I was recently introduced to the concept of family as tribe, and I can't stop thinking about it. The idea is that your immediate family, your family of origin, is your tribe, and that most people feel an intense, often unconscious pull or connection to their tribe and will defend a member of the tribe if he or she is attacked. I guess the idea is that if you marry or start a family of your own, you build a new tribe but still remain connected to your original tribe.
I liked this idea when it was presented to me. Or maybe it was that it made sense to me. It seems to allow for the fact that you may not have anything in common with or even like every member of your tribe but there is still this bond: You are tribe mates. The more I think about it, in fact, the more complex and beautiful the idea becomes to me, in the way a proof is beautiful, or a solution, or a machine.
I definitely feel a tribal connection to my immediate family as well as my extended family: my blood relations, my tribe. This is not to say that these are the people I feel closest to, necessarily, or love the most, or feel I am most like. That is not what a tribe is. And there are members of my tribe who, for example, think Mitt Romney would be a great president (only one I know about, but still), take comfort in the idea of the resurrection, gamble, hate dogs. These are not things I can relate to, not qualities I would seek out in a close friend, but they are irrelevant in terms of our tribal connection. The Romney supporter, for example, does not share my politics, but I would take a bullet for him. He helped teach me long division. I love him fiercely although we are no longer part of each other's daily lives. He is my tribe.
But I started in on the complexity of the notion, which I find so compelling, and that is more about the tribes we make and join of our own volition. I of course now have my own new family: a foursome, a fragile, fledgling tribe that grows stronger every day and will, I believe, one day grow its own branches, expand, as tribes do. And I belong to so many other tribes: my building, the parents at Lily's school, my high school friends, people from my home town, fans of the Boston Celtics, Scrabulous players, regular patrons of a particular fried chicken joint near where I live, readers, writers, lapsed Unitarians (and Unitarianism is hard to lapse from; it's pretty lapsed already), partisan Democrats, I could go on ad infinitum with the tribes I belong to both large and small, general and insanely specific.
I visualize these tribes like those circles that always used to appear in my math homework: the ones that overlap and the common, shared numbers go in the part in the middle, the ones unique to each category in the part that is just of the individual circle. Do you know what I mean? Venn diagrams, they're called, I think. They're used for factoring; you could make a circle for 12, say, and one overlapping it slightly for 36, and the numbers in the little middle part would be 1, 2,3,4, 6 and 12 but not 9, not 18. This seems so clear to me--it's how I see it--but I can tell I'm not explaining it well, and I haven't yet said how it relates.
I think that each of us belongs to so many tribes, and that in the people we like the most, many of the tribes overlap, give us a feeling of genuine kinship. This, "kin," another word I have always liked. The concept of the kindred spirit, which I first read about in Anne of Green Gables 30 some odd years ago, has always made total sense to me, from the first time I read about it 30 years ago. I am always on the lookout for kindred spirits, consider myself lucky in having found a few. But even in those we love most, know best, the tribes don't overlap universally. People are way too complex for that. My husband belongs to some tribes whose language I can't even feign understanding, as do both of my parents, my sister, and all of my closest friends. As it should be.
And to take this just a little further, I think when people limit the number of tribes they belong to, or censor their tribe membership for the wrong reasons, they really limit themselves, become stunted in some sad way. People who refuse to acknowledge others in a tribe are the bigots, hatemongers, ignorants among us. They build impenetrable walls around their tribes and in doing so become smaller and less powerful.
Or at least that's what I think. I am trying to see the strength and beauty in the tribes I belong to, from my own primal tribe of origin to the many, many tribes I have joined, belong to by default or admire.
I don't think it's too strong a statement to say that taken all together, the tribes a person belongs to is who they are.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
A Lie, A Ladyslipper
I really, really, REALLY don't want this to turn into a parenting blog mostly because I want to be writing about things other than parenting. I guess on some level I don't want to feel like my world is really that small. But sometimes my world really is that small. Or maybe it's more generous to myself to say that in a day in which other, often interesting and outward-looking things do in fact happen to me, the parenting still looms largest of all. Ah, the preamble. Even the Constitution has one.
So Lily and I were walking the dogs the other day, when I suddenly realized that three out of Sadie's four paws had been colored red with magic markers. "Lily?" I asked. "What happened to Sadie's paws?" I wasn't actually mad; in fact, I was trying not to laugh, as it occurred to me that it probably wouldn't be very good for Sadie to have to lick all that marker off. I also had thought we had finally absorbed the "only on paper" rule when it came to magic markers. The drawings she glued to the walls this morning made me realize the "only on paper" rule had uncharted waters still.
She shrugged dramatically, her shoulders hunched up by her ears, palms upstretched, eyebrows practically waggling. She looked like a miniature Marx brother. "I can't imagine," she said. "I just don't know." We kept walking. "Do you think I colored Sadie's paws?" I finally asked? No, she said. "Daddy?" No, again. "Annika?" Not her either, she said. She sounded like she was enjoying this a little too much. I, on the other hand, was starting to feel a little annoyed.
"Lily, I know you colored Sadie's paws," I said. "I don't like it when you don't tell me the truth. Can you please just admit that you did it?" Uncharted waters again, but in a way that couldn't be fixed with spray-on cleaner. I felt uneasy about what I was saying, my irritation, but I didn't know where else to go: she had lied to me, was digging in her heels as we continued the argument.
"No, Mama," she said, stopping on the sidewalk with an angry glare. "I did not do it. I think Sadie did it all by herself." I resisted the urge to shout, "The dog does not have opposable thumbs!" It seemed undignified. And I was mad at this point, at her and at myself. We argued all the way upstairs, and for a little while longer. I finally got her to acknowledge some role in the coloring of the paws, but she never fully owned up to it, and she made it seem like she was just saying what I needed her to say to get me to let the subject go.
I'm not sure why I couldn't. It was funny--the red paws, the lie itself, the idea of Sadie making red strokes on her white fur with the marker held between her teeth, I guess, in some distorted dog version of a manicure. And I knew the lying itself was developmentally appropriate. I had once come home from preschool and told my mother I'd spilled paint all over the floor on purpose. My mother, mortified, called the school. I'd made it up. Kids lie to test you, to be made to feel safe in spite of the lie, sometimes just because of a burgeoning imagination, and they do need to be told that you know they're not telling the truth. But arm-twisting a begrudging confession is bad parenting. I knew it as I was doing it. Sigh.
But the whole exchange made me think of something, something else, something I haven't thought about in a long, long time. It must have been almost thirty-five years ago. I was very young; we were at my grandparents' house, which is--as Lily likes to point out--in the woods. It's on a corner lot in an increasingly developed suburban neighborhood, yes, but undeniably surrounded by a very small patch of woods. I was playing in the yard by myself. Mostly I stayed in the grassy yard by the house, but this time I had ventured a little way down the driveway, where the grassy yard met the decaying leaf covered floor of the woods, and then I saw it: a ladyslipper. For some reason, this had been drilled into me since birth. It was illegal to pick a ladyslipper. I knew that for some reason, not sure why, now that I think about it, my mother really cared about this law. It was serious business. They were endangered, I guess; it was actually illegal to pick them. (Or so I have always assumed; now I will do some online research and find out if this was a sham, although I can't imagine a motive for it.) I sat in front of it. It was white tinged pink, otherworldly. It looked like an enormous, elegant insect; a fairy pod. I knew more than I knew almost anything else that I could not, must not, pick it. And then I did.
I was found out. Did I confess? Was I caught? I don't remember. But I will never ever forget picking that ladyslipper.
This seems related to me to Lily's paw-coloring. Maybe it's just because I have so few memories in which I can so vividly conjure up an emotion from being her age. I think I remembered it for a reason.
So Lily and I were walking the dogs the other day, when I suddenly realized that three out of Sadie's four paws had been colored red with magic markers. "Lily?" I asked. "What happened to Sadie's paws?" I wasn't actually mad; in fact, I was trying not to laugh, as it occurred to me that it probably wouldn't be very good for Sadie to have to lick all that marker off. I also had thought we had finally absorbed the "only on paper" rule when it came to magic markers. The drawings she glued to the walls this morning made me realize the "only on paper" rule had uncharted waters still.
She shrugged dramatically, her shoulders hunched up by her ears, palms upstretched, eyebrows practically waggling. She looked like a miniature Marx brother. "I can't imagine," she said. "I just don't know." We kept walking. "Do you think I colored Sadie's paws?" I finally asked? No, she said. "Daddy?" No, again. "Annika?" Not her either, she said. She sounded like she was enjoying this a little too much. I, on the other hand, was starting to feel a little annoyed.
"Lily, I know you colored Sadie's paws," I said. "I don't like it when you don't tell me the truth. Can you please just admit that you did it?" Uncharted waters again, but in a way that couldn't be fixed with spray-on cleaner. I felt uneasy about what I was saying, my irritation, but I didn't know where else to go: she had lied to me, was digging in her heels as we continued the argument.
"No, Mama," she said, stopping on the sidewalk with an angry glare. "I did not do it. I think Sadie did it all by herself." I resisted the urge to shout, "The dog does not have opposable thumbs!" It seemed undignified. And I was mad at this point, at her and at myself. We argued all the way upstairs, and for a little while longer. I finally got her to acknowledge some role in the coloring of the paws, but she never fully owned up to it, and she made it seem like she was just saying what I needed her to say to get me to let the subject go.
I'm not sure why I couldn't. It was funny--the red paws, the lie itself, the idea of Sadie making red strokes on her white fur with the marker held between her teeth, I guess, in some distorted dog version of a manicure. And I knew the lying itself was developmentally appropriate. I had once come home from preschool and told my mother I'd spilled paint all over the floor on purpose. My mother, mortified, called the school. I'd made it up. Kids lie to test you, to be made to feel safe in spite of the lie, sometimes just because of a burgeoning imagination, and they do need to be told that you know they're not telling the truth. But arm-twisting a begrudging confession is bad parenting. I knew it as I was doing it. Sigh.
But the whole exchange made me think of something, something else, something I haven't thought about in a long, long time. It must have been almost thirty-five years ago. I was very young; we were at my grandparents' house, which is--as Lily likes to point out--in the woods. It's on a corner lot in an increasingly developed suburban neighborhood, yes, but undeniably surrounded by a very small patch of woods. I was playing in the yard by myself. Mostly I stayed in the grassy yard by the house, but this time I had ventured a little way down the driveway, where the grassy yard met the decaying leaf covered floor of the woods, and then I saw it: a ladyslipper. For some reason, this had been drilled into me since birth. It was illegal to pick a ladyslipper. I knew that for some reason, not sure why, now that I think about it, my mother really cared about this law. It was serious business. They were endangered, I guess; it was actually illegal to pick them. (Or so I have always assumed; now I will do some online research and find out if this was a sham, although I can't imagine a motive for it.) I sat in front of it. It was white tinged pink, otherworldly. It looked like an enormous, elegant insect; a fairy pod. I knew more than I knew almost anything else that I could not, must not, pick it. And then I did.
I was found out. Did I confess? Was I caught? I don't remember. But I will never ever forget picking that ladyslipper.
This seems related to me to Lily's paw-coloring. Maybe it's just because I have so few memories in which I can so vividly conjure up an emotion from being her age. I think I remembered it for a reason.
750 words minus about 500
Okay. A scene. That's all I have in me right now. Here goes...
It is summer. It's hot, and although school's been out for only a few weeks so far we are already wandering around complaining of being bored when we aren't at my grandparents' house with our cousins and the pool. This day I was home; I don't remember Alison being around. Maybe she'd gone off to a friend's. My grandfather came over to switch the top of my mother's MG from hard to soft. Or at least I think that's what he was doing; I don't know much about cars. I do know that he was putting a soft top on it: that when he began there was no roof on the car, and when he was done, there was.
I worshipped my grandfather, and there were only so many opportunities one had to be alone with him. For some reason, although I suspect I knew even then, at 13, that this was not a job that would ever be mine, I decided I needed to document what he was doing. I had been watching him gather what he needed, get organized for the job, while standing barefoot on our uncomfortable gravel driveway in my bare feet. In the jerky awkward way it is possible to run on sharp-edged gravel, I ran into the house and emerged with a pad of paper, a medium-sized one, and a pen.
As my grandfather worked, I wrote down what he was doing, asking him when I didn't know. I wrote it out in steps, in an instruction list, like this: 1), 2), 3) and so on. I don't remember what any of the steps were; I am certain I didn't understand them then either. We didn't discuss what I was doing or why. I have no idea where this list is, if it survived, when or if it was thrown away. It was never used. My grandfather died the next day.
It is summer. It's hot, and although school's been out for only a few weeks so far we are already wandering around complaining of being bored when we aren't at my grandparents' house with our cousins and the pool. This day I was home; I don't remember Alison being around. Maybe she'd gone off to a friend's. My grandfather came over to switch the top of my mother's MG from hard to soft. Or at least I think that's what he was doing; I don't know much about cars. I do know that he was putting a soft top on it: that when he began there was no roof on the car, and when he was done, there was.
I worshipped my grandfather, and there were only so many opportunities one had to be alone with him. For some reason, although I suspect I knew even then, at 13, that this was not a job that would ever be mine, I decided I needed to document what he was doing. I had been watching him gather what he needed, get organized for the job, while standing barefoot on our uncomfortable gravel driveway in my bare feet. In the jerky awkward way it is possible to run on sharp-edged gravel, I ran into the house and emerged with a pad of paper, a medium-sized one, and a pen.
As my grandfather worked, I wrote down what he was doing, asking him when I didn't know. I wrote it out in steps, in an instruction list, like this: 1), 2), 3) and so on. I don't remember what any of the steps were; I am certain I didn't understand them then either. We didn't discuss what I was doing or why. I have no idea where this list is, if it survived, when or if it was thrown away. It was never used. My grandfather died the next day.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
A Trifle
This afternoon I was tutoring a quirky and wonderful eleven-year-old girl who has a very natural funny writing voice but has never learned much about structure--about organizing her thoughts and words in ways that allow her to best express herself. She, and her equally amazing older brother, are examples of why I continue to do some tutoring; working with them is gratifying, fun, and helpful to me as a thinker and writer myself.
Anyway, I was helping this girl write an essay about the time she met her hero, Jane Goodall. I can't remember how it came up but at one point she let it slip that she had a baby blanket, one that had been given to her mother at her baby shower, one that she'd had all her life. It is called Silky. After she told me this she looked at me with slightly narrowed eyes, waiting to see, I think, if I was going to give her that "aren't you sweet" smile adults give kids so often and that Lily, at 4, already dislikes. I don't blame her; I hated it too. So instead I told this girl about my baby blanket, which was also given to me on the occasion of my birth, and which I had until my freshman year of college.
My blanket was called Soft Blanket. (I also had a black cat named Midnight; what can I say? My creativity kicked in late?) I loved Soft Blanket. To be totally honest, I feel a little sad writing about Soft Blanket now; I miss it still, I realize. When I went on an exchange trip to France in eighth grade, I cut a little square of Soft Blanket to bring along with me--my sister's idea, as there wasn't room in my bag to bring the whole blanket. And when I went to college, I brought Soft Blanket along. It didn't occur to me to be embarrassed by this, and as it turned out both of my roommates, and Nicole, had brought along their own "attachment objects"--a term I'd never heard until becoming a mother.
Nicole and I regressed with our blankets, even more than the actual fact of their existence implied. I guess we did this in appropriate college student ways: throwing each other's blankets out our fourth floor windows onto the quad, holding each other's blankets hostage, talking trash about each other's blankets. Wow--sounds dorkier than I realized when I see it in print. Know that we were not actually social outcasts: This was an activity reserved for bored Sunday afternoons or late night post party wrap-up sessions; it's not as though we were parading the blankets through the dining hall.
Anyway, over spring break of that first year of college, I went to visit Nicole in San Francisco. I brought two of my favorite possessions: my red Swedish clogs, which my mother had brought back from Dallarna, and Soft Blanket. Which, in hindsight, was a mistake. I had bought my ticket with these American Express vouchers that were popular at the time and cost $129 round trip but required a stop in usually Minneapolis. And Minneapolis, it turns out, is where Soft Blanket met its (his? her?) untimely demise. Or at least was lost to me forever. When I went to pick up my luggage at the airport in San Francisco, where Nicole's mother had come to pick me up, my bag had come open. I rifled through its contents quickly, urgently; three things were missing: the carefully wrapped house-guest gift I had brought for Nicole's mom, my red handpainted clogs, and Soft Blanket.
Nicole's mom took me to the customer service counter to report the damage to my bag and the missing items. The woman behind the counter asked me to give a complete description. She told me there was a team of people at the airport in Minneapolis who would be able to search and likely find my missing things, that it happened all the time. She said she would call right then, as soon as she had my descriptions. I duly described the wrapping paper, the shape of my gift. I described my distinctive red clogs. And then....I stumbled.
"Well," I said slowly. "It's a blanket. Or it used to be a blanket. It's more like a piece of material that's kind of....falling apart. It's pink and white--or it used to be pink and white; it's actually sort of a dirty whitish grey. It has a little square cut out of one corner where--" I stopped. The woman was looking at me a little sympathetically, a little concerned. Nicole's mother's brow was slightly furrowed. I knew then that Soft Blanket was gone. The airline staff in Minneapolis was not going to be able to locate and salvage what to the untrained eye was a dirty threadbare rag.
Sure enough, within 24 hours I had the gift and my clogs. I got the zipper fixed on my bag. I never saw Soft Blanket again.
