Little, plastic animals from the zoo…
Lion puppets from our pass through Hong Kong
Playing with stop motion animation
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If I never been born
I totally missed my usual Ides of March tribute to my dear, old Pat. If she had seen this March’s birthday, she would have been 83. She’s never that far from my thoughts, Pat, mostly when I’m doing something wacky.
Recently she’s been in my thoughts, because while we never specifically talked about birth control–hell I’m still waiting for someone to take me aside and explain the facts of life–I think she’d have much to say about Rick Santorum, the Catholic church and the country’s “progressive” conversations on contraception that will ensure we move back to circa 1956.
Seriously, the national dialog has backslid into a parallel universe where medicine hasn’t changed and women are just gals waiting on husbands to save them from spinsterhood or sluttiness.
For some reason, I flashed back over 30 years to a classic Pat moment of logic clashing with the status quo.
I’ve written before about a certain friend I had back from junior high to high school past college into adult life. For ease of reference, I’ll call her Sally Mae. Now old Sally Mae caused a great deal of friction between my mater and me. Pat never liked her, and I didnt really understand until I got all growed up and had problems of my own with her.
One of the ironic aspects of Sally Mae’s and my friendship was how her mother always thought of me as a bad influence. I was a special kind of bad influence as far as school kids go. I got pretty good grades in the highest level classes. At the time I didn’t swear or drink, and my biggest hobby was reading.
Still and all, Sally Mae’s Ma didn’t trust me. She didn’t cotton to my book learning. In retrospect, I also think she thought my vocabulary was kind of uppity, which was maybe understandable given that my 12-year-old self knew more words than her. She bristled like a wet cat one of the first times I was in their house and asked where there books were. I had never been in a house without any book shelves.
Non sequitur alert: I just thought of a downside of dating in the age of tablet computers. How the hell can you just someone new if their bookshelf is virtual? You’d never have the early warning of standing in an apartment and coming upon an entire collection of Ayn Rand.
In addition to distrusting my precocious self, Sally Mae’s Ma was suspicious of my mother, because she worked and by necessity left us alone some of the time. Not for very long, mind you, since Pat was a school teacher precisely because it let her be home when her kids were.
Like a few people in our town, I think Sally Mae’s mother would have been more comfortable if instead of raising us kids to be smart and take care of ourselves, Pat just found another husband and settled herself down.
Now when I look back at that time in my life, I realize that my mother probably didn’t dislike Sally Mae as much as our fights might have indicated otherwise. Nope, I think she just knew that the family of my bestest best friend was more conservative, more bigoted and more narrow than anyone I had known to date. And by god or by nagging, she had to try to protect me from my choice in friends.
All of this relates to the current state of women’s choice and contraception through one particular day, a day in which my mother came home from the grocery store spitting with rage. Pat was apoplectic. Purple with anger. All kinds of heated. She could barely sputter out the reason.
Pat had run into Sally Mae’s mother at the store. Over the aisles of canned goods and produce they had an interesting tête-a-tête.
Now getting back to my being a bad influence and my whole family being suspect, the ironic twist is how much trouble Sally Mae and her brothers were able to attract. Their mother worried about the evils in the outside world, but overlooked the demons under her roof. For example, her darling daughter used me as a foil to hide that at 15/16 she was dating a 20+ hippie with his own apartment and van. Her special friend was a friend of her oldest brother.
Today, at the age of 48, my oldest brother still wouldn’t let me date one of his friends, let alone spend the night at his apartment or drive around in his van.
At 19 one brother in Sally Mae’s family got his girlfriend pregnant.
A mother of three boys herself, Pat, in the grocery store aisles bumped into Sally Mae’s mom and offered her sympathy for the trouble in which the kids had found themselves. I wish I had a transcript of what went down after that, but I know Pat came home enraged.
What I do know is that Sally Mae’s mother brushed aside any notion of trouble and started talking about the upcoming wedding. And, Pat, logical, unconventional, and now I realize radical Pat, told her that they shouldn’t ruin their lives. They shouldn’t marry so young, because they “had to.” The kids had choices and as the adult, Sally Mae’s mother should know that and help them make the right choice.
Words were exchanged. Much more than that, I don’t know. I’m almost certain my mother’s sanity and morals were both brought into question.
