Monthly Archives: January 2025
If You Weren’t a Writer…
What would you be?
An interviewer asked Lorrie Moore of all people this question:
Interviewer: If you weren’t a writer, what would you be instead?
Lorrie Moore: I’d be a bad singer or an okay waitress. But I would undoubtedly be writing in my spare time. Just as I do now. Writing’s natural place is as a passionate side hustle.
I like what she said. Writing has been my passionate side hustle for the last thirty years, but it’s also been my actual hustle. I have been writing for a living–a corporate poet of sorts!–since 2003. I’ve done other work in addition to the writing for my company, to be clear. I have prepped and packed and laid out and edited, I have managed projects and print runs. I managed press placements for years, which was really, really demanding and really, really fun. For the past eleven years, I have been primarily focused on copywriting.
Its been good work, writing for a company. It doesn’t use up my creativity. It spurs it, because sometimes, when I’m churning up some romance copy for the side of a box or a hangtag, my longing to write something of my own is so piercing that I think I might cry. So I come home, and I do that.
But what would I do if I hadn’t written for a living ? That’s easy. I’d have been a realtor.
Why? Reason One: I love to sell!
When I found myself a single mother of three with a high school diploma and a pressing need for employment, I went to work at the mall selling things. I worked at a seasonal Christmas store first, then went on to women’s plus-size clothes. And I loved it. If you hate selling things, this won’t make sense: There is something rich and satisfying to be found where merchandise meets customers. I am good at making the match. I don’t want to sell something to someone who doesn’t want it. I want it to be right.
But you don’t make any money working part time at the mall, and I needed benefits and a retirement plan, so I went back to school, finished my degree, and became employable at a rate a little higher than minimum wage.
Side note: I think I’d have been great at selling cars, too. My South Dakota dad sold farm implements and cars and he was excellent at it. My facility for sales was inherited from him.
Reason Two: I love homes.
I am fascinated by homes. Fascinated by how they are laid out, when they were built, how they work for the people who live in them. I’d have loved to find just the right home for someone, to scour the listing and make the match. I have a great nose for a deal. And as a side benefit, I could go into people’s homes all day long for a living, and see their furniture, what they hung on their walls, how they lived in their own sacred space of home.
That’s the problem with the modern trend of home staging. It removes the personality of the owner by design. I get that from a sales perspective, but for a snoop like me, it’s a real letdown. This is general curiosity, mind you. I am just as curious about the homes of friends. I walk in and start my inspection, gleaning what I can from what they hang and where.
Do I have regrets?
Maybe. I’d have made so much more MONEY if I’d spent my career selling things instead of writing things. But I’m in the home stretch, here. It’s a little late for regrets when you’ve signed up for Medicare.
I am what I am. Until, in just a few months, I am retired.
MLK day
Maybe one way to get through the time ahead is to remember truth and beauty.
Here’s something true and beautiful for you, for all of us, for today.
Kris Kristofferson died, and I’ve been writing.
An idol has fallen
I try not to acknowledge how long I’ve continued with serious crushes on famous people, but with the passing of Kris Kristofferson, I have to own up. I found his face, twang, rangy movements and blue eyes irresistible. I am so sorry to see him gone.
I saw him in concert only once, in 1979 in Missoula at the university. You can read about it right here: https://www.concertarchives.org/concerts/willie-nelson-kris-kristofferson-don-bowman
The clip on that page is terrible and has nothing to do with the show I watched while standing next to a friend named Dan Fuquay, beaming with embarrassed adoration when Kris took the stage.
I’ll leave discussion of his music to my betters. This is a great article about his influence on music and movies.
A Star is Born
This movie isn’t perfect, but he is. I don’t suppose it was much of a stretch for him to play a self-destructive rock star. I watched it again after watching the Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga version a few years ago, and was shocked at how well his part of it holds up.
Is Bradley Cooper a better actor? Of course he is.
Is his the better performance? Debatable.
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea
Yesterday I tracked down another movie I remembered from the seventies, rentable on Prime for 3.99. Or you can watch it for free on YouTube, but I have no idea if it includes the explicit parts.
It’s a disturbing movie full of adolescent anger, voyeurism, and animal abuse. The boy is part of a gang headed by a budding psychopath, and the ending is terrible. The reviews were bewildering and bad.
Still, Kris Kristofferson was in it, and according to the scandalized reviews, he was naked.
