Perfect Moments

In the sixties, when I used to sit down cross-legged on the floor to watch the escapades of the Starship Enterprise and her crew, I was a fan of Captain James T. Kirk.  We raised Doberman Pinschers and William Shatner had Doberman Pinschers and he was a charismatic figure.

Mr. Spock inspired less feeling for me. He always seemed something of a cold fish, and since I was a girl of many passionate opinions, I just didn’t care that much for unflappable logic of the half-Vulcan half-human man with the pointy ears.

So I never became a Trekkie (or “Trekker” as apparently they prefer) but I did, in time, get to be a huge fan of Leonard Nimoy. That started at a party, where someone had a copy of The New World of Leonard Nimoy, which contains gems like “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” and “Proud Mary,” “I Walk the Line” and “Let It Be Me.”

Nimoy was clearly a man of many gifts. Singing wasn’t one of them. This record was dreadful. And it wasn’t his first, he’d had at least three others before this one, I was told. We didn’t know if he was so tone-deaf that he didn’t know that he couldn’t sing, or if he just didn’t care. There was something appealing about that. Clearly, he enjoyed making records, his ego didn’t need for them to be good records.

Each time I saw Leonard Nimoy doing something other than Star Trek, I was charmed. He was an educated, intelligent, gracious man. He had a strange relationship with Mr. Spock, evidenced by the title of his 1975 memoir “I Am Not Spock” and also by his second one twenty years later “I Am Spock.”

Nimoy was a kind of Renaissance man for Hollywood. He wrote books of poetry, was an avid and accomplished photographer, recorded those awful records, and did film and television work that had nothing to do with Vulcans.

Like a television movie about Golda Meir. And he directed Tom Selleck in Three Men and a Baby and Diane Keaton in The Good Mother. He wrote and starred in a one man play about Vincent Van Gogh. He appeared in a mini-series of The Sun Also Rises. (As Count Mippipopolous. He was versatile, but Jake Barnes might have been a stretch.)

He was not a one-trick pony, certainly, but that one defining role was the one he was never able to shake.

Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock eat pie.

 

He was gentle with his Star Trek fans though, and made frequent appearances in regards to the beloved character. He often appeared with his old friend, William Shatner, including a few cameos on Shatner’s gig for Priceline. There were talk shows, conventions, the role reprised on both television and the large screen.

He provided voice-overs for “Spock” on the Simpsons, Futurama, Big Bang Theory. When Leonard Nimoy’s death was announced this morning someone wrote “Who will tell Sheldon?”

Leonard Nimoy’s stepson signed Bruno Mars to the Warner Brothers. That might have been the extent of it, but no, there’s Leonard playing an fictive self in a ratty bathrobe in an alternate version to “The Lazy Song.” The character is really pretty scurrilous– what Leonard Nimoy might have been if he was bitter and lonely and living in the San Fernando Valley. It’s amazing he was able to keep a straight face, but I guess he had practice.

Because of course, he was neither bitter nor lonely.

In a taped interview included in the New York Times obituary, he explained how the Vulcan Salute came to be. It turns out the that the now iconic gesture– with which almost everyone greeted Leonard Nimoy (including President Obama) was one he observed during a Kohanic blessing at temple when he was a child in Boston.

Though his father instructed him to turn away, to avert his eyes, he peeked. He saw the Jewish priests’ outstretched hands in blessing and he thought it “magical.” He suggested the V-shape hand signal (it is actually the sign for the Hebrew Shin)  to Gene Roddenberry many years later, and a chapter in popular culture was born. But watch the video at the link. To hear him tell the story is lovely.

Just over a year ago, Leonard Nimoy was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It’s a ghastly way to die.

“I quit smoking 30 yrs ago,” he tweeted to his fans. “Not soon enough. I have COPD. Grandpa says, quit now!! LLAP.”

LLAP. “Live Long and Prosper. ”

“Smokers, please understand,” the messages continued. “If you quit after you’re diagnosed with lung damage it’s too late. Grandpa says learn my lesson. Quit now. LLAP. I’m doing OK. Just can’t walk distances. Love my life, family, friends and followers.”

On the 23rd of February, his last tweet was posted.

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP.

He probably didn’t come up with his last message on Monday. He’s had a little time to think about how to say goodbye to all those people who loved him and his character so much. It doesn’t matter when he came up with it, it is his last, most beautiful, gift to his fans.

My friend David Weinstock wrote today  “Hail Spock, who made the 1970s a better place for Jewish boys with strange ears.”

It must be a very difficult time for Leonard Nimoy’s family and for his friends and for his colleagues and all of the people who knew him so well and enjoyed him so much. I know this to be true because of how his death this morning, at the age of 83, has affected the rest of us.

I admit it, I have wept.

Highly illogical.

 

 

 

 

 

Playing Scales

It’s not that I have nothing to write. I have a list of things to write. An essay nearly finished,  interesting exercises that I could run through, the writer’s equivalent to playing scales. Tonight an invented one: I found a website that generates random photos. When I asked for one, this is what it sent me.

I can do something with this picture. I can invent a story about it. That might be fun. For awhile I noodled around with it, but other than riffing on themes of (first) abandonment and (second) longing I didn’t get anywhere. One of the toughest things about writing fiction is keeping out of the cliches that riddle our psyches like land mines. Maybe I’ll write a story about this photo, but I have to think on it awhile.

Years ago, a man disappeared on a jet ski in a local lake. It’s a man-made lake, and it lays like a little dimple on the Ohio landscape. You could sit in a canoe in the middle and see every shoreline and everyone on the shoreline could see you. They found the body of the man, may he rest in peace, but by then I’d already written a story — in my head, of course– complete with Maury Povich, Belize, and the underbelly of Dayton’s east side. I need to get that stuff down on a page.

Non-fiction is so much easier– you just tell the facts. Or try to. Journalists are human, so bias creeps in, even if it’s just in the choices of adjectives we make, or which quotes to include. Yesterday, the Register Guard newspaper of Eugene, Oregon ran a story about an elderly dog who was stolen out of her yard by “rescuers.” Not “a woman”. Not “a thief”, but “rescuers.”

