Mar 9, 2012
I have desired to go where springs not fail
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow
And I have asked to be where no storms come
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb
And out of the swing of the sea
Gerard Manley Hopkins – Heaven-Haven: A Nun Takes the Veil
This is one of the few poems I have memorized and retained – I learned it as a teenager. It is a fantasy of cloistered life, and probably unlike any cloister inhabited by real people, though a vow of silence could certainly reduce the hail and storms. In my mind I often visit this poem.
Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection
My dream is solitude in a small white room, empty but for a single bed with a white candlewick spread, a nightstand with a lamp and a book, and a table with a bud vase holding a single rose. And my real life? Crazy with clutter and people.
After my brief first marriage I had always lived alone with my son. When he was 14, Iris, who had a two-year-old, suggested we join forces. We bought a house together, and shared expenses, chores, and lots of tea and laughter as the boys tore around the house.
After a couple of years, though, Iris got married. I bought her share of the house, and then advertised for roomers so that I could pay the mortgage. A succession of young men moved in and stayed with us briefly.
I only remember a few. A Nigerian man and an Africaaner, both grad students, shared our house. They did not like each other, though they had something in common – they ran up huge phone bills and then balked at paying. After they moved on, a musician moved in. He was a short, chubby man who practiced his bassoon in the living room. The other roomer thought he was gay, and complained to me about sharing the bathroom because he feared he would catch AIDS.
Finally we found two roomers who felt like family. We got along so well that we decided to share meals. I cooked dinner; they bought the food and, with Eric, cleaned the kitchen. I’ve always loved cooking for people who like to eat – now I had three hungry and very appreciative young men. I particularly remember a chocolate layer cake that lasted only one night.
Rick was a massage student. He set up his table at home and practiced on me on Sunday nights. Claudio was a Brazilian who was getting his doctorate in coastal engineering. I would find him pacing in the living room early in the morning, playing Bach at high volume on the stereo, as he wrestled with his thesis. Then one morning he burst into the kitchen and announced that he had figured out turbulence in breaking waves. He was ecstatic.
Rick graduated from massage school and joined his fiancé in Colorado. Claudio got his degree and returned to Rio. Then Eric finished high school and left home.
Eric’s teenage years had been rough on both of us. His absence wasn’t a case of out of sight, out of mind – I thought of him a lot. But he thrived on risk and extreme physical exertion, and it was so much easier to hear about his various adventures and misadventures from a distance.
.
Now I felt my life opening in front of me, a clear, empty space, and I was exhilarated. It was little things: I didn’t have to tell anyone where I was going or when I would be back, and when I returned, everything was just where I had left it – no wandering scissors. And it was the big thing: now I could write. I’d always found that my wool-gathering faculty, so necessary for writing, was fully occupied with work and child.
Lambtown 2008 (Dixon, CA) by WonderMike. Flickr via Sprixi. CC by license
GATHERED WOOL
Living alone, I completed my first novel, and got a good start on a second. Though a boyfriend moved in, he was very quiet and self-sufficient, and didn’t take up a lot of physical or psychic space.
Meantime I volunteered as a guardian ad litem, advocating for children who had been taken from their parents for abuse or neglect. But after watching two children move from foster home to foster home, I had no choice – I took them in myself. The boyfriend moved out. The children and I struggled together for almost two years, while I worked and tried to maintain some semblance of a social life. I put the writing on hold.
Eventually the children left, and I briefly lived alone, until Joe moved in. We married, and Amanda came to live with us for a couple of long stretches before it became permanent.
I have friends who live alone. I admire their independence, and envy their control over their time and space. I also admire foster parents who have three, four, five children at a time, and always have room in their houses and hearts for one more. I would love to be so open-hearted, so welcoming.
I think we all have a dream of greener grass. The farmer yearns for the city, the city girl for bucolic bliss. We visit our dream for solace, but if we are lucky enough to have had choices and made the right ones, maybe we are living the life that suits us.
