Exit Only
“Because once you depart from this one-way road of life, there is just no getting back on.”
Your Friends All Think You're Crazy
Speaking of how others see you, the low point of your relationship with your significant other has to be when he or she tells you that your friends all think you’re crazy. (And here's a pretty crazy person right here so thrilled at the idea of being away from her work station that she's blinded by smiling!) My sister Nan's onetime spouse said this very thing to her once and it immediately shot to the top of the list we keep of the all-time worst things one person can say to another person.But now I look at yesterday’s post about all I carry onto a plane and am compelled to wonder about my own sanity as a person who will only travel with her own food. Who must personally concoct all her own beverages. Who would not in ten million years eat the fruit from the salad bar.Does this mean I have trust issue then?( "What in OUR house?!" as Lady Macbeth says when it's discovered that the poor old king has been murdered even though she was the one who goaded Mac into killing the guy.)Could be, could be. That would certainly explain why I'm so uneasy as a passenger that I keep my foot jammed down on an imaginary brake. I do trust Old Dave behind the wheel which is surprising since the guy tailgates like you wouldn’t believe. And yet t he’s never had a mishap on the road, never gotten so much as a speeding ticket, galling fact, but there it is. He says he thinks it’s safer to ride close to the people in front of you somebody else doesn’t cut in and themselves cause an accident.I guess you can rationalize just about anything if you try hard enough. Doesn’t the White Queen tell little Alice that she has sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast?Maybe the main impossible thing I myself believe before breakfast is that I'm sunnily normal.But come on. Is anyone normal really? I mean why else did God put Lady Gaga here on earth to spread her Born This Way message?I could treat you to a dozen examples of the odd things I do but hey. I bet we all have a list of oddball secret things we do. You know there are people out there who save their toenail parings in ajar. You know there are people saving their bellybutton lint in case they want to spin it into wool some day and knit up a bunch of tiny sweaters.What’s fun is noticing the oddball things in yourself.Tell you one thing: it sure helps you keep from judging others.See this grand lady below with her nose in the air?
I can get behind the sitting with your drink and gazing around part but where’s the fun in judging what you hear people saying? I’m usually too busy smiling and shaking my head at the varieties we humans come in. That and guarding against any cut up fruit the bartender may try sticking in my drink.
How We Look to Others
The late Caroline Knapp wrote once that all her adult life she knew she seemed very ‘smooth and ordered’ on the outside but in fact was ‘roiling and chaotic' underneath, and boy did that ever strike a chord for me because I am told I seem pretty ‘smooth and ordered’ too.Once, when I brought a teen to look at a boarding school to which he was hoping to win a scholarship, the young woman who interviewed him asked to speak to me separately afterward. We chatted about things generally and about this young man too, and at the end she said, “I just feel as if I could talk to you all day! You’re so CALM!”She evidently couldn’t hear the yips and barks and funhouse shrieks going on inside me.
You just don’t know what the inner reality of another person is; that’s why you can never judge.Another interpretation of myself that I've sometimes been treated to involves the fact that I tend to walk around with a smile on my face.
“You’re always smiling at people! Why are you always SMILING?" near strangers have said to me in random settings.Out of the blue like that. Not during any kind of conservation. Just in this pointed, halfway-nasty way as if what they were really saying was, “How about I punch you in the face right now?”I've also noticed over the years that people who know you only a little often don’t like you that much, especially if you seem happy. It’s as if they think you stole their portion of happiness; that they could be a whole lot happier if YOU weren’t so darn happy.When I was as a high school teacher, students who knew me only from seeing me in the corridors sometimes disliked me. I know because they would tell me as much, after they had become my students. But by then they were in my class, and wrapped in that warm blanket of niceness, the one that all teachers are meant to wrap their pupils in, and their dark assessments had melted away.Here's one thing I know to be true: If I find someone hard to like, it's almost always because there's something about them I'm not quite ‘getting’ yet. I just need to pay closer attention and try to know them better.As to the always-smiling-at-people part, I smile that way because the aunt who raised me smiled that way - throughout a life that was far from easy. I used to love walking down the street just behind her, to see the effect she had on the people in her path. By the time she had passed them, they were smiling too.So you can roil all you want on the inside or be baffled or gibbering like a chimp and nobody will necessarily know it. That’s one more nice thing the sainted Fred Rogers told his television audience of little ones: Other people really CAN’T read your thoughts and thank Heaven for that!
What's Worse?
