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2006
Chattanooga Times-Free Press
Columns by Dana Shavin A Dog, a Peach and a Poem: A Recipe for a Happy New Year, December 17 Idol Dreams, November 5 Snakes on a Plane? Not a Problem! September 24 My Mower, Myself: What Our Machines Tell Us About Ourselves, August 13, 2006 Nothing is Permanent--Thankfully, May 21, 2006 It's How You Look at it That Makes All the Difference, April 9 Who Will Take Care of us When We're Old? February 26, 2006 A New Year Rides in with Fresh Promises, January 15
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A
Dog, a Peach and a Poem: A Recipe for a Happy New Year |
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Admittedly, I’m a bad poet. I read poetry infrequently, and understand it almost never. In spite of this I bring a certain awe to the process. It’s the same awe I might bring to reading about, say, electricity. Beyond my reverence for the complicated way it works, I’m no electrician, either.
My most recent attempt to write poetry was two years ago. I was taking an online writing class and the assignment was to write an entire poem using only one syllable words. “Fun,” I thought, monosyllabically. “Ooh, and hard.” I labored for a week. The result was a twenty- line poem entitled Shark’s Peach. It told, in single syllables, the story of a small dog named Shark who is awakened one summer night by the scent of a newly fallen peach. He sneaks out of the house and follows his nose to the peach tree. He eats the fallen peach, then retraces his steps back to bed. And then I learned a few things about poetry. Like that often a poem starts out with a little story, but somewhere along the way it is supposed to take a turn and become about something bigger. I thought about Shark’s Peach. A little dog finds and eats a piece of fruit. Clearly my poem needed work. Not long after I wrote Shark’s Peach I met a man who told me the story of meeting a woman and having a drink with her on a candlelit balcony overlooking a large Midwestern city. The man talked for a long time describing the candle and the balcony and the woman and the city. “I can’t explain the impact,” he said, which he couldn’t. “But the vision of that candle on the table against the backdrop of the city stays with me.”
It took me a few minutes, but at last I thought I knew. He was living a poem! It was all there, the little story and the big story. It was obvious to me that what the man saw was not just a candle and a city, but the size of his life against the size of life in general.
Once I saw the little and big story in the starry -eyed stranger’s tale, I believed I saw little and big stories everywhere. Everyone had them, if only they would look.
Over Thanksgiving my husband and I had several people to our house for dinner. At one point, amidst the din of dishes clanking and people talking, my brother and I stood in the middle of the living room, staring at the bookshelf.
“Anatole Broyard?” I repeated. “I started reading his memoir but never finished. What about The Corrections?” “Loved it,” said my brother, “Except the middle part about the business he was involved in.” “Me too!” I said, delighted. “Did you read his book of essays?” “Not yet. What about The Lovely Bones?” And so on. My brother and I inhabit different worlds and our meetings are often strained. But in that moment, I saw it again, the little story unfolding into the bigger one: the chatting about books turning into the story of our finally becoming adults, and forgiving something neither of us could name. As I write this, Shark the peach-eating dog sleeps beside me on the sofa. Every few minutes his body twitches in a dream I am certain is all about nighttime peach raids. As I think again about his poem, it suddenly occurs to me that at its inception was the little story of a dog who ate a fallen peach, but at its heart there was a larger story after all, even if I didn’t know how to write it. Shark’s Peach, it turns out, is the story of going after that which calls out to you. Best wishes for a happy new year, and for finding your stories, big and small. |
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A few nights ago I dreamed I was a contestant on American Idol. Two things are disturbing about this: the first is that, of all the reality shows that have burst onto the scene in recent years, American Idol most represents, to me, the desperation of the masses to be seen and heard regardless of talent or message. The second is that I didn’t win. I told my husband (who, conveniently, is an ex-therapist) about the dream. “What’s it mean?” I asked. He answered with a question, as any decent, annoying therapist will do. “What is it you feel you’re not winning at?” “How long do you have?” I asked. “How long do you need?” he asked back. It isn’t like I haven’t been here in the “I can’t win for losing” territory before. I recently read a wonderful quote in a book whose title I promptly forgot. “How many times does something have to happen to you before it finally occurs to you?” it went. “Seven,” said