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A Holiday Story of Mice and
Men |
Lately I
have been thinking a lot about kindness. It
comes at a time when I have not been feeling
particularly kind myself, the reason being that
someone has recently been unkind toward my
husband and me. It's a toss-up, I think, whether
kindness begets kindness or whether a person
simply lives an ethic of kindness and either
gets, or doesn't get, kindness in return.
My husband is a kind person. Unfailingly,
unassumingly, unabashedly kind. He isn't kind
because some doctrine promises an afterlife of
Ho Hos and green valleys in return for his
kindness. He is kind because he's happier that
way. He also believes that while kindness may
not automatically beget kindness, it is more
likely to do so than is rage, sarcasm, or
whining (also known as "doing it my way").
Recently we had an unpleasant business
dealing with an unpleasant person who did an
unpleasant and unfair thing to us.
"When I die, cut my heart out and send it
to him," my husband said, in a rare moment of
drama-queening.
"So he can see what a kind one looks like?"
I asked, stroking his cheek and looking at him
with quiet empathy.
My husband glared at me. "No," he said. "To
finish the job he started."
Which was sad. You can't tromp on a kind
man's heart and then get it in the mail and not
feel something. In my eyes he was simply trying
to share the gift of kindness.
The thing about kindness is how it seems to
open all sorts of doors you didn't even know
there were keys to. I invited my sister to
Thanksgiving and she decided she wanted to move
here instead. This past year we helped a fellow
artist with her booth at an art show and now
she's a good friend and a must-see on our trips
to Chicago. Sixteen years ago a stranger smiled
at me in the hallway of my workplace and twelve
years later I married him. It would seem that
you never know what you're going to get when
kindness enters the picture. Which I suppose is
why I am so often tempted to stand by my old
habits of rage, sarcasm, and whining. At least
these bring predictable outcomes.
Recently I asked my husband about
particular instances of kindness that had been
perpetrated upon him. He named some general
things: a teacher who took him under her wing;
his grandmother who assigned chores at every
turn but gave back love at every corner.
"It's interesting," he said. "Sometimes
it's easier to remember the unkind things in
life than the kind things because kindness
doesn't leave a scar."
Later that week, his mother bragged about
what a kind child he had always been.
"It's because I always made him share his
candy with other children before he could eat
it," she said.
"Which is why I was always tricking my
friends into grabbing the electric fence wire
and firing my BB gun into their rear ends," he
whispered to me, kindly. Which would seem to
suggest that in certain instances kindness does
in fact leave a scar.
All of this makes me think about kindnesses
for which I still feel a glow of gratitude.
There is the kindness of strangers like the one
who drove me and my bloody head home after a
fall from my horse in the middle of a street 30
years ago. There are the strangers who drove my
hitchhiking college friends and me to and from
town without murdering us. There are the
ex-boyfriends who did me--ok, and
themselves--the kindness of leaving or allowing
me to leave without undue argument or stress.
And there is my aforementioned husband, who
just last night heaved his pecan pie-saturated
body off of the sofa to take out a little mouse
we'd caught in our no-kill trap baited with
chocolate cake. Out he went into the night,
trudging deep into the high pasture grass where
he kindly reunited our rodent friend with the
out-of-doors.
A little while later, plowing past leftover
squash casserole, creamed corn, and homemade
bread, all in our refrigerator as a result of
the kindness of friends, I turned an accusatory
eye toward my husband.
"Where's my apple?" I asked.
"In the pasture with the mouse," he said.
"Cake seemed a little one-sided."
That's my man. The one with his heart in
one hand and a balanced side dish for a mouse in
the other.
If kindness begets kindness and mice ever
rule the world, my husband will be sitting
pretty in the kingdom. I just hope he's kind
enough to take me along.back to the top
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Life Imitates Folk Art |
My husband
and I just returned from a show where folk art
is king. It is a quirky, wonderful show in the
woods of Tuscaloosa where the likes of Buddy
Snipe and Danny Hoskinson sell sculptures
rendered from scrap metal and melted plastic
buckets. Throughout the seven acre spread there
are ceramic bowls and wooden platters and
drawings on tar paper scattered about on the
ground, handcrafted quilts and silk scarves and
beet-dyed wearables swinging from the limbs of
trees. There are totem poles rising up from the
straw and paintings on tin stacked against cars
draped with rugs painted to look like Satan's
den. All around you the unmistakable aroma of
funnel cake and Porta Potty waft about on the
breeze. There is no place on earth like it--with
the exception of our front porch.