I’m home now from out west. I put in my five hours on a plane, my knees pressed against my chest and the tray table driving itself into my sternum.Flying is such a joy.I should admit that traveling knees in my mouth is my own choice, because I hate to have to use those overhead bins. People vie so for the space in the overhead bins and I’d just rather not do that if I can help it. All jockeying for position makes me uncomfortable. Not enough testosterone in the mix maybe.Plus what if you need something during the flight and it’s up there in the overhead bin? You then you have to stand up in front of that whole planeful of bored people who are going to WATCH as scraps of luncheon meat rain down on your head because you had them in your raincoat pocket after stopping to refuel your rental car where,realizing how hungry you were, you then bought a package of ham and tore open with your teeth so as to toss most of it down as you zoomed toward the airport and who needs that?It’s embarrassing to find yourself festooned in half-eaten foodstuffs, like our friend Oscar here.
( I remember that sales trip back from Ohio so vividly! All I needed was a banana peel on my head.)Anyway, so now I choose to travel right WITH everything I might need stuffed in my backpack.Which I then jam under the seat in front of me.Which is why my knees are up so high: my feet are resting on it.For this last trip I had craftily poured my coffee into Thermos Number One back in the terminal.I had done a similar thing with Thermos Number Two, filling it with the special brew of lemonade and mint tea I favor.PLUS, I carry my own food, natch. That day it was two boiled eggs and some black beans for the first snack; a small tub of cauliflower and salmon for the second. (I never do tire of the looks on my seatmates’ faces and when I pop the Tupperware tops and release the scent of these dishes into the air. :-) )So, I reasoned, I was all set. I would eat well and drink my drinks straight from the ‘jugs’ .Then all I figured I might need from the flight attendant was a nice cup of ice.She served it to me and 20 minutes later I knocked it over, letting icy water spill all over my lap, soak between my legs clear through to the seat of my pants.Whether or not it worse than wearing shreds of deli meats about my head and shoulders is hard to say but I can certainly attest that it was it was a WHOLE lot lot less comfortable.
Way to Go
This is Susan, who is really on the mend now with the drain out, and the eye no longer stitched shut, and, the doctor said, some ‘tone’ beginning to return to her face.She does her physical therapy religiously, though balancing on one foot with her eyes closed still makes her tip over.She’ll figure that out. She'll conquer that mountain, just like she conquered the one in this picture. (She’s a geologist: I think I never said that here.)Down below here is the sweet illustration that is displayed in their guest bathroom, where Kevin and Susan have it displayed, and where I admired it, every day I was out in that high desert with our 'patient.' (oh! Should say the details of this journey of Susan's start here and continue on..)
A good piece of advice, Goethe! It was good for Sooz, who has long since internalized its message, and good for us all.
Time and Patience
Kids are so frank. We were at the church where little Peter goes for day care. It's a very welcoming sort of place in spite of the posters showing Adam and Eve as white people with straight blow-dried hairdos.Now Peter is little; not two feet high, so it was faintly surprising to me see a eight-year-old named Connor hailed him.“Yo, PETE! High five!” he called and Peter offered his own version of that universal male salute before losing his balance and sitting down hard on the church hall rug."Hey HEY!" shouted Connor approvingly. Then his glance fell on Peter’s mom Susan, who bears the marks of the surgery that three weeks ago severed her 8th cranial nerve, ending her ability to hear ever again with her left ear.“You look kind of …weird,” the boy said.Thanks!” said Susan. “It’s the eye patch.""She looks a little like a pirate, right?" said I, going for a jaunty take on things."No but there’s more. Your mouth looks funny.”In fact that whole side of her face is still without feeling, the muscles still unable to draw the curtains of tissue up into a smile or down into a frown or anywhere at all really. Her right side is completely mobile so the contrast is marked."It’ll go back to normal soon. It’s just resting now after an operation she had.”That was me again. I say this ten times a day, sometimes to kind strangers so greet me here in the home of Mormonism and sometimes - many times - to myself. It’s a fact, the doctors say, and not a fond hope. It will go back to normal eventually: when Annie was here last week the doctors said all feeling and movement would return to that side of the face though it could take months. “Months!” Annie agonized in the email she wrote to to fill me in on things.I think we all feel as Annie felt when she typed that word: Anxious. Scared. Maybe even faintly outraged?If we do feel that way it’s because we are only laymen and have no real sense of the miracle is to be able to remove a tumor so rare that only ten people in a million are diagnosed with it each year. We have scant sense of the miracle it is to be able actually to sever the slender filament that is the 8th Cranial Nerve without doing damage to the surrounding circuitry - and THEN to see the beneficiary of the surgery sitting up and talking and even taking a step or two just hours after it.Laymen want miracles and instant results but Fate is schooling us all in patience.And so we can wait until her body heals and she can resume life as the same dark-eyed beauty she was on the day of her marriage to kind tender funny Kevin who wraps her in his arms many times a day here in the city of the Great Salt Lake and all through the night as well.
