Rambling thoughts spurred by the last post

Thank you, dear readers, for your responses to the last post. I appreciate them all. I want to respond to each one of you personally, for you all had something interesting and provocative to say. I know I'll be writing again about all the topics I touched on. Aging, self image, body image, control, insecurity, strength, acceptance. I could pick any of these topics and devote an entire blog to it. But since I contend that "everything is interesting" I won't be doing that. Speaking of single subject blogs, my second side blog is not being attended to. Again, I am keenly aware that I am in need of at least three lives. Perhaps they'll cure death before I die. Somehow, I doubt it.

When I re-read what I had written, I had to disagree with myself about one thing. I wrote that I had not gotten over some of my anorexic thinking, "not by a long shot." I still have remnants of anorexic thinking, to be sure, but I am over most of them. And I want to acknowledge that, not just for myself, and not just to set the record straight, but for anyone who is suffering from an eating disorder. Yes, one can get well.

What's left? I still am attracted to extremely thin people. I admit it. One part of me recoils in horror as another part of me is attracted. But at the same time, I have come to find all shapes and sizes attractive. Unfortunately, I do not extend that to myself, but most of the time I just do not notice. Another thing that is left is what is called "body dysmorphia." When I look in the mirror I see what I feel, not what is really there. These days, this is a positive thing. I like the person in that mirror. It's only when I have to try on some pants in a dressing room that I notice I'm not thin.

In the downscale stores, the dressing rooms are a horror. The designers of these torture chambers are idiotic. For one, turn the lighting down. The room should feel candlelit, slightly romantic and luxurious. I'm not the only person who feels drained and stressed out after leaving a dressing room. The last time I tried on some jeans, I left the dressing room with sweating palms, and much to my shame, a mess. I was shaking slightly. Victoria's Secret has great dressing rooms, but they don't sell minimizing bras, so I don't go there any more. Listen up, Kohl's, if you want your next quarter to be better, pimp out those dressing rooms.

Now that I've veered off course, I'll try to reign myself in. One commentor had mentioned that Annie Lennox looked like she had plastic surgery. I'm not so sure, but I'm no expert on this. Here's what she had to say to Reuter's:
"I still want to be an empowered performer, an empowered woman. I want women to see that and think, 'It's OK, she's got a few wrinkles and it's fine.' I don't have to lie about my age ... What's to be ashamed of? And what is so wrong about being older?"
Lennox is 54 years old. She's just put out an album. Personally, I'm not all that interested in hearing it, but it's great that she's still at it. Patti Smith is still at it, too. Now, I'm fairly certain that she hasn't had "work done."

I'm not posting these photos to be catty. These women have been role models to me, as I once was a performer trying to buck the beauty standard and just perform. Of course, sex appeal and charisma are a big part of being a popular musician, no matter how edgy one is. But, there are some women who have either not relied on their looks to carry them or who have had great fun playing with their adrogyny. Patti Smith and Annie Lennox are two of them. Others that I can think of (off the top of my head) are k.d.lang, Laurie Anderson, and Sinead O'Connor.

Patti Smith genuinely changed my life. I wasn't a fan of hers. She was too "pop" for my taste. But I had never seen her in person. I was a bit too young to have seen her at CBGB's, and saw her play at at fairly small venue just when her album "Horses" came out. There were balcony seats and I was in one of them, but not for long. I was mesmerized. There was a woman on stage who was not seducing the audience with her sex appeal. She was as intense as any performer I'd ever seen. She looked like an innocent waif girl and a young street boy at the same time. She howled. She stalked. She twirled. She was doing exactly what she wanted, at least in my eyes. It was a revelation. I wound up at the edge of the stage, barely breathing, transfixed.

That week I started playing guitar in a band. I didn't give a damn what I looked like and what others thought. Seeing Patti Smith gave me that strength. Me, a terribly shy kid, almost mute, who had absolutely no faith in herself, no self-esteem, almost complete self-hatred, somehow, miraculously, played my guts out on stage. I still don't understand it.

Tonight, I'm trying to cover too much ground. The last post brought up a lot for me. The comments, too, touched me. And so, I'll end it here, for now. To be continued. . .

Addendum: I wanted to mention that TMC posted "Strength, Part I", a mosaic of strong women. I'm looking forward to Part II (and more?)

Inconsistent

For about a year, I've been playing this online game called Eight Letters in Search of a Word. I put it in the sidebar, but I hadn't announced. Consider it announced.

It's a competitive anagrams game. If you do play, here's a hint - type the words in. Don't use your mouse. You'll be way too slow to get a decent score if you do. It took me a while to figure that out. Of course, I hadn't read the directions. They're on the site somewhere.

You may be wondering what the point of this entry is. It's not just to suggest that you play this game.

It's to talk about me, of course.

I'm pretty good at word games. However, I never win Eight Letters in Search of a Word. There's some other players on that site who are unbeatable. At first, I thought these people must be cheating and getting their computers to play, but I got an insanely high score a few times and realized it was possible. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't folks who are cheating, for I find it hard to believe that some of these people always get such impossibly high scores. But then again, they just may be consistently brilliant at playing. Unlike me.

When I play, I'm consistently inconsistent. Here's the game: there's eight letters that always make an eight letter word. You type in as many words as you can in the allotted time (one minute?) and hope that you find that eight letter word in the process. I'm amazed at how sometimes I'll think I've exhausted all the possibilities, have found the eight letter word, and then discover that another player has a score twice as high as mine. Take the word "generals", for instance. Can you think of two other eight letter words that you can make out of its letters?*

Well, I couldn't think of the two others in one minute. I was too busy typing in four letter words. Sometimes I'll play this game and feel golden, finding the eight letter word right away. It just hits me intuitively. Other times I can't see a thing. I'll stare and stare at the words and they mean nothing.

This seems to be the way I am at most everything. Sometimes I excel and other times I'm terrible. There's usually no middle ground.

I used to play pool almost every night. I tried and tried and never became consistent. This almost got me killed one late night. Seriously.

I was hanging out at an after-hours club in New York City. I'll admit that this was a dangerous place to hang out, even if you do absolutely nothing but sit at the bar. The place was filled with drug dealers. It was on the corner of the street that I lived on, and opened at 4:00am in the morning. There was some sort of secret way to knock on the door to get in, and I have no idea what it was. I have no idea how I knew was it was, come to think of it.

It was the kind of place where you didn't want to look at anyone the wrong way. I sometimes played pool there, but I always played with someone I knew. I was playing a game, quite terribly, one night, when another couple asked if we wanted to play for money. My friend said, "Sure." The game was for fifty bucks. I have no idea why he agreed, but he was a good pool player.

So, we started to play. Every shot I made was a terrible. Everyone was laughing at me. They had already seen I was a terrible at pool, so it wasn't any kind of surprise. But my partner was playing well, and the last shot came down to me. What a shot it was. There were two balls left, sitting near the corner pocket, with the eight ball slightly closer.

I wasn't sure my friend even had fifty bucks on him and I hadn't gotten one shot in the whole game, so I was determined to get these shots. They were hard, and the likelihood of my making them was low, especially the way I had been playing. But I got 'em. This wound up being a big mistake.

The fellow we were playing against picked up my friend by his shirt and starting yelling at him that I was a shark. He wanted to beat the crap out of someone. He was yelling about us all stepping outside. Then he started to say something about killing us. All over a game of pool.

The odd thing is that I have no memory of how this resolved itself. Obviously, I'm still alive. My friend is still alive, too. I do know that I never went back to that club. I never had any business hanging out there in the first place. I wasn't a good pool player, a drug dealer, a prostitute (or any other kind of criminal). I just happened to be up at odd hours.

Anyway, noone threatens to beat me up for playing a great round of Eight Letters in Search of a Word after I play a lousy round. And that's how I play. I'm not a word game shark, just an inconsistent thinker and game player.

Image notes: These images are both of East 14th Street in New York City. I found them embedded in an excerpt from the book, "The "New Woman" Revised
Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street", by Ellen Wiley Todd, which can be found here. I used to play pool at Julian's Billiard Hall on 14th Street, which was on the second floor. For all I know, it's the same pool hall that's advertised in both the photograph and the drawing.

*enlarges and gleaners

A bit of pink history (warning: excessive unedited rambling ahead)

"When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey held to that split."*

When I was in my twenties and having terrible migraines due to stress, I went to a psychologist who was obsessed with getting me to wear pink. How this would help my migraines was (and still is) beyond me. In spite of the fact that his office was but 20 minutes from New York City, then the capital of the all-black wearing world, this bit of style news had not reached Dr. I-forget-his-name. Besides his ridiculous assertion that my choice of wearing all black was an indicator of a morbid state of mind, I only remember a few things about this man, whom I saw once a week for a year. He hardly spoke, and spent a little too much time making distracting sucking noises and scrunching up his face. I just tried to make the same sound I remember, but wasn't able to do so. It sounded like he was trying to extract something stuck between his teeth. The strange movements of his mouth indicated to me that he may have been also trying to find that bit of something with his tongue. That, I can imitate, and the act of doing so makes me think of him. Seriously, I would have preferred he use a toothpick or excuse himself for a moment to go floss. But I suspect that there was nothing stuck between the good doctor's teeth. It was just a habitual act, and one I would imagine annoyed more than one patient.

