Boss-Lady passed this one on to me -- a nice twist on a mix we've made in my family for years. I really can't get enough of it. (But if you don't like cottage cheese, you won't be fond of this.)
In a medium to large bowl, combine:
Large container small curd, good quality cottage cheese
1/2 cucumber, chopped
1 fresh tomato, chopped
1/2 medium onion, finely chopped
2-3 generous dollops mayonnaise
lemon juice, to taste
salt and ground black pepper, to taste.
Refrigerate several hours to allow the onion to flavor the mixture through.
(Variation: Add sliced green olives.)
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
bridges standing still
Chicago celebrated the Fourth of July on the night of the Third, holding its annual fireworks display over the lake. I was there visiting J.; she had just finished taking her national board exam in her med program, and I had chosen that week for my vacation, and Chicago in summer is a great way to blow off some restless steam and add another year to what I hoped would become an annual tradition. We spent the late afternoon and early evening with her fellow med student friends picnicking in the park.
Unlike some of my experiences with students in the humanities, the med students willingly accepted an outsider into their social ranks without unspoken judgment or talking too much shop, and I had a lovely time. Once real dark set in, we packed up and moved with the rest of the hundred thousand celebrants to stand in the streets on the lakeshore and admire the gorgeous explosions over the water.
I've always loved fireworks, and these were truly spectacular, all the deep, heart-jarring booms and trailing streaks of color that I look forward to every year. J.'s friend O. snapped pictures, hoping to get a good one; we all alternated between making fun of each other and standing in silent appreciation of the show.
The amazing part of the night, though, happened when the fireworks ended and the crowd began moving. I've driven on some of those streets in the daytime, and they're always whizzing with traffic; but every year for one evening automobile traffic stops and human traffic swarms the pavement. The festive atmosphere was made even more jovial by this rare release from the traffic laws that define American orderliness: We felt patriotic, and we felt naughty, and since patriotism started off as naughtiness, we gloried in upholding our country's origins by breaking, for a little while, from its laws. The men in our group mapped out the best way back to where we were going, the girls followed, and my heart burned with good American pride every time one of those well-bred boys turned and craned his neck to account for everyone else in the flock.
Our mapped-out route took us along a different way than the previous year's: This year, the bridge over the River was stopped. Cars sat silent, bumper to bumper on the arch, and we commented on its rather eerie resemblance to a zombie movie like I am Legend. Like an army of ants the pedestrians overtook the bridge en masse, even more delighted to be allowed to be naughty and walk between the waiting cars.
The view from the center of the bridge was astounding: The dark water curved directly to the horizon, a mirroring centerpoint for the lit high rises stepping back from its walls. I pulled out my cell phone to take pictures, not caring how touristy it looked; but then I heard hundreds of exclamations, and looked up to see Chicago natives everywhere running to the walled edges of the bridge, whipping out their own cameras and leaning over the river, calling their friends to take their portraits against the backdrop.
Snapping her own shots of the view, J. explained, "Pedestrians are never allowed on this bridge."
All around me I heard people saying, "...once in a lifetime view..." "...never see this again..." "...omigod, once in a lifetime, c'mere, get me standing right here..."
Our group scattered considerably, since all of us were hanging back to capture the moment. I savored it as long as possible, hardly looking where I was going when I finally decided that the naked-eye experience topped anything a picture could show me later. The cityscape was breathtaking, one of those sights that makes you somehow believe in human achievement and human goodness, that makes you catch your breath in pride at what you are, and what you all are together.
My cell phone doesn't take the best of pictures. I erased most of them. I don't need them to be terribly good, however; when I look at the ones I have left, once in awhile, I see against the dark backdrop of my mind the shimmer of lights, caught and held by black water under a black sky, and I hear around me the sounds of human wonder at humanity, astonished and captivated, united by a sudden beauty.
Unlike some of my experiences with students in the humanities, the med students willingly accepted an outsider into their social ranks without unspoken judgment or talking too much shop, and I had a lovely time. Once real dark set in, we packed up and moved with the rest of the hundred thousand celebrants to stand in the streets on the lakeshore and admire the gorgeous explosions over the water.
I've always loved fireworks, and these were truly spectacular, all the deep, heart-jarring booms and trailing streaks of color that I look forward to every year. J.'s friend O. snapped pictures, hoping to get a good one; we all alternated between making fun of each other and standing in silent appreciation of the show.
The amazing part of the night, though, happened when the fireworks ended and the crowd began moving. I've driven on some of those streets in the daytime, and they're always whizzing with traffic; but every year for one evening automobile traffic stops and human traffic swarms the pavement. The festive atmosphere was made even more jovial by this rare release from the traffic laws that define American orderliness: We felt patriotic, and we felt naughty, and since patriotism started off as naughtiness, we gloried in upholding our country's origins by breaking, for a little while, from its laws. The men in our group mapped out the best way back to where we were going, the girls followed, and my heart burned with good American pride every time one of those well-bred boys turned and craned his neck to account for everyone else in the flock.
Our mapped-out route took us along a different way than the previous year's: This year, the bridge over the River was stopped. Cars sat silent, bumper to bumper on the arch, and we commented on its rather eerie resemblance to a zombie movie like I am Legend. Like an army of ants the pedestrians overtook the bridge en masse, even more delighted to be allowed to be naughty and walk between the waiting cars.
The view from the center of the bridge was astounding: The dark water curved directly to the horizon, a mirroring centerpoint for the lit high rises stepping back from its walls. I pulled out my cell phone to take pictures, not caring how touristy it looked; but then I heard hundreds of exclamations, and looked up to see Chicago natives everywhere running to the walled edges of the bridge, whipping out their own cameras and leaning over the river, calling their friends to take their portraits against the backdrop.
Snapping her own shots of the view, J. explained, "Pedestrians are never allowed on this bridge."
All around me I heard people saying, "...once in a lifetime view..." "...never see this again..." "...omigod, once in a lifetime, c'mere, get me standing right here..."
Our group scattered considerably, since all of us were hanging back to capture the moment. I savored it as long as possible, hardly looking where I was going when I finally decided that the naked-eye experience topped anything a picture could show me later. The cityscape was breathtaking, one of those sights that makes you somehow believe in human achievement and human goodness, that makes you catch your breath in pride at what you are, and what you all are together.
My cell phone doesn't take the best of pictures. I erased most of them. I don't need them to be terribly good, however; when I look at the ones I have left, once in awhile, I see against the dark backdrop of my mind the shimmer of lights, caught and held by black water under a black sky, and I hear around me the sounds of human wonder at humanity, astonished and captivated, united by a sudden beauty.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
My Funny Valentine
(7/27/08 Construction notes: I've added a new Part V.)
I
It’s Easter break my senior year in college, a raw rainy night typical of Pennsylvania springs, and the yard is swathed in mud. My friend Kristin, who grew up in nearby Erie but whom I never met till college, is sitting with me on the outside swing so that she can smoke a cigarette while we chat. Her chipper, round baby-doll face, half obscured by her curly baby-doll black hair, grins up at my shoulder. Like me, she walks on the outskirts of acceptability at our tightly conservative school, and her company makes my loneliness less lonely, particularly as she possesses the rare gift of complete acceptance.
I first met her looking crazy on the sidewalk bordering the Quad next to my dorm. It was a crisp late September day, that perfect kind when the leaves riot in wild stabs of color and hurl themselves into the air, and, drunk on the autumn smell, I was cavorting around trying to catch them, one hand already full of the leaves I’d found remarkable. Kristin and her boyfriend Eric, one of my fellow English majors, came upon me just as I straightened up with an armful of leaves and a branch or two clutched to my chest.
"Tree lady!" Kristin said delightedly as they stopped. She laughed at me, but it was an exuberant, joyful laugh, one that didn’t say, as others’ laughter usually did, My God what a freak; it said, Oh how interesting!
As such acceptance is still rare, I drum my heels into the mud and laugh with her, staring happily into the empty small town streets. An indefinable something, a noise or a movement, catches my attention, and I turn my head to see, several yards behind me, the black cat Mom told me about, hiding behind the front wheel of our ‘87 Volkswagen Golf. His eyes are fixed, wide and fearful, on my face.
"He won’t come near anyone," Mom had said, "and he looks hungry."
Fear in any creature transports me to an overwhelming compassion, yanks out of me the passionate need to soothe and comfort, and my love for cats has defined me since early childhood; so I ease away from the swing, putting a little more distance between me and the cat, and crouch down the way any cat lover knows to crouch when trying to woo one.
"Heeeere, kittykitty," I croon, one hand extended, fingers rubbing in a soft shh. "Kittykittykitty, priiitty kitty."
I can hear Kristin telling me something that sounds like, You’re weird, but it only breaks halfway into my consciousness. All my attention focuses on willing the cat to come to me.
He inches out from under the car. He takes half a step in my direction, changes his mind, cringes back, and then begins to pace – quick, jerky paces, a movement I recognize as desire combating terror. Just before I change tactics, I see him take a breath as if gathering all his courage to him, and then he shoots across the yard and thrusts a ragged head under my hand and freezes.
I look down at him; his eyes are tightly closed. I croon again and begin, slowly, to stroke his head. His eyes pop open, he casts one look of relieved exhaustion at me, then flops on the ground, rolls around and begins to purr a throaty black-cat purr (which always sounds a little junglier than other cats’ purrs).
"I can’t believe that," Kristin says. Running my hands over the rough bones of starved ribs, I look up at her and smile.
II
"We named him Simon," Mom says.
I hold the phone away from my ear and stare at it in horror. Simon? I should have tried to sneak him back to school somehow. Of all the awesome names in the world for a black cat, "Simon" was never one that crossed my mind.
I can hear the phone buzzing, so I shift it back to my shoulder and say, in a defeated tone, "Simon...okay. How is he adjusting?"
I hear her masking worry under an irritating cheerfulness. "Oh, well, he’s still getting used to the other cats," she says.
As it turns out, "getting used to the other cats" isn’t so much a process as a state of being. Simon hates the other animals. When I move back home for the summer after graduation, I always find him hiding in the basement, looking sullen. If I cajole him for long enough with little tickles under the chin, he’ll usually emit a reluctant purr; but he prefers to be alone.
Occasionally a mood swing takes over and he follows me all over the house, charging from room to room, whirling in circles like a hairy dervish, and bolting back out again.
"Weird cat," is my sister’s remark.
"I like him," I respond.
Mom looks after him disappearing into the basement after growling at the dog one morning, and says, with a sigh, "Well...he still likes you best."
"Darn straight," I say.
III
"Okay, baby, we’re hooommme," I say in my crooning-to-Simon voice, pushing open the door to my apartment and wedging the cat carrier through. All my luggage still waits in the car, suitcases and bags and boxes of Christmas loot; but I wanted to take my best present right upstairs.
I’m terrified he’ll hate it here; the five-and-a-half hour ride seemed to traumatize him. I’m still mad at the State of Indiana for thundering uncalled-for hailstones down on the car just as Simon was starting to relax and cautiously emerge from under the coat I’d thrown over him, but I mask my worry under an irritating cheerfulness, close the door, set down the crate and pop its door.
Instead of remaining crouched inside, he flows out and perks his ears, looking down my little hallway toward the living room. As he sniffs the air a few times and begins to investigate, his deep purr rattles from his ribcage. Kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room – his expression, as he inspects my furniture and the size of our living space, is self-satisfied. Happy. In fifteen minutes he’s made himself at home.
At bedtime, once I’ve wrestled the suitcase upstairs to dig out my pajamas, I creep under the covers, shivering, and turn off the light. Somewhere in the night I vaguely wake enough to realize that I’m warm; when I open my eyes in the morning, I find Simon curled up on my feet, his blunt profile statuesque against the mirror.
IV
We’re a physical family. Always touching each other, simple absentminded touches: Mom running her hand along my shoulder as she passes me sitting at the dining room table, me whacking my sister gently on the hip to ask her to move to one side so I can get in the bathroom cupboard, Dad reaching for Mom’s hand after she passes him the chicken at supper.
Physical with our pets, too – always scratching the cats under the chin or petting them, sometimes the wrong way just to annoy them; thumping the dog’s barrel when he asks for a little affection. We discipline the pets physically as well, often necessary especially with the dog, a stubborn Doberman who needs constant reminders that he’s bottom of the family food chain.
We kind of control our pets, actually, but I didn’t think of it that way till now, trying to coax Simon out from behind the couch where he’s been hiding for an hour.
I caught him eating my favorite plant, and gave him a smack. Our other cat, Alex, glares at us, offended, when we do this and stalks off with injured dignity; but Simon gave me a horrified, terrified look and fled the room. I’ve spent the last hour in an agony of guilt, trying to love-talk him back to the hand he seems so afraid of.
When he finally creeps into the kitchen and touches my hand with his nose, I carefully stroke him, then gather him up. He starts to purr in my ear, and I vow aloud that I’ll never touch him in anger again.
I never do. And it’s funny how, after awhile, I notice that whether I stretch my hands toward him, or reach out a toe to scratch his jaw the way he loves, he never, ever flinches at my approach.
V
I've never put a whole lot of credence in ghosts. The supernatural, certainly; but the idea of not-quite-departed souls lingering in physical places didn't sit well with the theology in which I was raised.
My childhood best friend Hillori and I had all sorts of theories of our own to explain weird happenstances, particularly the ghost stories surrounding Gettysburg -- we both had a passion for the Civil War, and she reinacted as a soldier in a local regiment. Our pet theory involved rips in time, through which people could occasionally view the past. It didn't matter to us that it was uncorroborated by anyone else; we liked it, and that was that.
Of intense interest to us was an old house, uninhabited but maintained, that rested half a mile outside town. We discovered it one day on one of our after-school rambles, both of us avoiding, for our own reasons, going home. As we trekked down the road talking our favorite kind of nonsense, we looked past two shaggy rows of grapevines and a wild line of trees and saw the house. Small and white, with pieces of colored glass sitting on the inside windowpanes, it gave off every neglected air of a long unlived-in dwelling, although someone had mown the lawn.
The spirit of investigation overtook us, and we walked around peeking in all its windows, then ventured onto the surrounding property. The late spring balminess of the air brought out a charming, distinctly haunted atmosphere to the place. A few enormous lilac bushes in heavy bloom dotted the side yard; on the other side of the house was a tangle of vine-choked pines and a half-rotten cherry orchard. An outbuilding containing a couple of rusted classic cars shored up the backyard, and attached to that were the broken-down walls of something that had once been a cement-block room.
As we started around the back of the fallen walls, our feet crunched on the spiky balls of horse chestnuts. I felt a strange, threatening feeling coming from somewhere around me -- the feeling you get when unfriendly eyes are watching you. The sensation increased, and I looked up and saw the tree.
It was a huge chestnut, looming over the garage and most of the backyard, with its arms thrust violently upward and outward. Immovable, unshakeable, it threw off an aura of menace. I felt distinctly unwelcome.
Hillori and I glanced at each other, and turned without speaking to make our way back to the side of the house, where the feeling lessened considerably and became merely the sadness of an abandoned home.
"Did you feel it?" Hillori asked.
"Yeah," I said. "It was creepy."
"I think it was the tree," she said.
We returned many times to the house over the course of the next couple of years, enjoying the strange blessings the place yielded up -- English roses in early summer, wild grapes in early fall, wide cherry branches to perch on and watch the traffic from hiding while we talked. The lawn was always mown, but we never saw the mower.
And we never went back to the tree. Occasionally we'd creep a little closer to it than usual, to see if the forboding was still there, and it always was. We never came to any conclusions about it, never invented any theories beyond that trees are mysterious, and this one bore us ill will.
I think of that tree, and those deliciously half-creepy, happy times as I come thoughtfully back to my apartment's bathroom where I had been getting ready for bed. As I washed my face, I distinctly heard, in the upper ranges of my hearing, a faint jangling noise that sounded like my cell phone ringing. Most of my friends, and all of my family, live far away, and I spend a good deal of my off-work hours on the phone; any time it rings I rush to it in the delighted assurance that people love me.
But it hadn't rung. No "missed call" message blinked at me when I flipped open the cover to check. I carry the phone with me back to the tiny bathroom, put it where the volume will blast my ears if it rings, and return to rinsing my face.
And I hear the faint jangling again.
It happens rather frequently, and only when I'm in the bathroom. The house is old for the area -- built in 1901 in one of South Bend's historic districts, it was divided into four apartments many years ago, and I have speculated that my bathroom is one of the most unchanged in the house. It's been renovated, certainly, enough to put in caulked paneling around the cast-iron claw footed tub and rig pipes for a shower, but I strongly suspect that mine is the house's original tub, and there's a feeling in the bathroom -- not, as with the tree, a feeling of malice, but a strange kind of longing.
I conclude eventually that the whatever-it-is -- I still don't buy into the idea of ghosts -- attempts, from time to time, to make its presence known, to communicate something, and in the attempt does a weird mimicry of my cell phone, since that sound always brings me running. I don't talk about it much to anyone, because even I think the idea is crazy, but I'm not much given to hearing things, and this phenomenon is fairly consistent. Since it doesn't bother me, I shrug it off and learn to ignore it.
When Simon comes to live with me, the room he avoids most is the bathroom. Every time I step into the shower, he pushes his way through the door and sits on the floor yowling anxiously until I poke my head out from behind the curtain to reassure him that I'm still there. His worried, sharpened eyes fix on the place of my disappearance until I reemerge, and then he inevitably jumps into the tub to inspect every worn-enameled inch, lap at the standing water a few times, and jump back out to rub against my wet legs.