I guess patience is what we all need to pack in our daily knapsacks. Patience and a strong dose of gratitude for blessings received.I know I felt blessed yesterday when the woman behind me at the checkout in Wallgreens asked what brought me to Salt Lake City and heard the story and then asked for Susan’s name.“I will pray for her tonight” she said. She hugged me and I stumbled back to my car in the blinding high-desert sun, a wash of fresh tears brimming in my eyes.
The Work of Healing
My biggest job here in Salt Lake City has been to help with little Peter here, whose cheeks extend so far to the right and left of his head he practically needs a set of directionals to signal before he turns.I’ve noticed a few things in this fair city, limited as my movements have been:One thing I couldn't fail to pick up one is that my rental car's radio kept scooting right past the two NPR stations favor of stations of a more muscular God-based nature. I also noted that it's considered pious to save on water: I listened in awe as one announcer with an especially pulpit-y voice told listeners that though God was indeed happy to see you looking CLEAN, he would also like to see you re-use the bath towels, even share their use among family members. “Remember,” he intoned, “you use a towel after you wash yourself, not before.”Most of the rest of my experiences were right here in the home of our recovering patient where young Peter wakes cheerfully every morning, babbling for a while in his crib before having milk and a book in bed with his parents. Then he pads about taking his daily inventory of the whole household, especially the three pets, the serenely laconic feline team of Lucy and Elsie who regard all things with that lofty cat calm, and then this genial goodwill ambassador Bosco. ( Photo credit to 21-month-month-old Peter, who after snapping both pictures, let Bosco lick his face before then licking the whole front of my camera himself, lens and all.)
I have been responsible for the Pork and Black Beans night. the Steak with Peppers and Onions night, the Broiled Salmon night and the Scallops with Feta and Zucchini Pasta night. I haven’t done this much cooking since my first month of marriage.After supper I clear the table and do the dishes, then set to work assisting with the snacks, drinks and double lunch that Peter will take to daycare in the morning, I have brought him there come 8am, sometimes on my own and sometimes with his Mum or Dad while he yodels away in his little car seat, naming objects and creatures like Adam in the Garden.Meanwhile, the patient Susan, forgiven work until further notice, tends to her recovery.She and I put drops in her left eye, which still won’t close all the way, that whole side of her face being paralyzed and without feeling still. When her cornea on that side began to dry out they sewed it shut, poor lamb. By now the stitches are out but she wears a protective plastic patch.We also tend to the opening in her tummy where on Monday they inserted a kind of drinking straw that allows the slow exiting of blood mixed with the protein-rich white blood cells that being about her healing. When she does a mini-crunch a the doctors told her to do, this substance comes out quickly. this is pretty scary though so most of the time we just tape on the big gauze bandage and the liquid seeps slowly out. “Wicki-leaks” we call it.Meanwhile, up in her head where the tumor was, all is well. The 2.5 cc. acoustic neuroma is gone and so what of the hearing on her left side went with it along with her balance? Her right side will take over both functions if she keeps going out into the noisy world and letting it learn.We went to the movies yesterday to help that happen, the $1.50 matinee showing of Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, maybe not the best choice. When we walked in, the theater was totally empty which seemed pretty cool.
Then we came home again, I got back to work in the kitchen and she, Kevin and I once again gave ourselves over to the moist enveloping love of three pets and a baby.
Chapter 9,864, in which I (FINALLY) stop being such a baby
It’s hard for me to know sometimes what I’m supposed to be doing here: tell what I’ve been up to or just entertain the troops, so to speak. It’s the dilemma of all columnists-and-bloggers who write to delight a weary public.Anyway, I said the other day that I did some flying, which is how our learned about that we can no longer pack our snow globes in our carry-on bags, but I didn’t say where I was going or why.I also didn’t say that I was nervous about the trip and not really getting it about how you have to be AT the airport two hours before the flight. Old Dave was away and I kind of lost focus. Two hours before the flight was to go Wheels Up I was still watching my documentary about Annie Leibowitz and sewing the hem into a pair of drapes. I also forgot to call the cab company to GET to the airport until 10 minutes before I needed it to come fetch me.And then, trying to fix my hair, I burned my face in two places. Really burned it.I was nervous because I was unsure of my ability to fulfill my mission here in Salt Lake City and care for this girl who has been part of our extended family since the spring of 1990.Here are Annie and Susan back in high school, Annie in the Barnard T-shirt next to dark-eyed Sooz.)
