shore. We'll see. And I finally have the right fish for my coral painting... and--Well. I just have to paint is all.
I can't walk away for two months again. Undoubtedly new things to write will start nagging at me softly, then louder I will have to come back and finish them, if only to shut them up. Do you find that, too? That a work of art yells at you to get over there and DO it? That a story weaves into your dreams and mucks them all up ? Or paintings arrive unannounced and fully blown?
Sometimes the muse is downright rude. Oh. And I've recently begun to write music for the Thursday night group of which I am a part. I never wrote music before in my life. THAT is calling to.
But the thing is? Now I am free. Free of the house that was too much for me, of having to consider anyone else in my days. I am free to fly. And that's WAY easier than walking. My friends dubbed me the Phoenix. I like that, as I said. It's mythical enough, and I am slowly working on a painting of that. Each feather is being cut individually. I work on it when I DO feel weak, when I feel that I cannot take any more pain or loss, or have one more hope placed in my hand to look at and cherish, only to have it taken away and thrown beyond my reach the moment I believe. I mean, really. Who doesn't want to be the center of her own myth? It can be useful when the darkness visits.
The demons rarely stay for long any more. And when the fires come, I FLY. Fly straight up and free.
I'll be back in a couple of weeks, but I will be following your blogs. It's how I start and end most days.
Then, too, I may be back writing sooner if new entries interfere with my dreams and then start yarping loudly at me as the paintings did!
In the meantime, as Carl would say, keep makin' art. I am so very lucky to have made blogging friends here... and I think it all started with Carl at Artistic Balance and Jo at Majority of Two. And built from there. If the blogs I follow are not familiar to you, I'd also suggest you root around among them, and give some a try! I know that reading such fine words and seeing such beautiful words have made me think more, feel more deeply--and have lifted my spirits when I needed it.
Regardless, painting dreams seem to be taking over for now, and it's time I paid attention. Often the two forms--writing and painting--feed off one another.
But I've been so lucky to get about thirty new followers in a short time, and some of my entries might make more sense if you look at earlier ones. They might illustrate more of who I am.
I dance on the edges of things, skating the curve between the yin and the yang, the dark and the light, where life and death touch. But the only way I survived all the pain was to cling to the beauty and try to let go of the horror, swinging toward that rainbow on these slender vines of whatever beauty I could see. Sometimes they broke. Sometimes they took me to somewhere safe for a time. Sometimes they took me directly into a pile of ... not good stuff. I have lived between the extremes, but early on, it taught me to live BY extremes. Too much so often. 'Matt' once told me, "Your love, our love, this love between us was so big it scared me to death. You scared me to death. I had to run away."
SO... I did my best to kill myself off by inches in my twenties, until my broken back saved my life. It was a real, tangible problem to fight, to overcome, to conquer, instead of demons just out of my reach. And conquer it I did, for twenty years longer than they gave me to live or to walk, so far. T I'm here. I walk. I stand. But mostly, I live. And as I have said in previous comments, I use the elves and fairies, the wildflower days and the Lake, the beauty and laughter of Christmas, to cut the demons down.
Blog Entries for While I am Painting, not Writing--for those of you who are so inclined
For any of you newer followers who are interested, I've included some early entries--Losing Dad was the latest and about nine of you were around then, perhaps. I did not remember a thing about the abuse and violence until I lost my dad--Losing dad, finding therapy . This entry talks about him in a little more depth than the Slayer of Monsters under My Bed.
I could not really start the process of having the distance to write about it all until after my mom died. I was far too closely entwined with her, her struggles, her failures, her victory. HER life story. (Hence, I am kicking around tackling a memoir that focuses on her and on our relationship.) I could not separate myself properly. I include the following entry, which shows most clearly so far, the wide swings of feelings about her.
Losing Mom, finding my way
When I had lost both parents, then I opened up and began to write about it all, a bit at a time. But I let no one see. I let very few in that deeply even in talking. It took years to truly have it lose the power to hurt me. But I had my breakthroughs, and life changed. I got new tools to use to actually enjoy pastels in life. Grays even. Balance without boredom was a brand new concept to me at 37, after she died.
I think one such breakthrough came when I stopped blaming Mom for everything, that was a huge step.
Underlying Premise--I cannot blame my mother, dammit.
This next is the beginning of it for me, and it is pretty horrifying, I think... Where the terror and the sociopath were born, but also where the love was born. This was the one story that made my therapist cry, but it is pivotal to the gift I was given to cope, through the Robin Hood Days, and through the days of jumping at the too small sounds in the night, when my other brother came. Bear in mind I was perhaps a year and a half older than the me in the picture of my window box elves entry -- three and a half! I don't know that I had more than two followers when I wrote this one. Grace by Any Other Name
I blocked the incident out entirely until I was about 36, just as I did the sessions with Jack, and the rape that made me start carrying a steak knife to my room at night. No one ever said a word about the knife, a small fact that makes me wonder still. I never tried to hide it. In fact, if Jim was in the living room, I made sure it was very visible... Still, my memories were only of elves, until my father died, and Pandora's box flew open, and the demons were let loose for good.
Out of that little bitty girl came a solution for most traumas, most pain. Love. Agape, not emotion so much as the gift. The gift of love.
It was what I used over and over before each of my nine back operations--I would say the names of the people I love, over and over and over -- it was far more powerful than thinking of people who loved me. After all, who would love a woman like me anyway? They all left so fast, and it was so very hard to believe back then that there was anything in me to love ... But there was nothing hard about my naming the ones that I loved, whether or not they loved me back. It helped me get through many situations which scared me. Cover the fear with love
Funny thing is, most of those people DID love me back, and have loved me ever since. It kept coming as a shock when these women united so often, catching me before I hit the ground, over and over again. The Women
***
I think losing my daughter in 1994, just two years after her father left, broke the final dam of some sort of resistance to share my core with others. I did not think anything could ever be worse than this. (That will undoubtedly be an entry one day--one of the most bizarre experiences, aside from the worst moment of my adult life. Hearing that she was dead.) I moved to Pennsylvania six months later, learned to paint, and simply breathed. Between 1987 and 1994 I lost both my parents, had my ninth back surgery, went through psychotherapy for post traumatic stress, bought a house with my sister, had both kids leave for college, had my husband leave me for his student teacher who was Jessie's age, and finally lost my daughter.
When I wrote the poem to her in 2005 that is in the next entry, I had lost three best friends and my nephew and my brother as well. I was worn out from losing people and starting over, but I also knew I was going to lose my sister, too (I wrote about her in January of this year). (From 2000-2006 I lost my minister -- and dear friend--to suicide, two close friends, my nephew who hanged himself, my brother and finally my sister. I was kinda tired. And I was losing my ability to walk. I was starting over for the sixth time in my adult life, I felt.)
This is just a bit of a tribute to my love for my Jessica. She is inextricably entwined in my path to wanting to write again, in wanting to fly if I cannot walk. My Jess
That's enough of the hard stuff. I understand if you don't want to read any of those. I am so grateful for the support you all give me in writing, in letting me know that you don't think it a crazy idea for me to write a book. Of course, I'd have to write it anyway, because writing is what I do. I could not stop it, one way or another, if I tried. Like breathing. Like praying, singing, painting. Like loving. So if I write a book no one wants to publish or read, I'll keep writing anyway.
If I do not just go down into my studio and get started on those paintings, I will lose my brain altogether, howver. I thought I could create a schedule where I would, oh, paint in the morning, write in the afternoon. Nope. I'll do both in spurts... but as long as I do one or the other every day, then it's fine.
Okay, for those of you newer followers who don't really want to just read the heavy stuff about me, I have other entries that show something else!
NOW About Fairies or Faeries, and other Kinds of Magic
What More you Really Should Oughta Know
For those of you who want the silly and the magic, Birthing Fairies: the Honest Truth, not the Fake truth is self-explanatory. Some of you may have not had this in your education and if you have small children or grandchildren, you might need to pay attention to this factual account. Jo over at Majority of Two can corroborate that this is how they are born. She found this out in Canada, so it isn't just me.
Beyond the magic of my mother, I was also given our summers. Huckleberina Finn is a sample of that. Then of course, there was Christmas....
Those three entries are some of the shiny parts of my life.Hence my comparison of my family environment as a rain forest: lush or rotting, with little in between.
As for me, one of the pictures I've dreamed is birthing fairies... a spot on the lake that shines so clear for me still. I finally think I know how to get what I want on paper--the overbright sparkles that get larger as they come to shore. We'll see. And I finally have the right fish for my coral painting... and--Well. I just have to paint is all.
I can't walk away for two months again. Undoubtedly new things to write will start nagging at me softly, then louder I will have to come back and finish them, if only to shut them up. Do you find that, too? That a work of art yells at you to get over there and DO it? That a story weaves into your dreams and mucks them all up ? Or paintings arrive unannounced and fully blown?
Sometimes the muse is downright rude. Oh. And I've recently begun to write music for the Thursday night group of which I am a part. I never wrote music before in my life. THAT is calling to.
But the thing is? Now I am free. Free of the house that was too much for me, of having to consider anyone else in my days. I am free to fly. And that's WAY easier than walking. My friends dubbed me the Phoenix. I like that, as I said. It's mythical enough, and I am slowly working on a painting of that. Each feather is being cut individually. I work on it when I DO feel weak, when I feel that I cannot take any more pain or loss, or have one more hope placed in my hand to look at and cherish, only to have it taken away and thrown beyond my reach the moment I believe. I mean, really. Who doesn't want to be the center of her own myth? It can be useful when the darkness visits.
The demons rarely stay for long any more. And when the fires come, I FLY. Fly straight up and free.