my friend Mimi when I told her about the quote. “It’s a rhetorical question,” I said. “Not if you have an answer,” she said. In my case, things have to happen more than seven times before they finally occur to me, and it can still take a dream to drive a point home. I am not winning at my attempts to convince potential agents that I am the spawn of badboy literary genius David Foster Wallace. I have yet to be lionized on the merits of my accomplishments with acrylics. As the mother of none I will win no parenting awards; I’ve long since quit showing horses, trying to read the most books in the summer, or insisting on a tofu meal at least once a week. American Idol? Forget about having the wrong voice to represent a generation. The question is whether I have a strong enough voice to represent myself. And then it hit me: my dream floated in on the leaden wings of early hot flashes and an impending November birthday. I am teetering on the cusp of 45; suddenly 44 is so achingly, innocently young. I pine for the fair skin and smooth face of 44 as 45 arrives on my doorstep like a sumo wrestler to the breakfast table. Birthdays always make me wonder whether it’s ever possible to feel you’ve done the best you can. If on the stage of life, your dance could ever be graceful enough, beautiful enough, enough enough. If we always wish we’d taken the road we shunned, or feared, or declared somehow too not-us. When David Foster Wallace is lying on his deathbed, will he wish he could have been Jessica Simpson all dressed up in curls and song? If I ever reach my artistic pinnacle, which, granted, changes year to year, will I wish I’d made children instead and created a certain immortality? “I think it was my outfit,” I tell my husband, who is still waiting patiently for me to come to insight about y American Idol debacle. “I realize now there was no way I could win wearing a brown plaid skirt and bunny slippers.” My husband nods. “You weren’t dressed for success?” . “You cannot represent a generation, any generation, in plaid anything.” “So you missed out on your big opportunity due to a glitch in planning.” “Exactly.” My husband looked at the clock beside the bed. “I’m afraid were out of time,” he said. My point exactly. |
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There’s a new movie out whose scariness
derives from what some might call fear’s axis of evil: the combination
of slimy, biblically implicated reptiles, airplane travel in the post
9/11 world, and entrapment in a small area. Really, I wonder, is this
the best they could do? I could set resting heart rate records watching
such fare. If they really want to shake me to my core, then they need to
understand that, for me, fear rotates on a single evil axis. Only then
will they make the truly terrifying movie. They’ll call it: Public
Speaking Anywhere.
According to my research, public speaking is more scary to more people than death. For me the two are virtually indistinguishable, the exception being that people do not feel compelled to tell you that with enough practice you will get better at death, or that learning to die effectively will advance your career and build character.
I have had a phobia of public speaking for as long as I can remember. In fourth grade I had to give a speech on mollusks. From the day the assignment was made I fretted and sulked. Every time I cracked my encyclopedia to the letter “M” I felt a chill breeze blow across my skin. I stumbled through the talk, and while I can’t remember anything I said, I can recall with agonizing clarity the oscillating fan someone turned on in my chest that day, which was busily chopping up my heart and lungs into tiny, irreparable pieces. A period of classroom silence lasting twelve years ensued.
People try to sympathize. They admit to their own pre-speech jitters. But those of us who suffer the equivalent of an out-of body experience when called to state our name are unmoved by their confessions. Jitters are normal. Terror isn’t.
Where my fear comes from I don’t know. My father reveled in an audience, and my mother led therapy groups. My sister joins poetry slams, is a solo pianist, and recently sang on stage. My brother has taught classes, accepted awards with aplomb, and is the outspoken leader of a large television news team. And me? I am the quiet force behind two careers that allow me the public silence I have always felt necessary: as a painter and a writer, I speak in color and in metaphor, but most importantly, I speak in isolation.
There is a bright spot in all this. When I was fifteen, my friend Kim convinced me to enter a horse show.
“You’ll have fun,” she said naively. “Uh, huh,” I said, the low whir of the oscillating fan just beginning to rev up in my chest. “It’s all about the horse,” Kim said. “No one will even see you.”
I arrived at the show on the appointed day, and within seconds was confronted with the awful reality of bleachers dotted with spectators and a ring full of judges. The fan in my chest kicked into high gear. I started to have vision problems and I couldn’t feel my legs.