About six months ago, Susan lost feeling in her face and began stumbling a bit at night, on her way to the bathroom, mostly, when the house was dark. It turns out she had an acoustic neuroma, a rare growth in her auditory canal that was pressing on some key cranial nerves . It didn't look like It was going do any shrinking and it was leaning uncomfortably close to the brain stem.She had surgery to remove it on July 25th. Her husband Kevin and her brother Gary were there in the hospital all that day and sent us all updates. (“Update: the ENT surgeon has finished making the opening in Sooz's skull and the neurosurgeon is now removing the tumor. SO far it's going well.") TWO surgeons! Six hours!)Once she was released five days post-op, a local friend came, then a college friend. Then Annie came for a week and I flew in the day Annie flew out. And another fleet of people will carry on when I leave, Susie’s dearest aunt, another college friend, Kevin’s parents… )Our work – and my work this week - has been to buy/cook the meals, play with the baby, do the laundry and help dress the surgical site. 'Sites' I should say: there are two since the surgeons needed to patch the opening they made in her head with a bit of fat from her belly. (They made in her head with some fat from her belly. (Free lipo!” she had joked on the phone, but she frankly has no fat at all in her belly or anywhere else either which is why her tummy is so sore: they had to really dig to find enough.I was nervous about how I would do all I needed to do with my problematic back and my thumbs that will no longer press down hard on the release of a carseat belt.I was nervous about being able to lift little Peter and cajole him into doing what we needed to do moment to moment. So nervous! – right up until I got here and saw what she was facing every day with swelling at the tummy and an eyelid that won’t close and a half a face that’s still not moving these three weeks later - at which point all nervousness ceased and I got down to work.It was a good lesson for me... and like all such lessons put me in my place, and reminded me that I myself am actually at the center of very few stories indeed.;
How We SEEM
The late Caroline Knapp wrote in her memoir Drinking: A Love Story that all her adult life she SEEMED very ‘smooth and ordered’ on the outside but in fact was ‘roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath.”Only 'not noticeably, never noticeably' she then added and these words struck me as so apt and oddly…. familiar they got me wondering how many others have felt just this way, maybe not the secretive part but the roiling-and-chaotic-on the-inside part.I know I myself seem pretty ‘smooth and ordered’ on the outside. Once, when I brought a young person to look at a boarding school to which he was hoping to win a scholarship, the woman who interviewed him asked to speak to me separately afterward. We chatted about things generally and about this remarkable young man as well, and at the end she said, “I just feel as if I could talk to you all day! You’re so CALM!”She evidently couldn’t hear the yips and barks and funhouse shrieks going on inside me.
You just don’t know what the inner reality of another person is; that’s why you can never judge.A second, related interpretation of myself that I have been treated to involves the fact that I tend to walk around with a smile on my face.“You’re always smiling at people! Why are you always smiling?" near strangers have said to me in random settings. Just out of the blue like that. Not during any kind of conservation. Just in this pointed, halfway-nasty way as if what they were REALLY saying was, “How about I punch you in the face right now?”Why do people come at each other this way? Are we hard-wired to harbor mistrust and judgment? Or is it that life here in Wild West America has brought out these qualities in us?I've also noticed over the years that people who know you only a little often don’t like you that much, especially if you seem happy. It’s as if they think you stole their portion of happiness; that they could be a whole lot happier if only YOU weren’t hoggin' all the happiness for yourself.When I was as a high school teacher, students who knew me only from seeing me in the corridors sometimes disliked me. I know because they would tell me as much, after they had become my students.But by then they were in my class, and wrapped in that warm blanket of niceness that all teachers are meant to wrap their pupils in, and their dark assessments had melted away.I've finally figured out one thing by now: If I find a person hard to like it is always, always because there is something about them that I am not quite understanding yet. I know I will feel differently if I can just get to know them better.As to the always-smiling-at-people part, I smile that way because my Aunt Grace smiled that way throughout a life that was far from easy.I used to love walking down the street behind her, to see the effect she had on the people in her path. Invariably, by the time she had passed them, they were smiling too.So you can roil all you want on the inside or be baffled or gibbering like a chimp and nobody will necessarily know it. That’s one more nice thing the sainted Fred Rogers told his television audience of little ones: Other people really CAN’T read your thoughts and thank God for that, because as I write this I’m three hours late for breakfast and all I can think is “bacon-bacon-bacon” and “coffee-coffee-coffee.”
