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2003
Chattanooga Times-Free Press Columns by Dana Shavin
Aging Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be, December 7 |
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Somewhere around the middle of
this month, I had another birthday. I say "another" because I just had
one the week prior to that, and, if I remember correctly, a few weeks
before that as well. My mother says that's impossible, because she
refuses to age in a hurry. My life might be a NASCAR track and my days
fast cars, but her life is a slow boat moving backwards through thick
water. How this can be I don't know, but I look forward to the time when
years grind to an almost halt and I am able to slow the process of aging
by my own powers of refusal. My sister made the obligatory call on my big day but didn't catch me in. Most likely I was on my fourth lap around the track, gunning for my next birthday. So she emailed me instead, along with this slightly sarcastic but no less loving birthday message from my niece: "I'm only sixteen. Eat your heart out." It was a screech-to-a-halt kind of comment. What amazed me is not that she is only sixteen, but that she is SIXTEEN, the tiny girl who used to stand on my husband's enormous feet when she was three, glare up at him, and declare that he was the most spoiled person she knew. How could this little being, who introduced me to the unfamiliar world of children, who met me halfway by becoming as articulate at seven as I was at twenty-five, and more well-read a few years later than I will ever be, be sixteen already? A few months ago my sister wrote to say she discovered a paperback hidden under Leah's bed and was thrilled to think it might be a sign that she was finally maturing into a rebellious reader of trashy novels. But alas, it was only The Varieties of Religious Experience. Disappointed, my sister returned the book to its hiding place and wrung her hands. I wrote my niece back. "Forty-two might look a little worse on the outside, but it feels a lot better on the inside." Cruel maybe, but maybe not. What I meant was that in case she secretly feels, as I secretly felt, that her life hinges on teen-specific worries--grades, for example, social standing, or parental conflict that has nothing to do with her--she should relax. Every new lap around the track brings brand new scenery. Some will be prettier, some will be uglier, but overall she'll find it is worth the trip. I'm sure not everyone feels this way, but the further I get from my formative years, the happier I am that they're gone. I remember being Leah's age and staring forlornly out of the school bus window at grown-ups in their cars. They were so lucky, I thought, because they were old, and old people were ungoverned by convention, society, expectations. They were beyond the constraints of other people's rules for behavior and ideas of how you should look and feel. I was wrong about some of that, of course, but I was also right. I do have the freedom to guide my own life within the constraints of allowable behavior. I know I can't steal other peoples' dogs just because I think the dogs will like me better, for example. I can't ban women from wearing stirrup pants should they ever, regrettably, come back into fashion. I can, however, gleefully brush my dog in the kitchen while in my head my mother makes bloodcurdling noises of protestation about the pillows of dog hair in transit to the pots and pans. I can eat dinner at an unheard-of hour if there is something more important I am doing at 6:30. I have to work for a living, but I can do the job I want to do instead of the job that makes sense. I can admit that I was hard to live with as a kid, but I can forgive myself for what wasn't my fault. If I can't stop aging, maybe I can at least enjoy its gifts. Which is what I was really trying to say to Leah: that what looks a little ragged around the edges is much more refined around the heart. Oh, and "So eat YOURS out, kid!" |
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This morning my friend Beth and I
placed the second of the three dogs that found me last month. "Lily," a
tiny puppy found in a chicken house, went to live with a family of four
in north Chattanooga. She left Beth's yard yawning in the arms of her
new dad. A few days ago, "Ladybug," the beagle found with Lily, went to
a home in Flintstone, and by next week, "Chase," the dog plucked from
the intersection of 20th and Broad, will have been with her
new family on Signal Mountain for several days. I exhale with guarded relief. For the moment, I am stray-free, and I can feel my life come back to me in pieces. The things that bothered me pre-Chase, Lily and Ladybug are mere shadows now: the sadness I had about a show I was rejected from, the envy I felt when I read a writer friend's short story, the worry I had about a project that seemed destined to fail. Because I don't have children, it takes a different kind of devotion to keep my life events in perspective. In my case, when the going gets rough, needy dogs appear. Providing for them takes precedence, and once they are safely taken care of--fed, vetted, re-homed, or kept--I begin to remember what life was like before them. As I am waxing eloquent on the virtues of commitment, patience, and trust in the dog-placement process, my husband interrupts to remind me that I learned none of these things. "It's all about relaxing your grip and letting things take their course," I say. My husband reminds me that I boarded a wave of depression and rode it for three weeks until all the dogs were placed. "Well then it's about not getting bent out of shape and expecting the worst to happen," I offer. My husband reminds me that I cried for a week and then confessed to an escalating terror that centered around the irrational belief that these three docile, sweet-natured dogs would, out of frustrated homelessness, grow to despise us. He recounts for me how, four years ago, I worried that Shark, the tiny potato-shaped Cocker Spaniel I found at a Conoco station, might eventually live up to his name. Never mind that he was named for the golfer and not the fish--I actually believed he might one day look up from where