The story, by Chelsea Gorrow, has gotten an enormous amount of play on social media lately. The dog turned out to be 17, and was being provided with palliative care by her life-long owner. This news story called the dog “Hope” the name the “rescuers” had bestowed on her and quoted them as if their beliefs were gospel. Even though the dog’s name was Zena and they knew that. Eventually she was returned to her owner, who felt his hand was forced and took her to be euthanized the day she returned.

I was moved by this example of bright yellow journalism to do something I rarely do anymore–  to correct the story and send it back to the writer and all four of her editors. They all ought to be ashamed. Of course, I didn’t hear anything back, they probably chalked up the email to “some crackpot old woman.”

But aside from those kinds of egregious lapses in judgment, writing non-fiction is just answering these challenges: make it plain, make it engaging, make the reader stick with it. Who, what, when, where and why is also helpful.

Of course, fiction has those too, but starts with the initial enormous hurdle: make it believable.

I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that.

Like I said, I have a list of things I intend to write lo, these 40 days. A list.

So, how is it that I find myself, once again at the keyboard after one in the morning, writing the equivalent to chopsticks? It’s everything I can do not to creep into the living room to watch Big Bang Theory’s Kunal Nayyar  host the Late Late Show. Bob Newhart’s his guest. But if I do that, nothing will get written. Nothing at all.

I am just so damned tired. I have projects on every burner, some of them in crisis, some of them boiling over. Today I took time out to go for sushi with my friend Rita. We’ve been trying to get together since before Christmas. It’s been close to a  year since we actually went to lunch. So even though I wavered for a moment this morning and thought maybe I should just work instead, I didn’t. I went to lunch, by God and I’m not sorry. Friendships deserve tending too.

Then I worked.

By the time I was heading home from the office, I felt crummy. One arm aches. I’m plagued with lightheadedness. There are weird twinges here and here and here. I keep dropping things. I believe that stress is either killing me or making me a hypochondriac. Maybe both. So I had a nap on the sofa, and didn’t get anything written and now I’m too tired and I have to go to sleep!

There’s a little flourish, there at the end, did  you hear it?

Maybe there’s some benefit to just dragging my carcass here to the desk and writing something. I hope so.

 

 

Unchristian.

 

This video popped up in a Facebook news feed today. The woman who reposted it is a kind and intelligent woman. I have no truck with her, but I think the people who concocted this little swirl of fiction are immoral, disingenuous, ugly.

To save you from wasting the six and a half precious minutes that I did watching this piece of soppy cinematic saccharine, I will give you a short synopsis. After all, you can never get those minutes back.

The premise is that this boy, about 11 or 12, is huddled in freezing temperatures in a ripped shirt and ripped jeans and no shoes on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk with a bit of cardboard and a garbage bag. About ten feet away from him, a neatly dressed man is sitting on the sidewalk.

We are supposed to believe that this kid sat on this sidewalk, crying and shivering for two hours while New Yorkers streamed past him.

Right.

Finally, the neatly dressed man approaches him, hunches down on the sidewalk with him, and gives him his coat. The man tells the boy that he is homeless too.

Uh-huh.

Then two dudes come up, tell the neatly dressed man that the boy’s not homeless, he’s their little brother, but they’re really touched by what he did so here’s five hundred bucks.

Sorry, no, this does not pass the sniff test.

The two guys are from “Ock TV”, a Youtube channel better known for taping “pranks.” The people involved in this segment were all actors. (You can see the same woman pass through several times in different coats.) The “homeless man” is not homeless. The kid is certainly not homeless. And this little scene did not play out on the streets of New York for two hours.

Two hours would not pass without a cop passing by, or without someone calling the police. That’s a Lane Bryant store they’re sitting outside. Think that every woman coming and going in and out of that store for two hours is going to overlook a kid moaning and writhing on the sidewalk?

Would you?

Of course not. Would everyone stop? No, probably not, but many if not most, would.

It’s very tired, this trope of the “noble homeless” and the disgustingly unaware masses. Some homeless people are altruistic, some are not. They are not, as a group by their circumstances, more noble than the rest of us.

Nor are the people of Manhattan an insensitive teeming mass. People do stop to help.  One afternoon in Tribeca, I took a bad step on a piece of uneven pavement, twisted my ankle and fell on the street. Several people stepped forward to offer assistance. It is simply not believable that a child would be huddled on the sidewalk for more than a minute or two before someone offered him aid.

The daughter of old friends panhandles her way around the country– part of a youth movement called “traveling kids” or “train hoppers.” . She happened to be at home this summer when we were visiting her folks. On  that Sunday afternoon she and her boyfriend made seventy-five dollars panhandling for two hours on the streets of Seabrook, New Hampshire.  People panhandle because it they get a return for their effort.

People help other people because that is human nature. The best part of being human, the most Christ-like of Christian behavior is to love one another.

Despite its appearance on the pious website “Faith Tap”, this video is not Christian. It’s makers fail at Christianity 101. (They’re not too great at filmmaking either.)

This video has been shared via Facebook 99,000 times. More than three million people have “liked” it. I wonder how many of those sent money to these guys?

 

The people who passed by this child on the sidewalk were directed to do so. They are actors. They’re not deserving of your contempt, they probably didn’t even make scale for this.

Reserve your disgust for the young men who produced this tired old homily. They are playing you, they are manipulating your sense of sympathy and outrage to line their own pockets. Remember, we are better than that. We are kinder, we are gentler and on the whole, we look after each other.