Most of the sessions I had started with at least fifteen minutes of silence. He didn't believe in starting a conversation, even with the smallest of talk, such as "How are you?" No. He was most assuredly a tabula rasa kind of shrink. I knew nothing about him besides his propensity to make sucking sounds and the probable search for foreign objects in his mouth. He always wore a sharp looking suit and combed his jet black hair straight back, giving him more the look of a gangster than a psychologist. Maybe he led a double life. It never occurred to me until now, but I'd venture to guess he did not, and that I only suspect so because I watch the TV show Criminal Minds, which may lead me to believe any one of us is a potential serial killer.

For one year, I sat in near silence with this man. Finally, I decided to call it quits and he said, "Now you're ready to begin therapy. Would you like to start coming twice a week?" I had to laugh, for I then realized he was pretty much quoting the last line of Portnoy's Complaint. My answer to him was a definate "No thank you."

Besides his annoying sucking sounds, he really irked me with his pink-wearing prodding. I finally caved in and showed up one day wearing a dusty pink suit. I remember he thought this was some kind of breakthrough, though I'm thinking that was the day I started thinking I was wasting a good deal of money paying this silly man to badger me with gender stereotypes while I still continued to suffer from killer migraines. The suit did nothing to help my headache. It was ugly, unflattering, and a terribly dull, too pale shade of pink, a color which I've come to enjoy quite a bit, and not in the least because I've embraced my girly-girl side. There are pinks that are quite strong. It can be an intense color, unlike the insipid light pastels that grace many a baby girl's bedroom walls.

It's quite funny, thinking back, that I decided this fellow was completely useless as a therapist when I realized he couldn't see that my pink suit was just ugly. I have a vague recollection that I considered it a test of some sort. If he just approved of my ability to comply and nothing more, then I considered him a failure of a therapist. I had such odd notions about aesthetics; in truth they were terribly snotty and elitist. A person who couldn't judge the difference between shades of pink or see that I had intentionally worn something atrocious was not someone I could trust. I shouldn't have trusted him after the first fifty minutes of teeth sucking, but I was pretty insecure at the time, in spite of my snobbery.

I really was a jerk when I was young. I certainly can be a bore now, but I hope, at least, that I can recognize it when I am. Then, I did not, or when I did, I rather enjoyed myself. That kind of behavior is the behavior of the truly insecure, and I'm sometimes surprised to see it in people who are over thirty years of age. Snotty posturing is okay when you're in college or younger, but afterwards, well, one should really see a (good) shrink if you're still acting out of such insecurity.

I've seen quite a few terrible mental health professionals in my life, sad to say. At the age of fifteen, I was forced to see a therapist and this man gave me some of the craziest advice you can imagine. If it was today, he could be sued for telling a teenager what he did, which was "Go out and get laid. Smoke some pot like everyone else." Huh? Thankfully, he did not suggest I do this with him. And thankfully, if he had, I probably would have slapped him across the face. Yes, I've been known to do this, though it's been over ten years since the last time I've had the need. The last time, I felt awfully bad about it. I knocked the poor guy's glasses off, and that seemed far worse than a little slap for being a pig.

Please note that I'm not advocating hitting people. Diplomacy is the best option, but I think there must be something primal and old-fashioned in me that overrides my normal judgment when confronted with digusting commments made by men. And I fully admit to having a double standard. Women have made inappropriate lewd comments and such to me, and none of them got slapped. Maybe that's because they aren't as much of a physical threat. That's the only thing I can think of. Well, these days this stuff doesn't happen any more, so I don't have to torture myself thinking about it.

Phew. This is what came out of thinking about the color pink?

Here's a good place to stop and take a break. A cup of tea perhaps? The subject is about to change, not once, but twice. Two breaks may be in order. Or you can come back. One needn't read an entire entry in one sitting. You wouldn't eat an entire pie at once, would you? If you said, "oh sure I would!", then proceed. . .

Since I'm babbling and rambling, I might as well tell you about some of my day. I won a Christmas gift basket, which included a 22 pound turkey and all the food needed to cook up a feast for a family of six. I had forgotten I had bought a raffle ticket on Election Day. When I answered the phone and heard it was the woman from the Town Office, I thought, "Uh oh." I do owe some taxes. But no, I won the raffle. Now, I don't need a big turkey, but I suppose I could have used the rest of the groceries. I asked the woman if she knew of any families that were really in need that might be better recipients. She seemed surprised that I wasn't all excited about winning. I was surprised that I won something, no doubt, but it didn't seem right to accept it as there was a high probability that some family with children would appreciate it more than I. So, I asked her to please give it to someone else. I have to admit (do I really?) that I would have liked to personally deliver it, but that's really a selfish desire on my part. It doesn't take all that much largesse to give away an unexpected raffle prize. I do hope that it makes someone's holiday a little nicer.

On the perfume front, I discovered that I really miss having some Serge Lutens' Bois de Vanille. It's such a soothing scent, even if it smells pretty much like cotton candy (though I try to convince myself it's "a sophisticated cotton candy"). I keep thinking there must be a cheap-o perfume that smells like this, but I haven't found one. When I discovered that indeed there wasn't a drop left of the stuff, I decided to re-try Louve, and once again was taken with how truly ordinary this scent is. It's opening is overly sweet, even painfully so. Every time I've tried it, I recoil to the point of not being able to tell you (or understand myself) what in the world I am smelling. It's screams at me to close down my senses. What's truly strange is that less than a half an hour later it's so banal a scent that I don't even notice it. To me, it smells like talcum powder for tweens, a truly drug store perfume smell that I still can't identify. A hint of candied cherries? Oddly, I neither like or dislike it. That is the definition of banal, I suppose.

So, I crave the smell of sweet vanilla and turn once again to Hanae Mori's Butterfly, a truly unsubtle scent. But it satisfies my craving. It's like getting Edy's when I really want Haagen Daz iced cream. Or maybe not. I'm probably just trying too hard. And come to think of it, I keep dismissing the Hanae Mori scent, for no reason that I can think of. Maybe I still am a bit of a snotty elitist. No, the Hanae Mori is not as good as the Lutens' Vanille, but the Lutens Louve is a fairly wretched, pointless scent and I'm not constantly writing about how lousy it is. Poor me. I'm so positive that a Lutens is good, while something I can get at Macy's can't possibly be, that I am missing the fact that I've been enjoying Butterfly over and over again. I must give this some thought.

Well, my dear reader, if you've made it this far, you deserve some sort of award. For what, I'm not entirely sure. There were other things I meant to write about today, but it's been another weird day that feels like it's been a week long. So, I'll save whatever else I have to write for another time. Maybe next time, I'll be more terse. Lately, that's been almost impossible. I will end this entry here. Abruptly. There's no conclusion, for this entry is one big mess. I could delete it with one keystroke, but I won't. This big mess is rather like my life at the moment. Well. No wonder that's what I'm writing!

I just realized that the impetus for this entry was never even mentioned. I should have a good laugh at my expense. I stumbled upon a fun little thing called Instant Flowers, an on-line tool to create pretty somewhat cartoonish bouquets. It's quite a bit of fun. Unfortunately, their save-to-blog feature doesn't seen to work. I suggest giving it a try. It's a sweet, nice diversion.

Painting note: Henri Matisse Woman in Pink 1923 On my laptop screen, she looks like she's wearing coral. What do you see?

*I had read about this years ago, but don't remember the source. This quote is from Peggy Orenstein's New York Times article "What's Wrong With Cinderella?"

A trip back in time, prompted by cigarettes

A forty-six year old man takes up smoking, just to see what it's like, and, to write about it.

When I was fourteen or so, a friend of mine's mother took up smoking. She was thirty six, and I thought she was pretty old. I also knew enough to think that there was something profoundly wrong with an adult taking up smoking. Us teenagers, I thought, we're prone to peer pressure and all that, and we're kind of dumb, even though we don't think so, but mothers, well, they ought to know better.

I often wondered about what was really going on in that household. The house looked perfectly normal and nice from the outside; the lawn was mowed, the shrubbery was clipped and the azaleas bloomed in bright colors. But once I stepped inside their doorway, the world suddenly seemed gray and listless. My memory of that home looks like an photo with all the color drained out of it.