After a week or so, I realize that I don't hear the jangling half-music anymore. I look at my companion thoughtfully that night, as I brush my teeth and he stares at me, recalling all of the stories I've read claiming that spirits dislike cats. Whatever was or wasn't happening in that old bathroom, now whenever I bend down to wash my face in the cast-iron sink, I hear nothing at all, and when I lift my head to reach for the towel, the first thing I see, sitting in the doorway with watchful eyes tracking my movements, is Simon.
VI
Exhaustion and worry have horrible ways of intensifying each other, and the fluorescent lighting has me sitting with my head in my hands, trying to drive away a headache. Simon hunches as far under the counter as he can get on the other side of the exam room. I've tried reading but I can't concentrate. It's the third time in four days I've had him to the Animal ER, and my stomach hurts with the fear that I'll lose him, or, worse, have to make the choice to give him up.
He hasn't peed in days, and although my friends laugh a little when I tell them this, my tears quiet their scoffing.
"Look," I say, "a cat's urine is very, very toxic. If they can't pass it, it can kill them."
They offered sympathy, then, but now it's far too late to be calling anyone and I feel terribly alone.
Other unfortunate patients crowded the waiting room when my turn finally came to sit in one of the exam rooms -- a teacup poodle that had been standing in the wrong place when his owner kocked a can of Campbell's soup off the counter, a huge Golden Retriever panting in terror and pain from the lawn ornament stuck in his haunch, a mangy cat that looks merely old. Simon stopped yowling once I brought him in, and didn't move except to brush his nose against my fingers when I stuck them through the slats in the crate, until the exam room door closed and I let him out.
I watch him pressed up against the garbage can, trying to hide from the shrillness of the light and my palpable, though repressed, panic. Memories riot in the front of my mind, a montage of moments that made my life with him so idyllic. Me on the phone, saying, "Mom, it's so nice to have something care when I come home!" Simon flopping at my feet to stretch himself full length on the floor, backwards, until he looked so much like a big black hairy piece of elbow macaroni that I started calling him Noodle. Me laughing as Simon chases me in circles around the apartment, doubling back to charge me head-on, rolling triumphantly on the floor every time he startles me into a shriek. Me sleeping better with a heavy lump of warm kitty pressing on my feet. Waking up every morning to a hard furry little skull cracking against my forehead with a sharp purr. Mom saying, "He talks? He barely made any noise here, he's a different cat since he started living with you..."
And Simon sitting at my feet, his yellow eyes fixed on my face, lidding themselves slightly to my singing, "You've made me so very happy / I'm so glad you came into my life..."
I rub my forehead and look up, watching him watching me. He won't come over to me, and his fur looks matted and sweaty, and his eyes are glazed a little with pain.
I take a deep breath and start singing.
VII
The State of Denmark is rotten in summer. I've spent every day so far since the weather warmed up waving insects out of my path.
I
It’s Easter break my senior year in college, a raw rainy night typical of Pennsylvania springs, and the yard is swathed in mud. My friend Kristin, who grew up in nearby Erie but whom I never met till college, is sitting with me on the outside swing so that she can smoke a cigarette while we chat. Her chipper, round baby-doll face, half obscured by her curly baby-doll black hair, grins up at my shoulder. Like me, she walks on the outskirts of acceptability at our tightly conservative school, and her company makes my loneliness less lonely, particularly as she possesses the rare gift of complete acceptance.
I first met her looking crazy on the sidewalk bordering the Quad next to my dorm. It was a crisp late September day, that perfect kind when the leaves riot in wild stabs of color and hurl themselves into the air, and, drunk on the autumn smell, I was cavorting around trying to catch them, one hand already full of the leaves I’d found remarkable. Kristin and her boyfriend Eric, one of my fellow English majors, came upon me just as I straightened up with an armful of leaves and a branch or two clutched to my chest.
"Tree lady!" Kristin said delightedly as they stopped. She laughed at me, but it was an exuberant, joyful laugh, one that didn’t say, as others’ laughter usually did, My God what a freak; it said, Oh how interesting!
As such acceptance is still rare, I drum my heels into the mud and laugh with her, staring happily into the empty small town streets. An indefinable something, a noise or a movement, catches my attention, and I turn my head to see, several yards behind me, the black cat Mom told me about, hiding behind the front wheel of our ‘87 Volkswagen Golf. His eyes are fixed, wide and fearful, on my face.
"He won’t come near anyone," Mom had said, "and he looks hungry."
Fear in any creature transports me to an overwhelming compassion, yanks out of me the passionate need to soothe and comfort, and my love for cats has defined me since early childhood; so I ease away from the swing, putting a little more distance between me and the cat, and crouch down the way any cat lover knows to crouch when trying to woo one.
"Heeeere, kittykitty," I croon, one hand extended, fingers rubbing in a soft shh. "Kittykittykitty, priiitty kitty."
I can hear Kristin telling me something that sounds like, You’re weird, but it only breaks halfway into my consciousness. All my attention focuses on willing the cat to come to me.
He inches out from under the car. He takes half a step in my direction, changes his mind, cringes back, and then begins to pace – quick, jerky paces, a movement I recognize as desire combating terror. Just before I change tactics, I see him take a breath as if gathering all his courage to him, and then he shoots across the yard and thrusts a ragged head under my hand and freezes.
I look down at him; his eyes are tightly closed. I croon again and begin, slowly, to stroke his head. His eyes pop open, he casts one look of relieved exhaustion at me, then flops on the ground, rolls around and begins to purr a throaty black-cat purr (which always sounds a little junglier than other cats’ purrs).
"I can’t believe that," Kristin says. Running my hands over the rough bones of starved ribs, I look up at her and smile.
II
"We named him Simon," Mom says.
I hold the phone away from my ear and stare at it in horror. Simon? I should have tried to sneak him back to school somehow. Of all the awesome names in the world for a black cat, "Simon" was never one that crossed my mind.
I can hear the phone buzzing, so I shift it back to my shoulder and say, in a defeated tone, "Simon...okay. How is he adjusting?"
I hear her masking worry under an irritating cheerfulness. "Oh, well, he’s still getting used to the other cats," she says.
As it turns out, "getting used to the other cats" isn’t so much a process as a state of being. Simon hates the other animals. When I move back home for the summer after graduation, I always find him hiding in the basement, looking sullen. If I cajole him for long enough with little tickles under the chin, he’ll usually emit a reluctant purr; but he prefers to be alone.
Occasionally a mood swing takes over and he follows me all over the house, charging from room to room, whirling in circles like a hairy dervish, and bolting back out again.
"Weird cat," is my sister’s remark.
"I like him," I respond.
Mom looks after him disappearing into the basement after growling at the dog one morning, and says, with a sigh, "Well...he still likes you best."
"Darn straight," I say.
III
"Okay, baby, we’re hooommme," I say in my crooning-to-Simon voice, pushing open the door to my apartment and wedging the cat carrier through. All my luggage still waits in the car, suitcases and bags and boxes of Christmas loot; but I wanted to take my best present right upstairs.
I’m terrified he’ll hate it here; the five-and-a-half hour ride seemed to traumatize him. I’m still mad at the State of Indiana for thundering uncalled-for hailstones down on the car just as Simon was starting to relax and cautiously emerge from under the coat I’d thrown over him, but I mask my worry under an irritating cheerfulness, close the door, set down the crate and pop its door.
Instead of remaining crouched inside, he flows out and perks his ears, looking down my little hallway toward the living room. As he sniffs the air a few times and begins to investigate, his deep purr rattles from his ribcage. Kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room – his expression, as he inspects my furniture and the size of our living space, is self-satisfied. Happy. In fifteen minutes he’s made himself at home.
At bedtime, once I’ve wrestled the suitcase upstairs to dig out my pajamas, I creep under the covers, shivering, and turn off the light. Somewhere in the night I vaguely wake enough to realize that I’m warm; when I open my eyes in the morning, I find Simon curled up on my feet, his blunt profile statuesque against the mirror.
IV
We’re a physical family. Always touching each other, simple absentminded touches: Mom running her hand along my shoulder as she passes me sitting at the dining room table, me whacking my sister gently on the hip to ask her to move to one side so I can get in the bathroom cupboard, Dad reaching for Mom’s hand after she passes him the chicken at supper.
Physical with our pets, too – always scratching the cats under the chin or petting them, sometimes the wrong way just to annoy them; thumping the dog’s barrel when he asks for a little affection. We discipline the pets physically as well, often necessary especially with the dog, a stubborn Doberman who needs constant reminders that he’s bottom of the family food chain.
We kind of control our pets, actually, but I didn’t think of it that way till now, trying to coax Simon out from behind the couch where he’s been hiding for an hour.
I caught him eating my favorite plant, and gave him a smack. Our other cat, Alex, glares at us, offended, when we do this and stalks off with injured dignity; but Simon gave me a horrified, terrified look and fled the room. I’ve spent the last hour in an agony of guilt, trying to love-talk him back to the hand he seems so afraid of.
When he finally creeps into the kitchen and touches my hand with his nose, I carefully stroke him, then gather him up. He starts to purr in my ear, and I vow aloud that I’ll never touch him in anger again.
I never do. And it’s funny how, after awhile, I notice that whether I stretch my hands toward him, or reach out a toe to scratch his jaw the way he loves, he never, ever flinches at my approach.
V
I've never put a whole lot of credence in ghosts. The supernatural, certainly; but the idea of not-quite-departed souls lingering in physical places didn't sit well with the theology in which I was raised.
My childhood best friend Hillori and I had all sorts of theories of our own to explain weird happenstances, particularly the ghost stories surrounding Gettysburg -- we both had a passion for the Civil War, and she reinacted as a soldier in a local regiment. Our pet theory involved rips in time, through which people could occasionally view the past. It didn't matter to us that it was uncorroborated by anyone else; we liked it, and that was that.
Of intense interest to us was an old house, uninhabited but maintained, that rested half a mile outside town. We discovered it one day on one of our after-school rambles, both of us avoiding, for our own reasons, going home. As we trekked down the road talking our favorite kind of nonsense, we looked past two shaggy rows of grapevines and a wild line of trees and saw the house. Small and white, with pieces of colored glass sitting on the inside windowpanes, it gave off every neglected air of a long unlived-in dwelling, although someone had mown the lawn.
The spirit of investigation overtook us, and we walked around peeking in all its windows, then ventured onto the surrounding property. The late spring balminess of the air brought out a charming, distinctly haunted atmosphere to the place. A few enormous lilac bushes in heavy bloom dotted the side yard; on the other side of the house was a tangle of vine-choked pines and a half-rotten cherry orchard. An outbuilding containing a couple of rusted classic cars shored up the backyard, and attached to that were the broken-down walls of something that had once been a cement-block room.
As we started around the back of the fallen walls, our feet crunched on the spiky balls of horse chestnuts. I felt a strange, threatening feeling coming from somewhere around me -- the feeling you get when unfriendly eyes are watching you. The sensation increased, and I looked up and saw the tree.
It was a huge chestnut, looming over the garage and most of the backyard, with its arms thrust violently upward and outward. Immovable, unshakeable, it threw off an aura of menace. I felt distinctly unwelcome.
Hillori and I glanced at each other, and turned without speaking to make our way back to the side of the house, where the feeling lessened considerably and became merely the sadness of an abandoned home.
"Did you feel it?" Hillori asked.
"Yeah," I said. "It was creepy."
"I think it was the tree," she said.
We returned many times to the house over the course of the next couple of years, enjoying the strange blessings the place yielded up -- English roses in early summer, wild grapes in early fall, wide cherry branches to perch on and watch the traffic from hiding while we talked. The lawn was always mown, but we never saw the mower.
And we never went back to the tree. Occasionally we'd creep a little closer to it than usual, to see if the forboding was still there, and it always was. We never came to any conclusions about it, never invented any theories beyond that trees are mysterious, and this one bore us ill will.
I think of that tree, and those deliciously half-creepy, happy times as I come thoughtfully back to my apartment's bathroom where I had been getting ready for bed. As I washed my face, I distinctly heard, in the upper ranges of my hearing, a faint jangling noise that sounded like my cell phone ringing. Most of my friends, and all of my family, live far away, and I spend a good deal of my off-work hours on the phone; any time it rings I rush to it in the delighted assurance that people love me.
But it hadn't rung. No "missed call" message blinked at me when I flipped open the cover to check. I carry the phone with me back to the tiny bathroom, put it where the volume will blast my ears if it rings, and return to rinsing my face.
And I hear the faint jangling again.
It happens rather frequently, and only when I'm in the bathroom. The house is old for the area -- built in 1901 in one of South Bend's historic districts, it was divided into four apartments many years ago, and I have speculated that my bathroom is one of the most unchanged in the house. It's been renovated, certainly, enough to put in caulked paneling around the cast-iron claw footed tub and rig pipes for a shower, but I strongly suspect that mine is the house's original tub, and there's a feeling in the bathroom -- not, as with the tree, a feeling of malice, but a strange kind of longing.
I conclude eventually that the whatever-it-is -- I still don't buy into the idea of ghosts -- attempts, from time to time, to make its presence known, to communicate something, and in the attempt does a weird mimicry of my cell phone, since that sound always brings me running. I don't talk about it much to anyone, because even I think the idea is crazy, but I'm not much given to hearing things, and this phenomenon is fairly consistent. Since it doesn't bother me, I shrug it off and learn to ignore it.
When Simon comes to live with me, the room he avoids most is the bathroom. Every time I step into the shower, he pushes his way through the door and sits on the floor yowling anxiously until I poke my head out from behind the curtain to reassure him that I'm still there. His worried, sharpened eyes fix on the place of my disappearance until I reemerge, and then he inevitably jumps into the tub to inspect every worn-enameled inch, lap at the standing water a few times, and jump back out to rub against my wet legs.
After a week or so, I realize that I don't hear the jangling half-music anymore. I look at my companion thoughtfully that night, as I brush my teeth and he stares at me, recalling all of the stories I've read claiming that spirits dislike cats. Whatever was or wasn't happening in that old bathroom, now whenever I bend down to wash my face in the cast-iron sink, I hear nothing at all, and when I lift my head to reach for the towel, the first thing I see, sitting in the doorway with watchful eyes tracking my movements, is Simon.
VI
Exhaustion and worry have horrible ways of intensifying each other, and the fluorescent lighting has me sitting with my head in my hands, trying to drive away a headache. Simon hunches as far under the counter as he can get on the other side of the exam room. I've tried reading but I can't concentrate. It's the third time in four days I've had him to the Animal ER, and my stomach hurts with the fear that I'll lose him, or, worse, have to make the choice to give him up.
He hasn't peed in days, and although my friends laugh a little when I tell them this, my tears quiet their scoffing.
"Look," I say, "a cat's urine is very, very toxic. If they can't pass it, it can kill them."
They offered sympathy, then, but now it's far too late to be calling anyone and I feel terribly alone.
Other unfortunate patients crowded the waiting room when my turn finally came to sit in one of the exam rooms -- a teacup poodle that had been standing in the wrong place when his owner kocked a can of Campbell's soup off the counter, a huge Golden Retriever panting in terror and pain from the lawn ornament stuck in his haunch, a mangy cat that looks merely old. Simon stopped yowling once I brought him in, and didn't move except to brush his nose against my fingers when I stuck them through the slats in the crate, until the exam room door closed and I let him out.
I watch him pressed up against the garbage can, trying to hide from the shrillness of the light and my palpable, though repressed, panic. Memories riot in the front of my mind, a montage of moments that made my life with him so idyllic. Me on the phone, saying, "Mom, it's so nice to have something care when I come home!" Simon flopping at my feet to stretch himself full length on the floor, backwards, until he looked so much like a big black hairy piece of elbow macaroni that I started calling him Noodle. Me laughing as Simon chases me in circles around the apartment, doubling back to charge me head-on, rolling triumphantly on the floor every time he startles me into a shriek. Me sleeping better with a heavy lump of warm kitty pressing on my feet. Waking up every morning to a hard furry little skull cracking against my forehead with a sharp purr. Mom saying, "He talks? He barely made any noise here, he's a different cat since he started living with you..."
And Simon sitting at my feet, his yellow eyes fixed on my face, lidding themselves slightly to my singing, "You've made me so very happy / I'm so glad you came into my life..."
I rub my forehead and look up, watching him watching me. He won't come over to me, and his fur looks matted and sweaty, and his eyes are glazed a little with pain.
I take a deep breath and start singing.
VII
The State of Denmark is rotten in summer. I've spent every day so far since the weather warmed up waving insects out of my path.
Friday, July 25, 2008
small world?
I shifted a little bit in the leather chair so that the cards I dropped into my lap wouldn't slither into the creases.
"Well, you know," I was saying to Meg, "I just really like E. She's one of the only ones who didn't look at me as if I were lying to her."
We were discussing, as women will, the difficult nature of obtaining a decent OB/GYN while I played solitaire and Meg bottle-fed Josie.
"Plus, she hates how insurance companies don't cover stuff for women," I said. "She promised to write a nasty letter if they give me trouble."
"Nice," said Meg. "Where do you go?"
"That one on Lafayette."
"Oh really? No way!" she said. "That's where I go! What's your nurse practictioner like?"
"Pretty, curly light hair..."
"...tall?"
"Yeah! That's the one."
"Wow! She did our ultrasound, I really liked her."
We grinned at each other and sat back, murmuring about small worlds and the strange coincidences that bring women together. We swapped a few more stories while she played with Josie and I reshuffled the deck.
Later, as we got ready to take Josie on a walk with Meg's husband Phillip, Meg looked up from squeezing Josie into her adorable little pink pants.
