The Feminist Grandma

Waiting for Irma

To my readers: This is my first post since January. Family troubles, including two serious illnesses and my sister's death, turned off all my writing except my diary for a while. I believe I'm back in business now.

 

Tuesday night I told Amanda I’d go to Walmart first thing Wednesday to prepare for Irma, the monster hurricane that might be heading our way. I told her not to tell Joe, since I was sure he would scoff. She didn’t tell Joe, simply asked me in his presence, “Did you tell Grandpa about Walmart?”

Joe didn’t scoff, exactly, just claimed that we weren’t going to lose power because we never have since the lines were buried underground. I pointed out that in 2004 power went out all over town despite the buried lines. (Gainesville doesn’t get the full force because we’re halfway between the Gulf and the Atlantic,60 miles from each of them. But this is a monster hurricane, extremely large, extremely fierce.)

 

image: weather.com

 

Though I’ve lived in Florida 43 years I’ve never prepared for a hurricane before. When I lived near the coast, in Jacksonville, I was a young single mother, and I would dither and fret as hurricanes threatened: I don’t know how to put up plywood, don’t have tape, what do I do, what do I do? As I look back I realize how very young I was, and how far I’ve come.

Five hurricanes hit Florida in the summer of 2004. Number two, Frances, was a mere tropical storm by the time it reached Gainesville, but some people lost power for two weeks. We only lost power for 45 minutes. We were in bed when our neighbor’s huge laurel oak, hollow inside, slammed down onto our roof, right over our heads. It took nine months to replace the roof and repair all the damage.

 

image:mldavisinsurance.com

 

Irma is coming at a particularly unfortunate time for the Muumuu Mamas. This weekend was going to be our annual beach expedition, eight of us together for three nights, with no responsibility for anyone but ourselves, all of us lovers of food, conversation, dancing, long walks on the beach, and each other. My sister Luli died just three weeks ago, and I needed comfort from those seven mamas, so when our beach weekend blew away, I was gloomy. But then the women came up with an alternate date in November, and Julie found us a house, so I’m feeling more cheerful. click

 

relaxing at the beach 2013

 

Just after 6:00 on Wednesday morning I headed to the nearby Walmart with a short list: water, tuna, soup, crackers, baked beans, pineapple, ravioli and smoked oysters (both favorites of Amanda). The parking lot was only a third full. The shelves were even emptier.

image:financialmoneytips.com

Going down the canned goods aisles was an interesting lesson in what people won’t eat, and what I’m willing to eat if desperate. All the tuna was gone, but there were plenty of water-packed scallops, clams, and oysters. Two cans of herring, two of smoked oysters - I took them all. The only baked beans left were vegetarian or ‘touch of maple.’ I took two of the latter, though now I’m having second thoughts.

All the soups were Campbell's. Cases and cases of cheese soup, and cream of mushroom, and a fair amount of broth. That was it, except for three four-packs of chicken noodle - I took one - and a few cans of Slow Kettle Style portobello mushroom-and-madeira bisque, and andouille sausage jambalaya with chicken and ham. How nasty do you suppose they’ll be? No ravioli, and I turned up my nose at the spaghetti-o’s. I got saltines and peanut butter crackers - the only peanut butter available was flavored, or swirled with jelly, and I just couldn’t.

Am I too fussy? images: target.com, reddit.com

 

Little snack packs of nutella for Amanda. Canned pineapple and canned corn - the only canned produce I can stomach. A jar of peanuts, a box of raisins, instant oatmeal. I asked a woman stocking the chips shelves where the bottled water was. She said there was none left at Walmart but they had pallets at the Publix at Hunter’s Crossing, which opened at 7.

I arrived at Publix at ten to seven. They had opened early; people were already leaving, with carts loaded with water. This was the on-their-way-to-work crowd. I took two 24-packs of pint bottles, though I hate buying plastic bottled water. But inside, in the water aisle, a man was just unloading pallets of gallon jugs. The Official Recommendation is a gallon per person per day for three days, so I took 8 gallons and returned one of the 24-packs.

Publix’ shelves were more generous than Walmart’s. I bought lots of tuna, four cans of Progresso soups, ravioli. In the ethnic aisle I considered a can of beans that contained blood sausage,chorizo and ham, but thought better of it. I love blood sausage, but in a can? I don't think so.

image: cubanfoodmarket.com

People who only bought water were in the ‘ten items or fewer” check-out lines. (I love that Publix’ sign-makers know the difference between less and fewer). Everyone else was in the regular lines, twenty or more people in each line, the lines stretching way down the aisles. I took an instant dislike to the man in front of me, and reached all sorts of unsupported conclusions about him. He muttered gloomily that there’s a thin line between humanity and chaos, and people shouldn’t panic. I was sure that in an emergency situation he would try to take charge, bossing everyone around, with no skills nor information.

There was no sign of either panic or chaos. Instead people were cheerful, saying how many families they were buying for, what happened to them in previous storms, claiming expertise because they’d lived in South Florida for years and were used to it. Somebody pointed out that after it was over we could always donate the water jugs to some other emergency down the road. There was a pleasant sense of community, and it cheered me up to be doing this, brought me out of the very inward state I’ve been in since Luli died.