 

 

Shoe Bliss

It’s a stereotype that women love shoes, and like so many stereotypes, there’s a kernel of truth in there somewhere. It isn’t just Imelda Marcos. We’ve all seen those episodes of House Hunters, where she either has a room dedicated to shoes. Or she need a room in which to put her collection of shoes. There’s usually a  smiling, indulgent-looking man in the mix somewhere. When a box of shoes arrives in the mail for me at my house my husband gets that look too. “More shoes?” They’re not Manolo Blahniks. No Jimmy Choos in my closet. I have a tendency to twist my ankle when walking, even in bare feet. I don’t have any clothes that go with that sort of shoe. I sure don’t have the body to wear them naked anymore. But if you love Christian Louboutin, if that’s your shoe groove, all the more power to you. They’re works of art, those shoes. So beautiful. Just not on my feet. Yes, I am the girl of the sensible shoes. I started out in Buster Browns. Once when I was 13, I traded a family heirloom for a second-hand pair of red platform shoes, like something out of  Aladdin Sane. (Weirdly, the other shoes I remember from the closet of my early adolescence  were Earth shoes, blue Adidas court shoes and riding boots.) Mostly my shoes are solid. Save one pair of kitten heels for grown-up occasions, I could sprint after a dog in every pair of shoes I own. Physical therapists like my shoes. Now, don’t go away thinking my shoes are boring. In my closet, at one time or another, you could find flocked floral black and white Dr. Martens. Pale-pink leather lace-up paddock boots. Black Mary Janes with purple flowers. Yellow clogs with ladybugs. Cobalt blue Beatle boots. At least six pairs of Dr. Marten’s combat boots– and I still want the ones with the Union Jack toe. Not a fan of running shoes, (or running) though I did get a pair of Merrells the last time I went on a fitness thing. I loved them. They were black, modern, sleek, almost elegant. They were designed for “natural running.” They nearly ruined my feet and left me with a year-long misery of plantar fasciitis. Right now as I sit at my desk in my jammies, my feet are toasty and warm in Stegmann boiled wool clogs. Sexy? Ooo-whee, let me tell you. One afternoon I went into a shoe store in Santa Cruz with my friend, Christy. Christy is not just my wonderful friend, she’s my astral twin, my sister from another mother. We walked into this shoe store and our mouths dropped. We clutched each other’s arms. “Look at those shoes!” she whispered. It was a whole store full of our favorite sort of shoe: fun, sensible, playful, comfortable, zany shoes. Cute shoes you could wear running after a dog. Thank God they weren’t having a sale. The right shoe makes you feel like anything is possible. You can slay dragons, talk people off ledges, catch the thief, land the contract, get the guy, get the girl, grab the brass ring. (And this is true whether the right shoe is a five-inch stiletto or a Bass Weejun.) The wrong shoe is as bad as the wrong foot. Best not to even start. I get a new pair of shoes and I fall in love. I hate to wear anything else. I wear those shoes until the seams are falling apart. (Like that last pair of crimson red Naots. God those were great shoes.) Then I’m heartbroken and I have to go shoe shopping again. But shoe shopping for me is a bit complicated– they just don’t have my shoes at Payless or Shoebilee, or Shoe Carnival. My shoes make themselves the object of a quest. And when they arrive, finally, at last, generally through the mail, all is bliss at our house for awhile. This is my perfect shoe. I really appreciate a good black Mary Jane (named after Buster Brown’s sister, did you know that?) and I’ve had lots and I hope I have many more pairs of comfortable, sturdy, sensible black Mary Janes in my life ahead. But a red Mary Jane. That is something else altogether. Hans Christian Andersen’s grim tale notwithstanding, that is the shoe that speaks to me. I never had red Mary Janes as a child. My mother was sensible and bought me the brown ones. I’m making up for that now.

Oh I used to be disgusted And now I try to be amused. But since their wings have got rusted, You know, the angels wanna wear my red shoes. But when they told me ’bout their side of the bargain, That’s when I knew that I could not refuse. And I won’t get any older, now the angels wanna wear my red shoes.

Buckley Hill

Looking Up Peel Street

Returning to Boston is very uncomfortable. So much has changed there over the last twenty years that it is hard to find a single thing that still looks the same. With the inexorable beat of the developers’ drum, it has been reinvented several times over, with plenty of money changing hands each time.  Even the historic parts, which somehow ought to stay the same, seem swept up in a kaleidoscope of memory and change.

But this is not about Boston. It’s only mentioned because it is in such stark contrast to the village in England where I landed at age 10-and-a-half after my life took a dramatic fork in the road. That place, Marsden, nr. Huddersfield, W. Yorkshire, England is a place that seems never to have changed.

Through the eye of Google earth, I can visit it again from my desk chair. I can virtually walk up Peel Street, past Pogson’s bakery where we used to buy “ham butties,” past the hardware store where I tried to buy elbow grease. I can turn left up Brougham Road towards my old school. There was a shop along there where we went regularly for fish and chips, wrapped in newsprint.

Those places are probably gone now, or changed hands or perhaps they’re sweet shops or hairdressers or a 99p shop. But the street itself is much the same, the bridge over the River Colne, the slumbering gray-green Pennines hemming in the horizon all around.

We lived at the bottom of Peel Street, where it meets Station Road, next door to The Swan, which used to be a pub, but is now a youth hostel apparently. The house, number 3, was called “Buckley Hill” — and that’s a how a letter would reach me– at “Buckley Hill, 3, Station Road, Marsden, nr. Huddersfield, W. Yorkshire, England.”

There were plenty of letters sent by my father, and other relatives left behind in the States, writing with news of dogs and the American Top 40 and the Connor kids up the street.

(Letters went the other way too, from the post-box in the wall in front of the house: the pony (Minty), my teacher, Mrs. Docker,  was tired of me always writing about horses. She has silver-gray hair to her waist. Cadbury Flake is The Best!!!, but could you please send some Tootsie rolls?)

 

Buckley Hill

But this is not about any of that either. This instead is about Buckley Hill. In the spring of 1973, at age 11 and a half, I walked out the front door, got in the backseat of our grey Morris Minor, went to the Manchester airport,  and left forever on a BOAC jet bound for JFK.

Yet, I remember the house with it’s tiny walled garden and its 300-year-old kitchen more clearly, more vividly than so many other things that have come and gone.

In Connecticut I’d had my own room, pink, in a rambling four-square on a corner. In Connecticut I’d been an only child.

