Posts in Category: musings
Some random thoughts while sick with Covid.
I have it again. So why don’t I read?
I have a stack of unread books by my bed that violates OSHA safety standards, and Covid. Again. You’d think I’d use this enforced sick/downtime to read, but my brain prefers television when I’m sick. I watched the entire season of Fallout yesterday, which is campy and gory and absorbing and gorgeous, despite the grossness. I have no idea what I’ll watch today.
I managed to expose my entire family on Thursday. So far, two are down with Covid. The two finished the exposure job by hosting a family BBQ yesterday (from which I stayed home, being sick) (and then tested myself) (and then you can imagine the rest).
I’m alone in my house.
The three other people who live here have scattered to avoid contagion. The backyard bunnies are my only companions right now. There are two, I think, though you really can’t be sure, because General Woundwort might be making then eat in shifts or whatever. They come out in the mornings and nibble away. They seem young to me because their movements are skittish and herky jerky. But they are rabbits. Aren’t rabbits always fearful and quick to scatter?
I’m alone, but cared for, as my husband brings necessary things to the front porch, as a good husband does. I breathlessly await my Paxlovid, sweet nectar of the Gods, bring on the bad mouth taste because it will make me stop barking like a seal and running like a faucet.
I know there are people out there who have never had Covid. I wonder what that would be like. I also wonder if they have it and just don’t test. When I was talking to the clinic today, the woman helping me told me that she worked in what was previously the Covid clinic. In 2020, they would get 6,000 calls per day. What a nightmare, and yet here we are, life as usual, carrying on. Just, Covid is part of it now and probably always will be.
Social Security
It finally kicked in, folks. I am officially a retiree. This means I received the propaganda email from the Social Security Administration telling me that the “Big Beautiful Bill” had eliminated taxes on my social security. Except it didn’t. So if you got that email and said “Whoo Hoo!” your celebration was premature. Especially if that’s your primary source of income. You can read about that here: Nope.
I also learned that in a canny and cunning move, the Republicans have set the huge cuts to Medicaid and rural hospitals out after the midterms. So. The many people who aren’t paying attention–and this is all so exhausting that I don’t blame anyone for not paying attention–will only get the bad news about their health care coverage AFTER they can vote out the people who made it happen. Tricky, tricky. I bet FOX news isn’t covering that part.
We have to keep paying attention to the right things.
But in this thicket of bad news, how do we sort through the distractions to find those right things? I mean, sure, it’s horrible that the government is building concentration camps in the USA again, but then there’s the assault on freedom of speech through presidential lawsuits intended to keep us ill-informed. Trump and Elon had their big messy public break-up, but the gutting of various key agencies is the real news, yes? Not the social media insults traded by the two largest egos in the Western world.
How do you choose what to read about, to care about, to despair over? I’d like to say this is death by a thousand paper cuts but in truth these are more like sledgehammer blows, aren’t they? With this full-on assault on America, which hits matter most?
The Paxlovid has arrived. I’m going to go watch something mindless on TV, and wait for the miracle of recovery while sucking on butter mints, the only thing that really cuts that taste.
Art Imitates Life. Kind of.
Sources of inspiration
One of the most baffling questions a writer is asked is, “Where do you get your ideas?” We are talking about inspiration, of course, which often boils down to imitation.
I was at a writer’s salon a couple of months ago. A very enthusiastic new member listened to me read a work in progress, a really short piece about a woman lying on the cement floor of her basement, hiding from her husband but in actuality hiding from this world we are living in.
We bring shorter, messier pieces to this salon. Nothing is very polished, unless it’s one of those rare poems or stories that flies through fingertips to keyboard and needs no revision. So I read this weird little piece about this young woman deciding whether or not to ever get up off the floor and face the world. When I was done, the enthusiastic new member asked, “Where on earth did you get that idea?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I think I babbled something about how the room/basement in question featured in a novel I’d written before (Gentry spends a lot of time in that room in book two) and for some reason I wanted to write about that room again. Which sounds strange but I think if we tracked back our inspirations we would mostly find strange things, yes?