Mar 2, 2012
For your amusement and edification, here is a compilation of anecdotes, quotations, and a bit of poetry in honor of Women’s History Month. At the end of this post I’ve included links to buy the books I used.
Mehitabel Haskell, speaking at the Worcester Convention, October 15, 1851:
“…This meeting, as I understand it, was called to discuss Woman’s Rights. Well, I do not pretend to know exactly what woman’s rights are; but I do know that I have groaned for forty years, yea, for fifty years, under a sense of woman’s wrongs. I know that even when a girl, I groaned under the idea that I could not receive as much instruction as my brothers could. I wanted to be what I felt I was capable of becoming, but opportunity was denied me. I rejoice in the progress that has been made. I rejoice that so many women are here; it denotes that they are waking up to some sense of their situation…” (Tanner, Leslie B.,ed. Voices from Women’s Liberation, p.63. Signet. New York.1970)
VICTORIAN SCHOOLGIRLS SCHOOLGIRLS IN AFGHANISTAN
Sojourner Truth, speaking at the Broadway Tabernacle, September 6, 1853:
“…Now, women do not ask half of a kingdom, but their rights, and they don’t get them. When she comes to demand them, don’t you hear how sons hiss their mothers like snakes, because they ask for their rights; and can they ask for anything less? … But we’ll have our rights; see if we don’t; and you can’t stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as you like, but it is coming. Women don’t get half as much rights as they ought to; we want more, and we will have it…”
(Tanner, p. 73)
PHOTOBUCKET.COM by WOMAN-HEART
Reverend Olympia Brown was the first woman ordained by the Universalist Church. In 1867 Lucy Stone asked her to go to Kansas to work for suffrage there: a referendum was coming up on a constitutional amendement granting suffrage to Blacks and women. She tells us about that summer and fall:
“Kansas was just then emerging from the great struggle for freedom which culminated in the civil war. Many of her men had been killed… The crops that season had been destroyed by grass hoppers. Many of the pioneers were suffering from malaria and other diseases incident to the settlement of a new country. There were few public conveyances, either by rail or stage or livery. The outlook was not encouraging. [The party had made the speaking engagements without any knowledge of the country, and they were often fifty miles apart]…. In many places there were no roads, only a trail across the prairie and sometimes not even that. Under such circumstances, to lose our way became almost a daily experience… But on we went, and the most remarkable thing about the campaign was that notwithstanding all these difficulties, the speaker did not, during the whole four months, miss one appointment.” [The amendment was rejected.] (Stratton, Joanna L. Pioneer Women:Voices from the Kansas Frontier, p. 261. Simon and Shuster, NY. 198l.)
KONZA PRAIRIE TRAIL, KANSAS RAKING AND BURNING GRASSHOPPERS
Mississippi Winter IV, by Alice Walker:
My father and mother both
used to warn me
that “a whistling woman and a crowing
hen would surely come to
no good end.” And perhaps I should
have listened to them.
But even at the time I knew
that though my end probably might
not
be good
I must whistle
like a woman undaunted
until I reached it.
(Walker, Alice, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, p. 22. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. New York. 1984.)
At the founding meeting of The National Colored Labor Union in 1869, the needs of working women were ignored, and the women challenged the group. A delegate from Newport, Rhode Island, spoke:
“…Are we to be left out? we who have suffered all the evils of which you justly complain? Are our daughters to be denied the privilege of honestly earning a livelihood by being excluded from the milliner, dressmaker, tailor, or dry good store, in fact every calling that an intelligent, respectable industrious female may strive to obtain, and this merely because her skin is dusky? These privileges are all denied colored females of Newport. However well they may be fitted for other positions, they are compelled to accept the meanest drudgeries or starve… Therefore the colored women of Newport would ask that you remember us in your deliberations so that when you mount the chariot of equality, in industrial and mechanical pursuits, we may at least be permitted to cling to the wheels.” (Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter, p.69. Bantam Books. Toronto. 1984.)