I rode grimly into the ring like a soldier approaching the front lines of a war he doesn’t support. And then an amazing thing happened. My terror abated. Like the soul of a dead person at the moment of expiration, my anxiety took leave of my body. Where it went is anyone’s guess, although I would venture it entered my horse, who, on the cue to trot, rocketed out from under me. We were out of ribbon contention, I knew, but all that mattered in that moment was the lesson: fear, I saw, was not unshakeable. Even my horse believed she could outrun it.
Thirty years later, as I prepare for a public reading, I am banking on the lesson that fear is not unshakeable. As I re-think my past in the public eye, a new, shiny horse bursts out of the gate bearing the name Opportunities Lost. On her back, hope rides high, balancing the regret that’s always been there: for the Bat Mitzvah I could not have, the career paths I could not pursue, the father I could not eulogize. The personal terror of the public moment steals much from us that we cannot reclaim. But as the day of my reading approaches, I suppose you could say I’m getting back on the horse. Or, depending on your fears, on the snake-filled plane. |
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It occurs to me
that our machines have become the predictors of our future. My insight
comes on the heels of a conversation I had with my husband recently. I
was complaining that as soon as we got the van’s air conditioner
serviced, the Jeep’s alternator started to act up, and once we got the
alternator taken care of, the lawn mower’s fuel line erupted.
"Why does it seem like our stuff is always breaking?" I asked. "Because everything we have is old," he said. It’s true. Combined, our cars are at the age where they need to start thinking about a retirement fund. This year the mower turns old enough to drink. Suddenly our machines are no longer just a means to an end, they are our intimate guides to the end. They teach by example. They are leading us down a dark corridor, to the future of our impending decline. There was a time, when the lawn mower was young, that I would burst out of the house on a sunny day, freshly showered and intoxicated by the aroma of peach-thickened air. Already the neighborhood mowers were circling their yards in an unchoreographed dance that I ached to join. I raced to the barn, hopped astride our own mower, and popped the clutch. Thrilling to the roar of youthful horsepower, I dropped the deck and shot out of the paddock, into the bright yellow sun of a perfect morning. Back and forth, back and forth I went in my hypnotic massage of the lawn, a three hour tour of duty, my own personal trip to everywhere. In those early days, I wrote while I mowed. Pages of a novel bloomed like wildflowers in my head. Acres of words stretched out before me, becoming fields of stories. Mowing was how I untangled them. When the yard was done I ran inside to type: a little pruning, a little moving this to there, and the stories were complete. I sent them off to be published. Some were. I was never so happy as when I was mowing. Except, of course, when I was finished, and recording what the grass had taught me. Did I mention the fuel line erupted? This was sometime after the mower lost a deck wheel, the hood latch broke, and the belt mysteriously elongated itself and fell off. We pushed the mower up into the back of the pickup truck, which had a flat, and after my husband fixed the flat we took the mower to the doctor. Thankfully, it still works, but it idles uneasily and protests sharp turns. It slurps gas and backfires unapologetically. Its progress is slow and its cut uneven. We should probably retire it but that seems cruel. After all, we aren’t as efficient as we once were either, but that hardly means we’re ready to quit. Admittedly, it’s hot in the saddle these days. I don’t mow without a thick frosting of sunscreen on my exposed parts. I wear a hat for my hair, sunglasses for my contact lenses, and enclosed shoes instead of no shoes. By the time I’m finished my skin is so shiny I can see the sky reflected in my own shoulders. And it’s harder now to hear the stories in my head. I tell myself that’s the fault of the mower, its sickly drone and noisy protestations. I haven’t lost perspective though. Our machines might be old and pointing the way but we’re not there yet. We’re barely baby boomers, after all. By Christmas I will be my family’s sole representative of the under-50 crowd. And if you believe in such a thing as dog years, we are way younger than the two cocker spaniels that live with us, who have discovered that sleep beats barking while the mowers dip and spin, and saves energy for dinner and scratching and looking out the window. Feeling young, I’ve discovered, just means you have to ignore certain realities and embrace others. Our cars might be old, but they aren’t dead, and the yard, though choppy, is cut. Wherever time goes, we also go, but the same can be said about babies and seedlings and new, shiny things. Our machines may suggest our future, but thankfully, they aren’t the engineers of it. |