he slept (on my chest, wrapped in a binkie) and declare war on Mommy. None of these scenarios, need I mention, has ever come to pass. If I've learned anything it's that we--neither people nor dogs--never really know where we're going, or what we'll find when we get there. The path we walk is more like an ocean, directionally infinite and lacking clear markers. Four years ago when Shark went to that Conoco station to scavenge for food, he found a new home. When I went to the Conoco for gas, I found a hungry dog. When my husband came home to eat, he found an anxious wife holding a potato-shaped dog and pacing the kitchen where dinner wasn't cooking. Which makes me think I just need to make my best guess as to where I'm headed, but be prepared to wind up somewhere else. Now that the strays are placed and it's just my husband and me and our two dogs, I think about what Lily, Ladybug, and Chase left us with. In my yard and Beth's there are empty runs and piles of straw. There are multiple holes of notable depth where Chase thought she smelled a mole. Every dog blanket I own is dirty from its parade around the yard, flying like a flag from a dog's mouth. There are other, less tangible legacies as well: the show I wanted to be in has come and gone, and I am no longer sad. The envy I felt over the story I wanted to have written has faded. The project destined to fail is soaring. Since you never know exactly where you're headed, it seems like the best thing to do is appreciate where you are. This is what a yawning dog in unfamiliar arms knows best, and what I could stand to learn over and over again. |
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The story of how I ended up in a
goat pen wearing my new Steve Madden bowling-style shoes really begins
with the story of the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah, as it is called,
arrives in the strange nether-month of September. It floats in softly on
the smell of my mother's oven-roasted brisket, bathed in a tomatoey
promise of redemption and renewal. Rosh Hashanah is followed a week
later by Yom Kippur, the dreaded Day of Atonement, which requests that,
along with meditating upon and feeling terrible about the previous
year's sins, you also refrain from eating and drinking for twenty-five
hours. I can remember pestering my mother about the particulars of
fasting when I was younger: "What if, while I am brushing my teeth, some toothpaste slips down my gullet? Is that a sin? What if I am crossing the desert on Yom Kippur and just as I am about to die of thirst someone offers me water? Can I drink it? Can I chew gum if I promise not to swallow my saliva?" And later, as an adult, I wondered if it would be ok if I just skipped breakfast and cut back drastically on my cigarettes, from thirty to ten, as long as I promised to still feel very bad about my previous year's indiscretions. Clearly, I was not up to snuff on the spirit of the law. I don't think fasting was intended to be punishment, though it is hard to understand this when you are ten, or at any age, really, when you are hungry. Fasting, if I have this correct, isn't penance, but is what allows you to do penance. It removes the distraction of everyday worries by focusing your immediate attention on the here and now, so that you will concentrate on how you have sinned and how you will clean up your act. Truthfully, the older I get the less I fast. I atone for the sin of not fasting by calling my mother, who does fast, and wishing her a happy new year. Her hungry mood and disappointment in how Jewish I am not feels a lot like punishment. In addition to fasting less I also have begun to think that the lines between atonement and redemption are blurred at best. This Rosh Hashanah, as my husband and I were driving to Atlanta for a date with the aforementioned brisket, the cell phone rang. It was Chattanooga Animal Services, and they were not calling to wish me a happy new year. "We caught your dog," said the officer on the line. My heart did a triple axel. "My" dog was a stray I had been unable to catch myself at the corner of Broad and 20th Street. My husband and I had tried for two days to lure her to us with canned food and earnest promises of redemption and renewal. She had stared at us with the narrowed, untrusting eyes of a dog not accustomed to a world of humans. This Rosh Hashanah morning, however, she was finally in safe custody. We went to Atlanta with an edgy uncertainty--how we would take care of this needy dog--but also with the warm feeling that we had led her gently into her own new year. Three days later, faced with the task of finding newly spayed and vaccinated "Chase" a home, I passed an abandoned chicken house just in time to see a tiny face peeking out. I got out of the car, and when I did a squirrel-sized puppy ran out to greet me, followed by a second slightly larger puppy. I sat down in the grass and looked up to the sky in the vicinity of where I thought God might be standing. "Is this my punishment for never fasting on Yom Kippur?" I waited for an answer as two ecstatic young lives explored the folds of my clothes and the length of my hair with muddy paws and teeth sharpened to points. My dog family had suddenly exploded from two to five, and I struggled to understand what I had done to deserve this overdose of stress. Later that morning, stomping around my friend Beth's goat pen-turned-puppy pen, I looked sadly down at my newly purchased, newly muddied Steve Madden shoes, and I thought again about atonement and redemption. The fact is, this Jewish new year three needy lives crashed through the roof of mine, and in spite of the fact that I feel burdened, I know that I must not call their luck my punishment. Maybe the lines between atonement and redemption are blurred because they are one and the same thing. Maybe I do not fast but am visited by dogs, and maybe this makes them not my problem but my opportunity. Maybe in the spirit of providing, I am provided for. Maybe this is my redemption. |
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Last month my husband and I
celebrated our two-year anniversary. It's a small accomplishment, not
the kind of anniversary, I discovered, that wins you any real points.