The wedding happened. So did the inevitable divorce.
Thanks to my mother’s politics, or practicality, Sally Mae’s mother took a closer watch of me. Nonetheless, her daughter lost her virginity years before I did. (Cruelly and sadly, Sally Mae told stories about me, implying to our friends that I had done all of the things that were in fact her secrets. Who knows what she told her mother.)
Now, 30 years later or so, it’s stunning to me that this conversation is still happening. Instead of more choices, we have the same or less. And narrow-minded people still get away with calling women sluts.
The story I meant to tell
Arghhh. I just began some navel-gazing, introspective, intellectual vomit. Then I remember that I might be the only person who ever reads this page, and I didn’t want to read that kind of boring shit.
So I scratched the dandruff off my head and remembered the thing I meant to write about a month or so ago. God, no wonder I feeling like I’m getting older, I keep letting time slip by me.
To whit, the story. There’s one great thing I love about traveling, and maybe it could be true the next town over, but it’s definitely true when you are far away, no one’s talking your language and every thing feels strange, foreign if you will. It’s when your brain sort of gets into the place where your normal routines just don’t apply, and your willingness to do anything is expanded canyon wide.
The best travel stories are the ones in which the teller knows for a brief flicker the rules weren’t for him, but invincibility was.
Obviously, I have one of those stories.
Penang is an island state of the coast of the mainland of Malaysia. Not far off the coast, mind you, there’s a bridge. Parts of the area are as over overdeveloped as a place that’s been trod as part of a trade route since the 15th century can be. But other parts are wilder with narrow winding roads and hills green with rain forest-y overgrowth.
Thanks to the narrow, winding roads, and maybe a island vibe of not entirely giving a fuck, the locals are repudiated throughout the country as the worst drivers around. The local paper’s stories of traffic gore kind of bear out that reputation. Alongside the usual vehicles, there are swarms and swarms of folks on tiny motorcycles, slightly more roadworthy than scooters, warning in and out of the traffic havoc.
It probably means something that both M. and I come from places that have renowned bad drivers. At least his home state doesn’t have the equivalent of Massholes, like mine.
Anyway, whenever I’m there, between looking the wrong way when crossing the road, on account of that driving on the left thing, and the nutty drivers, I figure I might get picked off in the streets.
On the other hand, we’re in vacation mode. Nothing can touch us.
Near our hotel there was a network of women handing out flyers for a manicure, pedicure, reflexology, massage, whatever you want we got kind of place. Actually, it was four places, and there was one woman who we kept seeing in front of a different place every day. Turns out she owned all four places, and, while to the tourists they might have seemed like different places, for her they were part of a continuum.
One day, walking across the street from one of the places with time in our hands, an older woman called to us the usual sales pitch. We called back does she take credit cards, because we had no cash. She said, “yes.”
One thing I’ve figured out from traveling. — if you are in a tourist area and seem agreeable to spending cash, a good chunk of the time the proprietor of a business or her staff will agree with you. There is time enough to sort out the negativity, and from the outside they just want you in the door. “Sorry, cash only,” doesn’t get you in the door.
Tricked again, we entered the cash only business. And the old woman who brought us in was an affable problem solver. She turned right to M. and told him not to worry he should start on his foot massage, she would simply take his ‘wife’ on the back of her motorcycle, and we’d go to the ATM. She called it her “moto,” and given that she was approaching or had surpassed 60, I actually didn’t realize what she meant at first.
With a borrowed helmet on my head, I sweatily clutched her matronly love handles and headed down the road. Even though I couldn’t completely understand her Chinese accented words over the roar of the engine, I gathered that she was going to take a couple of back roads to keep us out of traffic.
Check. I’m on the back of a motorcycle, driven by a stranger on some back alleys of an urban area on and Asian island.
In retrospect that could have gone awry.
I laughed when I came back and told someone the story. She reacted, “Oh my god, there could have been people waiting down the alley or outside the ATM.” For all I knew, it could have been a ruse to mug a tourist.
That had never occurred to me. I was thoroughly in the travel headspace where you go with the flow and everything works out. Here I am to testify.
I wonder if my demise will be in a foreign back alley some day. I have to admit, I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers.
Maybe it was a mid-life crisis
Ahhh, the weekend of the fourth of July. So full of memories for me. There were childhood summers at the beach, bonfires and fireworks.