News from the Airport
1.) The good news from the airport is, if you were born before 1937 you no longer have to take off your shoes and light coat! Victory for the over-75s!2.) The bad news is, you can’t carry your snow-globes home in your suitcase anymore. "Tough luck, people" the sign all but reads. Pack ‘em in your checked luggage and take your chances like the rest of us.. And speaking of taking your chances, I almost packed my tube of sunless bronzing agent but then pictured what would happen if a gorilla sat on the suitcase and the stuff glooped out and gave all my whites a healthy tan? Just the other day my friend told me about his suitcase: it arrived at the destination city laid open as if by the Jaws of Life with the suit he was going to wear to the family wedding hacked to pieces. It was like someone took a machete to it he said.Also: The news from the airport that isn’t new is:a.) They’re still taking people’s pictures in that screening both that shows your soft little clam-body all naked and defenseless, though I must say I don't see why people get so upset about this gizmo. I figure it’s just some poor soul behind a screen 100 or 200 feet away stifling a yawn as he looks at us all, or anyway the ones chosen for the screening, all in that same boring pose, legs spread apart, hands clasped above our heads like so many out-of-shape prize-fightersAND....b.) The line at Starbucks is endless. Hurry past any airport Starbucks at 6am, 2pm 11pm and you'll see two dozen people lined up for that pricey fix. Sometimes even Santa needs some java. I saw him just yesterday trying to sneak this snow globe past Security.No dice.But lucky for him he was born before 1937 so at least didn't have to step out of that marvelous outfit. I'm counting the days til 75 myself. Having to take off that underwire bra and put it in the bin is really gettin' kind of OLD for me. :-)
God to Adam & Eve
In the spirit of another new week this, by poet Tony Hoagland. It's God talkin' to the kids:
God said (and already you can tellI’m making this up),Let this woman and this manBe joined togetherIn front of the sea and the grassAnd the trees who don’t careHe said, Let them makeA gate in themselvesThrough which the other can passAnd may the gate never be closedSo they can feel the truth of being enteredAnd the loneliness of beingImperfectly misunderstood —Now go, God said,Into the country of loveChange it with your experimentsDon’t be intimidated Enjoy your skinImpress meMake something growFor your bravery merely in undertakingThis impossible taskI make you a special loan called TimeNo, don’t bother to thank me now —You can pay me back as you go
Fifty Shades of Who Cares
So why IS this book Fifty Shades of Grey such a best seller? They say that for Victorian men one major draw in visiting 'Ladies of the Night' was to enjoy the feeling of not having to be in control for a while - so wearying to run an Empire AND bully your wife over the dinner table! - but I imagine the old Joy of Sex was pretty high on the list too.Still I don’t find the idea of reading one silly handcuff story after another all that compelling.I have nothing against handcuffs. I saw the film Bill Durham like everyone else; I remember how rookie Tim Robbins gets to pitching so much better after Susan Sarandon starts tying him by his wrists to the bedposts and reading him poetry - remember?
But still: I’m pretty sure when God gave us sex he was thinking "Here’s a fun thing to do," not "Here’s a fun thing to watch, or read about - other people doing.Plus you don't get a new person with second-hand sex. and new people after all are what it's all for. ;-)
Fashions in Dieting
This new health-consciousness, I don’t know. In the old days, you didn’t really know what your body did with what you ate. You thought it rude to inquire, almost. In the old days, if you dropped food on the floor, you’d kiss it up to God and pop it in your mouth anyway.“You eat a peck of dirt before you die,” my ancient great aunt used to quote from her own childhood, and her faith reassured us: She was born in the 1860s and lived on past the age of Sputnik.Today there’s no trust of this sort. You simply can’t buy a packaged food item without seeing that list of ingredients on its side. And as for produce, every single apple bears a sticker nowadays; every banana in the bunch.And food habits in the old days were a different thing.Say you had a big morning ahead of you.“Eat a good breakfast!” your folks would boom, and then they’d come at you: with stacks of toast slathered in jelly, pancakes drooling in butter, and eggs fried in the fat that they’d cooked the bacon in.In my house, the grownups also gnawed the knuckles of the turkey carcasses and sucked the marrow from all the beef bones. We kids were too squeamish for it, but they ate organ parts too: the chicken hearts and the chicken livers. The brains and the stomach lining.Most Americans ate that way: avidly and a lot.And even after those first postwar decades, they kept the party going, with fondues and casseroles and dessert every night. Now you’re likelier to see skim lattes and dishes made of tofu, which is light and spongy and like somebody’s brain, pigeon’s more than a cow’s maybe.Also, people really drank: Highballs. Cocktails. Now it’s more wine and beer, and pregnant women leave the stuff alone entirely.Back then too, cigarettes were everywhere. Even the TV anchor delivering the news had one, right there in an ashtray. I we never rode the 50 miles to our cousins’ house without being closed up in air made blue by cigarette smoke.It’s what adults were then: Smokers. Drinkers. Big, big eaters.You can tell they ate a lot by looking at the snapshots, the men with these peacetime pot bellies which they were wore their belts up over for some reason, giving them all a kind of Oliver Hardy look.Today, nobody wants a pot belly. Everyone wants to look chiseled and edgy, though few of us do, God knows.The gym-addicted do, of course. I found myself in a social hug with such a person recently. The blades of her hipbones stabbed my stomach and her pointy chin trowelled into my shoulder. It was like hugging a garden implement.Yet as a nation we’re growing fatter instead of thinner. They say it’s the fault of the Super-Sized soft drink, 32 ounces of high-fructose corn syrup sold for a song everywhere you turn.So we miss our old food-treats, but then we go and invent new ones. So what can we conclude here?That we’re all for improving ourselves, but only a little.And that we sure like to look on the bright side. In fact I read in a news magazine’s cover story on the Faith of the Nation that according to the poll they were citing, most of us (a) don’t believe in Hell, (b) do most definitely believe in Heaven, and (c) are just sure we’re going there.Optimists, see?Let’s all toast to the optimists then – but let’s hold off on those Belgian waffles too.