NATIONAL COLORED LABOR UNION CONVENTION
Ida B.Wells, a Black journalist from Memphis, is best-known as leader of a campaign against lynching. “It was 1884, and Ida B. Wells took her seat in the “Ladies Coach” of a train bound for Memphis from Woodstock, Tennessee. But by that year, customs in the South were changing. A conductor demanded that Wells leave the first class section for the smoking car. When she refused, the conductor attempted to force her from her seat – a mistake, he quickly realized when he felt a vicelike bite on the back of his hand. He called more conductors to his aid, and to the standing cheers of the White passengers on the train, the three men dragged [her] out of the car.”
Wells sued the railroad. She won, and the railroad appealed. They offered her more money than the court had awarded her if she would just not contest the appeal. She refused. The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the award. (Giddings, p. 22)
IDA B. WELLS
Here is an anonymous pioneer on the Kansas frontier, speaking about the marriage vows:
I already had ideas of my own about the husband being the head of the family. I had taken the precaution to sound him on ‘obey’ in the marriage pact and found he did not approve of the term. Approval or no approval, that word ‘obey’ would have to be left out. I had served my time of tutelage to my parents as all children are supposed to. I was a woman now and capable of being the other half of the head of the family. His word and my word would have equal strength.” (Stratton, p. 58)
“Ella May Wiggins was born in 1889 in Appalachia. At sixteen, she married a logger. A few years later, he was crippled in an accident, leaving her the sole provider for a family of nine children, four of whom died of whooping cough. She moved the family to cotton mill country and worked for ten years as a spinner. She joined the National Textile Workers Union, engaged in ferocious struggle with the company bosses and used her own songs for organizing. In 1929, at the bloodiest moment in the union struggle, she was shot and killed on her way to a union meeting at the mill in Gastonia, North Carolina.” (Bernikow, Louise, ed. The World Split Open, p. 309. Vintage Books. New York. 1974)
Revolutionary Dreams by Nikki Giovanni:
i used to dream militant
dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i’d be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural
dreams of being a natural
woman doing what a woman
does when she’s natural
i would have a revolution
(Giovanni, Nikki, Re:Creation,, p.20. Broadside Press. Detroit.1970)
Septima Poinsette Clark was born in 1898 in Charleston, South Carolina, and died in 1987. She was an unsung hero of the civil rights movement, who established citizenship schools throughout the South, recruiting hundreds of teachers who taught thousands of others to read, to register to vote, and to stand up for their rights. She said,
“I think that the work the women did during the time of civil rights is what really carried the movement along. The women carried forth the ideas. I think the civil rights movement would never have taken off if some women hadn’t started to speak up.
Women need to grab the men by the collar and do more. That’s the way I feel. We need women who will get these men by the collar and work with them. We still have a hard time getting them to see what it means to vote.” (Lanker, Brian. I Dream a World, p. 164. Stewart, Tabori, and Chang. New York, 1989.)
SEPTIMA POINSETTE CLARK. IMAGE BY BRIAN LANKER
Johnnie Tillmon, born 1926 in Arkansas, is the founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization. She says:
“I got this idea of organizing women on welfare who lived in the project. We stopped a lot of harassment. There used to be a time when they would look in your dirty clothes hamper for men’s clothes. They used to come to your house at midnight and they used to pump the kids, “Where’s your daddy?”
If your kids look clean or your house looks clean, then you must be doing something fraudulent, because they understand that you really shouldn’t be able to do what you do with the money you get. So when you trade a man for the man, you still got somebody telling you how to live your life.
There’s six white women to every black one on AFDC in this country. But nobody ever talks about that. I met a group of white women from Kentucky who said, ‘You cannot leave us out of this organization. We’re having the same problem with our welfare department that you have as a black woman.’ So that’s why the organization was made up out of everybody.