I'll be back in a couple of weeks, but I will be following your blogs. It's how I start and end most days.
Then, too, I may be back writing sooner if new entries interfere with my dreams and then start yarping loudly at me as the paintings did!
In the meantime, as Carl would say, keep makin' art. I am so very lucky to have made blogging friends here... and I think it all started with Carl at Artistic Balance and Jo at Majority of Two. And built from there. If the blogs I follow are not familiar to you, I'd also suggest you root around among them, and give some a try! I know that reading such fine words and seeing such beautiful words have made me think more, feel more deeply--and have lifted my spirits when I needed it.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Runaways to Redbank Part III: Whiffle Ball and Pictures of Dirt
Lest you think that yesterday's entry indicated some inner loneliness or sliding into a funk, here's Runaway III. I love traveling alone, and this is partly why--the northern Jersey shore. And I am afraid there will be a Runaways to Redbank IV, because, well, there is my fiftieth birthday trip and the guy on the beach. And, did I ever get to Redbank for more than a pit stop? We'll see... I mean, there was the internationally know rock star, but where? And if I lump them all into one trip, oh well. Tough....
Please note, once again, any photos are included for fun here--they are from various easily accessible websites I found from googling the kind of pictures I wanted. Except the patterns in the sand... those are mine. MINE I tell ya!
If you are new to my blog and have no clue what I'm talking about, and want to have a clue, see Runaway I , and Rnaway II. This is continuation of my two days ... (You may also find why I love traveling alone if you root around and find Deliverance I and II)
(And with this entry, I'll be on hiatus for a little while--and I do mean a little--to start a painting or two that have been haunting me for a week.)
Which Way Will She Wander?
I headed back north toward Red Bank from West Long Branch, NJ. My dear, dear friend David (a professional drummer and brilliant computer scientist I'd known since I was 22) had told me about an old-fashioned music store called Jack's, that famous musicians from all over frequented. And there were what looked to be a wonderful natural foods place and a couple of artisan type shops...
Only there was also Sandy Hook. And it was a blustery, perfect day to walk another beach. Really. I mean, music store .... miniature Cape Cod. Food store ... marvelous sand bar formations. Gee. What won? And, of course, West Long Branch had offered such interesting characters, I felt as if I were on a roll. Sandy Hook it was.
The peninsula juts up quite a few miles toward the city. You can park the car to the right of the road, to stand and facet the ocean, then simply turn around to see the bay. Remains of WWII missile sites hide in among dunes so old that they were more pure white hills with alien dwarfed forests laced by pure white paths to guide the way. Unlike Cape Cod,Sandy Hook is too small for towns--there is just a military base at the tip. So for miles, all there was to see were bay, ocean, dunes and sky.
And living things, of course, including people.This time around, once again, the Jersey spirits had come out to play.
Barefoot Navigation...
It took perhaps ten minutes to get past the initial cluster of people. I do not move easily over dry sand. One little boy, perhaps ten, saw me lose my footing a little, cane notwithstanding, and offered me his arm, gentleman style. Just his open-faced smile steadied me. You know that kind of look they offer when the world has given them no reason to expect less in return? Well, I could not disappoint him and accepted his arm. When we reached packed sand, he bolted, barely saying good bye, as was right.
An obstacle course lay before me, however, that held potential for decapitation; unmanned fishing poles. The poles stood oh, between 8 and 47 feet tall, stuck deeply into the sand, with nearly invisible lines angling into the sea. When monsters of the deep pulled, they bent to their own tune, performing a beautiful, if dangerous dance--but only when the fish were running. The dance was wild today, but no one seemed to care but me.
All the men belonging to the poles sat about fifteen feet back, sleeping or drinking their beer, occasionally glancing at the lines, or gawking over mirrored sunglasses at any stray woman who came by. Let us simply say that today they did not even see me; there was a bikinied trio nearby and rumor had it they were about to turn over. I stared at the chorus line of bodies turned in their chairs, heads turned further still over right shoulders, beers halted in mid-route. They waited, breathless. The women turned, the men smiled, the poles danced on.
Anyway, the navigation trick was to find the space where one could easily walk along the hardened surface of packed wet sand far enough from the water to avoid the lines, but close enough to the water to find interesting, well, stuff. I couldn't look down, though, because I had to walk in such a zig zag path that I got a little dizzy. (No, this was something beyond my normal state.) Finally I gave up, moving to the dry sand, which was far harder for me. Pulling each leg up, loaded with sand at every step very soon caused throbbing pain. Still that beat slicing an eye or worse.
I saw a dune and driftwood log and made for it. At this point, I realized the cane was slowing me down, so I pretended it was a baton and I was performing in the circus, and only dropped it four times. When I reached safety, with my accustomed grace, I fell more than sat down. "Ladies and gentleman," I said to my adoring crowd, undoubtedly moved by my twirling, "with grace, she moves. Nay, verily like a doe doth she walk in the world."
OMG, a Family of Living Elves!
Unfortunately, a laugh from behind some scrub disturbed my soliloquy, and a small curly-headed gnome was giggling at me. I bowed to him and he scampered off toward the protected side of the dune. Through the brush was a family on which I could spy so easily, it was sinful. A dad, my 3 or 4-year-old sprite, and another little boy about my internal age--six or seven at most--were getting up from what looked like a feast. Both looked more like Garth Williams' illustrations than real boys, and, since nothing so far that day had felt much like my real life, that seemed just about right.
Dad wore khaki knee-length pants and a tank top, with wide apart blue eyes on a face that was crowned with unruly, curly light hair. The boys had bright colored, droopy bathing trunks and the same hair. So far, so good. They had piled together the remains of the major food groups: fried chicken, potato salad, chips, cookies, cake, pie, soda, and--what was that? There among the plastic ruins: one Blue Willow china plate, precisely crossed with pistol-handled pewter knife and fork, one cobalt crystal wine glass, a folded sea blue cloth napkin and a silver bucket with a wine bottle in it.
They clearly belonged to Grandma: knee-length skirt, a long-sleeved white blouse with a peter pan color fastened at the neck with some sort of shiny pin. She was barefoot and turned before I quite saw her face, but she, too, had short curls that could not and would not be tidied into submission. Wild curls seemed an oxymoron on her. Dad was on his cell phone. Grandma was smoothing her blouse and patting herself as she started to clean up, occasionally seeming to yank her curls into submission. It did not work. The china and curls said Queen of the Fairies, but the clothes? Aha. 'Incognito,' I thought.
The thing about Jersey so far that sang to me, that sang clear down deep in my soul, was that exaggeration was redundant here. The place was one walking, talking, lounging whopper of a fish story wherever I rested.
Sandy Hook Whiffle World Series Champion
"Grandma, let's play ball! C'mon Grandma, I won't pitch hard. PLLLLEEEEASE." The older elf had the family mass of honey hair that stuck out at all angles like new wood shavings, with one long bit he was perpetually swiping at. Dad snapped the phone, sat back on his heels, and smirked at his mother.
"Yeah, Mom. Show them how it's done," he said as the smirk widened into an outright grin. Suddenly he must have seen me watching and he kind of jerked his head as if to include me in on the joke. I simply smiled, relieved to be accepted, but at this point it would have been moot. I'd come to this theater and dammit, I was gonna see my show!
"Now, Daniel, I have not played ball since I was a child. I don't remember how." Grandma looked down, but she was facing me now and I'm sure her mouth was turned up at the corners. Her hair suddenly seemed to loosen and grow a bit. It had to be a fairy was lurking behind those buttoned down clothes. It showed in the curled toes. Perhaps I am mistaken; she was not that close.
"I'll show you how," the older one said. "And we won't keep score. Tommy can be the base. Tommy go over there with your shovel and pail so Grandma will know where to run."
"Kay, Danny. I do that. Run to me, Gamma, okay? I have to dig now." And that was almost all we heard from Tommy. He squatted there with his pail and shovel, face focused and body contorted as only a small child can manage. I think he'd found a shell, or perhaps a magic stone.
Danny got an enormous bright red bat and electric blue whiffle ball from a beach bag the size of Milwaukee. "Okay, now watch me, Grandma. You hold the bat like this and then you swing like this and hit the ball." He was so serious, he almost had a little scowl as he tossed the ball up and swung. He missed the first few times, but then connected. Unconcerned he said, "See? Just like that."
Grandma smiled and nodded. She untucked her blouse and practically glided toward the "playing field," rolling up her sleeves. She shook her head once and the curls grew some more ... I felt myself sitting forward on my log, and I gripped the straight up stub of a branch beside me.
"Okay, so I won't stand too far away so you can hit the ball," Danny said, and moved perhaps two feet from his grandmother.
"Young man, I will hit YOU with the bat, instead of the ball and I do not think you'd care for that. I might hit YOU clear over the dune," she said, as serious as he. I liked her. I think I liked her a lot. The boys and their dad were clearly in the family of elves with those eyes, so my guess had to be right. This explained the clothes. She had to pass. I wondered at the strain it must have been. She was curiously at home with a bat.
Daniel danced as he backed up, yelling, "Grandma, COME ON."
"The more you yell, the slower I get, so you might as well stop, dear." Something in her voice ... He stopped. Immediately.
She stepped to the sea turtle plate, gently tapped it three times, and she and that bat were one. 'Uh-oh,' I thought. 'Danny, Danny, Danny.'
"Strike one, Grandma," he said. "It's okay. Just keep trying."
I glanced at her son and he was leaning back, smiling broadly. Tommy looked up a moment, but she wasn't running yet, and went back to his shovel, humming tunelessly, but very loud.