At home I stored my supplies, and told the family we don’t TOUCH them unless the power goes out. For extra security I hid the oysters and nutella behind other cans. We can celebrate the end of hurricane season with a most peculiar feast, and donate the water bottles to the HOME Van.

 

I felt a proud sense of accomplishment as I looked at my tidy stash. And last night Joe, who has been following every detail of the forecasts, and analyzing how they are produced, said that he took back his mocking, and thought I had done an excellent job. It’s only Thursday, but Amanda's school has already cancelled Monday’s classes.  Nothing is supposed to happen in Florida till Saturday morning, and north Florida doesn’t expect trouble till Sunday afternoon. The roads north will be godawful jammed, the gas stations are running out, the sky is gray. We’re waiting for Irma, who may not visit us. I hope she veers way east to the middle of the ocean, but if she hits us, I will eat weird soups, and enjoy NOT saying ‘I told you so.’

 

UPDATE: I’m posting this Friday morning. Gainesville is now smack in the center of the cone of uncertainty, and so am I, with a small nervous knot centered somewhere between my throat and my belly, and possible tension covering head to toe. My sense of humor may evacuate. I fret about all the possible horrors for everyone else, but for us I just focus my hopes on: Please no more trees on the roof.

MOOC

 

Last spring I discovered MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses), when my friend Sandra posted a notice on Facebook of a Stanford course, Ten Pre-Modern Poems by Women. My sister Luli and I both signed up.

The professor, Eavan Boland, is an Irish poet and professor of humanities and creative writing at Stanford.click  She was aided and abetted by young poets in the creative writing program. After Boland talked a bit about the poet and her time, and described the poem, we read it and gave our first impressions. An illustrated lecture went more deeply into the poet’s life and times, and analyzed the poem. A contemporary poet commented on the poem, and then we had homework assignment. Faculty and students responded to each other in the discussion forum.

Some of the poems - Browning’s “How do I love thee?” and Rossetti’s “When I am dead, my dearest” were very familiar. I’d seen them so often that the words had lost their meaning. But doing the homework, and reading the faculty and students’ remarks, I saw them fresh.

"I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach"  Image: The Grand Canyon. National Park Service

 

"When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head..." image: Flickriver.com

I’d never heard of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, but I loved her poem, “Washing Day,” a picture of the weekly disruption in an 18th century English middle class family when the washer woman comes to do the laundry. It’s full of vivid scenes and pictures: the clotheslines break, the dog knocks over the drying rack. a little boy loses his shoe in the mud. We see the whole population of the household: the wife, husband, maids, children, grandmother, visitors. There are enough characters and action in Washing Day to make an amusing play, or if you are novelistically inclined there are plenty of scenes to get you started.

Laundry Day c.1765. Image: British Museum

 

For each week and poem there was a choice of three homework assignments, always including the opportunity to write a poem of your own. For me this was the easy way out. Rhyme and meter are in my blood - doggerel runs in my family. I can write a bad sonnet with the best (or worst) of them, but I soon found I focused more on the poem under discussion if I wrote one of the essays instead.

Rosetti’s poem came alive for me again when I went to YouTube and heard it set to music. I listened to three versions with different melodies and performers. The different songs transformed the poem into something new, and led me to examine the original more closely. click

I was enjoying this course so much that I signed up for another one, Harvard’s Poetry in America: the Civil War and its Aftermath. It had a great deal more material than the Stanford course, all of it tempting. It included a baritone singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot under a slide show of engravings and photos, a discussion of The Gettysburg Address, a Confederate nurse’s diary, and John McCain reciting The Cremation of Sam McGee, which he learned in Vietnam when the prisoner in the next cell tapped it out in code. I soon realized that if I added that course while continuing the Women Poets course I would be a full-time student. I don’t have time for that, so I stopped after a couple of weeks.

 

Union nurses in the Civil War. Image:civilwarsaga.com

 

I finished Ten Pre-Modern poems in June, and early in September I started taking Modern and Contemporary American Poetry from the University of Pennsylvania. Each poem was accompanied by a video discussion between the exceptionally good professor and his grad students, conducting close readings of all the poems - word by word and line by line, not neglecting punctuation and line breaks. There was a lot of additional material available, as well as very intelligent discussion on the forums. This was the best and most challenging of the three courses. I stuck with it for eight weeks, through the Beats, but with my Voices Rising concert and a trip to the Grand Canyon looming, and from sheer intellectual exhaustion, I stopped.

UPenn Prof. Al Filreis and grad student Anna Strong.. I loved watching these video discussions partly because Al reminded me so powerfully of my late friend Jim Hardy, down to his voice and the twinkle in his eye.

All the courses have participant discussion forums, and participants come from all over the world. I love hearing furriners talk about us, because it reminds me once again how very parochial we are. People from Peru or Pakistan aren’t necessarily affected by the American orthodoxy-of-the-week. In the Harvard course, several recommended Gone with the Wind as an excellent portrayal of the horrors of the Civil War.