Yes, and Transgender People Too
It could be hard following this blog which is one minute about silly stuff and the next about something serious, like addiction or giving away your power in sexual subservience. What I'm saying is that on Sunday I wrote about Marilyn Monroe's terrible struggle. Then yesterday I talked about trying to drive home from the eye doctor’s after having my pupils dilated. (OK that’s not really a picture of me; I keep my whiskers trimmed closer. ha ha.) And now I want to tell you how great it is that the Board of Selectmen of my town has just now voted to include the words “gender identity" in our official Human Rights Statement.Three of us were allowed to speak in favor of this motion.This added language echoes the intent of a state law that went in to effect here just last month that makes Massachusetts the 16th state in the nation to add non-discrimination laws for gender identity in the areas of employment, housing, K-12 public education, and credit.Additionally, Massachusetts Hate Crimes laws were also updated to include gender identity. This law is a very good thing, since transgender youth in particular are now being targeted in the same vicious way gay youth were once targeted (and still are targeted in many quarters.) The child born male who knows even at three years old that his outsides don’t match the way he feels inside is not rebelling against anyone; this is that child’s deep reality.I heard Jennifer Finley Boylan speak when She’s Not There first came out, her first book on the experience of being transgendered. I remember her telling the audience how she remembers crouching under the ironing board and watching as her mother pressed her father’s shirts.“Someday YOU’LL go to work dressed in a shirt like this,” her mother said to Jennifer who the world then called James.“Oh no I won't!” she remembers thinking, even at that tender age. Ms. Boylan is a 12-time author, professor at Colby College, and good friend to that quintessential Mainer Richard Russo who gave the world among many other books Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool and whose friendship with Boylan is part of that book’s narrative.The board of my town’s Multicultural Network on which I serve had this to day in a letter to the editor last spring:For most of us, our gender identity and gender expression are straightforward—our physiology, our outlook, the way we choose to dress, our mannerisms, our relationships are in harmony within ourselves and with societal expectations. For others of us, the physical characteristics we are born with are in conflict not only with societal expectations but also with our internal sense of self--at all levels: physical, emotional, behavioral. Moving through myriad choices in resolving personal wholeness and harmony is a daunting task in itself. Transgender and gender non-conforming people deserve the right to enjoy the same non-discrimination and civil rights as other Massachusetts residents.In Massachusetts, 76% of transgender people report harassment in their jobs. Thirty-one percent of transgender youth, in grades K-12, experience physical assault. Passing through an airport body imaging scan or undergoing an annual physical at a medical facility can become unimaginably difficult, especially when dealing with under-educated personnel. Transgender individuals suffer depression, anxiety, health issues, and job discrimination at an increased level. A Massachusetts Department of Public Health report (July 2009) recommended that “Support of non-discrimination protection for transgender persons could help reduce stigma and, by extension, improve health.The three of us who spoke last night just spoke from the heart. And we spoke to a body of people who saw the wisdom in this motion: They passed it unanimously so here is how our town's Human Rights Statement will now read: “Winchester is a community that is grounded in respect for every individual and, therefore, protects all residents, employees, business owners, students and visitors in the enjoyment and exercise of human and civil rights. It is town policy to ensure equal treatment and opportunity to all individuals regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, ideology, socio-economic status, health, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, military status or disability.”I feel so proud to live here. I feel so proud of my townspeople too for doing as Gandhi recommended and being the change they wish to see in the world.
Needlework, Really?
This was me at the eye doctor's where I just went for my annual checkup. It was hard enough driving home after with cloven hooves for hands on the wheel never mind having messed up peepers.