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Saving
Faith in Dallas |
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A while back my husband and I were reading
about a celebrity who had gone through a difficult time in her life. The
interviewer asked what got her through. "Faith, family, and exercise," she answered. "Well," I joked. "At least we've got exercise." What made me think of this was a recent encounter at an art fair that stunned me into realizing I still had a semblance of faith as well. The setting was Dallas. The weather was hot, and, as happens when the weather is too hot for the natives to shop, my husband and I, who were both exhibitors, walked around and became customers ourselves. I bought some earrings and frozen lemonade. He bought smoked almonds and a four dollar coke. And then we negotiated for a painting. The paintings we liked by a man I'll call J (not his real initial) were oil cityscapes, spontaneously rendered, colorful, and large. Of two that we especially liked, one had a barely discernible nude in the background, and the other featured graffiti that was hard to make out. We decided to go with the graffiti-embellished cityscape. Because we were trading art for art, we carried two of my husband's photographs to J's booth, and fifteen minutes later J brought our chosen, already cherished, painting to ours.  He set it down. "Now this here," J said, wagging his finger in the direction of the richly textured, painted sky, "This says Have A Nice Day." My husband and I squinted at the purplish sky. Yes, maybe we could see some of the letters. But then again not. It didn't matter. We weren't getting the painting in order to read it. "And this here," J went on, stabbing the same finger at the centermost point of the anonymous city, "This says 'Heil Hitler.'" Excuse me? Surely I had heard wrong. What the painting said was not 'Heil Hitler" but 'Heel, Heidi." Heidi, I decided, was J's beloved dog. "Yup," J said, stretching and patting his belly with both hands. "I do a lot of these. I did one for an old Jewish man a few years back." He said "Jewish" the way an angry prison guard might say "child molester." "I knew he'd been in a concentration camp, so I painted a swastika right in the middle of the painting, then covered it up where he'd think it was something else." He looked at us and giggled at the memory of this happy secret. By this time I had gathered there was no heeler named Heidi, and every hair on both of my arms was standing up. I could feel my eyeballs spinning in their sockets and hear my mother gasping all the way from Atlanta. "Oh!' I said, effectively. I happen to be Jewish. "Huh!" said my husband, somewhat more confrontationally. He is not Jewish, except by proxy. It was in the moments that followed that I realized nothing connects you more deeply to your faith than having to defend it. In a span of fifteen minutes, the amount of time my husband and I actually owned the painting before returning it, I wandered miserably through a field of prickly emotions ranging from the pained innocence of disbelief (many have offered to "save" me over the years but none has offered to blatantly hate me) to the satisfying self-righteousness of outrage (How Dare He? How Could He? Who Does He Think He Is?). By the time we carried the offensive painting back to J, I was something I hadn't been since I was ten and at the top of my Hebrew school class: fervently Jewish, and proud of it. Which is why what happened next surprised and baffled me: I apologized. I actually said the words, "I'm sorry J," as we put the painting back in his booth. I have no idea what I was sorry for unless it was not wanting to be the one to tell him he'd told the wrong story to the wrong person. In which case I was apologizing to myself. "Me too," said J, although I think he was just sorry to lose possession of my husband's beautiful photographs. We walked out of J's booth one painting poorer but infinitely relieved. As my husband put his arm around me, I thought about how much is revealed in a chance meeting of only a few minutes, the amount of time it took for us to fall in love with a piece of art, grow wary of its creator, and discover that the act of standing up for yourself, however small, is itself an act of faith.
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My friend Mimi remembers the
moment she stopped chewing gum forever. |
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Over the winter I heard a TV movie critic
come down hard on Steve Martin for trying his hand at a new kind of character.
Martin, feeling the need to expand his reach, or maybe having grown tired of
playing the same lovable, hilarious goofball, had taken a serious movie role.