I believe in rhetoric to a certain extent. But you can only rhetoricize so long and then you have to deal with fact. Now, I can do as much rhetoricizing as the next person. But sometimes I had to start a mess to get to the facts.” (Lanker, p.92)
JOHNNIE TILLMON. IMAGE FROM BLACK KOS at DAILYKOS.COM
This is from comments by Audre Lorde, the poet, at a conference in 1979:
“As women, we have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” (Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider, p. 112. The Crossing Press. Freedom, CA. 1984)
THE MASTER’S HOUSE. IMAGE BY RIYANNICOLE at PHOTOBUCKET.COM
Remember? by Alice Walker:
Remember me?
I am the girl
with the dark skin
whose shoes are thin
I am the girl
with rotted teeth
I am the dark
rotten-toothed girl
with the wounded eye
and the melted ear.
I am the girl
holding their babies
cooking their meals
sweeping their yards
washing their clothes
Dark and rotting
and wounded, wounded.
I would give
to the human race
only hope.
I am the woman
with the blessed
dark skin
I am the woman
with teeth repaired
I am the woman
with the healing eye
the ear that hears.
I am the woman: Dark,
repaired, healed
Listening to you.
I would give
to the human race
only hope.
I am the woman
offering two flowers
whose roots
are twin
Justice and Hope.
Let us begin.
(Walker, p.1)
Buying the books:
Tanner, Stratton, Giddings, Giovanni, and Lanker are available from the Independent Online Booksellers Association. click
For Walker and Lorde try the Independent Booksellers Association website click. They will hook you up with a bookstore near you, which can order it if it’s not in stock.
Powell’s Books has all but Bernikow and Giovanni. click
Amazon has lots of dealers selling the Bernikow. click
Feb 24, 2012
After I retired I went searching for a dog. I knew just what I wanted: female, two to five years old, around thirty-five pounds, short-haired, good with cats and kids. I read the classifieds, and went to two adoption fairs, but most of the dogs were too big for me, or too tiny for Joe.
Then I went to PetsMart, where rescue groups display adoptable pets on Saturdays. The cages were lined up in a wide aisle by the beds and blankets. The dogs were standing and wagging, pacing and whining, lying with heads on paws and ears twitching. Most of the dogs were very big or very old, and then I came to Dixie. She was sitting up straight with eager ears and cocked head, her eyes looking right into mine. She had a glossy black coat with a crooked white blaze down her chest, and her left front leg was missing.
I went straight to the adoption table. Laurie, from Puppy Hill Farm, told me Dixie had arrived just that morning, and they didn’t know much about her. She was a lab cross, seven months old. Her leg had been amputated after a car accident, and the owners had surrendered her to the vet. The vet’s staff described her as “very sweet.”
They gave me a leash, and Dixie and I went for a walk. She didn’t pull very much or very hard, except in the dog food aisle, and she was remarkably calm. Her tail wagged at cats and children, and when people stopped to talk to her, she didn’t jump up on them. When I sat outside on a planter she sat right in front of me and gave me her enthusiastic attention. I told myself that the trauma of the accident and surgery and the month at the vet had matured her, so it wasn’t really like adopting a puppy. I weighed her in the vet’s waiting room, and she was thirty six pounds. Already seven months old – I was sure she wouldn’t grow much bigger. And with only three legs, she would probably be comfortable with my slow walking.
I told Laurie that I did have to check with my husband before bringing home a three-legged dog, but I was sure it would be alright with him. Since I couldn’t reach him on the phone, I hurried home. It was alright with him, though he might have been happy to forego my imitation of the puppy’s eager expression and posture. I raced back to the store.
THE FEMINIST GRANDMA PLAYS PUPPY
Suddenly I had the pre-adoption jitters. Life was simple with only a cat. What was I getting myself into? Though I’d been planning this for so long, it still felt like my usual impulsive decision, guided by passion rather than reason.
But those yearning puppy eyes had me yearning right back. So I filled out the forms, and signed the papers. I promised that if it didn’t work out, I would return Dixie to Puppy Hill Farm rather than take her to the pound. And Laurie helped me pick out what I needed: a crate, leash, food, a chew bone.