You see, my husband and I are having work
done. No, we're not having our faces lifted, our
teeth pulled, or our tummies tucked. What we are
having done is so much more painful than
surgery. We are renovating our house. I take
that back. We WERE renovating out house. Since
our carpenters have gotten busy with other
projects, now we're just hosting what looks like
a permanent folk art installation in our yard.
. When renovations are going well it is
like being pregnant but without the annoying
bodily changes. Every day the thing you are
creating gets a tiny bit bigger and you can't
help but dream and plan for its future. When
renovations are not going well, it is like
giving birth prematurely to a sixteen year-old
boy with a hammer in his hand and a bad case of
attention deficit disorder. At some point,
neither a sixteen year-old boy nor a carpenter
will show up when he's supposed to. At first you
worry. Then you realize he's having a fine time
across town, where things are more interesting
at somebody else's house.
It wasn't always this way. In March, when
our "three month" project began, our carpenters
showed up every day. When they couldn't make it
they called to tell us. They even went beyond
the call of duty, redoing a thing or two that
didn't turn out like we'd planned. We loved them
for that, so we gave their name to friends.
"Consummate professionals," we called them. So
our friends hired them too.
But then the inevitable happened. With new
and bigger projects, their interest in us waned.
No matter that they lost interest at precisely
the moment they had us confined to two small
rooms of our disassembled house. No matter that
for three months we have been living in these
two rooms with two dogs and eighteen pieces of
furniture, every book we own, all of our dishes,
cleaning supplies, pots and pans, and our
clothes. No matter that most of the eighteen
pieces of furniture have been converted to table
tops to hold all of it since there are no
closets, no cabinets, and no shelving. No matter
that we dress ourselves from piles of clothes,
eat our meals off of our photo albums, and I
won't even mention what we did for the several
days our carpenters decided we could live
without a toilet. Our lives imitate folk art,
with everything we own gathering dust and
scattered around us, all of it mingling with the
smell of an incomplete bathroom and the ripped
out rotting innards of our house rising like a
totem from our driveway.
It's funny--and by funny I mean
agonizing--that whenever we mention we are
fixing up the house, the entire world lets out a
collective groan and comes forth with its own
tales of carpenter malfeasance and abandonment,
laying stories at our feet like gifts of
assuagement.
"They ran out of money, right?" says
Everyone, followed by an eye roll and a
sympathetic pat on the shoulder.
I have heard a hundred renovation horror
stories since our three month project began
eight months ago, but this is the latest: a
couple we know paid a bricklayer to brick their
house. The bricklayer quit mid-project and
disappeared. After countless futile efforts to
contact the bricklayer, the bricklayer's elderly
father showed up at the couple's home and
finished the job his son wouldn't. This makes me
think that if our consummate professionals
aren't responsible enough to finish what they
started, then we may have to call their parents
and hope that their muscles are still strong and
their ethics stronger.back to the top
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Being
Rediscovered Online Raises Questions About Past |
Recently
my friend Jack was lamenting that no one from
his past has ever tried to find him online.
"If I had married and changed my name it
would be one thing," he said. "It makes it worse
knowing that I am so easily findable, and no one
has looked."
I sympathized with him in the way that
only someone who has been recently found online
can sympathize: I yawned and said, "Tough luck."
It's finally happened for me: I have been
rediscovered by someone from my past. Two weeks
ago I got an email from a familiar name that
said simply, "Are you the girl who used to sit
across from me in homeroom?" I wrote back that I
was. The looker-upper wrote again: "I came
across your website, and it seems like you've
led such an interesting life since high school."
Me?
I asked Gordon what he had been doing for
the past twenty-five years. He wrote back: two
marriages, one child, a career in the air force,
currently stationed in Asia working as a weapons
specialist.