I saw it in the theater with Brother Steve. BAD IDEA. We were both uncomfortable to be sitting beside a sibling during the racy parts, but we handled it with dignity. The wildly sexy parts seem almost tame in comparison to today’s offerings. I can’t handle this kind of movie score anymore. It’s as ham-fisted as Sarah Miles’ faked orgasms.
Kris delivers such a natural, unaffected, effortless performance. He’s doing so in a movie full of British actors who are Acting With A Capital A. So it’s jarring. But I watched it anyway, transfixed by those blue eyes, fast-forwarding through the parts I couldn’t tolerate.
Things I didn’t know
When news of his death broke, I read a few articles, but this one is the best:
I knew Kris Kristofferson was a Rhodes scholar. Of course I knew that, I always track down the facts of my celebrity crushes. What I didn’t know was how deeply the works of William Blake and other poets affected his songwriting.
Go on, read the Poetry Foundation article. It is so much more interesting than my personal blatherings about a gifted man with haunted blue eyes.
Great photos here:
Things we used to say
Refreshing the Vocab
When our grandson moved in with us, I told my husband that it was my intention to have him talking like a sixty year-old before he moved out. I wanted him to bust out sayings like, “whatever floats your boat” and “a good gig if you can get it” and “different strokes for different folks”–all prime examples of late-Boomer axioms that slip out of my mouth now and then. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, “No one Rides For Free: Gas, Grass, or Ass.” Unfortunately this dates to the 1970s and I remember hearing it and thinking it was funny when I was a young teen. These were counter-culture, hippy-inflected sayings. They were cool at one time. They no longer are.
If you’re wondering, my grandson has not picked up any of my old-lady sayings. I have a vocabulary that tends toward ridiculously erudite, so he’s more likely to bust out with a highly specific adjective than a long-haired hippy maxim. But this has made me think about cultural reference points, and how they become dated without our even noticing. Here are a few things that I grew up hearing and saying that were teetering on the brink of obsolescence in my own youth. I think almost no one says these anymore.
Sherman Tank
When you wanted to convey something’s strength, its ability to withstand mortar fire, you said it was built like a Sherman tank. These were WWII tanks that were so incredibly well-made, they were used into the 1970s. Sherman was, of course, a general in the civil war.
You could also insult someone by saying they were built like a Sherman Tank, especially if that person was a woman. This was replaced with Brick House. The funny thing is, Sherman Tank was pejorative, and Brick House was a compliment. But it also teeters on complete obsolescence despite that wonderful song.
Anything related to the Titanic
I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, and the maxims that used it as an example were many as I grew up. When something failed, it sank like the Titanic. People wasting time on a hopeless endeavor were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. There were iceberg-related Titanic sayings, too. This link is actual footage of the actual ship from the Library of Congress: https://www.britannica.com/video/titanic-shipwreck-disaster/-281894
And this Titanic stuff would probably have gone the way of most of these old sayings, except for a little movie that came out in 1997 and reminded the world of this massive ocean liner. But that movie is old enough that “Jack…Jack…” will soon be a joke that old people make, and young ones don’t understand.
Pony Express
Faster than the Pony Express! Yeehaw! The Pony Express was a wild ride, and a short one. This messenger service took ten days to get a letter from Missouri to California. Riders rode a succession of horses in breakneck relays, and it became synonymous with traveling at great speed. I was born 100 years after the Pony Express began, and it only ran for eighteen months. But it lived as a legend and was still a common saying until I was around forty. So when you’d say something got there faster the Pony Express, it was like overnight Amazon shipping that arrives before dark on the day you order it. This link will take you to a PBS video about modern day re-enactors that’s so interesting!
https://www.pbs.org/video/pony-express-y65bzb
Fort Knox, The Denver Mint
Fort Knox implied safety, guardedness. “She keeps her jewelry locked up like Fort Knox.” The actual Fort Knox is part of the gold bullion reserve, where we supposedly have enough gold bullion to back our currency. But of course the USA no longer operates on a gold reserve, which does not alarm me. All currency is an agreement, including the value of gold, which is just a metal. It’s only valuable because we all agreed at some point that it was valuable. But if you tell someone under twenty that a place is as safe as Fort Knox, they have no idea what you mean.
The Denver Mint is another currency-related example. There are two mints in America, one in Philadelphia and one in Denver. The mint is where they make money, so people would protest, “What am I, the Denver Mint?” or the like, like you were capable of printing more when you ran out. I wonder if our lessened use of paper and coin has something to do with our not using Fort Knox and Denver Mint anymore. We also no longer talk about being made of money, or money growing on trees.