Among the many changes that came with life in Marsden were the addition of a step-sister and step-brother, and the three of us shared a room.  It was over the kitchen and the pipes that ran up from the AGA cooker warmed it. Casement windows looked out over a long narrow courtyard between us and the Congregational Church. It was there I set up a series of little hurdles to play “show jumping” in the long days between riding lessons.

Each night I slept in a little white metal bed. There was a nightstand, and a desk. It wasn’t unusual to stay up late reading with a flashlight under the covers: Swallows and Amazons, Enid Blyton, The Chronicles of Narnia. On the desk, there a portable record player in a tan-buckram case where I played my cherished collection of Beatles records until someone appeared at the door and said “Get to bed. Now.”

We always parked in front of the house, and came in through the gate. The  drawing room had a line of chairs and a square grand piano. Up the right hand wall rose the staircase. My stepfather was the village physician and this room and the one directly above it were dedicated to that. Not much ever seem to happen in the room with the square piano, but you’d occasionally find strangers sitting there– women working on their knitting, men from the mill.

At the top of the stairs then was the domain of the staff– Peggy and Eileen and Dulcie. There were others. Typewriters and telephones and shelf after shelf of manila folders with the medical histories of every one in the village. Those rooms belonged to some other purpose and we were to steer clear of them.

There was one  bathroom in the house,  up the stairs and at the end of the hall, for staff and family alike. One long bathtub, big enough for two ten year old girls to bathe in at once. The toilet tank was up near the ceiling, and you pulled a long chain to make it flush. There were antiques in the bathroom. I’d never seen that before.

Downstairs,  a door on a swinging hinge opened into the family sitting room. Most of the room was taken up by yet another grand piano, and leather arm chairs nestled around a coal grate. Those chairs, inexplicably, have managed to stay with us for more than 40 years, and sit in my mother’s living room in South Carolina.  When you curled up in the chairs, it seemed that the piano was looking over your shoulder.

William, age six, used to sit on the piano bench and pick out delicate melodies along the keys. He’d been brain-damaged through an accident at birth: cerebral palsy, significantly reduced hearing and sight, cognitive deficits. If he wanted something he sang. “Would you like some tea?” meant that he was hungry.

The kitchen was the original room of the house, with stone walls and stone floors worn smooth. Milk was delivered each morning in pint bottles at the door, and was consumed immediately, which was just as well as the refrigerator was tiny, about 18″ square. My mother used to grouse that the room was so cold that the refrigerator was redundant anyway. There was a yellow box of Weetabix, William’s favorite.

William and Hannah and I ate tea in the afternoon, sometimes my mother made it, other times in was Jean Woods, the housekeeper. There was eggs and toast, Robertson’s jam with golliwog on the label. In the corner was  near the AGA stove was a small black and white television on which we watched Coronation Street, Top of the Pops, Show Jumping.

For years I wore a triangular scar on the back of my wrist, where I’d been pushed against the AGA in the midst of an argument with Hannah. The AGA was always on, summer or winter. The scar has faded so much that nowt  can’t find it anymore in the roadmap of my hands.

I don’t remember what the squabble was about. What to watch on the telly. The horrible smell of the fried bread she liked to make. That some boy liked her better than me. Who ate the last McVitie’s biscuit.

One afternoon in the kitchen– Hannah came back from the orthodontist in Manchester with new black and maroon platform shoes. I was livid and not at all gracious, as just a few weeks earlier I’d been made to get plain brown sensible oxfords. That was the difference between going shopping with Humphrey who would indulge such whimsies if it suited him, and my mother who thought that children shouldn’t dress like trollops.

They’d brought me a riding crop as a consolation prize, which only added to how much trouble I was in for being beastly about Hannah’s new shoes.

On Christmas day the town band crowded into the kitchen filling up the room. They played for the doctor a selection of carols of the season, and the the very last song was “My Old Kentucky Home,” especially for my mother and me, the Americans. How thrilled I was that they played a special song, an American song. It made me homesick, but in a nice way.

 

Of Soup and Love

 

“Of soup and love, the first is better.” — Spanish Proverb

 

It’s been cold for days. It’s the end of the month, which means both groceries and money are short. But there’s a chicken in the freezer and soup seems like a good idea.  My mother made a chicken soup and rice when I was growing up; it was an excellent soup for tea and sympathy.

Years ago, in the unending quest to make chicken soup interesting, I concocted a recipe which has become one of the standards here: whole chicken, well-salted, simmered until tender. Remove the carcass, add chili powder, cumin, sriracha, blend to incorporate schmaltz and broth.  Pick chicken. Set aside the cartilage, skin, and nasty little parts for the dogs. Return the meat to the broth, add corn, diced red pepper, vidalia onion, garlic, beans, cilantro and rice. Serve with diced avocado, shredded manchengo cheese, more chopped fresh cilantro.

It’s a good night for it, and it makes a huge pot of food and sustains our little family for several days.

Given that I was wrestling pigs in mud (well, really, I was handling people being obtuse, but it might as well have been pigs in mud) I asked my beloved if he would mind putting the chicken in the pot to start. He swears he added salt, but I think he must have been distracted. He kept rushing the pot outdoors to the nearly-zero temperature so it would cool quickly. My God, we’ve developed hang-ups about food safety regarding chicken.

The carcass is cooked to the point of disintegration. No big deal, it will be more like a chicken stew. I chop and slice, open cans and bags of vegetables, add the rice and go to read. Occasionally, wandering through the kitchen, I give it a stir, add a bit of something. An unsalted chicken is a tall hurdle to cross.

Along the way I am distracted. When I come back to check, the rice has cooked nearly to porridge, a kind of Chinese jook. Not my preference, but it will be okay. But when I begin to stir, I realize that the rice has scorched to the bottom.

Now the members of my husband’s tribe make a scorched rice soup– it’s called something like “fahn-del” — that may not be right– it always makes me think of a baby’s “fontanelle” when he mentions it. He used to claim to be making scorched rice soup every time he burned the rice in one of my saucepans.  Eventually we bought a rice cooker.