As the outline of his last two decades
unfolded before my eyes, my own supposedly
interesting life took on a dull pallor. Granted
it's had its highs and lows, but for the most
part I feel I've lived predictably. Like Gordon,
I have flown, but only while munching small
pretzels and punching my way aimlessly through
658 satellite radio stations with a copy of
Oprah Magazine on my lap. I have traveled to
other countries--Mexico, Canada, Texas--but I
have never been to a place like Asia. And as for
combat, the only deadly weapon I have ever
wielded is a Glen Campbell album.
My friend Gordon's post high school years
have been a showcase of bravery and dedication
and discipline. I am impressed by his
accomplishments and his courage, the coming
together of so many emotional and academic and
philosophical choices that at the time we could
not have known were percolating in a public
school homeroom in Atlanta in 1978.
It's easy to see how I came to have a
number of questions for Gordon. Specifically:
was I a good dresser in high school? Did I
appear to be a member of any particular clique?
Was I nice? Did anyone besides me think I was
fat? Did anyone notice that my friend Bobbi and
I had the same brown corduroy pants one year?
Did I seem smart? As I mulled over these and
other pressing questions, it occurred to me that
perhaps it was not Gordon's life that had
captured my imagination, but the arrival of my
own past in the package of someone who had been
there. Sure, Gordon's life was interesting, but
more importantly, he held clues to my own.
I often feel that I am without history. My
grandparents died early and my immediate family
did not keep close ties with extended family. I
failed to ask my father the questions that might
have connected me to a graspable past; my mother
and I are close but we focus on the present. In
response, or maybe in anticipation of feeling
rootless, I began keeping a journal when I was
twelve, creating for myself a perplexing,
subjective history that is now thousands of
pages long and is centered exclusively around my
view of things. Without a history lesson or two
from others, it's all just conjecture.
The last time I was home my mother pulled
me into her bedroom to show me her father's
ring, which had only just arrived from his
recently deceased wife's estate. My mother told
me that my brother put the ring on his young
son's finger, and that the experience was a
moving one. And rightfully so: a ten year-old
boy and his long dead great-grandfather meet at
last at the foot of a wide bed over an open
jewelry box. I turned the ring over in my hand,
slid it onto my middle finger, and waited for
something historic to happen. Nothing did,
unless you consider the possibility that old
friends are the instrument of old men, sent to
remind you that the past has many versions.
back to the top
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Shopping Nirvana Turns
Ugly, then Redeeming |
There's a
new game in town. I won't name names, but it's a
consignment store for women. Its slogan promises
to relieve you of clothes you have recently
bought and instantly disliked in exchange for
fistfuls of money that you will happily spend in
the store on other women's recently purchased
and instantly disliked clothes.
This is not a store for people over twenty.
The clothes are uncomfortably trendy: blue jeans
barely scale the summit of your rump; thin
colorful shirts encase you like cellophane,
shrink-wrapping your torso from chest to navel
but leaving bare a wide band of epithelial real
estate just above the jeans, undesireable
property that no one should ever see, ever,
including your dog.
"You will hate yourself if you go in
there," said the intelligent half of my
personality to the age-inappropriate half that
dresses me every morning, sending me out of the
house looking I forgot the twenty-five birthdays
that have happened to me since bell bottoms were
cute on anyone.
I blocked out the warning and forged ahead
into the store. While I was neck deep in a rack
of clingy half-shirts and color-organized halter
tops my husband called on the cell phone. He was
eight hours into a fourteen hour road trip,
desperate for a human voice.
"Honey?" he croaked into the phone, his own
voice rusty from disuse.
"Is this important?" I said. "I am very
busy."
"Where are you?" he asked.
I rolled my eyes even though he couldn't
see them, and made a little noise of disbelief.
"Only in shopping nirvana," I said. "Do you
need something or can I call you back?"
His voice wavered a little but thankfully
he said it could wait, and with the mash of a
tiny button I plunged him back into the silence
of his own road-weary thoughts. I felt a little
bad about it until I happened upon an adorable
blue number with flappy sleeves and a coy
neckline.
I barely noticed that no one in the store
was remotely close to my age, nor would they be
for decades, until I went to pay for the shirt.