I told the girl this, as I am telling you now, and she listened, carefully. When I was done, she lowered her head, shaking it a little in dismay. "That sucks," she said, finally. I forgave her the slang. She is, after all, eleven. And, she was right.
Anyway, I was helping this girl write an essay about the time she met her hero, Jane Goodall. I can't remember how it came up but at one point she let it slip that she had a baby blanket, one that had been given to her mother at her baby shower, one that she'd had all her life. It is called Silky. After she told me this she looked at me with slightly narrowed eyes, waiting to see, I think, if I was going to give her that "aren't you sweet" smile adults give kids so often and that Lily, at 4, already dislikes. I don't blame her; I hated it too. So instead I told this girl about my baby blanket, which was also given to me on the occasion of my birth, and which I had until my freshman year of college.
My blanket was called Soft Blanket. (I also had a black cat named Midnight; what can I say? My creativity kicked in late?) I loved Soft Blanket. To be totally honest, I feel a little sad writing about Soft Blanket now; I miss it still, I realize. When I went on an exchange trip to France in eighth grade, I cut a little square of Soft Blanket to bring along with me--my sister's idea, as there wasn't room in my bag to bring the whole blanket. And when I went to college, I brought Soft Blanket along. It didn't occur to me to be embarrassed by this, and as it turned out both of my roommates, and Nicole, had brought along their own "attachment objects"--a term I'd never heard until becoming a mother.
Nicole and I regressed with our blankets, even more than the actual fact of their existence implied. I guess we did this in appropriate college student ways: throwing each other's blankets out our fourth floor windows onto the quad, holding each other's blankets hostage, talking trash about each other's blankets. Wow--sounds dorkier than I realized when I see it in print. Know that we were not actually social outcasts: This was an activity reserved for bored Sunday afternoons or late night post party wrap-up sessions; it's not as though we were parading the blankets through the dining hall.
Anyway, over spring break of that first year of college, I went to visit Nicole in San Francisco. I brought two of my favorite possessions: my red Swedish clogs, which my mother had brought back from Dallarna, and Soft Blanket. Which, in hindsight, was a mistake. I had bought my ticket with these American Express vouchers that were popular at the time and cost $129 round trip but required a stop in usually Minneapolis. And Minneapolis, it turns out, is where Soft Blanket met its (his? her?) untimely demise. Or at least was lost to me forever. When I went to pick up my luggage at the airport in San Francisco, where Nicole's mother had come to pick me up, my bag had come open. I rifled through its contents quickly, urgently; three things were missing: the carefully wrapped house-guest gift I had brought for Nicole's mom, my red handpainted clogs, and Soft Blanket.
Nicole's mom took me to the customer service counter to report the damage to my bag and the missing items. The woman behind the counter asked me to give a complete description. She told me there was a team of people at the airport in Minneapolis who would be able to search and likely find my missing things, that it happened all the time. She said she would call right then, as soon as she had my descriptions. I duly described the wrapping paper, the shape of my gift. I described my distinctive red clogs. And then....I stumbled.
"Well," I said slowly. "It's a blanket. Or it used to be a blanket. It's more like a piece of material that's kind of....falling apart. It's pink and white--or it used to be pink and white; it's actually sort of a dirty whitish grey. It has a little square cut out of one corner where--" I stopped. The woman was looking at me a little sympathetically, a little concerned. Nicole's mother's brow was slightly furrowed. I knew then that Soft Blanket was gone. The airline staff in Minneapolis was not going to be able to locate and salvage what to the untrained eye was a dirty threadbare rag.
Sure enough, within 24 hours I had the gift and my clogs. I got the zipper fixed on my bag. I never saw Soft Blanket again.
I told the girl this, as I am telling you now, and she listened, carefully. When I was done, she lowered her head, shaking it a little in dismay. "That sucks," she said, finally. I forgave her the slang. She is, after all, eleven. And, she was right.
Postponing Oscar Wilde (Who Would, Needless to Say, Not Be Pleased)
Baby would not go to sleep tonight, and I can't take on Oscar. I know; other people whose babies won't sleep are working on a cure for cancer. Sorry.
Just a little bit about second children, I think. This, I want to write about. What interests me? To begin with: a fear, seldom discussed, but shared by many when I mustered up the courage to ask about it. I was afraid, when I finally decided to have a second child, that I wouldn't love her as much as my first one. Now the party line on this is a no-brainer. There is plenty of love to go around. Your heart expands. (Is that a Celine Dion song? Yikes.) It will be different, but equal. And on and on. But while part of me was willing to go along with this, another part of me remained stubbornly skeptical. I had never experienced anything like the fierceness of my love for Lily. There was no way, I told myself in agonizing moments, I could exist with twice that kind of intensity. And what was worse, I worried that I wouldn't be able to fake it, that this future second child would always sense her second-hand, diluted love and that this would affect her development, her sense of self.
Now I am supposed to write that the instant I met Annika, all these fears disappeared. I fell in love with her instantly, and all previous anxiety fell by the wayside replaced by this all-encompassing, ever-expanding love. Hmm. It is true that I fell in love with her instantly. There was enough love for that. And I don't love Lily more, just differently, and I kind of forgot in all my worrying that the very nature of love is its shifting over time--that it is not an "ever fixed thing" per Shakespeare (I think I am disagreeing with Shakespeare--is that allowed?) but the ultimate waxer and waner, roller coaster, cyclical, slippery thing.
Or at least it's always been that way for me; I can fall in or out of love with someone or something in an instant; my love for those I have loved the longest and most would look--if graphed--like a giant zig-zag. But I still feel a little uneasy about the way my love is being doled out, spread thin. It is exhausting, sometimes, to love. Does that sound terrible? It might sound worse than what I mean. I will back-up, or try to. I guess it's that I can still remember what it felt like to love Lily when she was my only child, and I liked the way it felt. When I think about it, the love, and even it being just the two of us, it makes me feel a little sad sometimes. I suppose it's not far out in left field to allow yourself a little mourning of a relationship that once was and is no more. But it never will be again. That's hard. And it's different now. And I will never have that kind of intense first love with Annika. It's different already, but it was never just the two of us. And it won't be. And that makes me a little sad too, in another way.
I wonder, often, how this will play out as time goes on. I have stopped, shocked, on a few occasions when it became crystal clear to me that each of my parents have a very different relationship with my sister than they do with me. I have sat in the backseat of a car as my father and Alison were silly with each other while driving somewhere in a way that my father and I never are. I have seen my mother look at Alison in ways she never does at me. It's hard to pinpoint, these differences, but I know it when I see it: the way the love is different. Not better, not worse. Different.
More on this will come....Goodnight.
Just a little bit about second children, I think. This, I want to write about. What interests me? To begin with: a fear, seldom discussed, but shared by many when I mustered up the courage to ask about it. I was afraid, when I finally decided to have a second child, that I wouldn't love her as much as my first one. Now the party line on this is a no-brainer. There is plenty of love to go around. Your heart expands. (Is that a Celine Dion song? Yikes.) It will be different, but equal. And on and on. But while part of me was willing to go along with this, another part of me remained stubbornly skeptical. I had never experienced anything like the fierceness of my love for Lily. There was no way, I told myself in agonizing moments, I could exist with twice that kind of intensity. And what was worse, I worried that I wouldn't be able to fake it, that this future second child would always sense her second-hand, diluted love and that this would affect her development, her sense of self.
Now I am supposed to write that the instant I met Annika, all these fears disappeared. I fell in love with her instantly, and all previous anxiety fell by the wayside replaced by this all-encompassing, ever-expanding love. Hmm. It is true that I fell in love with her instantly. There was enough love for that. And I don't love Lily more, just differently, and I kind of forgot in all my worrying that the very nature of love is its shifting over time--that it is not an "ever fixed thing" per Shakespeare (I think I am disagreeing with Shakespeare--is that allowed?) but the ultimate waxer and waner, roller coaster, cyclical, slippery thing.
Or at least it's always been that way for me; I can fall in or out of love with someone or something in an instant; my love for those I have loved the longest and most would look--if graphed--like a giant zig-zag. But I still feel a little uneasy about the way my love is being doled out, spread thin. It is exhausting, sometimes, to love. Does that sound terrible? It might sound worse than what I mean. I will back-up, or try to. I guess it's that I can still remember what it felt like to love Lily when she was my only child, and I liked the way it felt. When I think about it, the love, and even it being just the two of us, it makes me feel a little sad sometimes. I suppose it's not far out in left field to allow yourself a little mourning of a relationship that once was and is no more. But it never will be again. That's hard. And it's different now. And I will never have that kind of intense first love with Annika. It's different already, but it was never just the two of us. And it won't be. And that makes me a little sad too, in another way.
I wonder, often, how this will play out as time goes on. I have stopped, shocked, on a few occasions when it became crystal clear to me that each of my parents have a very different relationship with my sister than they do with me. I have sat in the backseat of a car as my father and Alison were silly with each other while driving somewhere in a way that my father and I never are. I have seen my mother look at Alison in ways she never does at me. It's hard to pinpoint, these differences, but I know it when I see it: the way the love is different. Not better, not worse. Different.
More on this will come....Goodnight.
Monday, February 25, 2008
A Moment
I was all set to write something inspired by an Oscar Wilde quote I stumbled on earlier today, but I think I'll save it for tomorrow. I just went over to the Pack-and-Play to check on Annika, who's been asleep for a couple of hours--which is great, considering before that she wasn't asleep for what seemed like three weeks but was actually since about 2. She is on her back, arms and legs splayed, head tilted slightly to one side, her tiny mouth, so much like Lily's, curled in a hint of a smile. Maybe she is thinking: I'm going to wake up in five minutes just to keep her on her toes. Probably not, though. I seem to be lucky with my children in the sleep department. Once they're asleep, they tend to stay asleep. I'm the one who doesn't sleep over here.
But I digress. So I was standing leaning over the Pack-and-Play which, for those of you who don't know is a sort of portable crib. Annika has been sleeping in this, set up in the dining room, because we have not been able to renovate our apartment, as per our original plan, and she doesn't have a room of her own; there is no room anywhere else for the crib. So at night, when I sit at my desk, she is six, seven feet away from me; when I stop typing, I can hear her breathe.
There is no cliche more prevalent among parents than "Time flies." If I had a dime for every time somebody has told me this in the context of parenthood, well, let's just say we'd have a bedroom for Annika already. And in some ways it's totally untrue. As someone who struggles with the mundane aspects of caring for an infant--the bouncing, changing, feeding, cooing, carrying, bouncing again ad infinitum--sometimes time seems stretched to its maximum capacity. This evening, for example, when an exhausted Lily was having a tantrum while Annika was screaming in her swingy seat and I was trying to get a bottle together, the two minutes it took me to do so seemed like all of 2007.
But earlier in the evening, as Lily sat on my lap as we read together, or tried to, as Annika kept wailing wherever we put her, Lily sighed, patted me on the back, and said while shaking her head, "Sometimes having a baby is just dreadful." Suddenly the last 4 years seemed to have passed in an instant. How can I have a child old enough to commiserate with me, old enough to use the word "dreadful?"
And now Annika. An hour ago or so I sat in the reclining chair and reclined it all the way back. I haven't done this in a while and then, right then, remembered August, when I spent every evening just like that: elevating my feet and trying not to think about how uncomfortable I was, imagining Annika, this theoretical child. It's like this: however you get your child, and it happens in so many ways, there is one universality. One day you don't have her, and then the next day you do. It has nothing to do with how old the child is when you become parent and child, or the circumstances of the child's birth or arrival. In my case, as soon as Annika was born, the hellish aspects of the pregnancy dissipated; to invoke another cliche, once the child is, you have bigger fish to fry. I don't mean you ever forget. Each child's arrival into a family is a universe-sized story. But the story becomes background noise so quickly you can't believe it when you have these moments remembering how large it all loomed beforehand.
Anyway. I digressed again. And that may be the first time I have ever used the past tense of "digress." (The digression seems to be feeding off of itself.) What I was going to say was Annika. Flat on her back in a slightly pilly pale pink sleeper, breathing in the tiniest even puffs, her tiny hands in loose, relaxed fists, already a person. How did this happen? How is it that I already have to really really try to remember before her? I mean, I can--of course I can remember what it was like before I had any children. But it does seem strange, still, and I don't mean to belabour the obvious, that one hot day last summer, as I lay in the reclining chair trying to visualize a child's face, countenance, being, she was not. And now she is. And yes, it happened so very, very fast.
Tonight, I let Oscar Wilde rest on his weary laurels. I want to remember this moment: me, standing over a navy blue Pack-and-Play in a dining room on West 16th Street wearing a sweatshirt I've had for twenty years, looking down at this perfect little person and listening to her breathe.
But I digress. So I was standing leaning over the Pack-and-Play which, for those of you who don't know is a sort of portable crib. Annika has been sleeping in this, set up in the dining room, because we have not been able to renovate our apartment, as per our original plan, and she doesn't have a room of her own; there is no room anywhere else for the crib. So at night, when I sit at my desk, she is six, seven feet away from me; when I stop typing, I can hear her breathe.
There is no cliche more prevalent among parents than "Time flies." If I had a dime for every time somebody has told me this in the context of parenthood, well, let's just say we'd have a bedroom for Annika already. And in some ways it's totally untrue. As someone who struggles with the mundane aspects of caring for an infant--the bouncing, changing, feeding, cooing, carrying, bouncing again ad infinitum--sometimes time seems stretched to its maximum capacity. This evening, for example, when an exhausted Lily was having a tantrum while Annika was screaming in her swingy seat and I was trying to get a bottle together, the two minutes it took me to do so seemed like all of 2007.
But earlier in the evening, as Lily sat on my lap as we read together, or tried to, as Annika kept wailing wherever we put her, Lily sighed, patted me on the back, and said while shaking her head, "Sometimes having a baby is just dreadful." Suddenly the last 4 years seemed to have passed in an instant. How can I have a child old enough to commiserate with me, old enough to use the word "dreadful?"
And now Annika. An hour ago or so I sat in the reclining chair and reclined it all the way back. I haven't done this in a while and then, right then, remembered August, when I spent every evening just like that: elevating my feet and trying not to think about how uncomfortable I was, imagining Annika, this theoretical child. It's like this: however you get your child, and it happens in so many ways, there is one universality. One day you don't have her, and then the next day you do. It has nothing to do with how old the child is when you become parent and child, or the circumstances of the child's birth or arrival. In my case, as soon as Annika was born, the hellish aspects of the pregnancy dissipated; to invoke another cliche, once the child is, you have bigger fish to fry. I don't mean you ever forget. Each child's arrival into a family is a universe-sized story. But the story becomes background noise so quickly you can't believe it when you have these moments remembering how large it all loomed beforehand.
Anyway. I digressed again. And that may be the first time I have ever used the past tense of "digress." (The digression seems to be feeding off of itself.) What I was going to say was Annika. Flat on her back in a slightly pilly pale pink sleeper, breathing in the tiniest even puffs, her tiny hands in loose, relaxed fists, already a person. How did this happen? How is it that I already have to really really try to remember before her? I mean, I can--of course I can remember what it was like before I had any children. But it does seem strange, still, and I don't mean to belabour the obvious, that one hot day last summer, as I lay in the reclining chair trying to visualize a child's face, countenance, being, she was not. And now she is. And yes, it happened so very, very fast.
Tonight, I let Oscar Wilde rest on his weary laurels. I want to remember this moment: me, standing over a navy blue Pack-and-Play in a dining room on West 16th Street wearing a sweatshirt I've had for twenty years, looking down at this perfect little person and listening to her breathe.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Proof
When I was growing up we spent August each year on Martha's Vineyard. A couple of times, my cousins--Andy, Jacy and Brandon--came to visit us there; these were probably the best days of the best vacations we ever had. Andy and I are the same age, Jacy and Alison the same age, and Brandon one year younger. As kids, we were more than cousins, as most people understand the relationship, but not quite like siblings either; I could see, even as a young child, that their relationships with each other were different than their relationships with us, as well as from mine with Alison. But in most ways, for all of us, I think, this was a good thing. Sibling relationships can be so intense, so fraught. As a group of five, we worked better than we did in any other combination, better really than we did as familial groups of two or three.
I tell you this as background because I want to tell you a story. One of the things we used to do when we were on Martha's Vineyard was, of course, go to the beach. We always went to the same beach, and if you walked far enough down the beach, past the blankets of families with coolers and teenagers with portable radios and children scampering in the froth at the demarcation line between water and shore, there was a little stream coming from a little pond, and the water from the stream ran straight into the ocean, slashing the beach in two. On calm days the slash was more like a scratch, hardly visible from the beach entrance, easy to walk over for children and adults alike. On stormy days, or those days after a storm, the stream widened and at nine, ten, eleven, I could not step over it--could not always, even, back up and run as fast as I could toward it and take a giant leap--legs stretched wide as I went airborne--landing with a jolt up each leg on the other side: sandy, immensely satisfied.
Now keep in mind this stream was shallow. All a person had to do was walk right through. But if a person was, say, ten, and stubborn, and had decided that it was a display of weakness to simply walk right through, a person would be challenged and a little giddy with the proposition of trying to make a sailing leap in the air, especially if there was anyone around to be impressed. One day, walking on the beach with my father and grandfather, the stream seemed especially wide and rough. In fact, my father had to make a leap himself to cross it, and my grandfather smiled at me, extended his hand. I think he was going to walk through it with me, maybe thought that I was nervous about traversing it solo, either through or over, which I was. A little. But not too nervous to attempt the jump. My grandfather went first, not much more than what I called a giant step for him, and he and my dad stood waiting on the other side. I backed up. I made a false start, dug my heels in the sand. And then I ran, ran as fast as I could, and pushed off just at the right moment--you feel it in your bones when that happens--and landed beside them. We kept walking. I remember this still.
