The Feminist Grandma

Food Dog

After I retired I went searching for a dog.  I knew just what I wanted: female, two to five years old, around thirty-five pounds, short-haired, good with cats and kids.  I read the classifieds, and went to two adoption fairs, but most of the dogs were too big for me, or too tiny for Joe.

Then I went to PetsMart, where rescue groups display adoptable pets on Saturdays. The cages were lined up in a wide aisle by the beds and blankets.  The dogs were standing and wagging,  pacing and whining, lying with heads on paws and ears twitching. Most of the dogs were very big or very old, and then I came to Dixie. She was sitting up straight with eager ears and cocked head,  her eyes looking right into mine. She had a glossy black coat with a crooked white blaze down her chest, and her left front leg was missing.

I went straight to the adoption table. Laurie, from Puppy Hill Farm, told me Dixie had arrived just that morning, and they didn’t know much about her. She was a lab cross, seven months old. Her leg had been amputated after a car accident, and the owners had surrendered her to the vet. The vet’s staff described her as “very sweet.”

They gave me a leash, and Dixie and I went for a walk. She didn’t pull very much or very hard, except in the dog food aisle, and she was remarkably calm. Her tail wagged at cats and children, and when people stopped to talk to her, she didn’t jump up on them. When I sat outside on a planter she sat right in front of me and gave me her enthusiastic attention. I told myself that the trauma of the accident and surgery and the month at the vet had matured her, so it wasn’t really like adopting a puppy. I weighed her in the vet’s waiting room, and she was thirty six pounds. Already seven months old - I was sure she wouldn’t grow much bigger. And with only three legs, she would probably be comfortable with my slow walking.

I told Laurie that I did have to check with my husband before bringing home a three-legged dog, but I was sure it would be alright with him. Since I couldn’t reach him on the phone, I hurried home.  It was alright with him, though he might have been happy to forego my imitation of the puppy’s eager expression and posture. I raced back to the store.

 

THE FEMINIST GRANDMA PLAYS PUPPY

Suddenly I had the pre-adoption jitters. Life was simple with only a cat.  What was I getting myself into?  Though I’d been planning this for so long, it still felt like my usual impulsive decision, guided by passion rather than reason.

But those yearning puppy eyes had me yearning right back. So I filled out the forms, and signed the papers. I promised that if it didn’t work out, I would return Dixie to Puppy Hill Farm rather than take her to the pound. And Laurie helped me pick out what I needed: a crate, leash, food, a chew bone.

I snapped on the new leash and Dixie and I walked to the car. I boosted her up into the front seat, where I had put our old beach quilt. I petted her and talked to her all the way home, and she was very well-behaved. We went for a walk around the neighborhood. I let her explore as she pleased, and for an untrained dog and owner, we did very well, with no pulling or yanking. That night, as she lay on the floor between our recliners, Joe acknowledged that Dixie was a very fine dog.

I have no allegiance to the old Confederacy, and I didn’t want a dog named Dixie, especially a dog who looked a lot like a lab in profile, and a lot like a pitbull from the front, a dog who lunged and barked at pick-up trucks.  We tried out a dozen names.  Joe rejected Callie; I refused to name her Stumpy.  I’ve named my previous dogs after food - Tuna, Oyster, Chilidog - and so I finally settled on Trisket, changing the spelling so I wouldn’t feel like a commercial.

     
                                                              MY DOGS

A week after I got Trisket, we began obedience classes.  I had three particular goals for her: to walk on a leash without pulling, to go to her bed (one in each room) when told, and not to jump up on people.  She also learned to sit, wait, lie down, and stay.  She learned to turn in a circle when told to dance, and ring a bell when she wants to go out.  At the command ‘Leave It,’ she will reluctantly refrain from eating food or more disgusting things left by the side of the road, or keep walking at a steady pace, only her head turning, when another dog challenges her.

THE PROUD GRADUATE

The training made her a  wonderful companion, and though she grew to fifty pounds, I was happy with my choice.  Still, there is one behavior we haven’t been able to train away.   All my dogs have been good eaters, gobbling breakfast and dinner the minute the bowl hit the floor.  But Trisket is more than a mere enthusiast.  She steals food every chance she gets - from the pantry, the table, the trash.

We try to keep Trisket out of the kitchen when we’re not there.  We close her in the two front rooms, shutting the sliding door.  But her friend Ouzel, like all cats, always wants to be on the other side of a closed door, and with a persistent paw she can inch it open enough to slip through. Trisket follows.  Joe finally put a hook and eye on the door.  As long as we remember to latch it, the food is safe.

Still, there are three humans in the house.  If we are each inattentive once every three weeks, Trisket has unsupervised access to the kitchen once a week.  It’s not that we’re stupid, it’s a question of focus.  When Amanda was little I would ask her, 'What is Trisket thinking about?' and she would answer, ‘Food’.  Although I am quite fond of food myself,  I occasionally allow my mind to be distracted by other things, such as my afternoon nap or world peace.
                       
When Trisket gets into the pantry she has a great time. She has torn open bags of flour and cornmeal and dragged them to her bed in the living room.  We find granola bar wrappers in her crate.  Once she ate a huge box of raisins. 

Raisins are allegedly toxic, but the things that are supposed to poison dogs don’t seem to affect Trisket.  When she was new to our family, she stole a giant chocolate bar from the pantry, and ate the whole thing.  I called the vet and told her Trisket had eaten seven ounces of chocolate.  The vet advised me to squirt hydrogen peroxide down her throat with a medicine dropper. Trisket was amenable, and after two doses she vomited copious amounts of slimy chocolate foam.  In the middle of the pool was an entire stick of butter, unchewed.  I’m so sorry I don’t have a photo to share with you.

To keep her out of the garbage, we tried a dog discouragement device with a red plastic flap on a spring, which we would set on top of the trash can.  If she tried to get into the trash, it would fly open in her face with a loud snap.  But it would also fall off the trash can, leaving it unguarded.

Even more than trash, or ingredients from the pantry, Trisket likes real food from the table. Bob and Arupa came over one night for dinner.  Arupa is a vegetarian. I prepared a delicious cheesy vegetable casserole in a big pyrex pan, and set it on the kitchen table to cool. When I returned to the kitchen, Trisket had eaten a third of the dish.  We ordered a pizza.

In obedience classes I learned to use rewards to train Trisket - a clicker, a cheery ‘Good dog!’, a kibble.  But stealing food provides its own instant reward.  Even if I believed punishment worked and were willing to use it, I would have to catch her in the act, and of course I never do.  When I come in the room, there is the mess or the empty wrapper, and Trisket runs off to her cage. 

Trisket is eight years old now, and sometimes I speculate about what kind of dog we will get when she is gone.  Joe has an easy answer: our next dog will be a cat.

 

 

 

NEXT WEEK: WOMEN IN BOLD

Do you know how to turn a food-obsessed into a food-indifferent dog? I'd love to hear from you! Click "comments," below.

 

 

Country of the Old

"People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But old men know when an old man dies.”
                                     Ogden Nash - Old Men

 

Donald Hall has an essay in the January 23, 2012 issue of the New Yorker about the strange country of old age.  At 83, he is no longer able to do much of what he loves, including write poetry. He spends his days looking out the window at birds and trees and weather, on the New Hampshire farm that has been in his family for generations, and writing about what he sees.  It is a beautiful piece, tinged with humor, love, anger, and acceptance. 

.“...[O]ld age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven [as his wife did] or fifty-two [his father].  When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing.  It’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers.  It is a pleasure to write about what I do.”
                        
He says he has lost the gift of poetry, but his prose is enviable. His view out the window is illuminated by memories.  He hasn’t lost the eye for detail, the wit of metaphor, the ear for assonance and alliteration.  Hummingbirds “enter the horns of hollyhocks, gobble some sweet, and zig off to zag back again for another lick.”  Through the seasons “...the flowers erupt and subside.”

HUMMINGBIRDS AND HOLLYHOCKS by STEPHEN A. ASCOUGH click

My mother died when I was twenty-three, and I’ve always treasured friendships with older women.  I have several friends in their eighties. None of them are sitting by the window yet.  But one swears she will not.  She hopes to find a way out before she loses her ability to get around.  Another has given up doctors as an aggravation.  She refuses to spend her remaining time sitting in waiting rooms and being treated like a worthless piece of meat. 

Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternative, said Maurice Chevalier.  Some old people I know do consider the alternative, and think it preferable to the inexorable progress of loss, diminishment, dependency.

I think what I fear most about old age is loneliness.  I am not yet at an age where the obituaries usually bring news of my friends.  My father was 98 when he died.  He was the last of his generation, and all the friends of his childhood and youth were gone.

The Muu Muu Mamas focus on fun and frivolity, fortified by wine, but we also count on each other in times of need and trouble. click  Though we are all under seventy,  I can’t help myself; I wonder how we will age.  Hall says, “...However much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.  It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life....”

It would be easy to let go of old friends as their quick wit slows, or they become garrulous bores.  Hall believes that kindness to the old is always condescending. He is already in that alien land, and there’s no telling how I’ll feel if I get there, but I think he’s wrong. We began our lives dependent, and if we hang around long enough, we’ll need help again.  I hope my friends and I will shore each other up when we are failing, and feel no pride nor shame in it.
                  

IMAGE BY AMY_LEDERER AT PHOTOBUCKET.COM

I think of old age as a hard part of life that I wouldn’t want to miss. As I become more needy, maybe some of my arrogance will fall away, and I will learn humility.   Maybe I will gain deeper understanding as I move from loss to loss.  Acceptance is not a sprint, but a lifelong marathon.  

My view may be too rosy.  At 64 I’ve had my troubles.  Sometimes I’ve responded with anger, whining, and paralysis, sometimes soldiered on.  I’m not confident that I have found the appropriate mix of howling, whimpering, and stiff upper lip.  Donald Hall, sitting at the window looking out, loving the world as he prepares to leave it, encourages me.

  

IMAGE BY RENTON PIRATE AT PHOTOBUCKET.COM

 
"An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress..."
                William Butler Yeats - Sailing to Byzantium
                   

Donald Hall is still singing. 
           

 

NOTE: I had thought I could link to this article, but it is only available to subscribers.  If you're not a New Yorker subscriber, it's worth a trip to the library to read it, or you can go to this link to access the whole issue for $5.99. click

 

NEXT WEEK: FOOD DOG

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The Blog Bird

A previous ornithological post click drew gratifying response, so I am bringing you another bird.  I owe this one to my sister Luli, who suffers, as I do, from bizarre and frequently scatological images.
                 
This blog is six months old, and I have written twenty-five posts, most of them focused on me.  Like many people, I find myself fascinating.  I love stories with rich detail, and the stories I know best are my own. I could happily fill a blog post with photos of my dog, my cat, the rooms of my house, and my amateurish attempts at container gardening, frequently wrecked by squirrels.

THE SQUIRRELS TOOK MY THYME

If I felt free to write about Amanda - her troubles and triumphs, the funny or maddening things she does - I would have a goldmine.  Since I want to protect her privacy, instead I mine the past.

I think I’m far enough along in life to have found the proper balance between smugness and self-loathing, but while writing my previous post, about the cute little rich girl misbehaving on the train home from prep school click ,  I had a severe attack of the latter.  ‘Who gives a shit?’ I thought. 

I’m not planning to stop writing the blog.  It is excellent practice, and finding the pictures is really fun.  The weekly deadline maintains order and discipline in my otherwise ad lib life.  While the thought of reading all day with cat and cookies has its appeal, I know from experience that sloth bums me out.  I could turn back to my novel, but I’m still avoiding that.  It has scared me off by being too close to my own life, and the revision I have in mind is daunting - it requires me to eliminate the main character. 
               
Before I began The Feminist Grandma I consulted with Sandra, whose blog frequently highlights other activists and writers. click  She suggested that I sometimes feature subjects other than myself, and I think it’s time to do that. Otherwise The Feminist Grandma will become The Blog Bird, which flies in constantly diminishing circles until it disappears into its own asshole.

THE BLOG BIRD (WITH APOLOGIES TO THE MAGNIFICENT SANDHILL CRANE)

 

 

NEXT WEEK: THE COUNTRY OF THE OLD

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The Sound of a Train

"Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance; everybody thinks it's true."  (Paul Simon - Train in the Distance)

The whistle calls, “We’re on our way, we’re leaving you behind.”  The roar of the wheels on the rails comes closer, louder, more urgent, and then fades away, promising new places, new romance.

I love trains.  When I was at boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, I took two trains home to Ann Arbor - Boston to Albany, Albany to Detroit.  It was Christmas, and the Boston train was filled with kids going home from prep schools and colleges.  We took over the club car with our guitars, pocket flasks, and bags of sandwiches and cake. From Boston to Albany it was the great traveling Honey Hunt.

At Abbot Academy in the sixties there wasn’t a lot of boyfriend activity.  Twice a week we could walk in pairs to town, so if we weren’t too scared of getting caught we could meet a local boyfriend.  On Sunday afternoons after church we could have a caller in the parlor.  At dances with boys’ prep schools we could pair up with a boyfriend if we had one, or we could love the one we were with.  “Love” meant dancing as close as we could get away with, or sneaking off to make out behind the bushes.

So sex was hard to find.  Of course there must have been lesbians, but I was never aware of them.  Though a few of the teachers were long-time housemates, lesbian love seemed so exotic and unreal.  Surely these dowdy spinsters weren’t involved.  The teachers were in the same category as parents and other impossibly old people: we shielded our minds from any thoughts of their sex lives.

At the same time, we were obsessed with sex and romance.  I had barely been kissed, but I was a virgin with aspirations - the only girl in the tenth grade dorm who admitted she wanted to get laid, the expert in sex who told the others everything I had learned (from books) about free love.

I had two boyfriends: Charles, a lanky senior at a progressive prep school in Vermont, and Toby, a pudgy Harvard sophomore. Until we moved from Cambridge to Ann Arbor I could see them on holidays - Charles and I went to a street dance in Boston, Toby took me to a night club. But in boarding school the point of a boyfriend was letters - after lunch we crowded around the mail slots hoping for something other than a letter from our mother.  Both Charles and Toby obliged.

With a love affair that was essentially epistolary, we could have as many boyfriends as we wanted, or could get.  So I sat in the club car on the train from Boston, singing harmony and hoping for romance.

Jamie McPherson* went to Groton. He was suave and preppy, with tousled hair and soulful eyes.

JAMIE WAS CUTER

When we learned that we were both going on to Detroit, we were a natural pair. He was joining a friend for the two hour layover in Albany; so we agreed we’d find each other in the club car on the Detroit train.