Last year when I announced to a friend that it was my one-year
anniversary we both burst out laughing. One year is so unremarkable in
the lifetime of a marriage that drawing attention to it is like
announcing that you've just inhaled. People take it for granted that
you'll make it at least a couple of years. Most people anyway. On the eve of our second anniversary my husband said, "Can you believe we made it this long? " Which struck me, again, as funny. He said it like a man in the midst of a harrowing adventure. It's not that we fight. Or disagree on the important things, like Mueslix, a dog in the bed, and the empty spot Soledad left that NBC can't fill. It's that marriage is a big scary hole into which you throw yourself along with another person, and hope that, by virtue of your love, the scary hole will become more like a cozy enclave. It's that the little piece of paper that wasn't going to change anything changes everything, practically retroactively. It's just what happens. It's not the kind of thing you can explain to a young couple on the rosy precipice of marriage, or for that matter to yourself at age 39 and on the verge of legalizing your 13-year love affair. You think you know what you're getting into when you marry, but you do not know. One thing marriage changes, for example, is your right to run away. You can no longer make grand, door-slamming exits because unless you follow it with a grand, door-slamming divorce, you must, at some hour, return home. Even if you've never made such an exit -- even if such an exit is beneath you, it's likely that, finding yourself married, you will have an almost immediate urge to leave a room occupied by your spouse in just such a way, only because you can't. Knowing you can't will make you insane. Marriage changes your right to eat ice cream straight from the carton with a hot knife. Even if you've married the kind of person who is willing to wield his own knife over the mocha almond, you cannot permit a spouse to watch this activity because it's strange enough to do it and stranger still to allow witnesses. This too will make you insane. Marriage changes your right to decorate exclusively with Human League posters and things you drew in high school. This, alone, will not make you insane, unless your spouse's taste runs to the formal, in which case this will make you twice as insane in half the time. Marriage changes your right to adopt every dog that glances in your direction, including the ones that already have homes. It puts limits on the size of your anticipated animal-family, under the auspices of protecting you from heartache, worry and financial ruin. This you think will make you insane, but, strangely, makes you saner. Marriage changes your right to skip your vitamins just because they're so big. It changes your right to be unable to cope, too tired to care, too angry to speak and too messy to live with. Marriage changes your right to let the yard go one more week without mowing because you live on a deadend road and only you will see it. In spite of the changes our lives have undergone at the random hand of marriage, my husband and I have weathered well, I think. I have found that while marriage removes certain rights to selfishness, it replaces what it takes with a bottomless generosity. Marriage demands, in the best way possible, that you talk about what bothers you for as long as it takes. It allows for mistakes in judgment, poorly chosen words and time-limited sulking. Most importantly perhaps, marriage loves intensely and without restraint what marriage brings home together. In this way, the sum of our parts has proven greater than the whole of either of us. So here's hoping for two more eye-opening, life-changing years -- and if it isn't too much to ask, maybe just a few more dogs. |
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My husband thinks we're moving to
Key West. It's a wishful delusion borne of one art show trip to the tiny
island last February. He realized that while most of the United States
cowers under a frosty four to six month blanket of winter, there exists
an entire collection of people who haven't felt a chill in decades.