But that is not the point of this story, although it is related. What I wanted to tell you about was the dam. One morning, at the beach with our cousins, we decided to build a dam. Not just a dam for a sand castle, but for the stream, the stream that ran vertically from the pond behind the dunes into the ocean and on this day was medium-sized--not rushing and wide, not a mere scratch, but strong enough and big enough to inspire the idea of damming.We came up with a strategy, a plan. Andy and I were in charge--always, always in charge. Our charges were alternately obedient and defiant, with a soupcon of either glee or annoyance. We set up a sort of assembly line, in stages. We hauled rocks, first, and built up the base with them. We added more rocks, and filled the crevices with smaller rocks. We packed grass and mud on top of all of the rocks. We did this for hours, in the hot midday sun, for most of a very long day. At dusk, when my parents and grandparents were starting to make motions of packing up farther down the beach, near but not next to the families with picnic blankets, the teenagers with radios, we stopped the flow of water. It astounded us. It didn't last very long. The next day, only a few rocks remained at the base of what had been our dam. We didn't care.
I have been writing since I was four, maybe, five? For as long as I can remember. I have taken a thousand writing classes, in a hundred different venues, and I have heard the admonishment, "Show, don't tell," in every possible amateur and professional scenario. I am not going to explain what I think this story, these two little stories, scenarios, mean. I don't think I have to. And although they're no great shakes--I just wrote them in a half an hour without editing more than a word or two--but still I like them much better than anything I could have written about childhood in an expository fashion. And, I think they have much more to say. I want to stop trying to tell people things. It doesn't work; or it doesn't work as well as the thing itself, painted with words as carefully as I am capable of. When it's right, it speaks for itself.
I tell you this as background because I want to tell you a story. One of the things we used to do when we were on Martha's Vineyard was, of course, go to the beach. We always went to the same beach, and if you walked far enough down the beach, past the blankets of families with coolers and teenagers with portable radios and children scampering in the froth at the demarcation line between water and shore, there was a little stream coming from a little pond, and the water from the stream ran straight into the ocean, slashing the beach in two. On calm days the slash was more like a scratch, hardly visible from the beach entrance, easy to walk over for children and adults alike. On stormy days, or those days after a storm, the stream widened and at nine, ten, eleven, I could not step over it--could not always, even, back up and run as fast as I could toward it and take a giant leap--legs stretched wide as I went airborne--landing with a jolt up each leg on the other side: sandy, immensely satisfied.
Now keep in mind this stream was shallow. All a person had to do was walk right through. But if a person was, say, ten, and stubborn, and had decided that it was a display of weakness to simply walk right through, a person would be challenged and a little giddy with the proposition of trying to make a sailing leap in the air, especially if there was anyone around to be impressed. One day, walking on the beach with my father and grandfather, the stream seemed especially wide and rough. In fact, my father had to make a leap himself to cross it, and my grandfather smiled at me, extended his hand. I think he was going to walk through it with me, maybe thought that I was nervous about traversing it solo, either through or over, which I was. A little. But not too nervous to attempt the jump. My grandfather went first, not much more than what I called a giant step for him, and he and my dad stood waiting on the other side. I backed up. I made a false start, dug my heels in the sand. And then I ran, ran as fast as I could, and pushed off just at the right moment--you feel it in your bones when that happens--and landed beside them. We kept walking. I remember this still.
But that is not the point of this story, although it is related. What I wanted to tell you about was the dam. One morning, at the beach with our cousins, we decided to build a dam. Not just a dam for a sand castle, but for the stream, the stream that ran vertically from the pond behind the dunes into the ocean and on this day was medium-sized--not rushing and wide, not a mere scratch, but strong enough and big enough to inspire the idea of damming.We came up with a strategy, a plan. Andy and I were in charge--always, always in charge. Our charges were alternately obedient and defiant, with a soupcon of either glee or annoyance. We set up a sort of assembly line, in stages. We hauled rocks, first, and built up the base with them. We added more rocks, and filled the crevices with smaller rocks. We packed grass and mud on top of all of the rocks. We did this for hours, in the hot midday sun, for most of a very long day. At dusk, when my parents and grandparents were starting to make motions of packing up farther down the beach, near but not next to the families with picnic blankets, the teenagers with radios, we stopped the flow of water. It astounded us. It didn't last very long. The next day, only a few rocks remained at the base of what had been our dam. We didn't care.
I have been writing since I was four, maybe, five? For as long as I can remember. I have taken a thousand writing classes, in a hundred different venues, and I have heard the admonishment, "Show, don't tell," in every possible amateur and professional scenario. I am not going to explain what I think this story, these two little stories, scenarios, mean. I don't think I have to. And although they're no great shakes--I just wrote them in a half an hour without editing more than a word or two--but still I like them much better than anything I could have written about childhood in an expository fashion. And, I think they have much more to say. I want to stop trying to tell people things. It doesn't work; or it doesn't work as well as the thing itself, painted with words as carefully as I am capable of. When it's right, it speaks for itself.
Focus, Focus
I was about to start writing some rambling contemplative thing about letting go--of ideas, people, beliefs, mindsets--and why it is so difficult. But I fear I'm edging in some of these near diary entry territory, which is not a bad thing (if I weren't so damn tired all the time I'd do that too) but not what I set out to do. Am I wrong in continually trying to cut myself off when I sense this veering? Is all writing important writing if you're trying to write: to keep the muscles warm and active? Or should I be reining in my late night dorm conversation type monologues and giving myself exercises, pushing ahead on assignments or pitches or sketches or notes for future projects?
I'm having a little existential crisis, in part, I think, because I'm having trouble with something I'm working on. It's fiction, and although I always find myself irritated when people make assumptions that nonfiction writers can't write fiction (thus, becoming fiction writers too, I guess), I must also admit that I always have trouble writing fiction, and in the very same way, regardless of the specific nature of the project. I feel as though I can come up with believable engaging characters, and I can write settings and dialogue quite well, thank you very much. I even feel as though I can maintain my voice--or achieve a distinct one that suits the purpose, which some people consider the hardest part of the game.
It's plot, plot that's the problem. I come up with all of the props, and they're good props, and then I just don't know what to do to them to get them to an ending. This always leads me to the same dismaying thought: I am not actually creative. I know I can write. I've always known that, somehow--does that sound vain? There are so many things I can't do, and know I can't do, that I will allow myself that vanity, I guess. But if I can't originate a story, come up with the "what happens" out of nothing, from my own mind, then what am I? A describer, an observer, a commentator, even, but not a storyteller--or not one of stories that haven't actually happened, which is--although the end results shouldn't indicate it--different.
Although I know, objectively, that the ability to create with words is a real worthwhile talent, when I produce an essay, or writing of any kind that expresses what I want it to in eloquent or surprising ways, I feel on some level that I am generating a product thanks to my known ability. Even when what I have written stems from that "channeling" quality that comes only sometimes, I never feel it has the mysterious origins and combustion spark of real art. It does not seem the same to me as starting with nothing--a blank page, empty screen, white canvas, a treble clef--and ending up with something huge that nobody else in the history of the universe could ever have made in just the same way. It doesn't feel like magic. Now I know too that this both denigrates what is most important to me and in a way detracts from the excruciating work that goes into making art, and I also know that nonfiction writing is art equal to any other kind of art and that fiction writing requires just as much if not more work. It is not borne of fairy dust. I'm just telling you how I feel, along with what I know.
And this is why I will keep trying. Some part of me believes I can tell stories--knows I do so sometimes already in certain ways--or I wouldn't keep on trying. I hope.
I'm having a little existential crisis, in part, I think, because I'm having trouble with something I'm working on. It's fiction, and although I always find myself irritated when people make assumptions that nonfiction writers can't write fiction (thus, becoming fiction writers too, I guess), I must also admit that I always have trouble writing fiction, and in the very same way, regardless of the specific nature of the project. I feel as though I can come up with believable engaging characters, and I can write settings and dialogue quite well, thank you very much. I even feel as though I can maintain my voice--or achieve a distinct one that suits the purpose, which some people consider the hardest part of the game.
It's plot, plot that's the problem. I come up with all of the props, and they're good props, and then I just don't know what to do to them to get them to an ending. This always leads me to the same dismaying thought: I am not actually creative. I know I can write. I've always known that, somehow--does that sound vain? There are so many things I can't do, and know I can't do, that I will allow myself that vanity, I guess. But if I can't originate a story, come up with the "what happens" out of nothing, from my own mind, then what am I? A describer, an observer, a commentator, even, but not a storyteller--or not one of stories that haven't actually happened, which is--although the end results shouldn't indicate it--different.
Although I know, objectively, that the ability to create with words is a real worthwhile talent, when I produce an essay, or writing of any kind that expresses what I want it to in eloquent or surprising ways, I feel on some level that I am generating a product thanks to my known ability. Even when what I have written stems from that "channeling" quality that comes only sometimes, I never feel it has the mysterious origins and combustion spark of real art. It does not seem the same to me as starting with nothing--a blank page, empty screen, white canvas, a treble clef--and ending up with something huge that nobody else in the history of the universe could ever have made in just the same way. It doesn't feel like magic. Now I know too that this both denigrates what is most important to me and in a way detracts from the excruciating work that goes into making art, and I also know that nonfiction writing is art equal to any other kind of art and that fiction writing requires just as much if not more work. It is not borne of fairy dust. I'm just telling you how I feel, along with what I know.
And this is why I will keep trying. Some part of me believes I can tell stories--knows I do so sometimes already in certain ways--or I wouldn't keep on trying. I hope.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Brave New World?
You know what I love? Yearbooks. A total stranger could hand me their high school yearbook on the subway, and I'd pore over it for hours. The yearbooks of people I actually know? Total fascination. I can get lost in them, immersed, cross-checking people for clubs and sports teams, younger siblings, on and on. As a child and a teenager, I used to lie on the couch in our den and read my parents', cover to cover, not so much imagining them as teenagers but imagining the whole world, wondering who was friends with who, why the class president had been elected, if the lead in the junior class performance of South Pacific was really any good or did she get the part because she was pretty--as she was also the homecoming queen. Seriously, I could do--did do--this for hours. Sometimes I can get into the wedding announcements in the New York Times like this--do the groom's parents, a plumber and a nurse, feel annoyed by their son's marriage to the flighty daughter of a hedge fund manager and a volunteer at the Met?--but not as much as yearbooks, which are not the beginning of novels, like the wedding announcements, but short stories--a slice of people's lives.
Facebook is my new yearbook. I don't actually spend that much time surfing Facebook, largely because I just don't have that much time. But when I do, an hour or so a week, spread out, I can get lost in an individual's "slice"--the self they are presenting (such a small slice, in most cases, more like a sliver), the messages they've received from their friends, their friends themselves, the way they identify their religion and political persuasion. It's funny to me that these are the two attributes people are asked to identify in the very short space alloted to the introductory lines. Many people I know--and their friends--don't answer these; the space is blank under their name. Others give a provocative response--"really, really liberal" or "what I'm in the mood for" (as though one might be in the mood to be, say, a libertarian). I myself initially identified myself as a "secular humanist," the clunky term I've decided best describes my "religious beliefs" but then thought better of it and deleted it. It seemed to ask more questions than it answered, even to me. I didn't like its definitiveness. In fact, I prefer some of the wackier, looser identifiers I've seen: "Hebe," for example, and "not that into it." I especially love that one, which echoes the popular self-help slogan adopted by single women in the wake of Sex and the City: Take that, Religion--I'm just not that into you.
I am also interested in how many people identify their birthday but leave out the year--allowing them to receive "happy birthday" messages from friends and acquaintances (if you know it's someone's birthday you feel like a heel ignoring the information) but preventing anybody from actually knowing how old they are. Some of these ageless Facebookers are perfectly willing to acknowledge they're "on the prowl," or interested in "a good time"; they just don't want anybody getting into their business and knowing, say, that they happen to be 42. Weird. And the Scrabulous--I have developed a soft spot for a few people I was not friends with at various stages of my life but have been Facebook-friended by when I saw that they too were, should we say, passionate about my stress release du jour. I have not played Scrabulous with any of these people, but just picturing them at their desks somewhere out in the world sliding tiny computerized letter squares across a game board makes me like them more. I guess that's weird too--for me.
But the weirdest thing of all is that you can actually get a real sense of who somebody is by looking at this thing--or who they've become, I guess, as I'm more interested in the pages of people from my past than in those of you I speak to almost every day. I'm about as interested in Nicole's Facebook page as I am in a wad of discarded gum in the gutter; I may never have even read it. I should link to it here, but I'm kind of over the linking thing; it's not for me. But the friend from my third grade Bluebird troop? The one who could not, really could not learn her multiplication tables and became a Stanford-educated economist in the Middle East? Her, I am very interested in. How did this happen? It amazes me. But what amazes me more than her transformation from 3 x 3 = 10 to Doctor is the fact that I know this at all. This is way beyond yearbooks. This is the future. Three dimensional, or more--back in time and forward fast. A step on the way to the future, I suspect. It really kind of blows my mind.
Facebook is my new yearbook. I don't actually spend that much time surfing Facebook, largely because I just don't have that much time. But when I do, an hour or so a week, spread out, I can get lost in an individual's "slice"--the self they are presenting (such a small slice, in most cases, more like a sliver), the messages they've received from their friends, their friends themselves, the way they identify their religion and political persuasion. It's funny to me that these are the two attributes people are asked to identify in the very short space alloted to the introductory lines. Many people I know--and their friends--don't answer these; the space is blank under their name. Others give a provocative response--"really, really liberal" or "what I'm in the mood for" (as though one might be in the mood to be, say, a libertarian). I myself initially identified myself as a "secular humanist," the clunky term I've decided best describes my "religious beliefs" but then thought better of it and deleted it. It seemed to ask more questions than it answered, even to me. I didn't like its definitiveness. In fact, I prefer some of the wackier, looser identifiers I've seen: "Hebe," for example, and "not that into it." I especially love that one, which echoes the popular self-help slogan adopted by single women in the wake of Sex and the City: Take that, Religion--I'm just not that into you.
I am also interested in how many people identify their birthday but leave out the year--allowing them to receive "happy birthday" messages from friends and acquaintances (if you know it's someone's birthday you feel like a heel ignoring the information) but preventing anybody from actually knowing how old they are. Some of these ageless Facebookers are perfectly willing to acknowledge they're "on the prowl," or interested in "a good time"; they just don't want anybody getting into their business and knowing, say, that they happen to be 42. Weird. And the Scrabulous--I have developed a soft spot for a few people I was not friends with at various stages of my life but have been Facebook-friended by when I saw that they too were, should we say, passionate about my stress release du jour. I have not played Scrabulous with any of these people, but just picturing them at their desks somewhere out in the world sliding tiny computerized letter squares across a game board makes me like them more. I guess that's weird too--for me.
But the weirdest thing of all is that you can actually get a real sense of who somebody is by looking at this thing--or who they've become, I guess, as I'm more interested in the pages of people from my past than in those of you I speak to almost every day. I'm about as interested in Nicole's Facebook page as I am in a wad of discarded gum in the gutter; I may never have even read it. I should link to it here, but I'm kind of over the linking thing; it's not for me. But the friend from my third grade Bluebird troop? The one who could not, really could not learn her multiplication tables and became a Stanford-educated economist in the Middle East? Her, I am very interested in. How did this happen? It amazes me. But what amazes me more than her transformation from 3 x 3 = 10 to Doctor is the fact that I know this at all. This is way beyond yearbooks. This is the future. Three dimensional, or more--back in time and forward fast. A step on the way to the future, I suspect. It really kind of blows my mind.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Oh What a Night
Other people are so unknowable, and for some reason I can't stop trying to "solve" them, as though they--you--were all finite, and if I just tried hard and long enough I could truly figure them out. I have always been like this, and it is a weird quality: this insatiable curiosity about even people I do not know well or even at all, combined with an unsophisticated ability to be regularly surprised by details that don't mesh with my in-the-moment picture of who a person is. Why, when I know this is true, do I feel the same jolt of astonishment every time I learn that the friend of a friend I'd deemed a strident intellectual is passionate about a particular dopey TV show, that an acquaintance I'd pegged as an old school lefty is actually a bit of a hawk, that someone I'd envisioned heating up a frozen dinner makes pasta from scratch?
I both love being surprised by the details and am over and over again dismayed or thrown off guard by them. Maybe this is a typical problem people have, and I have just never discussed it with anyone before. I want to be surprised by people, always. I believe it is what makes the many moments that constitute our ordinary days worth living, worth remembering, what makes us interested in each other. And so often the details that surprise me flesh out my notion of a person in the most interesting and appealing ways--people are never as simple, or as understandable, or as knowable--that word again--as I think they are. And, it does seem true to me that in many cases the more you get to know someone, the more you like them because you begin to understand them, to learn the little unusual unpredictable details that distinguish them from your preconceived portrait, often massively so.
But then, why the frustration? Why should it bother me that I have to continually reassess, revaluate my portraits of both the people I know and those I want to or encounter without knowing. This is so vague, I know. To tell the truth, I'm not even sure what I'm getting at, or why. I was looking at Facebook before I started to write, and before that I was at Jersey Boys, the Broadway show, with my father and sister, and both things made me think about unknowability. And knowability. At the show, my dad was sitting between us; this was his third time seeing it. I took him before it got big, because he is a huge Frankie Valli fan. My sister wanted to see it (I will write about this another time, this inherited love of the music of the 50s and 60s and its connection for us to my dad), so she and he went together. And then my dad wanted to see it with us both, so although once was enough for me, I went back tonight.