In more recent memory, there was what stands as my favorite work story to date — the epic saga of is she crazy or ain’t she, and might she really ever stab anyone? It was a warm July 2 or 3, much like the one I am enjoying today, in which I agreed to haul my ass up to Marblehead, MA, a lovely, well-heeled town by the sea, and meet with a psychologist to take a psych test to determine what I already knew — I’m neither violent nor crazy.
It was a lovely chat we had, the therapist and I, about writing and comedy, Lenny Bruce, shivs and non-conformity. Then, I quietly answered questions on a worksheet meant to elicit my mental state. I didn’t need a therapist, but turns out the kick in the ass (or the kick out the door) by my employer was just what I needed.
About nine months after the “layoff” as I politely refer to my termination, as sanctioned by the lawyers and paperwork, I pointed my old Beetle convertible west. And, seven years after the trip to Marblehead, here I am about as west as you can get relaxing by another ocean.
Meanwhile, I still have friends and family back east, who I miss, of course. A group of them with whom I try to reunite (is that what reunion means?) when I’m back for the occasional Christmas, had an impromptu gathering at our chosen restaurant. By the wonders of technology that barely existed when we first became friends, we chatted on cell phones, restaurant east to highway-driving west. Turns out I had interrupted what Steve referred to as avoiding what Socrates implied was a worthless life. In Braintree that night, my friends and contemporaries were drinking wine and talking about where their lives had led and what should happen next.
The best part was that as they passed the phone around, two different friends told me to check in with one of the others. Each was worried about the other needing to figure out some fun in our middle-aged lives.
Around the same time period, a friend I had met through comedy approximately a thousand year’s ago back in Massachusetts at a place called “Angie’s Clams” started a blog. The blog, called “The Year of Living Joyously,” is about her own experiment in rethinking her life (now in L.A.). I’m not the least bit down with the Abraham-Hicks stuff, it causes my skeptical meter to channel off the charts, but I can dig the desire to shake up the status quo.
All of this stuff got me thinking about myself. Really, just about anything could trigger me thinking about myself. That’s how I roll.
Where, though, would I be, what would I be doing if I stayed back in Cambridge in my old condo? Would I have gotten another job much like the one I had? Would I have done something else? Would my liver have survived the no-doubt late nights at comedy clubs with cigarettes and beer?
It’s unknowable.
What I do know is that I left. I came to California without a job. Then I got one, a cushy one. I came to California unsure about the guy who I spent months with on the telephone, but we decided to give co-habitation a try. Now, we own a cute, airy ranch near the beach together. In absolute truth, I think, the risk-benefit skewed way, way out of my comfort zone. I did it anyway.
In my self-examined life, taking that flyer, packing up the car with clothes and driving away was just what I needed. Or maybe I just needed to make myself do something so extreme that every nerve ached and every fiber of irrational fear and anxiety shivered.
Today, I’ve met people who may as well be from another country or planet, and I appreciate their outlook in a way I never expected.
Sure, California has a deserved rep for shallowness, wine and hot tubs. I have no doubt at all that the empty phrase “Have a nice day” first was uttered in this neighborhood. I think it’s the temperate weather that causes a special kind of vacuousness.
At the same time, however, people here know how to enjoy things more than I ever encountered in the East. I can’t think of one person I know now that doesn’t have at least one, if not a dozen, outside interests that they actively pursue. It’s exemplified for me in the president of my actual job’s signing up for our softball team. He’s not just the president, he’s not just an intellectual far, far, far more than an athlete, he’s a dude who is literally retirement age by all definitions. But, the man ain’t afraid of doing something just for fun or getting tagged out at third.
If I had stayed in Massachusetts, even if I stayed working among academics, I never would have cracked a beer on a picnic table at a suburban park with a former dean of a major university just as they turned the lights out for the night. That I know.
I wouldn’t own two wetsuits and a skateboard (admittedly, I suck and can’t ride it, especially on our undeveloped town’s shitty roads). I wouldn’t pick fresh lemons from our backyard whenever I need a splash of citrus. I wouldn’t wake up to M.’s having made fresh coffee and smilingly serving breakfast in bed. Maybe I never would have tried Dungeness crab or co-hosted a Chinese New Year’s party in which we served a full roasted pig, ugly head and all.