Then, as if in apology, I muttered, "My daughter
will love this." I shouldn't have worried: being
a grown-up in a teenager's store renders you
instantly invisible.
In the sliver of time between my credit
card processing and the tiny bag with the tiny
shirt making its way across the counter to me, I
saw the slogan that promised money for clothes.
It was then I knew I would be back. Because if
there is anything I have, it is clothes I never
wear, bought by the aforementioned intelligent
half of my personality but rejected morning
after morning by the half that dresses me.
In I pranced, a week later, with a bagful
of clothes. I heaved them up onto the counter
like a hunter throwing down his kill. I don't
mind saying I was proud: all manner of trendy
retail outlets and designers were represented
inside this one fat, round, thirty-pound bag:
Gap, Old Navy, Ralph Lauren, Ann Taylor,
American Eagle, Donna Karan. There was even a
pair of never-worn slacks from Filene's Basement
in Chicago, a purchase which required that I
first resign myself to the annoying oxymoronic
fact of a basement store being on the second
floor, and then that I try on clothes in a
fitting room with no partitions and very little
heat.
I waited for the clerk at the counter to
hand the teen ahead of me a fistful of bills in
exchange for her used clothes.
"$237," said the clerk brightly. "Would
you like that in hundreds or fifties?" The girl
took her money in fifties, and floated off to
shop.
I pushed my stash over toward the clerk and
waited patiently as she went through it,
dividing things into mysterious piles, checking
for sizes and brand names and spots and zipper
malfunctions. I am happy to report that
everything worked and nothing was dirty. When at
last the clerk turned her attention back to me
she was, in fact, reaching into her money
drawer. My heart pounded.
"Nine dollars," she said brightly. "Would
you like that in ones or quarters?"
"Nine dollars?" I squeaked.
"Here are the clothes we couldn't take,"
said the clerk, handing me back the bag with
almost everything re-stuffed into it.
"Nine dollars?" I squeaked again.
"Ma'am, most of the styles you brought in
haven't been seen since 2003!" said the clerk,
already beginning to go through the next
person's bag of clothes.
I just stood there in disbelief. "That
wasn't that long ago!" I blurted out.
It was then that it happened: the clerk
stopped what she was doing and stared at me as
if I was not invisible.
And that, I tell you, was worth all the
pain.
back to the top |
Learning to Live with Change |
Two weeks
ago a young carpenter crawled underneath our
house a brave boy and shot back out a wiser man.
Legend has it he got a glimpse of the snake that
just days earlier had left its long, brittle
skin in front of the porch. Not long after the
carpenter had his scare, my husband and I saw
the snake ourselves, en route to the garden, his
five foot torso lumpy with mice. Out of earshot
of the snake, I told my husband I liked its old,
discarded skin better. Years of slithering about
had given it character the new, shiny skin
lacked.
"You just hate change," my husband said.
It's true. I do hate change. Or maybe I
don't hate change so much as I mourn bygone
eras. This week the young carpenter and his crew
walled off our foyer from our living room, the
first step toward creating a laundry room that
will be large enough for me to stand in with
both feet.
"This is so sad," I said to my husband, my
heart heavy in the shadow of the new, spacious
room.
"Why is it sad?" he asked through lightly
clenched teeth. My husband does not share my
propensity for finding what is wrong in what is
obviously so right.
"Because we're leaving an era behind. This
will never be the same house again."
It isn't that I don't want room enough to
bend over the dryer without having to first move
the kitchen table out of the way. I do. Likewise
I want a real dining room where my husband and I
can have Passover seders and Thanksgiving feasts
and after-Christmas recovery dinners. I want a
screened in porch where we can watch the
fireflies and listen to the crickets and read
the paper and watch it rain. It isn't that I
don't want the house, or us, to grow. It's just
that I get so attached to the way things have
always been that change, even for the better,
feels like loss.
Recently I was talking to a friend about
a house I lived in before I met my husband.
"Remember the red house on the hill that
had no stove, no refrigerator, and no heat and
one morning I found two dead mice on the kitchen
counter?"
"Yes," said my friend.
"God I miss that place."