After strike two, I held my breath, but no. She gave the ball a tiny tap and trotted -- yes, trotted is the ONLY word -- toward first base. Danny tagged her out. "Too bad, Grandma. Maybe next time."
He quickly struck out.
When Grandma had her next at bat, she smiled as sweetly as could be. I thought of that poem from childhood, "How doth the little crocodile" ... was that how it started? ... But it ended with " and welcomes little fishes in with gently smiling jaws." She motioned for Danny to move away, but instead he wound up like a pitcher. "Watch THIS one Grandma, then I'll pitch it nice to you, I promise."
Oh, how Grandma connected. Danny ducked as the ball shot past his ear and it was still headed up when it flew far above Tommy's head. The wind caught it and it danced wildly in the air a moment before the downward arc. I clapped. I cheered. I couldn't help it. She turned once toward me, eyes crinkling at the corners, as wide apart as the rest, and gave a slight nod.
Dad was laughing as he went after the ball, Tommy jumped up and down and then ran in circles, Danny stood sort of clueless with lower lip beginning to grow, and Grandma?
She simply trotted to Tommy, picked him up and kissed him, whirling him around a few times, then trotted back toward turtle home, giving it a little kick with her toe, long before Dad came back. She began to readjust her collar, then stopped, and she left her hair alone. She smiled broadly and opened her arms toward Danny.
He still seemed caught between his ego and pride in his grandma, on the verge of a dramatic pout. His dad pat him on the head as he passed with the ball, and said, "Most valuable player, girls' softball, 1950-1954. Danny, she had a 310 batting average. Your grandma is a star, kid."
The boy wheeled and glared at his grandma. "YOU CHEATED Grandma! You really cheated!"
"Yup" was all she said, smiling still. Then she shrugged and turned to saunter back to the picnic ruins, when Danny ran and threw his arms around her waist from behind, burying his face in her back.
I know my cues; I picked up my stuff and moved on.You can safely spy on the Queen of the Fairies just so long ...
Pictures of Dirt
The fishing lines ended about five minutes further down the beach. I headed toward wet sand, and began to notice bits of interesting things that had been dragged in by the tide which was now receding. Without the poles I could look down, and I came on a formation that intrigued me and I started to snap pictures from every direction.
I loved the patterns in the sand that something else had made, and that lone stone in the middle. I walked all around trying to figure out how the tree pattern had been made when, not too far away, I heard it.
"Bernie. Bernie! Whaddyou think that woman is doing? Bernie, go ask her what she is doing. Bernie, do ya hear me? Guhwan! Ask her."
Now the Jersey accent's not quite Brooklyn, though it's close. "Ing" ends with a hard 'g.' And 'er' is pronounced almost, but not quite like 'ar.' It is harsh, and almost bursts from the mouth." All in all, it is an amalgamation of the most distinctive parts of a New York and Philadelphia twang that jars one into full alert.
I do not believe there is any other sound so harsh as a Jersey woman yelling.
I looked up and there they were, the antithesis of sprites. Sitting in their folding, webbed chairs. She was in a housecoat. The kind that have those metal snaps, short sleeves and are often in bold floral prints. For some reason, she had two pink rollers on the top of her head, with almost no hair left in them, so they sort of bounced in the breeze. (I bet she also had a bathing cap that had all those little colored bits of rubber sticking out on the top. You know, the kind that flutter with every move and are especially disconcerting in a pool aerobics class.) She also was wearing fuzzy pink mules, not sandals or flip flops. Her hair was bottle-black, which made her skin seem gray. I have no idea how old she was--somewhere between 55 and 93, I'd say.
Bernie was built like a bull. Sitting there, he seemed about as wide as he was tall, from the waist up. He had a very tan, very large and hard belly covered with gray fur, and his head was sort of a tanned bowling ball atop a neck that had tan lines in the creases. He was gripping a beer that was on his left knee. There was some sort of grayish lawn sparsely distributed on his head, with An Oscar the Grouch face--vaguely annoyed with bushy eyebrows that crossed his eyes in an unbroken line.
I tried not to stare because he was also wearing boxer shorts with large hearts that had faces on them. I tried. I really did try. I did not succeed. And I do believe my mouth was hanging open to boot.
"Miss!" he shouted, to appease his wife.
"Yes?" I jumped.
"Waddaya doin?" He did not move.
"I coulda done that, Bernie. Go talk to the woman, fergodsake."
"Shaddup, Gladys." Of COURSE it was Gladys. What else could it be? Gladys and Bernie go to the beach. I should have known. This was pre-reality shows, or I would have looked for a camera crew.
"I am taking pictures here. There is a beautiful formation in the sand," I said, somewhat lamely. I just knew the laughing heart shorts would stand up and...yup. He got up, first bracing a hand on each knee as he straightened. Standing, he still seemed about almost as wide as he was tall. His legs were bowed and he was wearing tennis sneakers with holes so large his big toes stuck out to the knuckle. And the shorts screamed at me. I could hear them. I looked down and away, but I could feel the giggle well up. I don't think he heard.
His sigh was audible from fifteen feet away. He lumbered to me and looked down.
"See how pretty that is?" I asked.
Bernie looked back up at me, his unibrow unevenly twisted. He was shorter than I. He glanced down again and up. "You a photographer or something?" Again with the hard 'g."
"Noooo... But I like taking interesting pictures, that's all." He looked down and up again, simply shrugged, Jersey style, bigger than life.
He grunted and turned toward his wife. "Gladys, she's taking pictures of dirt! She says they're interesting!" And his arms opened wide and he managed to shrug his entire body. I swear in Jersey, shrugging is a dance form of its own.
"Taking pictures of dirt?"
"Yeah, that's what she's doing. Taking pictures of dirt. Where you from anyway?"
"Connecticut."
"Oh. Well, then, that explains it. Gladys, she's from Connecticut! That's why!"
Gladys nodded, ducked her head as she raised an arm and with a flourish of the hand, said, "There you go!"
He plodded back up toward his chair, silent but with open arms, palms up. She was nodding. I was done.
Character Overload. (A little known, but somewhat scary syndrome. It involves an immediate need to rock back and forth while mumbling) Red Bank would have to wait. Debriefing time was needed. Besides that night David and I were heading for some place where it was wholly unlikely we'd run into any characters: a bar on open mike night, and he was in the back up band ...
Please note, once again, any photos are included for fun here--they are from various easily accessible websites I found from googling the kind of pictures I wanted. Except the patterns in the sand... those are mine. MINE I tell ya!
If you are new to my blog and have no clue what I'm talking about, and want to have a clue, see Runaway I , and Rnaway II. This is continuation of my two days ... (You may also find why I love traveling alone if you root around and find Deliverance I and II)
(And with this entry, I'll be on hiatus for a little while--and I do mean a little--to start a painting or two that have been haunting me for a week.)
Which Way Will She Wander?
Only there was also Sandy Hook. And it was a blustery, perfect day to walk another beach. Really. I mean, music store .... miniature Cape Cod. Food store ... marvelous sand bar formations. Gee. What won? And, of course, West Long Branch had offered such interesting characters, I felt as if I were on a roll. Sandy Hook it was.
The peninsula juts up quite a few miles toward the city. You can park the car to the right of the road, to stand and facet the ocean, then simply turn around to see the bay. Remains of WWII missile sites hide in among dunes so old that they were more pure white hills with alien dwarfed forests laced by pure white paths to guide the way. Unlike Cape Cod,Sandy Hook is too small for towns--there is just a military base at the tip. So for miles, all there was to see were bay, ocean, dunes and sky.
And living things, of course, including people.This time around, once again, the Jersey spirits had come out to play.
Barefoot Navigation...
It took perhaps ten minutes to get past the initial cluster of people. I do not move easily over dry sand. One little boy, perhaps ten, saw me lose my footing a little, cane notwithstanding, and offered me his arm, gentleman style. Just his open-faced smile steadied me. You know that kind of look they offer when the world has given them no reason to expect less in return? Well, I could not disappoint him and accepted his arm. When we reached packed sand, he bolted, barely saying good bye, as was right.
An obstacle course lay before me, however, that held potential for decapitation; unmanned fishing poles. The poles stood oh, between 8 and 47 feet tall, stuck deeply into the sand, with nearly invisible lines angling into the sea. When monsters of the deep pulled, they bent to their own tune, performing a beautiful, if dangerous dance--but only when the fish were running. The dance was wild today, but no one seemed to care but me.
Anyway, the navigation trick was to find the space where one could easily walk along the hardened surface of packed wet sand far enough from the water to avoid the lines, but close enough to the water to find interesting, well, stuff. I couldn't look down, though, because I had to walk in such a zig zag path that I got a little dizzy. (No, this was something beyond my normal state.) Finally I gave up, moving to the dry sand, which was far harder for me. Pulling each leg up, loaded with sand at every step very soon caused throbbing pain. Still that beat slicing an eye or worse.
I saw a dune and driftwood log and made for it. At this point, I realized the cane was slowing me down, so I pretended it was a baton and I was performing in the circus, and only dropped it four times. When I reached safety, with my accustomed grace, I fell more than sat down. "Ladies and gentleman," I said to my adoring crowd, undoubtedly moved by my twirling, "with grace, she moves. Nay, verily like a doe doth she walk in the world."
OMG, a Family of Living Elves!
Dad wore khaki knee-length pants and a tank top, with wide apart blue eyes on a face that was crowned with unruly, curly light hair. The boys had bright colored, droopy bathing trunks and the same hair. So far, so good. They had piled together the remains of the major food groups: fried chicken, potato salad, chips, cookies, cake, pie, soda, and--what was that? There among the plastic ruins: one Blue Willow china plate, precisely crossed with pistol-handled pewter knife and fork, one cobalt crystal wine glass, a folded sea blue cloth napkin and a silver bucket with a wine bottle in it.