As an example, I wrote a beautiful poem (that I can’t link to because it’s in a print journal ) inspired by a pdf about the types of grasses most commonly found in South Dakota. I was looking for names for my “real” job, from which I am retired, but as part of it I named products. I always scoured the internet searching for interesting ideas and found this pdf about grasses, and that inspired “Flyover Country.”
So I tried to explain to this man that this strange little room in the basement of a house (where I have never lived) in Oklahoma City (where I have never even visited) just wanted to be written about. Which invests the room with an animate agency that it certainly doesn’t possess, but I associate the weird little room with despair. I was feeling despair over the state of the world (still am btw), and this odd little story is what came out.
I think he thought I was crazy.
Anyway…
Some parts of my life do inspire my fiction, especially where my second divorce is concerned. I process through writing (if you read this blog, you know that) and I poured much of my own pain and grief into The Iris Files. I was completely broken by, not the divorce itself, but the long, desperate, painful years before the divorce, when I was presented with lists of ways I could improve everything about myself in order to avoid breaking up the family.
I think Iris said it best:
In retrospect, I think that the demands for change were simply a kindness on Hart’s part, a last chance, because he thought that after fourteen years, he owed me that. He was extending to me, as a matter of courtesy, the opportunity to become the woman he desired, in an attempt to save himself the trouble of a divorce and the expense of child support.
I was unable to accomplish the transformation.
Like Iris, I failed. I was unable to be anyone besides myself. Part of it was my own angry stubborn nature (go me!) and part of it was how widely the list varied from month-to-month. The list of changes I needed to make was extensive and inconsistent, based on whoever caught my ex-husband’s eye at the time. His eye was seemingly caught easily and often.
One of his suggestions was helicopter skiing (that’s in Iris). I should somehow become the kind of woman who wanted to helicopter ski. Cut my hair short, wear small pearl earrings, and crisp pleated khaki shorts. Get my nose fixed. Get a facelift (I was thirty). Take up tennis. Dye my hair blonde. Wear more jewelry.
Being treated as a remodeling project is demoralizing and dehumanizing. He often demanded that I go back to work full time. At what, I wondered? He suggested driving the city bus, delivering mail, or working for UPS. “You won’t be happy until you see me in a uniform, will you,” I said. “You think you’re too good for those jobs,” he answered in an accusing tone. “I do,” I replied.
This dragged along for years. If I’m honest, it was a constant in the marriage. It just got more constant, more brutal, more cold during those last years. He told me I should want to change to make him happy. “If you loved me, you’d want to change for me.” I said, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t ask.”
I finally said, “Why don’t you go find someone you like, instead of trying to change me?” Eventually, he did. It was awful. It was also a relief.
Lessons learned
How many novels can one unhappy marriage inspire? Way more than two. It’s tricky talking about your marriages, past and present, in a public forum. It’s much easier to hide it in your fiction. The thing is, healthy relationship patterns make for happy lives and boring novels.
I am reminded of a long-ago member of my long-time book group, who would always complain that whatever characters we were reading made bad choices. She would tut-tut away about it, as if we were in group therapy for the character as opposed to discussing a novel.
Finally, I said, “If every one in a novel made healthy choices, we would have no story, no plot, no conflict. Novels would be didactic, like Victorian children’s books about good manners.” She blinked at me for a moment, considering. I’m not sure she understood, and anyway, she’s long gone.
I have procrastinated enough.
I wrote this blog post because I haven’t posted in a bit. Retirement is very, very busy for me. It’s almost grueling, and I’m not sure how I ever found time to work full-time. But what I’m supposed to be doing right now is writing a cover letter for agent queries for a finished novel that has nothing to do with my divorces or that odd little room in Gentry’s basement.
I haven’t queried an agent in twenty years, but I remember how horrible the process is and I would do anything to avoid it. Still, it must be done.
Wish me luck on this agent thing.
Nosferatu lives. And we watched it.
We Finally Watch it.