Union Station in Albany was like a smaller Grand Central: vaulted ceiling, crowds of strangers.  No one knew me - I could be whoever I wanted.  I loved to try on characters and lives.  Once in a restaurant I pretended I was a French student and spoke no English.  On a plane I presented myself as a thirty-year-old mother of three; this struck me as glamorous.  It was modeled on my sister-in-law Esther, whom I adored.

I bought a ticket for a couchette for $11 and then wandered around with an ice cream cone, people-watching.  When no one spoke to me and gave me a chance for role play, I sat in the waiting room with my novel, happy to know I had a date for the night train.    

  

ALBANY UNION STATION

Jamie and I found each other, and went on to the dining car.  White tablecloths, stemmed glasses, flowers, and the black night with flashes of light.  The waiter was smiling and benevolent, but we didn’t have the nerve to order a drink.  Though I wanted a steak, I had a salad.  If Jamie saw how I liked to eat, he might think I was fat.  Coffee was sophisticated so we ordered two demitasses, but barely drank it, and then made our way through the swaying cars to my couchette.

The couchette was a child’s delight.  The seat unfolded into a narrow bed under a big window; the sink unhooked from the wall to cover the toilet.  The sleeping car porter had unfolded and made up the bed. We explored all the cunning devices, and then lay on top of the blanket and began to explore each other. 

I had a problem.  Of course I wanted to go all the way - wasn’t I a proponent of free love? Jamie was as cute as they come, and I could lose my virginity on the night train!  But I had my period.  I had to tell him before he got past my bra, but then he would think that I thought that he thought...oh dear. 

Somehow I told him, and we both agreed we would simply have to stop above the waist.  If he had heard of fellatio, he didn’t have the nerve to ask me.  So we cuddled and kissed, and for me it was True Love. He’d never seen a bra in full light so I let him examine mine.  I showed him how a tampon worked, though I didn’t demonstrate on myself.  We tried to sleep for a while, tightly spooned, but the bed was too narrow, and eventually he went back to his coach seat.       

I woke in the middle of the night in Canada, warm in my bed, and watched the tall pines rushing past, the snow lit by moonlight.  Alone, I could savor every word and kiss and touch, and dream of what would come.

I didn’t see Jamie in the morning, and he was going back to school earlier than I.  Maybe there would be a letter when I got back to Abbot.  My father met me in Detroit, and we drove to Ann Arbor. I didn’t know a soul there; we had moved from Cambridge just before school started, so I spent a lonely Christmas with my annoying family, waiting for my real life to begin again.

 

 
CLUB CAR                                                                       DINING CAR

 After a long three weeks I was on the train again, but this time the club car was full of boring businessmen, so I ordered a Coke and settled in with a novel.  A Creep sat down next to me, a balding blonde with a red face and a gray suit. He bought me dinner and two rum and sodas, then followed me to my couchette.  I opened the door, slipped inside and closed it securely behind me.  I have a clear image of him standing stunned, open-mouthed - but it must be an imaginary memory

I spent the night dreaming, awake and asleep, of Jamie. In the morning I dressed in jeans and a sweater, and went back to the dining car for breakfast The waiter brought me water, offered coffee, and said, “Where’s your friend?”  And so completely had I obliterated the Creep from my thoughts, so entirely had my dreams been filled with Jamie, that I said, “Oh, he’s not on this train, he’s traveling tomorrow.”.

Back at school I waited for a letter from him - a week, two weeks - and then it came, on high class cream-colored notepaper, black ink, a small clear script.  “I’m glad I met a girl like you.”  I puzzled over that line like a biblical scholar, trying to wring from it some pledge.  I consulted with my friends - were they words of love or was he calling me a slut?  I clung to his closing: Love, Jamie.  I wrote him back, pages and pages of witty stories of my Christmas at home, full of scorn for my parents and stupid teachers, warm accounts of after hours revels in the dorm, and probably a bit of poetry.

I never heard from him again. It was a romance as beautiful and brief as a bubble. Charles and Toby’s letters kept coming, and there were more dances, more trains. Jamie was a game, Charles and Toby were games.  Men only ceased to be a game when I began raising a son, and realized that these aliens beings were simply human.

I took a train from Jacksonville to New York a few years ago - a nightmare of crying babies, a seat designed to prevent sleep, and a club car full of drunken middle-aged people joking about penis size.  Trains aren’t what they used to be, but then, neither am I.

   

   

 *Fake name of course

 

NEXT WEEK: THE BLOG BIRD

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Mama Don't Want No VULGAR

“That’s vulgar,” my mother would say.  Oh. Well then. That settled it; I wouldn’t dream of doing anything vulgar. 

My mother died when I was twenty-three, before we had fully recovered from my adolescence.  I grope in the dark to understand her.  Much of what I think I know is probably wrong.

I was reminiscing with my sister-in-law, Esther. “And what’s wrong with vulgar?” she said.  “It just means common.”  Though I was past fifty, and had long since shattered every one of Mother's taboos, I had never questioned that vulgarity was shameful. It was a powerful moment, and I began thinking of all the things that Mother considered vulgar. 

Dangling earrings. Pants worn with high heels.  Bikinis. Clashing colors. Chartreuse. Fuchsia. I was in 7th grade when I got my first sexy bathing suit: an orange tank with broad fuchsia stripes up the sides.  Everyone knew orange and pink clashed, as did red and pink, green and blue. I have to assume I chose the bathing suit, and I admire Mother for buying it.  She was encouraging autonomy.  Or maybe she was just tired.

DANGLING EARRINGS ON VULGAR RED LACE

The word Mom.  In 1955 Phillip Wylie coined the term momism in Generation of Vipers, an astonishingly misogynistic (and extremely popular) book.  Mother absorbed his loathing, and I can see her mouth stretched in an exaggerated O as she spoke the word Mom with contempt.  As children we called her Mummy, nicely British, therefore not vulgar. (My father was an extreme anglophile.)

New York accents, nasal voices, loud female voices, crude language. “Gentle voices,” my father would say, if Luli and I spoke too loudly, and he frequently spoke of Esther’s melodious voice.  I never heard "shit" until I was 12, and was astounded some years later when I realized Mother knew the word.

Carmen Miranda, Las Vegas, blondes.  Ginger Rogers was only saved from vulgarity by her elegant pairing with Fred Astaire.

 

Fried foods, chewing gum. “It’s like a cow chewing her cud.” And Mother would do a wonderful cud-chewing imitation.

Fat women in stretch pants.  Fat women.  Fat.  My father felt fat women were a personal insult, as they apparently did not care to attract him.  My sister Luli says Mother was terrified of becoming fat.  Luli was fat for many years, distressing my father, as she was his favorite.

I learned the concept so well I can apply it to things my mother never mentioned.  Tap dancing is vulgar (except for Fred Astaire); ballet is not.  Why weren’t Broadway musicals vulgar, full of flashy colors and blondes?  Probably because my mother and  father enjoyed going to an evening of dinner and theater in the city.

 

It’s hard to know where my father’s thoughts ended and my mother’s began.  The only subject on which I know they disagreed was Eleanor Roosevelt.  My mother admired her; my father dismissed her.  She was homely, and her voice was horrid.

 Mother was the daughter of a distinguished professor, whose specialty was southern agricultural history. Professors were respected, but ill-paid, and her mother taught piano.  Mother grew up in the south, went to college at George Washington, and belonged to Kappa Delta.  She dropped out after her junior year to marry my father, a Jew from New York.  He was six years older than she.

Dad was ashamed and contemptuous of his father, but he was proud of his mother.  His father was an entrepreneurial merchant whose business failed, a man full of life and bonhomie. Her family were sugar barons in Colombia, where she was raised rich and sent to a Jewish boarding school in London.

I believe Dad was quite young when he began denying he was Jewish. He dropped his father's name and took his mother's, changing his surname from Jacobs to Eder.  He was over 90 when he told me my mother’s parents didn’t like him because he was Jewish.  It was the first time I had ever heard him acknowledge it.
       
My father was successful as an international corporate lawyer, and my parents lived the high life in South America and Long Island.  But Esther once described my father as a man standing outside a beautiful house, with his nose pressed against the window. 

I think my mother also felt like an outsider. Yearning to be not just respectable, but aristocratic, my parents had to guard against any taint of the vulgar.

I try to find a common thread in the things my mother identified as vulgar.  Anything flagrantly sexual was certainly vulgar.  Anything which suggested Jewish.  Anything from poor southern culture, which would include anything Black.

The other day in Cordele, Georgia I met a woman in the motel breakfast buffet.  She was a very fat woman, with bleached blonde hair. She told me she is raising five foster children - a 17 year old whom she’s had from birth, two three-year olds, and two four-year olds. They live out in the country, so there’s plenty of room to play.  She loves having foster children. Her face glowed as she talked of them.

She, her husband and some in-laws were on their way from Michigan to Florida to take a Caribbean cruise, and she was very excited.  I asked if the children were in respite care. “Oh no, my daughter and her husband are keeping them.”

 

My mother would consider modern-day cruises vulgar, though ocean crossings in the grand style of the first half of the twentieth century were fine.  Yet Mother valued kindness above all.  Would she see past the stretch jeans, the dyed hair, to the generous heart and patient spirit of this woman?  I like to think she would.

  

MOTHER

 

 

NEXT WEEK:  The Sound of a Train

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There But for Fortune

When I was in college everyone took a personality test. We ridiculed the question that asked whether you preferred carrots raw or cooked, and assumed it was about sex (wasn’t everything?) 

COOKED OR CRUNCHY?

But I also remember being asked to agree/disagree with statements such as “Success in life is largely a matter of luck” and “I can control my destiny.”  As I understand it, your answer to these indicates your sense of efficacy and likelihood of success.  If you think life is largely a matter of luck, you’re out of luck.
               
But so much of life is determined by luck.  You walk along happily for awhile, doing whatever it is you do, and then life comes along and snatches the rug out from under you.  The personal calamities: dread disease, business failure, loss of a loved one.  The public calamities: hurricane, riot, economic collapse.  Any of these will knock you flat.

Wise advisors, such as self-help books and grandmas, say that though you can’t control what happens to you, you can control your response.  While some are defeated by fortune, others rally and stand up again, like one of those little dolls with a rounded, weighted bottom. No matter how many times you knock it over, it pops right back up. 

 
   


 

So where do we get our optimism, the courage to fail, the will to keep trying?  I say pluck is also a product of luck.  If we are very fortunate perhaps we are born resilient, but I think for most it is nurture, not nature.  And our luck resides in the circumstances of our birth. 

I have an image of babies, each set at the beginning of a path.  On every path there are hurdles. On some paths there are small, regularly spaced hurdles, and at each early hurdle, hands reaching out to help the child clear the bar, voices raised in praise when she does.  On other paths the hurdles are high as a house, and the child is alone.  Some rare few of these children - and who knows the source of their strength? - will clamber over and move on, but many more will be defeated.
                  

PERDITA FELICIEN AND DAWN HARPER

 I used to ask my law students why the homeless victims of hurricanes receive assistance and compassion, while the world scorns the chronically homeless, whose lives were blown awry by abuse, war, illness.  And they would reply that the chronically homeless people were responsible for their own situation, and should help themselves.  Yet the students knew very well that for some people the deck is stacked from the beginning.

Puzzling over their need to blame the victim, I thought it was hard for them to acknowledge the role of luck in their own success.  They wanted to have control.  And if they believed they had not earned their many advantages, they would feel guilty.  Even more, it was important to believe that the losers had brought their troubles on themselves.  Otherwise, what was to prevent the same thing from happening to them?

I’ve had a lovely life, full of friends and lovers, a late and happy marriage, interesting work, adventures, travel, and even economic security.  The primary reason is that I’ve been lucky. Of course I’ve met my share of hurdles, and worked hard, but I was lucky to be born into a family that blessed me with enthusiasm, optimism and resilience as well as material well-being. 

There were plenty of weeds in the family garden - alcoholism, tyranny, petty snobbery.  For me they were hidden by the flowers.  My parents assumed I would succeed in school and in life.  My father was an optimist until the day he died.  He was also overbearing, but because I was the last child, I wasn’t the star of his dreams, which meant I had room to move.  My mother was gloomy but loving, and I was very close to her.  They were both voracious readers.  They had more than enough money, and happily they valued education and experience over stuff, so we had excellent schooling, travel and adventure in our lives.

 

As one of the lucky ones, I hope to repay my debt to fortune with compassion and appreciation.  I should keep my heart open to the one who has not been lucky. I can’t walk a mile in her shoes - she’s wearing them, and only she knows how they hobble, where they pinch.  But I should meet her where she is, and help where I can. 

And I should appreciate good luck while I have it; it will certainly come and go.  I can’t live looking over my shoulder for that figure that will snatch the rug out from under me, but I can rejoice when life is going well.  Denise Levertov said it as well as it can be said:

                                                           Of Being

                                                   I know this happiness
                                                   is provisional:
            
                                                              The looming presences -
                                                              great suffering, great fear -

                                                              withdraw only
                                                              into peripheral vision:

                                                    but ineluctable this shimmering
                                                    of wind in the blue leaves:

                                                    this flood of stillness
                                                    widening the lake of sky:

                                                    this need to dance,
                                                    this need to kneel:
                                                                                 this mystery.

 

                                                                                                        in Breathing the Water     (1987)

 click

 

NEXT WEEK:  Momma Don't Want No VULGAR

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Sue's Cabin - a Shaggy Dog Story

(I promised you a post on The Fairy Queen, but the Fairy Queen was shy)

North of Macon, in the Oconee National Forest, the road to Sue’s cabin is a long drive, with towns and turns that fill a page of directions.  At four o’clock one spring morning I loaded Oyster and Chilidog into the back of my Honda wagon and headed up the interstate.  Driving in the dark with no landmarks but the exit signs, no traffic but the trucks, the time and distance passed quickly, and the sunrise on my right was soft and clear.  We drove up I-75 and I-16 and over many country roads to Sue’s cabin.

OYSTER AND I; CHILIDOG

 

The wiggling and whining began when we reached the old bridge over Murder Creek, rusting iron and old wooden planks that made the Honda rattle.  As soon as I parked at the end of Sue’s drive and opened the tailgate, the dogs burst out of the car, and Putnam tore up the hill, barking, to meet them.  Then there was ass-sniffing and nose-touching, circling and chasing until they were all satisfied they knew each other.

SUE AND PUTNAM

The cabin is well below the road, and the unpaved driveway descends steeply, then rises to a clearing.  Fog or rain turns the Georgia clay to slick mud, trapping the cars, so we always walk in.  We trudged up and down the hill, mercifully dry on a cool sunny day, lugging water jugs and food.  