They clearly belonged to Grandma: knee-length skirt, a long-sleeved white blouse with a peter pan color fastened at the neck with some sort of shiny pin. She was barefoot and turned before I quite saw her face, but she, too, had short curls that could not and would not be tidied into submission. Wild curls seemed an oxymoron on her. Dad was on his cell phone. Grandma was smoothing her blouse and patting herself as she started to clean up, occasionally seeming to yank her curls into submission. It did not work. The china and curls said Queen of the Fairies, but the clothes? Aha. 'Incognito,' I thought.
The thing about Jersey so far that sang to me, that sang clear down deep in my soul, was that exaggeration was redundant here. The place was one walking, talking, lounging whopper of a fish story wherever I rested.
Sandy Hook Whiffle World Series Champion
"Grandma, let's play ball! C'mon Grandma, I won't pitch hard. PLLLLEEEEASE." The older elf had the family mass of honey hair that stuck out at all angles like new wood shavings, with one long bit he was perpetually swiping at. Dad snapped the phone, sat back on his heels, and smirked at his mother.
"Yeah, Mom. Show them how it's done," he said as the smirk widened into an outright grin. Suddenly he must have seen me watching and he kind of jerked his head as if to include me in on the joke. I simply smiled, relieved to be accepted, but at this point it would have been moot. I'd come to this theater and dammit, I was gonna see my show!
"Now, Daniel, I have not played ball since I was a child. I don't remember how." Grandma looked down, but she was facing me now and I'm sure her mouth was turned up at the corners. Her hair suddenly seemed to loosen and grow a bit. It had to be a fairy was lurking behind those buttoned down clothes. It showed in the curled toes. Perhaps I am mistaken; she was not that close.
"I'll show you how," the older one said. "And we won't keep score. Tommy can be the base. Tommy go over there with your shovel and pail so Grandma will know where to run."
"Kay, Danny. I do that. Run to me, Gamma, okay? I have to dig now." And that was almost all we heard from Tommy. He squatted there with his pail and shovel, face focused and body contorted as only a small child can manage. I think he'd found a shell, or perhaps a magic stone.
Danny got an enormous bright red bat and electric blue whiffle ball from a beach bag the size of Milwaukee. "Okay, now watch me, Grandma. You hold the bat like this and then you swing like this and hit the ball." He was so serious, he almost had a little scowl as he tossed the ball up and swung. He missed the first few times, but then connected. Unconcerned he said, "See? Just like that."
Grandma smiled and nodded. She untucked her blouse and practically glided toward the "playing field," rolling up her sleeves. She shook her head once and the curls grew some more ... I felt myself sitting forward on my log, and I gripped the straight up stub of a branch beside me.
"Okay, so I won't stand too far away so you can hit the ball," Danny said, and moved perhaps two feet from his grandmother.
"Young man, I will hit YOU with the bat, instead of the ball and I do not think you'd care for that. I might hit YOU clear over the dune," she said, as serious as he. I liked her. I think I liked her a lot. The boys and their dad were clearly in the family of elves with those eyes, so my guess had to be right. This explained the clothes. She had to pass. I wondered at the strain it must have been. She was curiously at home with a bat.
Daniel danced as he backed up, yelling, "Grandma, COME ON."
She stepped to the sea turtle plate, gently tapped it three times, and she and that bat were one. 'Uh-oh,' I thought. 'Danny, Danny, Danny.'
"Strike one, Grandma," he said. "It's okay. Just keep trying."
I glanced at her son and he was leaning back, smiling broadly. Tommy looked up a moment, but she wasn't running yet, and went back to his shovel, humming tunelessly, but very loud.
After strike two, I held my breath, but no. She gave the ball a tiny tap and trotted -- yes, trotted is the ONLY word -- toward first base. Danny tagged her out. "Too bad, Grandma. Maybe next time."
He quickly struck out.
When Grandma had her next at bat, she smiled as sweetly as could be. I thought of that poem from childhood, "How doth the little crocodile" ... was that how it started? ... But it ended with " and welcomes little fishes in with gently smiling jaws." She motioned for Danny to move away, but instead he wound up like a pitcher. "Watch THIS one Grandma, then I'll pitch it nice to you, I promise."
Oh, how Grandma connected. Danny ducked as the ball shot past his ear and it was still headed up when it flew far above Tommy's head. The wind caught it and it danced wildly in the air a moment before the downward arc. I clapped. I cheered. I couldn't help it. She turned once toward me, eyes crinkling at the corners, as wide apart as the rest, and gave a slight nod.
Dad was laughing as he went after the ball, Tommy jumped up and down and then ran in circles, Danny stood sort of clueless with lower lip beginning to grow, and Grandma?
She simply trotted to Tommy, picked him up and kissed him, whirling him around a few times, then trotted back toward turtle home, giving it a little kick with her toe, long before Dad came back. She began to readjust her collar, then stopped, and she left her hair alone. She smiled broadly and opened her arms toward Danny.
He still seemed caught between his ego and pride in his grandma, on the verge of a dramatic pout. His dad pat him on the head as he passed with the ball, and said, "Most valuable player, girls' softball, 1950-1954. Danny, she had a 310 batting average. Your grandma is a star, kid."
The boy wheeled and glared at his grandma. "YOU CHEATED Grandma! You really cheated!"
"Yup" was all she said, smiling still. Then she shrugged and turned to saunter back to the picnic ruins, when Danny ran and threw his arms around her waist from behind, burying his face in her back.
I know my cues; I picked up my stuff and moved on.You can safely spy on the Queen of the Fairies just so long ...
Pictures of Dirt
I loved the patterns in the sand that something else had made, and that lone stone in the middle. I walked all around trying to figure out how the tree pattern had been made when, not too far away, I heard it.
"Bernie. Bernie! Whaddyou think that woman is doing? Bernie, go ask her what she is doing. Bernie, do ya hear me? Guhwan! Ask her."
Now the Jersey accent's not quite Brooklyn, though it's close. "Ing" ends with a hard 'g.' And 'er' is pronounced almost, but not quite like 'ar.' It is harsh, and almost bursts from the mouth." All in all, it is an amalgamation of the most distinctive parts of a New York and Philadelphia twang that jars one into full alert.
I do not believe there is any other sound so harsh as a Jersey woman yelling.
I looked up and there they were, the antithesis of sprites. Sitting in their folding, webbed chairs. She was in a housecoat. The kind that have those metal snaps, short sleeves and are often in bold floral prints. For some reason, she had two pink rollers on the top of her head, with almost no hair left in them, so they sort of bounced in the breeze. (I bet she also had a bathing cap that had all those little colored bits of rubber sticking out on the top. You know, the kind that flutter with every move and are especially disconcerting in a pool aerobics class.) She also was wearing fuzzy pink mules, not sandals or flip flops. Her hair was bottle-black, which made her skin seem gray. I have no idea how old she was--somewhere between 55 and 93, I'd say.
Bernie was built like a bull. Sitting there, he seemed about as wide as he was tall, from the waist up. He had a very tan, very large and hard belly covered with gray fur, and his head was sort of a tanned bowling ball atop a neck that had tan lines in the creases. He was gripping a beer that was on his left knee. There was some sort of grayish lawn sparsely distributed on his head, with An Oscar the Grouch face--vaguely annoyed with bushy eyebrows that crossed his eyes in an unbroken line.
I tried not to stare because he was also wearing boxer shorts with large hearts that had faces on them. I tried. I really did try. I did not succeed. And I do believe my mouth was hanging open to boot.
"Miss!" he shouted, to appease his wife.
"Yes?" I jumped.
"Waddaya doin?" He did not move.
"I coulda done that, Bernie. Go talk to the woman, fergodsake."
"Shaddup, Gladys." Of COURSE it was Gladys. What else could it be? Gladys and Bernie go to the beach. I should have known. This was pre-reality shows, or I would have looked for a camera crew.
"I am taking pictures here. There is a beautiful formation in the sand," I said, somewhat lamely. I just knew the laughing heart shorts would stand up and...yup. He got up, first bracing a hand on each knee as he straightened. Standing, he still seemed about almost as wide as he was tall. His legs were bowed and he was wearing tennis sneakers with holes so large his big toes stuck out to the knuckle. And the shorts screamed at me. I could hear them. I looked down and away, but I could feel the giggle well up. I don't think he heard.
His sigh was audible from fifteen feet away. He lumbered to me and looked down.
"See how pretty that is?" I asked.
"Noooo... But I like taking interesting pictures, that's all." He looked down and up again, simply shrugged, Jersey style, bigger than life.
He grunted and turned toward his wife. "Gladys, she's taking pictures of dirt! She says they're interesting!" And his arms opened wide and he managed to shrug his entire body. I swear in Jersey, shrugging is a dance form of its own.
"Taking pictures of dirt?"
"Yeah, that's what she's doing. Taking pictures of dirt. Where you from anyway?"
"Connecticut."
"Oh. Well, then, that explains it. Gladys, she's from Connecticut! That's why!"
Gladys nodded, ducked her head as she raised an arm and with a flourish of the hand, said, "There you go!"
He plodded back up toward his chair, silent but with open arms, palms up. She was nodding. I was done.
Character Overload. (A little known, but somewhat scary syndrome. It involves an immediate need to rock back and forth while mumbling) Red Bank would have to wait. Debriefing time was needed. Besides that night David and I were heading for some place where it was wholly unlikely we'd run into any characters: a bar on open mike night, and he was in the back up band ...