I snapped on the new leash and Dixie and I walked to the car. I boosted her up into the front seat, where I had put our old beach quilt. I petted her and talked to her all the way home, and she was very well-behaved. We went for a walk around the neighborhood. I let her explore as she pleased, and for an untrained dog and owner, we did very well, with no pulling or yanking. That night, as she lay on the floor between our recliners, Joe acknowledged that Dixie was a very fine dog.
I have no allegiance to the old Confederacy, and I didn’t want a dog named Dixie, especially a dog who looked a lot like a lab in profile, and a lot like a pitbull from the front, a dog who lunged and barked at pick-up trucks. We tried out a dozen names. Joe rejected Callie; I refused to name her Stumpy. I’ve named my previous dogs after food – Tuna, Oyster, Chilidog – and so I finally settled on Trisket, changing the spelling so I wouldn’t feel like a commercial.
MY DOGS
A week after I got Trisket, we began obedience classes. I had three particular goals for her: to walk on a leash without pulling, to go to her bed (one in each room) when told, and not to jump up on people. She also learned to sit, wait, lie down, and stay. She learned to turn in a circle when told to dance, and ring a bell when she wants to go out. At the command ‘Leave It,’ she will reluctantly refrain from eating food or more disgusting things left by the side of the road, or keep walking at a steady pace, only her head turning, when another dog challenges her.
THE PROUD GRADUATE
The training made her a wonderful companion, and though she grew to fifty pounds, I was happy with my choice. Still, there is one behavior we haven’t been able to train away. All my dogs have been good eaters, gobbling breakfast and dinner the minute the bowl hit the floor. But Trisket is more than a mere enthusiast. She steals food every chance she gets – from the pantry, the table, the trash.
We try to keep Trisket out of the kitchen when we’re not there. We close her in the two front rooms, shutting the sliding door. But her friend Ouzel, like all cats, always wants to be on the other side of a closed door, and with a persistent paw she can inch it open enough to slip through. Trisket follows. Joe finally put a hook and eye on the door. As long as we remember to latch it, the food is safe.
Still, there are three humans in the house. If we are each inattentive once every three weeks, Trisket has unsupervised access to the kitchen once a week. It’s not that we’re stupid, it’s a question of focus. When Amanda was little I would ask her, ‘What is Trisket thinking about?’ and she would answer, ‘Food’. Although I am quite fond of food myself, I occasionally allow my mind to be distracted by other things, such as my afternoon nap or world peace.
When Trisket gets into the pantry she has a great time. She has torn open bags of flour and cornmeal and dragged them to her bed in the living room. We find granola bar wrappers in her crate. Once she ate a huge box of raisins.
Raisins are allegedly toxic, but the things that are supposed to poison dogs don’t seem to affect Trisket. When she was new to our family, she stole a giant chocolate bar from the pantry, and ate the whole thing. I called the vet and told her Trisket had eaten seven ounces of chocolate. The vet advised me to squirt hydrogen peroxide down her throat with a medicine dropper. Trisket was amenable, and after two doses she vomited copious amounts of slimy chocolate foam. In the middle of the pool was an entire stick of butter, unchewed. I’m so sorry I don’t have a photo to share with you.
To keep her out of the garbage, we tried a dog discouragement device with a red plastic flap on a spring, which we would set on top of the trash can. If she tried to get into the trash, it would fly open in her face with a loud snap. But it would also fall off the trash can, leaving it unguarded.
Even more than trash, or ingredients from the pantry, Trisket likes real food from the table. Bob and Arupa came over one night for dinner. Arupa is a vegetarian. I prepared a delicious cheesy vegetable casserole in a big pyrex pan, and set it on the kitchen table to cool. When I returned to the kitchen, Trisket had eaten a third of the dish. We ordered a pizza.
In obedience classes I learned to use rewards to train Trisket – a clicker, a cheery ‘Good dog!’, a kibble. But stealing food provides its own instant reward. Even if I believed punishment worked and were willing to use it, I would have to catch her in the act, and of course I never do. When I come in the room, there is the mess or the empty wrapper, and Trisket runs off to her cage.