As some of you know, my daughter and grandson have been living with us for, well, a while, now. And this has been fun and hectic and rewarding and so on, but it has also meant that we are not likely to tune in something terrifying when he’s here. As a result, we had not watched Nosferatu yet, despite knowing it was going to be a wild ride. But he is with his dad this weekend, and my daughter is off being young, so we decided to sit down and watch the extended cut (it’s four minutes longer, folks) of Nosferatu.
My experience with Eggers films is mixed. I really enjoyed The Witch (well is enjoy the right word for something terrifying?). I stopped watching The Lighthouse (life is too short). We saw The Northman in the theater and I was busting out laughing by the end of it, because it does feature two naked barbarians battling it out with broadswords on a live volcano. Eggers doesn’t hold back.
So we turned out the lights and tuned in.
The movie begins with Lily Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, entreating the screen for some love and tenderness, only to be answered by the creepy voice of Nosferatu. Then, it goes on from there with a plot that is very familiar to readers and watchers of any Dracula story, because Nosferatu was a rewriting of Dracula for the purposes of making a movie without Bram Stoker’s permission. You have all the same characters with minor changes, and it takes place in Germany.
This creates two problems; one, none of the actors can do a credible German accent, and two, there is no sea passage between Germany and Transylvania. The accents, feh, who cares. The sea passage is much more crucial to the plot, so the Jonathon Harker character arrives to the castle after a journey on horseback, but then the count arrives to Germany via a ghost ship.
I’m not sure how many of you have read Dracula, but it’s a wildly uneven book with incredibly dull parts, like, unforgivably dull, and it is also an assembled text, composed of standard storytelling, all kinds of journal entries, news items, long monologs written in accented speech, and so forth. The best way to read it is with a free substack called Dracula Daily, and by the way that starts fresh in two weeks so sign up now! (no ad here, just, it’s such a cool way to read a difficult book).
Back to the movie.
If you’ve seen the play version of Wicked, you probably appreciated how the playwright combined elements of the original Baum book, the 1939 movie, the novel, and the entirely new musical. This version of Nosferatu does something similar. The parallels to Dracula are part of it, of course, since its stolen in the first place. But there are MANY parallels to the original Nosferatu movie, including long shots of Max Schrek-inspired finger shadows. And I saw copious nods to Coppola’s Dracula.
All of this is to say, this movie is a labor of love, an homage, a masterwork, and not nearly as good as I’d hoped it would be. Some of it is the lauded camera work. It seems that every shot is set up for maximum impact and maximum Wes-Anderson-but-filthy-symmetry. That sounds good, yes? But the constant center framing of all the action lets you know that Something. Important. Happens. You lose the sense of a story unfolding, of action or story, and start to see one masterfully framed painting of horror after another. Here it COMES. Dead CENTER. Right in the MIDDLE. And so on.
Sets and costumes are gorgeous and perfect. There is no sense of Fake London, like in the Coppola movie. Our German village is perfectly created.
So let’s talk about the acting.
The acting in this is about a hundred times better than in the Coppola Dracula. Lily Rose Depp is fascinating. You can’t take your eyes off her when she’s onscreen, whether she’s pining for her lost husband or having a sexually-tinged seizure or behaving indecently under the sway of Count Orlok. She’s convincing up to and including her last moment, which is both tender and profane.
Everyone else is good to excellent. Willem Defoe as the alchemist who is a ripoff of Van Helsing takes large bites of the scenery and chews them with great gusto. My husband remarked, “Defoe really commits, doesn’t he?” and we cracked up. But when Defoe is framed up in a crumbling architectural element and waving his hands madly, it’s all a little much. I’m sure he had fun. But were we supposed to be laughing?
The Renfield-type character can’t even touch Tom Waits’ Renfield. He tries, he runs around bloody and naked and insane, but he’s just the requisite crazy guy waiting for his master to arrive. I don’t know how Waits did what he did in the Coppola mess but that was one helluva performance and all other Renfields will be judge by his uber-Renfield.
And the Undead Himself.
Well, then, let’s get to the Skarsgaard Orlock. You know, it’s fine to bury a gorgeous man under a bunch of ugliness. Eggers managed to do that to this actor’s brother (I think they are brothers) in The Northman by making Hamlet (yes, The Northman is a retelling of Hamlet) savage and dirty and brutal and dumb. But he was still nice to look at.