"Wait," she said. "Didn't I recommend you to that place?"
I thought for a second and burst out laughing.
"Yes," I said. "You did. Three years ago."
We spent the next few minutes doubled over, mocking ourselves. "You know you've been friends forever when..." we said.
Phillip told us later that he'd overheard the conversation from where he worked on the computer in the next room.
"Did you hear us realize how stupid we were?" Meg asked.
Phillip said placidly, with his usual edge of sarcasm, "I heard. I remember Meg telling Sarah to go there."
Meg and I decided that completely forgetting certain things make life a constant and delightful surprise. Everything seems like a coincidence.
"Well, you know," I was saying to Meg, "I just really like E. She's one of the only ones who didn't look at me as if I were lying to her."
We were discussing, as women will, the difficult nature of obtaining a decent OB/GYN while I played solitaire and Meg bottle-fed Josie.
"Plus, she hates how insurance companies don't cover stuff for women," I said. "She promised to write a nasty letter if they give me trouble."
"Nice," said Meg. "Where do you go?"
"That one on Lafayette."
"Oh really? No way!" she said. "That's where I go! What's your nurse practictioner like?"
"Pretty, curly light hair..."
"...tall?"
"Yeah! That's the one."
"Wow! She did our ultrasound, I really liked her."
We grinned at each other and sat back, murmuring about small worlds and the strange coincidences that bring women together. We swapped a few more stories while she played with Josie and I reshuffled the deck.
Later, as we got ready to take Josie on a walk with Meg's husband Phillip, Meg looked up from squeezing Josie into her adorable little pink pants.
"Wait," she said. "Didn't I recommend you to that place?"
I thought for a second and burst out laughing.
"Yes," I said. "You did. Three years ago."
We spent the next few minutes doubled over, mocking ourselves. "You know you've been friends forever when..." we said.
Phillip told us later that he'd overheard the conversation from where he worked on the computer in the next room.
"Did you hear us realize how stupid we were?" Meg asked.
Phillip said placidly, with his usual edge of sarcasm, "I heard. I remember Meg telling Sarah to go there."
Meg and I decided that completely forgetting certain things make life a constant and delightful surprise. Everything seems like a coincidence.
rushed
I've been staring at a computer screen all week at work; it's crrrrrazy.
In lieu of a more thoughtful post (I have one or two in the works, but they're a little more in-depth and therefore time-consuming), I'm going to write about fingernails.
My maternal grandfather's best redeeming quality is his fingernails. They're indecently long, strong, smooth, lovely. I always glare at his hands when I visit, irritated with my DNA for throwing out that gene and handing me the ridged, brittle, flaky fingernails that were a horrendous plague to a teenaged girl learning about obsessions with nail polish.
The best and most socially acceptable solution was to take piano lessons, which required the short, stubby fingernails my hands naturally seemed to favor. Fortunately my nail beds are deep and well-shaped enough that my fingernails still look elongated and slender; applying nail polish was just a bit messier for me than for other girls.
I found, in the end, that ingrained habits are like ivy, working stubborn little prying roots into the cracks of girlhood wishes: I prefer short nails. My undressed fingertips are more readily in control of what they're doing, and I have fewer calluses where the nails embed themselves in my palms when I write.
But if ingrained habit is strong, busyness and laziness are even stronger. And so, for probably the first time in my life, my fingernails are, for me, long (for the rest of the world, there) and strong (I must be eating properly), and all day as I've been typing dictations and murdering my eyes on the computer screen, my fingernails have skittered over the keys threatening me with typos and carpel tunnel.
And, true to form, and the dilemma that is modern womanhood, I'm torn between following my preference and cutting them off, and vainly preserving the prettiness of their social normalcy.
In lieu of a more thoughtful post (I have one or two in the works, but they're a little more in-depth and therefore time-consuming), I'm going to write about fingernails.
My maternal grandfather's best redeeming quality is his fingernails. They're indecently long, strong, smooth, lovely. I always glare at his hands when I visit, irritated with my DNA for throwing out that gene and handing me the ridged, brittle, flaky fingernails that were a horrendous plague to a teenaged girl learning about obsessions with nail polish.
The best and most socially acceptable solution was to take piano lessons, which required the short, stubby fingernails my hands naturally seemed to favor. Fortunately my nail beds are deep and well-shaped enough that my fingernails still look elongated and slender; applying nail polish was just a bit messier for me than for other girls.
I found, in the end, that ingrained habits are like ivy, working stubborn little prying roots into the cracks of girlhood wishes: I prefer short nails. My undressed fingertips are more readily in control of what they're doing, and I have fewer calluses where the nails embed themselves in my palms when I write.
But if ingrained habit is strong, busyness and laziness are even stronger. And so, for probably the first time in my life, my fingernails are, for me, long (for the rest of the world, there) and strong (I must be eating properly), and all day as I've been typing dictations and murdering my eyes on the computer screen, my fingernails have skittered over the keys threatening me with typos and carpel tunnel.
And, true to form, and the dilemma that is modern womanhood, I'm torn between following my preference and cutting them off, and vainly preserving the prettiness of their social normalcy.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
hello, goodbye
I remember as a teenager watching my favorite TV shows and movies and feeling a certain amount of derisive confusion regarding the characters' telephone conversations. Always curt and dramatic, however dull the call, the actors delivered their dialogues and hung up without saying goodbye:
"No, I won't drive you to the park. My schedule's too busy. Ask Ernie, okay? Okay." Click.
"I love you so much. I can't wait to see you again." Click.
"Hi, Mom, I'm in the hospital and this will probably be my last phone call. I know you can't make it here in time, so I want you to know that I love you and forgive you." Click.
"When are we meeting for lunch? Okay, sounds good." Click.
At the time I thought this absurd. "There's Hollywood for you," my friends and I would say, "inciting drama at the expense of real life. Nobody gets off the phone like that. Who doesn't say goodbye? Maybe they're trying to cut screen time."
And yet, I've noticed, very few people in real life have time any longer to say "goodbye." Even "'bye" seems to take too much time. Most of the calls going into or coming out of my office end in "uh-huh," "okay," or "thank you." And then, just like the actors I ridiculed in my adolescence, both parties hang up.
Have we grown too busy and impatient, with all the forms of instant communication available to us? Have we succumbed to the example of the television and the big screen in our haste to get more done? Have we become ruder as a people?
Or is it, maybe, all of that and something else? "Goodbye" is a contraction of the Old English for "God be with you." In most of the Romance languages as well, bidding a person "goodbye" commits him to God (the Spanish "adios," as well as the French "adieu," the Italian "addio," and the Portugues "adeus," literally mean, "to God"). In more dangerous times, when travel was long and difficult, visits were few and far between, plagues abounded and the mortality rate was generally high -- and the populace as a whole believed in God -- the bidding made excellent sense; even if the person was your neighbor, you might never see him again.
So perhaps the gradual disappearance of "goodbye," at least from the business world (at least in my area), reflects our cultural worldview.
"Hello," on the other hand, comes from OE/Latinate "Hallo," or "Hollo," or "Holla," basically meaning, "Hey, you!" Which strikes me as funny -- the irony is significant, because "hello" doesn't seem to be going anywhere, and is foundationally kind of rude.
Whatever the cause, saying goodbye to goodbye feels a little strange, now that I've started to notice it.
"No, I won't drive you to the park. My schedule's too busy. Ask Ernie, okay? Okay." Click.
"I love you so much. I can't wait to see you again." Click.
"Hi, Mom, I'm in the hospital and this will probably be my last phone call. I know you can't make it here in time, so I want you to know that I love you and forgive you." Click.
"When are we meeting for lunch? Okay, sounds good." Click.
At the time I thought this absurd. "There's Hollywood for you," my friends and I would say, "inciting drama at the expense of real life. Nobody gets off the phone like that. Who doesn't say goodbye? Maybe they're trying to cut screen time."
And yet, I've noticed, very few people in real life have time any longer to say "goodbye." Even "'bye" seems to take too much time. Most of the calls going into or coming out of my office end in "uh-huh," "okay," or "thank you." And then, just like the actors I ridiculed in my adolescence, both parties hang up.
Have we grown too busy and impatient, with all the forms of instant communication available to us? Have we succumbed to the example of the television and the big screen in our haste to get more done? Have we become ruder as a people?
Or is it, maybe, all of that and something else? "Goodbye" is a contraction of the Old English for "God be with you." In most of the Romance languages as well, bidding a person "goodbye" commits him to God (the Spanish "adios," as well as the French "adieu," the Italian "addio," and the Portugues "adeus," literally mean, "to God"). In more dangerous times, when travel was long and difficult, visits were few and far between, plagues abounded and the mortality rate was generally high -- and the populace as a whole believed in God -- the bidding made excellent sense; even if the person was your neighbor, you might never see him again.
So perhaps the gradual disappearance of "goodbye," at least from the business world (at least in my area), reflects our cultural worldview.
"Hello," on the other hand, comes from OE/Latinate "Hallo," or "Hollo," or "Holla," basically meaning, "Hey, you!" Which strikes me as funny -- the irony is significant, because "hello" doesn't seem to be going anywhere, and is foundationally kind of rude.
Whatever the cause, saying goodbye to goodbye feels a little strange, now that I've started to notice it.
Friday, July 18, 2008
will you lie your way home?
Yesterday in the office I received a lengthy business-related phone call from a man who then came into the office today and began telling me about the issue all over again while he waited for Boss-Man to come to the front.
I stopped him with a smile to say, "I was the one you spoke with yesterday, Mr. ____."
He pointed at me. "That was you."
"Yes."
"Oh," he said, with a leer. "The sexy one."
There are not words sufficient enough to express how much I hate these kinds of incidents. I find that word, from a stranger, extremely offensive – how much more blatantly can it be stated that to him I am only a body on display for perusal? And why must he state that at all?
Yet even when the word is less offensive – pretty, beautiful, etc. – I find the situation uncomfortable. I don't know these men. They're not my friends; I'm not dating them. I’m not at a bar; I’m at work. If I were in a bar, I would be able to respond more freely; but since, at work, I am restricted to professionalism, I can do nothing but a.) become freezingly polite; b.) try to find something to do, preferably out of the room, where I don't have to look at the man in question; or c.) attempt to pretend that I’m not bothered by what feels like a kind of coercion, since I’m in a situation where a man is not acting like a gentleman, but, as I can do nothing to tell him so, I must act as though his actions weren’t rude, suggestive, and inappropriate.
Strangely it’s usually the older men who act this way; men closer to my age or younger tend toward a politeness we’re taught not to expect from our generation. If I’m sitting on my front porch, which faces the road, and someone drives by honking, he’s most likely over forty; if someone drives by and waves, he’s in his thirties or younger. (Teenagers are a coin toss.)
I don’t fault humanity for its sex drive; almost everyone has it, and I don’t have a problem with men in general; I like guys a lot. But I don’t like feeling, from specific individuals, that I’ve suddenly been reduced to the mental role of stripper in an environment where I have every right to feel professional and safe. These little instances make a girl feel embarrassed, powerless and soiled. They make a girl feel ashamed.
I don’t like that our culture has done this to us. To all of us, men and women alike. There’s something horribly wrong with this era of supposedly outspoken freedom. It's freedom in all the wrong ways.
I stopped him with a smile to say, "I was the one you spoke with yesterday, Mr. ____."
He pointed at me. "That was you."
"Yes."
"Oh," he said, with a leer. "The sexy one."
There are not words sufficient enough to express how much I hate these kinds of incidents. I find that word, from a stranger, extremely offensive – how much more blatantly can it be stated that to him I am only a body on display for perusal? And why must he state that at all?
Yet even when the word is less offensive – pretty, beautiful, etc. – I find the situation uncomfortable. I don't know these men. They're not my friends; I'm not dating them. I’m not at a bar; I’m at work. If I were in a bar, I would be able to respond more freely; but since, at work, I am restricted to professionalism, I can do nothing but a.) become freezingly polite; b.) try to find something to do, preferably out of the room, where I don't have to look at the man in question; or c.) attempt to pretend that I’m not bothered by what feels like a kind of coercion, since I’m in a situation where a man is not acting like a gentleman, but, as I can do nothing to tell him so, I must act as though his actions weren’t rude, suggestive, and inappropriate.
Strangely it’s usually the older men who act this way; men closer to my age or younger tend toward a politeness we’re taught not to expect from our generation. If I’m sitting on my front porch, which faces the road, and someone drives by honking, he’s most likely over forty; if someone drives by and waves, he’s in his thirties or younger. (Teenagers are a coin toss.)
I don’t fault humanity for its sex drive; almost everyone has it, and I don’t have a problem with men in general; I like guys a lot. But I don’t like feeling, from specific individuals, that I’ve suddenly been reduced to the mental role of stripper in an environment where I have every right to feel professional and safe. These little instances make a girl feel embarrassed, powerless and soiled. They make a girl feel ashamed.
I don’t like that our culture has done this to us. To all of us, men and women alike. There’s something horribly wrong with this era of supposedly outspoken freedom. It's freedom in all the wrong ways.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
high 80s
The laughable result of driving oneself everywhere with the window down: I looked at my arms yesterday and noticed that my left is a distinct shade browner than my right. So much for that even tan.
Okay, my fellow Children of the 80s, I was thinking about some of the indoctrination we received from the public school system when we were knee-high to a grasshopper (I'm not referring to it in a negative light, by the way), and wondered if it was uniform and nation-wide, or specific to certain regions. I'm planning a post on the issue, sharing my memories of those happy days, but I wanted to take a brief poll first:
When I hear "3 Rs," I think of one (well, three) thing(s). Do you? What are they?
(If no one responds in a couple of days, I'll give a hint.)
Okay, my fellow Children of the 80s, I was thinking about some of the indoctrination we received from the public school system when we were knee-high to a grasshopper (I'm not referring to it in a negative light, by the way), and wondered if it was uniform and nation-wide, or specific to certain regions. I'm planning a post on the issue, sharing my memories of those happy days, but I wanted to take a brief poll first:
When I hear "3 Rs," I think of one (well, three) thing(s). Do you? What are they?
(If no one responds in a couple of days, I'll give a hint.)
Saturday, July 12, 2008
the ants come marching forth in hoardes, hurrah. hurrah.
My home has become in insect petting zoo.
It's completely disgusting. I don't object to creepy crawlies in the outdoors; I consider that "their" territory, and while I don't shed a tear or lose any sleep about stepping or sitting on, or swatting, a few here and there while walking or picnicking or what have you, I'm much more content to leave them alone, or observe them from my gigantic height with interest.
Inside, though, they transform into the insidious stuff of nightmares. And my little house -- which I've christened The State of Denmark -- having been built in a slipshod manner to serve as a summer cottage, seems to invite them in. Welcome! Come, occupy my corners high and low, bring all your relatives, bring a friend. Here there are damp dark spaces in plenty which no invention of human hands can clear. You shall live long and prosper in the baseboards and around the sinks. Your children's children's children shall look upon the weatherproof tiles and countertops and be glad.
So I am set upon from all sides.
But the good God has sent me a weapon forged in the groves of Florida: Comet. (Not just a bathroom cleaner, it turns out.) Last week I flipped on the bathroom light to start the bedtime process, and what met my eyes drove all thoughts of sleep away and sent gooseflesh crawling over my skin: two dozen enormous black carpenter ants just starting to scurry nervously in the sink. Two. Dozen. They were in my drinking cup. They were on my toothbrush. They were beginning to swarm over the lip of the sink.
I shrieked and rushed from the room, trying to think in a blind panic what I might have on hand that would kill them. I couldn't flush them down the sink until they removed themselves from the faucet handles. I ran in a little circle in the kitchen, then grabbed the 409. Once in the bathroom, however, the 409 failed me; too close to empty, it sputtered at the ants a little bit and subsided. I cursed and threw it from me. I scrabbled in the bathroom cupboards and my hands fell upon the bottle of Comet.
I rose from the floor brandishing my ally in what, to an ant, was probably the equivalent of Ursula emerging, huge and roaring, from The Little Mermaid's stormy waves. Only I didn't get close enough to let them dangle from my crown; I let loose a cannon spray of cleaner, shouting, Die!
They did. Quickly. I began reinforcing The State of Denmark's defenses by spraying down the walls and corners behind the sink where I suspected they had retreated upon seeing the ranks of their sistren fall.
I've been on the warpath ever since. It's sadly a losing battle -- the wet chilly summer has contributed to their flocking in droves away from the rain and into my living space. No matter how much I vacuum, however spotless the kitchen, however regularly taken out the trash, they reaccumulate at a horrifying rate. I've taken to wearing OFF! in the house and moving from room to room with the Comet clutched in hand. (The weird thing about Comet is that its active ingredient is citric acid. Not ammonia or bleach. Bizarre.)
This morning I finally picked up a can of atmospheric spray which promises to kill everything. I'm going to overhaul The State of Denmark to free myself of these ghoulish pests.
It all just underscores my decision -- my need -- to move out of this freaky little house when my lease runs out. If I don't, I'll have to a.) spend another stuffy, dreary winter in a tiny dark abode, and b.) pay another ten dollars a week for this already outrageously priced dwelling. (Dwelling? I don't actually call this dwelling.) And THAT's an idea that can take itself somewhere very hot.
But yes -- in the meantime, Comet has become my best friend. I think it's undermarketed. And it's less ghastly in the lungs than Raid.
It's completely disgusting. I don't object to creepy crawlies in the outdoors; I consider that "their" territory, and while I don't shed a tear or lose any sleep about stepping or sitting on, or swatting, a few here and there while walking or picnicking or what have you, I'm much more content to leave them alone, or observe them from my gigantic height with interest.