Above the Fold, Page One, Front Page News, Extra-Extra!
All of these refer to papers. Real papers, the large size that folded in half. So if something was above the fold, it was the lead story, the hot news, the first listing on your Apple News app. But we all look at our phones now, and a large population gets their news such as it is from F*x, or read the crap links posted on Tw*X and mistake the sources as reliable. The idea of a newspaper is so quaint now, like the evening edition, or newsies in their knickerbockers and porkpie caps, running around exhorting people to get the latest for two bits (do young people even know that’s a quarter?).
Inquiring Minds Wanna Know
This is not a person, place or thing. This also doesn’t seem that old to me, but fifty-to-forty years ago it was a tagline for The National Enquirer. Until the 1990s, this was a way to say, “My interest is piqued.”
Now we just want “the tea.” Remember when we made fun of the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News? It was hilarious that anyone read those. They are a step up from what so many Americans are reading now.
Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett
These were heroes of the American West, and their names were synonymous with Westward Expansion. They had guns and cultural hegemony on their side. Also TV shows, which were dated and in reruns when I was a kid, but there was so little to watch that I occasionally watched them and therefore the theme songs live on in my lizard brain, never to be forgotten.
No one ever made a black and white TV series about Jim Bridger, who was a true mountain man. This is probably because he married a Native woman and took up the ways of the Natives, instead of engaging them in gunfights. Also, he didn’t have a coonskin cap to his name.
Billy the Kid, Al Capone, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde
These were the bad guys. Each was a symbol of criminal prowess in his/their time.
Billy the Kid was an old west outlaw. He was simply a name to me. When we were running around Claremont, SD with capguns playing cops and robbers, this was the bad guy name. I don’t think anyone young knows who he is now, even though have been more than fifty movies made about him, including a movie from the 1970s with a rare screen appearance by Bob Dylan. He was a killer and a thief, and he kept getting away, right up until he didn’t.
Dillinger and Capone were gangsters, known for riding on running boards and gunning down coppers. They had many movies made about them. Though they were always brought to justice, their fedoras and pinstripe suits, their instrument cases full of tommy guns, their sneering slang made them anti-heroes for decades. Kids still said “You dirty Rat” from one of these movies when I was a kid (except Edward G. Robinson never actually said that). The reference was already dated, but these things hang on, like the taint of criminality and the grudging admiration it secretly inspires. They were the Martin Shkrelis and the Crypto-Kings of their day.
Bonnie and Clyde were Depression-era outlaws on a crime spree. They were ruthless, heartless, low-class, shameless, but they captured the public imagination during the Depression and people rooted for them. They were played by two gorgeous actors (Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) in a landmark movie in the 1970s, which resuscitated their legend for another good chunk of years. I wonder if anyone knows who they are today, or cares. Let me tell you, if you haven’t seen it, the movie is a masterpiece.
There are a few criminals in danger of expiration – John David Hinkley, the Unabomber. I always wonder when DB Cooper will lose his last hold on the American imagination.
Mata Hari/Tokyo Rose
These were spy women. I didn’t know exactly who they were as a child, but these names lingered in the public consciousness, carrying the waft of sexual temptation that would lead to treason. From the way in which people used their names, I understood that they were crafty and evil. Mata Hari was an exotic dancer and spy in WWI. Tokyo Rose was the name given to a group of Japanese women who went on the airwaves to gently encouraging Allied soldiers to give up in WWII. I can understand how Tokyo Rose lingered in my youth, because WWII had only been over for fifteen years when I was born. But how did Mata Hari hang on? It had to be all the movies. I mean, a sexy stripper spy?
No wonder she inspired a popular video game!
Keep On Truckin’
My point is, things hang on, right until they don’t. The cool hippy slogans of my time are ancient history today, but they still slip in here now and then. Someday they will lose all meaning, replaced with Skibidi and Rizz, which will too sink into the sea of obscurity.
Like the Titanic.
What Am I? DNA has some clues.
My English mother.