 

image: ew.com

Most forum posts drew no response - I suppose we’re more interested in our own thoughts than in anyone else’s. In the Civil War poetry course, the longest thread by far was started by someone who asked people to share their creative work. The poetry poured in. None of it had anything to do with the Civil War.

Like any college student, I like to gripe. Judging by the professors in these courses, the current fashion in academia, perhaps stolen from literary fiction, is to discuss everything in the present tense. I hear journalists on NPR do this too.

I suppose somebody has decided that it brings history to life, but it annoys the hell out of me. Aside from impoverishing the language, it flattens our sense of history, and creates a false intimacy, a pretense that barriers of different world-views and culture don’t exist or don’t matter. It leads directly to our presuming to judge the outrages of other eras as though we sensitive souls of the 21st century occupy some moral high ground. I’m convinced that wickedness and cruelty, intolerance and exploitation, selfishness and greed continue in humankind at pretty much the same level through the ages. Only the victims and methods change.

 

image: thinglink.com

image: linkedin.com

 

The discussion in the women poets course frequently raised issues of class, race and gender. While I’ve been obsessed with these most of my life, I found myself impatient with what seemed to be requisite and rote comments. I finally wrote a waspish response in my essay about “Washing-Day,” which I generously share with you:

Yes, they hired laundresses, who doubtless had rough lives. Maids worked very hard and had little power or independence. The poet could have written about The Washer Woman, but on this occasion she chose to write about what it was like in the household on wash day. I see no need for 21st century readers to tut-tut about the evils of other historical periods - we have plenty of our own. If I read a contemporary poem about a young girl who is a gifted gymnast, I don’t feel impelled to discuss the sweatshops in which the beads were sewn onto her costume, unless the poet is implicitly leading me there.

 

Gabby Douglas. Image:usa.com

 

Aside from my quibbles with substance, I found the technology cumbersome. It took four tries to create a damn password for the Stanford course - with each try, they came up with a new rule: must have numbers, can’t use symbols, must be gluten-free.

  image:passwordmeter.com

                                                                                                                            
All my passwords are gluten free. image:fixyourdigestion.com   

 The Harvard course was worse. It ate my three paragraphs of delicious analysis TWICE. It buried all kinds of critical information several layers down in various links: there were eleven pages of FAQ, and then a separate FAQ thread in the discussion section. It took a lot of digging to discover that the course was designed for Chrome, and Firefox users (me) were particularly likely to have problems.

I recommended the course to Luli, but suggested she just read and view the materials rather than try to respond. She claims she once took a hammer to a recalcitrant computer, and the obstacles in this course were so frustrating that I was afraid she would blow up her whole office.

If I had a hammer...  image:hongkiat.com

 

The Modern Poetry course, which Luli was very engaged with, refused to recognize her after a couple of weeks, and though she and I spent hours on the phone trying to fix the problem, she finally had to give up.

It was their loss. Luli’s participation in the Women Poets course had enriched it for me and many others. Thanks to a wild and crazy adolescence, she barely finished high school and never went to college. She’s as widely read and knowledgeable as anyone I know except our sister-in-law Doris, but she hangs out with a number of highly educated writers and librarians, and she thought it would be cool to have a certificate saying she completed a course at Stanford.

 

Luli got a certificate. Image:stolinsky.com

 

We enjoyed the course together by phone and email. Luli in academia is a little like Alice in Wonderland - she sees things for what they are, rather than accepting the strange transformations of truth that blossom in the groves of academe. For example, here was her response to my discussion of the You Tube performances of Rosetti’s poem:

cor blooming blimey! what a load! i listened to the ones you mention, plus a passel of others...not all the way through any of 'em, because i thought them all total rubbish. as maudlin as a bunch of drunks. which the poem isn't. and so many overblown orchestral arrangements for this simple, tongue in cheek song. my god. but, i liked your essay.

A bunch of drunks. image:crujonessociety.com

 

For all my carping, I think MOOCs are great. However, be warned. Though all of the courses emphasize that you can participate as much or as little as you want, it’s hard to resist doing more than you have time for. It’s like  spreading a buffet in front of a hungry person. The Ten Pre-Modern Poems course is the least demanding (after all, it’s only ten poems) and its approach, including the assignments, the least rigorous. But I enjoyed it, I learned a lot, and it didn’t eat up my life. The Civil War poetry course was rich with material, and I will probably return to it. Though I didn’t stick with it long, my impression is that their poetry analysis is more historical than literary. The Modern Poetry course felt like a graduate seminar in poetry - very intense, and very focused on the poetry. I gained new appreciation for Dickinson, Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Ginsberg, and met others I’d never heard of. I do intend to go back to it, though I’m a little daunted by the time required to do it well, and I may tire of the close reading approach.

Here's a link to find MOOCs. click. Courses in subjects like engineering, computer science, and business far outnumber the arts and humanities. But their search engine is good, and if you’re so inclined you should be able to find the courses I’ve mentioned, as well as other humanities courses.

In the quest for eternal life and vigor, boomers are advised to keep exercising their brains along with their bodies. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me, though vigor sounds nice, but I love reading poetry, and learning new stuff is fun.