In this movie, this other Skaarsgard’s Orlok is huge, menacing, and in advanced state of decay. I do wish Eggers would have taken a note from the Coppola Dracula and cleaned up his Orlok a bit, transformed him into a seductive dandy once he left the castle. But he stays just as grotesque and decayed. And the note that Eggers did import–the horrible, gargled, marbles-in-his-mouth Dracula diction–that is well and firmly in place, but with the addition of a strangled wheeze, as if Orlok were a three-pack-a-day smoker ending his life with galloping emphysema.
It is almost impossible to make out what he is saying, but that’s okay because it’s just a bunch of evil commanding crap. You will obey me! Silence, slave! And so on. The “extended cut” turns out to be mostly a couple of extra minutes of him speaking in the castle. Without subtitles I couldn’t make out most of it. I tried to console myself with the fact that at least we were not subjected to the heart-shaped hairdo that Gary Oldman wore in the Coppola Dracula. But really, between the voice and the rot, this Nosferatu asked a lot of the viewer.
At the heart of it, the sad, sick heart
So now I want to leave aside the aesthetics of this movie, and talk about the part of it I’m most interested in interrogating. And that is, the deep trauma at the heart of Ellen. She is the source of the evil, it is revealed, because of that tearful entreaty at the beginning of the movie that invites Orlok into her psyche and eventually, her life. The physicians blame her seizures on excess of blood, part of an overwhelming “base nature” that came on with her young womanhood. This was held at bay when she was married (it’s clear that sex with her husband delayed Orlok for a time).
Eggers also covered this territory in The Witch, when a young girl entering puberty sends her shunned Puritan family into psychic danger, or maybe they just ate blighted corn that made them crazy, but its all centered on her: a lonely girl entering young womanhood in isolation, though as I recall it’s her brother’s puberty that sets it all off.
Ellen is especially lonely for love and touch, as her mother is dead and she’s a privileged child, with all the isolation that seemingly brings. But there’s more to it than that. She starts to confess to her husband, to explain that her starvation for touch led to some kind of event with her father, who found her writhing and unclothed and…she stops there.
The implication is that something deeply traumatic happened that caused her father to reject her. He is not part of the story, even though he is alive. And whatever happened, it sent her to the entreaty at the beginning of the movie, a lonely girl sobbing into the night, craving love and touch. Like the brother and sister in The Witch, young Ellen’s emerging sexuality awakens evil.
When a young woman enters puberty and has desires, it does invite evil into her world in the form of unwanted attention and attempts at predation. But is she the source of that evil, or just the target of it? This is the troubling question at the center of both The Witch and Nosferatu, and both movies seem to say that the only cure for this evil is to surrender to it. That troubles me deeply. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting. I’d rather be wrong, here, but I think I’m right.
And that is my review of Nosferatu. Feel free to tell me what you thought of it in comments.
The Clock, and Keeping Time
from a Katrina prompt
The first clock I remember was a toy. Most of mine were hand-me-downs, but this wooden clock was my very own, purchased new in 1963. The Fisher-Price “Tick Tock Teaching Clock” was wooden, with a dial on the back to crank for music, and a clock face on the front. Best of all, it had a yellow plastic handle so I could carry it anywhere.
The music box played “Grandfather’s Clock.” This is an old song written in 1876 by Henry Clay Work. There are popular enough versions by Burl Ives and Johnny Cash, but my version was timed to the tick-tock of an old clock. I sang along words I knew from somewhere, not caring how macabre they were.
Ninety years without slumbering
tick tock tick tock
his life seconds numbering
tick tock tick tock
It stopped. Short.
Never to go again
when the old man died
I belted it out, oblivious to both time and death. While the music played, a round panel with a window rotated on the clock face, showing children enjoying their daily activities as the hours ticked off toward eventual adulthood, old age, death.
I’d like to think I learned how to tell time with this old clock, but I’m sure I didn’t. My early play was mostly solitary. My older siblings were busy being older than me. My father was working, and my mom was busy with the demands of three kids, running a household, and giving piano lessons in our front hallway.