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Why I am Done with Dating: How Fondue Changed My Life
I keep getting, every now and then, messages from friends that go something like this:
And once in a great while, I am simply lonely, until I remember how NOT alone I really am. Nevertheless what sticks with people are those few times I express the fear or loneliness, not the 98% of the time when I kinda LIKE being alone, and realize that when I want company, I have it with my friends.
Regardless, they try to "help" me. Furthermore, I did read an interesting piece in another blog about how it should not be put down if a woman treats finding a mate like any other dream, where she goes after it systematically and all out. After all, isn't this one of the most important things you would ever do with your life? Why would you think, especially after a certain age, that it will somehow come to you?
The thought of doing that makes me want to toss my cookies. Besides which, until Matt came back, men were entirely off my radar. I frankly had no interest or time to worry about dating, small talk, dealing with strangers because maybe I might want to live with one. Nope. The one reason I sometimes wish I'd never let him in the door is that it woke the woman up entirely and now she has nowhere to go. But the trade off still doesn't seem worth it.
Besides which, I have a mirror. I am not someone any man would go ga-ga over. He might grow not to care about the imperfections and over-abundance, if he found me funny, interesting, and smart; still, we'd have to get over that initial first impressions stuff. And, then, too, so would I.
But I find it interesting what these women think I will want. The men all love walks on the beach. Okay. I can't walk. One wants a fit woman who loves the outdoors. Yeah. Well. So much for that. I love the outdoors, but mostly I have to watch it from a porch or a window. Another guy--and I really love this--wants a woman between 45 and 55 "who enjoys long walks and has no baggage."
Long Walks and No Baggage Issues: Small Talk at 59
Let's look at that, shall we? I'm 59. Both friends who sent this particular guy to me, said, "Lie." Uh huh. "They all do that." Oh, goodie. This makes what really amounts to slicked up blind dating extra special. I then point out that if a woman that age has no "baggage" she's lived in a cave, in which case she most certainly does have baggage because she would have had to avoid living life! "Oh, you know what they meant."
Yeah. I do. Dear Readers, if you have read the last four entries in this blog, how on earth could I be a person without baggage? In my background we have alcoholism up the wazoo, and older brother who may or may not be alive but we do know was in prison for three years and has been gun runner and drug dealer, two suicides, sexual abuse, divorce, losing a child -- you name it. Something for EVERYONE in my life.
"So don't talk about it."
Okie doke. Piece of cake. That would presume I'm interested in casual dating or relatively casual sex. I'm not. I'm more interested in pursuing creativity than a man. But let's just look at that, in case I wanted to know someone. In case the fear of the future outweighed my faith that things will work out.
We have a first date and go out to dinner. He sees clearly that I don't look as good as the photo I may have put together for the online dating hoo-ha. But, then, neither does he. That's okay. We both get over that and laugh. But he also sees that, as we are walking to our table, I got the dragging one leg thing going for me and I keep having to straighten up because I tend to lean more and more forward as I walk. It's really pretty.
He's a good guy, though. We sit down. I quickly ask him the first question because, like, I don't want to, like, let him know who I actually am. And besides, I know that the strain of walking through the restaurant has brought beads of sweat to my forehead, and my eyes are kind of shot. Fortunately, all that disappears quickly, so I'm okay in a minute. He talks about his two grown kids and that he and his ex-wife are on speaking terms as long as they are not in the same room for more than an hour, with the kids and grandkids. I get him to keep talking for fifteen minutes, but, as I said, he's a good guy.
Long Walks
"So what about you? I noticed that you had some trouble walking there. Are you okay? How did you hurt yourself?"
I don't know how to field this. Do I minimize it and, well, lie, just so maybe I have a second date where I'll have to explain why I lied? Okay, you can just tell him about the back and be strong. "I had a lot of back surgery a long, long time ago, and now I have the problems that happen later in life. You know, some arthritis and nerve damage, but I'm working on it every day. I just have trouble walking is all."
Lame. The words sound so lame. He is quiet a minute and says, "Well why did you have all that surgery?"
"I fell down the stairs. Slipped on black ice." I've fielded this one before, when I didn't want to say that actually, I have had back trouble all my life, but I thought everyone did ... that it started when my brother used to push me down the stairs and then would go, "Mommy, Jetty fell!" Baggage. So I hope he does not pursue the back stuff.
"So.... how many back operations?" Oh, GOD no. So much for small talk there.
OR, he doesn't ask about the back. He really doesn't feel like he wants to know just yet about the limp. Already he is, in his head going, 'She's really overweight. She can't walk across a room, let alone on the beach. Well. She is kinda pretty anyway. She's funny, too. I'll ask her about her family. That's safe.'
Got Kids?
"You have any kids?"
Inside my heart hurts. My Jessie. My Jessie. And I know that this just is not a topic for a first date. But I cannot leave her out. She was my daughter. Okay, I have to be honest, because when people find out that she was my Stepdaughter, lots of times they get annoyed that I was not clear from the start Of course that always makes me really mad, because when I love someone, there is no step-ANYTHING. But do I lay this on someone now? There is no graceful...
"Hello...." he might say, little laugh. "I didn't want this to be a trick question."
I blurt, "I had two. I raised my ex-husbands two kids. I had a son and daughter." And there it is. That silence that I know so well, from a man or woman.
"I'm afraid to ask. Had?"
And there we go...
Let's try a third angle! Surely there is a safe area. Even if we start with books and movies and things like that, and it's okay. Somewhere in that conversation will come up family. And the second area of family questions is...
So. You have brothers and sisters?
"Do you have brothers or sisters?" "Are your parents still with us?" Things along that line. And somehow it will get to They are all dead. Granted, many have lost their parents by now, and possibly a sibling if they are the youngest. But most haven't lost them all. Most didn't lose both parents when they, the kids, were in their thirties. Most haven't had their siblings die and get the bonus of a gun-running, drug-running brother who has had two contracts on his head. It's dramatic, but my guess is it also qualifies as baggage.
Bottom line? There is no small talk for me, when it comes to my health or my family, that will not devolve by the third round of back and forth into baggage.
Baggage--We All Have Baggage, and Shouldn't We?
Maybe the guy has had a life full of baggage too. Well, of course, to some extent, and that's a good thing. I don't really want to date a man who is younger than 55 or older than 64. Why? Because, quite frankly, we wouldn't have some crucial sensibilities in common.
The teenage and college lives of most people I've met who are more than five or six years older than I are far more like people of the generation up to ten years older than like the kids who hit their teens in about 1962 - 1972, give or take. The Beatles. The Stones. Viet Nam. The Kennedy assassinations. Martin Luther King. No curfews in college. Wearing jeans in high school. Marijuana. Acid rock. Work shirts. Fraying your bell bottoms--not buying them that way. Ironing hair. Afros. "You look like Jesus." Post Elvis. Just after the height of the Detroit sound, and moving into folk rock and James Brown...
So many things like that, that were part of my sensibility. And a woman's being a little uncomfortable at the chivalry of past generations--I like simple courtesies. And I enjoy being pampered, but I also like to pamper. There is a feeling of condescension sometimes for me in chivalry, which puts me on edge. I don't like it when a man gets annoyed that, on a first date, I want it dutch. And far too often I have found, even when I was much, much younger, that we just had such different experiences that it's too hard to get through. I like the idea that there will be that generational shorthand that comes with generally shared experiences.
The point is that, my generation, like any, will have had baggage unless we have lived in a tree--a really boring tree at that. If some of it is shared already, where it's a given that we were award of protests, feminism, a guy's fear of the draft lottery, the way vets were mistreated when they came home, the rise of divorces, so MANY things--if we already know all of that, we can have more relaxed conversations.
And if a man does not want a woman with baggage, he ain't gonna want me. Period. And if he has none, I don't want him.
But do I want to learn and deal with a man's baggage from scratch, at our age?
That is a question my friends and I have been addressing now. And, for all the mess, and as short as his re-entry into my life was, I still miss Matt. I will always miss him somewhere inside, just as I did for thirty years. But it is not even near the end of the world. And even if I was out of balance for a time, I found it again.
But the thing was, I knew his baggage. I knew him. I knew his flaws, his strengths. I knew where he stumbles. I knew where he flies. And I already had intimacy there. And he remembered me when I was young and, well, yes, pretty darned good-looking. I remember him that way as well. It took half an hour and one kiss for me to simply see him young again. I really do not care about the years of living that changed his appearance. And he behaved at least as if he didn't care either, and the truth is, he knew my stuff, too. Our small talk lasted half an hour and we were in synch again. And I allowed myself to be that vulnerable, inappropriately, because I knew him, because it was so very easy, so very quickly.
The truth is I do not want to try to get to that place with someone new. I don't care enough about having a man as my companion to bother. I prefer the company of women. The male/female intimacy and that sense that I was fully safe for all time, that I had with Matt... hey. I kissed a multitude of frogs before and after him, and they just didn't fit. Had I stumbled across someone back then, within a few years of my divorce, before another twenty years of living, failed relationships, serious health issues, and profound losses? SURE. It might have been fine, even though different.
NOT NOW. I am at a different point, a different beginning now.
But why is it that some women and men, for that matter, refuse to believe? Why must people tell me that somewhere out there is just the man for me? Well, yeah. there is. But he is not available and no one will know me as well as he. It's done. There is not time. I have too much to do with the time I have left to devote dinners to small talk. It's time for my personal, artistic soul to fly and do whatever dance it may. Solo. Why won't people understand that? Must we be coupled to be happy? No. Any rational answer is "no." Love comes in friendships, too. As do companionship and support.