Trisket is eight years old now, and sometimes I speculate about what kind of dog we will get when she is gone. Joe has an easy answer: our next dog will be a cat.
Feb 17, 2012
“People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when…
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But old men know when an old man dies.”
Ogden Nash – Old Men
Donald Hall has an essay in the January 23, 2012 issue of the New Yorker about the strange country of old age. At 83, he is no longer able to do much of what he loves, including write poetry. He spends his days looking out the window at birds and trees and weather, on the New Hampshire farm that has been in his family for generations, and writing about what he sees. It is a beautiful piece, tinged with humor, love, anger, and acceptance.
.“…[O]ld age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven [as his wife did] or fifty-two [his father]. When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do.”
He says he has lost the gift of poetry, but his prose is enviable. His view out the window is illuminated by memories. He hasn’t lost the eye for detail, the wit of metaphor, the ear for assonance and alliteration. Hummingbirds “enter the horns of hollyhocks, gobble some sweet, and zig off to zag back again for another lick.” Through the seasons “…the flowers erupt and subside.”
HUMMINGBIRDS AND HOLLYHOCKS by STEPHEN A. ASCOUGH click
My mother died when I was twenty-three, and I’ve always treasured friendships with older women. I have several friends in their eighties. None of them are sitting by the window yet. But one swears she will not. She hopes to find a way out before she loses her ability to get around. Another has given up doctors as an aggravation. She refuses to spend her remaining time sitting in waiting rooms and being treated like a worthless piece of meat.
Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternative, said Maurice Chevalier. Some old people I know do consider the alternative, and think it preferable to the inexorable progress of loss, diminishment, dependency.
I think what I fear most about old age is loneliness. I am not yet at an age where the obituaries usually bring news of my friends. My father was 98 when he died. He was the last of his generation, and all the friends of his childhood and youth were gone.
The Muu Muu Mamas focus on fun and frivolity, fortified by wine, but we also count on each other in times of need and trouble. click Though we are all under seventy, I can’t help myself; I wonder how we will age. Hall says, “…However much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life….”
It would be easy to let go of old friends as their quick wit slows, or they become garrulous bores. Hall believes that kindness to the old is always condescending. He is already in that alien land, and there’s no telling how I’ll feel if I get there, but I think he’s wrong. We began our lives dependent, and if we hang around long enough, we’ll need help again. I hope my friends and I will shore each other up when we are failing, and feel no pride nor shame in it.
IMAGE BY AMY_LEDERER AT PHOTOBUCKET.COM
I think of old age as a hard part of life that I wouldn’t want to miss. As I become more needy, maybe some of my arrogance will fall away, and I will learn humility. Maybe I will gain deeper understanding as I move from loss to loss. Acceptance is not a sprint, but a lifelong marathon.
My view may be too rosy. At 64 I’ve had my troubles. Sometimes I’ve responded with anger, whining, and paralysis, sometimes soldiered on. I’m not confident that I have found the appropriate mix of howling, whimpering, and stiff upper lip. Donald Hall, sitting at the window looking out, loving the world as he prepares to leave it, encourages me.
IMAGE BY RENTON PIRATE AT PHOTOBUCKET.COM
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…”
William Butler Yeats – Sailing to Byzantium
Donald Hall is still singing.
NOTE: I had thought I could link to this article, but it is only available to subscribers. If you’re not a New Yorker subscriber, it’s worth a trip to the library to read it, or you can go to this link to access the whole issue for $5.99. click
Feb 10, 2012
A previous ornithological post click drew gratifying response, so I am bringing you another bird. I owe this one to my sister Luli, who suffers, as I do, from bizarre and frequently scatological images.
This blog is six months old, and I have written twenty-five posts, most of them focused on me. Like many people, I find myself fascinating. I love stories with rich detail, and the stories I know best are my own. I could happily fill a blog post with photos of my dog, my cat, the rooms of my house, and my amateurish attempts at container gardening, frequently wrecked by squirrels.