While we are breaking ice on dog bowls in December, all of Key West is
dining al fresco and collectively fanning itself in the face. The
contrast alone sends shivers. It may have been the first time I fully grasped the concept of equatorial proximity. While I knew from watching Willard Scott that weather varies--sometimes drastically--from region to region, I never really "got it" until I went to one of the more enviable regions during unenviable times at home. Having gotten a taste of summer in February, I am forever doomed to pine in winter. Sometimes knowledge isn't a good thing. But we aren't moving. The fact that the cost of living in Key West per month is roughly our combined semi-annual income is one reason. But the main reason we aren't moving, there or anywhere, is because I have just learned my way around Chattanooga. And even if Key West is only two miles wide by four miles long, that's roughly eight square miles in which to drive around aimlessly looking for the grocery store. Geography has never been my stronghold. "Do the opposite of what your instincts tell you," my husband suggests, apropos of a Seinfeld moment when it dawns on George that if every instinct he's ever had is wrong, doing the opposite must be right. This means I must turn left out of the bathroom at Lowe's even though a strong magnetic force field and even my center of balance is pulling me right. It means that when I leave a store in the mall I must not go the way my body cries out to go or else I will pass all of the stores I've already passed. It means when I leave my booth at a large art show to walk around, I must take with me, on a little slip of paper, my own booth number and a pen to map my route, because sometimes I can't keep up with which way I'm not supposed to go. My husband, who has faith in me despite the evidence, makes me the navigator on trips. It's flattering but ultimately time-consuming. It requires numerous impromptu stops on the side of the road to fine-tune our progress. "Remember," he says, gently taking the map from my hands, "blue lines are major highways, not rivers." It doesn't help that I have a nephew who, at eight, is a geographical genius. Last Passover he spent all of the Seder biting his matzo crackers into the shapes of geographically correct states. "Look," he said, "Here's Maine. Could I have some more matzo? I need to make Louisiana along with its outpost isles." When I was his age I lived in fear my school's Geography Workbook. In it were pages and pages of maps with tiny superimposed pictures of corn cobs, wheat stalks, people in funny outfits, and unknowable lines and symbols that I surmised either had something to do with Willard Scott's weather systems or were cryptic gang messages that somehow snuck into print. Incredibly, as if the maps weren't confusing enough, there were questions about them. We were to somehow glean relevant answers from the meaningless juxtaposition of corn cobs, wheat stalks, and lines. As I remember, the words "import" and "export" figured prominently in the questions, but the answers were as perplexing to me as why in the world we build major highways under rivers. I'm starting to wonder if it's a psychological thing. If a sense of direction has less to do with getting around physically than it does with knowing where you're headed emotionally. As I ponder this I think about what a better idea it would have been to have a Life Workbook instead of a Geography Workbook. How the shifting commodities of everyday life--love and trust, fulfillment and charity, negativity and healing, self-determination and faith--have always been more important than weather systems and the size of Greenland. It's hard to bite a cracker into the shape of the human condition, but sometimes finding my way is harder. |
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"I'm an artist," I hear myself
tell someone, and I have to admit it sounds silly even to me. "But
wait," I want to say, "there's more! I used to have a real job! The kind
that makes you cry every morning and smoke till your face turns gray!
That's right, I had a respectable job!" There are good things to be said about real jobs, of course. For one thing, they pay you for your time, even though you spend four of every eight hours at work scouring the Yellow Pages for new career ideas. And they are a shortcut to intimacy. People make inferences about other people based on what they do, which cuts unnecessary time off of having to actually communicate. The thing about artists is they enjoy a kind of glamour that, say, envelope stuffers and telemarketers do not. Read on if you don't believe it. I'm sitting across from my booth at the first of twelve outdoor shows of the season. I'm a little frayed around the edges. It was a fourteen hour drive to Miami pulling a U-Haul trailer that bucked and kicked in protest of changing lanes. It's a "dolly to your spot" show and the handtruck has a flat tire. I am, of course, constipated, and I am four days into the wearing of a foam and metal splint on my right middle finger, which is broken, swollen, and pointing helplessly at nothing. Still, I'm hopeful. With any luck, two years from now I'll have full range of motion in the finger, and for now, I'm not hungry and it isn't raining. Four hours later, I am toying with the idea that I am not visible to the human eye. No one has walked into my booth, but ten people have walked into my chair. Just as I am entertaining myself by thinking of all the ways I could test my theory of invisibility (scratch myself in unusual places, start an argument with my shoe) a woman in a long flowing skirt approaches me purposefully. I smile warmly, sit up straight, and prepare to engage in a discussion of my paintings. At last! Instead she looks admiringly at my crooked finger. "I'm a huge fan of splints," she croons, cradling her face in her