The funny thing is I went to this eye doctor’s with a sackful of needlework. NEEDLEWORK! At the eye doctor’s! where the first thing they do to you is tap your head back pry open your frightened little eyes and squeeze an oily yellow blurt of squirt into them!The squirt is a numbing agent of some kind that anesthetizes the area so that they can then squeeze in the drug that dilates the pupils – or as the tech explained it, paralyzes the muscles so your poor irises CAN’T contract to protect the eye from too much light. Bring on the eclipses! The light barrels on in and that’s how they check your pressures to be sure nobody backstage there is cookin’ up a sneaky case of glaucoma, which can leave you blind - or, in my mother's case, necessitate an iridectomy that leaves you with eyes like a goat (see above.)Make no mistake: I’m happy to have my eyes checked. In fact and I find all parts of the exam both entertaining and instructive. I just can’t seem to get it through my head every year that of the muscles are paralyzed I won’t be able to focus. That is, read.Or choose a playlist on my iPod.Or, God knows, do needlework.And yet I brought the iPod.I brought the needleworkI brought even the Kindle thinking to set it on A VERY LARGE FONT for the 40 or so minutes I would be waiting for my pupils to dilate and my doctor to finish Facebooking her friends over her ham sandwich .In the end it was all foolishness. First, the wait was one 15 minutes, and second , the muscles of my eye were stopped in their tracks, like the butterflies my sister and I used to asphyxiate and then mount with common pins in our grandfather’s old cigar boxes.So no reading. No groovin’ on tunes. Certainly no needlework.I just had to sit looking like this for six hours waiting for the drug to wear off. Paralyzed is paralyzed it seems, however strong you may wish otherwise.
Marilyn and Caroline
For weeks now I’ve been thinking about our Marilyn, practically the founder of that group of people for whom no last name is necessary. Today she will have been dead for 50 years. As everyone seems to know by now, she was just 36 when they found her sprawled across her bed, the phone under her hand..For weeks I have also been thinking about writer Caroline Knapp, who as of this summer has been dead for ten years. She was just 42 when she succumbed to a very aggressive form of lung cancer: diagnosed in April, gone in June.But I remember so vividly the day they found Marilyn’s body. I remember so clearly looking down at my own changing body and thinking, "How did all THIS get here?" It was a bewildering new world all right; having guys fake-sighing and then laughing when I passed in the corridors. I suddenly had a boyfriend too, young as I was. He was blond with perfect ears and just 5 foot 2, my same height at the time. I liked that we were small like that. It made the whole boyfriend girlfriend thing so much less scary. It made us seem to me like children still, which of course we were.Children.Innocents.This boy and I were together the day the news broke about Marilyn’s death and it chilled me to my core, I think because even at that young age I saw in her something familiar, naïve way of pleasing others that I sensed was becoming my way. It’s how young women were taught to be back then, ever pliant and agreeable.I was heading down that path, all right; and were it not for an ability to shine in school I can't think how I might have ended. Giving people my shirt as well as my cloak, to use the metaphor. Memorizing the birthdays of people I had only just met so I could send them a card in four or six or eleven months and to prove what? To purchase what?I gave away far too much time and attention to others, and kept far too little for myself.Marilyn did that too, and used alcohol to keep herself blind to the fact.In her brave book, Caroline Knapp writes with great insight about addiction's riptide pull. In it we learn what she finally learned about self-worth, and about alcohol's insidious way of acting like your closest friend - right up until it reveals itself as your deadliest foe. She talks about her father, high-achieving and remote, every night drinking his martinis-with-an-olive.And because, as she puts it, “alcohol travels through families like water over a landscape,” she drank as well, starting at age 14.
Just by her description of a glass of chilled white wine filled to the brim and beading with moisture you can see how she loved it, in much the same way Marilyn loved her champagne, alternating its use with the pills she took at night to help her sleep and the ones she took in the morning to help her function again.Well I don’t know just where I’m going here except to note that while Marilyn lost her battle, Caroline won hers, thanks to the 12 Steps. She got sober and she wrote a wonderful book which I would recommend to anyone. It certainly helped me with my decades old habit of over functioning.Drinking: A Love Story, it is called.Now let’s watch this video of Marilyn and salute the oh-so-natural and the oh-so-perishable beauty that was hers.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJfBUKCnzNs&feature=related]
Clone Yourself and Go Naked
It's too hot to work so I thought I'd just find a dock and go sit by it.That's Old Dave on the left.(Italian you know; they take a good tan.)I'm the other three, the ones with the Irish pallor...I cloned myself to get more done about a year ago. It works! This is Terry One Two and Three, with Terry Four Five Six just fixin' to get their feet wet....
Terry Seven and Eight are cooking lunch and paying bills. (Hey, SOMEBODY'S got to stay dressed and serious!)
Me, I Looked Like Bea Arthur
You hate to think so but it’s true: compared to, say, the French, we Americans look pretty sad. I mean there they are sipping fine wines in their awesome clothes, and here we are chugging down our Big Gulps and boarding airplanes in our sweatpants. It’s not so much that we don’t care how we look. It’s that we lack confidence and are befuddled when it comes to our dress. Because what else but a befuddlement born of uncertainty could be responsible for the way we go around in clothes as baggy as old pajamas? I mean aside from the fact that we’ve all grown a mite hefty? And when we’re not going around in clothes that are too baggy, we’re going around in clothes that are too tight. Think how many of us look like teddy bears sausaged into pantyhose.