And we sat there, in our bad, high seats, watching the unknown performers sing songs we knew all the words to, and I felt like a unit, like we were members of a very small, very tight tribe (another concept I will come back to), and I thought to myself: this is my life, this moment, these people, it is happening now, in the mezzanine of a theater on 52nd Street. And we walked out together afterward, and down into the subway, and I stood holding a pole while they sat next to each other on the bench seat. Alison started talking about Las Vegas. I had tuned out, had something else on my mind, and then I tuned back in, and all of sudden had another revelation: We were not a unit at all. Although she is one of the people closest to me in the entire world, she is no more knowable, really, than anyone else. I went to Las Vegas once, on a cross-country drive with a friend, and I hated it. I said to myself as we drove out of town: I never need to go there again. And here was Alison, not just talking about how much she loved it but how much she knew I would love it, and I watched her mouth moving and thought: I am as unknowable as anybody else.
And it only kept going like that all night. (I am starting to feel as though somebody might have spiked my bottled water with hallucinogens, but what can you do?) My father confessed to having bought himself a very expensive coat, a luxury item he'd coveted for years, and I thought it again: Why? What pleasure did this give him? What need did it fill? Did it fill a need at all? Does that question reveal more about me than him? I was really making myself a little crazy with this, and then we got home, and I logged onto Facebook--which started out as a conduit to online Scrabble but has now become for me a bit of an anthropological study. You see, Facebook allows you to see your "Friends'" profiles, but also their Friends' profiles, and on and on until you are so removed from your original point of contact that you are reading the favorite books and movies of a 50 year old man who lives in Norway and being surprised that he expresses such antipathy for John McCain. Or at least it allows me to do this, because I can't help myself. It has something to do with this quest to know people--Who are their friends, anyway? Will knowing that help, will it lock another tiny piece into the infinite puzzle?
Enough. More tomorrow. Maybe more coherent more.
Must add: It's a Total Lunar Eclipse. Not a Total Eclipse of the Heart. Very cool.
I both love being surprised by the details and am over and over again dismayed or thrown off guard by them. Maybe this is a typical problem people have, and I have just never discussed it with anyone before. I want to be surprised by people, always. I believe it is what makes the many moments that constitute our ordinary days worth living, worth remembering, what makes us interested in each other. And so often the details that surprise me flesh out my notion of a person in the most interesting and appealing ways--people are never as simple, or as understandable, or as knowable--that word again--as I think they are. And, it does seem true to me that in many cases the more you get to know someone, the more you like them because you begin to understand them, to learn the little unusual unpredictable details that distinguish them from your preconceived portrait, often massively so.
But then, why the frustration? Why should it bother me that I have to continually reassess, revaluate my portraits of both the people I know and those I want to or encounter without knowing. This is so vague, I know. To tell the truth, I'm not even sure what I'm getting at, or why. I was looking at Facebook before I started to write, and before that I was at Jersey Boys, the Broadway show, with my father and sister, and both things made me think about unknowability. And knowability. At the show, my dad was sitting between us; this was his third time seeing it. I took him before it got big, because he is a huge Frankie Valli fan. My sister wanted to see it (I will write about this another time, this inherited love of the music of the 50s and 60s and its connection for us to my dad), so she and he went together. And then my dad wanted to see it with us both, so although once was enough for me, I went back tonight.
And we sat there, in our bad, high seats, watching the unknown performers sing songs we knew all the words to, and I felt like a unit, like we were members of a very small, very tight tribe (another concept I will come back to), and I thought to myself: this is my life, this moment, these people, it is happening now, in the mezzanine of a theater on 52nd Street. And we walked out together afterward, and down into the subway, and I stood holding a pole while they sat next to each other on the bench seat. Alison started talking about Las Vegas. I had tuned out, had something else on my mind, and then I tuned back in, and all of sudden had another revelation: We were not a unit at all. Although she is one of the people closest to me in the entire world, she is no more knowable, really, than anyone else. I went to Las Vegas once, on a cross-country drive with a friend, and I hated it. I said to myself as we drove out of town: I never need to go there again. And here was Alison, not just talking about how much she loved it but how much she knew I would love it, and I watched her mouth moving and thought: I am as unknowable as anybody else.
And it only kept going like that all night. (I am starting to feel as though somebody might have spiked my bottled water with hallucinogens, but what can you do?) My father confessed to having bought himself a very expensive coat, a luxury item he'd coveted for years, and I thought it again: Why? What pleasure did this give him? What need did it fill? Did it fill a need at all? Does that question reveal more about me than him? I was really making myself a little crazy with this, and then we got home, and I logged onto Facebook--which started out as a conduit to online Scrabble but has now become for me a bit of an anthropological study. You see, Facebook allows you to see your "Friends'" profiles, but also their Friends' profiles, and on and on until you are so removed from your original point of contact that you are reading the favorite books and movies of a 50 year old man who lives in Norway and being surprised that he expresses such antipathy for John McCain. Or at least it allows me to do this, because I can't help myself. It has something to do with this quest to know people--Who are their friends, anyway? Will knowing that help, will it lock another tiny piece into the infinite puzzle?
Enough. More tomorrow. Maybe more coherent more.
Must add: It's a Total Lunar Eclipse. Not a Total Eclipse of the Heart. Very cool.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Practical Matters
Okay. I have a meeting with an editor at a parenting magazine tomorrow, a hip one I'd love to write for. Am brainstorming ideas and want to write them out in a sort of list. And and all practical feedback as well as any suggestions for pitches will be much appreciated. Please hope on my behalf I can find something other than dog hair coated track pants to wear.
1) The joys and pitfalls of sharing something you love with your child. I am thinking of this past December when Lily and I went to the Nutcracker together. I didn't even realize how much I wanted her to love it until she did. She has no way of knowing, of comprehending, what an enormous role ballet played in my childhood. If she had been bored or had it not spoken to her, I think I would have been maybe even a little devastated, if you can be a little devastated. When she said, "Mama, it is just so, so beautiful," during the loooong duet, I breathed a secret sigh of relief. It's the Nutcracker for Pete's sake, I'm not buying her toe shoes, but it felt important to me that she love it.
And isn't that a little bit of a problem? I'm not sure. I know that children often love what their parents love BECAUSE their parents love it. For example, I would not love basketball as passionately as I do if it were not for my dad. But children's passions can also be their own. My love of reading and Alison's love of cooking stem from our parents' interests but from early on were also different, our own. I guess I'm interested in the ways in which we become invested, sometimes overly so, in our kids.
2) I'm very interested in birthday parties (see previous post--I know I should link here; let me try). Well, anyway, I have written some about this in previous posts. Perhaps a piece on the current trend toward extravagance and a plea for simpler, more child-centered events? Could also try to write about the history of the birthday party, its evolution and significance. And finally, could have a service component: ideas for parties themselves.
3) Some of my other nostalgia-related ideas: board games, the weekly television event or family outing to the movie theater.
4) The playdate. When was this word invented? When I was a kid, you called a friend and asked if he or she could "come over." As in, "Jessica, can you come over (or the extended version: can you sleep over?) on Saturday?" I don't remember arranging such encounters with other kids myself at the age of 3 and 4, the way kids do today. And I don't remember such encounters being organized so aggressively by parents, either. I think one's siblings used to be considered sufficient?
5) The second child. I would love to write about my fears leading up to the birth of my second child, which proved mostly unfounded, but also the complications that have ensued due to her presence in our family, many of which were largely unanticipated. I would have loved to read something like this myself before having Annika.
6) Another piece I've worked on in previous posts: the way the gender roles in my family became traditionally defined upon our becoming parents and how this continues to be a rough transition for me.
7) The secret night life of mothers. The fact that so many mothers I know conduct so much of their lives between the hours of bedtime and 1 a.m. Or even later. This is out of necessity, and is not generally a good thing, but sometimes I like the solidarity of it, the determination we muster up to hold onto the selves we were before becoming mothers, even if it means doing it in the middle of the night.
8) The way my dogs prepared me for motherhood. I know, there are those of you rolling your eyes right now, but it's true. The summer before Lily was born, we lost our 12 year old collie, Johnson. In the year before his death, I was his constant companion, caretaker, nursemaid. I learned more about nurturing and selflessness in that year than in the previous years combined. And then Sadie and Scout came with their own important lessons too, in terms of balancing, meeting more than one creature's needs at the same time and equally well, in spite of the differing needs, discipline, boundaries, the infinite nature of love, the sometimes hateful, often exhausting throes of being so completely needed, depended on.
9) Home schooling. There are so many misconceptions about home schooling, and--I am learning--so many reasons people do it, including so many excellent ones. I'd love to write something about this, debunking some of the myths and investigating some of the successes. This would probably be a longer, more thoughtful piece, come to think of it. Probably not for this magazine.
I will hope to come up with some more before my meeting tomorrow. It's at 3, so if you have any suggestions or input before, say 2, bring it on!
1) The joys and pitfalls of sharing something you love with your child. I am thinking of this past December when Lily and I went to the Nutcracker together. I didn't even realize how much I wanted her to love it until she did. She has no way of knowing, of comprehending, what an enormous role ballet played in my childhood. If she had been bored or had it not spoken to her, I think I would have been maybe even a little devastated, if you can be a little devastated. When she said, "Mama, it is just so, so beautiful," during the loooong duet, I breathed a secret sigh of relief. It's the Nutcracker for Pete's sake, I'm not buying her toe shoes, but it felt important to me that she love it.
And isn't that a little bit of a problem? I'm not sure. I know that children often love what their parents love BECAUSE their parents love it. For example, I would not love basketball as passionately as I do if it were not for my dad. But children's passions can also be their own. My love of reading and Alison's love of cooking stem from our parents' interests but from early on were also different, our own. I guess I'm interested in the ways in which we become invested, sometimes overly so, in our kids.
2) I'm very interested in birthday parties (see previous post--I know I should link here; let me try). Well, anyway, I have written some about this in previous posts. Perhaps a piece on the current trend toward extravagance and a plea for simpler, more child-centered events? Could also try to write about the history of the birthday party, its evolution and significance. And finally, could have a service component: ideas for parties themselves.
3) Some of my other nostalgia-related ideas: board games, the weekly television event or family outing to the movie theater.
4) The playdate. When was this word invented? When I was a kid, you called a friend and asked if he or she could "come over." As in, "Jessica, can you come over (or the extended version: can you sleep over?) on Saturday?" I don't remember arranging such encounters with other kids myself at the age of 3 and 4, the way kids do today. And I don't remember such encounters being organized so aggressively by parents, either. I think one's siblings used to be considered sufficient?
5) The second child. I would love to write about my fears leading up to the birth of my second child, which proved mostly unfounded, but also the complications that have ensued due to her presence in our family, many of which were largely unanticipated. I would have loved to read something like this myself before having Annika.
6) Another piece I've worked on in previous posts: the way the gender roles in my family became traditionally defined upon our becoming parents and how this continues to be a rough transition for me.
7) The secret night life of mothers. The fact that so many mothers I know conduct so much of their lives between the hours of bedtime and 1 a.m. Or even later. This is out of necessity, and is not generally a good thing, but sometimes I like the solidarity of it, the determination we muster up to hold onto the selves we were before becoming mothers, even if it means doing it in the middle of the night.
8) The way my dogs prepared me for motherhood. I know, there are those of you rolling your eyes right now, but it's true. The summer before Lily was born, we lost our 12 year old collie, Johnson. In the year before his death, I was his constant companion, caretaker, nursemaid. I learned more about nurturing and selflessness in that year than in the previous years combined. And then Sadie and Scout came with their own important lessons too, in terms of balancing, meeting more than one creature's needs at the same time and equally well, in spite of the differing needs, discipline, boundaries, the infinite nature of love, the sometimes hateful, often exhausting throes of being so completely needed, depended on.
9) Home schooling. There are so many misconceptions about home schooling, and--I am learning--so many reasons people do it, including so many excellent ones. I'd love to write something about this, debunking some of the myths and investigating some of the successes. This would probably be a longer, more thoughtful piece, come to think of it. Probably not for this magazine.
I will hope to come up with some more before my meeting tomorrow. It's at 3, so if you have any suggestions or input before, say 2, bring it on!
More on Neighborhoods
When I was sixteen, I ran away from home. It was winter; it was snowing. I was incredibly angry with my parents for some reason, and maybe they were angry with me too, although I don't think so. I have absolutely no idea why I was angry, not so much as a shred. And the conflict could not have been a significant one, in the grand scheme of things. I was so far from a rebellious teenager that when I try to think of bad things I did, I almost can't. I guess a couple of times I drove into Cambridge when I wasn't supposed to? During the day? Seriously. I was a goody-goody.
But still, I was angry. I remember this, and because it was snowing, and I didn't have my driver's license yet, I ran away, or rather walked away: up our driveway and down the street in the general direction of my best friend Caroline's house. It would have taken me hours to get there, although only a fifteen minute drive. The roads between our homes are narrow and winding, and it was snowing pretty hard. I don't think I had anything with me, no snacks or supplies, and I knew my parents would know where I was going. But the reality is that none of us--me, my parents--could have thought I was going very far at all. It was a symbolic running away, and I got exactly what I deserved for the hollow gesture.
About five minutes into my journey, headlights shone through the night from behind me. A car approached, then slowed, then slowed still more so it was driving beside me, as I walked, about 2 miles per hour, I would guess, from my usual pace. It was my father, "Joel," as my friends called him even then--when he wasn't around, of course--the most overprotective parent in the history of suburban parents. This was a man who had literally followed me to school as soon as I was able to walk. The school was about a tenth of a mile from our house, and I walked with two friends, boys no less, but still he followed, hiding behind trees, undetected, unbeknownst to me. The window nearest me rolled down; I kept walking, snow falling softly on my shoulders, my eyelashes. My feet were cold already. In my inchoate anger, I had not had time to don boots, although again, I can't remember the details, what I was wearing on my feet.
It was a beautiful night, I do remember that. And so much of the town I grew up in is beautiful, still. Its relatively recent rural past is still in evidence in many pockets, especially near my parents' house--where there is no neighborhood to speak of, but acres and acres of woods, ponds and streams. It is possible, on a snowy evening right after dinnertime, to drive a car 2 miles an hour down the street for quite some time with no other cars approaching in either direction. It is possible to pass only 4 or 5 houses during this time, while keeping one's eyes on the paths of light made by headlights on the unplowed street, while ignoring one's equally determined father, who--with the benefit of heated seats--was less likely to be the first to give in.
I gave. Before I'd gone even halfway to my grandmother's house, two miles away, the car stopped, and I got in. We rode in stony silence back home, where I probably took a bath and sulked for a while, called Caroline and told her I wasn't coming. Or maybe she hadn't known. This was long before the days of the cell phone. House phones had cords. I'm not sure why I started writing this except that moments of the evening--although not the arc of it--are so vivid to me still: the blackness of the night, the headlights on the snow, my damp, cold feet, the window rolling down, the solitude and isolation both before and after my father pulled up in the car.
I think in some way it is a snapshot of my childhood in a small town: how easy it was to be alone, how the expanses of space in every direction helped form me, my idea of the world, how I didn't really realize there were other ways, other places, in which to live.
But still, I was angry. I remember this, and because it was snowing, and I didn't have my driver's license yet, I ran away, or rather walked away: up our driveway and down the street in the general direction of my best friend Caroline's house. It would have taken me hours to get there, although only a fifteen minute drive. The roads between our homes are narrow and winding, and it was snowing pretty hard. I don't think I had anything with me, no snacks or supplies, and I knew my parents would know where I was going. But the reality is that none of us--me, my parents--could have thought I was going very far at all. It was a symbolic running away, and I got exactly what I deserved for the hollow gesture.
About five minutes into my journey, headlights shone through the night from behind me. A car approached, then slowed, then slowed still more so it was driving beside me, as I walked, about 2 miles per hour, I would guess, from my usual pace. It was my father, "Joel," as my friends called him even then--when he wasn't around, of course--the most overprotective parent in the history of suburban parents. This was a man who had literally followed me to school as soon as I was able to walk. The school was about a tenth of a mile from our house, and I walked with two friends, boys no less, but still he followed, hiding behind trees, undetected, unbeknownst to me. The window nearest me rolled down; I kept walking, snow falling softly on my shoulders, my eyelashes. My feet were cold already. In my inchoate anger, I had not had time to don boots, although again, I can't remember the details, what I was wearing on my feet.
It was a beautiful night, I do remember that. And so much of the town I grew up in is beautiful, still. Its relatively recent rural past is still in evidence in many pockets, especially near my parents' house--where there is no neighborhood to speak of, but acres and acres of woods, ponds and streams. It is possible, on a snowy evening right after dinnertime, to drive a car 2 miles an hour down the street for quite some time with no other cars approaching in either direction. It is possible to pass only 4 or 5 houses during this time, while keeping one's eyes on the paths of light made by headlights on the unplowed street, while ignoring one's equally determined father, who--with the benefit of heated seats--was less likely to be the first to give in.
I gave. Before I'd gone even halfway to my grandmother's house, two miles away, the car stopped, and I got in. We rode in stony silence back home, where I probably took a bath and sulked for a while, called Caroline and told her I wasn't coming. Or maybe she hadn't known. This was long before the days of the cell phone. House phones had cords. I'm not sure why I started writing this except that moments of the evening--although not the arc of it--are so vivid to me still: the blackness of the night, the headlights on the snow, my damp, cold feet, the window rolling down, the solitude and isolation both before and after my father pulled up in the car.