So now there is a slight scorched taste to the soup, but adding more sriracha and cilantro masks it well enough. Elmer doesn’t mind. Later, when I lift the lid to show our son that there was a pot of soup, I see that it is full of something that looked like blackened cornflakes floating on the surface.

“Did you scrape up the scorched rice from the bottom of the pot?” I ask him. He nods vigorously, smiling. “It’s good that way.”

For you, maybe.

He may well be Chinese-American, but he was born and brought up in Los Angeles, and grew up eating hot dogs and fried chicken along with the traditional dishes his mother made. Why on earth would he think that we would want to eat soup with scorched black rice bits floating in it? For a moment I wonder if it was some kind of passive-aggressive nonsense, but another carryover from growing up Chinese is the inability to waste food. (“I’ll just scrape the mold off, it will be fine.”) So he wouldn’t set out to ruin a pot of soup for the rest of us just to be bloody minded.

Julian heats up some frozen taquitos.

There’s a maple yogurt in the fridge, I can add some granola to it.

 

 

Scenic Route 53

“A great alternative way to reach Grants from Gallup is via Scenic Route 53, which runs parallel to, and south of, I-40. It takes a full day to really experience this out-of-this-world landscape of lava tubes and red arches, volcanic craters and ice caves, as well as unique historical attractions and traditional New Mexican towns.”  

-Lonely Planet

On Friday, I turned 53. I’m not particularly bothered by it. I happened to be online around 1 a.m. and commented that I’d been 53 for 53 minutes, to which my mother (the next day) said “Not exactly.” Which is true, I wasn’t born until 6:40 in the evening. My father had gone home to make a sandwich.

And it was one time zone over, so I guess I wasn’t truly 53 years old until twenty minutes of eight on Friday. But that’s not what this is about. I could be turning 39 or 57 or 10.

This is about expectations.

Like everybody, I’ve had good birthdays and crappy ones. I’ve had full-blown week-long celebrations and birthdays that passed with little notice. Oh wait, that last part’s not true.  I’ve never had a birthday that passed without notice.

But lately I’ve started to realize that the enjoyment I found in a celebration had direct correlation to what I expected from it– but not having any expectations is not only not realistic, it’s not the answer.  The answer is this: make your own fun.

One of the very best things about my birthday is that the weather, which has been a socked-in-solid deep freeze for the last several weeks began to thaw. I know it isn’t spring, this is still January. But it was forty something, and the air felt soft. I went out into the world wearing a velvet coat.

It starts with a swim at the Y, a brand new luxury for me. The day before my husband went with me to sign up for a membership and bought a parking pass for good measure. Then we went out to buy shoes.

“Shoes?” you query. “Who needs shoes to swim in a pool?” Well, that’s true. I don’t need shoes to swim in a pool. But I might need them to sneak a little walking or racquetball or some other exercise disguised as fun. This is a very delicate arrangement, I don’t want to frighten my good intentions.  These are the shoes, they’re far more gaudy than any pair of shoes I’ve ever bought in my life, my footwear exists in the spectrum from Doc Martens to sensible Mary Janes.

After swimming, it was off to the kind of meeting that makes you wish you were having a root canal instead. For two hours. Lord help me. Save us from people who refuse to be reassured and offer nothing in the way of solution or support.

And I didn’t even get paid for those two hours lost forever from my life, on my birthday no less– it was all part of a volunteer gig. On the other hand I was the youngest person in the room. That gives me faith that 53 is not all that old, and that there are still plenty of years ahead for me to make trouble.

After the meeting, a late lunch with a friend. The white tablecloth restaurant where we hoped to go had closed for lunch, so we ended up at Panera, but that was alright, I had a favorite salad and it was delicious. My friend gave me this wonderful birthday card, one of the best I’ve ever seen. Inside it says “You’re just a few clicks past thirty.”

 

I would have lingered longer but I had to go pick up my son.

At home, there were birthday cards– one, from my father’s widow, had a generous check enclosed. There was an odd shaped package from my mother, which turned out to be a tall object resembling an umbrella stand.  We don’t think it truly is an umbrella stand, but it has found a place in the hallway and I like it.

Earlier, on our way to the closed restaurant, I passed by the windows of a shop I had only seen from the car. I’d always thought it was a high end gift shop– you know, home of the $40 paperweight. But walking by the window I saw on a shelf a figure of a dog, but I hadn’t had time to check it out before going home. So, it’s my birthday, right, I’ll indulge myself a little.

Back to the shop, and it is chock full of interesting stuff, shiny baubles and costume jewelry and beautiful French wrapping paper. The dog figure is only ten dollars, but it looks like the head of a mastiff on the body of a hound, so I pass on that, but pause over a number of bracelets, inspect some marked down Christmas ornaments and buy some French wrapping paper. It’s a place I’ll go back to, I’m only sorry it took me so long to go in the first time.

From there to the weird hum of the Goodwill outlet, where I found a blue plaid wool blanket, a poster from a Grand Funk Railroad tour, a first edition of LeRoy Neiman’s Art and Lifestyle, an interesting Melmac tray and a Magnajector. This is a Magnajector.

 

 

From Goodwill to the grocery store, and flush with the unexpected birthday check, I splurge on steaks for us. And a ganache-covered torte to serve as birthday cake.

Birthday dinner, then was sublime. More relaxed than any restaurant and you could go back for seconds. No candles on the torte and no singing (that may have been a misstep) but the cake was awesome.

It was nearly midnight before I sat down to check the computer. There were emails. A couple of texts. Some Facebook messages . . . and more than 150 posts wishing me a happy birthday. Some of them so perfect as to be gifts all in themselves.

Like this one.

And this one from my friend, Terri, quoting Byron.

And this one from my pal Mark, noting my return to the water.

What gift could be better than messages like those from friends like that?

And then I found out all kinds of interesting things about the number 53.