I bet I look like that every time I try going to the gym in that perfectly serviceable leotard from the great Age of the Fonda Workout.
I think we all worry about our ‘look’ these days, in a way that nobody worried in an earlier era, the men in their fedoras, the women in their sheaths.I recently attended a neighborhood gathering described on the invitation as a ‘cocktail party,’ a word whose elegant associations evidently threw us all for a loop.We SHOULD have been perfectly casual in our attitude toward the event. After all it would be just us neighbors with no danger of our running into any red carpet moments.Plus, less than an hour before the party was to start, a storm straight out of the Book of Revelations blew in, and the power went out all up and down the street. Thus, chances were, we wouldn’t even be able to SEE one another.Still, we all fretted, as we discovered once the sun returned and the party started in earnest.One neighbor came in classic cocktail-party garb: a little black dress with super-high heels. Yet even she worried she was dressed wrong.“I had doubts at the last minute,” she told a group of us. “‘What am I doing in THIS?’ I thought, but by then it was too late to change.”A second guest said, “Heck, look at me! Do you SEE this jacket?”It was seersucker. Red seersucker, or was it a reddish pink?“AND it’s part of a SUIT!” he yelped. “I had the whole thing on before it occurred to me that it might just be a little MUCH!”But to me he looked great, as I told him when we all stopped laughing long enough to resume talking.What didn’t look great was the get-up I had on, a weird, semi-tunic-y thing that had looked very chic when I saw it on that cruise ship, especially after all the Daiquiris I’d inhaled out there on the deck. In truth I looked like all four Golden Girls rolled into one. AND, with the curse of the curly-haired that is my curse, and the rain that had so lately buffeted us, my hair had Gone Rogue; just swelled right up, like the foil around your Jiffy Pop.But hey, what are you gonna do? We’re not Parisians and that’s a fact. So really we might as WELL jump into our clothes, baggy or sausage-casing tight and toast the summer - just maybe with a nice French wine instead of a Big Gulp. And while watching this to-me-very-funny video of how some people used to actually dress at the gym. I did! I actually did![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu7c9H6ngLI]
Lazy Time of Year
It’s hard to take time off from writing a blog.Sure, you’re your own boss with a blog but I myself feel so uneasy when I don’t have something lined up to post at dawn of the next day. I feel like I’ve gone to bed without saying my prayers or something.Still, it was nice over the last 48 hours to vow to take a little time away; also to have made a small mini-rule about just NOT GOING to that gym that pulls me towards it like some irresistible kind catnip, whether I want to be drawn there or not. It’s the Nia and the Hip Hop Cardio, and mostly the Zumba that I love. To move like that! To music! With others!This week so far I have mostly just done a little fake swimming, with this little guy.
I went to sit shiva with a family recently bereaved.I sent three thank you notes and mailed two gifts.I bought curtains in a room long crying out for curtains and then became so obsessed with the fact that they’re five inches too short that I went BACK to the store, bought a fifth curtain to cannibalize for its extra yardage, and spent two hours yesterday measuring and sewing, getting ready to perform that grafting operation, which I couldn’t undertake today because I somehow found myself out of common pins and only a fool sews without first pinning.Over this past weekend as the guest of some good friends on Cape Cod I did a lot of eating, basking, reading, eating and more eating. I’m trying that Tim Ferris diet (which deserves its own post and will doubtless get it soon enough as I begin to turn into a black bean, having eaten so many of them.)And this Next weekend I hope to be going out this wee bobbing cork of a dinghy I bought a few years ago in spite of family’s derisive laughter. It’s got this little sewing machine of a motor but you can go right out all by yourself in the middle of a body of water and look up at the sky and think "Take ME Now"! It’s the same feeling I while flat on my back and bobbing on a raft. The boat’s motor is so quiet that the last time I went out in it I think I maybe tied it up with the engine still running. Anyway recharging the battery took forever but hey: live and learn.Right this second and also over the past 48 hours I've been teaching myself about eye makeup. I don’t think I’m gettin’ away with it exactly. I may have to file it under Looks You’re Probably Too Old For but it’s been fun playing with it and isn’t that what summer is for?August now. Hate to think the long days might be ending, but they aren’t really doing that yet. Not yet, anyway. Not today.
Back in the Day
Just came upon this photo from a few years back when this house was filled with kids.Look how cute they were:
The truth is the house is filled with kids this summer too.I'd say more but I have to lug a gallon of milk and four bottles of Cran-Grape juice in from the car now, and then see if I can get my $500 Bose radio back from its place in the guest bathroom ... Hip-hop and the smell of boys' deodorant are what fill the air here these days!At least they're all very neat .....