I think in some way it is a snapshot of my childhood in a small town: how easy it was to be alone, how the expanses of space in every direction helped form me, my idea of the world, how I didn't really realize there were other ways, other places, in which to live.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
My Neighborhood (rough, but a start of something bigger)
My dad, when he's in an especially good mood, or after he's had about nineteen cups of coffee, will sometimes call me and sing into the phone the old theme song from Mr. Rogers: "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighborhood, won't you be...my neighbor." The funny thing is that my dad doesn't live in a neighborhood, not even close. The houses on the street where I grew up, and where he still lives, are far from each other--as much as 5 or 6 acres separates us from the closest "neighbor." And although we know most of the people who live in the few houses at our end of the street, there is no sense of neighborhood at all--no block parties, borrowing of cups of milk or eggs, potluck barbecues, interaction whatsoever on a daily basis. This is not true of all parts of town. My cousins, for example, grew up on a little street where my aunt and uncle still live, and they had a neighborhood. The kids played together every day, the adults talked in their front yards, the teenagers babysat. Everybody knew everybody else, there were always other kids around, and from as far back as I can remember I was jealous of my cousins for this.
Throughout my childhood and adolesence, I sought this sense of community, the feeling of being a part of a group, in many ways I see now, although I have--ironically--always described myself to others as a person who craves solitude, avoids "joining," is not particularly social. Again, again, again, I think this is an idea of myself that I created, or settled on at some point in time and have stuck to out of sheer stubborness or inertia. Perhaps the fact that my father and sister are so manifestly extroverted played a part in this. I aligned myself early on with my mother, who is not an extrovert, and decided that like her, I was a predominantly solitary creature, self-contained--likable enough but not everybody's cup of tea.
But it is rather easy to view yourself with blinders half-on. As an adult, recently, in fact, I have realized something about myself that is counter to my lifelong self-assessments. I crave being part of a group. Although I am not particularly athletic (no need for jeers from the peanut gallery here), I never passed up an opportunity to participate in organized sports. I played three seasons a year from sixth grade through freshman year of college, when--for reasons I shall explain--I didn't need to anymore. Part of this is that I do like to play sports, in spite of lack of real ability, but a bigger part I think now is that I love to be part of a team. And I am a good teammate. I was the M.L. Carr of any team I was on--waving the white towel from the bench, as into the game as any of the stars, loving the action, the cameraderie, the grace of those with genuine talent, the shared emotion of victory and defeat.
Although I have always had this idea of myself on the sidelines, as an observer, this is also only half-true. I love organizing things: parties, performances, events of any kind. I feel bizarrely at home speaking to a large group, giving speeches or making toasts in public, reading to strangers, hosting events. And I have been told enough that I must give it some credence that the awkwardness I feel in such situations is not readily apparent to others. As it turns out, I'm not really that shy. I can be a bit of a ham. How does this happen? How do we get so stuck in a groove, hearing the same off note over and over, that we end up putting our hands over our ears and blocking out the background noise that might present a more harmonious, flattering sound?
I said I would explain one of the reasons I stopped playing team sports, and the main one is because as soon as I got to college, the very first hour, I knew I had been waiting all my life to live in a dorm. Some people, many, many reasonable ones, loathe communal living. And it is true that dorms are dirty, loud, smoky, cramped, crowded, often nasty places inside, even those with exteriors as beautiful as Vassar's. But in my first dorm I finally found myself in a neighborhood, and I loved everything about it, even dealing with the objectively less desirable factors: the mouse who lived in my closet, the girl on my floor who decided she hated me for no reason, the waits for the showers, the items of clothing that were borrowed and never returned, the nights when I wanted to sleep and everyone else on my floor wanted to blast Steve Miller in the hallway, and the nights when I wanted to blast Steve Miller in the hallway and everyone else wanted to sleep.
In this first dorm, I had two roomates. If one was mad at me, the other one wasn't, or vice versa, and sometimes the three of us talked late into the night. "Are you guys asleep?" one of us would whisper, and off we'd be. On the best nights, practically everyone on the hall piled into our room, or someone else's room, and we all talked, "Jungle Love" playing quietly on the stereo, people appearing, peeling off, on their own terms, on their own time: this, this was my neighborhood. If I needed a red plaid flannel shirt (this was 1988, people) because my blue one was dirty, a knock on the door across the hall would produce one. If it was 4:30 in the morning and my paper on Rastafarianism was barely begun, someone else was up too, and would give me a Diet Coke to get me through the pre-dawn hours.
I knew that everyone else did not love dorm life. They talked about it all the time. Most of my friends, in fact, coveted single rooms, and so I went along, got my own for sophomore year, and liked it too, liked being able to shut the door sometimes and be alone. But I never stopped being made giddily happy by the near-constant knocks on the door, the notes pinned to my messageboard saying could I have dinner at 7?, the raps on the wall exchanged with my friend in the room next door as we lay in our separate beds, alone, a wall between us, but parts of the same living whole.
Throughout my childhood and adolesence, I sought this sense of community, the feeling of being a part of a group, in many ways I see now, although I have--ironically--always described myself to others as a person who craves solitude, avoids "joining," is not particularly social. Again, again, again, I think this is an idea of myself that I created, or settled on at some point in time and have stuck to out of sheer stubborness or inertia. Perhaps the fact that my father and sister are so manifestly extroverted played a part in this. I aligned myself early on with my mother, who is not an extrovert, and decided that like her, I was a predominantly solitary creature, self-contained--likable enough but not everybody's cup of tea.
But it is rather easy to view yourself with blinders half-on. As an adult, recently, in fact, I have realized something about myself that is counter to my lifelong self-assessments. I crave being part of a group. Although I am not particularly athletic (no need for jeers from the peanut gallery here), I never passed up an opportunity to participate in organized sports. I played three seasons a year from sixth grade through freshman year of college, when--for reasons I shall explain--I didn't need to anymore. Part of this is that I do like to play sports, in spite of lack of real ability, but a bigger part I think now is that I love to be part of a team. And I am a good teammate. I was the M.L. Carr of any team I was on--waving the white towel from the bench, as into the game as any of the stars, loving the action, the cameraderie, the grace of those with genuine talent, the shared emotion of victory and defeat.
Although I have always had this idea of myself on the sidelines, as an observer, this is also only half-true. I love organizing things: parties, performances, events of any kind. I feel bizarrely at home speaking to a large group, giving speeches or making toasts in public, reading to strangers, hosting events. And I have been told enough that I must give it some credence that the awkwardness I feel in such situations is not readily apparent to others. As it turns out, I'm not really that shy. I can be a bit of a ham. How does this happen? How do we get so stuck in a groove, hearing the same off note over and over, that we end up putting our hands over our ears and blocking out the background noise that might present a more harmonious, flattering sound?
I said I would explain one of the reasons I stopped playing team sports, and the main one is because as soon as I got to college, the very first hour, I knew I had been waiting all my life to live in a dorm. Some people, many, many reasonable ones, loathe communal living. And it is true that dorms are dirty, loud, smoky, cramped, crowded, often nasty places inside, even those with exteriors as beautiful as Vassar's. But in my first dorm I finally found myself in a neighborhood, and I loved everything about it, even dealing with the objectively less desirable factors: the mouse who lived in my closet, the girl on my floor who decided she hated me for no reason, the waits for the showers, the items of clothing that were borrowed and never returned, the nights when I wanted to sleep and everyone else on my floor wanted to blast Steve Miller in the hallway, and the nights when I wanted to blast Steve Miller in the hallway and everyone else wanted to sleep.
In this first dorm, I had two roomates. If one was mad at me, the other one wasn't, or vice versa, and sometimes the three of us talked late into the night. "Are you guys asleep?" one of us would whisper, and off we'd be. On the best nights, practically everyone on the hall piled into our room, or someone else's room, and we all talked, "Jungle Love" playing quietly on the stereo, people appearing, peeling off, on their own terms, on their own time: this, this was my neighborhood. If I needed a red plaid flannel shirt (this was 1988, people) because my blue one was dirty, a knock on the door across the hall would produce one. If it was 4:30 in the morning and my paper on Rastafarianism was barely begun, someone else was up too, and would give me a Diet Coke to get me through the pre-dawn hours.
I knew that everyone else did not love dorm life. They talked about it all the time. Most of my friends, in fact, coveted single rooms, and so I went along, got my own for sophomore year, and liked it too, liked being able to shut the door sometimes and be alone. But I never stopped being made giddily happy by the near-constant knocks on the door, the notes pinned to my messageboard saying could I have dinner at 7?, the raps on the wall exchanged with my friend in the room next door as we lay in our separate beds, alone, a wall between us, but parts of the same living whole.
A Throwaway
Okay. I've been good, so good. It's been over a month now, and I have written EVERY SINGLE DAY. I'm not sure if you know how huge that is, how helpful it's been to me in so, so many ways, how proud I am of myself, how much I delight in your feedback, comments, corrections, input, even if you refuse to post it here.
But it was bound to happen eventually: I can't do a real one right now, I just can't. I won't even give the "too tired" speech; it is 12:30, but I'm not actually tired. A little wired, in fact, but there are a few things I need to do before I go to sleep, and morning will come early; Lily was asleep before 7:30, and I anticipate an early wake-up. I did other things today, instead. I made a big dinner for a friend's birthday, and I think he appreciated it enormously. I excavated dinosaur bones with Lily (don't ask), ran errands I'd been putting off, bounced Annika and lay on the floor with her, wasted some time on the Internet (that I would take back if I could, the time), and had a very satisfying phone conversation with a friend. And now it's 12:30, and I don't have the focus or energy to write something "real," but still I must write.
So here. I will tell you a funny Lily story, with the firm belief (even firmer than before) that writing is writing, that in telling this anecdote I am exercising the muscles, practicing my ability to tell a story, to write.
We were walking up the street to the car last night, at the end of the first part of our weekly journey (and yes, that is the right word) to Connecticut. Ben led the way, carrying Annika's car seat with a sleeping Annika inside. I followed, lugging two heavy bags. Lily trailed, sobbing and whining; it was about an hour too late, and she was tired and at loose ends. I don't even remember what she was upset about, but I was tired too and my patience worn thin, so I was mostly ignoring her but for an occasional, "Pick up the pace, we're almost there." After one loud sob, I stopped, feeling guilty and let her take the few steps to catch up with me. Her nose was running from the crying, and she lifted her hand and wiped her runny nose with it, both sides. Then she did the same thing with her other hand, too quickly for me to offer her a tissue, which 1) I didn't have and 2) I was too weighted down to supply. Her snotty hands gleamed under the streetlights. I know, but really they kind of did. "Mama," she sobbed. "I just want to hold hands with you." I looked at the hands. I couldn't do it. "Lil," I said, "My stuff is too heavy. We're about twenty feet from the car. And your hands are really dirty now. From your nose." The sobbing got louder. "I. Just. Want to hooooold your hand." By this point we had reached the car. We all got in. It wasn't pleasant. We drove in silence for about ten minutes, and then I heard again from the way backseat. "Mama?" She was still snuffling a little to herself. "Yes," I said, perhaps testily. "I wanted to hold your hand." I closed and then opened my eyes. "I know," I said. "Well, why wouldn't you hold hands with me?" I sighed. "You'd just wiped your nose with your hands, Lil. Remember how I was telling you that I really didn't want to catch your cold? That you had to use tissues and wash your hands carefully all of the time?" Silence, for just a few extra seconds. Then the voice again, that indomitable little voice, with a tremor in it, still. "And all I was wishing was for a sink to be right there on the sidewalk so I could do it. And have you hold my hand."
The heart swells, I swear that it does. If it's any consolation, or redeems me in your eyes, we held hands all morning today.
But it was bound to happen eventually: I can't do a real one right now, I just can't. I won't even give the "too tired" speech; it is 12:30, but I'm not actually tired. A little wired, in fact, but there are a few things I need to do before I go to sleep, and morning will come early; Lily was asleep before 7:30, and I anticipate an early wake-up. I did other things today, instead. I made a big dinner for a friend's birthday, and I think he appreciated it enormously. I excavated dinosaur bones with Lily (don't ask), ran errands I'd been putting off, bounced Annika and lay on the floor with her, wasted some time on the Internet (that I would take back if I could, the time), and had a very satisfying phone conversation with a friend. And now it's 12:30, and I don't have the focus or energy to write something "real," but still I must write.
So here. I will tell you a funny Lily story, with the firm belief (even firmer than before) that writing is writing, that in telling this anecdote I am exercising the muscles, practicing my ability to tell a story, to write.
We were walking up the street to the car last night, at the end of the first part of our weekly journey (and yes, that is the right word) to Connecticut. Ben led the way, carrying Annika's car seat with a sleeping Annika inside. I followed, lugging two heavy bags. Lily trailed, sobbing and whining; it was about an hour too late, and she was tired and at loose ends. I don't even remember what she was upset about, but I was tired too and my patience worn thin, so I was mostly ignoring her but for an occasional, "Pick up the pace, we're almost there." After one loud sob, I stopped, feeling guilty and let her take the few steps to catch up with me. Her nose was running from the crying, and she lifted her hand and wiped her runny nose with it, both sides. Then she did the same thing with her other hand, too quickly for me to offer her a tissue, which 1) I didn't have and 2) I was too weighted down to supply. Her snotty hands gleamed under the streetlights. I know, but really they kind of did. "Mama," she sobbed. "I just want to hold hands with you." I looked at the hands. I couldn't do it. "Lil," I said, "My stuff is too heavy. We're about twenty feet from the car. And your hands are really dirty now. From your nose." The sobbing got louder. "I. Just. Want to hooooold your hand." By this point we had reached the car. We all got in. It wasn't pleasant. We drove in silence for about ten minutes, and then I heard again from the way backseat. "Mama?" She was still snuffling a little to herself. "Yes," I said, perhaps testily. "I wanted to hold your hand." I closed and then opened my eyes. "I know," I said. "Well, why wouldn't you hold hands with me?" I sighed. "You'd just wiped your nose with your hands, Lil. Remember how I was telling you that I really didn't want to catch your cold? That you had to use tissues and wash your hands carefully all of the time?" Silence, for just a few extra seconds. Then the voice again, that indomitable little voice, with a tremor in it, still. "And all I was wishing was for a sink to be right there on the sidewalk so I could do it. And have you hold my hand."
The heart swells, I swear that it does. If it's any consolation, or redeems me in your eyes, we held hands all morning today.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Your Turn
Monopoly, Parchesi, Sorry, Clue, Life, Othello, Stratego, Connect Four, Scrabble, Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Rummy-O, Poker. Later: Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit. Still later: Whist, Charades, Dictionary, that game we played at parties where you wrote names on slips of paper and put them in a bowl and had to give your partner clues to guess the word. Games.
Games were a huge part of my childhood. I grew up in house not near any other houses. We didn't have a neighborhood gang the way my cousins did--a group of kids who hung out all day in summer and in the afternoons after school, playing whiffle ball and four square and flashlight tag, also games, now that I think of it: the active kind. My sister is just a year younger than I am, and when we were bored, or it was rainy, or on snow days, or lazy Sunday afternoons, and there weren't any other kids around, we played games. My mother was not, is not, a game person. I don't remember her playing board or outdoor games with us. My father claims to hate games, but he really doesn't--at least not the two predominant ones of our family's early years: poker and Monopoly, both of which he had enjoyed in younger days with his own sister and friends. And whiffle ball, which we played almost every evening after dinner in the front yard for a number of years, two against one with a swing player: a person could not, after all, pitch to herself.
Games, which I must confess I still enjoy, are so very useful and revealing. They occupy blank space in a day, force us to confront each other's gifts and deficiencies and strategies and senses of humor, teach us much about who we are: how we win and how we lose and how we, well, play the game. Games with two are intimate, intense. I see me and my sister in a booth on the top deck of the Martha's Vineyard ferry, hot chocolates, crackers filched from the box intended for those who'd purchased chowder, the green Othello board between us. I see Alison, slightly flushed and smiling; she is winning. She almost always, maybe always beat me at Othello, her only consistent victory in our never-ending gameathon, which is why she always chose it when it was her turn to choose. Revealingly, this is also why I never said no. There was always one more chance for me to try to win.
Games with two are a duet that can, in instant, become disonant. If my father wasn't playing--a distraction, a mitigating force--the Monopoly board could be pushed off the table in a fit of frustration, the little houses and hotels scattering like a handful of gravel on the wooden floor, the money swishing softly down, more slowly, more dignified, in pastel-colored piles. It was Alison who pushed it, her frustration matched by my ruthlessness--my irritation, tattletaling, disingenuous. I had led her to the brink and nudged her off, again; if it was I who was losing, I'm sure I found another way to prematurely end the game.
Group games are festive; hilarity ensues. The atmosphere becomes charged, voices louder, sometimes alliances form. Now I see me and Alison and my three cousins around my father's peeling poker table, a relic from his college gambling days, set up in our driveway in the blinding heat of summer in the middle of the day. Five card stud, seven card stud, Texas Hold 'Em: we had mastered them all by the time Andy and I--the oldest--were ten, and we bet with m and m's or pennies and nickels--never for real money, but we smoked candy cigarettes, ostentatiously drank from our soda cans, set neatly into the little holes designed for beer around the table, talked trash and showed our most brazen selves to each other, learned to keep a straight face, read each other's bluffs.