The critic was disappointed. "How can we reward [Martin] for turning his back on his genius?" he asked. In the privacy of my living room I raised my hand. "Oh! Oh!" I yelled. "By thanking him for taking the risk? By congratulating him for having the nerve to leave the safe but done-that for the unknown? By expressing our deepest appreciation for setting such a fantastic example of what it is to evolve?" I went on and on in this vein but alas, no one but my husband and two small dogs were paying attention, and the husband was iffy. I haven't stopped thinking about that critic's comment and how wrong I think he was. It's hard enough to define and re-define yourself with the passage of time, in relation to other people, within your career, with regard to your partner and your goals, without mouthy critics threatening disapproval if, once you've made a niche for yourself, you grow in some way and then try to find another one. I have a writing mentor I talk to every two weeks by phone. Often her writing advice doubles as a kind of therapy. Two weeks ago I called her for our scheduled meeting. "I'm having some trouble with the next half of the book," I told her. "I can't seem to move forward." "Don't worry," she said. "It's common for the wind to go out of your sails once you're halfway across the ocean. It's called Second Act Failure." I was ecstatic. As a one-time mental health clinician with experience on both sides of the couch, I know the value of a diagnosis. Just having a name to call something immediately tames the angst. The name itself isn't a cure, of course, it just becomes a cauldron in which to continue cooking the soup you started months or years earlier. But at least the soup is contained. Without that our issues are just a bunch of loose ingredients that don't add up to anything we can use. A diagnosis is like a definition of who we are in that moment, and sometimes it helps to explain who we've always been. It's nothing more than an organizing principle. Even if it isn't pretty--and really, what diagnosis is?--it can help you grasp the essence of things. The day after my writing mentor's assessment I went in for some tests on my gallbladder. "You carry your gallbladder high," the technician remarked during the dye scan. I looked at the TV monitor on which the illuminated organs in my abdominal cavity appeared like planets in a distant solar system. A constellation of little dye-lit stars paraded down the corridor of my interstellar digestive highway. I couldn't see where my gallbladder looked particularly high, but then it didn't look low either. Truth is, I had to ask which blob on the screen was my gallbladder. On TV, all organs look alike. The technician's comment got me thinking about the power of diagnosis and self definition again. I had never thought of myself as a high gallbladder person. Were any of my friends high gallbladder people? My family? My husband? I started to wonder if things you never knew about yourself could still define you, for example if you didn't know you were Jewish would you still pass politely on pork chops and Christmas? I doubted it. If you didn't know you had a high gallbladder, as I didn't, were you any more or less prone to Second Act Failure? Maybe Steve Martin, in the second half of his life, realized he had a serious side all along but it took the wind dying down before he could discover it. In which case I'm thinking that maybe, instead of "Second Act Failure," or "turning his back on his genius," we should call our challenging, sometimes frustrating, and sometimes even paralyzing attempts to move forward something nicer, like "Act Two." Because it's beginning to look like it's the way you define a thing that can make all the difference in the outcome. |
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This might sound melodramatic, but lately
we and our friends have been musing about who will take care of us when we're
old. It's silly, lighthearted speculation, of course--we are all in our forties
and early fifties, a far cry from Sunday drives and 5 o'clock dinners at
Shoney's and trips to Wal-mart for beige colored clothing. But as one of us
shops for a retirement home for her mother and another takes his father to
weekly doctor visits, we can't help but see the evidence before us: we are doing
it for our parents, and we are all childless. So who is going to do it for us?
As close friends for many years, we would potentially take care of each other, but the problem is that we will all be old at the same time. What we need is a younger, childless sibling, preferably one whose life has been a series of disappointments culminating in a social vacuum. The problem is that all of our siblings are either, like mine, much older, or they have kids of their own, i.e. their lives are, and will always be, a kind of social melee. There are simply no elder-care candidates in any of our families. Or so we have led each other to believe. Sometimes, when we are sitting around each other's living rooms sipping wine and fighting off the 8pm sleepies, we will eye each other suspiciously. Has someone discovered a long-lost (healthy, younger, socially inadequate) cousin whom they are keeping a secret from the rest of us? Has someone come into money and just put a down payment on a nice retirement villa for only himself and his spouse? Recently one of us returned from a family engagement with news about a younger brother's newfound openness to familial closeness. We were at dinner and we all sat forward at once. "Really!" one of us said, excitedly. "How wonderful for us--I mean you," stammered another. "Is he in good health?" "Does he have reliable transportation?" "Is he