Inside, though, they transform into the insidious stuff of nightmares. And my little house -- which I've christened The State of Denmark -- having been built in a slipshod manner to serve as a summer cottage, seems to invite them in. Welcome! Come, occupy my corners high and low, bring all your relatives, bring a friend. Here there are damp dark spaces in plenty which no invention of human hands can clear. You shall live long and prosper in the baseboards and around the sinks. Your children's children's children shall look upon the weatherproof tiles and countertops and be glad.
So I am set upon from all sides.
But the good God has sent me a weapon forged in the groves of Florida: Comet. (Not just a bathroom cleaner, it turns out.) Last week I flipped on the bathroom light to start the bedtime process, and what met my eyes drove all thoughts of sleep away and sent gooseflesh crawling over my skin: two dozen enormous black carpenter ants just starting to scurry nervously in the sink. Two. Dozen. They were in my drinking cup. They were on my toothbrush. They were beginning to swarm over the lip of the sink.
I shrieked and rushed from the room, trying to think in a blind panic what I might have on hand that would kill them. I couldn't flush them down the sink until they removed themselves from the faucet handles. I ran in a little circle in the kitchen, then grabbed the 409. Once in the bathroom, however, the 409 failed me; too close to empty, it sputtered at the ants a little bit and subsided. I cursed and threw it from me. I scrabbled in the bathroom cupboards and my hands fell upon the bottle of Comet.
I rose from the floor brandishing my ally in what, to an ant, was probably the equivalent of Ursula emerging, huge and roaring, from The Little Mermaid's stormy waves. Only I didn't get close enough to let them dangle from my crown; I let loose a cannon spray of cleaner, shouting, Die!
They did. Quickly. I began reinforcing The State of Denmark's defenses by spraying down the walls and corners behind the sink where I suspected they had retreated upon seeing the ranks of their sistren fall.
I've been on the warpath ever since. It's sadly a losing battle -- the wet chilly summer has contributed to their flocking in droves away from the rain and into my living space. No matter how much I vacuum, however spotless the kitchen, however regularly taken out the trash, they reaccumulate at a horrifying rate. I've taken to wearing OFF! in the house and moving from room to room with the Comet clutched in hand. (The weird thing about Comet is that its active ingredient is citric acid. Not ammonia or bleach. Bizarre.)
This morning I finally picked up a can of atmospheric spray which promises to kill everything. I'm going to overhaul The State of Denmark to free myself of these ghoulish pests.
It all just underscores my decision -- my need -- to move out of this freaky little house when my lease runs out. If I don't, I'll have to a.) spend another stuffy, dreary winter in a tiny dark abode, and b.) pay another ten dollars a week for this already outrageously priced dwelling. (Dwelling? I don't actually call this dwelling.) And THAT's an idea that can take itself somewhere very hot.
But yes -- in the meantime, Comet has become my best friend. I think it's undermarketed. And it's less ghastly in the lungs than Raid.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
May I help you?
I'm in Chicago, visiting my friend J. She and I have spent the evening poring over Mediterranean cookbooks to the dulcet strains of Peter Jackson's King Kong, and now she's curled up in bed and my sleeping bag lies open on the floor and I'm standing up to turn off the lights by the door.
I notice the light on in the closet that serves as a passageway to the bathroom. Since I hate sleeping in anything but cave-blind darkness, I stick my head in and crane my neck around, searching for a switch.
"How do you shut off the closet light?" I ask.
"Oh." Her drowsy voice sounds apologetic. "You can't. It had a string you pulled, but it came off and I keep forgetting to call the landlord, so the light's been on about three weeks."
"Three weeks?" I say. "Do you have a chair?"
We drag one into the closet and I climb up to search the light fixture, which resembles an umpire's mask, painted red. No knob or switch presents itself. I reach up to explore the rim and yank my hand back. It's oven hot.
I shake my fingers. "We should take out the light bulb."
"I don't want you burning yourself," J. says.
"It's not going to get any cooler," I answer. "Do you have any gloves?"
As she searches through a bin of winter clothes, I remember a hundred instances of my mother performing similar acts of fix-it rescues. She's pathologically helpful. Show her a person with a flat tire, and she's stopping the car and rooting through the trunk for a jack. Present her with a lost child in a crowded mall, and she's taking his small sweaty hand and marching off in search of a security guard. Become her neighbor and mention a broken window, and she's scaling a ladder with duct tape or filling her hands with splinters yanking a long-forgotten board out of the garage.
Something about it always annoyed me. Part of what I detested was how her attention would shift immediately from me to the helpless loser on the side of the road. I also disliked her openness -- she radiated "I want to help you" like a miniature sun of good will. She moved instantly from dropping and breaking glasses in the kitchen sink and bumping into table corners to possessing a do-or-die confident authority, even if she had no idea how to fix what was broken, and she seemed to do this mostly for strangers.
I didn't realize until a few years ago that I didn't like it because I had it too. Nothing interrupts your life like a rescue compulsion. I think our family was, somewhere far back in history, descended from St. Bernards. I could be screamingly late for an intensely important meeting, dancing in rage at the long lines at the post office, but should an elderly woman in a walker totter toward me on my way out the door, I'll wait five minutes for her to catch up so I can hold it for her.
On one of my summer college breaks, I was heading to the car to meet some friends when I saw a boy, about eight years old, take a tumble from his bicycle on the sidewalk bordering our yard. I think I broke light speed reaching him. He was just getting to his feet, staring at his bleeding hands with a pre-howling-fit horror, and he was all alone.
"Are you okay?" I said. "That was quite a fall. Let me see your hands."
Tears were spilling over his long blond lashes. With liquid blue Bambi eyes fixed on my face, he held out his hands for my inspection. Dirt and grit showed through the cuts under several layers of skin.
"We'd better wash that," I said. "Come on, I'll get you a Band-Aid."
He hung back, quavering, "My mom says I shouldn't go anywhere with strangers."
I wanted to fold him in my arms and keep him safe forever. "She's absolutely right," I said. "We won't go in the house. Just come into the yard and I'll wash your hands with the hose."
A little convinced but still wary, he followed me into the yard. I told him to wait there, went into the house for Neosporin, soap, a washcloth and Band-Aids, and went back out to him to fetch the promised hose. I doctored him up and sent him on his way, hoping that his mother wouldn't yell at him for following a stranger into her yard. My friends wondered why I arrived so late to the party. I shrugged.
You don't toot your horn when you have this thing, this by-product of an insane Boy Scout and a rabid paramedic, living in your chest. It's not something you do to look good. Most of the time it's embarrassing. Often I would love to be invisible, or have no face, or wear a mask. The thanks make me feel ashamed. I'm not that good of a person. I'm often lazy and bitchy and resentful and snide, ungracious to the people closest to me. I don't help out because it's good; I help out because I have no choice. I don't decide to help the man in leg braces reach the other side of the road. I don't choose to lift top-shelf groceries down into the carts of shorter shoppers. I don't choose. Something chooses for me. Helplessness, pain and fear yank out my inner St. Bernard and I'm at it before I've realized what I'm doing. So applause is pointless. I know the deeds are good, but they're not acts deserving of praise. And I can only fix small problems. If I had my way, I'd have a lot more power to fix larger problems, life problems, diseases, emotional trauma, poverty. Of course, I'd royally screw it up if I had that kind of authority, but still, my little episodes of helpfulness serve sometimes as a kind of apology for not being able to do more.
Learning not to fix things has been the hardest lesson of my life. I used to think I could save the world. I wanted to erase every line from every suffering face, I wanted to make people's lives happy and comfortable, and it seemed like everyone was suffering. In short, God wasn't doing it fast enough, and I wanted to take over.
I never got a Bruce Almighty shot -- and doubtless a good thing, too. Instead I failed, over and over, to fix people, and started to realize that a lot of human misery stems from free will, and that people tend to choose the things that will hurt them. Myself included. I chose, many times over, to take on the burdens of others' choices, thinking each time that maybe this person I could heal. It never worked.
But I learned. I can't pull a Peter and straighten the old man's crooked legs, but I can open the heavy door for him. I can't heal the pain of the divorcee still fighting with her ex over custody, but I can offer her a tissue. Others, and experience, have taught me that the small things matter the most in the end. The little things are like crossing a hot beach barefoot and stepping in a small spot of shade. The tree can't follow you all the way to the water, but it can keep the sand, here and there, just a little bit cool. The moments when the cashier voices her concern over the macabre self-loathing message on my shirt, when the middle-aged man asks if I can manage my heavy suitcase -- those are the moments that pull a person through the rough patches that nobody can overcome for him. I also learned this watching dozens of faces suffuse with gratitude as they yielded to my mother's compassionate authority.
And I still compulsively hate seeing things broken. So when J. straightens up from her bin with a glove and a heavy sock, I flip open my Swiss Army knife, put my hands in their protective coverings, and begin unscrewing the umpire's mask from the closet ceiling, saying, "Sorry. You probably just want to go to sleep, but this is where I'm my mother's daughter."
I notice the light on in the closet that serves as a passageway to the bathroom. Since I hate sleeping in anything but cave-blind darkness, I stick my head in and crane my neck around, searching for a switch.
"How do you shut off the closet light?" I ask.
"Oh." Her drowsy voice sounds apologetic. "You can't. It had a string you pulled, but it came off and I keep forgetting to call the landlord, so the light's been on about three weeks."
"Three weeks?" I say. "Do you have a chair?"
We drag one into the closet and I climb up to search the light fixture, which resembles an umpire's mask, painted red. No knob or switch presents itself. I reach up to explore the rim and yank my hand back. It's oven hot.
I shake my fingers. "We should take out the light bulb."
"I don't want you burning yourself," J. says.
"It's not going to get any cooler," I answer. "Do you have any gloves?"
As she searches through a bin of winter clothes, I remember a hundred instances of my mother performing similar acts of fix-it rescues. She's pathologically helpful. Show her a person with a flat tire, and she's stopping the car and rooting through the trunk for a jack. Present her with a lost child in a crowded mall, and she's taking his small sweaty hand and marching off in search of a security guard. Become her neighbor and mention a broken window, and she's scaling a ladder with duct tape or filling her hands with splinters yanking a long-forgotten board out of the garage.
Something about it always annoyed me. Part of what I detested was how her attention would shift immediately from me to the helpless loser on the side of the road. I also disliked her openness -- she radiated "I want to help you" like a miniature sun of good will. She moved instantly from dropping and breaking glasses in the kitchen sink and bumping into table corners to possessing a do-or-die confident authority, even if she had no idea how to fix what was broken, and she seemed to do this mostly for strangers.
I didn't realize until a few years ago that I didn't like it because I had it too. Nothing interrupts your life like a rescue compulsion. I think our family was, somewhere far back in history, descended from St. Bernards. I could be screamingly late for an intensely important meeting, dancing in rage at the long lines at the post office, but should an elderly woman in a walker totter toward me on my way out the door, I'll wait five minutes for her to catch up so I can hold it for her.
On one of my summer college breaks, I was heading to the car to meet some friends when I saw a boy, about eight years old, take a tumble from his bicycle on the sidewalk bordering our yard. I think I broke light speed reaching him. He was just getting to his feet, staring at his bleeding hands with a pre-howling-fit horror, and he was all alone.
"Are you okay?" I said. "That was quite a fall. Let me see your hands."
Tears were spilling over his long blond lashes. With liquid blue Bambi eyes fixed on my face, he held out his hands for my inspection. Dirt and grit showed through the cuts under several layers of skin.
"We'd better wash that," I said. "Come on, I'll get you a Band-Aid."
He hung back, quavering, "My mom says I shouldn't go anywhere with strangers."
I wanted to fold him in my arms and keep him safe forever. "She's absolutely right," I said. "We won't go in the house. Just come into the yard and I'll wash your hands with the hose."
A little convinced but still wary, he followed me into the yard. I told him to wait there, went into the house for Neosporin, soap, a washcloth and Band-Aids, and went back out to him to fetch the promised hose. I doctored him up and sent him on his way, hoping that his mother wouldn't yell at him for following a stranger into her yard. My friends wondered why I arrived so late to the party. I shrugged.
You don't toot your horn when you have this thing, this by-product of an insane Boy Scout and a rabid paramedic, living in your chest. It's not something you do to look good. Most of the time it's embarrassing. Often I would love to be invisible, or have no face, or wear a mask. The thanks make me feel ashamed. I'm not that good of a person. I'm often lazy and bitchy and resentful and snide, ungracious to the people closest to me. I don't help out because it's good; I help out because I have no choice. I don't decide to help the man in leg braces reach the other side of the road. I don't choose to lift top-shelf groceries down into the carts of shorter shoppers. I don't choose. Something chooses for me. Helplessness, pain and fear yank out my inner St. Bernard and I'm at it before I've realized what I'm doing. So applause is pointless. I know the deeds are good, but they're not acts deserving of praise. And I can only fix small problems. If I had my way, I'd have a lot more power to fix larger problems, life problems, diseases, emotional trauma, poverty. Of course, I'd royally screw it up if I had that kind of authority, but still, my little episodes of helpfulness serve sometimes as a kind of apology for not being able to do more.
Learning not to fix things has been the hardest lesson of my life. I used to think I could save the world. I wanted to erase every line from every suffering face, I wanted to make people's lives happy and comfortable, and it seemed like everyone was suffering. In short, God wasn't doing it fast enough, and I wanted to take over.
I never got a Bruce Almighty shot -- and doubtless a good thing, too. Instead I failed, over and over, to fix people, and started to realize that a lot of human misery stems from free will, and that people tend to choose the things that will hurt them. Myself included. I chose, many times over, to take on the burdens of others' choices, thinking each time that maybe this person I could heal. It never worked.
But I learned. I can't pull a Peter and straighten the old man's crooked legs, but I can open the heavy door for him. I can't heal the pain of the divorcee still fighting with her ex over custody, but I can offer her a tissue. Others, and experience, have taught me that the small things matter the most in the end. The little things are like crossing a hot beach barefoot and stepping in a small spot of shade. The tree can't follow you all the way to the water, but it can keep the sand, here and there, just a little bit cool. The moments when the cashier voices her concern over the macabre self-loathing message on my shirt, when the middle-aged man asks if I can manage my heavy suitcase -- those are the moments that pull a person through the rough patches that nobody can overcome for him. I also learned this watching dozens of faces suffuse with gratitude as they yielded to my mother's compassionate authority.
And I still compulsively hate seeing things broken. So when J. straightens up from her bin with a glove and a heavy sock, I flip open my Swiss Army knife, put my hands in their protective coverings, and begin unscrewing the umpire's mask from the closet ceiling, saying, "Sorry. You probably just want to go to sleep, but this is where I'm my mother's daughter."
Sunday, June 29, 2008
long enough to cover the subject
Probably the most notable aspect of my date with Little Boy Blue had nothing at all to do with the date itself, but with a comment he made in regard to clothing.
I'd told him in advance that I'd be wearing a skirt. "Nothing dressy," I said, "I'll just be wearing it with a T-shirt, but skirts are cooler and simpler in the summertime."
At the putt-putt course, he insisted on picking up my golf ball for me, saying he had more mobility wearing pants. I told him that actually, skirts allow for more mobility, but I thanked him for being a gentleman.
He looked down at the article of clothing in question.
"Oh, so that is a skirt?" he asked.
I thought, fleetingly, Great. They've set me up with the village idiot. "Well...it's not a dress," I said.
"No, I mean...well, it's just that...um, it's not, you know..."
"Ridiculously short?" I said.
"Yeah."
I said, a little curtly, "I don't believe in dressing like a whore."
As we moved on to the next tee, I almost tripped over the sidewalk, lost in a dazy sort of thought train.
I don't own any skirts that fall above the knee. I don't look like a school marm by any stretch; I like my clothes stylish and classy. But for various reasons -- an old-fashioned sense of modesty, my attitude toward my upper legs, a duty toward a professional, feminine appearance, and a skin-tight budget that prevents me from purchasing the latest fashion in teeny weeny scraps of fabric that barely escape being called crotchless briefs -- my skirts can generally call themselves "mid-calf length."
What shocked me was not Little Boy Blue's expectation that skirts be shorter. What shocked me was that people five years younger than I don't have a word for the bottom half of a dress with a more than four-inch inseam.
This past week I spent scrutinizing the dress patterns of today's "young girls," and grew progressively more horrified and discouraged. Daisy Dukes have come back. Girls walk the streets practically nude, leaving nothing to the imagination and opening themselves up to the harassment our officials frequently complain about. Reserve has gone the way of the pterodactyl. I found myself watching overly tanned legs and skimpily clad skinny asses swaying down the street without faces and thinking forlornly, "What is this world coming to?"
I didn't think I'd start bemoaning that question for another forty years. But here I am, dressed in my mid-calf length nameless clothing that leaves a great deal up to the imagination without sacrificing grace or style, still the subject of many stares and whistles and vocal car horns, thinking what these young people are missing -- respect, self-possession and personhood, among other things. And I feel old. Mysterious, dignified, classy; but old.
I'd told him in advance that I'd be wearing a skirt. "Nothing dressy," I said, "I'll just be wearing it with a T-shirt, but skirts are cooler and simpler in the summertime."
At the putt-putt course, he insisted on picking up my golf ball for me, saying he had more mobility wearing pants. I told him that actually, skirts allow for more mobility, but I thanked him for being a gentleman.
He looked down at the article of clothing in question.
"Oh, so that is a skirt?" he asked.
I thought, fleetingly, Great. They've set me up with the village idiot. "Well...it's not a dress," I said.