We shot pool, too, in my grandparents' basement. Same idea: faux, exagerated, mock tough guys, like something we'd seen out of some movie somewhere. The cues were rolled in the chalk for full minutes too long, the sounds of our parents upstairs, talking, laughing, communal: the most reassuring, constant background hum of my existence, my childhood soundtrack, until I left for school. In fact, that basement room, unfinished, dusty, peppered with lost items from my mother's, their father's, our aunt's own childhood's, could symbolize for me today the sense of safety, continuity, tribehood, that was a hallmark of my growing up. And the game itself. By the time I went to college, I was so good I could have taken on a barroom challenge, but I wasn't the best. I wonder if Andy still shoots pool. Or Alison, Jacy, Brandon. We were all good. That's what happens when you do something for hours on end, free from the pressure of trying, for the pure unadulterated pleasure of it.
I am going to resist turning this into a nostalgia piece. For all I know, kids still play games today; they must. I will say that the older ones I know play computer games, obsessively sometimes, and some of the little ones I know already seem to be headed in this direction. But I like to think that at their homes, when I'm not there to see them, on a rainy Saturday they are lying with a sibling on a floor--probably not the orange shag carpet of my parents' basement in the seventies--a board set up between them, snacks and drinks at the ready, rolling a pair of dice. I think if Lily asks me to play Candyland tomorrow, the most mind-numbing of all the games for small children, I will say yes. One must start somewhere, after all. And next year, maybe, I can teach her all about a Royal Flush.
Games were a huge part of my childhood. I grew up in house not near any other houses. We didn't have a neighborhood gang the way my cousins did--a group of kids who hung out all day in summer and in the afternoons after school, playing whiffle ball and four square and flashlight tag, also games, now that I think of it: the active kind. My sister is just a year younger than I am, and when we were bored, or it was rainy, or on snow days, or lazy Sunday afternoons, and there weren't any other kids around, we played games. My mother was not, is not, a game person. I don't remember her playing board or outdoor games with us. My father claims to hate games, but he really doesn't--at least not the two predominant ones of our family's early years: poker and Monopoly, both of which he had enjoyed in younger days with his own sister and friends. And whiffle ball, which we played almost every evening after dinner in the front yard for a number of years, two against one with a swing player: a person could not, after all, pitch to herself.
Games, which I must confess I still enjoy, are so very useful and revealing. They occupy blank space in a day, force us to confront each other's gifts and deficiencies and strategies and senses of humor, teach us much about who we are: how we win and how we lose and how we, well, play the game. Games with two are intimate, intense. I see me and my sister in a booth on the top deck of the Martha's Vineyard ferry, hot chocolates, crackers filched from the box intended for those who'd purchased chowder, the green Othello board between us. I see Alison, slightly flushed and smiling; she is winning. She almost always, maybe always beat me at Othello, her only consistent victory in our never-ending gameathon, which is why she always chose it when it was her turn to choose. Revealingly, this is also why I never said no. There was always one more chance for me to try to win.
Games with two are a duet that can, in instant, become disonant. If my father wasn't playing--a distraction, a mitigating force--the Monopoly board could be pushed off the table in a fit of frustration, the little houses and hotels scattering like a handful of gravel on the wooden floor, the money swishing softly down, more slowly, more dignified, in pastel-colored piles. It was Alison who pushed it, her frustration matched by my ruthlessness--my irritation, tattletaling, disingenuous. I had led her to the brink and nudged her off, again; if it was I who was losing, I'm sure I found another way to prematurely end the game.
Group games are festive; hilarity ensues. The atmosphere becomes charged, voices louder, sometimes alliances form. Now I see me and Alison and my three cousins around my father's peeling poker table, a relic from his college gambling days, set up in our driveway in the blinding heat of summer in the middle of the day. Five card stud, seven card stud, Texas Hold 'Em: we had mastered them all by the time Andy and I--the oldest--were ten, and we bet with m and m's or pennies and nickels--never for real money, but we smoked candy cigarettes, ostentatiously drank from our soda cans, set neatly into the little holes designed for beer around the table, talked trash and showed our most brazen selves to each other, learned to keep a straight face, read each other's bluffs.
We shot pool, too, in my grandparents' basement. Same idea: faux, exagerated, mock tough guys, like something we'd seen out of some movie somewhere. The cues were rolled in the chalk for full minutes too long, the sounds of our parents upstairs, talking, laughing, communal: the most reassuring, constant background hum of my existence, my childhood soundtrack, until I left for school. In fact, that basement room, unfinished, dusty, peppered with lost items from my mother's, their father's, our aunt's own childhood's, could symbolize for me today the sense of safety, continuity, tribehood, that was a hallmark of my growing up. And the game itself. By the time I went to college, I was so good I could have taken on a barroom challenge, but I wasn't the best. I wonder if Andy still shoots pool. Or Alison, Jacy, Brandon. We were all good. That's what happens when you do something for hours on end, free from the pressure of trying, for the pure unadulterated pleasure of it.
I am going to resist turning this into a nostalgia piece. For all I know, kids still play games today; they must. I will say that the older ones I know play computer games, obsessively sometimes, and some of the little ones I know already seem to be headed in this direction. But I like to think that at their homes, when I'm not there to see them, on a rainy Saturday they are lying with a sibling on a floor--probably not the orange shag carpet of my parents' basement in the seventies--a board set up between them, snacks and drinks at the ready, rolling a pair of dice. I think if Lily asks me to play Candyland tomorrow, the most mind-numbing of all the games for small children, I will say yes. One must start somewhere, after all. And next year, maybe, I can teach her all about a Royal Flush.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
On Nostalgia
Oh my god--I am nostalgic. In general, I mean. For the past. Which I guess is what nostalgia means, but I am a little bit shocked to discover this about myself at this late date, and to realize or be forced to acknowledge that it does have something to do with getting older, with being old enough to recall a past that is distinctly different (although of course in many ways the same) as the present. My realization came thanks to the list I was making of topics for a book idea: a book on childhood rituals--their significance, what they are now and how they have changed over time.
So I was making this list, the topic list, a sort of brainstorming of possible chapters or essays, and some of the topics were these: board games versus computer games, birthday parties (see previous posts), playdates, competition, meals, movies and television in real time versus on-demand, letters versus e-mail, reading, shopping, the Internet--those were the big ones. (Any input on this topic would be greatly appreciated--other ideas for sections, etc.) And although the point of this book would certainly not be what we have lost as we've modernized--and I don't even think it's a question of lost or gained, it's just different, and how do the differences affect children, and us--I realized that I was kind of dwelling on the things I think we've lost.
That's not right. I guess it's only natural to idealize the past, if the past is something you look back on fondly, and I do think I had a pretty nice childhood, perhaps especially in terms of these childhood rituals. But why do I think that the modern phenomenon of Webkins, which I just learned about yesterday I must confess, and researched a little online (I guess I don't feel nostalgic for the days of the Encyclopedia Brittanica), is not as nice, as special, as meaningful, as the stuffed animal Benjamin Bunny I had as a very small child, and whose bottom sported a purple velvet patch thanks to the time I sat him right down on a lit burner at my grandparents' house? Now I know that today's children may play this Webkins game (my diction sounds like an old lady's; I feel inches away from switching over to the word "slacks") as well as play with, create worlds for, make real their actual stuffed animals, and many children don't find the virtual toys or games as appealing as the actual ones, and that there are very real and even important benefits to staying on top of the current technology--not just for the future but in terms of using different parts of the brain at the same time, fine motor skills, building skills in a kind of communication network that will be a part of our children's lives whether we like it or not, to such an extent that it would be insane to deny it, I suspect.
I have never played Webkins. I was about to say that I don't play computer games, but that's not actually true, thanks to Scrabulous, whose inventors should win some kind of international prize. And now I am wondering if my nostalgia for the way things were is more style than substance, that again (one interesting thing about sevenhundredfiftywords for me is how themes are emerging on their own) it is the idea of the past I like, even as I embrace and am sometimes intimidated by the idea--and ideas--of the future. In other words, that although I claim not to want to be a person preoccupied with nostalgia, that it irritates me when my father, or others (I promise this is the last time I will refer to Andy Rooney) bemoan the "new technologies" by which they sometimes mean computers, in favor of the "good old days," I am prone to doing the exact same thing.
It has taken me a while to recognize this tendency in myself, as I am of a generation later than my father's (and about ten generations later than Andy Rooney's). Although we didn't have a computer until I was about eleven, and even then we used it to play rudimentary games such as Snooper Troops and to write "If-Then" loops in Basic code for homework assignments (one of the Wang kids went to our elementary school, and we had a computer room!), I had one in college, and then a cell phone in my twenties, and using the Internet and shopping online are not as alien to me as they are to some of my parents' generation--full fledged adults when the technology came about and was--continues to be--perfected. But I realize now that I have a visceral reaction to some of the things that today's kids in particular take for granted. When the kids I tutor talked about My Space or texting each other, I actually tsk-tsked in my head, thinking: how sad, what a waste of time. When some of the boys seemed obsessed with an online fantasy sports league, spending hours at their computers involved with it each day, I remembered the NCAA and other league pools of my adolescence, which involved complex charts and calculations on the part of one sports-fanatic friend in particular and often actually watching games together: feeling the swells of victory, the plunges of defeat as a group, the best part of being a sports fan, I think: the collective anguish and joy.
But why is my version, my memory, better? Or more valid? It's not, I guess, is the answer, the one I'm supposed to arrive at, accept. I can embrace and master each new technology that comes along, and I want to. I'd love to be more confident with all things technological, computerized, requiring me to push myself in ways that don't come naturally at all. I dread the idea of turning my back on the here and now; it has always been a fate I've pledged to avoid. But the cold hard truth is that it's not the world I come from. It may never feel like second nature, no matter how hard I run to catch up with it, and I may always have to fight off these fits of nostalgia, or at least to accept them for what they are: a feeling, a stylistic quirk, an idea.
Are the same kids who loved electric train sets, spent hours configuring tracks and building cities in my childhood, now the kids who show such proficiency, such mind-boggling ability to construct little worlds online, with the computer games that enable them to do so? Is it just the stuff that's changed, and if so, does it matter, is anything--has anything--been lost? I dig in my heels a little bit here. I can still feel Benjamin Bunny, feel the spots where his fur was flat from rubbing, feel the little nubby stitches where my grandmother had sewn his velvet patch, smell the always vaguely chemical smell of the place where he'd been singed, see the ragged edges of his pale blue coat, remember that some whiskers were bent, some gone altogether, know that he was never soft enough, plush enough to sleep with, remember how I loved him anyway. It is in a sensory way, maybe I am thinking now, that something has been lost, and if the technologies push away the time spent developing the sensory relationships then the loss is real and not just my nostalgia. Or maybe I am already too old to understand why this is just not so.
To be continued....
So I was making this list, the topic list, a sort of brainstorming of possible chapters or essays, and some of the topics were these: board games versus computer games, birthday parties (see previous posts), playdates, competition, meals, movies and television in real time versus on-demand, letters versus e-mail, reading, shopping, the Internet--those were the big ones. (Any input on this topic would be greatly appreciated--other ideas for sections, etc.) And although the point of this book would certainly not be what we have lost as we've modernized--and I don't even think it's a question of lost or gained, it's just different, and how do the differences affect children, and us--I realized that I was kind of dwelling on the things I think we've lost.
That's not right. I guess it's only natural to idealize the past, if the past is something you look back on fondly, and I do think I had a pretty nice childhood, perhaps especially in terms of these childhood rituals. But why do I think that the modern phenomenon of Webkins, which I just learned about yesterday I must confess, and researched a little online (I guess I don't feel nostalgic for the days of the Encyclopedia Brittanica), is not as nice, as special, as meaningful, as the stuffed animal Benjamin Bunny I had as a very small child, and whose bottom sported a purple velvet patch thanks to the time I sat him right down on a lit burner at my grandparents' house? Now I know that today's children may play this Webkins game (my diction sounds like an old lady's; I feel inches away from switching over to the word "slacks") as well as play with, create worlds for, make real their actual stuffed animals, and many children don't find the virtual toys or games as appealing as the actual ones, and that there are very real and even important benefits to staying on top of the current technology--not just for the future but in terms of using different parts of the brain at the same time, fine motor skills, building skills in a kind of communication network that will be a part of our children's lives whether we like it or not, to such an extent that it would be insane to deny it, I suspect.
I have never played Webkins. I was about to say that I don't play computer games, but that's not actually true, thanks to Scrabulous, whose inventors should win some kind of international prize. And now I am wondering if my nostalgia for the way things were is more style than substance, that again (one interesting thing about sevenhundredfiftywords for me is how themes are emerging on their own) it is the idea of the past I like, even as I embrace and am sometimes intimidated by the idea--and ideas--of the future. In other words, that although I claim not to want to be a person preoccupied with nostalgia, that it irritates me when my father, or others (I promise this is the last time I will refer to Andy Rooney) bemoan the "new technologies" by which they sometimes mean computers, in favor of the "good old days," I am prone to doing the exact same thing.
It has taken me a while to recognize this tendency in myself, as I am of a generation later than my father's (and about ten generations later than Andy Rooney's). Although we didn't have a computer until I was about eleven, and even then we used it to play rudimentary games such as Snooper Troops and to write "If-Then" loops in Basic code for homework assignments (one of the Wang kids went to our elementary school, and we had a computer room!), I had one in college, and then a cell phone in my twenties, and using the Internet and shopping online are not as alien to me as they are to some of my parents' generation--full fledged adults when the technology came about and was--continues to be--perfected. But I realize now that I have a visceral reaction to some of the things that today's kids in particular take for granted. When the kids I tutor talked about My Space or texting each other, I actually tsk-tsked in my head, thinking: how sad, what a waste of time. When some of the boys seemed obsessed with an online fantasy sports league, spending hours at their computers involved with it each day, I remembered the NCAA and other league pools of my adolescence, which involved complex charts and calculations on the part of one sports-fanatic friend in particular and often actually watching games together: feeling the swells of victory, the plunges of defeat as a group, the best part of being a sports fan, I think: the collective anguish and joy.
But why is my version, my memory, better? Or more valid? It's not, I guess, is the answer, the one I'm supposed to arrive at, accept. I can embrace and master each new technology that comes along, and I want to. I'd love to be more confident with all things technological, computerized, requiring me to push myself in ways that don't come naturally at all. I dread the idea of turning my back on the here and now; it has always been a fate I've pledged to avoid. But the cold hard truth is that it's not the world I come from. It may never feel like second nature, no matter how hard I run to catch up with it, and I may always have to fight off these fits of nostalgia, or at least to accept them for what they are: a feeling, a stylistic quirk, an idea.
Are the same kids who loved electric train sets, spent hours configuring tracks and building cities in my childhood, now the kids who show such proficiency, such mind-boggling ability to construct little worlds online, with the computer games that enable them to do so? Is it just the stuff that's changed, and if so, does it matter, is anything--has anything--been lost? I dig in my heels a little bit here. I can still feel Benjamin Bunny, feel the spots where his fur was flat from rubbing, feel the little nubby stitches where my grandmother had sewn his velvet patch, smell the always vaguely chemical smell of the place where he'd been singed, see the ragged edges of his pale blue coat, remember that some whiskers were bent, some gone altogether, know that he was never soft enough, plush enough to sleep with, remember how I loved him anyway. It is in a sensory way, maybe I am thinking now, that something has been lost, and if the technologies push away the time spent developing the sensory relationships then the loss is real and not just my nostalgia. Or maybe I am already too old to understand why this is just not so.
To be continued....
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
A Pause, and Just When I Needed One
This is going to be a little unorthodox, as it is not directly related in my mind, or overtly, to writing. Except that it is, in a way--in the way that writing is related to my constant low level anxiety about my own accomplishments, my incessant thinking and talking and yes, whining, about finding or not finding or striving for or not striving for balance in a life that makes me feel like I am always running, running to get to the next place, the next thing, the next accomplishment, and never ever ever getting there. Is this how anybody else feels too? Sometimes I wonder--or right now I am wondering, writing this--what would happen if I just stopped. Just stopped striving, I guess is the word, or a word, not quite right, as I am too lazy constitutionally to be a true striver, but still I strive. Always. I started to go into how, but I deleted: it would take too long, and I suspect that anyone reading this has an inkling of what I mean about myself anyway.
Today, I was sitting at my desk having just sent out what I thought was a very funny e-mail to six members of my high school class soliciting donations from them in honor of this, the year of our twentieth reunion. Now I hate reunions, have maybe never been to one, ever. I also hate both being solicited for donations and soliciting donations, which I have rarely done. But I did want to become more involved in my high school, which I love fiercely still, and when I was asked to be a "class agent" (see, why do they have to give it such an ominous, militaristic name?), I gritted my teeth and said yes. But one of the ways in which I am always striving is to differentiate myself from some unnamed "other"--in this case, I guess, the mythical prototypical "class agent"; thus my funny--possibly ill-advised e-mail which I really, really want to include because it was pretty funny in spite of being ill-advised, but I will resist.
Anyway, so I was sitting at my desk feeling pleased with myself, when the phone rang. For some reason, I answered it, as I didn't recognize the name that came up on the little screen, and a voice I haven't heard in maybe ten years said, "Amy?" It was the one of the six classmates I'd known the best--someone who had been a real friend. He explained that he'd just read my e-mail (and "laughed out loud," she added, to bolster her case that the solicitation was, indeed, funny) and decided to pick up the phone and call me (I'd included my number in case there were actual questions, not expecting it to be used), and so he did. "How are you?" he asked, and I told him. Not the whole shebang, of course, but I went on and on about the new baby, who I guess isn't really technically new-new anymore, and stress about ongoing schools, and sleep-deprivation, and my struggles to find time and space to write and read, and I can't even remember what else, but replaying my monologue in my mind does not make me beam with pride, let's just say. I wasn't as complainy as I've been at many times over the past year or so, but I was by no means at my best.