Nothing is perfect, and I still kick myself almost each and every day for not writing more or doing more with writing. Work is still a necessary grind to keep the bills at bay. I still wrap myself up with worry and doubt, especially of the insecure, self-doubt variety. I’m hauling some extra tonnage and for the first time in my life my stomach rolls over my waistband. (I’ve always been big-boned, as they euphemistically say, built low to the ground like a fire plug. Blessed I was, though, with a flat stomach, which I TRULY miss both bitterly and wistfully.)
If I had never left Cambridge, all of the above would likely still be true. The difference would be road trips to Napa, boogie boarding, amazing food, conversations I didn’t know I would have and a relationship that seems like it’s going to stay. It was a risk worth taking.
(And, if M. ever reads this entry, yes, I’ll stop “blaming you for dragging me west,” as you called it. But, if a major earthquake hits, all bets are off.)
Technorati Tags: age, aging, beach, California, earthquake, experience, friends, fun, growing older, life, summer, tired
Photoshop Christmas, 2010
Last night I stayed up late and finished up this year’s holiday greeting featuring Photoshop manipulation and the real lives of M. and me.
CHRISTMAS, the movie
Tonight I stayed up late and set up a little doohickey on this here website to be able to send electronic cards from the whole collection right here: http://wp.me/P8wYr-R0. Sadly, the spammers and assorted assholes have made the notion of an ecard rather obsolete. Maybe not so much obsolete as old-timey dangerous.
“Remember, Martha, when we gave the baby gin to calm her and then clicked willy nilly on links in email?”
Remembering a dream I had
Recently, I remembered a happiness I could never achieve despite my belief that some can attain it. For me, it will never be a reachable star.
Many moons and a couple of thousand of miles ago, I sat in a classroom. There, in the front, sat color-coded file boxes. They were the slick, good cardboard, shiny like magazine covers. Contained within were shiny cards, a bright color band on top, each with a different story or puzzle or game.
The product was called SRA. The acronym may be for Standardized Reading Aptitude. Or maybe Symbianese Reading Army, as it was the 1970s.
Each kid in the classroom was told what color they were, and they got to cluster around their colored box selecting an activity. As we moved through the weeks and months, we would development and be given access to a new color in the series.
Warren and I weren’t assigned a color. Within that classroom we were relegated to a strictly black and white world, no color codes for us. Black letters on white backgrounds, the text of books.
Together we walked to the front of the class and asked the teacher for our color. She was nice about it, but she clearly laughed at us. “Red, I guess. It’s the last color in e series.” We spent the rest of the afternoon amusing ourselves with a game or two that focused on vocabulary and comprehension skills we already had.
I loved being an early reader. Books brought me a sense of an entire universe that I couldn’t see from my window.
To this day, I remember the special vocabulary lists my second grade teacher wrote out just for me and tucked into new books I hadn’t tackled yet. Most definitely I learned the word “extraordinary” from Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
However, I also noticed something as I occasionally popped my nose above the pages and looked around the classroom. The other kids, the slow readers, always seemed to be having a raucously good time. They played loud and boisterous games, even when we were supposed to be quiet.
I was slower in learning how to make a triangular paper football and flick it over the goalposts of a friend’s two hands.
Worse, I got extra assignments. No matter how quickly I completed my work, the teacher always had a pile more waiting for me. Thin books moved to heavy tomes that tore away at the straps of my book bag.
In my childish brain it seemed so unjust. Purely because I could do my work, I was given more work to do.
My fantasy, therefore, was wishing that I never learned how to read. Or, maybe, more realistically, that I only ever could read at a minimally acceptable level. My whole life would have been different, as teacher after teacher passed me a long but never expected particularly much from me. I’d have more free time to master kickball and twisting a paperclip into the perfect missile to be launched from a rubber band.
Sometimes today, a fully grown adult, I still feel that way.
People expect more from me in some situations. I had a recent spate of meetings in which coming in or going out the door I got buttonholed for a couple more comments from the powers that be.
Meanwhile, I find myself shoulder to shoulder with the kids who never even made it to the red box, the last in the reading series. These kids, now adults, color-coded green or yellow or orange, get to leave meetings on time.