My friend's mother seemed to always have an apron on, which was unusual in my neighborhood, unless you were a maid or a grandmother. I don't remember her cooking. I do remember her standing at the kitchen sink, staring out the window or sitting at the kitchen table, smoking. She was pale, overly thin and tired looking. Her husband was distant, and I took his wearing a pocket protector and always having a slide rule on him as evidence of an emotionless nature.

I wanted to know why my friend's mother was unhappy. She had to be unhappy, taking up smoking as an adult, and doing all that quiet staring.

Their son sat in his room, smoking pot by himself. The house was a haze of smoke. When the kitchen was dark, as it always seemed to be, the ray of light that filtered in through the window was filled with dust.

My friend was a happy, bubbly and seemingly well-adjusted girl, and so, our friendship faltered. I was neither happy, bubbly or well-adjusted. I was far more interested in the boy who stayed up in his room, the listless mother and even her husband. What did he do at work? Was he ever affectionate with her? I suspected the answer to that was no, and so, she took up smoking.

I have no idea what happened to any of these people. I wonder if the parents are still together. Perhaps, today, they are all together, for it's Thanksgiving. Maybe they're in the same house that I visited as a kid. Now I'm terribly curious if this may be so. Is my friend's mother still smoking? Perhaps these days she stands in her backyard to do it. If that street is anything like it used to be, standing in front would be a social faux pas of the highest order.

A quick google search gave me some answers. It appears that both the mother, father and son still live in the same town. The daughter, my old friend, lives about twenty minutes away (two more stops on the Long Island Railroad). Seeing their names (and one photograph) made me feel very strange. I left the town of my childhood behind me a long time ago. Maybe they are having Thanksgiving together and perhaps their house is not so gray today, but I doubt it, judging from the profiles I have just read.

Image note: Lots of old smoking ads here.

The night before Thanksgiving

For the last few years, Dick and I have spent Thanksgiving with friends. It's fun. We eat too much and then complain about how full we are. We might play some music. It's laid back, not at all like the family Thanksgivings of my childhood.

I really love this holiday. I do give thanks, much to the dismay of most people I know, who act like I'm trying to give them an overly long hug. I suppose it's rather mushy, giving thanks. Sometimes I even try to get everyone to hold hands before the meal starts, but I'll try to restrain myself this year.

I am just too darned sincere.

I like Thanksgiving because anyone can celebrate it. It's not like Christmas, where if you're not a Christian, you have to come up with justifications for celebrating, like "it's an American holiday" and "let's pretend it's a solstice thing with presents" or some such. And it's not like, when I was a kid, celebrating Passover, where we'd make matzoh ball soup and I'd ask "what is this holiday about?" My parents would shrug their shoulders and mumble something incomprehensible.

I enjoyed my family's Thanksgivings when I was young. We ate ourselves silly. Some people would predictably fall asleep ten minutes after the meal was over, and the rest of us would play board games.

There was the usual weird stuff, the kind one sees in movies about crazy families. Near the end of his life, my grandfather developed kleptomania. The last Thanksgiving before both he and my mother died, she had to frisk him before he left her apartment. He had filled every pocket he had. Out came candlesticks, cutlery and small knick-knacks.

Another time someone decided that politely passing dishes around was too much bother and they (who did it?!) threw a small chicken across the table like a football.

The same stories and jokes were told, every single year. I'll end here, with the not-very-funny joke that was told, with great gusto, by my father, and that I feel obligated to tell, even if it's not at all funny, because it'll be Thanksgiving in about forty minutes:

A woman asks her son to take care of things while she goes on vacation. It's the usual; water the plants, make sure there isn't a gas leak and feed the cat. He's a dutiful son, and so, he does a good job. But the cat gets sick, and before he can get the poor animal to a vet, the cat dies.

He calls his mother in Florida and says, "Ma, I got bad news. The cat's dead." After she gets over the shock, his mother chastizes him; "What's wrong with you? Couldn't you have given me the news in a more charitable way?" "Like what?", asks the son. "Oh, you could called me and said that the cat was on the roof and you didn't know what to do. Then I would have told you to call the fire department. You'd hang up, pretend to call them, call me back and say that they're running a bit late but the cat's okay. You'd tell me that you'd call back as soon as they got there.Then, after about twenty minutes or so, you'd call and tell me the cat fell off the roof. See? Then, I would have been prepared for the worst!"

The son tells his mother that indeed he was insensitive by delivering the news to her in such a sudden way.

The next year, the man's mother goes to Florida again, but this time it's an all-girls thing. Being the dutiful son, he spends time with his father, who isn't used to being alone. His father is not a well man, and sadly, one night, after a particularly rich meal, he keels over and has a heart attack.

Of course, the son has to call his mother and tell her the news. So, he makes the call. "Having fun down in Florida?", he asks his mother when she picks up the phone. She replies, "Why wouldn't I? What's wrong with you? And so, how are things down in New York?" The son pauses for a moment and says,"Well, Ma, Dad went up to the roof earlier tonight."

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Painting note: I have never liked Norman Rockwell.
This painting is called "Freedom from Want" and is from a series he painted in 1943 entitled the "Four Freedoms."

Books, childhood, writing

I do not plan on abandoning this blog because I'm, ahem, writing a novel. I plan on being extra busy. I'm already tired, though the time change may be a good reason for that. It usually takes me two weeks to adjust to the time change. I don't mind that it gets dark an hour earlier than it did yesterday. I like the dark, and Maine is more than a bit bleak in the Winter, so I don't need to see it as much. Sounds strange, when I put that into words.

I thought, perhaps, that since it's only 8:30, I would put in a bit more time working on the novel. Let me amend that last sentence: I am not "working" on this novel. I am playing. Maybe the fact that I feel like I'm playing at being a novelist is why I have called the collection of words I've written thus far the "novel", referred to it as the "so-called novel" or wrote "ahem" in the first sentence of this post. but the truth is, I am playing a novelist (though not on TV).

Heh. I was intending to write about music. So much for that. I am not going to.

I wonder why it never occurred to me to be a writer. I learned to read at a very young age. I was fascinated with the written word. I remember very clearly that, when watching TV, if there were words on the screen, I'd call for my mother, because I wanted to know what those words were. Of course, she'd never arrive on time, but I know I did it anyway, much to her annoyance. Thinking back, I'd make a bet that the first word I learned to read was "Acme", the brand name on every product in Looney Tunes cartoons.

Saying books were an essential part of my childhood would be a gross understatement. When I was still in the picture book stage of life, I made my own, and I continued to do so after I started reading books without pictures. I still have some of these books, things made of colorful construction paper with names like "Cherry Street" and "Fun!" It reminds me that there actually was a time in my childhood when I had a happy side. There were some made of plain white paper, that I dictated to my father while he typed my words. I recall one in particular, which was a ghost story, and I wanted to draw a skeleton, but it was beyond my abilities, so my Dad drew it. I was quite impressed! My father drew wonderfully funny cartoons. On some Sundays he'd draw faces on soft boiled eggs and they were so fantastic I didn't want to break the shell. Of course, I had to, and learned my first lesson in non-attachment. Aha! Maybe that's why I became a Buddhist as an adult.

I still have some of these little books somewhere. They are the only things of my childhood that I still own. I have no family photos, nothing, but I have these.

I continued to draw but I stopped writing and became a reader instead. My reading was voracious. In the summer between the fifth and sixth grades, I made a pact with myself that I'd read one book a day. Why I wanted to do this, I have no memory of, but I remember it was a big deal. I got a roll of adding machine paper and fixed it to the ceiling of my bedroom. When I finished a book, I'd write the name of it on the paper tape, and sure enough, by the end of the summer, the paper was hanging near the floor with the names of all the books I had digested. I'm hard pressed to tell you what I read that summer, for I basically forgot each book as I started the next one. It was a contest with myself. I know I read Agatha Christie and stayed up late into the night to find out who dunnit. I had a sense that all her novels were terribly similar, but I was obsessed with reading all of them. Did I? I don't know. Probably not, but I may have read all the ones that were in our local library.

I was lucky to have a world class library in the town I grew up in. I was lucky, also, to have a father who advocated for me obtaining an adult library card before I was twelve. I still remember him arguing with the librarian at the front desk about the absurdity of not allowing a child who wanted to read good books to borrow books outside of the children's section. I'm sure my father could have taken these books out for me, of course, but I suppose he thought there was some principle involved. I did get an adult library card before I was twelve. I was thrilled. That library was a big one and there were countless books and new worlds that I clamored to dive into.