I grew up with a mother who decided she was English in her fifties. Through her mother’s side, she had traced her family roots back to the second sailing of the Mayflower. I suppose if Mom hadn’t been such a die-hard liberal, she might even have joined the DAR (she may have, for all I know). She’d visited Hartshorn House with great pride. There are Hartshorn houses in Providence RI and Vermont, but it was this one:
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1251959
Mom traveled England extensively. She and Dad enjoyed English-style B&Bs so much that they opened their own on Bainbridge Island (please note, this has been a private residence forever, so I can’t show it to you).
You can see the tile mural of the Canterbury pilgrims Dad installed over the fireplace in this photo – she bought it in Canterbury. You can also see some of the pink and white china of which she was so proud – my parents ate their meals off the Johnson Brothers pink castles every day. She also planted and tended (well, probably Dad did) a small English garden. Mom gave talks on the more impressive historic UK gardens she’d visited at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge.
Mom was English, through and through.
But…her sister was not.
The strange thing is, my aunt Elaine was Norwegian. She shared a passion for genealogy with my Great Aunt Christa. She’d done the research on their father’s side, and she may have even visited Norway. She paid attention to Scandinavian history and playfully incorporated it into her art.
She adored Poulsbo, a little town on the Kitsap Peninsula. She had two tile murals installed here; one of a dancing Norweigian couple, and one of five swans. Here is a short wayback newspaper article about the swan mural and my aunt, whose last name is misspelled here. Sadly, I can’t find a photo of the mural.
https://www.kitsapdailynews.com/news/a-homecoming-of-sorts-for-artist/
Here is another article about Aunt Elaine, but I think the drawing she referred to of her maternal grandmother makes no sense, as Grandma Foster was born in Kansas. On the paternal side, her grandmother was born in Yankton, South Dakota. So maybe she meant a great-grandmother–but if it was maternal, that’s the Mayflower side of the family.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-10-09-hm-43869-story.html
Anyway. Back to Me.
I have a complicated history when it comes to parentage. I was the second daughter born of a man and woman whom I understood to be German and English, respectively. His mother was born in Minnesota and raised in such a closed German society that she still spoke with a German accent. I found her daunting. I never met my paternal grandfather, who died with this father was young.
My parents divorced when I was six, and I only saw this original father a few times after that. When I was nine, my mother remarried, and at age 11, I was adopted by my stepdad, who became Dad. This is the father who raised me. He was half (I think) German and half Swedish. His mother was actually born in Sweden, and came over here when she was two. She had no accent, but her parents, my great grandparents, certainly did. Otto and Edith. They were charming people.
I envied my younger brother’s clear Swedish heritage. He also carries a trace of Genghis Khan DNA, which suits him, as does his clear path to a Viking heritage. I envied this. I love the Swedish aesthetic. I love the stave church where my parents had their wedding. Swedes were tall and strong and indomitable. I wanted to be Swedish so much.
DNA
So imagine my surprise as I have watched DNA unfold the story of my heritage. I am 40% German, but I am also 45% Scandinavian: 29% Norwegian, 12% Danish, 4% Swedish. When the test splits my DNA by parent, the 9% English I carry comes mostly from the paternal side, not the maternal (there were apparently French and English contributors to all that German heritage on my birth father’s side). There are a few other trace elements in my DNA – Scotland and Eastern Europe but really, I’m more Scandinavian than anything else.
I bought a test for my sister, who took one look at her results and said, “You got all the good stuff.” This bespeaks a general attitude of deprivation over any DNA reality. When we put our results side by side, we match exactly in heritage, if not percentages. Plus, she has French and Icelandic, of which I have neither. She got the cool stuff. But an older sister’s feeling of displacement by a younger sister…well, that is another post.
My DNA results are not life-changing.
I already go to Nordia House. We held my older brother’s memorial service there (he had a different father, but he still had to have a bunch of Norwegian in there from our “English” mother’s father). Nordia House is a Scandinavian cultural center. They have a yearly sale that yields treasures, and Christmas concerts with cookies. I enjoy occasional, expensive, delicious breakfasts at Broder Soder (I recommend the lost eggs or the lefse stack).
I’ve visited the Troll several times. I mean, how could you not?!
This does not make me Swedish. I do not have a home done in beautiful minimal Swedish decor. There is no Christmas aesthetic more beautiful than the Swedish, and my Christmases are all over the place. But when you add it all together, the Norwegian, the Swedish, the Danish, I am a bunch of Scandinavian. I’ll take it! When I push against the gorgeous carved wooden doors of this cultural center, I feel a boost of pride, knowing that, like my aunt, I belong here.
Godt nytt år to you all!