Sunday, March 27, 2011

Contentment

How is it possible to never have a moment and still feel (on occasion) as if I haven’t got a life? Am I the only one that feels this way? What to do, what to do?

When I was a little kid I had the standard dreams… I wanted to be a teacher, a business woman, a mother, a writer, an actress, a singer, a chef. Little did I know that I would have all of these careers, many simultaneously, and none of them would be what I imagined. I had no way of knowing that they would all be fulfilling yet all leave me wanting… something more, something better, something else, something different than what I have. What is contentment? If I had it would I want it after five minutes, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime? How do I know this ISN’T it? Why do I feel like both Helen Hunt AND Jack Nicholson in ‘As Good As It Gets’? Should I be taking prescription (may cause stomach ache, headache, diarrhea, heart palpitations, coma, ennui or death) drugs for this or just getting a bit tipsy (may cause stomach ache, headache, diarrhea, heart palpitations, coma, ennui or death) once a month? So many questions and not one satisfactory answer…..

I loved to carry around important (in my mind) papers when I was a kid. I would whip them out with a broken crayon or stubby pencil in hand and either act like I was teaching my bears and dolls math and science or that the papers were essential documents for some vague sort of enterprise where I was a very important person, vice president in charge of something. My parent’s gave me junk mail or old papers from my dads brief case to use in these fantasies, fully encouraging me to be a professional person. Even though they were old school they never said nice girls do not order their dollies to fetch them coffee or smack them with the ruler when they do not learn their ABCs fast enough. I was given old handbags to use as brief cases and tromped around in my mom’s pumps and some wooden beads, wrapping a towel shawl-like over my shoulders,  heaving great sighs and yelling ‘You’re fired!’ at hapless naked baby dolls with ink scars on their faces. In hindsight they were probably just so happy that I was playing a recognizable game with dolls instead of talking to my dear imaginary friends (Jan and Trilly Trolly, they weren’t from around here, obviously) all day that I could have been pretending to be an over-adrenalized despot and they would have found a way to applaud it. They did seem to get a little concerned when my teacher game morphed into Jean Joins The Convent (Hey, I was attending Catholic School!) and the shawl turned into a habit but that was short lived because, in my mind, nuns lived too predictable an existence and even at six I wasn’t comfortable with the status quo. From the Virgin Jean to bride was the next logical step. Nun’s habit to wedding dress and veil was just a tiny hop for my imagination. My rosary went from being tucked into my sister’s belt to hanging around my neck, I wore my mom’s white sandals instead of her black pumps and voila, I was adorable! I promptly pulled a baby doll out from under my dress… I was number six after all. I didn’t know the details but wasn’t totally naïve either…. and settled in to life in my third of the room as a married woman.

As with most girls house was a game that lasted for years. I started with the obligatory tea parties, swerved to the outer limits and pretended to be a wife both welcoming her husband home from the wars and one getting news of his death in battle. I tried out different excited and happy waves and Yoo-hoos. Kissing the back of my hand with loud smacks and chattering about the dance at the officer’s club. I pretended to drink (Rob Roys. I don’t even know what they are but it was my imaginary poison), smoke and eat caviar on crackers. I practiced batting my eyes. I would usher the invisible swashbuckler out the door, crying, wailing about how I would miss him and be strong… ten minutes later I would get the imaginary knock, the telegram (More of those important papers from my dad’s case. Oh happy day when he gave me carbon paper too) and fall, swooning, to the floor with my baby and a wad of toilet paper substituting for a hankie clutched to my chest.

These weird games came to an end when I was nine and moved to a regular suburb and became part of a new group of people. Where I had been one of hundreds of kids with their father’s either gone to war or gone to prison I now was one of hundreds of kids whose father’s wore suits and ties and went to work in the city every day. Where I had attended a Catholic school and a smallish church I now went to a regular elementary school and a huge church too far away to walk to. I had lived in a small, regimented community and suddenly I felt like I had been thrust into the big bad world. Where I had always played alone or with imaginary or inanimate friends I had a real live girl who came to my house and hung out with me and me to hers after school. Suddenly, where I had easily imagined myself in the starring roles of my fantasies I found myself at odds. I was way behind…. I started baton twirling, desperately trying to make my fat fingers spin the stupid shiny stick but succeeding in only breaking things and hitting myself in the nose. I tried to learn how to do cartwheels and back bends, to jump and clap like a cheerleader with the result being heavy bottomed tumbles in the back yard adorning my backside with eggplant colored bruises and twisting my ankles. I wanted to be blasé about riding my bike with no sibling or parent watching over my every move with an eagle’s sharp eye and instead got shaky and queasy when I got more than two blocks away from home. In short I was not cut out to be a regular kid. A VP, a teacher, a mother or a nun, sure, but not a normal 9 year old in suburban Virginia.