"No, I mean...well, it's just that...um, it's not, you know..."
"Ridiculously short?" I said.
"Yeah."
I said, a little curtly, "I don't believe in dressing like a whore."
As we moved on to the next tee, I almost tripped over the sidewalk, lost in a dazy sort of thought train.
I don't own any skirts that fall above the knee. I don't look like a school marm by any stretch; I like my clothes stylish and classy. But for various reasons -- an old-fashioned sense of modesty, my attitude toward my upper legs, a duty toward a professional, feminine appearance, and a skin-tight budget that prevents me from purchasing the latest fashion in teeny weeny scraps of fabric that barely escape being called crotchless briefs -- my skirts can generally call themselves "mid-calf length."
What shocked me was not Little Boy Blue's expectation that skirts be shorter. What shocked me was that people five years younger than I don't have a word for the bottom half of a dress with a more than four-inch inseam.
This past week I spent scrutinizing the dress patterns of today's "young girls," and grew progressively more horrified and discouraged. Daisy Dukes have come back. Girls walk the streets practically nude, leaving nothing to the imagination and opening themselves up to the harassment our officials frequently complain about. Reserve has gone the way of the pterodactyl. I found myself watching overly tanned legs and skimpily clad skinny asses swaying down the street without faces and thinking forlornly, "What is this world coming to?"
I didn't think I'd start bemoaning that question for another forty years. But here I am, dressed in my mid-calf length nameless clothing that leaves a great deal up to the imagination without sacrificing grace or style, still the subject of many stares and whistles and vocal car horns, thinking what these young people are missing -- respect, self-possession and personhood, among other things. And I feel old. Mysterious, dignified, classy; but old.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
the flip-side of the coin
I dated a baby.
I’m not running a line for a tabloid or packing for prison or campaigning a weird new shirt slogan. My blind date turned out to be twenty-one.
I did have a forewarning, and didn’t think it would be too big a deal...until I met him. Little Boy Blue isn’t immature or annoying, which initially came as a profound relief. Now I wish he possessed those faults in spades, because things are not going to work and for one of the first times, I’m the one that has to broach the subject.
He’s nice. Very, very nice. Very, very sweet. And so incredibly vulnerable it gives me a stomachache. I cringe from it because I remember it. It’s as though, in the early twenties, a person is a slug, creeping along in its unguarded softness, easily harmed by anything. Pass into the midtwenties, and the slug finds it’s grown, or climbed into, a shell. Not a shell in the negative, reclusive, suspicious sense, but a shell that encases the personality, gives it a little protection, and allows the snail to be discerning about the things that touch it.
I heard, the other weekend, about a friend-of-a-friend who was wishing to be more vulnerable with everyone. It's an unrealistic sentiment (although I’m guessing this friend-of-a-friend still qualifies as an early twenties). Adults can’t be vulnerable to everyone; humanity is full of treachery and ambition and hidden agendas, and one of the beauties of growing up is the freedom to choose the people you trust.
Little Boy Blue hasn’t gotten there yet. From what I’ve seen, in talking to him, and then during our date last weekend, he still doesn’t know that you can’t trust people just because you want to. And although there’s nothing wrong with that, witnessing a person start the School of Hard Knocks fosters far more of my maternal instincts than my girlfriend ones.
Then there are the naked, blind, furry questions the young twentysomething asks, outright, on the first date. What do you expect from a relationship? What’s your pet peeve? What do you prefer in a guy? These are questions you learn not to ask. It’s infuriating to try to puzzle out a person’s confusing behavior, but you still know better than to ask. Besides, this person you’re talking to is a stranger. You have to get to know someone, at least a little, before you begin to approach relationship expectations. And even when you do, it's not with the intention of fitting yourself to those expectations; it's to see if the expectations can mesh. I had the feeling that if I'd answered, "I prefer a guy who wears mullets and muscle shirts and never showers," he'd have skipped a bath the next day, gone shopping and started growing out the back of his hair.
His questions kept startling me -- and not startled like "Hey look! A butterfly just landed on my nose," but startled like you accidentally caught a glimpse of a person's weeping bedsore through a hole in their shirt. I hadn’t thought about these questions in, and I cringed as I thought the word, years. I kept answering, "Umm. Hm. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it in a long time." And then I’d try to make up something that didn’t sound too blunt. The honest answer would have been, you can’t have expectations. Not beyond the basic ones of mutual respect, affection, loyalty, physical attraction, companionship. Everything else depends on the individual, and people are so different that you have to tailor your expectations depending on whom you’re dating. Plus as you get older, not only do your expectations shift, but the lesser ones kind of evaporate, and you get, at the same time, more easygoing and yet pickier. Sometimes fulfillment or nonfulfillment of expectations can come clear pretty quickly, but usually it takes a little time, and you certainly can't tell on the first date. The first date always goes well. It’s too early to be talking about this.
I didn’t say any of that. I pulled something vague out from my memory stock of intense dorm room conversations while I watched traffic stream past the putt-putt course.
Worst, though, about the vulnerability, is the quickness of attachment. He kept telling me how comfortable he was talking to me, as if that were some kind of miracle, which, when you’re twenty-one, it is; I answered, gently and truthfully, "A lot of people are comfortable around me." And kept realizing that the age difference matters hugely. I may be delighted to be comfortable talking to someone I've just met, but through my own little mini Summer School of Hard Knocks I've learned that it's not usually a sign. It just is. LBB, however, seemed to be doing calculations in his head (the emotional equivalent of 1 +1 = 11) and kept alluding to how he wants to get married someday.
Then I came down with a lovely case of tonsillitis the day after we went out, and Tuesday he stopped by with chicken soup and a dozen roses. I gave the socially expected response, but inside I was thinking, O my God. I’ve gone out with him once. He thinks I'm his soulmate. This kid is freaking me out.
So I have to send Little Boy Blue on his way. He’s nice, but he’s too young. And he’s getting serious ideas FAR too quickly. We have nothing at all in common, but that wouldn’t matter to him (again the age difference), and I have to stop this before he starts getting really long term ideas before a second date.
We’re supposed to go out to dinner tonight. He’s stopping by to pick me up. I really don’t want to sit through a meal with him, though; I keep getting more uncomfortable the more I think about it. I mean, the poor kid. I’m not interested in dating him at all, and I’d rather get it over with now and avoid an awkward car ride home.
I’m contemplating breaking it to him in the driveway. Well, I’ll invite him to sit on the porch. I don’t like the idea of him spending money he doesn’t have on a meal where a girl tells him she doesn’t like him. (I’d pay my own way, if I went, but he doesn’t have the money to spend even on himself, and I can't afford it either.) Now I just have to figure out what to say.
The roses actually hurt me. I put them in water and hid them in the study. Then I called John and left him a voicemail that concluded with, "I’m never dating again."
It’s not true, of course. But I won’t be dating any infants in the near future. And, truth be told, at the moment I’m quite happy to spend my evenings sitting in the living room rewatching episodes of Dark Angel and playing my favorite solitaire game, Idiot’s Delight.
I’m not running a line for a tabloid or packing for prison or campaigning a weird new shirt slogan. My blind date turned out to be twenty-one.
I did have a forewarning, and didn’t think it would be too big a deal...until I met him. Little Boy Blue isn’t immature or annoying, which initially came as a profound relief. Now I wish he possessed those faults in spades, because things are not going to work and for one of the first times, I’m the one that has to broach the subject.
He’s nice. Very, very nice. Very, very sweet. And so incredibly vulnerable it gives me a stomachache. I cringe from it because I remember it. It’s as though, in the early twenties, a person is a slug, creeping along in its unguarded softness, easily harmed by anything. Pass into the midtwenties, and the slug finds it’s grown, or climbed into, a shell. Not a shell in the negative, reclusive, suspicious sense, but a shell that encases the personality, gives it a little protection, and allows the snail to be discerning about the things that touch it.
I heard, the other weekend, about a friend-of-a-friend who was wishing to be more vulnerable with everyone. It's an unrealistic sentiment (although I’m guessing this friend-of-a-friend still qualifies as an early twenties). Adults can’t be vulnerable to everyone; humanity is full of treachery and ambition and hidden agendas, and one of the beauties of growing up is the freedom to choose the people you trust.
Little Boy Blue hasn’t gotten there yet. From what I’ve seen, in talking to him, and then during our date last weekend, he still doesn’t know that you can’t trust people just because you want to. And although there’s nothing wrong with that, witnessing a person start the School of Hard Knocks fosters far more of my maternal instincts than my girlfriend ones.
Then there are the naked, blind, furry questions the young twentysomething asks, outright, on the first date. What do you expect from a relationship? What’s your pet peeve? What do you prefer in a guy? These are questions you learn not to ask. It’s infuriating to try to puzzle out a person’s confusing behavior, but you still know better than to ask. Besides, this person you’re talking to is a stranger. You have to get to know someone, at least a little, before you begin to approach relationship expectations. And even when you do, it's not with the intention of fitting yourself to those expectations; it's to see if the expectations can mesh. I had the feeling that if I'd answered, "I prefer a guy who wears mullets and muscle shirts and never showers," he'd have skipped a bath the next day, gone shopping and started growing out the back of his hair.
His questions kept startling me -- and not startled like "Hey look! A butterfly just landed on my nose," but startled like you accidentally caught a glimpse of a person's weeping bedsore through a hole in their shirt. I hadn’t thought about these questions in, and I cringed as I thought the word, years. I kept answering, "Umm. Hm. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it in a long time." And then I’d try to make up something that didn’t sound too blunt. The honest answer would have been, you can’t have expectations. Not beyond the basic ones of mutual respect, affection, loyalty, physical attraction, companionship. Everything else depends on the individual, and people are so different that you have to tailor your expectations depending on whom you’re dating. Plus as you get older, not only do your expectations shift, but the lesser ones kind of evaporate, and you get, at the same time, more easygoing and yet pickier. Sometimes fulfillment or nonfulfillment of expectations can come clear pretty quickly, but usually it takes a little time, and you certainly can't tell on the first date. The first date always goes well. It’s too early to be talking about this.
I didn’t say any of that. I pulled something vague out from my memory stock of intense dorm room conversations while I watched traffic stream past the putt-putt course.
Worst, though, about the vulnerability, is the quickness of attachment. He kept telling me how comfortable he was talking to me, as if that were some kind of miracle, which, when you’re twenty-one, it is; I answered, gently and truthfully, "A lot of people are comfortable around me." And kept realizing that the age difference matters hugely. I may be delighted to be comfortable talking to someone I've just met, but through my own little mini Summer School of Hard Knocks I've learned that it's not usually a sign. It just is. LBB, however, seemed to be doing calculations in his head (the emotional equivalent of 1 +1 = 11) and kept alluding to how he wants to get married someday.
Then I came down with a lovely case of tonsillitis the day after we went out, and Tuesday he stopped by with chicken soup and a dozen roses. I gave the socially expected response, but inside I was thinking, O my God. I’ve gone out with him once. He thinks I'm his soulmate. This kid is freaking me out.
So I have to send Little Boy Blue on his way. He’s nice, but he’s too young. And he’s getting serious ideas FAR too quickly. We have nothing at all in common, but that wouldn’t matter to him (again the age difference), and I have to stop this before he starts getting really long term ideas before a second date.
We’re supposed to go out to dinner tonight. He’s stopping by to pick me up. I really don’t want to sit through a meal with him, though; I keep getting more uncomfortable the more I think about it. I mean, the poor kid. I’m not interested in dating him at all, and I’d rather get it over with now and avoid an awkward car ride home.
I’m contemplating breaking it to him in the driveway. Well, I’ll invite him to sit on the porch. I don’t like the idea of him spending money he doesn’t have on a meal where a girl tells him she doesn’t like him. (I’d pay my own way, if I went, but he doesn’t have the money to spend even on himself, and I can't afford it either.) Now I just have to figure out what to say.
The roses actually hurt me. I put them in water and hid them in the study. Then I called John and left him a voicemail that concluded with, "I’m never dating again."
It’s not true, of course. But I won’t be dating any infants in the near future. And, truth be told, at the moment I’m quite happy to spend my evenings sitting in the living room rewatching episodes of Dark Angel and playing my favorite solitaire game, Idiot’s Delight.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
escapades in the kitchen: burgers part II
Stuffed burgers = fabulous.
I tried it out last night using feta cheese as the filler. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Next time I'll try it with gorgonzola, which takes to red meat like a Romeo and Juliet where the Montagues and Capulets reconcile before the suicides and everyone lives happily ever after organizing their dialogues into sonnets.
I tried it out last night using feta cheese as the filler. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Next time I'll try it with gorgonzola, which takes to red meat like a Romeo and Juliet where the Montagues and Capulets reconcile before the suicides and everyone lives happily ever after organizing their dialogues into sonnets.
Monday, June 16, 2008
hodges and podges
It was kind of a funny weekend.
I. Boy or Book?
Friday I got a text message from a guy I dated briefly last summer -- one of the local rookie cops. Nice guy, but a bit odd in that his behavior has always been erratic. Wouldn't call for weeks, but always looked like running into me made his day. Bizarre.
I'd written him off a long time ago as a result, but last week he stopped by the office and we chatted a little, so his text inviting me to dinner at a local restaurant with him and his housemates didn't surprise me much. I went, mostly out of curiosity.
The hanging out only lasted an hour, and the entire conversation centered around his housemates' wedding two weeks ago, and all the cute girls that attended. I was internally amused -- here he goes again -- and a little bored, and when I realized I was wearing the smug, condescending, tolerant expression I get when I'm amused and a little bored and trying not to show it, I got up and excused myself for a few minutes.
When I returned, they were paying their bills and getting ready to leave. No extensions of this strange hang-out invitation were given, so I bid them a cheerful goodbye and tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my evening -- it was only eight o'clock.
Thankfully Borders has a location just down the road from the restaurant, and the naughty book addict in my brain whispered, "Go! Go! Maybe something's on sale." (Evil naughty book addict.)
As I walked through the gleaming glass doors, a book with the painted torso of a skeleton smoking a cigarette caught my attention: David Sedaris' latest collection of essays, When You are Engulfed in Flames. Oo.
I opened the cover and before I'd finished the second page I was laughing aloud. In order not to frighten or bewilder other customers entering or exiting the premesis, I removed myself to the fiction section, next to his other works, and folded myself up on a tiny stool to keep reading. Sadly, I didn't yet own any of his other books, so, tired of fiction and yearning for humor, I yielded to the demon book addict and bought that book and three of his others (one of them was on sale. I didn't lose entirely).
That night I celebrated the true purpose of a single's bedroom and propped myself up on pillows and read. And laughed and laughed and laughed. I had to put the book down a few times and struggle for breath. Since my bedroom window is one of the few in my house with screens, and is therefore one of the few consistently open, I'm sure anyone taking a nice late-night walk quickened his pace, hearing the cacklings of a madwoman from somewhere inside.
II. Looking from the Crossroad
Saturday I continued my voracious consumption of Sedaris' essays, mostly while lying on my stomach baking in the backyard under a murderous June sun. The glare of the light off the white pages gave me a headache, but I resisted for a valiant while.
When I finally gave up (after all, it's hard to read while lying on one's back, and I want an even tan), I started thinking. Mostly about my writing. My thoughts wandered back to my thesis on Till We Have Faces my senior year in college. I remembered all the research I did on C.S. Lewis, particularly his early years writing, when he produced some of the most horrible poetry I have ever read. He kept on trying, though -- sonnets, epics (especially epics) -- until his friends and critics finally convinced him to give it up. Even when he turned to fiction and essays, and garnered huge success, even then, years after he stopped writing poetry, he still thought of himself as a poet and not a writer of fiction.
Conversely, I've always thought of myself as a fiction writer. My head teems with stories, good ones, innovative ones, stories that might win me some small acclaim in not-so-great genres like fantasy literature, some that might win me some small acclaim in slightly better genres. The problem is that I hate writing them. I enjoy writing the interesting parts, of course, but I don't like to bother myself with the rest -- to me it's just filler. When all of it ought to be part of one whole.
Even poetry has taken a backseat as the years after college, when my writing classes demanded production, slide away. What has emerged instead has taken its shape as you read it here: the blog.
I have just over three and a half years' worth of raw material on my blog for what I think I might like to do -- the personal narrative essay. Why not? I enjoy reading narrative essays, and I certainly enjoy writing them, or at least writing their bastard second cousins, the blog posts. One of the reasons I decided to take crap minimum wage jobs right out of college and then go wherever the wind took me was in order to have a more interesting life from which to draw for my writing. Back then I had gritty fictional realism in mind, but the principle holds true when applied to gritty personal narratives.
I have so many real life stories. And if I were given a dollar for every time I've heard, "Omigosh, Sarah, your life is like a drama/soap opera/novel/reenactment of Bridget Jones," I could comfortably pad my IRA.
So again, why not? This is the form in which I have trained myself, without knowing, these past four years. (I had another blog on another site before I fell in love with Blogger.) It's a form I have found I enjoy. And it gives me this blissful sense of directed purpose.
Bliss with a sharp edge. The bliss a piece of iron might feel, as it begins to understand the shape into which it's being hammered between naps in the coals. Ah. That's it. I know what I'm for. But it's still hot and there are still hammer blows and the blacksmith still isn't letting up. A fierce bliss, maybe. A harsh joy. A hint of shaping to undergo and work to do.
This spring and summer I've reached a lot of crossroads. After endless miles toiling along one undeviating way, being brought to a point of choosing has been an enormous relief. Being shaken awake to see the choice has been an enormous relief. Perhaps like the piece of iron saying, That spot, right there, it's not quite even, can we work on that? just as the hammer blow falls right on it. Ouch. Ahhhhh.