So I sat, pointlessly spinning the hands around, cranking that handle, watching children move through a day in that little window: riding a bike, being read to by a granny, shopping with mother, taking a bath, being serenaded in bed by a rooster, and then heading to school, little lamb in tow.
I don’t think those activities made any sense at all to me. My grandmother read to me, but I certainly never took a lamb to school. I couldn’t ride a bike. The sequence bore no resemblance to my own days, but I loved this toy. Tick tock, tick tock.
I played with it for hours on end.
*
We had ways to communicate the time to each other in my youth. We said “after” and “’til.” For the first half of the hours, it was “Five after,” “Quarter after,” “Twenty after.” For the second half of the hour, you said, “’til,” short for “until,” as in “Quarter ‘til.” The half hour was “Half-past,” as in, “It’s half-past.” You never said the hour, because everyone always had a basic idea of what the hour was. I lived in farm country, where people would look at the actual SKY to estimate the time. When I looked at a watch, I only looked at the minute hand.
When I was a teen, I heard other ways to call time. “Ten past (the hour)” and “Quarter of (the hour).”
*
My first watch was my mother’s. It’s a dress watch with a black cord band from the 1950s, and has her original name engraved on the back. This was a gift from a sailor named Red who wanted to marry my mother when she was fifteen. I wore this watch every single day until I turned 21. For that birthday, my parents gave me a little Seiko, a tank style that was very in that year. I loved that watch and wore it every single day until my then-husband gave me a different tank watch for our tenth anniversary.
This was a fancier watch, but our marriage started to fall apart soon after that. It went into a drawer to be ignored when he left, after a short stint in his possession after I gathered the jewelry he’d given me, put it in a paper bag with a couple of champagne bottles he’d saved from celebratory events—buying the house, the aforementioned tenth anniversary—and repeatedly hit the bag with a hammer.
There was also a note.
*
That year, once I regained my sanity, I bought myself two large men’s Timex watches with flexible bands, one silvertone, one goldtone. These are the first and only watches I have ever bought for myself. They still work, though they live in a drawer, now, with a big Rolex-looking Timex. My ex-husband bought me another watch many years after the divorce, a fancy lady’s watch with faux diamonds marking the hours. He was sorry, I didn’t care, I exchanged it for manly watch with a black leather strap as an act of, well, “Nice try, bub, but you really don’t know me anymore and maybe you never did.”
The last watch in the drawer is a dainty gold watch set with diamonds and rubies given to my grandmother by my grandfather for one or another anniversary. It doesn’t work. My grandmother pressed it on me when I was fifteen. It doesn’t work, but it’s pretty.
*
I don’t wear a watch anymore. Like everyone else, I check my phone or the corner of my computer monitor when I need to know what time it is. There is a clock on my stove, another on my microwave. But all these readouts are digital. I learned how to tell time on analog clocks.
A clock face is a time pie. I measure out a day in pie-slice increments. I convert those numbers to analog clock in my mind. Five minutes is a sliver of it, fifteen is a wedge. I know what I can accomplish in one third of a clock face, how far I can drive, how long I can talk on the phone. My relationship to time will always be spatial, like the kind of time I learned to keep on the Fisher Price clock.
*
I had a house fire in 2006. Almost twenty years later, I’m still trying to sort through what I own. This past summer, I opened a box and found my Fisher-Price Clock. It’s worn, but it works. I inspected it carefully, delighted by what I had remembered, intrigued by what I had not.
On the back, there is a more detailed breakdown of a child’s day, hour by hour. If we start at the top, then a child is sitting at a table having a midnight snack, or else he’s eating lunch. My money is on lunch. The day goes on. Reading with grandma at 1, napping at 2, shopping with Mom at 3, going down a slide at 4, taking a bubble bath at 5, eating again at 6, waking up to a rooster crowing at 7, eating breakfast at 8, taking the lamb to school at 9, working in the classroom at 10, and riding bikes at 11.