The final straw was when one of my friends sent a match.com picture where the guy was a born again, fundamentalist Christian who plays guitar and sings the gospel, and wants a good, traditional Christian woman to be his "help mate." I said, "You have known me for fifteen years now. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with this man's ad. He's far more straightforward than most, and I think that's great. HOWEVER, you know me. Let's see, fundamentalist Christian, wants a helpmate?? What on earth made you think he and I would have anything at all in common, and, frankly, that my meeting him would not be a waste of HIS time, let alone mine?"
"He plays the guitar."
Flash back to 1979: Up "Psycho" Theme
Which took me back to the only blind date I went on, right after Matt dumped me the first time, and I was 27 and had pretty much decided that being single made more sense than dealing with men. I'd lately been dumped by Matt... so I was being fixed up or encouraged to date anything that moved. It was the 70's as well: so for a time, I sort of "goed with the flow" anyway, despite what I felt inside. Yeah. I was 27. One of my best friends insisted I have a date with this guy, at her house. She even made the dinner. I figured, if this couple thought we might hit it off, well, hey. What the hell?
He was about thirty and sort of pasty colored, a bit heavy, which wasn't a particular problem except that it supported his comment of, "Nature is over-rated. I like being in a dark movie theater with a horror flick bigger than life, and a bag of popcorn. There's nothing like being so scared you pee your pants."
For some unknown reason, picturing him that way was not that big of a turn on. I told him I loved to hike--back then I was extremely strong and could walk just fine, despite the pain I often had--and preferred films that made me laugh, not scream. I kept it light and partly thought, maybe it was a joke and he was just trying to break the ice. An odd approach, perhaps, but after all, my friends knew me really well.
He leaned in toward me, "But really, EVERYONE should experience a good scare now and then, you know?"
Okay. My life. I looked at him and blinked twice. I smiled my best "YOU asshole" smile and said, "Life holds enough of those without going to look for them."
He leaned back and had one of those self-satisfied looks that sometimes evokes thoughts of violence in me. Forget about the movies. "You're one of those women with baggage, right? Man, why the hell would they stick me with you... Right. We're a great match."
"You are absolutely right, " I said."Well, this dates over. Let me give you a doggy bag to take home. You can eat it while you watch a movie." And I did, and he left.
When I asked the COUPLE why they had fixed me up with him, the husband said, "He's single?"
Tableware Trauma
Jean Ellen was having a friend over for dinner the next night, and persuaded me to join them because he had a friend visiting. Yeah. Well. Whatever. I said, "Okay, sure, but please do not consider it a date."
She said, "Well what would you call it then?"
"FINE. Call it a date. But it's tomorrow, and it it will be done with, and I really don't care." (Clearly, I was a very evolved, mature 27.)
I worked at a university library in the early days of Library of Congress electronic filing and inter library loan. I was part of the cataloguing department and a good part of my job involved computer research for the catalog librarian. We received a great many text books that had no official classification yet, and so we had to develop the call numbers and the correct research card classifications. It was as nerdy a job as one could have back then, which suited me. Besides which I got to meet an awful lot of faculty, and I could take free courses.
As turned out to be the case for every job I had outside of my freelance career, I was the ear of the director, and I was also in charge of developing and writing training materials for the department of which I was part. Mrs. C., my boss, was from Korea and was, by her own admission, old school. She was uncomfortable with other people's emotions and would inappropriately laugh with an old-fashioned machine gun rattle (Not as loud a sound as today's automatic weapons sounds) at people who were in pain, or who were emotionally distraught. She also had a habit of dragging me into the conference room to vent at the top of her lungs, forgetting the gap at the top of the walls, that allowed every sound to escape into the surrounding walls. And she would slip into a clichéd version of a Korean accent, forgetting her tenses, articles, and pronunciation. She would lose control, basically, because she trusted me.
Lucky me.
The date night was to be Wednesday. At work that day, Mrs. C. had begun to chastise me for some error on the research slips I had given her. We had enormous catalog books that weighed about 15 pounds each and were 30 inches tall by 12 inches wide. I had looked up the obscure composer's name, and then the various works this new book discussed, and created several citations for her, but they were not enough. When I balked at her, she screamed, as she dragged me into the conference room.
"You cannot take Criticism! Do you think I like it here? Don't you think I would like to work at exciting place? You do not belong here any more than I. You are Renaisssance woman, taking Spanish and French, writing poetry, singing, acting in plays, taking education courses. You do NOT BELONG HERE. Just like me!" It never ceased to amaze me that her tirade was almost always not about my bad work, but about feeling trapped. "I have son and husband and I am stuck here with this so SMALL JOB. I should be in New York. In California. Some place where I meet international people. And you should be too. You should go to school and get OUT OF HERE!"
But I transgress. What a shock.
I drove home that night knowing she was right. I was full of my own frustration, mostly because I could not figure out what I truly wanted. I thought that adult education was the direction I cared about--helping adults who wanted to climb up in the world to do it. But I knew this meant grad school, and a whole lot of work to figure out how to get there. I wanted to forget about it for a while, and just breathe first. It was in this frame of mind that I came home to find the entire kitchen a mass of sauce pans and smelling of hot peanut oil. Jean Ellen was in a nightgown, drenched from making I don't know what.
"We are having fondue. Beef fondue and I have made six sauces for us to dip in. The ice box cake is in the refrigerator. They will be here at 7 and I have to shower. Will you help me finish up?" It was only about 5:15, but it also was not my favorite thing to do when I walked in the door--clean dishes. The "boys" were coming at 7:30, also not my favorite time to start dinner. It was a work night. And she had to be out the door by 6:30 tomorrow herself. One night. Who cared?
Fondue. I think it's a waste of time, having to skewer some tiny bit of beef, hold it in boiling fat, then dipping it in a sauce. All those little dishes to spill, all that effort. It was "the thing" back then, so whatever. The guys came and were very nice, but something seemed odd. It was as if Norm and Ron had some shorthand language at all, and really, Norm was not the least bit datish toward me. None of that shyness or anything.
It occurred to me, when the three others were talking, that I might do better to put a couple of hunks of beef on the fork, thereby making the process more efficient. The only sauce I liked was teryaki anyway. I stuck an extra one on... cool.
Wait. Norm and Ron were talking about their place. Hold it. "You two live together?"
"Yeah, we've been dating for more than a year and Norm--"
"Jean Ellen? Why didn't you tell me?" I was kind of pissed. I would have been totally relaxed, but no. She insists it's date?
She looked down and said, "Well, I wasn't sure you'd say yes. I figured it had to be a date."
"YOU IDIOT" I said, and laughed, thinking, oh, GOOD, I could relax.
With which I stuck the third piece onto the fork as I laughed, but had to use a bit more force. Success! I skewered the meat and my left hand, both at once!
There I sat, facing my sister, who was at the end of the table. She went, "Oh, no! oh, no!"
I was looking down at the odd effect of a long fork, a few pieces of meat on it, jiggling back and forth.
Ron went, "Pull it out! Pull it out!"
Norm, next to me and unable to see, went, "What's wrong? What's wrong?"
I pulled it out, forgetting it is barbed. It made a peculiar sound and I felt ill. My hand was covered with a comingly of beef and Jeannette juice. I found myself thinking, "Thank God it's NOT a date."
When Norm realized what had happened, he put a gentle hand on my shoulder. "Jeannette, when was your last tetanus shot?"
"Huh?" (See, I was articulate, even back then.)
"Raw beef juice and metal? Shouldn't we get you to the ER?"
"Shit. Yeah, I guess so. But you guys can finish dinner first," I said, as the two blue spots on the front and back of my hand, straddling, YES, the middle finger, really began to let loose.
We went to the hospital. I went to the check in lady, hand bound and held UP the whole time and had to tell her, "I stuck a fondue fork through my hand."
She moved her eyes up, but not her head. "Really? I mean, really? You stuck a fork in your hand?"
"Yes. well. You see, I figured if I could get two pieces of beef on the thing, why not three? And I did, but I sort of got my hand, too."
"Uh huh. I see. So, clearly you pulled it out, but oh, yes. Well. This is a first. On the other hand," She looked up at me and smiled, "Last night I was here and you should have seen the man who had used the attachment to the Hoover Beats as It Sweeps Vacuum..."
I paused, but said most politely, "I think I am glad that I did not."
She smiled at me and ushered me into my cubicle. In what seemed like a second, an extremely handsome, oh, twelve-year-old-intern stuck his head between the incidents and asked in a revoltingly cheery voice, "Is this the forking incident?" and came in.
Inside I went, gay or straight, never again. NEVER. AGAIN. I don't care if it is a match sent from God, never again. "Yes."
"I see. Oh, my, look at how that finger is dipping. That's going to be a problem for you for a while, I am afraid. There looks to be some nerve damage. Oh. And it went all the way through. You were hungry?" And the thing is, though the corners of his mouth twitched, he did not crack a smile. And he didn't even look UP, the coward.
"Am I going to live? May I please just have my shot?"
When he gave that to me, he said, "Seriously, if you have to use your hands a lot for work tomorrow, you will have a problem possible. You may find you have a serious reaction in your right arm, since you haven't had one of these since childhood. You may not, but be prepared."
He bandaged the left hand so I could not really move my fingers, but, yes, the middle finger was not moving at all, and dipped below the others, which, when relaxed, curled. It remained straight. Lovely.
As I left, he said, "Really, Ms L., there are more effective ways to ingest your food than shooting it up," and his laugh was really a rather engaging one. I did not set foot in that hospital again for at least a decade, just in case.
Well. Picture the next morning, when I could move NEITHER hand well. My right arm throbbed, and my left hand as well. I had to call Mrs. C and tell her what happened. Let's just say the following day I had to show her both the wound, and the ER slip. She could not stop laughing all day, especially, when I went to wave good bye to a friend while I was writing something, and flipped her the finger, instead.