An era is an era. It doesn't have to be
life-changing to be remembered fondly. In the
case of the red house on the hill, I was working
my first job out of graduate school. I had just
acquired a third dog. My hair was longer than it
had ever been. The house, apart from its obvious
problems, sheltered me from rain and snow, and
inside its protective walls I weathered all
kinds of personal, middle-twenty-year-old storms
as well. I loved it for what it was and forgave
it for what it was not. A year later I moved out
to a fully functioning, considerably cleaner
house and was surprised to find myself almost
immediately heartsick. Like a jilted lover I
drove by the old place for months afterward,
enraged at the sight of the new renters parked
in the driveway.
I am sure I'll adjust to my new life in the
new-ish house and be able to enjoy it. I just
have to relax and get used to the fact that eras
are beginning and ending all the time, not just
when I happen to notice them. You can make
yourself crazy trying to take note of everything
that changes. When the carpenters cut down the
tree in the back yard, for example, I took
pictures. When they poured the footing, I took
pictures. When they laid the block for the
foundation, I took pictures. I took pictures
when they framed in the new living room, raised
the walls, built the porch, and changed out the
windows. Several times I took pictures of the
carpenters themselves, because let's face it,
people change too.
Today I grabbed my camera when I let the
dogs out onto their new porch for the first
time. In my head I had already labeled the
photograph, "Dogs Stand on New Porch for First
Time, June 2005." But instead of just standing
there and appreciating the porch, they
immediately found an opening underneath it and
shot out of the fence before I could snap their
picture. Dogs have no sense of eras, old or new,
and the accidental freedom they discovered
forced me to drop the camera and race out after
them into the dewy, sunlit yard.
Then again, maybe dogs understand eras
better than I do. Maybe they recognize that life
is meant to be lived at the moment it's
happening, not in retrospect. I wish I had a
picture of what I looked like when I realized
this. Because I was, in that instant, changed.
back to the top
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Renovation Means
Creating a Future
|
We've
decided not to move. The decision comes after
many evenings of discussion, most of them held
on our screened-in back porch, our eyes roaming
from bucolic lettuce garden to giant tree with
unstoppable above-ground root system to
falling-in cattle chute. Twelve years ago our
neighbors told us that our house was built by a
one-armed man, and since then the vision has
spawned two shortstories, a haiku, several jokes
and one metered rhyme. You don't just up and
leave a house with a history like that. So we're
going to renovate instead.
My husband loves the details of renovation.
"Don't ask me anything," I told him. "I trust
your vision completely, and I am not interested
in the journey." Of course, following my
proclamation several decisions were made without
my input, which spawned not just a fight but
fodder for two new short stories.
Renovating is a big deal. Beneath the
unbelievably monotonous details of picking out
cabinet hardware and auditioning potential new
front doors by rapping on them till your
knuckles are bloody, is the stony realization,
particular to midlife, that you may be creating
the last house you will ever live in. It's
enough to make you think twice about miniature
forks as drawer pulls.
But there is more to it, of course. Three weeks
ago, I came home from the studio to find that
the giant tree, the one with the unstoppable
above-ground root system, was gone. The roots,
we knew, had been threatening the house's
foundation for years, but we couldn't bring
ourselves to cut the tree down. It was the
backdrop against which, for the last decade,
we'd watched our lives and the lives of our
animals evolve. How many mornings, the summer of
the 13-year cicadas, did we watch my old hound
circle that tree, rooting for the tasty insects?
How many times did we look on as our little dogs
lay in wait for the squirrel that spiraled down
the tree's hospitable trunk, only to be chased
back up again? And how many spring mornings did
my husband and I sit at the kitchen table
counting down the moments until the tree leafed
out, and talking about the day, the week, the
year ahead?
Still, it threatened the foundation, and so it
had to go. That evening as I stood at the
kitchen window and stared quietly at the yard's
new gaping hole, the phone rang. It was my
cousin. My uncle Seamour, she said, was dying. I
left the window and drove to the hospital where,
less than two hours after getting the call, my
father's brother, the last living child of my
paternal grandparents, passed away.
The morning after the funeral, my husband and I
sat at the kitchen table and looked out onto the
yard. The sunlight fell unobstructed across the
grass; where the tree had been, there was
nothing but a large wound. We tried to talk
about the house but something larger was
looming. Suddenly we became aware of the roots.