So clear, the message. So orderly. Time passing. Days passing. Even years are passing on this clock, because on one side, four kids look out windows into four different seasons. So many hours, days, seasons, years.
I have had this clock for 61 years.
Tick tock, tick tock.
Hot Dog, Valentine….
Happy Valentine’s Day, all you big weenies.
Here they are. And there are so many of them. So many weenies, so many ways, that I feel I need to organize them somehow. But I’m going to start with one that’s sweet. I mean, sure, it has its Freudian implications here; weiners, buns, a pup and a pussycat. I totally get that. But at least it’s cute.
But then, of course, things start to get weird. There’s this star-crossed processed meats thing going on with hotdogs and baloney (remember when it was spelled bologna? I do. I am bologna years old).
What an unappetizing chunk of bologna in that one. Much better to have it…heart shaped?
Enough lunchmeat. It’s time for the hotdogs to get amorous with the condiments. Like this dapper little weenie with mustard under his hat and his stick in the relish.
Or this one, which is supposed to be about weenies and mustard, but I can only assume that there is mustard hiding inside the card (that little circle at the tip of the hotdog is a hinge, not…something else).
As a side note, nothing bugs me more than gigantic hotdog buns and undersized weenies and if that doesn’t sound Freudian I don’t know what does, but really. The ratio has to be right.
Moving on, the Mustard is super amorous here. He is even wearing spats. Look at that hotdog, reclining so luxuriously on that bun, waiting to be relished, but instead it’s going to be ravished by some really bad puns.
Wait, are there good puns? No chance! Here’s another bad one! I know it’s bad because I just made this pun myself!
This one is a dilly. Maybe that pickle is ready to be a side dish, tipping its lid like that to another reclining dog on a bun. Or is there something motherly going on here? Like, is the pickle jar going to adopt that little weenie, wich reminds me of Moses in his cradle of rushes?
Condiments abound on these next cards, which celebrate hotdog-on-hotdog love with all kinds of abundant mustards, just glopped all over the place.
This next one seems pretty graphic. It must be from the seventies, when the bounds of decency became a bit more elastic.
This one is a little more tasteful, don’t you think? Less gloppy for sure. The mustard hat is a nice touch.
And we are Freudianly forking a pickle here, but even so, this isn’t as fervent as some of the other weenie-on-weenie cards.
Lastly, we have some solo frankfurters. There they are , giving us a furtive side eye from within the comfort of their buns, inviting us to join them for a Valentine frolic.
That’s it for the hotdog Valentine’s Day round-up. May your day be fine and fun, and now I am going to go grill myself a hotdog. I mean, they don’t grill themselves, unless they’re this little weirdo here.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.
And we are SNOWED IN.
(since it’s Oregon, that means less than an inch of snow)
Whether or not you have a Valentine–or even want one–I still wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day. Here are further thoughts on the subject.
The first post is heartbreaking, even now. I suffered on that day. The second post is sweet and funny and happy. The choice is yours. Or you can read them both and take a sentimental journey with me.
And all the Creepy Valentine posts:
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY AND LET’S HOPE THE SNOW MELTS BECAUSE WE HAVE RESERVATIONS!
Free writing: This might work. It might not.
The Something, the Nothing
I haven’t been able to write lately because I have been seized in the jaws of outrage and fury. I can’t write about that because, in my day to day, I must function. I often write about nothing and try to make it into something, and today is one of those days when the drive to write is strong and the subject is off limits. So I am going to write about Nothing. Please understand, I am full-on possessed by the Something. I just don’t want to write about it.
So I was thinking about Rice-a-Roni this morning. Boxed rice/vermicelli mixes are a vice of mine. I discovered them when I was fifteen, and there was a certain herbed rice off-brand you could get four for a dollar. I can’t even remember what it was called (MJB Herb and Butter Rice?). So there I was in Yakima, fifteen years old and cooking dinner every night for my boyfriend, and that particular side dish made its way onto many a plate.
Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco Treat, was more expensive. But there was a fried rice version with tiny almond chips that I could convert into something wonderful by adding sauteed onions, celery and mushrooms. I did that quite a bit. No one has ever liked this besides me, but that’s never stopped me from making it. The only thing that made me stop was nitrates. I was to avoid nitrates while pregnant, and I was pregnant or nursing for the majority of my twenties, so, no Rice-a-Roni.
I ate it this past week, which has been a comfort food extravaganza. We might as well be living in a flyover state, because it’s been baked ziti, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf, tuna casserole, and the aforementioned dolled up boxed stuff (now nut-free). I am desperately trying to calm myself, to comfort myself with this food. It is really not working. At all.
This morning, I was thinking about what my daughters couldn’t eat while pregnant. Rice-a-Roni (nitrates) and cold cuts (no idea why here) and sushi (again, no idea why, maybe mercury). I probably wasn’t supposed to eat sushi while I was pregnant, either, but this wasn’t an issue for me in the 1980s. Back then, I thought sushi was a prank, and that no one would ever eat it for any other reason than they thought it made them cool. Then I tried it in the 90s, and discovered that the reason millions of people eat sushi on the daily is because it’s delicious. Who knew? Millions and millions of people, that’s who.
Enduring What’s Bad For You
It’s snowing outside right now, which generally makes me feel cozy and safe. I watch through my dining room windows, snug and smug, grateful for my life. But nothing makes me cozy right now. Nothing can make me feel safe. I have to remind myself to be grateful for my life. That’s what my grandma Lucille preached: gratitude. She was grateful for everything, and it kept her so calm.
I could use some of her calm right now. I am a calm person by nature. Some might even call me stolid. I’m not calm these days, but I am frozen in panic. I suppose that might resemble calm. Sometimes I remind myself to take deep breaths. Like a woman does in labor. She is in so much pain that she forgets to breathe, so part of the Lamaze training I had in 1982 was about remembering to breathe. To provide oxygen a body requires to withstand giving birth.
Did you know that a woman uses the equivalent of a marathon runner’s calorie expenditure when she gives birth? She also experiences the same euphoric rush of endorphins when it’s all over. That’s why she can do it again–that endorphin reward. Nature’s little bonus, to keep us all popping out children. But for some women, once is enough.
I have a dear friend who ran a marathon. She trained for a year with her Border Collie beside her, and ran the whole thing. Her husband and sons were there, cheering her on. And when she finished, in the midst of her euphoric endorphin reward, she said something like, “That was amazing and I never have to do that again!” That’s exactly what my younger brother said after skydiving on his 18th birthday. That it was fantastic, and he never had to do it again.
Some impossible things have to be repeated, apparently. Giving birth is survivable. So is running a marathon. Jumping out of an airplane, too. Usually. There are mothers who don’t make it, marathoners who have heart attacks, and skydivers who die in the air, or when they land. I understand those who choose the singular experience. “I did it once, I made it through, that’s enough.” Other people are hooked on it. They thrive on the danger, the rush. They never stop.
How to Do It
I am not a risk taker. I am more of a shepherd; fiercely protective of my own safety and the safety of those in my charge. I understand the fragility of life, but don’t do enough to guard my own health. I should not be eating nitrates and casseroles if I want to extend my years on this planet. I think that’s all right. I matter a great deal to a few people, and nothing at all to the majority. This world will carry on just fine when I’m gone.
Sometimes I need to remind myself of that, my insignificance. I pull back and take a high look down on this world, this tiny rock in an infinite universe, the life that clings to it thanks to a fragile layer of hydrogen and oxygen. The world’s problems are so minute from that view. So small that they hardly exist.
But I live here, in this layer, on this rock. The far view might ease my pain for a moment, but I have to come back to my dining room table, where I sit at a computer, where the snow is still falling, soft and white outside my window. I watch it and wonder and wait. I don’t know what I’m waiting for, but I have three grandchildren.
I guess I’m waiting to see what the world will look like for them.
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.
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.
The Homes of Men
It’s just a little different.
When I walk into a home, I can derive a lot of information about the inhabitant from the knickknacks, but only if it’s a woman. Men throw off some strange clues, as far as their environments. A single man is freed of womanly constraints, and free of her decisions as to what is worth displaying.