• It’s the number of an incredible scenic highway in New Mexico.
• 53 is a prime number.
• It’s the code for direct-dial calls to Cuba, a place I desperately want to visit.
• 53 is the racing number for Herbie the Love Bug.
• The Daily Mail says that 53 is when middle age begins.
• At 53, Ludwig van Beethoven completed his Ninth Symphony
• Sidney Sheldon began writing his first novel at 53.
• Robert E. Peary reached the North Pole at age 53, and that’s how old Walter Hunt was when he invented the safety pin.
• 53-year-old playwright Vaclav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia.
• Sue Monk Kidd published her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, at– yep, 53.
• The atomic number of Iodine is 53. In it’s gaseous state, it’s violet, like the cardigan I’m wearing in the photo above, taken on my 53rd birthday. It is present in ocean water, as I too, would so like to be. But the Egyptian-inspired pool at the Y will have to be a close second.
• The character of the Grinch (who stole Christmas) is 53.

As is Dewey Largo, who in the episode of The Simpsons that I just happened to watch on the night of my 53rd birthday, sings “My country ’tis of thee, my job is misery. Life disappointed me, I’m 53 . . . .”

(I think I aged better than Mr. Largo.)

 

Here’s what I know: you are responsible for your own happiness. I had a wonderful happy birthday, because I decided that I would have a wonderful happy birthday. Many, many people, friends and family alike, helped make it even happier. But from the time I got up in the morning I decided to celebrate the day like the present it was.

Today I am still eating birthday cake. Lucky girl.

A Second Cup of Tea

 

Last year, I decided that I wanted something different for the new year– not resolutions which seemed doomed to failure and designed to inspire self-loathing– but something else, a kind of “to do” list. Not a bucket list, with its solemn life-changing scope, something smaller. What I came up with was a “tea-cup list“.

On the original list, there were 15 items. I achieved 7 of them:  I did renew my passport and I did leave the country. I bought a kitchen torch, I took Ransom to the beach, I spent more time with friends. I threw away my old tired undies, I explored more, I kissed more.

But the living room ceiling is still without gilt, I didn’t get to Kitty Hawk, I haven’t been riding, though I did take a carriage in Central Park.  I didn’t take the train to the Library of Congress, and I didn’t find a place to swim.  The fireplace still needs tile, and I haven’t learned to make a pie crust– though I found a restaurant in West Milton, Ohio that makes the most wonderful pie, so maybe I can cross that off instead. I am not writing five days a week and that does vex me.

I still want to get to all of those things, but they won’t make this year’s list.  Oh, perhaps you will catch a glimpse of one or two here or there.  But it is a new year and I have new things, and new-old things I want to try. And as with last year’s, I post these not because I think you have any particular interest in how I plan to make my year, but in hope that it may inspire you to make plans for some fun of your own.

 

Tea for 2015

1.  Two finished chapters by March 1.

I’ve been spinning my wheels on this long enough. The research is always fun, but the weight of what I need to do has begun to tax me. It’s time to get those chapters written, the outline polished, the pitch made perfect. In March I want to begin to sell the book.  (And while this sounds a bit like a resolution and I am resolved to make it happen, it is finally, a gift to myself to move forward.) 

 

2.  French doors to the study.

There are two sets of vintage French doors in the garage. And a five-foot wide opening into my study through which sail dogs, husband, children and the like. I love my family, truly, but if I can’t close the door, they interrupt, and if they interrupt I don’t get any work done. See item 1. 

 

3.  Detroit Institute of Arts

The Detroit Institute of Arts is safe, thank God. I had planned to go and visit when it was in danger of being raffled off to cure the city’s bankruptcy.  The imminent threat has been abated, but I still want to get to the Motor City to explore restaurants and make photographs of another great American city and poke around the art museum and see my friends Ed and Jerry over there in Windsor. 

 

4.  A few nights at the Elizabeth City Bed & Breakfast

When the Wrights went to the Outer Banks to try their Flyer, the train took them to Elizabeth City, North Carolina. They stayed in the Southern Hotel there while waiting for the weekly freight boat to Kitty Hawk. The Southern is long gone, but the quaint and charming Elizabeth City B & B is in an old inn that was the Southern’s contemporary. I think there’s a pillow there with a mint on it for me. 

 

5.  Chincoteague

I want to go and see the ponies. It’s not so far. 

 

6.  Finish early

This one is even more like a resolution, but my relationship with deadlines is a toxic one. It makes me anxious and cranky, and I could just be a lot kinder to myself by not letting it go so long. I will try. 

 

7.  Swim nearly every day.

What a luxury, and one within the realm of possibility. I would not have modified it to “nearly”, and could have planned to swim every day but I know my own life well enough that my best hope is four or five days a week. 

 

8.  Hang every picture in the house. On freshly painted walls.

I have many wonderful paintings and photographs and the like that are stacked in closets and up against walls and packed in boxes. It’s time to hang them so I can enjoy them. Some of the walls need a new coat of paint first. I’ve got the paint, I just need to set aside the time to make it happen.

 

9.  Rookwood Pottery. A single tile. 

Rookwood Pottery is functioning again. I told my husband I’d like a bear for my birthday. Perhaps I’ll get my wish. But really I’d like to go and look at tiles and see them made and perhaps buy just one, and use that one splendid tile for the focus of the surround that the living room fireplace has needed since we moved in. Eight years ago. 

 

10.  Go to the zoo and visit the lions.

I love the lions at the Cincinnati Zoo. There are new cubs. It’s not so far, nor so expensive. I just like to sit quietly and watch, it’s good for the soul.  I’ve never been sorry to spend an afternoon there. 

 

11.  Have a lobster roll.

My most favorite food. I don’t know where I’ll get this lobster roll. It doesn’t seem all that likely I’ll get to the Maritimes two summers running. But maybe. Revere Beach is closer. And if it comes down to brass tacks, I’ll make one for myself. 