Some were round and fat, some chipped and
spindly. There must have been hundreds. They
reached up from the ground in places and lay in
piles in other places. The tree was gone, but
the roots were still there.
My uncle was kind to me. When I fled to
Alpharetta after my father died he helped me
find a job and come back. He checked on me
often, had me to dinner, read my columns and
called with comments. He worried about my
sister, asked about my dogs and kept tabs on my
art career, my husband, our happiness. He
forgave me my informality and my infrequent
visits. He died with his whole family around
him, an old man with a vast, unstoppable root
system.
The house grows, and where the tree was a new
porch will soon be. From there, my husband and I
will eat our meals and watch the garden and the
new trees take hold.
Renovation makes you think about things you
don't want to think about, like cabinet hardware
and trim colors, but it also makes you think
about the bigger questions. For my husband and
me, it is all about permanence, about making
enduring choices, about the strange and
exhilarating process of being in the midst of
one cycle while planning for another.
But along with the future, renovation makes us
think about the past. To that end, we find in
ourselves the indelible mark of our families,
and discover to our surprise a large,
unstoppable root system growing right inside our
house.
back to the top
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A Night of Worry Sheds Light
|
It was
one of those nights. The kind of night when the
dog feels bad but you don't know why. You run
through the vet's likely questions in your head:
no vomiting, no diarrhea, not so sick she turns
her nose up at pre-dinner treats, dinner, or
after-dinner snacks. No limping, no refusals to
weight-bear on any limbs, no compromised
alertness. Just one symptom: the inability to
get comfortable in bed, necessitating position
shifts at fifteen second intervals. All night
long.
And so there you are at 2 a.m., boring a
hole in the dog's skull with your eyes as if
awaiting a medical message that will only come
to you if you don't take your eyes off her.
"What's wrong?" you silently implore the
back of her head, but all she gives you is a
little whimper and a shift of her hips. It's
killing you, this not-knowing, and so you ask
your husband, who is not a vet and not awake,
what he thinks it could be.
"I just don't know, sweetie," comes the
gentle answer from the world's most patient man.
"I know she likes to sleep on her right side and
it seems like that's the side that's hurting."
Four seconds later he's asleep again, leaving
you to continue wondering what is wrong with
the dog, and adding to your worry a new and
unwelcome layer of concern: whether you knew
the dog prefers to sleep on her right side. As
you continue to stare and wait for your message,
you realize that you have always assumed your
love for the dog is greater and more enduring
than even your husband's. But now you are forced
to wonder whether you even knew this most basic
fact about her, this endearing and mysterious
preference that she cultivated and your husband
made note of, right there in your bed, right
under your nose.
At 4 a.m. the last milligrams of rimadyl
finally kick in and the dog grows still and
sleeps. As you stare at the ceiling listening to
the alternating breathless dreams of two dogs
and one man you wonder whether there aren't
other things to know about the dog that you
don't yet know you don't know. There are easy
facts: her favorite toy :an un-stuffed
Dalmatian; her favorite snack: carrot slices;
her least favorite activity: having her nails
trimmed. But maybe there is something else,
something huge you are overlooking even now, a
giant window to her vast and tender soul, that
you are passing blindly by. Maybe, you think,
you don't really know her at all.
In the morning a passing car wakes the four
of you with a start. The head of the formerly
sick dog pops up and when it does her body
follows suit, and before you can stop her she
has flown from the high bed, raced through the
house, and burst out of the doggie door to the
yard where she commences to a joyful yapping. No
sign of illness, no vestiges of leftover pain at
all.
Later that morning as you wait for your
husband to run an errand you take the
opportunity to finish a book in the car. Toward
the end of the book, which happens to be about
writing and not about your emotional state, you
come across a line that makes you stop reading,
makes you look up from the page and to the world
outside your rolled up window, take a deep
breath and throw your head back and exhale
loudly. It's the kind of line that says one
thing but means another, that explains the thing
it's meant to explain succinctly, but in your
hands, at this moment, has nothing to do with
what you are reading.