Happily, they go back to their desks. They work next to me, unaware, that I’ve just been handed an extra report to write and don’t understand why I like meetings even less than they do.
Spreading the word
I just lost a 3/4 written attempt to update thanks, not, to the WordPress iPad app. Fuck you to those who gave me a false security in computer code.
Other than that, I started the day on Facebook and ended up reading this interesting ‘blog post from Barry Crimmins.
Now Barry and I go way back, although he wouldn’t know it or likely remember me. During the first war for oil, waged by the first President George Bush, the Herbert Walker one, I watched Barry at an anti-war rally. It was actually an ill-fated date, in which after the day of protest my would be suitor opted for the pulchritude of my apolitical roommate over our shared political affinity.
Barry was also the force majeure behind comedy at Cambridge’s Ding Ho restaurant, a legendary show that laid the groundwork for the Comedy Studio, my home away from home when Cambridge was my home. I got to work with Barry a couple of times there and afterwards shoot the shit about comedy, politics and upstate New York, where he grew up and I got a college degree.
I’ve always liked his writing. His call for his own excommunication and people to turn their backs on a church whose leadership was at the very least complicit in not stopping child molestation struck a particular chord.
I feel fortunate that not only was I allowed to be a lapsed Catholic, arguably I was raised anti-church. Condemning the bad behavior of priests and the hierarchy that protects itself at all costs is second nature to me.
One thing that Barry’s essay has me reconsidering is my attitude toward the parishioners. I’ve always taken a wide berth in questioning the religious choices of others as none of my business. But I think he is correct in asking people to reconsider supporting an institution with a fetid history and the corruption to let the worst of human behavior continue and, until very recently, unchecked.
To understand my attitude to the church, you have to know my mother.
Two essential things, I think, set Pat apart in my memories: (1) as a mother of five and a schoolteacher, she was a ferocious defender of kids, and (2) she had little patience with phonies and hypocrites. Combine the two, and no doubt if she hadn’t walked away from the church years before, she would have been on cathedral steps with signs and shouts for justice the minute the first molestation scandals broke.
She died condemning the archdiocese of Boston for not outing the pedophiles in it’s ranks and treating them as the felons they are.
Pat’s break with church started well before the scandals, and as the youngest in our family I got the easiest ride where Sunday mass was concerned. Unlike some of my siblings, I never sat in parochial school or had to prove I attended mass by producing from my pocket a copy of the weekly church bulletin. All of my holy sacraments were performed in intimate gatherings among friends in family homes.
I think it started when my dad died. No, i think it started before. As an adult, I once asked my mother if she had anything critical to say about him, because what little she did speak of him was hushed and glowing praise. She smiled and told me that if anything he was “too religious.”
Apart from occasionally wanting to sleep in on Sunday, I think she never bought into the unassailable nature of the men who ran the church and the notion that those mere mortals should be worshipped too. Ironically, she married a man who left the seminary after he enlisted during World War 2.
I learned the word “chippy” from her, as the only noun I ever heard her use for women she remembered from her childhood. It was reserved for the women who accompanied the priests visiting her family’s seaside cottage each summer. As the niece of the coastal area’s Monsignor, she got to see a vacationing side of the men who came to visit him.
Maybe it was one of those memories kids have that aren’t totally accurate, and maybe some of the priests she met were good men who keep their vows. It colored her belief in the leaders, I suspect, though, even if she stuck with the church for many more years.
Later, when she became a widow, her disappointment in the established order of the church further crumbled, when without a man beside her she became an outsider. I don’t know the details of what and when and who exactly, but she remained bitter about her newfound status and unchristian treatment.
As a kid, I was lucky. When the local parish became unbearably reactionary and stodgy in the face of the turmoil of the 70s, a group of families rented space (from Protestants) and arranged for their own folk masses (newfangled service with guitars and pita bread, instead of organs and communion wafers). A round robin was formed where each week a different family or two worked on the theme and arranged for the communion gifts. A Jesuit from Boston College High School drove to the suburbs to say the mass.
Among our neighbors, in an offbeat, mildly revolutionary act, I think Pat found some of the religion and sense of community she craved. Where our parish church was pro-Vietnam and anti-women wearing slacks, this group leaned proudly left and may have been the most sincere Catholics I have ever met. I still remember the fervor and powerful grip of Mr. Boyce’s three-fingered handshake during the sign of peace. The prayers called out and the collection for a sister community in the Ozarks or Appalachia were heartfelt.