The good thing about all of the hours, days, weeks, months and years of playing by my self was that I had learned how to act. I could hang with the kids at the playground and fool them most of the time. I learned how to cartwheel, once, perfectly. They never knew twice would make me dizzy and I would fall over on my face, eating dirt. I had one baton trick which I could smile through and appear nonchalant about, bored with. I was too cool for cheerleading (You like those girls? Are you kidding me?) turning to music and books instead. I would call my friend before leaving home so that 90 percent of the time, she could meet me half way to the drugstore where we hung out, alleviating the need to pedal several miles by myself. I was an Oscar caliber performer and a constant work in progress...

This sounds sad, in fact down right pitiful, but it had some great upsides to it. For one, I can still do the one baton trick because I practiced it for a million hours. For another, in finding ways to avoid all of the things I couldn’t do and to not embarrass myself in front of all of the people I wanted to be like I became a person who is not afraid to not be like everyone (hell, for that matter, anyone) else.  Music and books have served me well and provided such great heights of joy in my life it is hard to not see them as living, breathing things. I can’t do a cartwheel anymore but I can, and do, dance. Not a ballerina, not a Rockette, but I can shake my soul with the best of them. When you can’t talk teen idol because you just don’t care that much, but you can make the best damn fudge from scratch in Annandale you still fit with the giggling gaggle you want to be friends with.

To this day I enjoy being alone-- reading, listening to music, cooking, and dancing-- at the same time I want to have a wide and loving circle of friends made up of people who share my interest and my passions and are willing to let me try out theirs without abandoning me if I fail. I am a business woman with an important enough job, though I do have to fetch my own coffee and have never been in a position to axe anyone (though I could give you a list…). I have been a wife who lost a husband (NOTHING like I imagined at play) and a mother, a writer, a dancer a chef…. I have it all, but I want something, something different, something better, just more.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Apothegms

ap·o·thegm [ap-uh-them]  –noun
a short, pithy, instructive saying; a terse remark or aphorism.

“Another day another dollar”, “six one way, half a dozen the other”, “in for a penny, in for a pound”, “slow and steady wins the race” These are the apothegms I grew up with and find myself repeating on a daily basis. They give me courage, help me stay on course (NOT stay the course, what a ridiculous tag line), help get me motivated in the morning and help me deal with the results of my actions at the end of the day.

Every morning before entering the monolith I work in I say “another day, another dollar”. It reminds me that that is the reason I come here, for a pay check. I do my job, they pay me, end of story. I like my co-workers for the most part, like what I do for the most part, but it is not my life, it is a means for obtaining and keeping the life I want. Life is what happens to me when I leave here, with my family, my friends, my interests. I simply do not understand people that feel that retirement is a loss. I yearn for the day I can retire, when I can spend my days in happy pursuit of the things that make me content. I want to write and get paid for it. I want to cook for people, to have them say ‘My gosh this is delicious’ and stand groaning and releasing buttons after a fantastic meal. I want to experience at will that moment when the batter I am stirring takes on the exactly right sheen and thickness and air bubbles pop leaving quarter size craters in the glossy slick surface. I want to read about a thousand books (for starters). I want to paint murals on the walls that surround me—trees and flowers, water and rocks, calming, lovely and wildly fertile murals so that the walls do not close in on me. I want to sleep until noon or not at all and spend the day in my pajamas watching trash TV or listening to beautiful music or dancing around my living room singing at the top of my lungs. In short, I want to be the one that everyone refers to as ‘that crazy lady’ while discussing my latest literary work or divine dish. Until then, I square my shoulders, mutter ’another day, another dollar’ and go on about my business.

‘Six one way, half a dozen the other’ is an apothegm that reminds me not to over analyze situations, people, conversations, directives and decisions. I find it so incredibly easy and self indulgent to get into my head and just spend the day there, playing around, messing with things that are better left alone. Imagine a child in a laboratory filled with chemicals and flame under beakers full of brightly colored smoking liquids and you will have an idea of what I mean. I am terribly introspective and could spend all of my time getting to know the ins and outs of me but frankly I am not all that interesting. I have to remind myself that since I don’t even have that good a handle on my motives and inspirations (Lets face it, every new day changes us. How can we ever understand it all?)  why the heck would I ever assume I had the power to determine what someone else was thinking or feeling or dealing with when they say or do something I find questionable. If I go six one way, questioning, theorizing, imagining and wondering, or half a dozen the other, accept at face value, the end result is the same. They said or did something I do not agree with or understand. Why stress over it?