It took me a little too long to get around to asking him how he was but eventually I did. "Well," he answered slowly. "It's been a rough year." And then I was finally quiet, listening, remembering how much I had liked and respected this person as a kid, for we had been kids when we were friends, 14 years old when we met, and as I was listening to him I pictured a grown-up, and it was a little jarring to look down at my lined knobby hands and see a grown-up's hands, holding the phone, clenching in fists, for what he was telling me was not easy to hear.
His daughter, born so close to mine, with the same name, even--a parallel Lily--had been diagnosed with autism, first with a terrible prognosis by an ignorant "professional," and then, apparently, more helpfully, by a kind one. His wife and daughter were living eight hours away, in an apartment in a city not their own, so the little girl could attend a special school while he worked, teaching (a born teacher, he is, and a true student too), long hours, hard work, while transforming their garage--alone, at night, I imagined--into a room where the daughter could do occupational therapy when she and her mother returned.
I can't make you see or know this old friend, this kind, good person who suffers in no way, shape or form from the kind of incessant striving, all-consuming running, low grade stereotypical navel gazing angst that I do, but I wish I could. And I wish I could make you understand how lucky this little girl is, this parallel Lily, to have father like him: a father who made a life for himself that he fits into beautifully even if the life itself is not always beautiful. A father who said to me, ten years after I had seen him last, at my wedding, I think, or someone else's, said to me today about his little girl, after I'd complained that two little girls were so much harder than one, and he'd said, well it depends on the girl: We do what we have to do. You'd do the very same thing.
Well, that's very generous, old friend. Sure, we'd all like to think so, I'd like to think so. But not, not for most of us, as graciously and selflessly and intuitively and relentlessly and sagely as you. I know this, somehow, about him: that this is who he is, who I knew on some level would always become. And I have been thinking about him, and his little girl, whom I also know somehow is a remarkable little person, all day, all evening, and now into the morning of the following day.
And maybe someday, I won't need such signposts, such glimpses into other people's lives, to remind me of what I should already know.
Today, I was sitting at my desk having just sent out what I thought was a very funny e-mail to six members of my high school class soliciting donations from them in honor of this, the year of our twentieth reunion. Now I hate reunions, have maybe never been to one, ever. I also hate both being solicited for donations and soliciting donations, which I have rarely done. But I did want to become more involved in my high school, which I love fiercely still, and when I was asked to be a "class agent" (see, why do they have to give it such an ominous, militaristic name?), I gritted my teeth and said yes. But one of the ways in which I am always striving is to differentiate myself from some unnamed "other"--in this case, I guess, the mythical prototypical "class agent"; thus my funny--possibly ill-advised e-mail which I really, really want to include because it was pretty funny in spite of being ill-advised, but I will resist.
Anyway, so I was sitting at my desk feeling pleased with myself, when the phone rang. For some reason, I answered it, as I didn't recognize the name that came up on the little screen, and a voice I haven't heard in maybe ten years said, "Amy?" It was the one of the six classmates I'd known the best--someone who had been a real friend. He explained that he'd just read my e-mail (and "laughed out loud," she added, to bolster her case that the solicitation was, indeed, funny) and decided to pick up the phone and call me (I'd included my number in case there were actual questions, not expecting it to be used), and so he did. "How are you?" he asked, and I told him. Not the whole shebang, of course, but I went on and on about the new baby, who I guess isn't really technically new-new anymore, and stress about ongoing schools, and sleep-deprivation, and my struggles to find time and space to write and read, and I can't even remember what else, but replaying my monologue in my mind does not make me beam with pride, let's just say. I wasn't as complainy as I've been at many times over the past year or so, but I was by no means at my best.
It took me a little too long to get around to asking him how he was but eventually I did. "Well," he answered slowly. "It's been a rough year." And then I was finally quiet, listening, remembering how much I had liked and respected this person as a kid, for we had been kids when we were friends, 14 years old when we met, and as I was listening to him I pictured a grown-up, and it was a little jarring to look down at my lined knobby hands and see a grown-up's hands, holding the phone, clenching in fists, for what he was telling me was not easy to hear.
His daughter, born so close to mine, with the same name, even--a parallel Lily--had been diagnosed with autism, first with a terrible prognosis by an ignorant "professional," and then, apparently, more helpfully, by a kind one. His wife and daughter were living eight hours away, in an apartment in a city not their own, so the little girl could attend a special school while he worked, teaching (a born teacher, he is, and a true student too), long hours, hard work, while transforming their garage--alone, at night, I imagined--into a room where the daughter could do occupational therapy when she and her mother returned.
I can't make you see or know this old friend, this kind, good person who suffers in no way, shape or form from the kind of incessant striving, all-consuming running, low grade stereotypical navel gazing angst that I do, but I wish I could. And I wish I could make you understand how lucky this little girl is, this parallel Lily, to have father like him: a father who made a life for himself that he fits into beautifully even if the life itself is not always beautiful. A father who said to me, ten years after I had seen him last, at my wedding, I think, or someone else's, said to me today about his little girl, after I'd complained that two little girls were so much harder than one, and he'd said, well it depends on the girl: We do what we have to do. You'd do the very same thing.
Well, that's very generous, old friend. Sure, we'd all like to think so, I'd like to think so. But not, not for most of us, as graciously and selflessly and intuitively and relentlessly and sagely as you. I know this, somehow, about him: that this is who he is, who I knew on some level would always become. And I have been thinking about him, and his little girl, whom I also know somehow is a remarkable little person, all day, all evening, and now into the morning of the following day.
And maybe someday, I won't need such signposts, such glimpses into other people's lives, to remind me of what I should already know.
More on Birthdays
I am hereby changing the subtitle of this blog to: Before 11 p.m. I actually like the idea of changing the subtitle regularly, kind of like those updates people do on Facebook, which I am always pleased to see but am too shy to do for myself for some reason. This is the same idea--changing the subtitle--but one step removed.
Oh, what a boring, dreadful idea. Woo hoo--changing my subtitles. I bore myself. The expression "get a life" comes to mind. But I am still changing the subtitle right now because it needs to be done. I cannot do the blog writing so late at night. It would be much more useful, truly, if I were fully awake when writing. Tomorrow I will write before noon.
But a little more on birthdays. It seems as though I am becoming not just my mother but my father as well--otherwise, why the inadvertent fits of nostalgia? And actually I didn't even mean to sound nostalgic, wasn't aware of the way it was sounding until I read the comments and then the entry again. And again, I feel myself wandering down the little rocky path to Generalizationville, a writer's lazy sloppy shortcut. For what I was going to write was that kids' birthday parties seem to have spiraled out of control, become extravagant showcases for parents, have so little to do with kids enjoying themselves anymore that they might as well not even show up. The kids, I mean. But of course, I live in Manhattan. I have been invited to some pretty psychotic birthday parties that certainly cost more than my own parents' wedding. But it is equally true, that here in good old NYC, home to some of the wealthiest kids in the US of A, I have been to birthday parties in people's lovely homey homes, with cakes made in the kitchen by one or both of the parents, and decorations such as cheerful balloons. In fact, I am annoyed at myself realizing that my real friends here have never thrown ostentatious extravagant birthdays that are not about kids having fun. Sometimes birthday parties need to be held outside the home because, well, apartments are small.Or just because the parents feel like paying someone else to clean up a bowling alley or bookstore or play space instead of opening their own home to destruction.
I think what happened here is that I took a real phenomenon, here in New York and elsewhere, I am sure, of fancy, out-of-control or otherwise non kid-centered birthday parties and decided to write about the phenomenon, beginning with a false contrast (although I never got to the contrast) to the misty watercolored parties of my own childhood. And the truth (oh the truth, how it hurts and doesn't always serve one's purposes) is that as a kid I went to plenty of parties at bowling alleys and movie theaters and restaurants and even roller rinks (take that, you modern kids--roller rinks!) where the cakes were bought and the money laid out, and you know what? They were really really fun. Or some of them were, if I remember correctly. I always liked bowling.
Well, I'm taking one for the team tonight. Does that make any sense? No, I don't think it does. But I think it's good if I never get used to having to post bad entries. It will keep me honest. I promise to do better, and earlier, tomorrow.
Oh, one last thing: I think what I was starting to do with the birthday party piece is forget about the layers of tissue. In other words, I was drawing what I thought a face was supposed to look like and not the actual face. Ahh.
Oh, what a boring, dreadful idea. Woo hoo--changing my subtitles. I bore myself. The expression "get a life" comes to mind. But I am still changing the subtitle right now because it needs to be done. I cannot do the blog writing so late at night. It would be much more useful, truly, if I were fully awake when writing. Tomorrow I will write before noon.
But a little more on birthdays. It seems as though I am becoming not just my mother but my father as well--otherwise, why the inadvertent fits of nostalgia? And actually I didn't even mean to sound nostalgic, wasn't aware of the way it was sounding until I read the comments and then the entry again. And again, I feel myself wandering down the little rocky path to Generalizationville, a writer's lazy sloppy shortcut. For what I was going to write was that kids' birthday parties seem to have spiraled out of control, become extravagant showcases for parents, have so little to do with kids enjoying themselves anymore that they might as well not even show up. The kids, I mean. But of course, I live in Manhattan. I have been invited to some pretty psychotic birthday parties that certainly cost more than my own parents' wedding. But it is equally true, that here in good old NYC, home to some of the wealthiest kids in the US of A, I have been to birthday parties in people's lovely homey homes, with cakes made in the kitchen by one or both of the parents, and decorations such as cheerful balloons. In fact, I am annoyed at myself realizing that my real friends here have never thrown ostentatious extravagant birthdays that are not about kids having fun. Sometimes birthday parties need to be held outside the home because, well, apartments are small.Or just because the parents feel like paying someone else to clean up a bowling alley or bookstore or play space instead of opening their own home to destruction.
I think what happened here is that I took a real phenomenon, here in New York and elsewhere, I am sure, of fancy, out-of-control or otherwise non kid-centered birthday parties and decided to write about the phenomenon, beginning with a false contrast (although I never got to the contrast) to the misty watercolored parties of my own childhood. And the truth (oh the truth, how it hurts and doesn't always serve one's purposes) is that as a kid I went to plenty of parties at bowling alleys and movie theaters and restaurants and even roller rinks (take that, you modern kids--roller rinks!) where the cakes were bought and the money laid out, and you know what? They were really really fun. Or some of them were, if I remember correctly. I always liked bowling.
Well, I'm taking one for the team tonight. Does that make any sense? No, I don't think it does. But I think it's good if I never get used to having to post bad entries. It will keep me honest. I promise to do better, and earlier, tomorrow.
Oh, one last thing: I think what I was starting to do with the birthday party piece is forget about the layers of tissue. In other words, I was drawing what I thought a face was supposed to look like and not the actual face. Ahh.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Happy Birthday
No, it's nobody's birthday. At least not anybody I know. I just couldn't think of a clever title, and I decided I will write a little bit about my thoughts on children's birthday parties, as it's part of one of two adult book projects I'm tossing around in my head. Or, rather, finally getting down to working on. In the next couple of days I will try to sum them both up, as I want the concepts to be less amorphous before deciding which is more immediately feasible and compelling and worthy of shaping into a real proposal.
But what a rambly, boring opening; I am not taking my own advice. Earlier this evening I advised a writer friend to open with a scene, to anchor the reader in a moment, and here I am with the preamble, the circling around, the hemming and hawing that always needs to get chopped in an essay. But I have to remind myself again--NOT an essay, this. A blog entry. A liberation from the form that allows me space and time and flexibility. A way to the work, not the work itself. Ahh. Now I can breathe. And maybe write.
Musical chairs. Does anybody ever play this anymore? We are in Karen Spierling's basement--I can see it now, a proper 1970s basement, made festive with loops of crepe paper and balloons and a card table with Dixie cups of juice and cake and even goodie bags, which contained not stickers or fruit roll ups or anything with any ecological or educational value but candy: plain old candy. And maybe a plastic ring, which would certainly have been made in China. Or somewhere where the plastic was b-a-d, bad. Musical chairs was the centerpiece of the party--Karen must have been 5? Or 6? Now I can't remember how we knew each other, except for the fact that her father was a minister who knew my mother, which makes no sense as my mother had no connection to the Presbyterian Church. Actually, we must have been younger; it must have been preschool. So maybe 4--Lily's age. I can't believe she has the same inner life, the same ability to relish a game of musical chairs, that I had 34 years ago at Karen Spierling's birthday. It actually blows my mind.
But I digress. Really digress. What I am getting at is that the party was in Karen's basement. It was planned by and held by her parents. Her father was a minister; this was not a suburban mansion. It was not a rented party space. It was her basement. The cake was made by her mom. I am certain of this--I don't remember it, but I know it was made by her mom because I don't remember any cake from any childhood birthday party I ever attended that was not made by the birthday kid's mom. My husband's dad made some of his, but that was because his mom wasn't around. Maybe rich people bought cakes, or people who really, really couldn't bake a cake from a box, but I doubt this. I think they were made.
Which is not the point either; I digress again. (And again and again and again--I apologize in advance.) It's not about who made the cake. If it had been bought, at the town's one bakery, or the local grocery store, the party would still have been in Karen's basement, and we still would have played musical chairs, and it would have been all the excitement we needed--the racing heart as the music seemed to slow, the false stop and then the push from behind, the hurling into the folding chair, the occasional toppling off or crash--full body slam--into another child, the hysterical laughter, the release of the laughter, the running, the dizziness, the breathlessness, the genuine, legitimate, nonsensical pride at victory, the prize. I just remembered this! There were prizes! If you won a game, musical chairs, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, potato sack race (I am starting to sound as though I grew up in a 1950s Beverly Hillbillies episode), you got a prize--a rinkydink, plastic nothing, but it meant that you had won; nobody wins anything these days beyond admission to private schools more competitive than Harvard Law or the preternaturally early label of ADD; games are defunct perhaps for this reason: one must be competitive at life, or one's parents must be so on one's behalf, but god forbid one would win the prize for being the best at musical chairs.
Too much digression for one night. Will tackle this in more depth to come. Any birthday memories triggered? Anyone guess where I'm going with this?
But what a rambly, boring opening; I am not taking my own advice. Earlier this evening I advised a writer friend to open with a scene, to anchor the reader in a moment, and here I am with the preamble, the circling around, the hemming and hawing that always needs to get chopped in an essay. But I have to remind myself again--NOT an essay, this. A blog entry. A liberation from the form that allows me space and time and flexibility. A way to the work, not the work itself. Ahh. Now I can breathe. And maybe write.
Musical chairs. Does anybody ever play this anymore? We are in Karen Spierling's basement--I can see it now, a proper 1970s basement, made festive with loops of crepe paper and balloons and a card table with Dixie cups of juice and cake and even goodie bags, which contained not stickers or fruit roll ups or anything with any ecological or educational value but candy: plain old candy. And maybe a plastic ring, which would certainly have been made in China. Or somewhere where the plastic was b-a-d, bad. Musical chairs was the centerpiece of the party--Karen must have been 5? Or 6? Now I can't remember how we knew each other, except for the fact that her father was a minister who knew my mother, which makes no sense as my mother had no connection to the Presbyterian Church. Actually, we must have been younger; it must have been preschool. So maybe 4--Lily's age. I can't believe she has the same inner life, the same ability to relish a game of musical chairs, that I had 34 years ago at Karen Spierling's birthday. It actually blows my mind.
But I digress. Really digress. What I am getting at is that the party was in Karen's basement. It was planned by and held by her parents. Her father was a minister; this was not a suburban mansion. It was not a rented party space. It was her basement. The cake was made by her mom. I am certain of this--I don't remember it, but I know it was made by her mom because I don't remember any cake from any childhood birthday party I ever attended that was not made by the birthday kid's mom. My husband's dad made some of his, but that was because his mom wasn't around. Maybe rich people bought cakes, or people who really, really couldn't bake a cake from a box, but I doubt this. I think they were made.
Which is not the point either; I digress again. (And again and again and again--I apologize in advance.) It's not about who made the cake. If it had been bought, at the town's one bakery, or the local grocery store, the party would still have been in Karen's basement, and we still would have played musical chairs, and it would have been all the excitement we needed--the racing heart as the music seemed to slow, the false stop and then the push from behind, the hurling into the folding chair, the occasional toppling off or crash--full body slam--into another child, the hysterical laughter, the release of the laughter, the running, the dizziness, the breathlessness, the genuine, legitimate, nonsensical pride at victory, the prize. I just remembered this! There were prizes! If you won a game, musical chairs, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, potato sack race (I am starting to sound as though I grew up in a 1950s Beverly Hillbillies episode), you got a prize--a rinkydink, plastic nothing, but it meant that you had won; nobody wins anything these days beyond admission to private schools more competitive than Harvard Law or the preternaturally early label of ADD; games are defunct perhaps for this reason: one must be competitive at life, or one's parents must be so on one's behalf, but god forbid one would win the prize for being the best at musical chairs.
Too much digression for one night. Will tackle this in more depth to come. Any birthday memories triggered? Anyone guess where I'm going with this?