Every trip to the cabin is a new adventure.  It began as a pine box with a loft, beautifully crafted by Emery, an old man who works alone.  The boards run diagonally up to the high ceiling, the wood gleaming yellow.  In the twenty years since he built the basic box and dug the hole for the outhouse, he has added a screened front porch, and an open deck on the back and side.  At each visit there are new souvenirs on the pine walls and wooden shelves: a tile with a hand-painted picture of the cabin, a turtle shell, a deer skull. 

Sue has ten acres, and watches with dread as other tracts of land are cleared and sold off in large lots.  But it’s almost twenty years since she built the cabin, and in that time she has only acquired two new neighbors and one new hunt camp. 

Her one close neighbor, Gloria, was there first, up the creek from Sue’s land.  She is a tall, scrawny, rural woman, missing some teeth.  The man who knocked them out left a dozen years ago, with some legal persuasion from Sue, and now Gloria lives happily with her old dog, her garden, and her chickens, who run free through the woods.  Free-range chickens, I suppose they are, but Gloria wouldn’t think of calling them anything so fancy. They’re just chickens.

Sue and I finished unloading the car, and I sat on the porch in the old Adirondack chair while she puttered: sweeping up a dead spider, pulling down a sleeping bag for my cot in the corner, bringing in wood for the stove.  For Sue, housekeeping at the cabin is play, not work.  After the long drive, I prefer to sit and gaze, breathing the cool piney air, listening to a cardinal sing three notes over and over. 

There will be plenty of time for talk, as we bush-whack through the woods, or huddle in front of the wood stove with our wine.  We have known each other since our twenties, when we were young lawyers fighting for the poor, young women struggling to be heard.  We have grown up together. 

JACKSONVILLE AREA LEGAL AID, 1975. SUE AND I AT LEFT.

The dogs had worn themselves out chasing up and down the hill.  Putnam was helping Sue putter, while Chili and Oyster lay at my feet.  Oyster was regal, her head high, her tongue out, panting.  Chili was half-asleep, her head on her paws, ears relaxed, eyes closing, her tail wagging whenever I threw a remark her way.

Sue brewed coffee on the camp stove, in a nasty old aluminum percolator.  I heard a rustling in the leaves.  One of Chili’s long ears twitched higher; Oyster turned her head.  Around the bend in the creek trail came three large hens in procession, pecking and chuckling and heading for  the clearing. 

Chili was up and out the door, down the cinder block steps in one wiry leap.  Two chickens flapped and squawked into the safety of the woods, but the lead chicken was flat on the ground, Chili standing over her.  I screamed, “Chili, NO!” and was at her side, holding her back by the collar.  Oyster and Putnam and Sue were with us now, dogs barking, chicken lying flat.  Sue dragged Putnam into the porch and threw me two leashes, and I hauled Chili and Oyster inside. We came back out and stood over the chicken.  It was injured, but still twitching, and we knew we had to kill it quickly. We’d explain to Gloria later.

Chili was my dog; it was my problem. But I had no  experience with killing chickens.  We had no gun.  Sue has No Hunting notices posted all around the perimeter, and a couple of Wildlife Refuge signs for good measure.  I would have to smash it with a shovel.  Sue went to fetch it, and I breathed deep to find strength.  I raised the big shovel up and over my head with both hands.  As I swung it down, the chicken leapt to her feet and raced into the woods.

 

NEXT WEEK:  THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE

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Tidings of Comfort and Joy

All happy Christmases are alike - compounded of food, friends, memories, and most of all, family, complete with love and aggravation.  We had a quiet one this year - no Twelve Days of Houseguests.click  Only Luli for four days, overlapping with Joe’s daughter Leah for three, overlapping with a day visit from Rick (Joe’s brother) and Catherine, plus two cousins and a girlfriend.

Before Christmas we went south for visits with family.  Tuesday night was a big Hanuukah dinner at Joe’s Dad’s house in Delray.  Fifteen people, matzoh ball soup, brisket, latkes, broccoli, apple cake and rugeleh.  The three children lit the menorah, played dreidel, and received generous money gifts.  We did not get to read the Hannukah story (the kids were a little out of control), but the menorah made an impression on Amanda, and each time we saw one in the following week she would tell me which day of Hannukah it was.

 

BY TERRY KATZ FROM 123RF.COM

The day after we returned from south Florida,  I picked up my sister Luli in Jacksonville.  Her plane was late, but not very, and we were home in time for dinner with the Hilkers.  Mary Anne and Larry are our only old friends with a young child.  Ariel is eleven, and she and Amanda have been friends since Amanda was born.  They call each other sister, and play and fight as though they were.

We spent a balmy evening outside in their back yard, with pizza and half a bushel of oysters.  Joe and Larry shucked most of them and fed them to Luli in a steady stream.  Amanda rode Ariel’s scooter around and around the patio, stopping on each circuit for another oyster warmed on the grill.

BY LENA GROENHALL AT WWW.123RF.COM

On Christmas Eve, Luli, Amanda and I  went to the children’s service at United Church of Gainesville.  I made Amanda leave her book in the car, and  told Luli she should leave her battered daypack, which serves as both luggage and purse. I had no good reason for either of these rules, just a fuzzy feeling that it was not respectful or appropriate - shades of my mother!  My bossiness made all of us cross, but it couldn’t ruin the service.

Sandy, one of the ministers, greeted Amanda at the door with a Wise Man figure to put on the creche when they came to that part of the Christmas story.  Amanda took it reluctantly, and told me “I don’t want to do it.”  “Okay, you can just take it back to Sandy.”  Which she did, after choosing seats for us in the front row.
   
Andy, another minister, told the Christmas story, with frequent pauses at the appropriate place for children to bring up their creche figures, or for all of us to sing a carol.  The children, many of them barely walking, many in lavish Christmas dress, carried their lambs, shepherds, and angels to the creche table, where Sandy helped place them.  Amanda’s figure wasn’t missed, as there were about a dozen Three Wise Men.

BY KATERINA STEPANOVA AT WWW.123RF.COM

The brief sermon in doggerel was accompanied by a slide show of Mary and Joseph, played by a very pregnant church member and her husband, searching in vain for a room at Gainesville’s seedy motels.  The service ended with everyone gathering in the courtyard with candles to sing Silent Night.  We sang many traditional carols that afternoon, with not a Rudolph or Santa in the bunch, and I was glad for Amanda to be learning the Christmas carols that I love.

We usually decorate our tree on Christmas Eve, so we had waited to buy one until we returned from South Florida.  But on December 22 all the tree lots were empty, and the tents were coming down.  Finally, at Home Depot, Joe found four trees, and rather than take advantage of having the last trees in Gainesville, the clerk gave him one for free, and sold him a lopsided bare pine wreath for a dollar.  I had found a bag of decorations - ribbons, small pinecones and a few balls - for 25 cents at the Children’s Home Society thrift store. So I wrapped the ribbon around the wreath, added a rumpled red tartan bow, some small pinecones, and a teddy bear and shiny balls. Joe worries that I will turn into Martha Stewart.
                               

After Joe wound the lights around the tree, Amanda hung all but the highest ornaments. She promptly broke the blown glass ornament Joe and I bought in New Orleans, and I told her “It’s a tradition - we break one ornament every year - it’s good to have it over with.”

So many of the ornaments carry memories.  The yarn ornaments I made with Amanda’s mother and uncle when they were young.  The punk snow man my son made, with a red mohawk and a safety pin in his ear.  On the mantel, tiny creche figures from Amanda’s uncle, and Amanda Angel, a little figurine I bought when she was three.  Missing is the ornament that was dearest to me - the angel Amanda’s mother made out of a toilet paper tube and a styrofoam ball decorated with glitter and spangles.  It topped our Christmas tree for fourteen years, until our relationship deteriorated and she took it for her own tree.   Now we have three ornaments made by Amanda, including a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows.
  

                    

         

On Christmas morning Amanda opened her stocking presents with great enthusiasm and appreciation.  Among other treats were a  tree made of cardboard, which, placed in a magic solution, grew fluffy crystals in 24 hours, and a small rubber rhinoceros which floated in a bowl of water until it became a large rubber rhinoceros, after passing through a slimy stage.

After breakfast (eggs, sausage, bagels, lox, cream cheese, grapefruit, strawberries and Calvados) we opened the presents under the tree.  Again Amanda took time to appreciate each gift, even the slippers and calendar, and then cheered us on as we opened our own.  I was thrilled by her graciousness and joy.  Although I am her mother now, I am still a grandmother, and easily impressed.

We gave her a dance program for the Wii, so after presents we all danced.  I flopped after about five minutes (no stamina, MUST resume regular exercise).  Joe lasted thirty minutes, while Amanda and Luli continued for a full hour.

Leah arrived the next day and we had another gift exchange.  The highlights were stick-on nails for Amanda, a book of poetry by Lucille Clifton for me, and for Leah, an invitation to accompany Joe to South Africa for two weeks this summer.  Amanda and I had both declined to go, but now she said, “When I said I didn’t want to go again, I didn’t know Leah was going.”  She adores Leah, her big sister, who indulges and plays with her while using all her middle- school-teacher tricks to keep her in line.  It’s a lovely relationship.

We always save our big Christmas dinner for the day when Leah arrives, and it was our best dinner ever. (Steaks, spicy grilled vegetable ratatouille, garlic greens (mustard and chard), mashed potatoes, apple and pumpkin pies with butter crusts and tangerine zest in the pumpkin.  Whipped cream and ice cream, OF COURSE.)  Luli and I love to cook together.  She is a professional cook, and I frequently seek her advice, but she insists that at my house she is the sous chef. The pies were worthy of the holiest of holidays.
 
Bruce and Iris came for dinner.  We have had many Christmas dinners with them and their two children.  But now Jordan lives in New York, and Casey has moved to Paris.  Iris had just returned from a visit, and told us that Casey has made her home there, and intends to stay.  Bruce said ruefully, “I guess our new hobby is visiting Paris.”  Leah has chosen New Orleans, and is making it her own. With all the Muu Muu Mamas, I rejoice when the children grow up and create their own good lives.

When Rick and his family came, we went canoeing on the Santa Fe River, after a feast of cold cuts and cake. We all  enjoyed it except Leah, who remembered too late that she hates canoeing.  It didn’t help that Amanda didn’t paddle much, and in attempting to splash Joe, had splashed Leah instead.  The day was way too cold for water fights, but Leah was very good-natured in her complaint.  We all went out for sushi, Leah and I ordered bizarre and very alcoholic drinks, and then Rick and his family took off.
    
There were more feasts and celebrations.  On New Year’s  Eve the Hilkers came for supper (salmon, parslied potatoes, greens and fruitcake). On New Year’s Day Sh’mal and Linda, old HOME Van friends, came for lunch out on the deck (egg salad, green salad, cheese, pumpernickel and oranges) and then we went to Peggy’s big retirement party in High Springs, where I saw most of the Muu Muu’s and many of their grown kids.  And that night, with Amanda in bed, Joe and I celebrated in the living room and danced to Beau Soleil, with a fire in the fireplace and the Christmas tree lights blinking.

The holidays wore me out, and I yearned for an empty house, and solitude.  I am thrilled to be back at work. Every year one of us says, "Can't we skip Christmas?"  But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

                                                            

 

 A message to my readers: If you have enjoyed The Feminist Grandma, please do me a favor.  Recommend it to a couple of friends, or to your "friends" on Facebook. And if you know any agents, editors or publishers, send them my way!

 

NEXT WEEK: THE FAIRY QUEEN

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The Feminist Grandma is on vacation - back January 6

The Twelve Days of Houseguests

 

 (I urge you to sing this to that fine old tune we all know and love)

 

 

 

On the first day of houseguests my true love said to me, “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

On the second day of houseguests my true love said to me, “Where’s my list?” and “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

On the third day of houseguests my true love said to me, “Fetch Don and Doris,” “Where’s my list?” and “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

On the fourth day of houseguests my true love said to me, “Eric comes tonight,” “Fetch Don and Doris,” “Where’s my list?” and “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

On the fifth day of houseguests my true love said to me, “TOO MANY GIFTS!” “Eric comes tonight,” “Fetch Don and Doris,” “Where’s my list?” and “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

On the sixth day of houseguests my true love said to me, “I’ll never eat again,” “TOO MANY GIFTS!” “Eric comes tonight,” “Fetch Don and Doris,” “Where’s my list?” and “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

On the seventh day of houseguests my true love said to me, “Let’s go get Leah,”  “I thought you said you’d do it,” “TOO MANY GIFTS!” “Eric comes tonight,” “Fetch Don and Doris,” “Where’s my list?” and “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

On the eighth day of houseguests my true love said to me, “Who’s coming next?” “Let’s go get Leah,”  “I’ll never eat again,” “TOO MANY GIFTS!” “Get it yourself,” “Fetch Don and Doris,” “Where’s my list?” and “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

On the ninth day of houseguests my true love said to me, “We should change the sheets,” “Who’s coming next?” “Let’s go get Leah,”  “I’ll never eat again,” “TOO MANY GIFTS!” “Eric comes tonight,” “It’s not my family,” “Where’s my list?” and “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

On the tenth day of houseguests my true love said to me, “We should  change the sheets,” “Whatta ya mean ‘we’?”  “Who’s coming next?”“Let’s go get Leah,”  “I told you I’d do it,” “TOO MANY GIFTS!” “Eric comes tonight,” “Fetch Don and Doris,” “Leave me alone,” and “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

On the eleventh day of houseguests my true love said to me, “Here comes Matt and Amber,” “We should  change the sheets,” “Whatta ya mean ‘we’?”  “Who’s coming next?”“Let’s go get Leah,”  “Where’d you put my wallet,” “TOO MANY GIFTS!” “You forgot the onions,” “Fetch Don and Doris,” “Where’s my list?” and “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

On the twelfth day of houseguests my true love said to me, “I’ll see you later,” “You forgot the onions,” “Leave me alone,” “Whatta ya mean ‘we’?” “I told you I’d do it,” “It’s not my family,” “You said you’d do it,” “GET IT YOURSELF,” “Where’d you put my wallet?” “Where’s my list?” “I’ll never eat again,”and “I can’t wait to see Lu-lee.”

 

The Feminist Grandma is taking a vacation -  I'll be back January 6

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The No Bird

 When I was employed at a little legal think tank, I spent a lot of time on causes dear to my heart: welfare rights, abortion rights, indigent health care. Most of my companions in these causes were volunteers, who had to follow their fervor outside of whatever job they were paid to do.  But at my job, which was largely self-defined, I was encouraged to engage with the community, and even had a secretary to help me with it!  So people were always asking me to do things - go to meetings, chair committees, give speeches.