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NEXT POST: JANUARY 8

Dabbling with the Muse

 

Neophilia. The word was coined by my sister Luli. With two more letters it could be something rather ghastly, but as it stands it simply means loving novelty.

Every few years I discover a new creative passion. I pursue it with fervor, but never develop any great skill. I love learning something new, and I love producing a physical object. My work, whether lawyer or teacher or mother, always consisted primarily of ideas and people.

I like to create something concrete (or butter)   source:iowastatefair.org

It began with crochet. When I was 28, my friend Saralu and I drove from Jacksonville to Lakeland for a cram course before the two-day nightmare that was the Florida bar exam. We had packed frozen soups,stews, and a crockpot, cheese and fruit, cookies and wine.

The cram course consisted of long lectures and written summaries of the entire body of common and Florida law, each subject - torts, contracts, trusts and estates, etc, crammed in a tiny font on both sides of  laminated pages. They were dense as a Claxton fruit cake, though less digestible. Every evening we returned to our motel room with heads buzzing - fee simple with remainder, statute of frauds, the mailbox rule, equitable estoppel.

After supper we poured wine, opened the cookies and sat on our beds, diligently memorizing the incomprehensible for about fifteen minutes.Then Sara unpacked her yarn and taught me to crochet.  In three nights I had made half a shawl. In the next few months I had made shawls for my friend Sue, my sister Luli, and both my sisters-in law. That took care of Christmas. 

 

For several years I entertained myself with yarn. I made a sweater for my son in brown, black and rust. He was five, young enough that he didn’t mind wearing it. I made a couple of lace shawls in a fan pattern. I invented my own granny square, a sunburst in brown, beige and yellow, and made an afghan for my boyfriend. Unfortunately I joined colors by simply weaving them in, as recommended by the crochet book, rather than knotting them. In a few years, the whole huge thing was beginning to unravel. Then I tried my hand at knitting. I bought expensive wool in lavender, pale pink, and deep cherry red, and made the front and back of a gorgeous sweater. Alas, I lost interest before I got to the sleeves, and I never finished it.

I took drawing classes. I learned to stare and stare, looking for lines and shapes and shifting shades of color. I drew a pair of shoes, a paper bag, and my masterpiece, a pair of hands holding a baby’s tiny feet, drawn from a photograph. I spent hours on Sunday afternoons, totally absorbed, leaning over the table, focusing so intently the sweat rolled down my face. I did lightning sketches at a Saturday morning drawing group, where $5 bought a couple of hours with a model. I carried a small sketchbook everywhere. I drew people in airports and animals in Africa. I realized that drawing from photos was easiest - the image already reduced to two dimensions - so I drew many earnest talking heads on McNeil-Lehrer.
 
I enjoyed the sketches, but it took hours to draw a full picture. I searched my craft closet while I wrote this post, and found the big brown portfolio from my drawing class. The pictures were dated March and April, 2002, before Amanda was born. Even though she usually lived with her mother in the early years, big blocks of empty time became less available after Amanda.

I gave up copying the world and began doodling my inner visions with colored markers. This was great fun, frequently fueled by marijuana. It resulted in many strange images on greeting card stock, often phallic or uterine or both. My all-time favorite is an anxious-looking multicolored bird pursued by little turd-y haystacks, a perfect depiction of aspects of my life.

 

 I took another class, and discovered the joy of collage. For eight weeks I worked on a huge naked goddess, with flames for hair and a rainbow of flowers above her head. The crowning touch was interchangeable merkins* in different colors - thread tangled up and stiffened with glue, attached to her mons veneris with velcro.

She has been in the closet for many years, and when I took her out I still loved the suggestion of musculature in her disproportionate limbs. I  could only find one merkin, a purple one that has faded to a boring brown.  I don’t want her anymore, and I was planning to throw her away if I could figure out how to put her out by the curb without horrifying the neighbors. But Luli begged me to send her to North Carolina. So I shall veil her in newspaper and take her to Fed Ex. It will be Luli’s last 70th birthday gift.

 

Goddess of Flowers and Fire

 

After this tremendous project my ambition shrank to a more manageable size and I began making greeting cards. Collage is very slow, or maybe I am very slow, and a single greeting card takes me several hours.

I love my collaged cards so much that I can’t bear to send them away; I have several waiting for an occasion worthy of their splendor. However, I did send one to Michelle Obama. It was a strange-looking woman, rather fat, resplendently attired with a belt and brooch, wielding a peppermint-striped cane. I wrote a gushing message expressing my great admiration, told her the card was inspired by her fashion sense (belt and brooch), suggested that Malia and Sasha might enjoy guessing the source of each scrap in the picture, and enclosed an answer key. I received no reply, nor did the Secret Service pay a call.

I made the card for Mrs. Obama when I was recuperating from my second knee replacement, shortly after Obama’s first inauguration. Recuperation entails a lot of time on the sofa, painful physical therapy, and frequent hydrocodone. Most of my creative work is not inspired by drugs, but when it is, it is truly...inspired.