"Don't worry forever," the line says. Into
the line you read the permission to care about
what you love without waiting for loss and grief
to creep in. Don't worry forever--about messages
in the night that may or may not come, about
illness and pain which are inevitable parts of
life, about who loves what more than whom. Love
amply and love hard--but don't worry forever
because what you love is hampered and picked
apart by fear. Suddenly you laugh out loud,
because the line in question has nothing and
everything to do with the reason you sat awake
all night, bent and sleepy over the dog, willing
a cure. You realize suddenly that it hardly
matters what form your sought-after messages
take, or when they choose to reveal themselves.
All that matters is that you divine them, and
that when they come, you are waiting with open
arms.
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What it Takes to Make a
Parent Happy |
My best friend's birthday is February 18th.
Which kind of stinks for her, because it is also
the day, seventeen years ago, that my father
passed away. Not that there is any connection,
except for the fact that there is that
connection. The same day I am mailing her
birthday card I am scurrying around trying to
find a grocery store in Chattanooga that sells
the traditional Jewish Yarzheit candle, a small
memorial votive that burns for 24 hours, and by
its flicker keeps your thoughts with the
deceased.
I was not terribly close to my father, and
he died before reparations could be made--that
is to say, he died before I wised up and
realized that fathers are human, humans are
fallible, ergo fathers can let you down without
meaning to, and almost always without wanting
to. I was a harsh critic when I was in my
twenties--still am in many ways--but I have this
fantasy that whatever my father's failings,
being disappointed in the adult I was to become
is not one of them. If I have a view of
Heaven--which I do, and it includes horses,
dogs, chocolate and notoriety--then it is that
my father floats around in his khakis and dress
shoes, thinking almost exclusively about how I
have made him proud.
Many years have passed and a lot has changed
since my father died. Back then my sister's
oldest child was one, and this year she started
college. My brother was a single guy, and this
year his marriage turns sixteen, his children
fourteen, eleven and nine. And I was a single
girl with a singular cause: to cure myself of an
unhappiness that attached itself alternately to
my job and to what I perceived as my own
undeniable failing: the fact that I had not
pursued a career of some difficulty, like
becoming an astrophysicist or a chemical
engineer. It was understandable, I reasoned back
then, that I was a disappointment to my father.
I was a miserable, underpaid, creatively numb
twenty-six year-old with no sense of humor and
even less perspective. Even I didn't want to be
with myself.
It's funny what we think our parents require of
us. I am reminded of a Charlie Brown cartoon
where Charlie Brown is apologizing to Snoopy for
not staying home all the time to make him happy.
"I was already happy," Snoopy's talk bubble
responds. If I had had the opportunity to ask my
father how I could have made him happy, I think
his answer would have been the same as Snoopy's.
My father, after all, wasn't the one with his
finger on the pulse of my career. He wasn't the
one with the ego to placate, all the negative
emotions to tame. When I think about it, it
doesn't seem like it takes all that much to make
a parent happy. As the daughter of two, I would
venture that simply being yourself is enough to
beget a happy parent.
Last weekend my husband took his father to
see an enormous sculpture in a town not far from
where his parents live. The artist had achieved
a modicum of fame as a result of the sculpture,
as had the town itself. As they drove away from
the site, my husband's father expressed
disbelief that a man would spend his time
involved in a seemingly unproductive pursuit
(art) when he could be accomplishing other, more
productive things.
"Like what?" asked my husband, who not
coincidentally, makes his living as an artist.
My father-in-law thought a minute. "He could be
salting hams," he offered.
I am not saying that if my father were
alive today we wouldn't still find ourselves,
like my husband and his father, reciprocally
misunderstood. But time lends the illusion, and
sometimes the gift, of perspective; while there
are components of my life he could not have
predicted, I am convinced he would support them
nonetheless. He might have preferred that I keep
my state job, but he would be thrilled to know
I'm better off as a painter. He might have
wished I'd had children, but he would adore and
spoil my dogs. And while he wanted me to stay in
Atlanta, he would be happy to know that the
apple fell close to the tree, and rolled just a
few hours north to the city where he was born.