Here are a few examples.
Watering Cans
One man I dated had a nicely furnished home with a glass-sided curio cabinet that held music boxes, and long shelves running around his living room that displayed a watering can collection. I was baffled. “Those belong to the former tenant,” he told me. The former tenant was his ex. When she moved out, she took only what she needed and left the rest to be collected at a later date.
Sure enough, five months after we’d started seeing each other, she showed up with a U-Haul and stripped the house bare. There was no remaining knickknackery whatsoever until a friend of his asked if he could store some Native American art there, at which point a few Navajo sand paintings and some Bev Doolittle (I know she’s not Native) prints took up residence on the walls.
But what if I hadn’t asked? What if I’d assumed that this man had a fondness for watering cans of all types, shapes, sizes, and fabrications? I have never seen a watering can collection before or since. What if we’d broken up before the former tenant had reclaimed her things? I’d have thought him fussy. Would I have been able to date him for the length of time I did if he’d been a watering can collector?
This does not keep me up at night. It’s just something I wonder.
Ugly Furniture
Another man I dated is remembered, not for his knickknacks, but for his living room furniture. If he had items of a decorative nature, they were overshadowed by the presence of the complete works of Louis L’Amour (bound in genuine leatherette) that filled his bookshelves. If you’re read Shopping at the Used Man Store, you know this didn’t end well.
Anyway, he had a set of a very specific kind of furniture. I’ll put a photo of it here for reference:
Now, please understand that this furniture was prevalent in the early 1970s, and I dated this man in the mid 2000’s. And to add to the ugly, some of the cushions were a brown floral, and others had been covered with a busy little floral print lavender cotton. He lived in a VERY nice apartment in a nice complex, he had an early model Prius and a big white truck, he owned expensive computers, a ‘number bed,’ and a fortune in fishing tackle. And this was his furniture.
His aunt and uncle had given it to him when he got divorced. He seemed to consider it an act of generosity on their part. Did he not understand that he’d been given the equivalent of White Elephant furniture, a set so ugly that Goodwill would refuse it?
We sat on it to watch his gigantic newly-divorced-man television. He didn’t really have room for the TV, the couch, and the loveseat in his crowded living room, but, as he said in all earnestness, “I didn’t want to break up the set.” Break up the set? I suggested he do so, but for firewood.
He didn’t laugh.
Coffee Cups
I dated a man who had lots of knickknacks one summer. He had souvenirs from his time teaching outside the USA, and some jade carvings he’d inherited from his grandmother. He had some motorcycle-related items and some Robert Wyland dolphin art I could barely bring myself to look at (in defense of this, those are actually worth money) (but please, no.).
Anyway, he also had a glass-sided curio cabinet, but his did not hold music boxes from a former tenant. It held coffee cups from all the recovery-related events he had attended in his 25 years of sobriety. I’d like to scoff (I love to scoff), but I found both his sobriety and his commemoration of it admirable. Plus I have a LOT of coffee cups, but the thing is I drink out of mine. The year before we met, one of his “former tenants” got mad at him and began taking mugs out of the cabinet and smashing them on his floor. The police were called.
You cannot mess with a sober man’s coffee cups.
Almost no knickknacks
My own personal husband owned exactly two knickknacks when we met: a wooden box and a small carved bear. By the time he moved in here, the bear had broken, so he just brought the box. It was no trouble to find room for it.
He did have one other decorative item: a ceramic cookie jar in the shape of a beehive. I have it on my hutch, where it lives harmoniously with my own collection of honey servers. It is the Queen Bee Hive.
Since I have so much decorative crap, it’s nice that my husband doesn’t. But he finds ways to decorate our house. He accents tables and countertops with small drifts of opened mail, lending a homey touch with various piles of ripped-open envelopes and ancient balance statements, maybe a cruise advertisement or two. He lets these accumulate until I ask what all that stuff is? Is that mail that needs tending, or…? At which point he goes through it, recycles and woodstoves it, thus clearing space for his next installation.
This is the perfect setup for me, the all-time champion accumulator of things.