For years, I was The Girl Who Can’t Say No.  And like most yes-sayers, I got in over my head, floundering to avoid drowning, dropping balls, mixing metaphors. Then one day I had a vision*** of a strange bird sitting on my shoulder.  It turned out to be the No Bird.  Since then, whenever anyone asks me to take on a project, the No Bird asks three questions. “Is it worthwhile?  Do you have time? Do you want to do it?”  Unless I can say yes to all three, I’m required to say No. This is harder than it sounds.

THE NO BIRD

First, worthiness is hard to assess.  Doing a kindness is always worthwhile. Fun is always worthwhile. Speaking truth to power is a moral imperative, and therefore usually worthwhile, though efficacy must sometimes enter into the equation, and one must beware of the self-aggrandizing tendency.

Time is elastic. If you want something done, ask a busy woman. Even if she consults her calendar for other commitments, she probably hasn't scheduled down time: time to lie in a hammock, drink a cup of tea, sit and stare.  And as she considers the request, she'll probably ignore family obligations and general maintenance.  So she's likely to say yes, and down time and all the rest get squeezed out. 

“Do you want to?” can also be a tricky question.  They like me, they like me. They’ll be angry if I say no.  I’m the best (or only!) one who can do it.  All these lead me to think, well yes, I kind of want to. But if the thought of it fills me with dread and depression, if my throat tightens and I want to hide under the bed - that’s a pretty sure sign that I don’t. 

Sometimes I overrule the No Bird. When worthwhile really means essential, and I’m truly the only one who can do it, we argue quite fiercely, and eventually the No Bird has to shut up.  (You can see that her beak is a little the worse for wear.)  But by and large my silly bird has been very helpful, and I haven’t joined a committee in years.

 

 *** Inspiration always comes to me in pictures. A house collapsing into a sinkhole, an infant left by a dumpster, a man standing in shadows at the edge of the woods - these sudden images generated my three novels.

 

NEXT WEEK:  The Twelve Days of Houseguests

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An Infidel in Church: the Church Search, Part II

 

A few weeks ago I wrote about finding a church that I loved, but Amanda rejected.  We continued our quest, visiting several, and now I believe we have found the church for us.

Two friends told me that the United Church of Gainesville had excellent children’s programs.  I knew they were a progressive church with a social justice orientation.  They were the source of our first HOME Van donation nine years ago: in a single service they collected 189 pairs of socks, 189 jars of peanut butter, and $189.  They also participate in the Interfaith Hospitality Network, in which member churches take turns providing temporary shelter, food and services to homeless families. So I thought we’d give it a try.

The people mingling outside the church were all white, but in the entrance Amanda was happy to see a girl she knew from kindergarten, and we sat with that family.  The sanctuary is a beautiful space of wood and windows.  People were welcoming, and the sermon was thought-provoking.  The children gathered in front for a story, we sang to everyone who had a birthday that week, and then Amanda went off with the children for Sunday School.

PHOTO FROM TRADITIONALMASS.ORG

As a child I went to an Episcopalian church.  To me, church is dogma and ritual and music.  The only dogma I’ve found at UCG is a commitment to welcome everyone no matter who they are or what they believe.  A part of me asks, So what’s the point?  The congregation has created lovely rituals, but they lack the mystery, history and solemnity I loved as a child. There is beautiful music of all sorts - classical, Dixieland, bluegrass -, but the hymnal seems to consist entirely of hymns written since 1960.  The lyrics are clunky progressive pieties, and give me the willies, though there are few I would disagree with. 

Still, Amanda enjoyed her time with the children, and wanted to return.  I found, as I always do in church, that the program of listening, speaking, silence and singing is a calming time that taps into wells of memory and grief I rarely visit.

Of all the churches we visited, Amanda liked this one the best.  I had my doubts, but I went to a meeting for prospective members.  We sat in a circle to say why we were there, and listened to members and ministers who told us what the church means to them. 

I heard the same words over and over: community, commitment to service and social justice, spiritual seeking.  I thought desperately, “I don’t want community. I’m drowning in community!”  I’ve been in Gainesvillle over thirty years, and have many old friends whom I see too seldom.  As for service, my hands are full with the HOME Van and school volunteering, not to mention Amanda. I don’t want any more obligations, or any more guilt.  Finally, when it comes to a search for truth and meaning, I am like someone born with no sense of taste.  I don’t miss it, and in fact take comfort in the thought that we are tiny specks in an unfeeling, unthinking universe. 

HUBBLESITE.ORG/GALLERY/ALBUM/THE_UNIVERSE

But Amanda likes going to this church, and feels she is part of the group.  We go almost every Sunday now, and bit by bit I am less of a stranger.  I’ve learned a few names, and I’ve signed us up to help host dinner for the homeless families who are staying at the church.  I like the thoughtful, honest sermons of the four ministers, and my prickly, judgmental voice is becoming fainter.  We may have found our church.

NEXT WEEK: The No Bird

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I Got Shoes

I don’t understand the passion for purses, but the passion for shoes? - I get it.  I used to mash my feet into spiky toes, pound my soles walking on spiky heels.  Three inches was as high as you could go back then, unless you shopped in specialty costume stores. Now heels are up to five inches. I see women in these tottery-high heels everywhere, and my toes hurt.  I see a young woman in platform shoes and fear for her ankles.

High heels screw up your feet, your legs, and your back.  They hurt us and hobble us.  Why do we wear them?  Because our self-images are still shaped by fashion and media. Along with thin and young, we think sexy means that look you get in high heels - long curving calves, buttocks and breasts pushed out. Feminism has only taken us so far, and when we’re on the prowl we’re still willing to suffer to look sexy.

OUCH

I always loved shoes, and have lots of shoe-memories.  As a toddler I had to wear ugly brown oxfords instead of Mary Janes.  In elementary school, I wore saddle shoes, in junior high I wore loafers and flats, and then it was boarding school and back to saddle shoes again. When our dog chewed on Luli’s flats my mother had the cobbler turn them into peep toes. I was jealous; my mother wore open toed pumps and they were very fashionable. We dressed up flats and pumps with clip-on bows and brooches.  I held color chips against my fuschia dance dress so the white satin pumps could be dyed to match. 

When I was fourteen I took the train alone into New York City. I wore slate-gray high heels with pointy toes.  It was my first time navigating the city on my own, and I strutted down Madison Avenue until my heel went into a grating and broke off.  It was white plastic with a spike inside.  I fitted the spike back into the hole, and limped the rest of the way to my appointment.

My first sexy boots were knee-high fake patent leather, and made my feet smell terrible.  I sprinkled talcum powder inside.  When I pulled them off my stockings were covered with powder and I left little white footprints on my first lover's carpet.  The idea that my feet could smell?  Mortifying.

I bought black patent leather sandals with spike heels and an ankle strap.  That was when I first heard “fuck-me shoes,” from a lover who liked fantasy sex, but was otherwise annoying.

RUDE SHOES (KIRIAKI BY NINE WEST)

I was close to forty when comfort trumped style.  After that, it was light weight hiking boots in winter, thick-soled sandals for summer and Naturalizer pumps with one- inch chunky heels in many shades for teaching or dress-up.  I didn’t stop wishing I could wear snazzy shoes, but the pain was persuasive. 
   
A couple of years after I got my new knees, my left arch collapsed.  My ankle was pulled out of alignment, swelled up like a balloon, and left me limping. I tried ice, braces, arch supports, cortisone shots.  The podiatrist finally gave up and sent me to a specialist, whose custom-made orthotic inserts fixed the problem. There’s only one catch - the inserts are very expensive and are made to fit one particular shoe.  So I wear the same shoe style all the time, with fancy dress and jeans. Old lady shoes are acceptable anywhere. They come in black, buff, and white. Until recently I had one worn out, knockabout pair, one kept-clean pair for dress, and one buff pair for variety.                      

I can’t go barefoot anymore - as soon as I get up in the morning I put on my shoes.  I miss my bedroom slippers in the winter, and sandals in the summer.  My feet are imprisoned except when I’m sleeping.  But foot freedom is  a small loss.  Now I can dance again, and even hike up hills.

                       

Still, every time I go to Zappo’s, where I buy my shoes, I linger over the “women’s heels” pages.  One pair promises to “capture your prey with a memorable message of seduction” They even have a brand called Promiscuous (WHAT is the world coming to!)  I yearn a while, and then I order another pair of Brooks Addiction Walkers. 

Then one day as I was whining to Luli about my shoes, she suggested I paint them.  Immediately I googled shoe paint, found a site with instructions, and ordered about $30 worth of supplies - 8 colors, leather cleaner, and an acrylic finish. Iris and Amanda and I had a happy morning painting, and since then Amanda and I have painted my two remaining pairs.  

 

AMANDA'S CREATIONS

PAINTING SHOES

 
THE FG COLLECTION

I’m amused by how my shoes cheer me up.  Every time I look down and see them peeking from my pants I smile.  It’s not all good.  I don’t have any shoes left for somber or formal occasions, and I know if I buy another black pair, the temptation will be too great. (I’m dying for zebra stripes.)   But dress codes for funerals have seemingly disappeared, and I’ll never be invited to the White House.  I'm glad to have shoes that say, "I am still here.” 

 

NEXT WEEK: An Infidel in Church: The Church Search, Part II

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One More Day for Thanksgiving

(Of course I’ve changed the names, and a few details, to preserve the limited privacy of our homeless friends.)

The HOME Van arrives at the Downtown Plaza, our busiest stop, at 5:45 on Thursdays.  A long line forms for food bags, followed by a line for soup, cornbread and hot chocolate.  A smaller line waits at the front of the van for medicine.  At the back people search through clothes, toiletries and books.  And a few people stand in front of me where I sit near the van, sorting socks to find what suits each customer: “You want short or long, dark or white?”

 
HOME VAN AT HOME

       
                                               HOMEVAN STUFFED WITH STUFF

Old friends, old enemies, and strangers stand in line together, loud or quiet, lively or withdrawn, all hungry, most homeless. Hugs, greetings, insults, jokes, gossip - who’s in jail, who’s in the hospital, what happened at the church dinner the night before.

Sometimes there are angry complaints - “How come you never have batteries?” but more often gracious, generous words - “You are a blessing,” “No, give it to Mr. Watson, he needs it more than me.” (Mr Watson is over 80.) There are more men than women, more black than white, more middle-aged or old than young.
                           
Times are always tough at the bottom; you might think a poor economy wouldn’t make any difference.  But work has long since dried up at the labor pools.  Shelves at the food banks empty quickly every week, and at every agency demand is up and donations down. There are more homeless people now.  The annual count in Gainesville used to find about 800 people; now there are 1500.

We never used to see children at the HOME Van, but now we often do.  Recently Laquita has been a regular customer.  She has a toddler in a stroller, and 6-year-old Shontelle.  Laquita waits patiently in line for food bags for the three of them, each bag with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a hard-boiled egg, an orange, a granola bar, and a bottle of water.

Shontelle stands by her brother.  Her hair is neatly braided in rows and plaits, and she wears the same public school uniform as Amanda - a polo shirt and pants. She watches our motley crew of customers with lively eyes.  Little Franco, bleary-eyed, leaps into the lap of a fat woman in a wheelchair.  Her thin cotton dress falls alarmingly low off her shoulders.  Joseph and Isaiah argue over a place in line, their expletives rising louder and ruder and then subsiding into muttered insults.  Michelle wears all her clothes at once - pants, skirts, shirts, sweaters, her head wrapped in shawls.

Arupa and I try to have a special gift for the children who show up - a stuffed animal, a book, a notebook and pretty pen.  I ask Laquita, “Do you think the kids would like this teddy bear?  She smiles and calls Shontelle over.  Without prompting, Shontelle thanks me and takes the teddy bear to her brother, makes it dance and talk for him.

GIFTS FOR THE KIDS   

More than the children, it’s the parents I ache for.  Living in a car, a church, a homeless shelter, they struggle to give their children a normal life. They are ashamed that they cannot provide, humiliated at taking the kids to a soup line. But the worst is the fear that protective services will take the children away.   
                           
Last year I took Amanda to the HOME Van Christmas drive-out, when we give out the Christmas stockings stuffed by people all over town.  They are white tube socks stuffed with candy, perfume, batteries, flashlights, toys, all sorts of treats that say “People are thinking of you, people care that you are living in the woods.”  With her best company manners Amanda handed out socks and candy canes, and helped eat the cookies.                 

               
 
               HOME VAN CHRISTMAS STOCKINGS                    

 A few weeks ago Amanda and I hosted dinner for the families who were staying at our church.  Hosting is easy.  With another volunteer we put out the food, eat dinner with the guests, and clean up afterwards.  This time there were three families, including four young children and two older boys.

After dinner Amanda went out to the playground with the children, but Darnel, the oldest boy, stayed behind to talk with me and the other volunteer.  He was a comical delight - full of 14-year-old braggadocio and wiseacre remarks. His uncle had moved with him and his younger brother from Detroit in August. They had spent the previous week in a motel, and would move the next week to another church. Darnel was enrolled in the prize-winning performing arts program at one of our magnet schools.  He said school was too hard. “At least you’re not bored,” I said. “Yeah, but I can’t sleep in class, so I’m tired all the time. They should let you sleep if you want to.”

We discussed rules that we think are unfair, and I offered rules against peeing in public.  Darnell thinks those are good rules.  “What can you do if you don’t have a home? You still have to pee.”  “Yeah, but how would you like it if you were walking down the street and some guy had whipped it out and was peeing?” “I’d walk behind him.” “Yeah, but what if he turns around suddenly and it goes all over your leg?” “I’d wash it off.” 

Amanda played with the other kids until well past dark.  The littlest girl admired her earrings and when Amanda told her she had a matching bracelet at home, she said,  “I wish I had a home.” Amanda said, “It’s hard not to have a home.  I wish I could help you.”

I had to stay till 8:30 when the overnight volunteers take over.  Joe came at 7:30 to take Amanda home for bedtime in her very pink bedroom - a hot shower, fleece pajamas, a chapter from the bedtime story, and lights out.     

 
     AMANDA'S ROOM IS JUST AS PINK - PHOTO FROM DIGSDIGS.COM     

 Today is the day after Thanksgiving.  If you are homeless, you may have eaten three Thanksgiving meals yesterday - everybody serves free dinners at Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you are housed, you probably have a refrigerator full of leftovers.

 
TURKEY DINNER BY NOMADCHEF.COM AT IMAGES.GOOGLE.COM

You may feel you have been as thankful as you need to be. But take time today to be grateful for one more thing.  If you are homeless, be thankful if you have no children.  If you have children, be thankful if you have a home.