I

 

 

 

 

 

 

Painting T-shirts was my passion for a while. I made one with hippos for my brother-in-law’s fortieth birthday. I made two with large birds, one nibbling strawberries from the crew neck, the other with baby birds peeping from the pocket. These were for my older brother Don and his wife Doris, who wore them all over China, looking very pleased and completely ridiculous. I drew a strange grinning face in black marker on a gray shirt for Luli. I liked it so much that I made one for myself in color labeled, “Grandma.” I used the same design on a dress for 3-year-old Amanda, with the caption: “I’m with Grandma.” It helped people match black toddler and white guardian, prevented them from saying, “Where’s your mother,” at playgrounds.

 

I have recently returned to crochet, and made about nine hats for homeless people. Several groups of women in Gainesville make hats for the homeless, and the HOME Van used to display them on a clothesline in the trunk of Nancy’s car - a wonderful assortment of styles and colors, all hand-crafted. It was a treat to see people shopping for their favorite, and an even bigger treat when somebody chose one of mine. Now that HOME Van driveouts are, alas, no more, I can donate my hats to the clothes closet at Grace Marketplace, which Nancy and her pals have set up as an elegant boutique.

 

Hats and stole (to keep the Feminist Grandma warm as she works)

To my surprise, digging into my craft closet to find my old work depressed me. I had been celebrating creative play. Now I was surrounded by abandoned pursuits, and suddenly Oughts and Shoulds and You Never Stick to Anything echoed around me. Apparently I’m not good enough unless I’m a great writer, drawer, singer, crocheter, and shoe and fabric painter. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind this nagging work ethic so much if it resulted in great achievement.                       

Every dabbler needs a craft closet

  
I am not worthy of the name of amateur. An amateur is one who loves passionately, who devotes herself to her art or craft. I am a dilletante, a dabbler. I have many brief, passionate romances, like a bee going from flower to flower, producing mongrel honey.

But damn it, I’m retired. Why can’t I just have fun? Consider the lilies of the field. Why should I have to toil and spin all my waking hours? I don’t suppose my goofy painted shoes click and t-shirts are quite as splendid as good old Solomon’s array, but they please me. Someday I may be sufficiently sane to acknowledge that is enough.


 
* Merkin: artificial pubic hair. “According to "The Oxford Companion to the Body," the custom of wearing merkins dates from mid-15c., was associated with prostitutes, and was to disguise a want of pubic hair, shaved off either to exterminate body lice or evidence of venereal disease.” source: Dictionary.com

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NEXT POST: JUNE 5

 

I Believe in Music

All my life I have loved to sing.  Family gatherings always included singing, with my brother Dickie playing the guitar. On long car trips, in between territorial squabbles, Luli and I harmonized in the back seat. I was in the chorus in high school, and the Jacksonville Concert Chorale when I was a young lawyer. 

I sing in the shower. I sing while I’m cooking, cleaning, gardening or driving. But constant song annoys those of us who like to be lost in thought; Joe sometimes and Amanda always asks me to shut up. I comply, though losing my singer makes me sad, and I sometimes resent being silenced, so I decided to take singing lessons and join a chorus.

singing in the kitchen  image:ubergizmo.com

In February I went to the United Church of Gainesville’s women’s retreat.  This is one of my favorite annual events. I like the women I’ve met at the church, and there are interesting workshops, religious, spiritual, artistic, or goofy. The setting is lovely, overlooking a marshy lake.  And the best part is I have two days and a night on my own, with a room all to myself.

 

  image:madisonfl.org

 

At this year’s retreat I met Rebecca Pethes, a young woman whose rippling curls and liquid voice are bright and warm as a new penny, and who teaches voice at Gainesville Guitar Academy. We instantly hit it off.

click

Then I attended a workshop, “Sound bodies, the first musical instruments,” where we made as many sounds as we could with our voices and bodies - rattling our tongues, popping our cheeks, howling, stomping, clapping, slapping and finally singing. After the workshop Jan Tucci invited me to join Voices Rising Community Chorus, an intergenerational group of singers who perform a wide range of music in two concerts a year.

Director Ruth Lewis and the chorus.  image: Senior Times click

 

Now every Monday I have a singing lesson. I told Rebecca I wanted to lengthen my breath, strengthen my high voice, and learn to sing softly. We started with one of my favorite songs, John Prine’s Angel from Montgomery, and I began to practice stretching out my vowels and making my consonants quick and crisp. When we had wrung most of the learning out of that, she gave me Caro Mio Ben, an 18th Century Italian song with a simple romantic melody and melodramatic lyrics, full of cruel lovers, languishing hearts and endless sighs. I love it. We’ve been working on it about four weeks, and I am learning to let the air just fall into my lungs even when I want to gasp for breath, to let it flow out again over my vocal cords without straining. I’m finding a balance between my chest voice and my nasal voice.

image: 18thcenturycommon.org

 

Sunday nights I sing with Voices Rising under the direction of Ruth Lewis, an enthusiastic and exciting conductor.  I have always loved classical choral music. In boarding school we trooped up the hill to sing Vivaldi’s Gloria with the neighboring boys school, including the trumpet-filled chamber orchestra, and I was hooked.  In Jacksonville we sang Mozart’s Requiem, with the thundering Dies Irae. Now I play it on my stereo at full volume.  We sang a concert version of Verdi’s Aida, with four excellent soloists but alas, no elephants.  I still thrill at the name of Aida’s lover Radames.