If it wasn't for that library, I have no idea, absolutely no idea, how I would have made it through childhood. The library was my safe haven, no matter what the problem was. When I was bullied at school, the library was the place where I was treated well, and no book ever bullied me. When my parents were fighting, the library was the quiet place where noone ever raised their voice. When I needed to escape from anything, the library was there, and so was the escape of both fiction and non-fiction. I could travel to ice caves in places I never heard of or far flung galaxies filled with aliens. Truth was, I was pretty non-discriminatory in my reading. My library allowed ten books to be taken out at one time and I would always, absolutely always, come home with all ten.

First I'd look at what was in the new book section. I did judge books by their covers. Whoever came up with the aphorism "You can't judge a book by its cover" is dead wrong. Okay, maybe that was true back before there were graphic designers and art directors and all books were bound in a few different shades of leather, but you absolutely can judge a book by its cover.

You can spot a romance novel or some chick lit a mile away. These are two genres that I have actually never read. It seems impossible to believe that I didn't at least try to read one or two, but I can't think of any.

I've read everything else (and I don't mean I've read every novel in the world. I mean, how many lifetimes exactly do you think that would require?)

I've gone through so many different phases where I'd read only one genre until I couldn't take it any more, or I'd read everything by one author, all in a row. I still do this now and again.

For nearly ten years, I would not read anything that was written after 1915 or so. Before that, I was a science fiction fanatic. I did think I had some sort of problem. Reading about the past or the future was certainly escapist, but isn't all fiction reading escapist? Maybe. Maybe not. I suppose it depends on how one reads.

For me, it really was mostly about escape. Reading blocked out the world. Add to that the fact that if one is reading, most people will not interrupt you, and it's the perfect thing for a maladjusted kid (or adult). And one can bury one's face in a book. Yes, a book is the perfect hiding place.

So, why did I never think of writing? I know I wrote fiction in junior high school and I got good grades, but it never occurred to me that I could write books. That was for other people, very special other people. I was not one of them. Maybe I'd keep a journal and sometimes venture into writing from someone else's perspective, but a book? No, I couldn't imagine being an author.

Writers were rarefied creatures who I imagined had immense imaginations. Coming up with a plot? How did they do it? It seemed beyond my imagination even to imagine how a writer came up with a plot. And unfortunately, I was brought up with the belief that if something didn't come naturally to you, and you had other talents, you should leave those other dreams aside. So, if the thought ever arose (which indeed it did) that I might like to try to write a book, even just to see how it felt or what would happen, I'd just brush that thought aside as fast as I could.

So, I guess I'm finally doing it. I'm writing the book I should have written when I was twelve years old. Here's one thing I'm grateful for: if I wrote it then, I would have had to write it longhand or on a manual typewriter. Ouch!

Image note: From Clara Hinton's 1906-1907 diary. Find more at the Historic Iowa's Children's Digital Diaries Collection.

My new lover pays for everything

No, I haven't a new lover. Nor do I have a new lover who pays for everything.

Someone googled those exact words and landed on my blog. Why? I have no clue, for I've never had a new lover who paid for everything nor can I imagine what I wrote that may have even touched on the subject.

I wonder if this unknown person has a new lover who indeed pays for everything and is thinking, "Is this okay?" Or maybe it's someone who wants a new lover who will pay for everything. After all, the answer to everything is on the Web, isn't it?

"How to get your new lover to pay for everything!" That's about as good a come-on as "how to lose 12 lbs without dieting". I tried that this summer and gained ten pounds.

I had a friend who dated a man who was wealthy and did indeed pay for everything. It was right out of "Pretty Woman", except that my friend wasn't a high class hooker gone good. This fellow bought my friend clothes, shoes, jewelry and dinner.

This was before e-mail, so I would get phone calls with inquiries like, "Is it okay that he took me out and bought over a thousand dollars worth of shoes yesterday?" What was I supposed to say? I wanted to say "Will he buy me a pair?" We both loved this little boutique in Soho that sold shoes that looked like they were made in the 1900's. I probably did say "will he buy me a pair", but he wouldn't have. The guy was a total jerk.

Actually, he was way more than a jerk. He started hitting her. He was a control freak. The clothes and shoes buying wasn't so much an act of generosity as a way of molding her. She was his Eliza Doolittle. This guy was a big player in the international banking business. He may have even owned a bank. I don't recall.

All I recall is that she was on the fence about whether to trade in going back to not having all that lovely stuff for autonomy and not being hit once in a while. The truth is, this is not a light story. Our friendship ended over this. I couldn't stand listening and I couldn't stand by while my friend was being abused. Nor could I make chitchat with him at dinner when I could see she was wearing concealer over a bruise on her face.

Stuff versus abuse. I can't imagine even thinking twice about that. But who knows? I've never been seduced in this way. So, I shouldn't judge. I did then. Now, I'm just sorry I lost that friendship (and I've googled her name many a time to no avail).

Image note: Peter Fox boots, still sold in a tiny shop in lower Manhattan. I actually own a pair of these, that I bought (with my own money) in 1985 or so. They have been re-soled twice. They are essentially in perfect shape, though the heels (which are thinner on my pair) are covered in leather and a bit beat up. They now cost 625 bucks! They were pricey back then, but not much more than any other decent pair of boots.

Baby teeth

Did you know that baby teeth are called "deciduous teeth"? I didn't. I asked Dick, "why do we have baby teeth?" and he googled it. The answer to this question is not known for sure. I suppose it's not that important to know why. What is important? Brushing and flossing!

After discovering that this blog received the lowest amount of visitors ever today, I figured I'd start a new entry with an incredibly exciting piece of useless information. After all, "everything is interesting", isn't it?

I did want to know why we have baby teeth. I remember the exact places where I lost some of my baby teeth and how it felt. I loved worrying those loose teeth with my tongue. It hurt, but it felt interesting, too. It's interesting to have such a strong memory of a sensation - where does one feel the memory? I can feel the sensation in my mind of a tooth ripping from the gum, just slightly, and the taste of blood in my mouth. My mother told me not to play with those teeth, and that I should let them fall out in their own good time, but it was just too tempting, just like when I've chipped a tooth as an adult, my tongue tip always wants to poke itself into that new space. What exactly is that urge?

Memories are fascinating things. They can be elusive or vivid, accurate or just plain wrong. They can be ever present in our minds or forgotten.

I remember losing a tooth at the Heinz pavilion of the World's Fair in Queens, New York. I was given a whistle in the shape of a pickle by a woman who was there. Wow!

I don't remember much of the years that I was in the 8th, 9th or 10th grades. Did nothing happen? I doubt that highly. Unfortunately, I suspect that those years were so awful that they are just a haze. It isn't that they were so long ago (which they were), for if I can recall perfectly losing a tooth in 1964, it would stand to reason I'd remember something that happened ten years later. But, no.

I bet you can remember losing at least one of your baby teeth, no matter how old you are. Anyone have a good story? Hardly anyone is reading this today, so I have a feeling there will be no responses, but I'm asking anyway.

The stats tell me that if I write about McCain, Palin, a celebrity,or Salvador Dali (who people seem to google quite frequently, for reasons I don't understand and should look into), I will get more hits. They also tell me that if I don't stay on topic, the people who've arrived here will bounce away quickly.

Oh well. I can't conform to the standards of good web traffic. It figures. I can't seem to conform to anything properly! More on that another time.

Image note: I didn't know there was a movie called "The Tooth Fairy". Looks pretty scary! I never thought the tooth fairy was anyone but my mother. I got twenty five cents for a tooth. I have no idea what they are going for these days.

Note: If you want to read a solid editorial on McCain, I suggest this. As I have criticism of the Palin pick, because I do not think she is qualified to hold so high an office in government, I will hold myself to the same standards and stick to writing about things like memories of losing baby teeth.

Once upon a time, with sheep

Once upon a time, I had this fantasy: I would move to Northern New England, raise sheep, spin their wool and weave blankets on a 19th century loom (and I'd make a living at it).

Well, I did all of that, except for the part in parentheses.

It's been quite a while, but I miss those sheep. Getting up with the sunrise and tending to the animals, though sometimes a chore, was mostly a pleasure. I'm not looking back with rose-colored glasses. I loved raising sheep.

The second year that I had sheep, we saw a crazy cold winter. One month (I forget which one) the temperature never rose above zero. One morning, I looked at the thermometer and saw it read minus 28. I bundled up for my trip to the barn. In one hand I had a bucket of grain and in the other, water. A part of me wondered if those sheep would be frozen to death.

They acted like it was any other day. Some of them were in the barn and others were out sitting in the snow. They all had mustaches of ice. As I entered the barn, I sloshed the water around and got one of my mittens wet. Stupidly, I put my hand on the metal handle of the door to steady myself. Thankfully, that was one tough mitten I had knit. It immediately froze to the door, but my hand was hot inside of it, and I didn't lose any skin. I would have, most certainly. There were "freezing flesh warnings" on the radio. I had never heard of such a thing before.