I have made momentous decisions -- in regard to my faith, in regard to my choice of career and location, in regard to my attitude toward my life and my singleness, and now in regard to my writing. My counselor told me a couple of months ago that, although my verbiage was overwhelmed and anxious, what he heard me saying was that my life was just beginning. I suddenly realized he was right -- my life is new, it's my own, I can shake free from the older influences that did me no good and choose how and where and under what conditions I want to live. It's still in the beginning stages, of course. But one of the greatest excitements of a journey is the starting out. Later on it'll get exhausting and frustrating, but now is the newness of discovery, the hardening to a purpose, the pointing the nose into the wind and tightening the shoulder straps and starting off.
III. The Winds of Change
The Little Hell Hole, also known as my house, has been trying to kill me. The air circulation makes the inside of a Ziploc bag sound positively refreshing, and the damp that traps itself inside appears to have been pumped in from the Amazon. The Little Hell Hole is moldering.
It's not the house's fault. But it's a sad house. Sitting inside it for any length of time would depress Shirley Temple. If it were a lot bigger and more open, it would hold that nice spooky atmosphere of a house with too many stories and no tongue to tell them with; instead it feels like it should have fallen down years ago, it isn't cute anymore (and probably hasn't been since the advent of indoor plumbing, when the home-made nature of the place took on a gruesomely callous flair), it's too clumsy to feel haunted, and the only thing holding it up has been, ironically, neglect.
So I'm looking for alternative places to live. I miss space. I miss the ability to rearrange the furniture if I want, I miss the ability to buy new pieces of antique furniture in order to rearrange if I want, I miss sitting at the dining room table, for God's sake. I miss light pouring in through the windows instead of hiding sourly outside, I miss the fresh smell of well-ventilated rooms, I miss books in my living room. I miss enough room for company.
I will probably begin looking seriously toward the end of the summer, closer to when my year's lease is due to run out, and when my landlord might feel more inclined to let me out of it early. Summer brings out the house's only two amenities: a large backyard and a wide gracious front porch, both of which I can enjoy without needing to sit inside the house.
In the meantime I have to make the place liveable for sleeping, and liveable for Simon, who has cast a thick coat of shed hair on all the floors (or would, if I didn't vacuum). I had called the landlord earlier in the week to beg for screens, and he said he'd rig some for me, but as of the weekend, no word, no screens. And I was DYING.
Saturday I spent a delightful evening with Meg, Phillip and Josie, and noticed how well-ventilated and cool their house was. I was thinking wistfully of whole-house fans, when my eye landed on an unobtrusive object in one of the upstairs windows:
A window fan.
I could have banged my head against the wall. Here is the perfect, sensible solution: draws in air and requires no screens. The very sense of it made it elusive, I think. So, with an end to the suffocation in sight, yesterday I drove through a storm that amounted to a pygmy hurricane to purchase a pair. Then I took them home and began the unexpectedly painful process of wrestling open the selected windows.
The one in the bathroom was the worst. Years of staying shut, with no fan whatsoever siphoning off the moisture in the room, had rotted the window frame completely. And by "rotted" I mean I was wiping black wet powdered wood off my palms after touching it. I managed to shove it up about eight inches when it stuck and wouldn't budge, and in trying to wiggle it from underneath, I felt the bottom of the frame give under the slight pressure and the glass cracked. I stopped in time to prevent a break, and then I stood there looking in helpless rage at the disgusting wood until my next-door neighbor, an elderly garrulous gentleman named Gordon, came to my aid -- having heard my shouted grunts of effort in getting the window as far as I did.
Between his tapping the window gradually up with a hammer, and my bracing the crumbling frame, we managed just to get it open enough to wedge the fan under. He helped me with the second bedroom window as well, muttering deprecations against my landlord for being cheap. But finally the fans were installed and turned on, and voila! blissful, beautiful, blessed breeze.
I'm hoping the one in the bathroom will keep all my towels from rotting. And now I can stand to live in my house. For as long as it takes to find a new, better-kept place.
IV. In a Brand-New Pair of Shoes
The Spine of Satan has muttered its way down to The Spine of One of Satan's Lesser Minions: no longer constantly putting me on the rack, so to speak, but easily tired and requiring vigilant caution. One of these vigilances, while simple, puts me at a slight disadvantage in regard to my usual style of dress: No More Heels.
This distresses me, as the number of flats I own you could probably pack in your wallet. Smaller people have criticized me for my love-affair with three-inch heels when I already stand at 5' 9-and-3/4" in my bare feet; but I love height. (I don't love heights. Walking over one of those city grates and staring at a street visible forty feet below me gives me the heebie jeebies. But I do love my height.) I love being tall. I enjoy all of its benefits -- a more slender-looking figure, the ability to see above everyone else's head in a crowd, rarely experiencing vision obstruction at the movie theater, helping others in the grocery store getting items off the top shelves, looking fabulous in a floor-length dress -- which, in my opinion, far outweigh its disadvantages -- buying pants, namely, and towering threateningly over men (although, depending on the situation, this can be a huge benefit. People don't try to push me around. All I have to do is loom a little).
So I cherish my heels. The Spine of One of Satan's Lesser Minions necessitates, however, flats. I've been wearing my only pair of black leather flip-flops, but that cramps my wardrobe a little; black isn't my first choice for summer.
While out on my window fans mission, therefore, I bought a pair of brown sandals. They're comfortable, cute, and match the half of my wardrobe that the black shoes don't. Considering my growing hatred of laundromats, this expansion of available attire works very well, allowing me to throw some variety into the mix, and avoid laundry for a little longer, even if I can't avoid it three inches taller than Nature intended.
V. My Old Man Fan Club
It just keeps growing, and keeps growing less flattering.
What possesses a man old enough to be my father's much older brother to ask a young woman out for a drink? I understand the inclination, but following through on it belies a loose grip on reality...and appropriate conduct.
I'm not in the mood right now anyway. My plate is heaped with work and with getting a life. Figuring out polite-yet-firm ways to shoo away these fifty- and sixty-year-olds hasn't been top of my priority list, and there's no way to tell them politely, "Shed thirty or forty years and I'll consider it." I'm as old as some of their children, for God's sake. And even if I had gold-digger tendencies, which, so far, I don't, these poor guys don't have any assets to appeal even to that trait.
They're not bad guys. They're just...way too old. Don't they know that? What girl has dreamed from her childhood of taking her three- and five-year-olds to visit Daddy in the nursing home, and paying their college tuitions from his estate? "Hi, honey, I'm here to wipe the drool off your chin and give you a new bedpan for our fifth anniversary. The kids helped decorate it so it matches your gown. Isn't it cute?"
It's the tenacity that stuns me. Give a twenty-something guy a slight snub (intentionally or not), and you'll never see him again. Brain an old guy with an iron skillet while saying "No thank you" in an assertive voice and he might get the idea that you're not interested.
Boss-Man says egos decrease in fragility as they age. Maybe I don't need an iron skillet, but a cannon.
VI. Around the Cobbler's Bench
D. works at the local post office. She has, for as long as anyone at my office has known her, been "a tough nut to crack."
I liked her from the get-go. Maybe she reminded me of the breed of people who populate my natal region: downward-turning lines slashed into the corners of her mouth, curt voice, aloof demeanor. Unfriendly, especially for the sunny vivacious Midwest (who are these people?). Or perhaps she presented a challenge, a bastion of guardedness upon which to work my own sunny vivacity until her dourness wore down like a stone under moss. Or maybe I've been old since I was born and the people I like best either share my mentality or are twenty years my senior (D. falls under the latter category).
Whatever the reason, we now get along splendidly. She reminds me, comfortingly, of my origins, of where I come from, of the people who are becoming increasingly unfamiliar (when I visit Pennsylvania I'm more and more surprised at how -- unpleasant -- people are to strangers) and yet whom I understand completely. She also possesses a wry sense of humor I enjoy. We swap tips and tricks for quitting smoking, complain about rude customers, jaw about the government, exchange town gossip. She tells me about her husband and asks after my dating life.
When I went to send out the mail on Friday, she asked if I were seeing anyone. I told her, with a snort, "No," and she made a face about the men in town, and then took on a thoughtful expression.
"I know a guy," she said. "He's the son of our best family friends. Nice guy. Really nice guy. At least you could meet him and go out to dinner."
"Sure," I said, remembering the New Deal, and, having learned a lot with CB, ready to apply the lessons. Besides, going home every night to a cat gets old, however beloved said kitty.
"I'll talk to him," she said.
Today while running office errands I bumped into a girl I barely know. She's about my age, and we chatted for a minute.
"I hear a friend of mine is going to ask you out," she said, with that sly "woo-woo-you're-going-to-be-talking-to-a-BOY" grin that girls never outgrow.
I had forgotten about D.'s offer.
"Oh?" I said.
"Yeah, I've known him forever and he told me a family friend of his was setting you up on a blind date."
I remembered then. Her grin got a little more dimpled. "He's really nice," she said. "He wanted to know if you were. I told him he couldn't weasel information out of me." Then she wished me luck and repeated that he's really nice.
"Nice" can mean so many things -- anything you want it to mean, really. When girls say it of guys it speaks to his character or temperament more than anything else, and is usually a good sign -- he may be a bit of a diamond in the rough, but worth a little scraping and polishing. Either that or he's just fantastically great.
The whole thing is funny. Blind dates are usually hilarious in that they're never not a total crap shoot. Small towns are funny in that a butterfly flaps its wings in Widow Allen's garden and the next day it's front page news. (Much fun can be had with this, when it isn't supremely irritating.) And I'm back to the Square One of Not Caring One Way or the Other, which ought to make any results whatsoever entertaining enough to add value to the experience.
Am I the monkey, or the weasel? Or am I the bench? I feel like the bench. And where on earth is the cobbler?
I. Boy or Book?
Friday I got a text message from a guy I dated briefly last summer -- one of the local rookie cops. Nice guy, but a bit odd in that his behavior has always been erratic. Wouldn't call for weeks, but always looked like running into me made his day. Bizarre.
I'd written him off a long time ago as a result, but last week he stopped by the office and we chatted a little, so his text inviting me to dinner at a local restaurant with him and his housemates didn't surprise me much. I went, mostly out of curiosity.
The hanging out only lasted an hour, and the entire conversation centered around his housemates' wedding two weeks ago, and all the cute girls that attended. I was internally amused -- here he goes again -- and a little bored, and when I realized I was wearing the smug, condescending, tolerant expression I get when I'm amused and a little bored and trying not to show it, I got up and excused myself for a few minutes.
When I returned, they were paying their bills and getting ready to leave. No extensions of this strange hang-out invitation were given, so I bid them a cheerful goodbye and tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my evening -- it was only eight o'clock.
Thankfully Borders has a location just down the road from the restaurant, and the naughty book addict in my brain whispered, "Go! Go! Maybe something's on sale." (Evil naughty book addict.)
As I walked through the gleaming glass doors, a book with the painted torso of a skeleton smoking a cigarette caught my attention: David Sedaris' latest collection of essays, When You are Engulfed in Flames. Oo.
I opened the cover and before I'd finished the second page I was laughing aloud. In order not to frighten or bewilder other customers entering or exiting the premesis, I removed myself to the fiction section, next to his other works, and folded myself up on a tiny stool to keep reading. Sadly, I didn't yet own any of his other books, so, tired of fiction and yearning for humor, I yielded to the demon book addict and bought that book and three of his others (one of them was on sale. I didn't lose entirely).
That night I celebrated the true purpose of a single's bedroom and propped myself up on pillows and read. And laughed and laughed and laughed. I had to put the book down a few times and struggle for breath. Since my bedroom window is one of the few in my house with screens, and is therefore one of the few consistently open, I'm sure anyone taking a nice late-night walk quickened his pace, hearing the cacklings of a madwoman from somewhere inside.
II. Looking from the Crossroad
Saturday I continued my voracious consumption of Sedaris' essays, mostly while lying on my stomach baking in the backyard under a murderous June sun. The glare of the light off the white pages gave me a headache, but I resisted for a valiant while.
When I finally gave up (after all, it's hard to read while lying on one's back, and I want an even tan), I started thinking. Mostly about my writing. My thoughts wandered back to my thesis on Till We Have Faces my senior year in college. I remembered all the research I did on C.S. Lewis, particularly his early years writing, when he produced some of the most horrible poetry I have ever read. He kept on trying, though -- sonnets, epics (especially epics) -- until his friends and critics finally convinced him to give it up. Even when he turned to fiction and essays, and garnered huge success, even then, years after he stopped writing poetry, he still thought of himself as a poet and not a writer of fiction.
Conversely, I've always thought of myself as a fiction writer. My head teems with stories, good ones, innovative ones, stories that might win me some small acclaim in not-so-great genres like fantasy literature, some that might win me some small acclaim in slightly better genres. The problem is that I hate writing them. I enjoy writing the interesting parts, of course, but I don't like to bother myself with the rest -- to me it's just filler. When all of it ought to be part of one whole.
Even poetry has taken a backseat as the years after college, when my writing classes demanded production, slide away. What has emerged instead has taken its shape as you read it here: the blog.
I have just over three and a half years' worth of raw material on my blog for what I think I might like to do -- the personal narrative essay. Why not? I enjoy reading narrative essays, and I certainly enjoy writing them, or at least writing their bastard second cousins, the blog posts. One of the reasons I decided to take crap minimum wage jobs right out of college and then go wherever the wind took me was in order to have a more interesting life from which to draw for my writing. Back then I had gritty fictional realism in mind, but the principle holds true when applied to gritty personal narratives.
I have so many real life stories. And if I were given a dollar for every time I've heard, "Omigosh, Sarah, your life is like a drama/soap opera/novel/reenactment of Bridget Jones," I could comfortably pad my IRA.
So again, why not? This is the form in which I have trained myself, without knowing, these past four years. (I had another blog on another site before I fell in love with Blogger.) It's a form I have found I enjoy. And it gives me this blissful sense of directed purpose.
Bliss with a sharp edge. The bliss a piece of iron might feel, as it begins to understand the shape into which it's being hammered between naps in the coals. Ah. That's it. I know what I'm for. But it's still hot and there are still hammer blows and the blacksmith still isn't letting up. A fierce bliss, maybe. A harsh joy. A hint of shaping to undergo and work to do.
This spring and summer I've reached a lot of crossroads. After endless miles toiling along one undeviating way, being brought to a point of choosing has been an enormous relief. Being shaken awake to see the choice has been an enormous relief. Perhaps like the piece of iron saying, That spot, right there, it's not quite even, can we work on that? just as the hammer blow falls right on it. Ouch. Ahhhhh.
I have made momentous decisions -- in regard to my faith, in regard to my choice of career and location, in regard to my attitude toward my life and my singleness, and now in regard to my writing. My counselor told me a couple of months ago that, although my verbiage was overwhelmed and anxious, what he heard me saying was that my life was just beginning. I suddenly realized he was right -- my life is new, it's my own, I can shake free from the older influences that did me no good and choose how and where and under what conditions I want to live. It's still in the beginning stages, of course. But one of the greatest excitements of a journey is the starting out. Later on it'll get exhausting and frustrating, but now is the newness of discovery, the hardening to a purpose, the pointing the nose into the wind and tightening the shoulder straps and starting off.
III. The Winds of Change
The Little Hell Hole, also known as my house, has been trying to kill me. The air circulation makes the inside of a Ziploc bag sound positively refreshing, and the damp that traps itself inside appears to have been pumped in from the Amazon. The Little Hell Hole is moldering.
It's not the house's fault. But it's a sad house. Sitting inside it for any length of time would depress Shirley Temple. If it were a lot bigger and more open, it would hold that nice spooky atmosphere of a house with too many stories and no tongue to tell them with; instead it feels like it should have fallen down years ago, it isn't cute anymore (and probably hasn't been since the advent of indoor plumbing, when the home-made nature of the place took on a gruesomely callous flair), it's too clumsy to feel haunted, and the only thing holding it up has been, ironically, neglect.
So I'm looking for alternative places to live. I miss space. I miss the ability to rearrange the furniture if I want, I miss the ability to buy new pieces of antique furniture in order to rearrange if I want, I miss sitting at the dining room table, for God's sake. I miss light pouring in through the windows instead of hiding sourly outside, I miss the fresh smell of well-ventilated rooms, I miss books in my living room. I miss enough room for company.
I will probably begin looking seriously toward the end of the summer, closer to when my year's lease is due to run out, and when my landlord might feel more inclined to let me out of it early. Summer brings out the house's only two amenities: a large backyard and a wide gracious front porch, both of which I can enjoy without needing to sit inside the house.
In the meantime I have to make the place liveable for sleeping, and liveable for Simon, who has cast a thick coat of shed hair on all the floors (or would, if I didn't vacuum). I had called the landlord earlier in the week to beg for screens, and he said he'd rig some for me, but as of the weekend, no word, no screens. And I was DYING.
Saturday I spent a delightful evening with Meg, Phillip and Josie, and noticed how well-ventilated and cool their house was. I was thinking wistfully of whole-house fans, when my eye landed on an unobtrusive object in one of the upstairs windows:
A window fan.
I could have banged my head against the wall. Here is the perfect, sensible solution: draws in air and requires no screens. The very sense of it made it elusive, I think. So, with an end to the suffocation in sight, yesterday I drove through a storm that amounted to a pygmy hurricane to purchase a pair. Then I took them home and began the unexpectedly painful process of wrestling open the selected windows.