Radames and Aida. image: arovingpittsburgher.blogspot.com

The repertoire for our upcoming concert includes only one classical piece, Sicut Cervus by Palestrina. The other pieces cover a wide range - folk songs, popular songs, and a show tune. At first I pooh-poohed eighty voices singing these simple melodies, but I’ve come to enjoy them. And we also get to sing a complex arrangement of the gospel Walk in Jerusalem, a deliciously woeful contemporary piece, Lamentations of Jeremiah, and the thrilling Pan-African national anthem, Nkosi Sikelela. 

Michelangelo's Jeremiah. image:commons.wikimedia.org

 

image: tvtropes.org

 

Amanda is galloping furiously into adolescence, with me and Joe barely holding on.When I practice my singing, when I’m thinking about my throat and breath and lips and tongue, about the pitch and rhythm of the notes, I forget everything else. When I’m singing with the chorus, surrounded by a great ocean of music, my life disappears.  For an hour on Monday and two hours on Sunday night, and in my daily practice sessions, I take a vacation from my troubles.  I believe in music. Singing brings me joy.

 

THE VOICES RISING CONCERT is May 4 at First United Methodist Church, 419 NE 1st St, Gainesville. There are 2 performances: 3pm and 7pm.

 

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Next post: May 30

Leave Me Alone

 Have you ever taken the Meyers Briggs test?  If you do, you’ll end up categorized along four different scales, including introvert/extrovert.  This doesn’t have much to do with the usual idea that an introvert is shy and retiring while an extrovert is a party animal.

Party animals. Image from sugarbutterbaby.com

Susan Cain's book, Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, made a discreet splash last year.  I can’t bring myself to read it. I’m sure it’s full of important data, amusing anecdotes, and helpful advice, but it sounds too earnest for me.

The concept I remember from Meyers Briggs is that an extrovert gets her energy from being with other people, while an introvert charges her battery with solitude.  No one would think it, since I can be pretty lively in company, but I am an introvert. I need huge doses of solitude to keep me going.

Charging my batteries

Once when Amanda was four and sitting quietly, I said something to her and she complained, “I was thinking, and now I’ve lost my think.” That’s how I feel. I like my thinks, and want to be left alone to wander around with them.

When I get home and see Joe’s car in the driveway I am likely to feel, “Oh good, Joe’s home.” When there is no car in the driveway I feel, “Oh boy, I’m alone.”
 

Oh good, he's home!

Once we were spending the evening with Mary Anne and Larry. I’ve known them over thirty years, and the four of us are as close to family as friends can get; among other things, we share late-in-life parenthood. I said to them, “Being with you is almost as good as being alone.” They understood that I was expressing profound affection.

These blessings came late in our lives

Since I retired I have had lots of solitude. Amanda goes off to her school, Joe goes off to his. My day stretches out in front of me, available for puttering, reading, writing and thinking. I love that.

Still, I have discovered that you can get too much of a good thing. Recently I had minor surgery on my foot. I have a walking cast, but mostly I have to sit with my foot elevated. The pain comes and goes, and if I’m willing to sleep for hours, I can control it with drugs. With all this solitude and enforced leisure, you’d think I would write and write, read and read. Instead I’ve bought streaming Netflix, and I’m watching many movies, as well as multiple episodes of Parks and Recreation.

This experience confirms my belief that watching TV is depressing and addictive. And when I’m confined to a chair, solitude is no fun at all.

So while Sartre had a point when he said that Hell is other people, Milton also got it right. "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."  I've got my dog, my cat, my ice pack, good books, good drugs, but if I can't emerge when I want to, my little solitary heaven becomes a bleak and gloomy place.

 

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NEXT POST SEPTEMBER 20

The North Carolina Zoo

 A few weeks ago I went with my sister Luli and her friend Margaret to the North Carolina Zoo in Ashboro.  It was the best day I have ever spent at a zoo.  Certainly the weather helped: blue sky, a steady breeze, high 70's.  But it was the zoo itself that impressed me.

The North Carolina Zoo has the advantage of space and a temperate climate - almost 1400 acres in the rural Piedmont, an hour and fifteen minutes from Chapel Hill.  It was built in the mid-70's as the first natural habitat zoo in the U.S. designed by Dwight Holland, a painter and designer who directed the zoo for many years. In the 80's it was expanded using a master plan by Jon Coe, a landscape architect who specializes in zoos. 

The zoo has two sections, North America and Africa, about a mile and a half apart as the snake slithers.  We began with the cypress swamp in North America, and the contrast with other zoos was immediately apparent.  The first exhibit we passed was various carnivorous plants - sundew, pitcher plants, Venus fly traps.  The signs had lots of information, but not so much as to be daunting, and the ranger there answered all our questions.  I loved learning a bit about the animals’ environments as well as the animals.