THE SQUIRRELS TOOK MY THYME
If I felt free to write about Amanda – her troubles and triumphs, the funny or maddening things she does – I would have a goldmine. Since I want to protect her privacy, instead I mine the past.
I think I’m far enough along in life to have found the proper balance between smugness and self-loathing, but while writing my previous post, about the cute little rich girl misbehaving on the train home from prep school click , I had a severe attack of the latter. ‘Who gives a shit?’ I thought.
I’m not planning to stop writing the blog. It is excellent practice, and finding the pictures is really fun. The weekly deadline maintains order and discipline in my otherwise ad lib life. While the thought of reading all day with cat and cookies has its appeal, I know from experience that sloth bums me out. I could turn back to my novel, but I’m still avoiding that. It has scared me off by being too close to my own life, and the revision I have in mind is daunting – it requires me to eliminate the main character.
Before I began The Feminist Grandma I consulted with Sandra, whose blog frequently highlights other activists and writers. click She suggested that I sometimes feature subjects other than myself, and I think it’s time to do that. Otherwise The Feminist Grandma will become The Blog Bird, which flies in constantly diminishing circles until it disappears into its own asshole.
THE BLOG BIRD (WITH APOLOGIES TO THE MAGNIFICENT SANDHILL CRANE)
Feb 3, 2012
“Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance; everybody thinks it’s true.” (Paul Simon – Train in the Distance)
The whistle calls, “We’re on our way, we’re leaving you behind.” The roar of the wheels on the rails comes closer, louder, more urgent, and then fades away, promising new places, new romance.
I love trains. When I was at boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, I took two trains home to Ann Arbor – Boston to Albany, Albany to Detroit. It was Christmas, and the Boston train was filled with kids going home from prep schools and colleges. We took over the club car with our guitars, pocket flasks, and bags of sandwiches and cake. From Boston to Albany it was the great traveling Honey Hunt.
At Abbot Academy in the sixties there wasn’t a lot of boyfriend activity. Twice a week we could walk in pairs to town, so if we weren’t too scared of getting caught we could meet a local boyfriend. On Sunday afternoons after church we could have a caller in the parlor. At dances with boys’ prep schools we could pair up with a boyfriend if we had one, or we could love the one we were with. “Love” meant dancing as close as we could get away with, or sneaking off to make out behind the bushes.
So sex was hard to find. Of course there must have been lesbians, but I was never aware of them. Though a few of the teachers were long-time housemates, lesbian love seemed so exotic and unreal. Surely these dowdy spinsters weren’t involved. The teachers were in the same category as parents and other impossibly old people: we shielded our minds from any thoughts of their sex lives.
At the same time, we were obsessed with sex and romance. I had barely been kissed, but I was a virgin with aspirations – the only girl in the tenth grade dorm who admitted she wanted to get laid, the expert in sex who told the others everything I had learned (from books) about free love.
I had two boyfriends: Charles, a lanky senior at a progressive prep school in Vermont, and Toby, a pudgy Harvard sophomore. Until we moved from Cambridge to Ann Arbor I could see them on holidays – Charles and I went to a street dance in Boston, Toby took me to a night club. But in boarding school the point of a boyfriend was letters – after lunch we crowded around the mail slots hoping for something other than a letter from our mother. Both Charles and Toby obliged.
With a love affair that was essentially epistolary, we could have as many boyfriends as we wanted, or could get. So I sat in the club car on the train from Boston, singing harmony and hoping for romance.
Jamie McPherson* went to Groton. He was suave and preppy, with tousled hair and soulful eyes.
JAMIE WAS CUTER
When we learned that we were both going on to Detroit, we were a natural pair. He was joining a friend for the two hour layover in Albany; so we agreed we’d find each other in the club car on the Detroit train.
Union Station in Albany was like a smaller Grand Central: vaulted ceiling, crowds of strangers. No one knew me – I could be whoever I wanted. I loved to try on characters and lives. Once in a restaurant I pretended I was a French student and spoke no English. On a plane I presented myself as a thirty-year-old mother of three; this struck me as glamorous. It was modeled on my sister-in-law Esther, whom I adored.