For me, it was fun. Where my older brothers and sister were brought up in the formal church, I had my First Holy Communion in a purple dress in my friend Janice’s living room. Penance, or what the cool kids now call Reconciliation, was eye-to-eye with a priest in the Morrissey’s den, cleared of toys and games for the solemn occasion.
It couldn’t last. Shortly after sanctioning the group and threatening to tell Rome, the church called us all back and brought in a hip, young priest who was meant to be more in touch with the community. He wasn’t. My mother stopped going just in time to allow me to refuse Confirmation, the sacrament where I would reaffirm my faith and be seen as an adult by the church.
I remain unconfirmed and unrepentant.
In young adulthood, I became more aware of Pat’s enmity to the church in general and priests specifically. I think my favorite episode came in the aftermath of my cousin’s Holy Communion. A schoolteacher to her last, over coffee and cake, she took exception to the age appropriateness of the priest’s asking a group of seven year olds to describe when they had last felt the savior’s presence in their lives.
The argument on early childhood development versus the lord was epic and ended in an exasperated priest telling her to seek psychiatric and spiritual counseling.
I’ve told the story before of how I learned from my aunt that my mother was pro-choice. If not for the arrogance of ao Catholic doctor at a well-established Catholic hospital booking a legal and routine D and C without asking my mother or explaining why, beyond his decision she shouldn’t have more children, I would never have been born into the hands of a Jewish obstetrician at a city hospital. Thank you, Pat, for exercising your right to choose and refusing that blessed abortion.
Late in life, she talked about Pope John Paul II and how his church was involved with the Nazis. She felt that by virtue of Jewish people being eradicated from Poland there was no way the Catholics couldn’t have known what was going on or downright sympathized with the Nazis. Her head would have exploded when former Hitler youth, Pope Benedict XVI grabbed his throne.
So, today, I sit reading about the church’s marketing campaign to have us lost sheep “come home.” I’ve read what Barry has written, and I appreciate the gift Pat gave me of not taking any of it at face value. I’m comfortably agnostic with atheist leanings, and I try to walk a secular human path of decency.
I have dear friends who believe, and maybe they are right to believe in Jesus, his teachings, the Virgin Mary, and a supreme deity. I honestly don’t know, and i suspect will never have the conviction in my lack of faith like Dawkins or Hitchens.
However, the acts of man, the church with it’s money and corrupt self preservation, I do not believe in them. No manner of explanation or prayer would ever convince me other than it is completely evil to allow a young kid to get raped. Letting it happen again, and again, and again is unconscionable.
Not writing and writing
I guess it’s summertime and I’m busy going on adventures, like whitewater rafting, walking to the beach and barbecue. And, of course, there is my most recurring adventure, sitting on the couch and getting fat.
I’ve had some ideas for things to write here. I could write about the full on anxiety and trembling I felt whitewater rafting when the full force of my first experience on the Nile came back and I started feeling irrationally and overwhelming phobic. I could write about Dr.Laura and how I learned about her epic fail from a chat with a homeless dude named Larry in Berkeley.
I could write about my experience concocting an evening outing for work that turned into my own little amusing performance art piece in which with a little help from some friends I brought a crowd with some uptight and overeducated folks to a veritable hippie street party. I could write about the mundane, or maybe the way in which I still feel like an abused spouse in the workplace, even as I only get positive reinforcement in this job.
Or, I could do what I’ve been doing and not write.
For over a year, I’ve been naval gazing and hang wringing and other body part manipulating in a pretty unspectacular, boring cave of writer’s block. Someone asked me seriously, genuinely, strongly why do I write, or more why do I feel compelled to write. Further, he told me I didn’t have to write and I certainly didn’t have to validate myself through self-flagellation at a keyboard.
It struck home, and I haven’t gotten full on unstuck. Combine that with the sinking feeling that the books I loved as a little girl are a technology with a cloudy future. Being an author was never an easy row to hoe, now with the state of publishing it seems worse than dirt farming.
This week, or more last week, though, I was reminded by life one of the reasons I do want to write. Not to be all cliched and philosophical at the same time, but sharing stories is kind of what it’s always been about humanity wise.