COLORADOCARNIVEROUSPLANTSOCIETY.COM

About 1100 animals of more than 200 species live in habitats designed to mimic their natural environment and give them as much space as possible.  All the habitats are behind glass; the larger ones with ample seating - benches and risers - to let us wait for the animals to appear.  Walking from one exhibit to the next we were usually in the shade, and many paths were landscaped to feel like woodland trail. The most impressive habitats were the western prairie, with elk and bison, the chimpanzee habitat, and the 37-acre African savannah, with elephants, rhinos, ostriches, antelope and gazelles.

 From a visitor’s point of view, the disadvantage of large habitats is that you may not see some of the animals up close and personal, or indeed not see some of the animals at all.  We arrived at the prairie and climbed up to the top step of concrete risers.  A vast expanse of waving grass and wildflowers was all we could see until Luli, our best spotter, saw what might be an elk’s head in the distance above the grass.  A twitching ear confirmed it.  A little later we realized that what looked like some sticks next to her were velvet-covered antlers.  We waited, enjoying the fresh air and wild flowers.    

 

 

Human families came by, the children clambered up the steps, looked around, and moved on.  Then the female elk stood up from the clump of grass and ambled toward us along the perimeter of the prairie, walking the length of the glass and disappearing into the brush at the far end.  The male followed her.  He was molting and his shaggy winter coat was in tatters.  Finally, a calf came along - we had had no idea it was there.  We probably sat fifteen minutes watching for elk, and then we moved on, past an extensive poster display about the loss of the great prairies, and modern day attempts to use the land for agriculture while preserving what native grasslands remain.  We stopped at another viewing point, and under a distant clump of trees saw a dark mound that was the back of a sleeping bison.

 

FOTOSEARCH.COM IMAGE k1110339

 We had come on a Monday, to avoid crowds of children - I thought field trips were usually on Fridays.  But the first thing we saw when we arrived were about seventy-five children from the Liberty Preschool, and we saw many school groups throughout the day, as well as parents and grandparents with preschool children and babies.  Despite, or perhaps because of the long walks between exhibits, and waiting sometimes in vain for a glimpse of the animals, the children and hence the parents were calmer and better behaved than I have ever seen at a zoo.  

Certainly the children acted like children - growling at the cougars, yelling “Wake up!” at the alligators - but they were far happier and less whiny than I usually see at zoos.  They had lots of room to run, and weren’t tugging at their parents to move from one animal to the next.  Spotting the animals soon became a game for them, far more interesting than watching a couple of bears or lions pace in a small cage. 

 We came to the endangered red wolves.  Their habitat was shady - brown ground covered with dry leaves, a shelter in the distance, a pond up by the glass.  We couldn’t see any wolves.  A father asked his family - “How many frogs can you find?”  Together we found eight huge bullfrogs in the murky pond.  Then a little boy spotted two ears behind a log, and patiently instructed me - “over there, see, just past the big tree”- how to find the wolf. Soon someone found a small red wolf over by the fence and we watched him for awhile. 

 

 The Sonoran desert, in a huge glass enclosure, was as hot as it sounds.  But it was fun looking for the critters -  birds, lizards, snakes - and the designer had thoughtfully provided grates in the path that blew cool air up at us.

We had arrived at the zoo at 9:30.  We were desperate for coffee and ready for lunch by the time we finished the North American section.  We bought bad pre-sweetened cappucino and sat in the shade at the Junction Plaza, where they have the special attractions - animatronic dinosaurs, the dino theater, a carousel - and a tram to take you between the two sections.  There was a restaurant, but Luli had prepared a picnic lunch - roasted vegetables,  bread and cheese, grapes and strawberries.  When we were through, we took the tram to “Africa.”

We walked away from the tram, rounded a curve and suddenly saw three giraffes eating from tree tops and two zebras grazing the grass.  One family was more absorbed by the turtles swimming in the pond.  At the chimpanzee exhibit we watched from a distance as a toddler chimp climbed repeatedly onto a nursing mother’s head.  Each time she gently lifted him off and set him on the ground.  Eventually another grown chimp, a male I think, came out of the woods and enticed the toddler away with a game of stick throwing.  

TREEHUGGER.COM  CREDIT: SHINY THINGS/FLICKR

At the lemur island, there were a couple of red-ruffed lemurs and six ring-tailed lemurs.  According to various internet sources, ring-tails hang out on the ground while red-ruffed are arboreal.  Lemurs have not been informed of this.  The two red-ruffed lemurs had the good sense to race around on the ground, but all the ring-tails were up in a most astonishingly spindly tree, mere twigs.  They leapt and climbed from limb to limb. 

RED RUFFED LEMUR: DURRELL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION TRUST  RINGTAILED LEMUR. PUBLI-DOMAIN-IMAGE.COM

I was pretty tired by the time we got to the savannah.  We sat on benches on the large overlook.  We saw one huge elephant far in the distance, and a couple of white rhinos, a kudu, a water buck and a Thomson’s gazelle a little closer.  Canada geese were everywhere, voluntary residents.