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 NEXT WEEK: I Got Shoes

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An Infidel in Church: the Church Search, Part I

I was looking for a church for Amanda and me. I am not a believer, but she attended church sporadically before she came to live with us, and her belief in God and Jesus are important to her.

 
FROM "A CHILD IS BORN" BY MARGARET WISE BROWN.  ILLUSTRATIONS BY FLOYD COOPER
click

Amanda has been self-conscious about her white grandparents, and undoubtedly will be again.  I wanted a church where we could both be comfortable, where a white grandma was accepted.  More important, I wanted a church where Amanda would hear more about love and forgiveness, about doing good works and rejoicing in God’s creation, than about possession by demons and the fires of hell.

It was a puzzle.  Where could I find a church for both of us - black Christian child and white atheist woman?  I heard of two “integrated” churches, and went on their websites.  They were big evangelical churches, and their photo albums didn’t look very integrated to me - a smattering of black faces among thousands of white.  And their missions and messages disturbed me, insisting that Jesus is the one and only Way.  Maybe searching for a Christian church that doesn’t focus on Christianity is unrealistic, but it can’t be good for Amanda to think Grandma and Grandpa are headed for hell. We ended by visiting four different churches.

Twenty years ago I took my foster children to a black United Methodist church.  I really like the minister there, who told me, “God doesn’t see color.”  The Methodists seem to accept that there may be various paths to truth, and they sing a lot of the hymns I grew up with.  So on Palm Sunday, Amanda and I dressed up and headed to church. 

Amanda chose a pew in the middle.  At first she sat stiffly, two feet away from me, looking a little worried.  But as the familiar sights and sounds sank in - the praise choir clapping and singing, people waving their hands, swaying - she began to relax. 

PITTSBURGH GOSPEL CHOIR from IMAGES.GOOGLE.COM

I sang enthusiastically.  At home I sing constantly, and it often aggravates Joe and Amanda.  He says, “Please stop singing,” and she simply says, “Grandma.”  But in church she didn’t object, and soon she was singing too.
   
The minister welcomed all the visitors, saying, “You are in the right place, you are where you belong.” She looked right at us.

It was a special day.  They were baptizing a baby, maybe a year old.  She had a great mop of soft black hair, and creamy tan skin.  Her black father and white mother were surrounded by family in all shades. They passed the baby to the minister, and when the water touched her face, she cried.  Amanda watched closely.

The minister introduced Michelle Duster, a descendant of Ida B. Wells.  She told us that while she was proud of her great grandmother, the anti-lynching crusader, all our ancestors were strong.  They were fighters and survivors.  They survived the Middle Passage, slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow.  And none of them did it alone.

IDA B. WELLS      

click

As far as I know, these were not my ancestors, but in this church Amanda would learn the values and history I hope she will cherish.  In this church I heard the messages that matter to me - messages about service, community, justice.  Church is for believers and seekers, and I am a comfortable atheist. But gospel music makes my soul sing, and I love to be in a place where people are rejoicing and trying to be good.  Here Amanda could find community and strength, and this is the church I would choose.

Unfortunately, our next visit was a disaster.  The minister called all the children up to the front, and Amanda of course went too.  But they had been rehearsing a reading, and the group leader sent Amanda back because she didn’t have a role in it.  She was mortified, and NEVER wants to go back.  I had to resume my search.

 

NEXT WEEK: One More Day for Thanksgiving

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The Muumuu Mamas Go to the Beach

Every fall the Muumuu Mamas, nine middle-aged women, go to the beach for a weekend. The others have demanding jobs, with too many needy people, students, committees, travel.  I am the only one who has retired, but I have Amanda.  The beach weekend is our escape, and we look forward to it all year.

Planning begins in the spring, when someone sends an email: is it time to begin looking for a house?  At least six weeks before the trip someone sends out a sign-up sheet for meals, and food porn fills our in-boxes..

Over the years we have gone from house to house, seeking perfection.    Michelle, the most fastidious of us, sets the standard. The consensus: we want a house that is nicer than our own. (For some of us that would not be hard to find.)  I am happy in shabby, and have a fondness for shacks, but I can wallow in luxury with the best of them.      
 

For two years we rented a house that belonged to friends of Michelle, but she was active in gay rights in Florida, the friends grew more conservative, and that became uncomfortable.  Then I found a beautiful house at the part of St Augustine Beach where driving is forbidden.  When we arrived it had just been sprayed for bugs.  Ceal couldn’t stand the smell, and earthworms were committing suicide in the swimming pool.  The next year we rented the house next door,  but the balcony had no shade.        

This year we think we have finally found a permanent home. It’s on the ocean, two stories, with five bedrooms and five baths, two living rooms, a deck upstairs and patio downstairs, a swimming pool, and a long boardwalk over the dunes to the water. Its name: Peace of Paradise.  

 

EARLY MORNING AT PEACE OF PARADISE

 Peggy, who arranged the rental, goes over early Friday to open the house; the rest of us drive to the beach in twos and threes.  When Iris and I arrive, we find Marcie, Michelle and Peggy already there.

Peggy challenges us to find the ugliest thing in the house.  She gives us hints: it is downstairs, and has been put away.  After a brief search, Iris comes back upstairs, waving her trophy.  A flamingo tchotchke, neck curving down, its rump a burst of pink feathers, standing in front of lurid green leaves.  It is one of a pair of bookends, and I long to steal them for the shelf in my office.       
 

Apart from the bird, the decor is inoffensive, standard beach themes with not too many shell-encrusted items. The swinging gate from the beach to the boardwalk has a mosaic peace sign.  Iris decides that the ceiling fan in the living room, huge blades shaped like palm fronds, is the only feature that is unacceptable.  If she weren’t so short, it might cut off her head, and anyway, it is clunky-looking. 
               
The Mamas give me a downstairs bedroom all to myself with a huge jacuzzi tub in my private bathroom and the pool right outside my door. They say  it’s because I go to bed and get up so early, and they want me away from the main part of the house. But they spoil me, I think,     because they are through with child-rearing and I have Amanda.   

Many of us are cooks, all of us are gluttons, and the food is endless and varied.  Among other treats this year we have the best cioppino I have ever eaten, black rice salad, warm red cabbage slaw, pasta with walnut pesto, a pear and apple cake, jelly tots. Plates of cheese, vegetables and hummus, and bowls of nuts are laid out on the counter, and there is always an open bottle of wine. I make black beans and rice for Friday dinner, Julie makes Caesar salad.  I was planning cornbread, but all of us thought somebody else was bringing eggs and milk.

Saturday morning I finish writing about 7:30, and decide to jump in the freezing pool.  A physical therapist once told me that ice is my friend, but I admit I was also showing off.  I strip and step outside.  Think a minute.  Go back inside and fill the hot tub, sink until my breasts are bobbing, and turn on the jets.  When I am hot to the core I pad out to the pool, walk to the edge and jump.  If I hesitated I wouldn’t do it, and in mid-air I have a moment of exhilaration, thinking, “Can’t turn back now!”  I tread water for about fifteen minutes, every aching joint and bone crying hallelujah. When I’m cold to the core I return to the tub.                
      

I smell bacon upstairs, and I’m tempted.  But once I go up and connect, it will be hard to tear myself away, and I am so happy to be alone, pampered, free.  I contemplate a nap. I write a little more, and then a smoke alarm goes off, piercing even way down here.  I’m ready.

Iris always brings her griddle and makes pancakes, but with no eggs or milk we graze - coffee, yoghurt, cheese, fruit, bread, sweet potatoes, bacon - there are plenty of choices.

After breakfast Marcie, Iris and I go to the store.  While they are at Publix, I go to the Dollar Tree for a coming-home gift for Amanda, and find bags of rubber snakes, perfect for her Halloween Medusa costume.  We head up A1A to the fish store, and while Marcie buys the fish for dinner, Iris and I go to the fancy thrift store down the street.  I find a nice purse for Amanda’s birthday for $9.50.  I plan to fill it with little gifts, individually wrapped.  I am a little concerned about heavy metal rings on either side, which could make it a handy weapon, but I decide we have outgrown that concern.

If our weekend has a theme it is, “No one does anything she doesn’t want to do.” People walk on the beach, read, write, swim in the ocean or the pool. A 1500-piece jigsaw puzzle attracts several of us, but by Saturday night it's abandoned as too hard. Iris and Michelle have brought their extensive beading supplies, and they and Julie spend some time making necklaces.

 

There is always someone cooking, someone eating, someone tidying the kitchen. We turn on the music and dance.  We talk and talk, and sit in comfortable silence. We take naps whenever we want. 

At dinner and afterwards we are all together, talking about our lives, telling stories. This year Julie has a variation on Dictionary.  One person reads the description on the back of a romance novel, and then all the others write first paragraphs for the book.  The leader reads all the paragraphs, and we guess the real one.

Marcie’s daughter Naorah named us the Muumuu Mamas when she visited at 10am on our first beach weekend and found us all lounging in our muumuus drinking wine.  We get together as often as we can, for dinner, canoeing, or celebrations.  We’ve made Christmas cookies, and Christmas stockings for the HOME Van. When I had knee surgery, Joe spent the night with me at the hospital and the Muumuus took daytime shifts, so I was never alone.  The nurses thought we were a church group.

One husband thinks we go to the beach to get away from our husbands.  Marcie says, “No, it’s because we want to be together.” (One of us who shall be nameless says, “The other is just a fringe benefit.”)

The beach weekend is our gift to ourselves and to each other.  It is a celebration of our friendship.  I don't know how I would manage without the Muumuu Mamas.

DAWN

 

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NEXT WEEK: The Church Search: An Infidel in Church, Part I

 

 

Finding My Better Self at a Writers' Retreat

In October I went to Jane’s Stories annual Writers’ Retreat.  It was my second time at a writers’ conference.  At the first, three years ago, I met Sandra, who told me that her goal is to find one new writer friend at each workshop she attends.  It was Sandra who encouraged me to go to the Jane’s Stories retreat. click

I needed no urging.  Like most loving mothers, I welcome any chance to re-enter the adult world.  And this time, unlike the last, I felt I had something to offer.  If a writer is anyone who writes regularly, and an author is a writer who has been published, a blogger is somewhere in between.  I’m proud of my blog, and had just acquired beautiful cards to identify myself.

 

Just before my first conference, Amanda came to live with us for the second time, and I wondered whether I should go.  Leaving Joe on his own for three days with an unhappy and confused little girl was troubling.  But the conference was here in Gainesville, so I would be home every night, and Joe urged me to go. This time it happened that once again Amanda was going through a rough patch, and once again I considered cancelling. But Joe is an old hand, and it was just 24 hours.  So I headed off to St. Augustine early Saturday morning, enjoying the solitary two-hour drive into dawn.

MATANZAS BAY - images.google.com from city-data.com

The retreat was at a restaurant, in a room overlooking Matanzas Bay. It included a two hour workshop on memoir by Karen Sayler McElmurray, author of two novels and her own memoir, Surrendered Child.  Sandra Lambert and Anne Martin Fletcher described their successful quests for an agent, and gave pointers.  Georgia Banks Martin spoke on fairy tales and poetry.  We had the opportunity to have a manuscript or query letter critiqued.  I brought a query letter for my third novel and Anne wrote useful scribbles all over it.  click  click  click  click

Attendance was small, which surely disappointed the hard-working, all-volunteer Jane’s Stories board.  But it produced a most wonderful workshop, in which everyone felt free to participate, and had valuable things to say.

This was all interesting and helpful.  But for me the most important part was being with people who are writers, who know what writing involves, and think it is worthwhile work.  For each of us it is different - we are more or less fluent or blocked, frightened or brave.  Most of us have been all of these.

These women have experienced writing as I have.  Mucking around in my mind to dig up thoughts and catch them as they fly out.  Beginning with a plan or throwing scraps at the screen to see what happens.  Returning the next morning to find words dead on the page, or a sentence that sings. Tidying up the mess - one of my favorite parts, as I am a decisive editor. Exulting when, after many revisions, a draft feels final. (It never is.)

They have also experienced the grim and tedious business of trying to get published.  I have submitted for years with no success, though once I had an agent, and two editors have been effusive about my writing as they rejected it.

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” said Samuel Johnson.  In truth, only a fool writes for money.  The odds of making money by writing are probably smaller than the odds of a high school athlete making it in the pros.  If it’s money you’re after, play the stock market; if it’s fame, try serial killing.
 

NO BLOCKHEAD HE? - Dr Samuel Johnson, after Joshua Reynolds Photo: THE GALLERY COLLECTION/CORBIS

            
I had dinner with Sandra, who is herself beginning to experience success, with publication in two prestigious literary journals.  Her generosity is an inspiration.  On her blog, full of beautiful photos and paeans to Florida nature, she tirelessly promotes the work of others, new authors and old. She doesn’t waste energy on carping and belittling.  Unless she is critiquing, she saves her breath for praise. 

Sandra’s attitude was an example and a gentle rebuke to me.  In the intensity of my long wish to be published, to be heard, I had become selfish and envious.  I clung to a distinction between real writers and dabblers.  As though it were a race, I looked around to see who was ahead of me.  But writing isn’t a competition, though the world would make it one.  There is room for all the flowers in the garden.

  POPPY GARDEN - by Slatesculpt at flickr.com/photos/57031315@N02/page3/    

 After dinner we went to Anastasia Books, where five women read from their work: memoir, poetry, essay, fiction.  I bought a book of poems by one, and a memoir by another. Some of the writers have had more success than others; all were well worth listening to.  To hear them was to remember that we each have unique vision, and can speak with a unique voice.  I intend to go to workshops when I can, and be inspired, not threatened, by other writers’ gifts.

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NEXT WEEK: The Muumuu Mamas Go to the Beach

Tidy Me

On a recent weekend I tackled the clutter in my office.  My office consists of a small bedroom, with a big desk, lots of books, and a bed, and a large former closet. The closet is my computer and file room.

We have four file drawers to hide the business of life, but my personal files were on two small shelves behind me in the computer room - files about Amanda, and writing, and recipes.  To Do’s were piled in no order on a three tier plastic tray next to the computer, and the rest of the computer desk had lists and works in progress and books to return to the library and dirty socks. The big desk was covered with stuff from our Africa trip: souvenirs, gifts, postcards, camera equipment.   A jumble drawer in each room held...jumble.