The one in the bathroom was the worst. Years of staying shut, with no fan whatsoever siphoning off the moisture in the room, had rotted the window frame completely. And by "rotted" I mean I was wiping black wet powdered wood off my palms after touching it. I managed to shove it up about eight inches when it stuck and wouldn't budge, and in trying to wiggle it from underneath, I felt the bottom of the frame give under the slight pressure and the glass cracked. I stopped in time to prevent a break, and then I stood there looking in helpless rage at the disgusting wood until my next-door neighbor, an elderly garrulous gentleman named Gordon, came to my aid -- having heard my shouted grunts of effort in getting the window as far as I did.
Between his tapping the window gradually up with a hammer, and my bracing the crumbling frame, we managed just to get it open enough to wedge the fan under. He helped me with the second bedroom window as well, muttering deprecations against my landlord for being cheap. But finally the fans were installed and turned on, and voila! blissful, beautiful, blessed breeze.
I'm hoping the one in the bathroom will keep all my towels from rotting. And now I can stand to live in my house. For as long as it takes to find a new, better-kept place.
IV. In a Brand-New Pair of Shoes
The Spine of Satan has muttered its way down to The Spine of One of Satan's Lesser Minions: no longer constantly putting me on the rack, so to speak, but easily tired and requiring vigilant caution. One of these vigilances, while simple, puts me at a slight disadvantage in regard to my usual style of dress: No More Heels.
This distresses me, as the number of flats I own you could probably pack in your wallet. Smaller people have criticized me for my love-affair with three-inch heels when I already stand at 5' 9-and-3/4" in my bare feet; but I love height. (I don't love heights. Walking over one of those city grates and staring at a street visible forty feet below me gives me the heebie jeebies. But I do love my height.) I love being tall. I enjoy all of its benefits -- a more slender-looking figure, the ability to see above everyone else's head in a crowd, rarely experiencing vision obstruction at the movie theater, helping others in the grocery store getting items off the top shelves, looking fabulous in a floor-length dress -- which, in my opinion, far outweigh its disadvantages -- buying pants, namely, and towering threateningly over men (although, depending on the situation, this can be a huge benefit. People don't try to push me around. All I have to do is loom a little).
So I cherish my heels. The Spine of One of Satan's Lesser Minions necessitates, however, flats. I've been wearing my only pair of black leather flip-flops, but that cramps my wardrobe a little; black isn't my first choice for summer.
While out on my window fans mission, therefore, I bought a pair of brown sandals. They're comfortable, cute, and match the half of my wardrobe that the black shoes don't. Considering my growing hatred of laundromats, this expansion of available attire works very well, allowing me to throw some variety into the mix, and avoid laundry for a little longer, even if I can't avoid it three inches taller than Nature intended.
V. My Old Man Fan Club
It just keeps growing, and keeps growing less flattering.
What possesses a man old enough to be my father's much older brother to ask a young woman out for a drink? I understand the inclination, but following through on it belies a loose grip on reality...and appropriate conduct.
I'm not in the mood right now anyway. My plate is heaped with work and with getting a life. Figuring out polite-yet-firm ways to shoo away these fifty- and sixty-year-olds hasn't been top of my priority list, and there's no way to tell them politely, "Shed thirty or forty years and I'll consider it." I'm as old as some of their children, for God's sake. And even if I had gold-digger tendencies, which, so far, I don't, these poor guys don't have any assets to appeal even to that trait.
They're not bad guys. They're just...way too old. Don't they know that? What girl has dreamed from her childhood of taking her three- and five-year-olds to visit Daddy in the nursing home, and paying their college tuitions from his estate? "Hi, honey, I'm here to wipe the drool off your chin and give you a new bedpan for our fifth anniversary. The kids helped decorate it so it matches your gown. Isn't it cute?"
It's the tenacity that stuns me. Give a twenty-something guy a slight snub (intentionally or not), and you'll never see him again. Brain an old guy with an iron skillet while saying "No thank you" in an assertive voice and he might get the idea that you're not interested.
Boss-Man says egos decrease in fragility as they age. Maybe I don't need an iron skillet, but a cannon.
VI. Around the Cobbler's Bench
D. works at the local post office. She has, for as long as anyone at my office has known her, been "a tough nut to crack."
I liked her from the get-go. Maybe she reminded me of the breed of people who populate my natal region: downward-turning lines slashed into the corners of her mouth, curt voice, aloof demeanor. Unfriendly, especially for the sunny vivacious Midwest (who are these people?). Or perhaps she presented a challenge, a bastion of guardedness upon which to work my own sunny vivacity until her dourness wore down like a stone under moss. Or maybe I've been old since I was born and the people I like best either share my mentality or are twenty years my senior (D. falls under the latter category).
Whatever the reason, we now get along splendidly. She reminds me, comfortingly, of my origins, of where I come from, of the people who are becoming increasingly unfamiliar (when I visit Pennsylvania I'm more and more surprised at how -- unpleasant -- people are to strangers) and yet whom I understand completely. She also possesses a wry sense of humor I enjoy. We swap tips and tricks for quitting smoking, complain about rude customers, jaw about the government, exchange town gossip. She tells me about her husband and asks after my dating life.
When I went to send out the mail on Friday, she asked if I were seeing anyone. I told her, with a snort, "No," and she made a face about the men in town, and then took on a thoughtful expression.
"I know a guy," she said. "He's the son of our best family friends. Nice guy. Really nice guy. At least you could meet him and go out to dinner."
"Sure," I said, remembering the New Deal, and, having learned a lot with CB, ready to apply the lessons. Besides, going home every night to a cat gets old, however beloved said kitty.
"I'll talk to him," she said.
Today while running office errands I bumped into a girl I barely know. She's about my age, and we chatted for a minute.
"I hear a friend of mine is going to ask you out," she said, with that sly "woo-woo-you're-going-to-be-talking-to-a-BOY" grin that girls never outgrow.
I had forgotten about D.'s offer.
"Oh?" I said.
"Yeah, I've known him forever and he told me a family friend of his was setting you up on a blind date."
I remembered then. Her grin got a little more dimpled. "He's really nice," she said. "He wanted to know if you were. I told him he couldn't weasel information out of me." Then she wished me luck and repeated that he's really nice.
"Nice" can mean so many things -- anything you want it to mean, really. When girls say it of guys it speaks to his character or temperament more than anything else, and is usually a good sign -- he may be a bit of a diamond in the rough, but worth a little scraping and polishing. Either that or he's just fantastically great.
The whole thing is funny. Blind dates are usually hilarious in that they're never not a total crap shoot. Small towns are funny in that a butterfly flaps its wings in Widow Allen's garden and the next day it's front page news. (Much fun can be had with this, when it isn't supremely irritating.) And I'm back to the Square One of Not Caring One Way or the Other, which ought to make any results whatsoever entertaining enough to add value to the experience.
Am I the monkey, or the weasel? Or am I the bench? I feel like the bench. And where on earth is the cobbler?
Thursday, June 12, 2008
the (fire)burn(s)out
I’m quite close to being Caught Up at work.
Of course, since I worked overtime and pushed myself too hard, the usual slide from energy on Monday to exhaustion on Friday has taken place much more intensely than usual. Today, for example, I slept in forty minutes, drank half a pot of coffee before the end of my first hour at the office, endured the bizarre combination of physical hype and mental comatoxicity that followed, developed a foul mood, stared glassy-eyed at the television over lunch, and dragged around for the rest of the day. I accomplished what I needed to, but it required every ounce of will just to exist in the present.
Well. Tonight I plan to absorb more episodes of Boomtown, which Eigh Ann loaned me, and which I’m mesmerically enjoying, over a rapidly assembled Everything Salad which requires little energy (mine OR the stove’s) and therefore radiates no additional heat. I plan also to abolish stress vibes by petting the cat, who has been more then usually affectionate – last night he took up his place on the ottoman and slept with an enormous happy smile on his feline face, stretching out every now and then so as just, delicately, to brace his paws on my foot.
And then, oh then, an early bedtime.
Of course, since I worked overtime and pushed myself too hard, the usual slide from energy on Monday to exhaustion on Friday has taken place much more intensely than usual. Today, for example, I slept in forty minutes, drank half a pot of coffee before the end of my first hour at the office, endured the bizarre combination of physical hype and mental comatoxicity that followed, developed a foul mood, stared glassy-eyed at the television over lunch, and dragged around for the rest of the day. I accomplished what I needed to, but it required every ounce of will just to exist in the present.
Well. Tonight I plan to absorb more episodes of Boomtown, which Eigh Ann loaned me, and which I’m mesmerically enjoying, over a rapidly assembled Everything Salad which requires little energy (mine OR the stove’s) and therefore radiates no additional heat. I plan also to abolish stress vibes by petting the cat, who has been more then usually affectionate – last night he took up his place on the ottoman and slept with an enormous happy smile on his feline face, stretching out every now and then so as just, delicately, to brace his paws on my foot.
And then, oh then, an early bedtime.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
just a little too much
There are time when nothing exists but work. This is one of those times. Work consumes every aspect of my life. Lately I've been having two kinds of dreams: one wherein I accomplish everything on my task list and have the office in shining flawless order (and then wake up and pout when I realize it was a dream), and the other wherein I can get nothing done and it's basically an extension of my actual days and I wake up with my fists clenched under the pillow.
I have to admit, I don't always mind. When something in my relational life collapses, it's always good to hurl myself into my work. I love and hate the arrival of five o'clock, because I get to take a break...and I also have no idea what to do with myself. Times like these remind me of all my show weeks in college theater, where everything is a catastrophe and the world is COMING TO AN END AND WHERE THE F--K IS THAT BLUSHER AND WHY CAN'T ANYONE MAKE THEIR CALL TIME AND IF I HEAR THAT STUPID SONG ONE MORE TIME I'M GOING TO KILL THE STAR OF THE SHOW. And yet it was the very head-cleaving stress that was part of the enjoyment of doing theater. Everything, not just the show, was extremely dramatic. Yielding to (and exacerbating) the slightest emotion held a savage catharsis that made the whole thing almost grossly therapeutic.
So with times at work like these. And it's good to feel that I'm finally getting something done.
But I'd like a little balance. Lately I just don't know how to relax.
On a musical note, I would like to highlight two songs that I love for their base lines. Give me an interesting, mobile, creative base line any day. Something you can feel intelligent blasting out your car window. For this, I recommend Josh Ritter's "The Golden Age of Radio" (which has searing lyrics), and Bright Eyes' "Classic Cars" (which just hits me in the pit of the stomach, I don't know exactly why; but the final variation on the chorus is amazing).
I have to admit, I don't always mind. When something in my relational life collapses, it's always good to hurl myself into my work. I love and hate the arrival of five o'clock, because I get to take a break...and I also have no idea what to do with myself. Times like these remind me of all my show weeks in college theater, where everything is a catastrophe and the world is COMING TO AN END AND WHERE THE F--K IS THAT BLUSHER AND WHY CAN'T ANYONE MAKE THEIR CALL TIME AND IF I HEAR THAT STUPID SONG ONE MORE TIME I'M GOING TO KILL THE STAR OF THE SHOW. And yet it was the very head-cleaving stress that was part of the enjoyment of doing theater. Everything, not just the show, was extremely dramatic. Yielding to (and exacerbating) the slightest emotion held a savage catharsis that made the whole thing almost grossly therapeutic.
So with times at work like these. And it's good to feel that I'm finally getting something done.
But I'd like a little balance. Lately I just don't know how to relax.
On a musical note, I would like to highlight two songs that I love for their base lines. Give me an interesting, mobile, creative base line any day. Something you can feel intelligent blasting out your car window. For this, I recommend Josh Ritter's "The Golden Age of Radio" (which has searing lyrics), and Bright Eyes' "Classic Cars" (which just hits me in the pit of the stomach, I don't know exactly why; but the final variation on the chorus is amazing).
Thursday, June 05, 2008
hrmph.
Crazy stupid day. Work chaotic. I don't even remember what I did today, but I know there wasn't enough of me to do it.
Sometimes I think eight arms are totally wasted on the octopus.
Sometimes I think eight arms are totally wasted on the octopus.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
escapades in the kitchen: burgers
One of the best things about warm weather is grilling.
It's just so OPPRESSIVE cooking in the kitchen when the weather turns hot -- even more so if, like me, you have a small kitchen with less ventilation than a tomb. Besides which, there's really no comparison between looking out a window and being outside the window. (Get me Out of Doors in summer, as much as possible -- and one of the best assets of my house is its wide, gracious covered front porch, where I can sit in comfort even in a downpour.)
Yesterday, feeling an aversion to the indoors and a distinct laziness about having to fiddle with stovetop knobs and run up the indoor temperature, I bought a couple pounds of ground beef and went to work making hamburgers.
(Now, one thing any of my readers must realize is that I. Love. Meat. Beef, pork, lamb, venison, poultry, fish -- I love it all. I will occasionally go vegeterian for a short period of time, because it feels lighter, but on the whole I enjoy using my incisors, eyeteeth and canines for their intended purpose.)
I decided to try something a little different from my usual method of seasoning the outside of the burger; this time, I thought, I'd season it all the way through.
There are no real measurements, and working with raw meat is always interesting because you don't know what "to taste" means until after you've cooked it. I recommend going with your instincts. Here's what I put in:
- seasoned salt
- garlic powder
- onion powder
- ground black pepper
- ground red pepper
- ground cumin
- Worcestershire sauce
- sherry vinegar
I placed the ground beef (80/20 -- lean beef, unfortunately, doesn't make very good burgers; the fat makes the flavor) in a large mixing bowl, added all seasonings generously, until I could start to smell it (meaning it was quite well seasoned, since the smell of raw meat is a bit overwhelming), and mixed everything together by hand. The rest was as usual: form into patties, season the tops with a little more Worcestershire sauce, and grill.
I found that I could make about eight burgers out of the two pounds of ground beef. Being inordinately indolent after work, I decided to vacuum seal and freeze the leftover patties individually -- that way all I have to do is throw one in the fridge in the morning, and throw it on the grill when I get home from work.
And doing it all that way is a LOT cheaper than buying the premade burger patties in the store.
Plus the flavor of the meat and the mixed-in seasoning was EXCELLENT. The burger barely needed condiments.
It's just so OPPRESSIVE cooking in the kitchen when the weather turns hot -- even more so if, like me, you have a small kitchen with less ventilation than a tomb. Besides which, there's really no comparison between looking out a window and being outside the window. (Get me Out of Doors in summer, as much as possible -- and one of the best assets of my house is its wide, gracious covered front porch, where I can sit in comfort even in a downpour.)
Yesterday, feeling an aversion to the indoors and a distinct laziness about having to fiddle with stovetop knobs and run up the indoor temperature, I bought a couple pounds of ground beef and went to work making hamburgers.
(Now, one thing any of my readers must realize is that I. Love. Meat. Beef, pork, lamb, venison, poultry, fish -- I love it all. I will occasionally go vegeterian for a short period of time, because it feels lighter, but on the whole I enjoy using my incisors, eyeteeth and canines for their intended purpose.)
I decided to try something a little different from my usual method of seasoning the outside of the burger; this time, I thought, I'd season it all the way through.
There are no real measurements, and working with raw meat is always interesting because you don't know what "to taste" means until after you've cooked it. I recommend going with your instincts. Here's what I put in:
- seasoned salt
- garlic powder
- onion powder
- ground black pepper
- ground red pepper
- ground cumin
- Worcestershire sauce
- sherry vinegar
I placed the ground beef (80/20 -- lean beef, unfortunately, doesn't make very good burgers; the fat makes the flavor) in a large mixing bowl, added all seasonings generously, until I could start to smell it (meaning it was quite well seasoned, since the smell of raw meat is a bit overwhelming), and mixed everything together by hand. The rest was as usual: form into patties, season the tops with a little more Worcestershire sauce, and grill.
I found that I could make about eight burgers out of the two pounds of ground beef. Being inordinately indolent after work, I decided to vacuum seal and freeze the leftover patties individually -- that way all I have to do is throw one in the fridge in the morning, and throw it on the grill when I get home from work.
And doing it all that way is a LOT cheaper than buying the premade burger patties in the store.
Plus the flavor of the meat and the mixed-in seasoning was EXCELLENT. The burger barely needed condiments.
we can only
I love the beginning of summer.
It has finally reached the point where even rainy days hold warmth, and that muggy haze which will torment us later on, but which I absolutely welcome right now.
Everything smells like steamed clover today -- I think the smell of clover and the taste of peaches are the essence of summer. And summer in Michigan is quite a thing to behold -- everything seems to radiate joy. Everywhere you go there are fresh fruit and vegetable stands, more beaches than can be counted, hand-dipped ice cream shops, green things, sun-baked fields, blue skies, and more sunshine than a person reasonably knows how to handle.
And for reasons perhaps not inexplicable, my musical tastes return to bluegrass in summer, particularly Gillian Welch. I think the thought of sitting on a porch, or at a campfire, or on the beach, strumming a guitar and singing simple songs of the Americana tradition holds a magnetic appeal.
I MUST learn the guitar. Since at present I can't afford actual lessons, the next best option is to teach myself -- a trip to Borders hovers in the near future. I pulled out my guitar on my lunch break this afternoon and tuned it for the first time in months (poor guitar). I'm even looking forward to the blisters on my fingertips.
Annnd Emmylou is releasing a new album in six days! Absolutely splendid.
It has finally reached the point where even rainy days hold warmth, and that muggy haze which will torment us later on, but which I absolutely welcome right now.