It felt warm in that barn. The smell of hay was strong. I sat down on a hay bale and remember wondering if I'd knit a replacement for that mitten. It was a scallopman's mitten, designed to be worn by hands that got wet in the cold waters off the coast of Maine. For you knitters out there, these mittens were 90 plus inches around, knit with worsted weight yarn on size 2 needles and to top it off, they were lined with loops of wool (thank you "Homespun Handknit") I knit them before I even moved to Maine, while I was dreaming up this fantasy. I could not wait until I moved to a place cold enough to warrant wearing such things.

But no, I never knit a replacement.

I really miss those mornings with my sheep. I don't miss the anxiety I sometimes had after I started hearing coyotes on a regular basis. I once saw one at the edge of the woods. The sheep knew it was there before I did. I was wondering why all of them were standing at the edge of the electric fence, all turning their heads in the same direction. I looked where they looked and saw a coyote, its head down low to the ground.

Thankfully, no coyote ever got one of my sheep. I think they would have outrun any coyote, actually. The first time I had these sheep sheared, the fellow who did it came with two sheep dogs. Those sheep bolted right out of the shearing pen. I am not exaggerating when I say that the dogs chased them for two hours before the fellow called them off. He was afraid his dogs would drop dead from exhaustion. He came back the next day and did it my way, which was pretty funny, for I was a city girl who didn't know much. But I knew my wild sheep. They'd be cooperative for a bucket of grain with molasses in the middle of summer, when all they usually got was grass.

I remember these as lazy days. I'd spend time sitting in the barn or up in the pasture. I'd sit on the picnic table near the vegetable garden and shoot the shit with the fellow who owned the property. We'd talk for hours and then go back to whatever we were doing, me weaving or spinning or moving the fences around. There was a lot of work, with the sheep or in the garden, or with something or other, but I just remember a sort of langorousness, as if the days were longer than any days that preceded it or days that have come since.

I really miss that piece of property. It was a quarter of a mile down a dirt road and had acres and acres of rolling pasture, surrounded by a woods with a meandering path that lead to a large pond with an active beaver dam. It was perfection. Unfortunately, it wasn't my own property.

I feel like I live in suburbia these days, but that surely is a joke, for if I wanted a few sheep in my backyard, I could have them. There's no zoning against it, as far as I know. I'd be surprised if there were. I thought perhaps we should get some chickens, at the least. Somehow I don't think any of these things are going to happen on my little half an acre, but who knows?

Tonight I started spinning again after so many years. A wonderful woman lent me a wheel and it felt great to practice the simple art of spinning wool. I wonder why I ever stopped.

Painting note: This is a first - I had another image gracing the top of this post that I disliked so much I had to remove it. Instead, I offer up:
Gerard Dou's "Woman Eating Porridge" 1637
Beautiful spinning wheel - Dou was a stickler for detail, and probably would be diagnosed with something (OCD, perhaps) in this day and age. He made his own brushes in order to work with such precision on a small scale.

Addendum: I am quite smitten with Dou's paintings. His use of light and attention to detail are spectacular. I highly enjoyed the paintings I saw on line. I'd love to see some in person. Once upon a time, I lived in a place where I could go to a museum and see great art. Ah, there are tradeoffs in this life, aren't there? At least, now, I've got the Web. If I didn't, I doubt I could managed to have lived in Maine so long.

Animal postcards

Preface: I wrote this yesterday and then thought, "My writing has become too breezy. This is filled with memories that could be delved into with more insight and humor. Rewrite it!" Well, to heck with that! Another time, perhaps.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I collected cats-dressed-as-people postcards when I was a kid. I don't know what happened to that collection, which was quite large. Too bad, both because I'd like to look at the postcards in person, and because they are worth something.

It took very little time to find information about these cards, information that I never knew. You can read about them here, if you are interested. There's no reason for me to regurgitate this fine website's information. And I did not copy the image above from them (as they expressively asked not to!)

Oddly, even though the publishing company was in New York, I remember buying these cards in Gloucester, Massachusetts, when I was ten years old. I only visited there once, so I must have gotten them elsewhere, but I have no memory of where specifically. They were not easy to find and I do remember the joy of discovering a new place to purchase them!

I liked to collect things when I was a kid. My first collection was of "nice" rocks, which is a pretty common thing for kids to collect. I still do collect what I consider to be nice rocks. The other things that I collected when I was quite young were old portrait postcards and silver spoons. I would go to antiques fairs and play up my being a cute little girl. I used to marvel at my ability to dicker with people, for in every other situation, I was completely shy. I must have wanted these things badly to transcend my normal self, or perhaps I thought it was an interesting game. It's not like I'd ever see these people again, and, they were adults, which is an important distinction. I had very little idea of how to act like a child. It was not "natural" for me.

I loved these cat postcards so much way back when. They had all the qualities that hooked me: lots of detail, no people (very important), not modern. I still remember how much I did not like picture books that had people in them when I was still young enough to read picture books. But I didn't like my animals au naturelle - they had to be wearing clothing! I recall a favorite book, one where there was an apartment building of squirrels inside a tree.

I was a weird kid, of course. And now, to one of the children next door to me, I am a weird adult.

An antidote to the Republican National Convention

First, if any of you haven't noticed by now, I am a liberal. Now that the word liberal is a dirty word, I feel uncomfortable even saying it. I listen to too much hateful talk radio, and I confess, they get to me. So has the Republican National Convention, where the loudest cheers have come from the most divisive words. Earlier this evening, Bill Frist gave a corny, stilted speech which actually held some wonderful ideals, yet the crowd barely listened. The folks who listen to talk radio, and who McCain is now pandering to, are moved only by fear and anger.

I am sad that McCain has sold himself out. I had believed, wrongly, that with Obama and McCain running against each other, we'd finally be done with ugly politics. I'm sick to death of it and I thought that most others were, too.

So, tonight, instead of live-blogging (with a hefty dose of Chanel cologne on to buoy my spirits), I am posting something I wrote for the Obama website, way back on January 27th. Yeah, it's corny, but I wanted to remind myself that there are other values than the so-called values that the religious right stands by. In spite of wanting to make some changes to this piece I wrote on that snowy night in January, I'm presenting it as it was written. Here it is - "Daring to Hope Like the Child I Once Was":

Throughout my life, my “dirty little secret” has been that I’m a patriot. Intellectually, I think nation-states are an anachronism, and I do believe that one day a time will come when they will be obsolete. But we’re not there yet. Not by a long shot. And one reason for saying this in such an off-handed way is that these United States can’t even “get along”.

During my lifetime, I’ve seen politics get uglier and uglier and though I do vote, I have done so with only the attitude of “well, at least this guy might not be as bad as the other guy”.

This is not the America I grew up in. I grew up in an America of promise. I grew up in an America of change. I grew up in an America where there was a vision of each generation being better off than the one before it. I grew up in an America where we went to the United Nations every year and felt proud that we were part of the world community. I grew up in an America where we envisioned a future where there would be no poverty, no racism, no hunger and an end to war.

This was an idealist place indeed.

And as I grew up and into adulthood, I grew to see these ideals as fantasies, the stuff of childhood and a past when “America” was naïve.

Barack Obama has changed my mind.

This morning when I watched Obama speak to the people of South Carolina, a crowd of diverse people indeed, I got choked up. The first time the camera pulled away from Barack and I got a glimpse of a middle aged black woman standing next to a young blond white girl, both with smiles on their faces and hope in their eyes, I succumbed to the “audacity of hope”. It IS audacious, in the face of what politics have come to. It is audacious in the face of all the pundits and naysayers, and dare I say it, other politicians.

I was brought back to a time when I was very young, too young to understand what was going on. My parents and I were at a rally for Robert Kennedy in Queens, New York during a time of great racial tension. I was scared, ‘cause I was a little kid and it was intense. But I learned later what a great event I had been to. I learned, too, that I was at many a march as young child, a baby even, in a stroller, for my mother was an activist.

But it all changed. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. The civil rights movement just faded away (at least for middle class white families like mine). In my eyes, the once idealist youth of the 60’s either dropped out or became wealthy and preoccupied with their money. For others, life became harder.

I look back to the year I first voted for president. It was 1976. I had a job then, typing in an office. I made 8 dollars an hour. If I went out looking for the same job now, I would be lucky to find it and I would be lucky to make that same 8 dollars an hour. It is 32 years later! I can’t afford to heat my house. I don’t have the money to pay my taxes.

Am I a failure or has my country failed me?

I have gotten a bit off topic, but it’s interesting in a way, because politics ARE personal. Obama has said in a few of his speeches that fathers and sons are competing for the same 7 dollar an hour job at Walmart. How does that make these fathers and sons feel? How do I feel, not being able to make any more than I did when I was 18 years old?