CLUTTER

I spent the better part of three days organizing, cleaning, and culling.  I enlisted Joe to help with the Africa stuff, since a lot of it was his.  Then I went through all the papers littering the computer desk and the To Do tray, all the folders on the shelves.  I took down a storage box, threw out a bunch of files from ancient matters, and replaced them with files from middle-aged matters. With glee I discarded many papers from our two years as foster parents, and consolidated the adoption papers into one accordian file. 

I went through the drawers and equipped each with plenty of pens, pencils, markers.  I hid the scissors way at the back where I hoped only I would find them. (Amanda and Joe have their own, but you know how scissors go wandering.) 

Now the computer desk has only the computer, the printer, and a paper tray.  The shelves behind me have writing books, stationery and computer supplies.  Active files are tidy on the big desk.

TIDY ME

I am blissful in my new space. The trouble is that I believe the order will last, and I’m really too experienced for such delusions.  It’s like giving up smoking.  You do it over and over, always hoping, and always relapsing.  Or like love when you’re young.  First you say, “This is The One.”  Then, after several, you say “Is this The One?”  After many more, you’re likely to say, “Fuck it, there ISN'T One.”

Still, I did give up smoking on the fifth try, when I was 36.  I did find The One - I won’t say how many tries - when I was 48 (even if he does leave his stuff on my desk).  Is it possible that at 64 I have finally conquered clutter?

 

 

NEXT WEEK: Finding My Better Self at a Writers' Retreat

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Why I love Like My Kindle

I grew up in houses full of books.  Book shelves are as fundamental to my sense of home as pictures on the walls.  When I visit a friend, I head to the bookcase, and imagine moving in for a weekend so I can read her books.  When Iris and I, both single mothers, decided to share a house, I was thrilled to see that she had an almost empty bookcase, then dismayed to discover that she considered books clutter, and used the shelves for ornaments and organizing.

My husband is resigned to my clutter, and he himself has shelves of natural history book, but he was pleased when I spent the first week of my retirement reducing the collection by a third.  (Thus making room for more books.)   With less money, I did resolve to rely more on the library, but I still have little bursts of book-buying, and my family gives me books for Christmas. I try to keep the collection culled by giving away anything that isn’t a keeper.
                       
I always pack books when I travel.  I like to take books about the place I’m going, and a fat Victorian novel for a vacation from the vacation.  One is not enough.  Suppose I don’t like it, or worse, suppose I finish it.  Once, alone in Nova Scotia, I found myself on a Sunday with nothing to read.  The only store open in Cheticamp was a drugstore, with a tiny book rack of mostly junk.  I found an Agatha Christie, but it was a quick read, not nearly enough to fill the tired hours after morning hikes, and the long nightly stretches of insomnia.

MY B&B IN BADDECK, NOVA SCOTIA HAD A BOOKCASE

 
L'ACADIEN TRAIL NEAR CHETICAMP: GREAT VIEWS AND MOOSE TURDS, BUT NO BOOKS

When I travel by car, books are no problem - even for a weekend I have two or three in my tote bag.  By air, with a small suitcase, it’s more of a challenge.  In France I had a used paperback of Les Miserables, torn into five sections for easy portability in my purse, though I had to overcome a lifetime of training to mutilate a book.

An e-reader is the obvious solution, but I am a technophobe.  I hate new gizmos.  I grumbled when I had to learn to use a computer for work. Answering machine, cell phone, digital camera - I could write an essay about my long resistance and eventual submission to each of them.

So I bought a Kindle before our trip to South Africa with great reluctance.  First I borrowed my stepdaughter Leah’s for a couple of days, to see how I liked it.  I was amused to see what an ambitious and improbable collection of free books she had downloaded, including War and Peace, and the complete works of Shakespeare and Dickens.  I read a few pages of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I didn’t know whether it was the Autobiography or the Kindle that I liked, but I went ahead and bought one anyway.  And I discovered the appeal and peril of the Kindle.

First, I downloaded a list of free books for Kindle, and a list of free children’s books.  Then I went shopping.  I’d never read any Wilkie Collins - I downloaded the The Woman in White and the Moonstone. Willa Cather’s My Antonia.  Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities. To my shame, Virginia Woolf’s fiction has always been beyond me.  I decided to give her another try, and downloaded Night and Day. For Amanda’s bedtime story I found Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, E. Nesbit, L. Frank Baum, and Hans Christian Andersen.

A character in The Moonstone uses The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe as his guide in all situations; it’s free on Kindle.  The Moonstone plot turns on opium, so I found Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.  I’d always heard Edward Gibbon was the great prose stylist of the 18th century, so I got all six volumes of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Now I understood Leah’s collection.

Everything had been free so far, and though I may never read the Gibbon, no harm done.  Then I went on a spree.  I had already read a lot of non-fiction about South Africa, but fiction illuminates a place in a way non-fiction can’t.  I bought thirteen contemporary South African novels.  Amanda is a reluctant reader, but loves anything with a screen. Ten easy-reading children’s books.  I flew off to Johannesberg with nineteen novels and fifteen children’s books in my purse (not to mention Gibbon).

I loved the Kindle, and delighted in its special features. With one click I can look up almost any word in the New Oxford Dictionary. I can highlight and store passages that appeal to me. I can search a word, which helps when a minor character whom I’ve forgotten reappears.  I often mis-lay a book when I’m in the middle of it, and wander the house trying to find it.  If I remember to put my Kindle back in its garish neoprene cover, it stands out wherever I leave  it.

 
MY HIGHLY VISIBLE KINDLE

Buying books on Kindle is easier than ordinary internet shopping.  It may be too easy.  When I hear of a book on NPR, or read a review in the New Yorker, I am much more likely to buy it.  Most of these are happy impulses.  I’ve read a fascinating account of two teachers in Colorado at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a warm and witty novel about a widowed British colonel and an Indian shop-keeper in Sussex. click  click  Nothing I buy is very expensive, but even in 2011 ten bucks is ten bucks, and though I never finished the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, I still believe a penny saved is a penny earned..

So I traveled around in South Africa and Swaziland, with a book always available for me and for Amanda, and thought I would write an essay in praise of my Kindle.  And then we came home.  Blissfully I sat in my ancient La-Z-Boy, early in the morning, lamp over my left shoulder, coffee beside me.  Home at last.  I reveled in the familiar sights, sounds and smells (we DO have a dog), and I looked over at the bookcase.  

Every book I saw called up memories - not only of its contents, but of where and who I was when I read it.  Books are the most reliable companions, more constant than a lover, less trouble than a dog.  But my memories of books are inseparable from their physical presence.  The cover entices me, and the book designer’s choices about typography and placement and proportion become part of the reading. click

When I read a book on Kindle, the design disappears.  All the technical challenges and choices that permit a book to fly through space and arrive on my Kindle within moments of my request are invisible.  The author’s words come to me unmediated, and there’s something exciting about that.  But a book on Kindle is like a phone conversation instead of a visit.
                                       
I wouldn’t give up my Kindle; there’s nothing like it for travel.  Still, when I’m home, I’ll choose the serendipity of a trip to the library or book store, or the familiar volumes that have comforted and nourished me all my life.

 

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NEXT WEEK: Tidy Me

This Short-Term Memory Thing

                                MIAMI AT NIGHT                                 BABOON FAMILY, SOUTH AFRICA                                           photobucket.com wisin_23                 copyright 2011 Joseph S. Jackson, by permission

 

We are going to South Florida one weekend, South Africa the next.  I sit with my coffee and make yet another list.  It takes about ten minutes to assign the remaining To Do’s to the remaining days. 

In the middle of writing a task for Wednesday I glance up at Tuesday. “Check boxes.” What boxes?  I  need cartons to tote canned goods for the HOME Van, but that’s not what I meant.  What I meant has fallen into the void that follows behind me, swallowing thoughts a minute after I think them.  It is gone, like a twig sucked down in the current, and like the twig it will bob up again somewhere down stream.  I know there’s no use trying to find it now.  I return to Wednesday.  There, right next to “load flash drive,” is half a word: “Dil.”  Shit.  That’s gone too.

My mother-in-law, Naomi, lives in Deerfield Beach, in a second-floor condo overlooking a canal.   We stop for lunch and a swim on our way home from Miami Beach.  She makes us coffee for the road, and I go down to the car to get my travel mug, grabbing a couple of satchels to carry down.  Unlock the trunk, put them in, go back upstairs.  “Where’s your mug?” Joe asks.  Oh. 

I go downstairs again.  I take the plastic bag with our wet bathing suits, and the gift bag Naomi gave Amanda to celebrate the adoption.  I unlock the car, put them inside, and go back upstairs.  Open the door, and stop still, my mouth gaping.  Joe laughs.  I turn around without a word, and head back down one more time, thinking, “coffee mug, coffee mug.”  This time I succeed, and head back up the stairs for the third time.  My mind may be slipping, but my legs are growing stronger.

Finally, after bouncing from bed to bed in Johannesburg, Kruger, and Swaziland, we are in our own house in Capetown, and I am cooking our first meal. Very simple: burgers with no buns, salad, potato chips from the plane.  The burger meat is too lean, and the stove puzzling - I’m accustomed to gas.  But as the burgers cook, I prepare the salad. 

 
OUR CAPETOWN KITCHEN

The kitchen is well-equipped, and I pull out a blue plastic colander to wash the greens.  I tear up the iceberg, arugula, spinach and watercress.  Get the oil and vinegar, salt and pepper.  The kosher salt is damp  in the grinder, and  comes out in clumps.  Oh well.  Plenty of pepper, and then oil.  Toss well, add the vinegar. 

Joe sets the table, Amanda gets the burgers, I bring the salad.  I return for the salt and pepper and am puzzled by the puddle of oil on the counter.  I examine the bottle - no cracks, no oil down the side to show I spilled it.  I wipe it up and we begin dinner.  Joe serves himself salad and says, “Liz, this is a colander not a bowl.”  He shows Amanda the holes - in my defense, they are inconspicuous in the dark blue plastic.  But it all comes back to me - I forgot to wash the greens, and dressed the salad in the colander.

I used to ask my law students not to come into class late, or talk during my lectures.  “I lose my train of thought, and there’s no telling when another one will come down the track.”  I don’t believe this is Alzheimers or dementia, just late middle age. Although it is a nuisance, I find it amusing, I suppose because my friends are in the same boat. But writing entails catching thoughts on the run, then tidying them up. How can I do it when my thoughts disappear? 

I could carry a little notebook, but I fear it would be one more thing to lose, like keys and glasses.  I’m sure there are plenty of memory tricks on the Internet - aging boomers are a booming business.  I will probably let it be.  None of my thoughts are so valuable that I can’t afford to lose them.  And another train always comes along eventually.

.
WHEN'S THE NEXT TRAIN?

Photobucket.com: Tracks. by ILYB2014
 

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The Great Beanie Wienie Disaster

(Warning: This story is not for the faint of gut.)

The HOME Van is a gang of volunteers who go out twice a week to campsites and parks, delivering food and miscellaneous items to homeless people. The food includes a supper bag with a sandwich, hard-boiled egg, granola bar, fruit and water, a cup of iced tea or hot cocoa, and homemade cornbread and soup.

HOME Van soup is really good.  It's thick with vegetables, beans, potatoes, rice or pasta, and meat (or meat substitute if made by a vegetarian). The people who live in the woods love it, and often take seconds and thirds if there’s enough.  A cup of soup is my supper on Thursdays, when I ride the van.  It’s more fun to share a meal than to stand by while others eat.

I coordinate the soup rota, and when no one else can, I make the soup.  Though I love to make soup for my family, five gallons is a challenge.  Browning five pounds of meat, chopping all those vegetables, sauteeing the onions and celery - it’s too much, and becomes slightly disgusting.  It also takes a good part of the day, and transferring the boiling hot soup into the thermos, then lugging it to the car, is a pain in the neck.

A couple of times I went all out, but now, on the rare occasions when we don’t have anyone to make soup, I make beanie wienies: ten pounds of chopped hotdogs and six giant cans of pork and beans.

5 GALLONS OF BEANIE WIENIES (AND 10 DOZEN EGGS)

This should be easy. What could go wrong?  Usually, nothing, and most of our homeless friends love beanie wienies.  But there was a day...

It was late November, a chilly day by Florida standards, and a good day for eating beans and hot dogs.  After a morning making sandwiches at HOME Van Central (Arupa and Bob’s house), I brought the five-gallon pot and thermos home. I chopped the dogs and opened the cans, stirred it all up and put the pot on a low flame.  Then I relaxed with a book, popping up every twenty minutes to stir.

Finally the stew was simmering. I ladled it into the thermos with a two-cup Pyrex measure. This is a hot and gloppy job.  Blobs of bean landed all over me, the stove, and the floor.  When the thermos was full to the brim, I screwed on the top, wiped off the sides, and cleaned up the floor, the stove, and me.  I put the scorched pot to soak with a layer of baking soda and an inch of water at the bottom.

All set to go. Ten dozen eggs in the front seat, two big pans of cornbread in the back.  I had worn-out knees back then, instead of my blessed bionics, and toting the thermos to the car was a struggle, but I got it up on the back seat, and headed out.

I was turning onto Main Street when the thermos fell over and the top popped off.  Five gallons of beanie wienies at flood stage covers a lot of territory. They flowed over the back seat and the floor, drowning the cornbread.

I had no cell phone to call Arupa, and anyway, the van was going out in ten minutes; there was nothing she could do.  The people who live in the woods would have to make do with bag suppers and hot chocolate. 

At HOME Van Central Arupa opened the door to help me unload.  Quicker than a flash mob, every fly in Gainesville arrived for the feast.  Where had they been, and how did they know?  We put the eggs in the van, marveling at the mess.  I skipped the Thursday night run, and went home to clean up.

I ladled and scooped and wiped, but it was way beyond me.  Fortunately, Steve, Amanda’s aunt’s boyfriend, had worked as a car detailer.  He came over the next morning, and in an hour or two the car looked as good as a six-year-old Camry owned by a slovenly grandmother ever will.  The smell persisted, but we thought it would dissipate over time.

It didn’t dissipate.  It got worse.  Steve came back to try again.  This time he removed the back seat, and found that the flies had done their job.  There were maggots everywhere. 

Who isn’t disgusted by maggots?  Only a mother fly.  I excused myself, and Steve cleaned them all up, then sprayed the car again with a nasty floral deodorant.  For months I drove around town with memories of maggots, breathing air scented with beanie wienies and chemical flowers.