I bought a ticket for a couchette for $11 and then wandered around with an ice cream cone, people-watching. When no one spoke to me and gave me a chance for role play, I sat in the waiting room with my novel, happy to know I had a date for the night train.
ALBANY UNION STATION
Jamie and I found each other, and went on to the dining car. White tablecloths, stemmed glasses, flowers, and the black night with flashes of light. The waiter was smiling and benevolent, but we didn’t have the nerve to order a drink. Though I wanted a steak, I had a salad. If Jamie saw how I liked to eat, he might think I was fat. Coffee was sophisticated so we ordered two demitasses, but barely drank it, and then made our way through the swaying cars to my couchette.
The couchette was a child’s delight. The seat unfolded into a narrow bed under a big window; the sink unhooked from the wall to cover the toilet. The sleeping car porter had unfolded and made up the bed. We explored all the cunning devices, and then lay on top of the blanket and began to explore each other.
I had a problem. Of course I wanted to go all the way – wasn’t I a proponent of free love? Jamie was as cute as they come, and I could lose my virginity on the night train! But I had my period. I had to tell him before he got past my bra, but then he would think that I thought that he thought…oh dear.
Somehow I told him, and we both agreed we would simply have to stop above the waist. If he had heard of fellatio, he didn’t have the nerve to ask me. So we cuddled and kissed, and for me it was True Love. He’d never seen a bra in full light so I let him examine mine. I showed him how a tampon worked, though I didn’t demonstrate on myself. We tried to sleep for a while, tightly spooned, but the bed was too narrow, and eventually he went back to his coach seat.
I woke in the middle of the night in Canada, warm in my bed, and watched the tall pines rushing past, the snow lit by moonlight. Alone, I could savor every word and kiss and touch, and dream of what would come.
I didn’t see Jamie in the morning, and he was going back to school earlier than I. Maybe there would be a letter when I got back to Abbot. My father met me in Detroit, and we drove to Ann Arbor. I didn’t know a soul there; we had moved from Cambridge just before school started, so I spent a lonely Christmas with my annoying family, waiting for my real life to begin again.
CLUB CAR DINING CAR
After a long three weeks I was on the train again, but this time the club car was full of boring businessmen, so I ordered a Coke and settled in with a novel. A Creep sat down next to me, a balding blonde with a red face and a gray suit. He bought me dinner and two rum and sodas, then followed me to my couchette. I opened the door, slipped inside and closed it securely behind me. I have a clear image of him standing stunned, open-mouthed – but it must be an imaginary memory
I spent the night dreaming, awake and asleep, of Jamie. In the morning I dressed in jeans and a sweater, and went back to the dining car for breakfast The waiter brought me water, offered coffee, and said, “Where’s your friend?” And so completely had I obliterated the Creep from my thoughts, so entirely had my dreams been filled with Jamie, that I said, “Oh, he’s not on this train, he’s traveling tomorrow.”.
Back at school I waited for a letter from him – a week, two weeks – and then it came, on high class cream-colored notepaper, black ink, a small clear script. “I’m glad I met a girl like you.” I puzzled over that line like a biblical scholar, trying to wring from it some pledge. I consulted with my friends – were they words of love or was he calling me a slut? I clung to his closing: Love, Jamie. I wrote him back, pages and pages of witty stories of my Christmas at home, full of scorn for my parents and stupid teachers, warm accounts of after hours revels in the dorm, and probably a bit of poetry.
I never heard from him again. It was a romance as beautiful and brief as a bubble. Charles and Toby’s letters kept coming, and there were more dances, more trains. Jamie was a game, Charles and Toby were games. Men only ceased to be a game when I began raising a son, and realized that these aliens beings were simply human.
I took a train from Jacksonville to New York a few years ago – a nightmare of crying babies, a seat designed to prevent sleep, and a club car full of drunken middle-aged people joking about penis size. Trains aren’t what they used to be, but then, neither am I.
*Fake name of course