Everything smells like steamed clover today -- I think the smell of clover and the taste of peaches are the essence of summer. And summer in Michigan is quite a thing to behold -- everything seems to radiate joy. Everywhere you go there are fresh fruit and vegetable stands, more beaches than can be counted, hand-dipped ice cream shops, green things, sun-baked fields, blue skies, and more sunshine than a person reasonably knows how to handle.
And for reasons perhaps not inexplicable, my musical tastes return to bluegrass in summer, particularly Gillian Welch. I think the thought of sitting on a porch, or at a campfire, or on the beach, strumming a guitar and singing simple songs of the Americana tradition holds a magnetic appeal.
I MUST learn the guitar. Since at present I can't afford actual lessons, the next best option is to teach myself -- a trip to Borders hovers in the near future. I pulled out my guitar on my lunch break this afternoon and tuned it for the first time in months (poor guitar). I'm even looking forward to the blisters on my fingertips.
Annnd Emmylou is releasing a new album in six days! Absolutely splendid.
Monday, June 02, 2008
"I have a new mission. It's called getting a life."
Updates:
1. Spine of Satan. I have this interesting condition. An extra (sixth) lumbar vertebra. Whereas the average homo sapiens has 206 bones in his/her body, I have 207. Cool, right? I'm the next phase in human evolution.
If that's the case, though, then the human race is slowly devolving. This extra bone is cracked. It was discovered when I fell down a flight of stairs at the age of sixteen. Suddenly pain like I'd never experienced radiated from a central spot just above my tailbone, and wouldn't stop (about 20% of the people who have an extra vertebra, I was told, have this series of cracks in the bone. No one knows why. About 5%, I was told further, experience pain from it. I have since concluded that I must be the extreme of all things). I wore a back brace for months. (Ugly. Oh, it was ugly. I had to wear boy's jeans because the brace eliminated my hips. I felt like Frankenstein.) I took Lortab. Nothing availed.
Of its own, however, my back began to improve. I had to stop horseback riding, which disappointed but didn't hurt me too badly, as I was a bit old for camp, which was the only place where I could indulge this favorite pasttime. I had to be careful of my movements and had restricted activities in gym class (which I didn't mind in the least). But the pain went away.
Until college, when driving the hour and a half home sitting in one position began forcing it to protest. I have since learned to pack a couple of sweatshirts and a pillow for long car trips, so that I can give it support and change sitting positions minutely. I also learned to take periodic breaks to walk around and shake it out a little.
Well, it had improved so much that I foolishly drove the eight hours back to Michigan from my sister's home last week with only one stop.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I haven't experienced this level of pain in years. I spent the weekend crippling around like a little old lady, moaning and hissing and gritting my teeth and shuffling along and gingerly easing myself into and out of chairs and sleeping with a foam pillow under my back to give it more support at night. Grr.
It's gotten to the point where I'm irritated with my body. Pain is distracting. I can't even carry files around at work. And the shadows under my eyes are no longer their normal purplish color, but actual grey.
My doctor is calling in some painkillers for me. Hopefully this phase will pass, and I will be humbly reminded that my human limitations have not evaporated.
2. Lessons Learned. I am 99% certain that my status as a single gal has been reinstated. (I love the Break-Up by Silence method. Just love it. No, wait, I hate it. C'mon, dude, it's so much easier to get rid of a loose tooth with one quick painful jerk, rather than wiggle at it like a dog worrying a bone for hours. Just get it over with and leave me without nagging questions.) I haven't heard from CB in over a week, which forced me to conclude that I wouldn't be hearing from him anytime soon. Also people in this small town who stopped talking to me while I was seeing him are now on speaking terms with me again. Yay for the grapevine wherein the subject of the gossip is the last to hear it.
It wasn't entirely his fault, just as it wasn't entirely mine. The problem with dating men who have no affiliation with faith or the church primarily concerns sexual mores: Even decent men, with good work ethics and good people ethics, have no clue what to do with a girl like me. It's not a source of anger for them, but pure bewilderment, and this strange and mythical specimen of female becomes too puzzling and too much work, especially when they find out that there's NO WAY they're going to "get any" from her, and that she's absurdly innocent in today's basely informed culture. (I'm learning, though, how not to make life more difficult for men; I've unwittingly done so several times over -- so the good thing about the failed attempt with CB is that I'm carrying away ways to avoid this sort of thing happening again, and, as I read in a truly crappy book somewhere, "All knowledge is worth having." It's going to take a few days to get over feeling a little sad about it. I liked him a lot. But the sadness will pass; it always does.)
Also, as Boss-Man says, who I am comes clearly to the forefront within a week or so, which drives them to stay or go (so far, always "go"). This is good, he says, in that what takes some people months to conclude -- that a relationship isn't going to work -- takes me no longer than two weeks, so I've never actually wasted my time on anyone.
I've concluded that I'm not very good at this casual dating thing. I'm going to continue to try it, because I see no other clear alternative, but the time, I think, has come to reexamine and readjust my priorities.
3. Getting a life. The new top priority is learning to live life to the fullest. Because historically my present has tended to be painful, and because I do not believe in living in the past, I have habitually lived in the future. However, the future has not yet arrived, and the present is the means to getting there, and if I don't live in the now, I'll never live in the future either. I am a free adult, with free choices, and great strength of will. I therefore choose (and must reenact the choice many times daily) to love my life, and to seek out those things which will enrich and enlarge it.
I've been moving in this direction anyway, only, out of force of habit, I'd been phrasing it in the negative: I will no longer do things out of self-pity (or desperation). The positive, however, is much more powerful, with many more options: I will live my life to the fullest. I've been asking myself, throughout the course of the last few days, What can I do to live to the fullest right now? The answers are often delightfully simple. Living to the fullest on a Saturday morning usually means drinking coffee and journaling on the porch, for example.
Long-term choices have yet to manifest themselves clearly; I'm not sure what I want in the next year, or ten years, etc. But I don't think I'll focus much on that. There are enough short-term choices to attend to. And somehow, making choices of a full life are rendered much easier in summer.
4. Sun Therapy. I can't get enough sunshine. After such an endless winter, and such a slow, cold spring, now that eighty degrees have finally begun to make a daily appearance, I greedily soak in all the UV and Vitamin D that I can. Two years ago I suffered a blistering case of sun poisoning, and have since eschewed the sun's direct rays, opting instead to maintain a lily-white, nineteenth-century-lady's appearance. This year, however, I have decided to get as brown as I can. Taking a tip from my sister, I have purchased various products to obtain a strategically even tan, and kicked off Monday with a bit of a sunbathe in the backyard during my lunch hour. It's amazingly therapeutic: I return to the craze of the office environment afterward with a Zen-like aura of tranquility. The slow, contented lassitude of having lain under the sun's caress while doing nothing is pleasantly slow to wear off.
5. Proceed with Caution. I don't understand the strange dearth of girls in this town who could be my friends. And I've already dated all three of this town's reasonably eligible men. Which leaves the rest: an overwhelming majority of older and/or married men...who all love me.
This is irritating on a number of fronts. The first and most significant is that I enjoy the company and conversation of men, so if I run into these gentlemen singly or in packs while I am about town, I stop to chat; but lately they've been inviting me to get-togethers and cookouts and outdoor activities like horseback riding, and I feel a strong reticence in regard to their invitations. It's not just the semi-ribald banter that we occasionally toss back and forth (and which I try to quell as wittily as possible); it's that, as far as the social events are concerned, a.) I have no idea whether or not their wives and kids would be there -- if they were, I'd be a little, but only a little, more willing to accept; I'm not going to be the single onion ring at a sausage party, if you know what I mean; but I just don't know; and b.) there is a swimming pool involved, and beer, which means bathing-suit-clad me admist drunk men, which spells disaster. No thanks. But the invitations from the single older men to do one-on-one activities like farm tours and horseback riding spell just as much disaster -- and I've reached the age now where, even if I had a female friend to bring along as a safety net, it would still be stupid, and might look even worse.
And with the afore-mentioned dearth of single women my age in town, the only potential social life I have is in these inadvisable situations.
Humph. I smile and dodge their questions as gracefully as possible, that I might still be able to chat with these gentlemen in public, although I'm becoming leery of doing even that. I don't want to encourage either idle ideas in masculine minds, or idle ideas in other heads which contain even idler tongues.
This is where I get a little annoyed with The Way Things Are, and also with CB. First of all, if I were still dating him, some of these men wouldn't be talking to me at all, thanks to the small town politics which are beginning to resemble an ant war. Second, the ones left (one of these older men is his father) would be able to talk to me within a specific context -- as CB's girlfriend -- and even though I would still refuse to be alone with them, I could hang out with them in more social situations, because I'd attend the events with CB. Third, I'd simply have more to do. CB is very much involved in the town's civic life, and there'd be a lot of work and a lot of fun stuff to be involved in, particularly in summer. (All of this is predicated on the fact that I like him; if I didn't, I wouldn't waste his time, energy, or potential emotions using him for the contingent social benefits.)
But oh well. A girl can't change The Way Things Are, nor can she force the affections of any man by any wiles (which I despise) or strength of will, however ironic it seems that, rather like cats at a dinner party who bolt straight for the one cat-hater in the room, I am simultaneously the cat lover on the sidelines thoroughly left out (when it comes to the men I'd actually consider dating), and the cat hater trying to throw off unretracted claws (when it comes to the men who are completely inappropriate) and be left in peace.
It's a funny old world.
1. Spine of Satan. I have this interesting condition. An extra (sixth) lumbar vertebra. Whereas the average homo sapiens has 206 bones in his/her body, I have 207. Cool, right? I'm the next phase in human evolution.
If that's the case, though, then the human race is slowly devolving. This extra bone is cracked. It was discovered when I fell down a flight of stairs at the age of sixteen. Suddenly pain like I'd never experienced radiated from a central spot just above my tailbone, and wouldn't stop (about 20% of the people who have an extra vertebra, I was told, have this series of cracks in the bone. No one knows why. About 5%, I was told further, experience pain from it. I have since concluded that I must be the extreme of all things). I wore a back brace for months. (Ugly. Oh, it was ugly. I had to wear boy's jeans because the brace eliminated my hips. I felt like Frankenstein.) I took Lortab. Nothing availed.
Of its own, however, my back began to improve. I had to stop horseback riding, which disappointed but didn't hurt me too badly, as I was a bit old for camp, which was the only place where I could indulge this favorite pasttime. I had to be careful of my movements and had restricted activities in gym class (which I didn't mind in the least). But the pain went away.
Until college, when driving the hour and a half home sitting in one position began forcing it to protest. I have since learned to pack a couple of sweatshirts and a pillow for long car trips, so that I can give it support and change sitting positions minutely. I also learned to take periodic breaks to walk around and shake it out a little.
Well, it had improved so much that I foolishly drove the eight hours back to Michigan from my sister's home last week with only one stop.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I haven't experienced this level of pain in years. I spent the weekend crippling around like a little old lady, moaning and hissing and gritting my teeth and shuffling along and gingerly easing myself into and out of chairs and sleeping with a foam pillow under my back to give it more support at night. Grr.
It's gotten to the point where I'm irritated with my body. Pain is distracting. I can't even carry files around at work. And the shadows under my eyes are no longer their normal purplish color, but actual grey.
My doctor is calling in some painkillers for me. Hopefully this phase will pass, and I will be humbly reminded that my human limitations have not evaporated.
2. Lessons Learned. I am 99% certain that my status as a single gal has been reinstated. (I love the Break-Up by Silence method. Just love it. No, wait, I hate it. C'mon, dude, it's so much easier to get rid of a loose tooth with one quick painful jerk, rather than wiggle at it like a dog worrying a bone for hours. Just get it over with and leave me without nagging questions.) I haven't heard from CB in over a week, which forced me to conclude that I wouldn't be hearing from him anytime soon. Also people in this small town who stopped talking to me while I was seeing him are now on speaking terms with me again. Yay for the grapevine wherein the subject of the gossip is the last to hear it.
It wasn't entirely his fault, just as it wasn't entirely mine. The problem with dating men who have no affiliation with faith or the church primarily concerns sexual mores: Even decent men, with good work ethics and good people ethics, have no clue what to do with a girl like me. It's not a source of anger for them, but pure bewilderment, and this strange and mythical specimen of female becomes too puzzling and too much work, especially when they find out that there's NO WAY they're going to "get any" from her, and that she's absurdly innocent in today's basely informed culture. (I'm learning, though, how not to make life more difficult for men; I've unwittingly done so several times over -- so the good thing about the failed attempt with CB is that I'm carrying away ways to avoid this sort of thing happening again, and, as I read in a truly crappy book somewhere, "All knowledge is worth having." It's going to take a few days to get over feeling a little sad about it. I liked him a lot. But the sadness will pass; it always does.)
Also, as Boss-Man says, who I am comes clearly to the forefront within a week or so, which drives them to stay or go (so far, always "go"). This is good, he says, in that what takes some people months to conclude -- that a relationship isn't going to work -- takes me no longer than two weeks, so I've never actually wasted my time on anyone.
I've concluded that I'm not very good at this casual dating thing. I'm going to continue to try it, because I see no other clear alternative, but the time, I think, has come to reexamine and readjust my priorities.
3. Getting a life. The new top priority is learning to live life to the fullest. Because historically my present has tended to be painful, and because I do not believe in living in the past, I have habitually lived in the future. However, the future has not yet arrived, and the present is the means to getting there, and if I don't live in the now, I'll never live in the future either. I am a free adult, with free choices, and great strength of will. I therefore choose (and must reenact the choice many times daily) to love my life, and to seek out those things which will enrich and enlarge it.
I've been moving in this direction anyway, only, out of force of habit, I'd been phrasing it in the negative: I will no longer do things out of self-pity (or desperation). The positive, however, is much more powerful, with many more options: I will live my life to the fullest. I've been asking myself, throughout the course of the last few days, What can I do to live to the fullest right now? The answers are often delightfully simple. Living to the fullest on a Saturday morning usually means drinking coffee and journaling on the porch, for example.
Long-term choices have yet to manifest themselves clearly; I'm not sure what I want in the next year, or ten years, etc. But I don't think I'll focus much on that. There are enough short-term choices to attend to. And somehow, making choices of a full life are rendered much easier in summer.
4. Sun Therapy. I can't get enough sunshine. After such an endless winter, and such a slow, cold spring, now that eighty degrees have finally begun to make a daily appearance, I greedily soak in all the UV and Vitamin D that I can. Two years ago I suffered a blistering case of sun poisoning, and have since eschewed the sun's direct rays, opting instead to maintain a lily-white, nineteenth-century-lady's appearance. This year, however, I have decided to get as brown as I can. Taking a tip from my sister, I have purchased various products to obtain a strategically even tan, and kicked off Monday with a bit of a sunbathe in the backyard during my lunch hour. It's amazingly therapeutic: I return to the craze of the office environment afterward with a Zen-like aura of tranquility. The slow, contented lassitude of having lain under the sun's caress while doing nothing is pleasantly slow to wear off.
5. Proceed with Caution. I don't understand the strange dearth of girls in this town who could be my friends. And I've already dated all three of this town's reasonably eligible men. Which leaves the rest: an overwhelming majority of older and/or married men...who all love me.
This is irritating on a number of fronts. The first and most significant is that I enjoy the company and conversation of men, so if I run into these gentlemen singly or in packs while I am about town, I stop to chat; but lately they've been inviting me to get-togethers and cookouts and outdoor activities like horseback riding, and I feel a strong reticence in regard to their invitations. It's not just the semi-ribald banter that we occasionally toss back and forth (and which I try to quell as wittily as possible); it's that, as far as the social events are concerned, a.) I have no idea whether or not their wives and kids would be there -- if they were, I'd be a little, but only a little, more willing to accept; I'm not going to be the single onion ring at a sausage party, if you know what I mean; but I just don't know; and b.) there is a swimming pool involved, and beer, which means bathing-suit-clad me admist drunk men, which spells disaster. No thanks. But the invitations from the single older men to do one-on-one activities like farm tours and horseback riding spell just as much disaster -- and I've reached the age now where, even if I had a female friend to bring along as a safety net, it would still be stupid, and might look even worse.
And with the afore-mentioned dearth of single women my age in town, the only potential social life I have is in these inadvisable situations.
Humph. I smile and dodge their questions as gracefully as possible, that I might still be able to chat with these gentlemen in public, although I'm becoming leery of doing even that. I don't want to encourage either idle ideas in masculine minds, or idle ideas in other heads which contain even idler tongues.
This is where I get a little annoyed with The Way Things Are, and also with CB. First of all, if I were still dating him, some of these men wouldn't be talking to me at all, thanks to the small town politics which are beginning to resemble an ant war. Second, the ones left (one of these older men is his father) would be able to talk to me within a specific context -- as CB's girlfriend -- and even though I would still refuse to be alone with them, I could hang out with them in more social situations, because I'd attend the events with CB. Third, I'd simply have more to do. CB is very much involved in the town's civic life, and there'd be a lot of work and a lot of fun stuff to be involved in, particularly in summer. (All of this is predicated on the fact that I like him; if I didn't, I wouldn't waste his time, energy, or potential emotions using him for the contingent social benefits.)
But oh well. A girl can't change The Way Things Are, nor can she force the affections of any man by any wiles (which I despise) or strength of will, however ironic it seems that, rather like cats at a dinner party who bolt straight for the one cat-hater in the room, I am simultaneously the cat lover on the sidelines thoroughly left out (when it comes to the men I'd actually consider dating), and the cat hater trying to throw off unretracted claws (when it comes to the men who are completely inappropriate) and be left in peace.
It's a funny old world.
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