This morning, when I watched Obama speak, and I shed tears as I saw the hope in the eyes of that diverse crowd, I felt what I did when I was young. I forgot the pains of not being able to pay my bills. I forgot myself completely. I felt united with others for the first time in years. And I felt united with a politician – a politician! – I felt hope. I felt pride in the possibility of a renewed America. I felt lifted above the workaday world of debts and bills and problems and saw the possibility of a future where we all saw each other as equals, stopped squabbling for a piece of the diminishing pie and instead saw ourselves baking new pies. Yeah, I’m getting sappy. I’m thinking of a time when there were pies left to cool on the window sill, the window open, and noone thinking there’s someone gonna come by and steal that pie. A time when kids played outside together, a time when we all dreamed together, even if some of us were Republicians and some of us were Democrats.

‘Cause that’s what it was like. I grew up next to a bigoted family but I we got along. I grew up when there were still clubs my family couldn’t join ‘cause we were Jews but I knew that someday that wouldn’t be true any more.

Let's give the children of this nation the hope that they deserve. It's scary to put our cynicism away. It's easier to believe that the status quo is too strong not to win. But I'm daring to hope and dream that it can be done, and I know, if you're reading this, you do too, somewhere inside of you. Let's get out there and give this message of optimism to others.

More late reactions to old news

The other day I found the July 28th issue of Newsweek sitting under some books. The cover story was "Murder in the 8th Grade". The subtitle of the story, right there on the cover (with a picture of the murdered boy) was "At 10, Lawrence King declared he was gay. At 15, a classmate shot him dead. A tale of bullying, sexual identity and the limits of tolerance."

From reading this, even without opening the magazine to the article, I was already angry.

I did go on to read the article, and it just made me angrier. First off, none of us needed to read the story of Lawrence King's life, unless it was to memorialize it. But this article was no memorial. Even though the author claims otherwise, the "tale" of Lawrence King's life is not responsible for his death. Did his being born to a drug addicted mother have anything at all to do with his death? He didn't commit suicide. Another child murdered him.

Yet, we are told all the salacious details of this poor kid's life. And then, to add insult to injury, we are told that his self-identifying as gay at an early age may have made him act out, thus causing other boys to be angry or afraid of him. It is postulated that, in the past (which past?) children didn't hear words like "gay" bandied about so freely, so they would not have identified so early as being homosexual. This is simply not the case. Whether a child has the words or not, they do know, and at very early ages, that they are different or that they are attracted to others of the same sex. This was true one hundred years ago. It is true today. Whether we call homosexuality "gay" or "potatoism" or nothing doesn't change a thing. Are we to believe if we stuff words like gay back in the closet that children will be better off? What a bunch of nonsense!

When I was in the 7th grade, everyone knew that there were two boys who were homosexual in our classes. There probably was more than two boys (and girls) who were gay in our school, for it was large, but I was friends with these two who were "out". We banded together because we were all bullied and teased because we were "different" in some way. But that's not really my point. My point is that there have always been kids who are not "sexually normative". Blaming "permissiveness" for creating a situation where Lawrence King may have set himself up for being killed is just plain wrong.

The real questions are barely asked (because no one knows what they are), and so, they are hardly addressed. Once again, a child kills another child. This time there's "a reason", it seems. No, Lawrence King didn't deserve to die because he was a problem in the school.

Why are there so many school shootings? We've been asking this, half-heartedly, since Columbine. Everyone says "it's because of bullying". Well, there was a whole hell of a lot worse bullying in the past and kids weren't shooting each other. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that bullying is okay and things were better in the old days, but when I read that things may have been better in the old days because we didn't allow students as much freedom of expression, well, I just say "No!"

I have no idea why kids are more apt to pick up a gun and shoot someone in these times. I have some guesses, and none of them have anything to do with childhood sexuality (which exists, has always existed and will continue to exist, no matter how much it unnerves adults).

Today, I'm going to reserve any ruminations about the "whys" for another time. I'd like to encourage anyone who's reading this to sit for a minute or two in silence for Lawrence King.

Image note: I suppose it may be seen as macabre to put this image up on this post. I had tried to find some 1970's gay pride button images, but only found one on someone's blog and since it was his personal collection, felt funny about using it. The reason I wanted to use an image like this is because of a very good friend I had back when I was in high school. At the age of 16, he wore a button that read "How dare you presume I'm hetereosexual?" He also wore makeup on occasion, along with clothes that basically screaming "flaming!" The school we attended was small and it was particularly bully free, but that was probably because almost everyone there had been bullied at other schools (and I suppose that's what landed us in the school for misfits).

Most people who read his button had no idea what it meant. Some of them didn't even know what the word "hetereosexual" meant, never mind the sarcasm. It was 1974. I don't know if my friend ever was the victim of a hate crime, but I've been. Back in 1980, I was walking down the street one evening in New York City and some guys started yelling at me from their car, "Lesbian! Go to hell!" and other assorted phrases of nastiness. They were fixated on the fact that I had a tattoo on my biceps. It was an affront to their sensibilities. One of them got out of the car and punched me in the face, knocking me unconscious. Yes, boys and girls, it once was dangerous for a woman to have a visible tattoo. It appears that it is still dangerous to be homosexual. And Newsweek dares tell us that perhaps the closet is the safest option? I am outraged.

The consequences of food choices (with a bonus recipe)

I'm not above engaging in silly time-wasting activities. I saw a friend had taken an on-line quiz about what kind of American English they spoke, so I took it (45% Yankee, 45% Average American, 10% Dixie). Then I wanted to find out "what my pizza says about me."

I was pretty curious what absurdities could be deduced from my answers. I like pizza without red sauce, extra cheese, mushrooms and sausage (if it's good, but the test didn't ask for that much specificity). I also like thin crust pizza, but honestly, if it isn't cooked in a wood fired oven or on my own pizza stone, I'd prefer a different kind of crust. I would guess that what I just wrote would classify me as one of those dreaded "elites", along with the fact that I like arugula. I prefer micro-brewery beer to wine, but that's mostly because I can't afford really good wine (and yes, I can tell the difference). Another piece of evidence that I am indeed a bit of a snob. If offered a Pabst or wine from a box, I will decline. I can't say the same for pizza. I'll eat pretty much any kind of pizza, as long as it has no anchovies or pineapple on it.

Why am I writing about this when there are important things to write about? Well, a lot of fuss has been made about Obama's eating preferences, which are seen as vaguely un-American. He's picky. I've been accused of that myself, as if I'd prefer to starve than eat spam. No, if I was indeed starving, I'd eat spam (though it occurs me that I've never tried it, though I have tried scrapple). Unlike Obama, if you saw me, you'd see that I can't be that picky, for I could stand to lose weight.

I've left you hanging with the pressing question of the day: "What does my pizza say about me?" Here it is:

"People may tell you that you have a small appetite... but you aren't under eating. You just aren't a pig.

You are a very picky pizza eater. Not any pizza will do. You fit in best in the Northeast part of the US.

Your taste in food tends to favor what's rich and comforting. You prefer food that will definitely satisfy you.

You are generous, outgoing, and considerate with your choices.

You are cultured and intellectual. You should consider traveling to Vienna.

The stereotype that best fits you is guy or girl next door. Hey, there's nothing wrong with being average."

I doubt anyone has ever described me as "the girl next door". In fact, in an article published in a Lubbock, Texas newspaper, there was once a picture of me with the headline "Would you bring this girl home to meet your parents?" I kid you not.

I'm curious as to how my preferences in pizza added up to "cultured and intellectual". And do they serve my favorite pizza in Vienna? Oddly enough, my forebears were from Vienna, and one of my great-grandmothers was a pastry chef there. Though she used dough on a daily basis, I would bet my life savings (not much, I'm afraid) that she never used any for pizza.

It's true I like rich and homey food, in spite of liking arugula. The way I like arugula the best is with pasta. Here's a wonderful little recipe for you, if you like arugula (the amounts of all the ingrediants are up to you): Chop up a large bunch of arugula. Shred a good amount of Ricotta Fresca, or if you can't find that, combine one part large curd cottage cheese with one part feta cheese and mix them together. Cook up some pasta (your choice). After you drain the pasta, quickly throw it on plates, putting the cheese and arugula on top. Drizzle some good olive oil on it, if you want. To make it even tastier, use garlic infused olive oil. This stuff is over priced. Make it yourself. Buy some cheap olive oil and throw a bunch of garlic cloves (cut in half) into it. In a week, it'll be as good as the expensive stuff.