***
The night after I told Jessie and Jay this story, I asked her to set the table for dinner. I sat down and saw a spoon at my place. We were having pork shops. She smiled sweetly and said, "I love you, Jeannette. I don't want you to hurt yourself."
Eight years ago Jean Ellen and I had yard sale, to clear out junk. We laughed about the fondue set I was tagging. Well, let me warn you about something. My four friends who "helped" us are my witnesses. We put out one set, with the original avocado green lettering. When the sale was over, there were three sets.
They reproduce. (Up Psycho music once more...)
I was just skimming through xyz online mate hunting [that's what I call it] and I "happened" to look at Connecticut in your area and I found these guys.After which I am sent the pictures and bios of one to three guys that they think I might be interested in. Up until the reappearance of 'Matt' into my life, this happened every couple of months, from probably four women. Since then it is far less often, but I happened to mention that as I age, I realize sometimes I do get scared. I have cash and I am very frugal, so it will last me at least four years right where I am living now. But I am 59, not 85. When the demons bite deep, well, I get scared. Two other women and I frequently remind one another that we will find a way to hook up and join forces, but a lot can happen in four years.
And once in a great while, I am simply lonely, until I remember how NOT alone I really am. Nevertheless what sticks with people are those few times I express the fear or loneliness, not the 98% of the time when I kinda LIKE being alone, and realize that when I want company, I have it with my friends.
Regardless, they try to "help" me. Furthermore, I did read an interesting piece in another blog about how it should not be put down if a woman treats finding a mate like any other dream, where she goes after it systematically and all out. After all, isn't this one of the most important things you would ever do with your life? Why would you think, especially after a certain age, that it will somehow come to you?
Besides which, I have a mirror. I am not someone any man would go ga-ga over. He might grow not to care about the imperfections and over-abundance, if he found me funny, interesting, and smart; still, we'd have to get over that initial first impressions stuff. And, then, too, so would I.
But I find it interesting what these women think I will want. The men all love walks on the beach. Okay. I can't walk. One wants a fit woman who loves the outdoors. Yeah. Well. So much for that. I love the outdoors, but mostly I have to watch it from a porch or a window. Another guy--and I really love this--wants a woman between 45 and 55 "who enjoys long walks and has no baggage."
Long Walks and No Baggage Issues: Small Talk at 59
Let's look at that, shall we? I'm 59. Both friends who sent this particular guy to me, said, "Lie." Uh huh. "They all do that." Oh, goodie. This makes what really amounts to slicked up blind dating extra special. I then point out that if a woman that age has no "baggage" she's lived in a cave, in which case she most certainly does have baggage because she would have had to avoid living life! "Oh, you know what they meant."
Yeah. I do. Dear Readers, if you have read the last four entries in this blog, how on earth could I be a person without baggage? In my background we have alcoholism up the wazoo, and older brother who may or may not be alive but we do know was in prison for three years and has been gun runner and drug dealer, two suicides, sexual abuse, divorce, losing a child -- you name it. Something for EVERYONE in my life.
"So don't talk about it."
Okie doke. Piece of cake. That would presume I'm interested in casual dating or relatively casual sex. I'm not. I'm more interested in pursuing creativity than a man. But let's just look at that, in case I wanted to know someone. In case the fear of the future outweighed my faith that things will work out.
We have a first date and go out to dinner. He sees clearly that I don't look as good as the photo I may have put together for the online dating hoo-ha. But, then, neither does he. That's okay. We both get over that and laugh. But he also sees that, as we are walking to our table, I got the dragging one leg thing going for me and I keep having to straighten up because I tend to lean more and more forward as I walk. It's really pretty.
He's a good guy, though. We sit down. I quickly ask him the first question because, like, I don't want to, like, let him know who I actually am. And besides, I know that the strain of walking through the restaurant has brought beads of sweat to my forehead, and my eyes are kind of shot. Fortunately, all that disappears quickly, so I'm okay in a minute. He talks about his two grown kids and that he and his ex-wife are on speaking terms as long as they are not in the same room for more than an hour, with the kids and grandkids. I get him to keep talking for fifteen minutes, but, as I said, he's a good guy.
Long Walks
"So what about you? I noticed that you had some trouble walking there. Are you okay? How did you hurt yourself?"
Lame. The words sound so lame. He is quiet a minute and says, "Well why did you have all that surgery?"
"I fell down the stairs. Slipped on black ice." I've fielded this one before, when I didn't want to say that actually, I have had back trouble all my life, but I thought everyone did ... that it started when my brother used to push me down the stairs and then would go, "Mommy, Jetty fell!" Baggage. So I hope he does not pursue the back stuff.
"So.... how many back operations?" Oh, GOD no. So much for small talk there.
OR, he doesn't ask about the back. He really doesn't feel like he wants to know just yet about the limp. Already he is, in his head going, 'She's really overweight. She can't walk across a room, let alone on the beach. Well. She is kinda pretty anyway. She's funny, too. I'll ask her about her family. That's safe.'
Got Kids?
"You have any kids?"
Inside my heart hurts. My Jessie. My Jessie. And I know that this just is not a topic for a first date. But I cannot leave her out. She was my daughter. Okay, I have to be honest, because when people find out that she was my Stepdaughter, lots of times they get annoyed that I was not clear from the start Of course that always makes me really mad, because when I love someone, there is no step-ANYTHING. But do I lay this on someone now? There is no graceful...
"Hello...." he might say, little laugh. "I didn't want this to be a trick question."
I blurt, "I had two. I raised my ex-husbands two kids. I had a son and daughter." And there it is. That silence that I know so well, from a man or woman.
"I'm afraid to ask. Had?"
And there we go...
Let's try a third angle! Surely there is a safe area. Even if we start with books and movies and things like that, and it's okay. Somewhere in that conversation will come up family. And the second area of family questions is...
So. You have brothers and sisters?
"Do you have brothers or sisters?" "Are your parents still with us?" Things along that line. And somehow it will get to They are all dead. Granted, many have lost their parents by now, and possibly a sibling if they are the youngest. But most haven't lost them all. Most didn't lose both parents when they, the kids, were in their thirties. Most haven't had their siblings die and get the bonus of a gun-running, drug-running brother who has had two contracts on his head. It's dramatic, but my guess is it also qualifies as baggage.
Bottom line? There is no small talk for me, when it comes to my health or my family, that will not devolve by the third round of back and forth into baggage.
Baggage--We All Have Baggage, and Shouldn't We?
Maybe the guy has had a life full of baggage too. Well, of course, to some extent, and that's a good thing. I don't really want to date a man who is younger than 55 or older than 64. Why? Because, quite frankly, we wouldn't have some crucial sensibilities in common.
So many things like that, that were part of my sensibility. And a woman's being a little uncomfortable at the chivalry of past generations--I like simple courtesies. And I enjoy being pampered, but I also like to pamper. There is a feeling of condescension sometimes for me in chivalry, which puts me on edge. I don't like it when a man gets annoyed that, on a first date, I want it dutch. And far too often I have found, even when I was much, much younger, that we just had such different experiences that it's too hard to get through. I like the idea that there will be that generational shorthand that comes with generally shared experiences.
The point is that, my generation, like any, will have had baggage unless we have lived in a tree--a really boring tree at that. If some of it is shared already, where it's a given that we were award of protests, feminism, a guy's fear of the draft lottery, the way vets were mistreated when they came home, the rise of divorces, so MANY things--if we already know all of that, we can have more relaxed conversations.
And if a man does not want a woman with baggage, he ain't gonna want me. Period. And if he has none, I don't want him.
But do I want to learn and deal with a man's baggage from scratch, at our age?
That is a question my friends and I have been addressing now. And, for all the mess, and as short as his re-entry into my life was, I still miss Matt. I will always miss him somewhere inside, just as I did for thirty years. But it is not even near the end of the world. And even if I was out of balance for a time, I found it again.
But the thing was, I knew his baggage. I knew him. I knew his flaws, his strengths. I knew where he stumbles. I knew where he flies. And I already had intimacy there. And he remembered me when I was young and, well, yes, pretty darned good-looking. I remember him that way as well. It took half an hour and one kiss for me to simply see him young again. I really do not care about the years of living that changed his appearance. And he behaved at least as if he didn't care either, and the truth is, he knew my stuff, too. Our small talk lasted half an hour and we were in synch again. And I allowed myself to be that vulnerable, inappropriately, because I knew him, because it was so very easy, so very quickly.
The truth is I do not want to try to get to that place with someone new. I don't care enough about having a man as my companion to bother. I prefer the company of women. The male/female intimacy and that sense that I was fully safe for all time, that I had with Matt... hey. I kissed a multitude of frogs before and after him, and they just didn't fit. Had I stumbled across someone back then, within a few years of my divorce, before another twenty years of living, failed relationships, serious health issues, and profound losses? SURE. It might have been fine, even though different.
NOT NOW. I am at a different point, a different beginning now.
But why is it that some women and men, for that matter, refuse to believe? Why must people tell me that somewhere out there is just the man for me? Well, yeah. there is. But he is not available and no one will know me as well as he. It's done. There is not time. I have too much to do with the time I have left to devote dinners to small talk. It's time for my personal, artistic soul to fly and do whatever dance it may. Solo. Why won't people understand that? Must we be coupled to be happy? No. Any rational answer is "no." Love comes in friendships, too. As do companionship and support.