capable of lifting?" It turned out this brother was not the answer to our strange prayer, and so we will have to keep looking for potential caretakers. It is lucky, I think, that we've started now, while we are still relatively active, interesting people. But things change quickly, I know. Just last week my sister emailed to say that her youngest daughter Isabel is now closer to being a teenager than she is to being born. (My sister loves these kinds of mental machinations that involve making yourself and others miserable by pointing out relative losses to relative gains. The day before I turned ten she proclaimed, ominously, that my age would never be in the single digits again. The next day I practically burst into tears as I blew out my ten candles and said goodbye forever to an era I hadn't known was so important or so fleeting.) And a few days before my sister's email, my gynecologist informed me it was time for my first colonoscopy, given the incidence of colon cancer on my mother's side. "Already?" I said, hoping my voice would convey a pleading negativity that would make her change her mind. "How old are you exactly?" she asked. "44," I said, enunciating poorly and squirming in my giant paper robe. "Forty-FOUR?," she practically yelled. "It is definitely time and in fact you're a little behind." I started to giggle in spite of myself and she, having endured thirty-plus years of humor centered around bodily functions and malfunctions, smiled politely. But it didn't change her mind. I called my mother when I got home. "This is your fault," I told her. "Things could be worse," she said. "Your cousin had it done the day after Thanksgiving, so she couldn't even eat leftovers." "Really!" I said, excitedly. "That's right," my mother said. "And how is she now?" I asked, my heart pounding in my chest. "Is she healthy? Does she have reliable transportation? Is she capable of lifting?" |
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Fifteen years ago, when I got my first
call to nest, my not-yet-husband and I went to look at a house with property on
Lookout Mountain. The ad promised a three bedroom house with all the predictable
amenities, plus a barn and five acres of land suitable for horses. It used words
like privacy, safety, beauty and comfort. I was so excited to have found my
dream house that by the time we got there I practically fell out of the car in
my haste to see it. Sure enough, the property had everything the ad promised.
The problem was that it also had something the ad left out: Poncho. In his happier days, happier being a metaphor for "alive," Poncho was a full blooded Quarter horse. He had lived on Lookout Mountain all his life, had been born there in fact, and, according to his owner, had no desire to live anywhere else. We were told he had a penchant for peanut butter and a love of sunbathing, but this we had to take at face value, for all that remained of Poncho was what had yet to decompose beneath an eight foot high dirt mound in the back yard of my dream house. As if that wasn't enough, the right to purchase the house was conditional. "Whoever lives here," we were told, "Cannot move Poncho." I looked at my not-yet-husband for confirmation of what I had heard. Poncho, he explained quietly, or more accurately, Poncho's Mound, would be a permanent fixture in our yard, something we would have to mow around, garden beside, keep the dogs from digging into, and explain to our friends, until such time as nature took its course and returned Poncho fully and flatly to the earth. "Which could be another hundred years," he added patiently. I looked back at the mound, which I now saw was leeching liquid into an adjacent small pond composed entirely of equine body fluids. "Let's go," I said. "I've had it with Poncho." I hadn't thought of Poncho in years when I came across something that reminded me of him recently. I was reading a book and came to this advice: "When your horse dies, get off." It was a book not about the art of horsemanship, in which case this would seem to be an obvious lesson, but about leaving behind what you cling to that no longer sustains you. Like bad habits, sour relationships, outdated ideas, a job you no longer enjoy. Or, in Poncho's owner's case, the actual dead horse. By keeping him front and center on the property, he was little more than a biohazard and a sorrowful reminder of loss. Why not bury peanut-butter loving Poncho a bit further from the house, where nature could take over in private and he could be remembered fondly, instead of planting him under the kitchen window and clinging to the illusion that he's still involved with the family somehow? So much of what we hold onto expires in time. This includes not just the things and people and animals we adore but the dreams and plans we had too. When I was little I wanted to be a jockey and work at McDonald's, but I got too tall and grew to dislike red meat. Later I wanted to be Stevie Nicks and live on a farm but I could never reconcile the rock-n-roll aspect of my future with the desire for chickens and solitude. Dreams and plans come and go, live and die; it's important to know when your horses are still in the race and when they're down for good. Personally, I love the dismount. I love saying adios to an old year and all its outdated routines and ill-conceived goals. The promises inherent in the simple act of starting fresh are intoxicating. This will be the year I sit up straight, finish writing my book, catch up on world politics, conquer my personal jealousies, become a gardener, and finally figure out what to do with amaranth flour. These are my new horses, and I look forward to the long ride to 2007. |