Woolfian Musings
Received an e-mail tonight from someone I care deeply about who is suddenly, and not by choice, living alone. This person remarked that in spite of the unhappy circumstances, living alone had its merits, and I was suddenly someplace else altogether: no longer at my desk, in the dining room, ten feet away from my sleeping baby, dogs on either side of chair, husband and four-year-old just on the other side of two walls. This comment struck a nerve with me, for I am now so seldom alone, and I crave it--solitude--so desperately sometimes. But I was going to say how I had been transported, whisked away to an apartment that was little more than one large room with a wall put up in the middle, dividing it: living space and sleeping space, each space preciously, wholly my own.
It was the year after graduate school; I must have been 25. 26? Not important. I too had found myself unexpectedly alone, and circumstances had conspired to bring me this apartment: a so-called one bedroom apartment on 70th Street, on the West Side, in a brownstone on a pretty little street with trees and a French bakery and sunlight streaming in the tall windows on the painted green floors. I loved the floors, especially, and my aunt--also suddenly alone and without the space for them--lent me two enormous soft chairs with ottomans that were covered in green-patterned linen, which looked as though they had been chosen especially to go with the floors. And my bed, which I assembled myself--I will never forget the sense of accomplishment when I finished, in the middle of the night, dripping with sweat--was also green. I had bought it in Cambridge, with money from my one of my first paychecks, and although I'd owned it at that point for a couple of years I had never put it together alone.
I loved this apartment, more than I realized at the time, I realize now, not because it was such a great place, although it was lovely, but because it was mine. I paid rent, of course, and it was quite reasonable. I worked freelance, in publishing, and I tutored, for cash, which I kept in a little antique wooden dresser that my mother had given me, and I always had plenty of money to do what I wanted to do, and I always did what I wanted to do, which mostly was stay home and read. That's not true--I probably went out more at night that year than any other of my life--out to dinner, out with friends, out to parties, just out (and I do remember the feeling of coming back at night, when I wanted to be alone, and sighing with gratitude at the luxury). But living alone affords one so much time alone that there is plenty to go around, so I went out, all the time, but I also stayed in all the time--on weekend days, which I have not had in the city forever now--and I sank into one of my aunt's green chairs, and I read.
Many things happened to me the year I lived alone in the apartment with green floors. One night two friends came over after work, and one of them brought a bottle of Tanqueray for a housewarming gift. I drank too much, with tonic, and got sick, and my friends were so kind to me--I remember I was wearing black pants that I'd bought in the largest size at a children's store, and I was drinking out of a big plastic cup. I hosted my graduate school friends for a little get-together and served frozen hors d'oeuvres I'd bought at Food Emporium, and they thought I was being ironic, but I actually love frozen hors d'oeuvres: tater tots, pigs in blankets, things like that, and we ate them off the cookies sheets set on the ottoman. My cat, Rory, who is still my cat, lived with me: she slept with me in the bed, and I wonder, now that she has been banned permanently from all bedrooms due to allergies, if she too remembers--in some non-verbal cat fashion--this apartment with the green floors, in which she was allowed--no, encouraged--to sleep in the bed. If you have a pet, you are never alone, and if you live alone, with a pet, you are truly fortunate, as is your pet: there are no other humans around to muck up the relationship.
Sigh. I feel old now, writing this. But it has made me happy to remember, and perhaps--if I am stalled one day--I will write some more about it, this apartment, living alone--because I have so much more to say that I am making myself stop, plugging the dam, as it were. But I do want to say that if you ever find yourself living alone, by choice or by circumstance, there may be hidden goodness in the experience. In some ways--although even earlier tonight I put my baby down for sleep and stroked her head with the back of my hand, thinking, "I have everything," and felt lucky to be in a home with a family--there is also something blessed in being, truly, by oneself.
It was the year after graduate school; I must have been 25. 26? Not important. I too had found myself unexpectedly alone, and circumstances had conspired to bring me this apartment: a so-called one bedroom apartment on 70th Street, on the West Side, in a brownstone on a pretty little street with trees and a French bakery and sunlight streaming in the tall windows on the painted green floors. I loved the floors, especially, and my aunt--also suddenly alone and without the space for them--lent me two enormous soft chairs with ottomans that were covered in green-patterned linen, which looked as though they had been chosen especially to go with the floors. And my bed, which I assembled myself--I will never forget the sense of accomplishment when I finished, in the middle of the night, dripping with sweat--was also green. I had bought it in Cambridge, with money from my one of my first paychecks, and although I'd owned it at that point for a couple of years I had never put it together alone.
I loved this apartment, more than I realized at the time, I realize now, not because it was such a great place, although it was lovely, but because it was mine. I paid rent, of course, and it was quite reasonable. I worked freelance, in publishing, and I tutored, for cash, which I kept in a little antique wooden dresser that my mother had given me, and I always had plenty of money to do what I wanted to do, and I always did what I wanted to do, which mostly was stay home and read. That's not true--I probably went out more at night that year than any other of my life--out to dinner, out with friends, out to parties, just out (and I do remember the feeling of coming back at night, when I wanted to be alone, and sighing with gratitude at the luxury). But living alone affords one so much time alone that there is plenty to go around, so I went out, all the time, but I also stayed in all the time--on weekend days, which I have not had in the city forever now--and I sank into one of my aunt's green chairs, and I read.
Many things happened to me the year I lived alone in the apartment with green floors. One night two friends came over after work, and one of them brought a bottle of Tanqueray for a housewarming gift. I drank too much, with tonic, and got sick, and my friends were so kind to me--I remember I was wearing black pants that I'd bought in the largest size at a children's store, and I was drinking out of a big plastic cup. I hosted my graduate school friends for a little get-together and served frozen hors d'oeuvres I'd bought at Food Emporium, and they thought I was being ironic, but I actually love frozen hors d'oeuvres: tater tots, pigs in blankets, things like that, and we ate them off the cookies sheets set on the ottoman. My cat, Rory, who is still my cat, lived with me: she slept with me in the bed, and I wonder, now that she has been banned permanently from all bedrooms due to allergies, if she too remembers--in some non-verbal cat fashion--this apartment with the green floors, in which she was allowed--no, encouraged--to sleep in the bed. If you have a pet, you are never alone, and if you live alone, with a pet, you are truly fortunate, as is your pet: there are no other humans around to muck up the relationship.
Sigh. I feel old now, writing this. But it has made me happy to remember, and perhaps--if I am stalled one day--I will write some more about it, this apartment, living alone--because I have so much more to say that I am making myself stop, plugging the dam, as it were. But I do want to say that if you ever find yourself living alone, by choice or by circumstance, there may be hidden goodness in the experience. In some ways--although even earlier tonight I put my baby down for sleep and stroked her head with the back of my hand, thinking, "I have everything," and felt lucky to be in a home with a family--there is also something blessed in being, truly, by oneself.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Some questions
I just read what I wrote yesterday, and although of course I saw weak spots and it needs editing, I am pretty pleased. For the first half of a first draft, I think I got what I wanted. I had fully intended to keep going tonight, but instead I want to force myself to slow down, as I think the next section, as well as the transition into it and the conclusion, are where I am most apt to get into trouble in some of of my characteristic ways.
Let me quickly explain where I want to go. Perhaps this is unorthodox (still not down with the blog rules, although with 25 days and counting I feel like I should get some kind of a badge or a pin), but I'd appreciate any advice anyone has as I proceed. You see, I'd like to proceed with caution, for a change. I am, after all, doing this not just to get things done but to get them done better. So. The overarching theme of this piece is the way having children changed my and my husband's roles in our marriage in a major way, toward--for the first time in our long relationship--the traditional. I would like to claim that this is true in many marriages, although I know I have to be careful with this for a number of reasons.
First of all, when I think of the couples I know, there are many who made either an overt or a tacit agreement that this would be so. I know some women who will openly admit to having no professional ambition, and some who do but agreed anyway to take on the burden of childrearing and domestic duties. This was not true for us, and was not true for many other couples I know, and I just can't stop thinking about what is, I know, something of a cliche: the fact that women--in spite of how much they work outside or the home, how much money they earn, their stated desires to the contrary--still end up carrying the bulk of this load on their shoulders. In other words, how traditional gender roles seem to go hand in hand with having kids, in spite of the ways in which the world has changed for women.
Obviously I am going to continue with my own story, using my experience and examples from my own life. I will write honestly about my own frustration with this shift in my marriage, perhaps not irrevocable but in place for the foreseeable future--as well as how unanticipated it was, which surprises me, makes me wonder if this is something women don't like to talk about or something I just hadn't listened to or thought to ask about. But the piece will be strongest if other women see themselves and their own lives in it, and if I can acknowledge my own role in the shift in terms of such things as desire for control, unavoidable advantages in experience and history, the pleasures inherent in the shift, for there are some, as well as the occasional shame that accompanies the pleasures, and on and on.
I know some of you, and some of you reading, don't feel this shift as acutely as I seem to. Some of you do, though, I think, in different ways. It's such a basic topic, really, universal, but complicated too, if I can make it so. I can see how it could be done badly, I can see how I could tackle it badly, and I am hoping that some of you might help me avoid some landmines before I move on, as well as share some thoughts on what your concerns might be or what you'd like to see addressed. Any comments from male readers would be really appreciated too, in light of what I am writing about.
Okay. It's actually not pre-dawn; I am thrilled. Maybe I have time for a few rounds of Scrabulous.
Let me quickly explain where I want to go. Perhaps this is unorthodox (still not down with the blog rules, although with 25 days and counting I feel like I should get some kind of a badge or a pin), but I'd appreciate any advice anyone has as I proceed. You see, I'd like to proceed with caution, for a change. I am, after all, doing this not just to get things done but to get them done better. So. The overarching theme of this piece is the way having children changed my and my husband's roles in our marriage in a major way, toward--for the first time in our long relationship--the traditional. I would like to claim that this is true in many marriages, although I know I have to be careful with this for a number of reasons.
First of all, when I think of the couples I know, there are many who made either an overt or a tacit agreement that this would be so. I know some women who will openly admit to having no professional ambition, and some who do but agreed anyway to take on the burden of childrearing and domestic duties. This was not true for us, and was not true for many other couples I know, and I just can't stop thinking about what is, I know, something of a cliche: the fact that women--in spite of how much they work outside or the home, how much money they earn, their stated desires to the contrary--still end up carrying the bulk of this load on their shoulders. In other words, how traditional gender roles seem to go hand in hand with having kids, in spite of the ways in which the world has changed for women.
Obviously I am going to continue with my own story, using my experience and examples from my own life. I will write honestly about my own frustration with this shift in my marriage, perhaps not irrevocable but in place for the foreseeable future--as well as how unanticipated it was, which surprises me, makes me wonder if this is something women don't like to talk about or something I just hadn't listened to or thought to ask about. But the piece will be strongest if other women see themselves and their own lives in it, and if I can acknowledge my own role in the shift in terms of such things as desire for control, unavoidable advantages in experience and history, the pleasures inherent in the shift, for there are some, as well as the occasional shame that accompanies the pleasures, and on and on.
I know some of you, and some of you reading, don't feel this shift as acutely as I seem to. Some of you do, though, I think, in different ways. It's such a basic topic, really, universal, but complicated too, if I can make it so. I can see how it could be done badly, I can see how I could tackle it badly, and I am hoping that some of you might help me avoid some landmines before I move on, as well as share some thoughts on what your concerns might be or what you'd like to see addressed. Any comments from male readers would be really appreciated too, in light of what I am writing about.
Okay. It's actually not pre-dawn; I am thrilled. Maybe I have time for a few rounds of Scrabulous.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Modern Love: A Beginning
I met my husband in college. Along with a number of other girls, some of whom are among my closest friends today, I was assigned to the only all-womens dorm on campus--its single sex status thanks to the demand of its wealthy donor, who clearly was wedded to the Vassar of the past. A few days into freshman year, we were already desperate: Does anybody know any men? Suddenly Nicole remembered a guy from her high school who'd left after sophomore year. She'd heard he was here; maybe we should look him up. We figured he'd have friends at least, and we could hang out in his co-ed dorm instead of our estrogen fortress.
That guy was Ben, and about six years after we graduated together, we got married; this summer we will have been married ten years. When we first started going out, we were essentially children, insomuch as twenty years old is a child these days. I still slept with my baby blanket; Ben bought frozen burritos at Seven Eleven with his dad's credit card. We played computer Yahtzee together. It was not a sophisticated courtship. But we were equals, in every way. I was an English major, he was an economics major. I whipped off my papers last minute, he wrote his in advance. Our backgrounds were different--my extended family lived within ten minutes of each other in Massachusetts, my parents had already been married a quarter of a century, Ben had lived all over the country, his parents' divorce had been protracted and acrimonious--but we were young, we were college students, we were, in many ways, or so it seemed, the same.
Vassar in the early 1990s was a place where political correctness and awareness were twin pillars on which all else was built. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put the school in the national news by allegedly making a racist remark after a lecture. A female professor did it again when she accused the school of sexism in her lack of promotion. And there was a movement, not as small as one would expect, to change the word "women" to "womyn," so as to avoid the inclusion of the patriarchal root.
When Ben and I graduated and moved together to an apartment in Cambridge, this was the air we had breathed for four years. The apartment had two bedrooms; we each set up our own desks and work areas. We shopped together for groceries and split the cost. I cooked more than he did, as it was second nature to me and I loved it, but he cooked too, sometimes, and I would no more have made his toast for him or poured his cereal than I would have ironed his socks. Actually, I have no idea how or if we did laundry; I have no recollection of doing any at all.
I remember our first salaries. I was an editorial assistant at a major publishing house. I earned $18,800. Ben was a paralegal at a major law firm; he earned $21,000. We thought we were rich. We could go out to dinner, to the movies, even away for the weekend if we wanted to, and pay for it ourselves. Our rent was $600 a month. That first year, Ben--who had a car and is the spender in our relationship to my saver--would occasionally borrow money from me to make up his half if he fell short. He always paid me back.
In the beginning, we both loved our jobs, loved working (the novelty takes a while to wear off), loved carrying our briefcases and wearing our suits, taking the T and meeting up for lunch downtown, between our offices. It did feel, in spite of our very real financial independence, in which we both took pride, like playing grown-up. But it never felt unequal. In every way, we were peers. I would not have been able to imagine this changing. In fact, it was Ben who wanted to get married. The summer before I left for graduate school in New York he asked me, afraid--I wonder now--of things changing too much when I left. I said no: I was going to become a writer, I was moving to New York. We didn't break up--yet. We memorized the bus schedule instead. For a year, almost two, this worked, and then it didn't. We split up.
Six months went by; we missed each other. I finished graduate school but Boston had lost its appeal. I had fallen in love with New York the way I had fallen in love with Ben: not overnight but over time, as its layers revealed themselves to me--so different from what I had known. Another six months--being apart wasn't working. We decided to get married after all.
That guy was Ben, and about six years after we graduated together, we got married; this summer we will have been married ten years. When we first started going out, we were essentially children, insomuch as twenty years old is a child these days. I still slept with my baby blanket; Ben bought frozen burritos at Seven Eleven with his dad's credit card. We played computer Yahtzee together. It was not a sophisticated courtship. But we were equals, in every way. I was an English major, he was an economics major. I whipped off my papers last minute, he wrote his in advance. Our backgrounds were different--my extended family lived within ten minutes of each other in Massachusetts, my parents had already been married a quarter of a century, Ben had lived all over the country, his parents' divorce had been protracted and acrimonious--but we were young, we were college students, we were, in many ways, or so it seemed, the same.
Vassar in the early 1990s was a place where political correctness and awareness were twin pillars on which all else was built. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put the school in the national news by allegedly making a racist remark after a lecture. A female professor did it again when she accused the school of sexism in her lack of promotion. And there was a movement, not as small as one would expect, to change the word "women" to "womyn," so as to avoid the inclusion of the patriarchal root.
When Ben and I graduated and moved together to an apartment in Cambridge, this was the air we had breathed for four years. The apartment had two bedrooms; we each set up our own desks and work areas. We shopped together for groceries and split the cost. I cooked more than he did, as it was second nature to me and I loved it, but he cooked too, sometimes, and I would no more have made his toast for him or poured his cereal than I would have ironed his socks. Actually, I have no idea how or if we did laundry; I have no recollection of doing any at all.
I remember our first salaries. I was an editorial assistant at a major publishing house. I earned $18,800. Ben was a paralegal at a major law firm; he earned $21,000. We thought we were rich. We could go out to dinner, to the movies, even away for the weekend if we wanted to, and pay for it ourselves. Our rent was $600 a month. That first year, Ben--who had a car and is the spender in our relationship to my saver--would occasionally borrow money from me to make up his half if he fell short. He always paid me back.
In the beginning, we both loved our jobs, loved working (the novelty takes a while to wear off), loved carrying our briefcases and wearing our suits, taking the T and meeting up for lunch downtown, between our offices. It did feel, in spite of our very real financial independence, in which we both took pride, like playing grown-up. But it never felt unequal. In every way, we were peers. I would not have been able to imagine this changing. In fact, it was Ben who wanted to get married. The summer before I left for graduate school in New York he asked me, afraid--I wonder now--of things changing too much when I left. I said no: I was going to become a writer, I was moving to New York. We didn't break up--yet. We memorized the bus schedule instead. For a year, almost two, this worked, and then it didn't. We split up.
Six months went by; we missed each other. I finished graduate school but Boston had lost its appeal. I had fallen in love with New York the way I had fallen in love with Ben: not overnight but over time, as its layers revealed themselves to me--so different from what I had known. Another six months--being apart wasn't working. We decided to get married after all.
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