A good friend, someone who I feel would have been a great friend had I not fled Boston, lost her mom. For the past year or so, she’s been keeping house and cooking meals and taking care of her mother however she needed. She emailed me a few days before when her mom was in a bad state after a stroke and then a series of strokes. The inevitable happened on Thursday.
Now, on the side of the country I left, she’s gone through the busy flurry of wakes and a funeral and having folks back to the house and making food and eating and storing food. No doubt, she’s functioning on autopilot and in the coming months she’ll feel intensely the change in the universe from not having to worry any more about her mother’s fragility and missing the place where her mother used to be.
I have the kernel of the idea about my mother, Pat, and me, and a few shallow chapters on my ‘puter, because story telling keeps us sane and keeps us knowing we aren’t alone. Not only would I get to exercise my demons by writing them down, but just maybe a reader would dig it and breath a little easier.
I can’t do anything to help my friend out but talk on the phone. I told her about my small smoking binge for the months that followed Pat’s funeral. It felt OK when she, having quit years ago, told me she and her brothers had been having a smoke on the stoop. For both of us, I think, there’s something cathartic in knowing someone else did the exact same thing.
The other day, I took a day off of work for no reason and with no plan. Ultimately, I wandered the aisles of Target and Daiso, a Japanese store with housewares and junk. It was relaxing to have absolutely no agenda. I came home with new underpants and various things for the house.
I laughed out loud in one department of a department store. A middle-aged woman and an older woman, crooked from osteoporosis, stood side by side in front of a shelf if empty bins. The older woman was examining a little plastic storage bin, carefully considering the possible purchase. The other woman, who really could only have been her daughter, questioned why she could possibly need it.
“You never can have enough storage, you know.”
The retort was quick and exasperated, “Yes, you can. Especially when you have no where to put it.”
I smiled a friendly head nod, as I passed by them in the aisle.
The dialog and its tone were so familiar, so comfortable. Among friends and strangers, I’m sensitive to all of the daughters and all of the mothers living through the last phase of their relationships. It’s a tough rite of passage, frustrating and rewarding.
On top of losing my mother, there are also a thousand ways in which I remember the Pat I did know and have in my life. I almost wrote on Twitter the other day that I can’t pass doll house furniture without quashing the urge to pick something up for her.
I wish now I could get some of her inspired and surprising creativity.
For example, I know she could help with another thing I could write about–a friend with breast cancer. She’s an unlikely friend, in that we’re not contemporaries (in fact she’s the same age as my uncle) and lives in Washington, DC. Still and all, we are long-distance coworkers who have swapped stories and realized some kinship, including strong-charactered mothers, and sharp, wicked senses of humor that have caused almost as much trouble as laughter.
As the contemporary of my aunt and uncle and from the generation about which Gail Collins writes, she’s straight up first generation feminist and solidly liberal. The pink ribbons, pink everything else and what Barbara Ehrenreich bitches about for its infantilism leaves her flat.
As does the notion that she should be a docile and placid patient, as opposed to the pugnacious fighter in her soul. I pity the poor oncologist or radiologist who doesn’t take the time to explain enough.
I want to send her something, especially post surgery and going into her second chemotherapy treatment, when she’s talking wig shopping and whether to go down to the army base for a $10 head shave from the barber there (apparently that’s a real option). If Pat were here, we could brainstorm. No doubt she’d come up with an off-the-wall scheme or some bizarre conglomeration of bargains and nonsense. Maybe she’d loan her a hat.
At gift-giving moments like this one, I always imagine the crazy, ragtag, assembled over weeks gift basket, which in my memories was colossally large, that Pat put together for a retiring colleague.
She didn’t leave behind blueprints for how to do such projects proud. I need those skills and those plans now, with one friend sick and another grieving.
At the same time, I need to remember all of the fights and frustration, big and small, with Pat or with life, including all of the many indignities she described as holding her back in life. If I remember the thousand things that made her great and the thousand things that made her troubled, i might have a story. I definitely would have a reason to not become complacent,
My life ain’t bad, But, somewhere there is still a gnawing. Maybe the words will escape some day, late to help my friends, but in time for some one else.
I fancy myself a raconteur
Today, I helped add a little more awkwardness to the world.