This is a first - a post about cooking! See, I'm not in the worst of moods! I do have a bit of a stomach ache from an overly rich meal I ate last night, however. I went, for the first time, to a popular local restaurant, "The Olde Mill Restaurant". The extra E on the word Old should have tipped me off to this place not being all that it was cracked up to be. It had the same fare as any typical Maine restaurant - lots of fried food (including huge piles of onion rings for two bucks) and a big pie menu. I ordered pot roast with mashed potatoes and carrots. THe entire plate was covered with a terribly dark brown gravy that smelled like "Gravymaster". I pushed that to the side and discovered that the pot roast was actually quite tasty. In spite of the pizza quiz, I am indeed a pig at times. I ate everything on my plate (plus quite a few onion rings). Of course, I paid dearly for my piggishness, and had a terrible night's sleep.

I rather wish I had gone somewhere where I could have had a good mesclun salad, but those places are overpriced around here. No wonder Americans are overweight. The cheaper the food, the higher the calories and the bigger the portions. Everyone knows this, so what have I got to add to it? I stopped eating at fast food restaurant years ago, but I do indulge in Coolatas, which must have at least a thousand calories in them.

Getting back to what my pizza says about me, I am assumed to be a Northeasterner (thin crust?) But how do they account for the "generous, outgoing and considerate with my choices"? How does food choice make one friendly, generous or outgoing?

I'll make some stabs at over-analyzing this bit of fluff. One can be generous in their choice of foods. If you're invited to someone's house and eat what they offer, regardless of whatever pickiness one might have (oh, say, vegetarianism or food allergies), one could be considered generous. Friendly? If, even as your eyes are swelling up due to eating an overabundance of whatever you're going into anaphalactic shock over, you say "Gee. That was great. Can I get the recipe?", you are indeed a friendly person, and quite considerate to boot. You're even more considerate if you don't put your hosts out by asking for a ride to the hospital for some epinephrine.

I don't have any serious food allergies and have ceased to be a vegetarian, so I have no reason to turn down any food I'm offered. Therefore, I have every opportunity to be friendly, considerate and generous when it comes to food choices.

Now I'll tell you a story that proves this isn't all in good fun. It hadn't occurred to me until now that I had an experience that gives all this nonsense some reality.

Years ago I was invited to a formal dinner party, something that is rare in these parts. The hostess asked me if I had any foods which I could not eat, which was truly considerate of her. I said I didn't much like fish and that I seemed to have a bad reaction to salmon, though while not an allergy, was more of a serious aversion. The smell of salmon makes me want to gag.

I showed up at the party, which had a few guests whom I knew the hostess was a bit nervous about. It was all very stiff and polite, everyone in their best clothes and making horrendously small talk.

The table was laid out beautifully and there were even name cards for the guests. First, a salad was served. Then came the main course: salmon.

I sat there politely with my plate of salmon, eating what was around it and trying not to breathe too deeply, but it started to become too much for me to bear. Without knowing it, I pushed the plate away from me. I didn't push it far. It was only about one or two inches further than where it should have been. But the hostess noticed. She asked me to come into the kitchen, where she asked me if there was something wrong. I told her that I had a problem with salmon, and very gingerly brought up that we may have had a misunderstanding, for I was sure I was clear about this when we had spoken about the dinner party. She declared she had no memory of it at all. I didn't see what the fuss was, really. There was plenty of other food, and it was lovely. I did ask if she minded if I removed the salmon from my plate and stuck to eating the side dishes. I returned to the table and told the other guests that I was allergic to salmon.

After dinner, the table was cleared and the hostess said that she was sorry to inform us that she was feeling poorly. She apologized for not serving any coffee, tea or dessert (which she indicated was something lovely), but she just had to go lay down. We all put on our coats and left.

About a week later I received a letter in the mail from this woman. It was four pages long. She told me she could no longer be my friend, for I had terrible manners. I had ruined her dinner party by rejecting her food and it had pained her so much, after all the trouble she had gone to, that she had taken ill and laid in a dark room for a few days. She said I had embarassed her in front of "important people" and would have to work hard to mend what I had done.

Who knew that my dislike of salmon could cause such distress? I must confess, there was a time I might have taken this letter to heart a bit for I used to be prone to terrible feelings of guilt, but this time I felt no such thing. I was rather outraged at being blamed for such neuroticism, even though I tend to be quite forgiving of other peoples' craziness (after all, I have much). But not this time. I wouldn't eat the salmon and I wasn't going to eat the blame. That was the end of the friendship.

On rare occasions I see this woman on the street. After more than fifteen years, she still will turn her back or cross the street to avoid me. Small town life is like that. There are people I would prefer not to see, too, but these awkward moments are over things that are bigger than a piece of salmon steak.

I daresay everyone is crazy in some way. It's just more obvious in some people than others. And I shouldn't be throwing stones, as they say. I mean this woman no harm by recounting this story, truly.

I just noticed that I thought I smelled salmon. Can one hallucinate smells? Perhaps I should think about the smell of a good pizza dough, cooking on a stone in a brick oven.

Painting note: Still Life with Stoneware Jug, Wine Glass, Herring, and Bread 1642
Pieter Claesz., Dutch, about 1597–1660

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a wonderful interactive site that includes "MFA Images: Feasts".

Addendum: I can't believe I'm still thinking about that pizza quiz. Since when was the "average girl next door" intellectual and cultured? We should be so lucky. Maybe we'd elect some better politicians if all us average folks liked thin crust, sauceless pizza with sausage and extra cheese. And, y'know, I've always wanted to go to Vienna. . .

Addendum #2: I felt rather uncomfortable that I had written about a person who lives in my area (and is still alive). I want to assure readers (and my friends) that this is an exceptional circumstance. I know for a fact (for reasons that would help disclose the identity of the person I wrote about) that the woman mentioned in this post will never read it, nor will anyone who could identify the "incident".

The ice storm, revisited

Last winter was the tenth year anniversary of the "ice storm" here in Maine (and Quebec). You may not have heard of it. It was hardly on the national news, which I've never quite understood, though the amazing fact that less than a dozen people died during this event may have rendered it un-newsworthy.

It's a lovely summer day here in Maine, yet I am thinking about the winter. I, like many, have been thinking about the winter ever since the price of gas skyrocketed. People may feel some relief now that prices have dropped somewhat. I know I do. I also know that it's absurd to feel relief that prices have dropped below four dollars a gallon. When I think of the dual financial realities of paying my hyper-escalated property tax and whatever it will take to heat my home this winter, I feel vaguely ill. I have decided to take the path of ignoring this pending emergency and presuming everything will be fine, somehow.

What does this have to do with the ice storm of '98? Quite a bit. One fantasy that I play with when I'm feeling hard pressed to envision just how I will pay my taxes, put gas in my car, or heat my house, is that the financial and governmental infrastructure will fall apart. That's right: I fantasize that I will no longer pay my taxes or my mortgage, and lucky me, I'll have a bit of land to grow food, perhaps keep chickens or small livestock and cut firewood on. I have a well, and if electricity stops working, I will have no problem building and using an outhouse.

Still, you may be wondering what this has to do with the ice storm, or why I'm wishing for this post-apocalyptic dystopia.

When the ice storm hit in '98, it was the dead of winter, but unlike the typical Maine winter weather, it had been raining. It rained for an entire week without let-up. This wasn't the first winter Maine had seen rain instead of snow. Even the most diehard Rush Limbaugh fans up here believed global warming was indeed happening, as they reported on the snowy winters of their childhood that were no longer a given. The Maine winters are long and dark and without snow they are harder to endure. Six months of dim light and cold are bad enough, but the snow helps. One can get outside to snowshoe, sleighride or ski. The whiteness of the snow makes it feel brighter. The snow also help insulate ones' house, and it covers gardens and crop fields, protecting them from the constant heaving of temperature changes. An "open winter" (one without a constant snow cover) is not a good winter. And we've had more open winters than not in the last 15 years or so.

It was nothing new when, back in '98, we had days and days of hard rain. But this time, things were different. Each day it got colder, but it kept on raining. The last two days before the rain stopped, the temperatures were in the 20's but still it rained. Everything was covered with ice. Sure, we'd seen this before, but this time is was thick. By the time it stopped raining, the ice was about six inches thick. I didn't know this, but I was living in one of the hardest hit areas.

The day it stopped raining, the electricity went off. This, too, was not unexpected, for the power stops around these parts fairly regularly. An ordinary heavy rain storm can cause an outage (and usually does). This time the power did not come on. The phone was dead, too, and it wasn't because we had a cordless phone which needed electricity. There was no phone service, period. In '98 there was no cell phone service in the area I lived in (and I'm not entirely sure if there is now, either).