We bought a new thermos for the Van.  Now when I bring soup, I strap the thermos into the front passenger seat, and put out a mother’s restraining hand when I turn or stop.  The Great Beanie Wienie Disaster became one of our many stories, which I share with you in honor of the ninth anniversary of the HOME Van.  click

 

 ARUPA AND THE HOME VAN

 

NEXT WEEK: This Short-Term Memory Thing

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Poetry Daily

My favorite place on the Web is Poetry Daily. Every day it gives me a new poem, from one of hundreds of literary journals and books. When I find a poem I like, I put it in a fat, three-ring binder, my own anthology. click

Louis Untermeyer’s  A Treasury of Great Poems, English and American, introduced me to poetry in ninth grade.  All the scattered bits that remain in my memory come from that year and that book. “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind...”  “I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart...”  “Love at the lips was touch as sweet as I could bear...”  I loved that book, but I left all my books (and my first husband) behind when I was twenty-three.

                               
LEFT BEHIND

 

I found the Treasury again at our library’s semi-annual used book sale. I paid two dollars and was reunited with hundreds of old friends. click

At 94 my father astonished a dinner party by reciting Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, all fifty lines.  He glowed with pride, and deserved to.  Doris, my sister-in-law, once recited the preamble to Intimations of Immortality. She seemed to do it for the sheer pleasure of hearing the words.  My sister followed with Jabberwocky.
 
I have always wished I had a big collection of poetry in my head.  It would entertain me when I have to wait in line, or when I am imprisoned in a small cell for my courageous political actions, or, perhaps more likely, in a hospital bed for one or another ailment of age.
               
When I retired I decided to memorize poetry.  I started with Elinor Wylie, “Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones, there’s something in this richness that I hate.”  I struggled to remember the poet's exact words, as she no doubt struggled to choose them, though some, I hope, came as a gift.  Over and over I repeated the whole sonnet, until it seemed to be firmly planted.  An hour later it was gone. 

In my computer I have a file of the ten poems I managed to memorize.  I wish I had such a file in my brain.  Each poem I added drove out the previous one.

download my ten poems

Years ago, I paid my two foster children to memorize short poems.  I believe I paid them a quarter. The first poem was

                                        I never saw a purple cow
                                        I never hope to see one
                                        But I can tell you anyhow
                                        I’d rather see than be one.

 
PHOTOBUCKET.COM BY RESPHINA

 

Like many other plans from our early days together, when I thought I could achieve perfection, this one soon fell by the wayside and our path descended into the mucky quotidian. 

I would like to try the same thing with Amanda.  She already knows the pleasure of rhyme and rhythm.  But Joe believes it is wrong to pay for learning, which should be its own reward.  He is adamant, so I concede, though I still believe it’s a good idea.
                                   
I read poetry for months at a time, and then I let it go.  Every time I come back to it I am renewed.  Thank you, Poetry Daily, for the daily gift.

 

 

NEXT WEEK: The Great Beanie Wienie Disaster

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Happy Birthday to Me

Here are two poems and a mini-essay on the subject of getting older.  I wrote the essay in July.  It’s now sufficiently aged, like the finest wines, cheeses, meats and me.

 

Nursery Rhyme: Numbers

                                    by Lola Haskins

Seven old ladies crochet for the boys,
Six old ladies hear thunder.

Five old ladies afraid of the noise,
Four old ladies go under.

One old lady to pick up the lace,
One old lady is crying.

How cruel to be born with only one face
And to see in the mirror its dying.

in Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems. copyright 2004 Lola Haskins. used by permission 

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I’m turning 64 tomorrow and I’m depressed.  Oh, not really depressed.  Maybe it’s wrong to use the word for my condition, when people I know and love are stalked by clinical depression.  But you know how certain birthdays just feel really old?   For me it was 8 and 13, 43 and 51.  The first two thrilled me.  The second two not so much.  This one doesn’t thrill me at all.  I feel as though I’m running out of time.  I feel as though there are a thousand things I once wanted to do, and now I don’t want to, or can’t.

My life is a boring succession of minor aches and pains - ankle, groin, foot, hand.  This month my shoulder is unhappy about the way I was sitting at the computer.  I’ve  been using my husband’s laptop and the chair is too low.  Now I’m in for six weeks or so of minor disability, ice, and possibly physical therapy.  When did my body get so damn sensitive?  It used to do whatever I want; now it complains when I ask it to get up in the morning and make me some  coffee. 

A friend sent an email of three photos, called Time Passes. Five little girls, six young women, five old women all lined up looking out at the ocean, all shot from behind.  The little girls hold hands, wear baggy shorts to their knees, stand so sturdy in the sand.  The young women lean over a boardwalk railing, frayed shorts above their buttocks, muscles smooth and luscious.  The old women are in bathing suits, bending over, showing six variations of ancient thighs. I never see my legs from behind - it’s quite enough to see them from above, with the six inch scars where my wonderful knee replacements reside.

I'd like to give credit but I can't find the source
 

 

I like the way I look, if I don’t look too close.  I like having fluffy white hair.   I like the way people in South Africa call me Mama and hurry to help me.  At the Origins Museum in Johannesberg I told the young man behind the desk that I had no cell phone to call a taxi.  He called his supervisor.  After buttering her up with a discussion of some problem he had solved, he asked if she could help him.  “I have an elderly lady here with no cell phone and she needs to call a taxi.”

Elderly - that was me.  Why does it sound so much older than old?  I see a little, trembling, bird-like woman, leaning on a cane.  No one could mistake me for a bird, nor do I usually tremble, though I’ve certainly had months with a cane, which I came to love for the stability it gave me after knee surgery, and the candy cane stripes that made children smile.

I was lying in bed, sad and stewing, and finally got up to write this.  Of course I felt better after I did. Now it’s morning.  I suppose I’m 64 by now, though it’s six hours earlier in Florida, and I was born at 2PM in Argentina - I have no idea what time it is there.  I believe in China I would be 65, because they count the time in the womb - or that’s what my father always told us. I will choose to believe it’s already happened, so I can stop dreading it and start getting over it.  I’m 64, and Joe is taking me out for a fancy lunch.  I can’t possibly count my blessings because I have too many, and I’d probably lose track.  Anyway, there’s no time to waste.
                   

I Ran Out Naked in the Sun

                                by Jane Hirshfield

I ran out naked
in the sun
and who could blame me
who could blame

the day was warm

I ran out naked
in the rain
and who could blame me
who could blame

the storm

I leaned toward sixty
that day almost done
it thundered
then

I wanted more I
shouted More
and who could blame me
who could blame

had been before

could blame me
that I wanted more

in Come,Thief   copyright 2011 Jane Hirshfield. used by permission

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The Help: Movie and Memory

I hadn’t planned to see The Help.  Another noble white savior of black victims?  No thanks.  I’d read two books on the subject of black maids in the South and thought I’d spent enough time on the subject. David Denby’s review in The New Yorker changed my mind. Apparently the film put the black maids front and center, and the acting was terrific.

I heard a professor from the Association of Black Women Historians on NPR, who said that the maids need to tell their own story, and people should read the historical and fictional accounts of domestic workers by black authors. And then a black caller said that she loved the movie  This caller said that as they exited the theater, the white audience was crying and the black audience was smiling.

I didn’t grow up in the south, nor with black servants.  But I have my own story, about life with our Argentine cook, Elisa.  Memory is fiction; fiction can be truth.  Much of my memory comes from my parents’ conversations about Elisa, conversations infused with affection and condescension.

My sister Luli and I were born in Argentina, where my father was lawyer for an American communications company whose tentacles reached around the world, fomenting or preventing revolution as its bottom line required. My brothers spent their childhoods in Buenos Aires, but we returned home when I was a baby and Luli a toddler.  And my parents, who had not lived in the States for many years, brought with them not one, not two, but THREE servants: Jackie, to nurse my brother who had polio, Theresa the maid, and Elisa the cook.

                      CHRISTMAS IN LONG ISLAND, 1948.  ELISA (THE TALL ONE) AND             THERESA,  IDENTIFIED ONLY  AS "SPANISH MAIDS"  
                 

Life in Long Island was dramatically different from life in Argentina.  No more hobnobbing with diplomats and government officials in Belgrano, parties at the polo club, weekends in the country.  Many of the neighbors had a weekly maid, but no one had live-in servants.  Jackie went home to Argentina.  After a couple of years Theresa moved to Queens and joined the other South American women who worked as housemaids.  But Elisa stayed.

She stayed for 18 years.  I grew up in Long Island, Cambridge, and Ann Arbor with my sister, my mother, and Elisa.  My father traveled a lot.  When he was there he seemed distant and imposing.  He looked like Eisenhower, and until I was five I thought he was The President.

I adored my mother, and trailed around after her like a puppy.  But Elisa was a close second in my affection. She cuddled and fed me, welcomed me in the kitchen, let me visit in her room in the afternoon, took me with her to Catholic church. My mother was small and thin; my father said with pride, “I always told Marcy I would divorce her if she became fat.”  Elisa was tall, stout and solid, with big strong arms.

When I was little I called her Lili, but graduated to Elisa.  My parents called her Elisa, and she called them Senora and Senor. She refused to learn English, though I’m certain that she understood every word of it. She was proud, and I think she didn’t want to feel stupid, the way you do when you are learning a language. My parents offered her classes, but she considered herself, as an Argentinian, superior to the other new immigrants.
                                   
She was an exceptional cook. I remember her chicken fricasee, her deep dish apple pie.  I watched her roll out the ravioli dough and put down spoonfuls of filling made with beef and pork, cover it with a second sheet and press it into squares with a rolling wheel.  She stuffed the homemade canneloni with calves brains, prosciutto, and spinach. When I had my first apartment, I asked her how to make meat loaf, and she gave me a stalk of celery, an onion, a green pepper and a few pinches of sage.

My sister and mother were often at odds, and Luli spent a lot of time in the kitchen with Elisa.  She herself became a professional cook, but even Luli can’t duplicate the rich, sweet crust on the deep dish apple pie, or the fricasee gravy.

Elisa cooked delicious meals, served them to us at the table, and ate alone in the kitchen. But when my parents went out, we’d have a special treat: frozen pot pies or TV dinners with Elisa.  For dessert, we made banana splits.

          ELISA JOINED US AT THE TABLE FOR LULI'S WEDDING CAKE.

         
When I was eighteen, Elisa went back to Argentina.  I remember her in a grey suit, with a purple orchid on the lapel, when we took her to the airport to fly to Buenos Aires.  She was eligible for Social Security, but there was some rule against non-citizens collecting if they lived abroad.  I don’t know how he did it, but Dad spent years in bureaucratic wrangling to get it paid to her.  The income made her relatively rich, and she lived comfortably with her niece’s family.

 
ELISA GOES HOME

When I was twenty, my mother’s breast cancer spread to her bones.  Elisa agreed to come back to help.  They were living in a three-bedroom apartment in Silver Springs, Maryland.  I visited them there, and found a very unhappy trio. 

Elisa cooked in the little kitchen, and tended my mother in the bedroom.  My father told me with amusement that she strenuously objected to wearing her old uniforms but, “Of course I insisted.”   Elisa had left her life in Argentina, where she was an honored matriarch, to help my parents, who had always claimed she was part of our family.  She returned as a friend, and they insisted she was a servant.  She left after a few months.
                                       
I was furious.   A child accepts whatever she sees; a teenager sees no one but herself.  Now I was old enough to begin trying to imagine Elisa’s life. 

She was in her early forties when she came to the States in 1948.  In 1957 she went back to Argentina for a year while our family lived in Bolivia.  Except for that year, she had no contact with her family except letters. 

She had a day off every week, but only occasionally took the train to Queens to visit with friends.  Her friends never came to the house.  I think she had no lovers. Sometimes she went to church.

In every house we lived in, she had her bedroom, and sometimes a bathroom of her own. She spent her days in the kitchen, and afternoons in her bedroom, listening to the Spanish-language radio and reading “La Prensa.”  She watched television with us in the living room; Perry Como was her favorite.  My parents bought her a television so she could watch in her room, but she never used it.  Occasionally she went to the movies with Luli and me. 

She opened presents under the tree with us on Christmas mornings in her maid’s uniform, then made Christmas dinner for a big group of friends and family.  After my father carved the turkey, she fixed herself a plate, and ate dinner in the kitchen.  She attended family weddings in her Sunday best.
                   
Elisa’s story echoes that of southern black maids in so many ways. She was a wonderful cook and caregiver.  She was called one of the family, and reminded of her second-class role at every turn. She demonstrated exceptional loyalty.  She knew every family secret, and we never knew hers.

I failed when I was twenty, and I fail now, to understand what it was like for her. I could create a fictional character out of these sparse facts, but I have no confidence it would contain Elisa.  My character would enjoy her work and be proud of her skill, but she would be lonely, angry, resentful.  If that was Elisa, she hid it remarkably well for the eighteen years I knew her.

LIZ, ELISA, LULI

My stepdaughter, majoring in African American studies at Oberlin, denied that Elisa could have loved me.  But Elisa was cut off from her family, had no children of her own, never married.  She was not like the black maids who “lived out.”   She had no children whom she must neglect to take care of us, no home other than the one we shared.  Not just because she was so important in my life, but for her sake, I hope she did love me and my sister.
 
My mother died when I was 24; Elisa died two years later.  She would have been in her 70's.  After long neglect, I was just getting ready to send her a picture of me and my son.  Her death left me with grief and guilt.

So what did I think of the movie?  The two black maids, Minnie and Abilene, were full, breathing women, with a chorus behind them of sympathetic victims.  Their white employers, Hilly and Celia, were respectively bully and bullied, with a chorus behind them of paper doll Barbies. Abilene's crude revenge was perilous and implausible, and diminished her. The movie was like a full painting and a pencil sketch glued together. If you’re looking for insight as well as entertainment, I’d recommend the books listed by the African American history professors, or one of those below.
           
New Yorker review 

ABWH Open Statement  

Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (book)  

Telling Memories Among Southern Women (book)

 

NEXT WEEK:  Happy Birthday to Me

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sweatin to the Oldies

I’ve found another hero - Richard Simmons.  Because of him, I have exercise in my life again, and I love it. 

I used to walk several miles every day, swim a few times a week.  I liked to dance and hike.  I even backpacked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back.  For several years, before and after my knee replacements, I worked out on machines at the gym.

When Amanda came to live with us, it all fell apart for a while.  She was everywhere and all the time.  Once she settled in, though, I was ready to exercise again.  After our morning bike ride to school, I would write and then go to the gym. But everything interfered or tempted me - a novel to read, errands to run, a nap, a lunch date. 

I needed exercise I could do at home.  At the library the only exercise video I could find was for pregnant women.  At 63 and out of shape, I figured it would be about my speed.  It was OK, though the music was faint in the background, the instructor was bland and pious, and her constant admonitions - breathe for your precious baby, this is the most wonderful time of your life - were irrelevant and faintly irritating.