One of my favorite apothegms, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’, means just go for it. If you are going to try a little bit then just throw your self into it head first and arms akimbo. I had a basketball coach in high school who told us if you are going to foul make them bleed. I thought it was horrible at the time but now, 35 years later I can see the wisdom in the advice (even if I would never, ever tell a child to hurt someone); In short, if you are going to do something that possibly carries a very high price you better give it everything you’ve got. Otherwise you will end up paying the maximum for surely minimal rewards. I am not saying I am courageous. Hell, I am not even close to bold most of the time, but if something is important enough for me to try then screw creeping down the steps in the shallow end! I head for the deep end right away.

The last apothegm in my list, ‘Slow and steady wins the race’, is one I think everyone knows, has heard since they were two and grandma read the ‘Tortoise And The Hare’ to them. I think this is an idea wasted on children, they just want to go, go fast, go faster, higher, longer than any other kid and possibly become Superman, you never know! But, if we hear it enough when we are tots,  ‘Slow and steady wins the race’ becomes meaningful when we need it most, brand new and shiny with purpose (imagine a tortoise with a big S—for slow—on his chest, rolling out of the phone booth of our imagination while a light bulb comes on over our heads). Slow and steady allows us to visualize and set long term goals (i.e. crazy lady status at retirement). Slow and steady allows us to endure the years of school, of work, of corporate climbing because we KNOW that these things pay off, that they will give us lasting peace and contentment (or at least a 401K so that we can fund our own peace and contentment). Slow and steady allows us to stay emotionally and/or physically afloat during the lean years, to stay with our spouse during the ‘Why did I ever marry YOU?’ times, to love our kids through the ‘I hate you! Gimme five dollars’ times, to tolerate our pets during the piss on the floor, chew the shoes and bite the preacher times. In short, slow and steady allows us to shudder through the not so great times so that we can revel in the wonderful times.

What grandma failed to read to us as kids was the epilogue to that story, when the tortoise goes home, has a nice hot soak in a well appointed bath, dresses in a natty new shell, aerodynamically designed with the racing tortoise in mind, pours himself an ice cold beer in a tall chilled glass, looks at a picture of the hare and goes ‘nanny nanny boo boo sucker’ under his breath as he sinks into his comfy furniture in that wonderful log he calls home.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Faded Pictures

Road trips rule! I can barely see so, sadly, I am not allowed to drive. Not even a little teeny weeny bit. This is very depressing for someone who likes to go see things because those things exist in her world. I like everything about road trips, including the miles and miles of lush forests lining the sides of highways. I like little towns and big cities and farms and hills and trees and woods. I like the act of getting where I am going as much as I like the actual arrival at my destination. In short, road trips rule. This I find to be highly ironic and slightly sadistic on the part of God or science or nature’s whimsy and the theory of chaos

I cannot remember a time when a road trip was not a wonderful thing. As children, my brothers and sisters and I were routinely packed into a giant station wagon or van with dogs, books, coolers and pillows and toted hither and yon by my parents. My first road trip happened before my memory came to life, leaving the state of my birth (Arizona) to go to Europe. Before we left our homeland we visited my mother and father’s families in Louisiana and Georgia. There are a few pictures from this trip that made me wish I could remember it. A shoe box holds a picture of me sitting under an inverted wooden playpen, surrounded by toys and looking for all the world like a two foot tall, curly headed, sticky faced, bottle toting prisoner of some crazy war. Pictures of my parents with their parents, everyone looking young and fit and headstrong and vibrant sit in the same box. My parents were beautiful people and when I look at these faded pictures I see that facet of them before wars, world travel, eight kids, marital and money problems, time and illness reduced their vibrant youth to the softly weathered visage- loving, echoing sadness -that I know best, their true selves shadowed by old age.

My sisters in too short hand me down dresses with sashes tied in crooked bows or flapping by their sides like calico flags rollick with my brothers and cousins in rolled up dungarees, striped Ts and tennis shoes. They are caught always moving; running, jumping, climbing, twirling, cart wheeling, skipping, diving, fighting, hiking, hugging, skating, holding hands. I want to run with those children now in the twilight. I want to catch lightening bugs while I listen to my happy parents talk softly on the screen porch with a sound track of katydids, baseball quietly on the radio and ice clinking in highball glasses.