All in all, I'm pretty sure my father would be
OK with the adult I became. Which is a
comforting thought in the wee morning hours of
February 19th , when the candle is
flickering itself out.back to the top
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Have a Happy (and Pleasurable)
New Year
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My husband says I really know how to put a curse
on a week. Five little words are all it takes
for misfortune to scope us out like a
heat-seeking missile to a forest fire. "Let's
have a good week," I said on a recent Monday.
The Monday was barely underway when the curse
took hold. My husband called to report he'd
broken the car's other windshield. "Other," as
in the one that was not already broken.
"I backed into a tiny sign," he said.
"Then put a tiny piece of plastic over it
and we'll fix it later," I said. "Later," as in
possibly never, depending on how well the
plastic held up.
"No," he said. "The sign was tiny but the
hole is huge." The meaning of huge became clear
when he picked me up for lunch. "Huge," as in
the hole could accommodate a man's head. But the
real problem, as I saw it, was that the rest of
the windshield, the part that was not already
lying in bits in a parking lot in front of a
tiny sign, was fighting for its freedom. Every
time we hit a bump the car lost more of its
glass. We were like a giant motorized mouth
spitting out thousands of glittering teeth in
our wake.
Later that day an art show rejection fell
through my mail slot, and I fended off the hurt
by losing my sunglasses. The week progressed,
and as it did it gave us more of the same: a
large order of new frames with broken glass, a
loose crown, a laptop crash with deadlines
looming…and a partridge in a pear tree. Only by
a "partridge" I mean a puppy, of course, and by
"pear tree" I mean a ditch. Because a difficult
week just wouldn't be complete without a lost
puppy in a ditch encroaching upon the last
vestiges of our sanity.
Ironically, or maybe not, my husband has
been reading about happiness. It's a good thing
to do anytime, but especially relevant at the
start of a new year. "Happiness," he reports
from the sofa, "isn't the same as pleasure." I
am on my way into the living room to show him my
new fleecy boots when I get the news.
"You can have lots of pleasure and never be
happy, because pleasure is fleeting while
happiness is enduring." He's paraphrasing, but I
get his point. I realize he has never been
acquainted with new boots, because if he had, he
would know that the pleasure they bring is
enduring. Still, I encourage him.
"So should we stop our quest for pleasure?"
I ask. Meanwhile, I am searching my mind for the
pleasure we've had lately. A movie? No time.
Dinner out? Hardly. Large unnecessary purchase?
We did recently buy a new towel rack to replace
the one that broke, but I do not recall getting
pleasure from this. There's the matter of the
boots, of course, but I like to think of those
as a necessity.
"There's nothing wrong with pleasure as
long as you don't expect it to fulfill you," he
explains through a mouthful of peanut M&M's. It
is then that I notice, with some glee, that the
laces on my new boots are an entirely separate
entity from the zipper. This means the calves
will always be snug regardless of whether the
laces are flapping. This is utterly fulfilling
in a way I cannot explain to my husband.
"What's our plan of action then?" I ask
him, because we are action oriented people who,
sensing a whiff of disarray anywhere in our
emotional environment, feel an immediate need to
brandish our psychological hammers and nails and
fix it. The house can be falling down around us
(and in fact the laundry room has been without
its sheetrock for four months owing to a silent
but horrific leak in the wall) but let there be
a pebble in our emotional path and we will blast
it out of our way with a mental snow-blower.
"The plan of action is to know what makes
us happy and do more of that," he says. I love
this advice. I once tried telling a fellow
writer that they should find a line they'd
written that worked and "do more of that." The
writer found this advice practically useless,
but it made perfect sense to me.
So I looked around at the rubble that had
been our week to see what I could salvage. The
windshield would have to be fixed (with another
windshield and not with a clear leaf bag, as I
had hoped). I would have to get new sunglasses,
see a dentist, and have the laptop lobotomized.
None of this, once done, was going to bring
fulfillment. Only one thing stood out as my
route to enduring happiness, and it wasn't the
boots after all. It was the thing that had also
brought me the most pain: the plight of the
discarded puppy, the worm-ridden, four-pound
barely-weaned pooch. I don't have to explain
this one to my husband because I know he already
gets it. Pleasure is a kiss on the lips, but
happiness is the hope that rides in your arms in
a car with a busted out windshield.back to the top |
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