One of the many funtabulous, swell things I’ve gotten to do over and over and over again in my daily, pay-checking earning toils is interview people who also want to toil. Lots and lots of jobseekers out there in the world, and coast to coast I’ve had to make with the questions and conversations.
Years ago I got to hear my all time favorite answer ever given to the cliched “Why are you interested in leaving your current position for this job?” The woman being interviewed explained that after the cops had come to her house for the third time for a domestic quarrel complaint they advised her she needed to make some changes. She continued that her current job was so stressful and intense she was forced to work late and would come home exhausted to an angry husband who would fight with her about working late. Hello escalation.
Job interview tip #1: Don’t mention the near arrest.
In all of the interviewing I’ve done or had done to me, I’ve kind of sorted some things. All bristling with management tips and experience I’ve mostly learned interviews suck, but they suck a little less if you have a conversation.
It’s not a conversation, really, but you can try. The problem is the format. Whether it’s television late night, the back of a gossip magazine or a dank interrogation room, the old Q&A is a clumsy o way to keep things moving. I put job interviews alongside interrogations. I’m not into water boarding and like to keep the torture minimal, so if I can get the ball rolling conversationally it seems more humane.
I’ve found, too, that if you can keep someone talking and they get comfortable they say the damnedest things. The violent chick who didn’t get the job that might save her from the police calls piped up after we put her at ease. The dude who once told me he was a “lesbian,” he was kidding, and talked up hanging out with me once he started was way too at a ease. As wAs the young woman who saw my old office and announced her first step in her new job would be to clean it up.
Another fave was the woman who part way through a doubled up interview with my director, a medical doctor, went into excruciating detail about the fun she had watching a new polar bear get loaded into the Stone Zoo. In our meeting afterwards, my director confessed that she stopped listening herself at some point and instead started watching the interviewee’s involuntary tics and tried to guess which psycho-pharmaceutical was responsible.
California hasn’t been as ripe with the forehead smacking interviews. Between the kind of jobs with which I’ve been currently involved and the proximity to a university of some repute, the over the top is more of the insufferable variety.
Today, though, was special, because the conversation I looked for, I pine for, I try so very hard to instigate never quite gelled. It wasn’t my show to emcee, and I let others take the lead. Holy smokes, I didn’t realize job interviews could be so painful. I couldn’t sit still and grasped for some reins to start steering partway into one.
OK, I knew they are almost always painful. These were first, bad date ugly. Stilted would be the discussion.
I learned two things. One, I’m actually not bad at interviewing, I should never ceded the lead. Two, if you never put the person a tad at ease, you get almost no information. I really got to write out a self-help how to book on my wisdom, damnit.
There's a reason they all died there, I think
I think there’s a reason so many celebrities are found toes up in hotel rooms. Janis, John Belushi, David Carradine. Is there any space on earth as weirdly distant and alien than a hotel room somewhere in the universe.
I’m currently sitting in a bed about 75 miles due south on the scenic coastal highway from my own bed. The occasion is signing up for a workshop for work. Apart from meeting fatigue, waking up extra early to drive that 75 miles and it being the end of the day, I’m just feeling bone tired from being all by my lonesome in that wall-crawling, restless, fidget way hotels bring on in me.
I want to be home. I’m not sure I’m designed to actually learn and think in a conference room. Maybe that sentence should be full stop I’m not designed to learn.
It was actually an interesting day, where I got to see how organizations can walk through getting to a message and a plan for getting it out there into the ether. Communicating and all in important circles. There was even an ex-governor in the room.
Sadly, I’m more voyeur than real playa this time around, and it’s going to be a tough slog in my row-hoeing workday world to use what I learned.
I got back to my room and paced. I took a shower out of boredom. I deep conditioned my hair, because I had an abundance of conditioner and time. I inventoried my miniature toiletries.u
On a regular Wednesday night, I’d check email, scan some news and various websites and maybe write right here. Telly on in the background.
It’s the same here. But it’s not the same.
Here, on the same coast I can hear from my house, faraway from M. whose snoring I can’t hear right now, I’m thinking of hotel rooms and dead famous people. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, I’m just as far away from an errant speedball, deadly bump of coke or bag of heroin.
(Of course, such a level of drug use is beyond me, just as elusive as the celebrity I don’t enjoy.)