I have wonderful, frightening pictures from Louisiana, huge snakes, lizards, spiders, evil warty toads lumbering across my grandparent’s small yard. My grandmother with a basket of eggs in one hand and blissfully ignorant chickens around her feet, pecking away at what would be their last meal before they were turned into one of our finest. My siblings are across the road, having disobeyed every adult around and braved the Mouton’s bull to cross the pasture and get to the barn where they leap and swing from the rafters into the hay mounded below. They walk into town with their young aunts and uncles and cousins galore, to buy Cokes in iced glass bottles and candy and Picayune cigarettes to smoke in the haunting, eerie privacy of the bayou. My grandfather sits in his chair by the fireplace, winter or summer, talking to my parents and my grandmother in a Cajun accent almost impossible to understand. He sits ramrod straight and strong, face weathered, his sweat salt stained grey Stetson hanging from his knee or the back of his chair, gravelly voiced from a lifetime of eating hot sauce and red pepper, somber and stern until he releases the most beatific smile ever seen on a human being. He lets me touch his soft face, he lets me slide up on his knee and lean against his farmers work worn body and I feel safe, lulled into a nap by the smells of chicken gumbo and chicory coffee and happy sounds of my father’s huge family’s loving and fighting.

We went to crawfish farms, and fishing on the gulf, eating huge pots of boiled crawfish and steamed clams and oyster sandwiches, waving cobs of corn dripping with butter as we raced around the beach. As night fell we became frightening, ragged apparitions in the exploding embers of a bonfire, dancing like little savages and whooping as the thunderheads gathered and billowed and put on a magnificent blue light show out at sea. A race homeward, the storms chasing us from our place as usurpers on the beach, lightening striking the road just feet behind the car while evil looking reptilian forms crawled out of the flooding ditches which lined the two lane shell topped road and made a rhythmic, percussive sound as they were flattened by the tires of our boat sized car. We fell exhausted into beds with corn husk mattresses, just two, girls in one, boys in the other, falling asleep looking at the water marks left by old floods during famous hurricanes on the ceiling above us. We dreamed of snakes falling out of the once inundated attic space and fait-do-dos and our (possibly imaginary) cousin the witch, Fawna Lee, whom we had never met but knew all about and could picture mixing potions in her crooked candle lit house on stilts among the cypress.

We took trips to Kansas City Missouri (more cousins!!) and West Point in New York state (and even more cousins!!), to Rock Creek Park and Lansing Michigan and Harper’s Ferry and the Erie Canal and New York City and Wichita Kansas and strip mines in Pennsylvania and Washington DC and Virginia Beach and Cape Hatteras.  My parents showed us family and history and beauty and joy.

As I grew older we traveled to Paris and Rome, to Venice and Amsterdam, to London and Bruges. We sailed around Europe in our big boat sized car, eight, ten twelve people on occasion rocketing along the tulip lined alleys or cobble stoned-trolley track cut streets, entertaining the locals who thought we were slightly crazy while we flitted through what amounted to pages in a child’s story book, Alps? I looked for Heidi and Hansel and Gretel. Venice? I searched for princesses hanging out tower windows and Marco Polo. Paris? Bonn? Amsterdam? I knew spies were around every corner, every mail box a dead drop, evil fascists held poor Jewish children captive in every attic we passed. The catacombs evoked chanting monks in grey sackcloth with incense and rope sandals, the coliseum was terrifying, lions and Christians still battled in my mind, rending flesh, slashing brute muscle, blood in the sand. Even though I was a kid, in fact, for most of these European trips I was a hormone obsessed teenager, I could not help but revel in the new-ness, the different-ness of what was around me. The flowers in their gardens, the look of their socks, the cut of their coats and the smell of their food all fascinated me. Although I was always very ready to be home, I waited anxiously for the next announcement of a vacation, a road trip, and adventure!!

We take trips now, as time and money permit, and I still feel myself getting worked up no matter if it is a trip to Stone Mountain an hour away of a trip across the country. Going places is always exciting, you always see something new, you learn something, and you change, even if just a tiny bit and hopefully you improve. I yearn to feel myself once again surrounded by sleeping humanity in a warm powerful car, snoring dogs and sleep talking babes curled into each other, crammed into the available square footage like grimy sardines as we cross thousands of miles through the star heavy skies of warm summer nights.