 

12.  Resurrect the Suburban.

Poor Suburban, our work truck, gasping for fuel, the front passenger seat torn asunder where the dog lost his mind one afternoon. There’s a spot on the roof with a bit of rust. It’s sat in the driveway so long now that the remote won’t work. But it wouldn’t take so much to put it all to right, and once again have a rig that will carry sheet rock, plywood, garden soil, straw bales, dog crates, storage tubs and furniture. I miss it, I miss sitting a bit higher than the rest of the traffic. I miss its limousine qualities. It’s a worthwhile endeavor to bring it back. 

 

13.  Winnow

Like everybody, I’ve got too much stuff. Some of this stuff I don’t even really like. It’s time to pitch it. Ditto the spices I’ve been carrying around since I was a sophomore in college. The shoes I will never ever wear again. Some of the ways I squander my time. Friends who aren’t friends. Clothes that make me feel self-conscious. Books that I haven’t read and won’t read or those I’ve read once and won’t ever read again. Music I don’t like. VHS tapes.

 

14.   Go to the movies.

I like the movies. There’s a first run cinema here where you can see them for five dollars a pop on Wednesdays. I just need to make a point to go. I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie in a theater. It might have been a decade ago.

 

15.  Keep being grateful.

This autumn I made a point to count my blessings– three a day for a hundred days. I’ve finished that exercise and it was a good one. I’m so very glad I did it, even though I’m –um– grateful that I no longer have to do it such a formal fashion. But it did change me in a profound way. I learned to look for the silver lining, to note the things that made me feel happy or joyous or content instead of just letting those slide.  The glass is more beautiful when it is half full.

 

 

Into the Dark

I looked at death tonight. I’d like to say I examined it like you would a textile, holding the weight of it in your hand, feeling the surface. But of course, it wasn’t like that.  No one touches death, we only picture it until it embraces us.

It was more like admiring something in a catalog and thinking “I wonder how that would be. What would it be like to try that on? Is it too expensive?”

In my twenties, I used to think about suicide on a fairly regular basis. I’d imagine the aftermath. I’d consider it as a solution, but not for long. If you’re thinking about the “after” you’re only kicking the tires. For a month or so, when I was 26, I slipped way below the surface and really thought I wanted to die. I was in so much pain that I didn’t see the point in going on living.

Luckily I had health insurance. Because I had health insurance, I had a psychiatrist, a good one, who kept me alive by making me sign a contract every day that I would not kill myself before I saw him the next day.

I don’t have a psychiatrist anymore.

But this evening, I looked at death again. And I didn’t think about “after.” I looked at it like one looks at a deep dark pool. Some alternative state. And what I thought is this: it would be so nice to rest.  This would stop all of the things that are hammering in my brain. The last box to tick on the last to-do list.

I have too much on my plate.

I am supposed to be writing a book. I haven’t done a damn thing for it since October. That inattention weighs me down. I have been busy with volunteer efforts. I have been busy helping friends. I have been busy spinning my wheels. The days start and end in the dark.

When I tell my friends that I am out of hope, they suggest chocolate. They say they feel the same.

At my house, the television goes constantly. My husband is wonderful in many ways, but he starts the day with “Paternity Court” and falls asleep on the sofa to “Rachel Maddow” on Tivo. I am not in the same room with it, but I hear it throughout the house. A friend of mine used to share the complaint– her husband had a particular fondness for “The Price is Right.”  When her husband died last winter, “The Price is Right” was on across the room.

Our twenty-year-old son lives with us. He’s a good kid, but he and his father can’t communicate.  As a result my husband nags me all day every day about the things he wants Julian to do, since direct communication  between the two of them so often ends in shouting.

Every plaint, every pundit, the queries by phone and email, the tasks left undone, each of them another stone in my pocket.

Today I met a friend for lunch. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was out of sync, not quite keeping up. Afterwards, alone, I sat in the car in a parking lot in silence. For twenty-five minutes, just staring out at the December sky. I felt strange. I ran some errands, picked up dog food and toilet paper.

Driving home through the city streets, I didn’t even feel like I was in the car. I felt like I was in some other place, perched on a diving board, my toes curled around the edge.

And then I came home. And the television was on and the dogs swirled around me. In the kitchen, my husband notes that I have tears in my eyes. I just nod. I don’t know why I’ve been crying. I don’t know why I feel so down. I don’t know why I feel so tired. I only know that I’ve been into the dark and out again.

 

 

No Thanks.

It’s my least favorite holiday.  I don’t think I really knew that, or even examined the question fully until today, but the verdict is clear. I’d rather just skip Thanksgiving. I believe that the grateful life is a healthy life, and that counting one’s blessings is a worthy use of time. I’ve made it Day 73 (so far) of delineating three different things I’m thankful for each and every day for a hundred days. It’s not that. I am grateful.

But this holiday . . . this holiday gets me down.

I was an only child and we lived 800 miles away from extended family.  In Ohio, my great Aunt Della was famous for her thanksgiving feasts. But I was never a guest there. I remember fish fries in the summer, and sauerbraten and homemade noodles,  and at Christmas the fudge she used to send through the mail. But I never had a chance to bow my head for prayer at her Thanksgiving table.

Nor at my Nana’s house in South Carolina. I’m sure there were Thanksgiving traditions there, but I don’t know what they were. I couldn’t even speculate. I know the fried chicken and the green beans and the macaroni and cheese and the pound cake. But Thanksgiving? I haven’t a clue.

I do remember one childhood Thanksgiving dinner at the home of a family friend:  roast goose,  Asti Spumante, Doberman Pinschers nosing around my lap for whatever I might slip them.

Then, a divorce, and we moved to England, where Thanksgiving is some foreign holiday, and the fourth Thursday in November passes without comment.  Later, in Canada, we again had Thanksgiving, but it’s the second Monday in October, celebrating the harvest and somehow cleaner, without the  bloodied history of European interaction with tribal nations. (Not that Canada doesn’t have it’s own brutal history, it’s just not that history.)