So I went on line and found Richard Simmon’s Sweating to the Oldies series, and bought all four.  I had never seen him, except briefly in ads.  He didn’t appeal to me: I thought he was just another sanctimonious self-help guru.  I was wrong.  He is a man full of laughter, happy to be totally ridiculous in the name of health.

The music is my age: Peggy Sue, Dancin’ in the Street, Twist Again. The routines are a great workout.  They are low impact, and use a lot of arm action to keep the heart rate up.  Each disc presents a different scene: a prom with a band, a party in a diner, an amusement park called ‘Sweatinland.’  Disc Four is a sock hop but for some reason begins with a black gospel choir in robes parading in and singing Shout.

His dancers are many races, young and middle-aged, most of them overweight.  They dance and sweat behind him for 50 minutes, smiling, laughing, flirting, singing along.  It really does feel like a party.   

Some mornings I throw my whole self into it.  Some mornings I move as if I were under water.  Sometimes I dance six numbers and then skip to the cool down section, other times I do the whole tape.  I usually dance in a tshirt and underpants and orthopedic shoes - no one sees me but my husband, and he deserves a laugh.

 Richard Simmons is happy, kind, and encouraging.  Every once in a while he slips in an earnest pep talk, and you can’t help but feel he cares about you.  But best of all, he is thoroughly silly.

Instead of the standard drab warning that it is a federal offense to copy the discs, he and some hulking police officers raid a warehouse.  They find about 75,000 pirated discs, and a surprising perpetrator.  Richard camps it up, totally over the top, and I’m convinced it is his real mother in the co-star role.

When the band begins He’s A Rebel, a couple rides a huge motor cycle on to the set.  The tarty blonde gets off, gives the man an extravagant smooch, and then lip synchs the song while Richard Simmons flirts outrageously with her, dancing all the while.  It’s My Party is an energetic pantomime, complete with crying.

At the end of each disc, the dancers form two lines and applaud each other as they boogie one at a time down the middle.  For some the screen shows how much weight they have lost; the numbers are impressive.  They say Richard Simmons has helped millions of people to exercise and enjoy themselves.  Now it’s millions plus one.  Bless him.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

 
   THE GOOD NEW DAYS

click

 

NEXT WEEK:     The Help: Movie and Memories

 

 

 

Teachers

Imagine a child who is regularly beaten with a hose.

Imagine a child who is locked in an apartment alone all afternoon.

Imagine a child whose last meal was rice for supper, a child who has not seen her mother in a year, who never met his father, who saw her brother shot, who goes outside and fights all the other beaten children.

Imagine a boy or girl who is all these children.

Then imagine that you are a teacher, and three or four of your eighteen students are these children.  They hide under tables, they knock over desks, they curl into sad balls in the corner.  They scream and swear and cry, bite and punch and kick.

You handle their behavior and its effect on all the others, and you teach most of the children to behave themselves in the classroom, to read, write and do simple arithmetic.  You spend hours of classroom time testing and testing and testing them.  You adopt curriculum changes nobody consulted you about.  On weekends you grade papers, fill out forms, write reports.   

Your reward? You are blamed for all the problems in the schools.  Your salary is tied to the academic success of all the children.  You are told there is no money for glue, paper, and scissors, so you send home weekly newsletters that half the parents don’t read, and beg for donated supplies.  When you don’t get them, you buy them yourself.    Every year you are fired in April, and probably re-hired in July, depending on the budget.  You hear people joke that those who can’t do, teach.

Imagine if it were otherwise. No merit pay based on week-long tests of little children. No special awards for Best Teacher, but good teachers rewarded for helping those who struggle, and irredeemably bad teachers dismissed. Teachers paid as well as the lawyers in the legislature who think they are experts in education, and come up with new policies, new curricula, new standards every few years. 

I bought Amanda’s teacher a button that says “Those who can, teach.  Those who can’t, make laws about teaching.”  I guess that says it all.                    

 click to buy from Zazzle

(Note: The children described above are not Amanda. I have volunteered at her school for three years, and I've seen and heard a lot.)

click to buy from Zazzle

Friends: It Takes a Village

  
                                  IRIS

School started Monday, and Iris came over last weekend to help Amanda organize her room.  Iris is a champion organizer.  She even has labels in the refrigerator.
       
Amanda’s room was my despair, though she is a top-notch tidier, and if I don’t ask her she does it on her own every few days, quickly whisking everything to its place. But there were too many things, and not enough places.  Broken toys, single earrings, dead balloons, pieces of plastic and cardboard with no known provenance, and everything she had brought home from kindergarten through second grade.  All of it in higgledy piggledy piles: on the dresser, on the bookcase, in the corners.  Piles on the desk so the flip top couldn’t be opened, piles on the night stand imperiling the nightly glass of water.
   
But even though I hate the mess, I am torn.  When I was a child the rule was: no food in your room, and keep the door closed.  So part of me says it’s Amanda’s room, not mine.  Another part says it’s my job to teach her how to keep control over the mountains of things that invade our space.  And a third part wants her to be what I am not.  I am a lifelong slob with organizing tendencies.  I live surrounded by clutter, but I love to spend a  morning tidying, and I long for bare, beautiful rooms.

 
MY CLUTTER

My internal conflict about Amanda’s autonomy is part of the challenge of being her mother.  Her favorite phrases are “I can do it,” “I don’t need help,” “Leave me alone.”  I’m never sure whether I should guide, instruct, require, or leave it up to her.  Lazy (let her do whatever and however she wants) is as bad as authoritarian (you’ll do it my way, right now).  It’s finding the crooked path between that is hard for me. 

I encourage independence as much as I can.  When we do the laundry together I help her sort and put away, but she loads and runs the machines while I watch.  She makes Sunday morning pancakes all by herself while I set the kitchen table and keep an eye out for danger.  She climbs the ladder and cleans the muck from the gutters under Joe’s supervision.   It’s a treat to see her gain competence and confidence.

At the same time, I often do know what’s best.  She has plenty yet to learn, and sometimes she has to let me teach it.  So I decided she would begin the school year with a desk she can work at, books and supplies she can find, and a closet where her clothes don’t disappear.  But I knew we would tussle if I tried to help, and I proposed that we ask Iris.

Iris has known Amanda since before she was born - she was at the baby shower for Amanda’s mother, and gave a women's welcome party when Amanda first came to live with us.  She was happy to help.  Her own grown daughter, temporarily living with her, won’t let Iris touch her room.

Amanda would have resisted me at every turn, but she worked happily with Iris.
They spent four hours organizing - sorting, boxing, even discarding.  Amanda scrubbed all the surfaces before they put everything away.  

Like anyone cleaning out a room, Amanda lingered over things - old toys, old letters, old photos.  I would have been in my juggernaut mode: don’t dawdle, we have a job to do.  Iris let her talk about the memories that caught her.  Amanda wouldn’t give away anything, but by the time they were through, the biggest bin was full of dolls, stuffed animals, and toddler toys.
       
I did a few little things as follow-up - moved winter clothes to a storage box on the top shelf of her closet, threw out the trash bag, moved the shoe rack into a corner.  I’m going to buy one more big bookcase to take care of the tidy piles still left to put away, and a label-maker.  Amanda resisted this until I told her it was Iris’ suggestion.  Then she agreed I could buy them, but I wasn’t to touch her stuff.  She and Iris would finish the job

Even with some work left to do, the room looks wonderful.  I can breathe in it again.  I am so grateful to Iris for doing this, and even more grateful for her role in Amanda’s life.  I’ll always be Amanda’s grandma, but now I’m her mother too, dispenser of rules, routines and requirements.  She needs women who can delight in her without trying to fix her.  Iris is one of these women, and Amanda loves her.

Why Blog? The Pond Scum Holds Forth

My father once said he really liked being important and hanging out with important people.  I replied, “I don’t. The only thing I hate worse than kissing ass is having my ass kissed.” (My father brought out the worst in me.)   
   
Emily Dickinson said it much better:

 I’m Nobody! Who are you?
 Are you - Nobody - Too?
 Then there’s a pair of us?
 Don’t tell! they’d advertise - you know!

 How dreary - to be - Somebody!-
 How public - like a Frog -               
 To tell one’s name - the livelong June -
 To an admiring Bog.    

   click

I can’t stand show offs.  Raconteurs annoy me.  Some men in my family indulge in monologues - I once clocked my father at 32 minutes without a break.  In law and academia people tend to hold forth.  When you combine these into a law professor, watch out!  I worked 23 years at a law school; I was surrounded by bloviators.
   
I have always felt my opinion is not called for on every subject.  Better to hold your tongue and be thought a fool than speak your mind and confirm it. If you use your ears more than your mouth, you learn a lot.  My mother taught, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”  But underneath this quiet, discreet exterior is the little girl saying, ‘Look at me, look at me.’  Deeper down is my yearning for everyone to like me, and my astonishment when someone doesn’t.  And surrounding it all is a completely distorted self-image.
    
For instance, I consider myself tactful and well-behaved.  My friends are astonished when I reveal that.  Apparently what I am is extremely blunt.  It’s true I sometimes say what no one else will, but I never get credit for all the times I hold my tongue. 
   
When I worked at the law school, I often gave speeches at conferences or to community groups.  I enjoyed giving the speeches, a nice mix of information and advocacy.  I was usually preaching to the choir, and I liked the audiences’ responsiveness, the admiring cluster of people coming up afterwards to agree with me.  After the talk, though, when I was alone, I quickly descended into self-loathing. What a know-it-all.  Who gives a shit what I think.
   
When I discussed this with my sister Luli, she sent me a cartoon captioned, “Lizzy receives the Nobel Prize for peace, literature, and general wonderfulness.” It was a picture of me with a brown paper bag over my head, muttering, “Pond scum, I’m pond scum.”  As you can see, she has a sharp wit, a skilled pencil, and an exaggerated view of the marvelousness of me. 

                            click  click

So why would I decide to write a blog, to throw my opinions out into the world for anyone to read?  Clearly, Ms Lookatme is in charge.  But more than that, with the complexities of raising Amanda, the writer I had struggled to create after retirement was expiring.  She needed time and attention.  Like Tinkerbell, she needed to hear me say, “I believe in you.” 
   
It’s been well over a year since Amanda came to live with us,  but I’m not yet ready to pick up my novel.  This blog helps me keep the writing going as I adjust to motherhood.  And I’m finding unexpected advantages in writing it.

Like many writers, I struggle for self-discipline.  If you’re a teacher, you have to show up every day, ready or not.  If you’re a baker, you have to provide the daily bread.  A mother’s work stands in front of her, insistent, a dozen times a day.  But the world is not waiting for my writing.  No eager audience is clamoring to hear from me.  I’m the only one who cares whether I do it or not.

When I was working on novels, I could always find an excuse not to write.  A novel takes at least a year just for the first draft.  What does it matter if I skip a few days?  I can always justify it with the idea that the whole thing is simmering inside.  But if I’m writing mini-essays, I can’t pretend I have weeks for them.  They’re not worth weeks.  And they’re a manageable size.  I can dump all my thoughts on the page in a morning or two, and then tidy them up.

Habit is taking over; each day I write makes it easier the next.  I remember reading an essay years ago in which a writer said that every day you don’t write, you’re not a writer.  This strikes me as both neurotic and male.  Every woman writer knows that family will interfere.  So I’m pleased to be writing almost every day.

And of course there is the practice - whatever you write, you are practicing your skills - the right word, rhythm, fluency of thought, editing.  The passive voice, present participles, cliches all raise red flags. Oops, there’s one now.

I didn’t anticipate how much I would learn about myself.  In my diary, my counselor and comfort in the darkest times, I usually simply ramble until I understand what’s troubling me.  In these mini-essays I choose a subject and find out what I think about it.

I’ve written and edited seven of these,  and have a dozen topics waiting.  I wanted to have a store of them, to avoid the paralysis that might come if I faced a deadline and an empty page.  (I’ve never been a journalist.)  I also wanted an assignment to keep me occupied during our extended stay in South Africa.  Six weeks is too long to be a tourist, too short to make a life.
   
The private me is still uncomfortable with the whole idea. Silence creates a peculiar power, a promise of deep water beneath the surface.  Maybe the voice of the duckweed is a shrill quack, and underneath is just muck.  But even Emily Dickinson wrote her letter to the world.  Do you suppose she would have pulled her poems out of the drawer and put them on the Internet?

Frog in duckweed. Copyright 2000 Narciso Jaramillo, used by permission.    click

 

Introduction to The Feminist Grandma

 

Foster mom:squirrel monkey and night monkey

I have been many kinds of mother - a single mother, raising my son from scratch, a single foster mother for a daughter and a son, a step-mother.  Now I am 64, and with my husband I am raising my eight-year old granddaughter, Amanda. Click here

I was a lawyer for 28 years, always focused on poverty.  I still am.  It’s not just a job; it’s a chronic condition.  I retired to write, and wrote three novels.  I helped start the HOME Van and nine years later we’re still going strong, carrying food and friendship to the people who live in the woods. Click here

When grandparents raise grandchildren there is usually a sad story behind it, but I’m not going to tell it.  That one belongs to my daughter and granddaughter.  Instead I’ll write about my friends and family, past and present.  I’ll write about an old woman raising a young child, a feminist struggling with traditional women’s roles, a writer who is suddenly a mother again.  It all sounds terribly serious, but everything has its lighter side.  I'll try to keep my professorial self under control.

When my son was growing up, I felt inadequate as a mother, and overwhelmed doing it alone.  In the1968 edition Dr. Spock included single mothers and “working” mothers in his 
chapter on special problems.  I was both.  I used to read that passage to my family law students to show them how dramatically times had changed.  Yet people still speak of “working mothers,” a ridiculous phrase that implies mothering is not work.   

                                                       Is motherhood work?  Vandmoderen by Kai Nielsen                                    
                                    

Now, for the first time, I have a partner, and I can do the job thoroughly.  I take Amanda to soccer and gymnastics and therapy.  I meet with her teacher, volunteer at the school, keep her at home when she’s sick.  I see that she tidies her room and brushes her teeth. 

I don’t feel inadequate.  But like any mother I come to the end of a busy day and can't understand what I did with my time.  Like any writer I struggle for discipline and focus, idle time to let my thoughts wander, work time to put the writing front and center.  Like any stay-at-home wife I negotiate jobs with my husband, and wonder if he understands what I do all day.

When Amanda came to live with us I put my fourth novel aside.  I’m not ready to pick it up yet; it’s simmering on the back of the stove.  Instead, now that she is settled and happy, no longer bouncing off and knocking down walls, I will write these mini-essays, send them out in my blog, and hope you will read and respond.