The first night was terrifying. The temperatures plummeted to near zero and the trees started to fall. Huddling inside the little cabin, it sounded like there was gunfire outside. The trees seemed like they were exploding. They cracked with a huge bang and then came straight down. We were all lucky that it was a wind-less night, for if it hadn't been, a lot more houses and people would have been hurt. We started to understand just how the trees were falling and saw we were relatively safe. I didn't understand the mechanics of it, but the trees were not falling hard. One did land on the roof on the house, but it did no damage (and later, we would see that this was indeed the case most everywhere).

That morning, we awoke to a world that looked devastated, as it indeed was. It appeared that a good percentage of trees had fallen through the night. It was truly beautiful, I must admit, but even though we had no contact with the outer world, we knew that something momentous had happened.

By day three, we still had neither power nor phone service. The postal service, which I'd never truly appreciated for its actually living up to the promise of delivering no matter the weather, well, it wasn't delivering (or picking up). We realized that everything had stopped. The road I lived on was barricaded with fallen trees, power lines and telephone poles. I couldn't get to work. I couldn't call anyone. We had no battery powered radio, so we didn't know what was going on exactly. What we did know is that we had to survive.

The lifestyle that I lived at that point turned out to serve well in this emergency. We heated the cabin with wood and so we had no worries about keeping warm. The electricity was out, but that hardly mattered. The stove was electric, but since we had no water pump, we were melting ice on the woodstove to wash with. We also cooked on it. We had no canned goods stockpile, for the house was small (and not being a survivalist, I wouldn't have stockpiled anyway). We did have root vegetables in the small cellar and an entire deer, cut up and ready to cook, in the freezer. Of course, the freezer wasn't working, but it was so full that its contents were staying frozen. And lastly, the outhouse that I cursed on a daily basis, well, I was quite thankful that it was there. In this emergency, a normal bathroom was rendered useless.

We were all set. The days were simple and devoted to one thing: just living. There was a schedule, unspoken and unset, but remarkably easy to understand. Wake up with the sun. Stoke the woodfire. Get ice and melt it on the woodstove. Make oatmeal on the stove. Start preparing food for the one major meal of the day by cutting up vegetables and dethawing the venison. Continue chipping ice off the cars. Bring wood in.

I realized that I liked this life. No bills came in and no bills went out. No bills were paid, obviously. No one could call to hassle us for not paying bills. In essence, with one crazy storm, we were knocked back into early 19th century living. However, we had no horse and so, the big order of business was getting the roads cleared (and the cars de-iced).

It appeared that noone was coming to help clear the roads. Somewhere around day three all the men with chainsaws on the road started clearing the mess. It was interesting how well these men worked together, for these were people who had major grudges against each other. The squabbles over teenage kids driving too fast at night or just why so-and-so had been in jail were put aside.

The only thing I needed when the road was cleared were candles and information. How were my friends who lived in other towns? Had many people died? The first day that I drove to the main road, I was shocked. It looked like an atomic bomb had been detonated. In every direction, all I could see were downed phone and power lines. Even by day five, in that part of Waldo county, power lines were laying in the middle of the main roads, unattended to. There were no moving vehicles in sight.

We lived like this for fifteen days. We had started driving a half an hour to Belfast, where power had been restored, to eat different food and shower at a friend's house. But part of me didn't want to return to the "real world". I loved that the TV and stereo were never on. I loved reading until dark and then going to sleep. I loved reading out loud as an activity. I loved the fact that just living was my job. Now, if I had thought this would go on for years, I may have thought differently, but I did ruminate about that possibility. I did possess skills that would be useful if things never returned to normal. I know how to grow flax and the old ways of processing it into something that can be spun into thread. I know how to spin and I know how to weave on old looms. I know how to raise sheep and process their wool for yarn. I can sew and knit. I know how to make butter.

I can't chop wood (to say my life, literally) but others can, and if it came to it, I could barter hand made clothes for wood.

I have been thinking about this stuff again because of the price of gas and because I am just finishing Kunstler's "The Long Emergency", in which he posits what will happen in the post-oil age. He imagines that places where people still know how to do things the old way will be able to manage to some degree. I don't know what to make of his apocalyptic vision. It rings true (though I'm not describing it well enough for you to judge). It's frightening, for sure. Our world will change, and change drastically.

When I think of a world pushed back into 19th century ways, the only thing I am scared of is that I will stay have to pay my mortgage and taxes. If I take that out of the equation, I think I will be perfectly fine, for some of my skills will suddenly have value where now they have none.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not sitting here wishing for the end of the world as we know it. For one thing, I want my internet connection!

But I must admit, I've had a fascination with post-apocalyptic ideas since I was a kid and a yearning for a lifestyle more akin to the Amish's than anything else for just as long. If it comes to that, well, I only pray that the mail service ends and no one will be demanding any money from me, for there will be none to be had.

In appreciation of suffering

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack
in everything
That's how the light gets in
-from "Anthem" by Leonard Cohen

Last week, a senior student at the Zendo played this song by Leonard Cohen. He also used these lines as an opening into his talk. Last night, at the end of the movie, "Duck", this song played while the credits rolled.

I had never heard this song before this week. It's not popular, and even if it was, I don't listen to anything but talk radio.

I don't like these kinds of coincidences. The chances of them happening are too small. Another one happened this week, which had an even slimmer chance of happening, but I can't remember what it was. Perhaps I blocked it out of my memory, for I remember that it was truly freaky, and even Dick, who is more of a skeptic than I (if that's possible) was unnerved.

Odd coincidences aside, I like what these lines have to say (or at least what I think what they have to say). I have often felt grateful for my the "cracks" in my personality and history, for they have always been openings towards a greater understanding and appreciation of being alive. These "bad things" have given me insight into others and myself and made me, hopefully, more compassionate.

I have often wondered (and have written about it here) about the connection between creativity and craziness. At times I have thought it a myth that without a certain amount of craziness or "bad experiences", there would not be the impetus to create. In the last few months, I have more or less decided that this is not a myth and that without some suffering of some kind, life tends to go unexamined.

This is not to say that when suffering ceases, so does creativity. Poetry that reveals nature (or the nature of things) is very beautiful. But, who is the one who looks at the bird sitting on the rock, the one who wrote that poetry? Intuitively, I think the author must have seen or experienced suffering, for it is in these moments (or after them) that we tend to see what is beautiful.

When my mother died, after I left the lawyer's office where I signed some papers, I came out onto the street and noticed the smell of the river. When had I ever noticed it before? Never in that neighborhood, filled with swarms of people, buses and cars.
But that day, I did, and I followed it until I came upon a restaurant with outdoor seating. The white tablecloths fluttered in the breeze. I looked at the menu and saw that the prices were too steep for me. I wanted to sit there, have a bite to eat and enjoy the beautiful day, so I examined the contents of my wallet (for that was all the money to my name, literally) and figured out that I could indeed buy an appetizer and have money for the tip, so I sat down and ordered something. I ate leisurely and with a deep appreciation for life.

My mother died as a result of a car accident. She was on her way back from a weekend in the country. At her apartment, hand washed clothing hung from a wooden drying rack in the bathtub. Of course, she expected to come home, fold up these clothes and put them away. But she did not. Seeing those clothes in the bathtub woke me up to the preciousness of life (and the cold reality of her death).

We do not expect to die, even if it's inevitable for all of us. We go about our everyday business, like washing clothes, with the expectation that we might be wearing them tomorrow.

I ate that overpriced meal near the river even though I couldn't "afford it". Was I thrown out of my apartment for non-payment because of this one little luxury? No.

That day, I realized I could not afford to live my life afraid of what might be. I realized that every day was an opportunity to truly appreciate what is. No, I don't remember this every day, for I'm pretty clouded by my aches and pains and neuroses. I'm not the Dalai Lama (at least not yet).

Recently, I've spent a lot of time explaining to people I know that everything is okay. I've got some undiagnosed problem involving my back which hurts like hell and makes it difficult to walk or stand for more than a few minutes. I'm filing for bankruptcy. It's okay. The star gazer lilies are blooming. Juvenile hummingbirds and rose breasted grosbeaks are practicing flying in my back yard.

I do not live in Darfur. I don't have cancer.

I know I'm repeating some of what I've written before, but in different words. This concept bears repeating, I'd say. So many of us walk around in desperation, when we really have much to appreciate.

I know I've hated it when people have told me things like "god gives you only as much as you can handle." What kind of god is that? I've also heard this story from an Orthodox Jewish friend, who said that god picks a certain number of people to give extra troubles to because he loves them the most, for those problems make them into people of extra strength and spirit.

I don't believe these things (though I have to say, I don't believe in god either). Yet, I do believe that we must make sense out of nonsense or adversity. It's not that it's been given to us for a reason. It's that we must make reasons, or in other words, learn.

Mistakes, accidents, adversity. . .they all have something to teach us, if we want to grow. This is life.

Photo note: The set from Shelagh Stephenson's play "Enlightenment"