The final straw was when one of my friends sent a match.com picture where the guy was a born again, fundamentalist Christian who plays guitar and sings the gospel, and wants a good, traditional Christian woman to be his "help mate." I said, "You have known me for fifteen years now. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with this man's ad. He's far more straightforward than most, and I think that's great. HOWEVER, you know me. Let's see, fundamentalist Christian, wants a helpmate?? What on earth made you think he and I would have anything at all in common, and, frankly, that my meeting him would not be a waste of HIS time, let alone mine?"
"He plays the guitar."
Flash back to 1979: Up "Psycho" Theme
Which took me back to the only blind date I went on, right after Matt dumped me the first time, and I was 27 and had pretty much decided that being single made more sense than dealing with men. I'd lately been dumped by Matt... so I was being fixed up or encouraged to date anything that moved. It was the 70's as well: so for a time, I sort of "goed with the flow" anyway, despite what I felt inside. Yeah. I was 27. One of my best friends insisted I have a date with this guy, at her house. She even made the dinner. I figured, if this couple thought we might hit it off, well, hey. What the hell?
For some unknown reason, picturing him that way was not that big of a turn on. I told him I loved to hike--back then I was extremely strong and could walk just fine, despite the pain I often had--and preferred films that made me laugh, not scream. I kept it light and partly thought, maybe it was a joke and he was just trying to break the ice. An odd approach, perhaps, but after all, my friends knew me really well.
He leaned in toward me, "But really, EVERYONE should experience a good scare now and then, you know?"
Okay. My life. I looked at him and blinked twice. I smiled my best "YOU asshole" smile and said, "Life holds enough of those without going to look for them."
He leaned back and had one of those self-satisfied looks that sometimes evokes thoughts of violence in me. Forget about the movies. "You're one of those women with baggage, right? Man, why the hell would they stick me with you... Right. We're a great match."
"You are absolutely right, " I said."Well, this dates over. Let me give you a doggy bag to take home. You can eat it while you watch a movie." And I did, and he left.
When I asked the COUPLE why they had fixed me up with him, the husband said, "He's single?"
Tableware Trauma
Jean Ellen was having a friend over for dinner the next night, and persuaded me to join them because he had a friend visiting. Yeah. Well. Whatever. I said, "Okay, sure, but please do not consider it a date."
She said, "Well what would you call it then?"
"FINE. Call it a date. But it's tomorrow, and it it will be done with, and I really don't care." (Clearly, I was a very evolved, mature 27.)
I worked at a university library in the early days of Library of Congress electronic filing and inter library loan. I was part of the cataloguing department and a good part of my job involved computer research for the catalog librarian. We received a great many text books that had no official classification yet, and so we had to develop the call numbers and the correct research card classifications. It was as nerdy a job as one could have back then, which suited me. Besides which I got to meet an awful lot of faculty, and I could take free courses.
As turned out to be the case for every job I had outside of my freelance career, I was the ear of the director, and I was also in charge of developing and writing training materials for the department of which I was part. Mrs. C., my boss, was from Korea and was, by her own admission, old school. She was uncomfortable with other people's emotions and would inappropriately laugh with an old-fashioned machine gun rattle (Not as loud a sound as today's automatic weapons sounds) at people who were in pain, or who were emotionally distraught. She also had a habit of dragging me into the conference room to vent at the top of her lungs, forgetting the gap at the top of the walls, that allowed every sound to escape into the surrounding walls. And she would slip into a clichéd version of a Korean accent, forgetting her tenses, articles, and pronunciation. She would lose control, basically, because she trusted me.
Lucky me.
The date night was to be Wednesday. At work that day, Mrs. C. had begun to chastise me for some error on the research slips I had given her. We had enormous catalog books that weighed about 15 pounds each and were 30 inches tall by 12 inches wide. I had looked up the obscure composer's name, and then the various works this new book discussed, and created several citations for her, but they were not enough. When I balked at her, she screamed, as she dragged me into the conference room.
"You cannot take Criticism! Do you think I like it here? Don't you think I would like to work at exciting place? You do not belong here any more than I. You are Renaisssance woman, taking Spanish and French, writing poetry, singing, acting in plays, taking education courses. You do NOT BELONG HERE. Just like me!" It never ceased to amaze me that her tirade was almost always not about my bad work, but about feeling trapped. "I have son and husband and I am stuck here with this so SMALL JOB. I should be in New York. In California. Some place where I meet international people. And you should be too. You should go to school and get OUT OF HERE!"
But I transgress. What a shock.
I drove home that night knowing she was right. I was full of my own frustration, mostly because I could not figure out what I truly wanted. I thought that adult education was the direction I cared about--helping adults who wanted to climb up in the world to do it. But I knew this meant grad school, and a whole lot of work to figure out how to get there. I wanted to forget about it for a while, and just breathe first. It was in this frame of mind that I came home to find the entire kitchen a mass of sauce pans and smelling of hot peanut oil. Jean Ellen was in a nightgown, drenched from making I don't know what.
"We are having fondue. Beef fondue and I have made six sauces for us to dip in. The ice box cake is in the refrigerator. They will be here at 7 and I have to shower. Will you help me finish up?" It was only about 5:15, but it also was not my favorite thing to do when I walked in the door--clean dishes. The "boys" were coming at 7:30, also not my favorite time to start dinner. It was a work night. And she had to be out the door by 6:30 tomorrow herself. One night. Who cared?
It occurred to me, when the three others were talking, that I might do better to put a couple of hunks of beef on the fork, thereby making the process more efficient. The only sauce I liked was teryaki anyway. I stuck an extra one on... cool.
Wait. Norm and Ron were talking about their place. Hold it. "You two live together?"
"Yeah, we've been dating for more than a year and Norm--"
"Jean Ellen? Why didn't you tell me?" I was kind of pissed. I would have been totally relaxed, but no. She insists it's date?
She looked down and said, "Well, I wasn't sure you'd say yes. I figured it had to be a date."
"YOU IDIOT" I said, and laughed, thinking, oh, GOOD, I could relax.
With which I stuck the third piece onto the fork as I laughed, but had to use a bit more force. Success! I skewered the meat and my left hand, both at once!
There I sat, facing my sister, who was at the end of the table. She went, "Oh, no! oh, no!"
I was looking down at the odd effect of a long fork, a few pieces of meat on it, jiggling back and forth.
Ron went, "Pull it out! Pull it out!"
Norm, next to me and unable to see, went, "What's wrong? What's wrong?"
I pulled it out, forgetting it is barbed. It made a peculiar sound and I felt ill. My hand was covered with a comingly of beef and Jeannette juice. I found myself thinking, "Thank God it's NOT a date."
When Norm realized what had happened, he put a gentle hand on my shoulder. "Jeannette, when was your last tetanus shot?"
"Huh?" (See, I was articulate, even back then.)
"Raw beef juice and metal? Shouldn't we get you to the ER?"
"Shit. Yeah, I guess so. But you guys can finish dinner first," I said, as the two blue spots on the front and back of my hand, straddling, YES, the middle finger, really began to let loose.
We went to the hospital. I went to the check in lady, hand bound and held UP the whole time and had to tell her, "I stuck a fondue fork through my hand."
She moved her eyes up, but not her head. "Really? I mean, really? You stuck a fork in your hand?"
"Yes. well. You see, I figured if I could get two pieces of beef on the thing, why not three? And I did, but I sort of got my hand, too."
"Uh huh. I see. So, clearly you pulled it out, but oh, yes. Well. This is a first. On the other hand," She looked up at me and smiled, "Last night I was here and you should have seen the man who had used the attachment to the Hoover Beats as It Sweeps Vacuum..."
I paused, but said most politely, "I think I am glad that I did not."
She smiled at me and ushered me into my cubicle. In what seemed like a second, an extremely handsome, oh, twelve-year-old-intern stuck his head between the incidents and asked in a revoltingly cheery voice, "Is this the forking incident?" and came in.
Inside I went, gay or straight, never again. NEVER. AGAIN. I don't care if it is a match sent from God, never again. "Yes."
"I see. Oh, my, look at how that finger is dipping. That's going to be a problem for you for a while, I am afraid. There looks to be some nerve damage. Oh. And it went all the way through. You were hungry?" And the thing is, though the corners of his mouth twitched, he did not crack a smile. And he didn't even look UP, the coward.
"Am I going to live? May I please just have my shot?"
When he gave that to me, he said, "Seriously, if you have to use your hands a lot for work tomorrow, you will have a problem possible. You may find you have a serious reaction in your right arm, since you haven't had one of these since childhood. You may not, but be prepared."
He bandaged the left hand so I could not really move my fingers, but, yes, the middle finger was not moving at all, and dipped below the others, which, when relaxed, curled. It remained straight. Lovely.
As I left, he said, "Really, Ms L., there are more effective ways to ingest your food than shooting it up," and his laugh was really a rather engaging one. I did not set foot in that hospital again for at least a decade, just in case.
Well. Picture the next morning, when I could move NEITHER hand well. My right arm throbbed, and my left hand as well. I had to call Mrs. C and tell her what happened. Let's just say the following day I had to show her both the wound, and the ER slip. She could not stop laughing all day, especially, when I went to wave good bye to a friend while I was writing something, and flipped her the finger, instead.
***
The night after I told Jessie and Jay this story, I asked her to set the table for dinner. I sat down and saw a spoon at my place. We were having pork shops. She smiled sweetly and said, "I love you, Jeannette. I don't want you to hurt yourself."
Eight years ago Jean Ellen and I had yard sale, to clear out junk. We laughed about the fondue set I was tagging. Well, let me warn you about something. My four friends who "helped" us are my witnesses. We put out one set, with the original avocado green lettering. When the sale was over, there were three sets.
They reproduce. (Up Psycho music once more...)
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