To Boston for college, and a hasty marriage one morning just prior to Christmas.  The month before my mother and stepfather came to visit for Thanksgiving,  but Bob was due for an extended family gathering at his grandmother’s house on the north shore. We delivered him there, met everyone, shook hands all around and left. Later, Bob said,  his sweet grandmother felt terrible for not asking us to join them, she’d been so flustered, there was plenty of food. But we went away and drove along the Massachusetts coast until we found someplace open. A dining room that looked out over the cold gray sea, where I ate tinned chowder and cringed under my stepfather’s harangue at not being asked to stay.

Of course, I was also rebuked for not taking more time off to be with them; but working in retail there were no days off the weekend after Thanksgiving, and we could be sure that those days were going to be utter hell.

Mind you, Thanksgiving itself is big business in Boston. Plimoth Plantation, which was developed around the site of the original colony has been a major tourist draw since 1947. It tries to present a picture of both the immigrant and indigenous cultures and you can still eat “America’s Thanksgiving Dinner” there for $93. Each. (Or $68, if you want to re-enact the 1621 dinner with  “A Sallet, Mussels Seeth’d with Parsley and Beer, a Dish of Turkey, Sauc’d, a Pottage of Cabbage, Leeks & Onions, and a Sweet Pudding of Native Corn.”)

Set off for Montana on my own some years later and I remember weeping when they played “American the Beautiful” on the radio.  Amber waves of grain, purple mountain’s majesty, fruited plains– yes! Finally, a place where Thanksgiving meant a connection to the earth.

Reality was that I married a lovely man with two young daughters. Every holiday was a cause for a fight with his ex-wife over where the girls would land, and Thanksgiving was no different. If we had them for Thanksgiving, we missed Christmas morning. And it wasn’t up to us to decide.

But working at a newspaper there in Montana I helped create the most rewarding Thanksgiving I’d experienced. While doing a human interest story on Meals on Wheels, we discovered that they didn’t deliver on Thanksgiving. Restaurants weren’t open on Thanksgiving. If you had nowhere to go that last Thursday in November, you were out of luck.

So we set about hosting an all-volunteer free Thanksgiving dinner for the community, citing of course, the communal nature of that first Thanksgiving. My friend Sheryl cooked the 90 turkeys on the rotating racks of her enormous bakery oven. The head chef from a nearby resort came to organize the kitchen. Food poured in, money poured in, volunteers came out in droves. No one was asked to prove their need. They only needed to want to be there with all of us. The District Judge gave the opening prayer. We fed 700 people.

The next year, we did it again. My father and his wife were on hand for that one, and again, it went splendidly. The next night, over dinner in Livingston’s best restaurant, my father lit into me for my lack of self-discipline. When I tried to defend myself (“I write 5000 words a week for publication, Dad. That takes some self-discipline”) he roared at me that he wanted some respect. I got up and walked out, happy Thanksgiving.

We did the Community Thanksgiving Dinner until 2001, when the events of 9-11 tapped out everyone’s last dime for charity. There was not enough money, or energy leftover to give locally.

Years later, we came home one winter evening to find three turkeys standing in the driveway. Live turkeys. They looked a bit like wild turkeys, but turned out to be Bourbon Reds that belonged to the neighbors. We were welcome to them, the neighbors said.

Apparently they’d acquired 4 turkey chicks in the spring and named them Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and Easter. Apparently “Thanksgiving” had put up such a ruckus at becoming the centerpiece of the holiday meal, the neighbors had lost interest in going through all that again.

Turkeys are funny animals.  These three– two toms and a hen– liked to sit on the ridge line of the  barns, or atop the chimneys like storks.  They slept in the barn at night, bedding down in the straw with the ponies.  They’d greet you in the morning and run to meet the car when we came home in the afternoon. They would cluck and coo and gobble as they made their way around the farm.

One day Edward the dog got loose and caught and savaged the two toms. I wanted to kill him, I really did. I was ready to load him up and head for the veterinarian. My son Julian, then about 8, wept and pleaded and argued Edward’s case until I gave in. I picked up the poor beleaguered carcasses, wrapped them in a sheet and set them in the back of the pick-up. I knew my husband would put them in the green dumpsters; there’s no burying anything in the Montana winter.

The hen mourned. I would watch her sitting alone on the barn roof. She wouldn’t go inside anymore. She turned away from the grain I brought her. With temperatures predicted to plunge to 20 below, I brought her into the mudroom of the house. She threw herself against the door. I let her out. In the morning I found her frozen to death in the snow.

It was a long time before I could face the carcass of a turkey on a platter. The next Thanksgiving we had a rib roast.

Late in August of 2005 my father came to terms with the fact that he wasn’t going to recover from laryngeal cancer. In the inexorable march over the next three months he scheduled people to come and visit. We sent an email– offering to travel from Montana to Missouri for Thanksgiving, thinking one last chance to do this right– but our offer was refused. He’d already scheduled his wife’s son Michael and Michael’s family for Thanksgiving instead. Absent was any message of inclusion. He died the day after Christmas.

Two years later we moved to Ohio,  and finally we had a shot at a real Thanksgiving with extended family– my 90-something-year-old grandmother, aunt and uncles. their families gathered at my uncle’s house. One year I brought the sublime macaroni and cheese I’d learned how to make from my southern Nana, and no one touched it.

But for the most part, these were happy gatherings, with pickles and noodles and turkey and ham and salads and a kid’s table and plenty of wine and conversations that went on long into the night. Then my grandmother died, and we met only one more time for the holiday.  This year my Uncle tells me that the main event at his house is a “quarter pound mixed-meat hot dog and curly fries.” He did have cranberry juice for breakfast.  I tell him that we need to be better organized.

We had a quiet thanksgiving here. We weren’t in the mood to cook, and the oven is broken anyway. We thought we’d just get by with burgers today. But the burger place was closed. You can’t buy a burger on Thanksgiving, but you can buy a big screen television. Or an iPad. Or whatever Macy’s and Kohl’s and Target is selling; the hordes out there trampling each other for deals hours after being grateful for what they already have.

Thanksgiving is marked at our house this year with bacon and eggs and hash-browns. Perhaps it’s better to just be thankful every day and never mind the rest of it.