When we all agreed we were through zoo-ing, Margaret looked at her watch.  It was ten minutes to five, and the zoo closed at five!  We had happily stayed almost eight hours, way longer than I usually stay anywhere, but now we had visions of spending the night in the African savannah.  We went down to the service road and flagged down a truck.  The kind driver radio-ed a ranger in a golf cart, who came to pick us up and take us back to the tram to North America, where we had parked.  We saw many families walking, but he gave us a ride because we are old. White hair is such an advantage!

There are all sorts of policy and ethical questions in regard to zoos, of course. click How do we justify penning up animals for our edification, even with the most enlightened approach to zoo design?  Why is the state of North Carolina supporting a zoo that very few of its citizens can get to or afford to visit? I can just imagine the legislature that passed that appropriation - I wonder who was the legislator from Ashboro! 

I know (sort of) the counter-arguments: breeding programs, preserving endangered species, fostering respect for wildlife;  jobs, tourism, economic development.  Jon Coe, who has generously shared information since I found him on the internet, says, "Regarding the morality of zoos, we may fault the original animal collectors, but I see today's zoo animals as "refugees from the human war of conquest over nature." Most zoo animals (at least mammals) were born in zoos and couldn't survive release back into the 'wild' even if any suitable areas could be found which aren't already at full carrying capacity. I believe when zoos can deliver the kind of experience you and your friends had and the quality of animal welfare NCZ provides it's animals, then they are justified. But there certainly are zoos and especially some private collections I cannot justify."

 

JON COE, ZOO DESIGNER, WITH BONOBO. used by permission

I've told you about my favorite parts of the zoo.  Some of the habitats struck me as small, and I don't know about caging gators and other reptiles that aren't endangered. I can’t sort it all out, and I don’t believe I have to have a carefully-reasoned moral stand on every subject.  Sometimes I just seek my pleasures in the world as it is.  If you like visiting zoos, the North Carolina Zoo is worth the trip.

                          
 
ENTRANCE TO THE NORTH CAROLINA ZOO

 

Note: In research for this post, I became totally absorbed in Jon Coe's website, where you learn a lot about zoos, and also can see his poetry and sketches from the field (ie wild areas few of us will ever visit).click

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Next post June 15, "Sheela-na-gigs"

Do You Care About Jesus?

I am not always a nice person.  “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” was one of my mother’s favorite sayings, but sometimes...

Joe and Amanda and I went out to dinner Friday night to celebrate the end of the FCAT’s, Florida’s terrifying standardized tests. We had a wonderful time at Harry’s downtown. Joe had a weird martini, I had a normal martini, and Amanda had a Shirley Temple.  She was in high spirits, and decked herself with Mardi Gras beads, which she shared with the large plaster alligator next to her.

 

After dinner we headed to Mochi, where the frozen yoghurt is self-serve and the toppings range from blueberries through chocolate chips to Cap’n Crunch.  Amanda boogied down the street ahead of us, but waited for us at the corner before crossing. 
                      

On the corner by Mochi we encountered a fair number of people who call themselves Warriors for Christ. A young man with a crewcut was standing on a milk crate.  I believe he had a megaphone.  Proselytizing Christians irritate me anyway, and anyone who calls himself a Warrior is down ten points with me before he opens his mouth.
 

I THINK I WOULD QUALIFY AS A GENERAL HEATHEN

 
He did open his mouth, and addressing me, asked, “Do you care about Jesus?” I should have just said no, of course, and continued on my way. Instead I replied, “I don’t give a shit about Jesus,” (I may have used the f-word instead; I’m not sure.) “You’re going to go to hell,” he told me, as I walked on with Amanda.  “And you’re going to take that little girl with you.  You have a responsibility to that child.”  Amanda made some gesture which I caught out of the corner of my eye; I believe she was flipping a bird.

 

iMAGE FROM PHOTOBUCKET BY LIBERAL NC

Amanda does believe in God and Jesus, and cares about them both when she thinks of it.  I asked her whether that boy’s Jesus was the one she knows, and she said no.  We  agreed that the only Jesus worth knowing is all about love, not hate and aggression.  After we left Mochi, we crossed the street to avoid the asshole, and encountered another young Warrior who asked if we would like a leaflet. I politely told her no thank you, and we went on.

Now the last thing I need is a callow youth telling me I have a responsibility to Amanda.  As I fume about it now, I make lists of all the responsible things I do that are focused on her, and wonder whether he’s ever been responsible for more than a goldfish.

               

Although I am not a believer, I usually try to respect the beliefs of others.  I do find it annoying that strangers feel entitled to interrogate me, but I know that many Christians feel that it is part of their duty to spread the Gospel, as it is the only path to their Heaven.  They’re supposed to be fishers of men (and women and children too, I suppose). 

SOURCE: CLIPART.OCHRISTIAN.COM

So I put up with them when they call to me on the street, and even when they knock on my door.  Part of me is sorry I was rude, and gave a rude example to Amanda.  But a bigger part of me gets a giggle whenever I think of it. Joe was happy that we had dinner AND a show.  I think perhaps I should drink martinis more often.

               

 

Next post May 18: Letters of a Woman Homesteader

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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

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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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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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