palms. "Can I look at yours?" I see she is wearing a rubberized contraption on her wrist, but that her fingers appear to be fine. It's clear I've attracted not an art lover but a lover of infirmity. Still, a tiny sleep-deprived corner of my brain is actually considering the possibility that while her admitted fascination lies in corrective devises, she could have an underlying penchant for huge, brightly colored paintings on plywood, and if I play my cards right, she might buy one. So, to my finger's horror, I take off my splint and hand it to her. In fact she did not buy a painting. She did not even look at a painting. Maybe didn't even know she was at an art show. She slipped the splint onto one of her many healthy fingers, and admired it as if it were an engagement ring. Utterly purposeless conversation ensued, and then thankfully, she handed back my splint and moved on. It's enough to send an otherwise ego-intact artist to therapy upon her return to town. "I'm a failure," I say, and secretly it feels good to admit it. "What's happening?" asks the therapist. "My art career is coming to an end," I say, not undramatically. "I mean it this time. I've been rejected from four shows this week, I haven't painted a good painting in two, maybe three years, and I'm constipated. I am coming to terms with the fact that I really don't have what it takes to be an artist and I am really, finally, OK with that." "Then why are you here?" "I just wanted you to know." I talk some more about how I plan to spend the next week cleaning out my studio and giving my paintbrushes away. When I am finished, the trusty therapist suggests that The End of my art career comes with amazing regularity. That it is always heartbreaking, always temporary, and always followed by an upswing. Ultimately, she sends me back to the studio to paint. But I am no longer able to paint, and so I dwell on that for some large number of hours. Eventually, maybe the next day, I pick up a paintbrush I haven't packed away to Goodwill. Incredibly, I paint a flower I can live with. And then I paint another. Over the next several days I build canvases and sketch and paint like someone who might not be a failure. I reserve the U-Haul-It for the next show and try to eat more roughage. The finger is healing and so is the heart. And if that isn't glamorous, I don't know what is. |
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The longer I live
the stranger I feel. I blame this on my parents of course, because
that's what you do when you major in psychology, get lots of therapy,
and ultimately decide, in what you proudly call your moment of clarity,
to discard that whole nonsense about personal responsibility. The fact
is, I am not like any other women I know. Which leads me to believe
that, forty-one years ago when my genetic map was in the works, crucial
information about how to be forty and female was mysteriously withheld.
Hence this unusual land I inhabit, somewhere between a twelve year-old
girl's barely extant sense of propriety and an old man's appreciation of
women who do not cry on his shoulder. I've known I was odd for some time. I was the only thirteen year-old girl at a friend's Bar Mitzvah dance to show up in jeans and hiking boots; I turned down baby sitting jobs because by age fifteen I could no longer relate to anyone so much as a month younger than I; at twenty-five I was stunned and confused when friends started to marry. None of which interfered in any significant way with my life; rather these were harbingers of strange habits to come, weird ways I would announce to the world that I am a middle-aged freak, owing, as I mentioned, to a failure of genetics. When my husband and I got engaged, both of us on the cusp of forty, his mother announced she would like to be the one to give us silverware. "But we already have silverware," I said to my husband-to-be, in the privacy of the house we had been sharing, amidst silverware, for a decade. "She wants to get us real silverware," he explained. "Nice stuff." "But we have silverware," I said, thinking that repeating myself would drive the important fact home, and remove from my life the pointless and mind-numbing chore of picking out utensils I already had in great number. My husband said he would tell his mother we didn't really need silverware. "Pick out silverware!" she growled, in the same tone of voice someone might order, "Get out of the car!" or "Put up yer dukes!" She added that we should also pick out dishes, even though we already had some of those, too. And so we made the pilgrimage to Pottery Barn, where we picked out enough silverware to host a ten-day non-stop multi-generational family get-together. I banished my pre-existing silverware to the floor of my closet like a stash of illicit love letters I would later be comforted to visit in private. Along with a failure to understand silverware, I also miss the point of gardens. A few years ago, I plopped a tomato plant in the ground, which prompted my husband to suggest that we fill in with some flowers. "Flowers?" I said, in the same uncomprehending tone with which I would later deny a need for silverware. "You know, tulips, zinnias, daffodils…" my husband said. I thought about my tomatoes and the point of growing them. "But you can't eat flowers," I said, a comment I would regret almost as soon as I made it. Recently I was at a friend's house with some other women near my age. As we approached the garden for a tour, I could feel my anxiety start to rise. I gazed out over the vast sea of color but there was nothing I recognized except a cat and a bench. I racked my brain for a descriptive adjective, but not knowing the language of foliage, I was at a loss. My friends all had elaborate input about the things they were seeing; they tossed around the names of flowers and groundcover, discussed the rates at which things grew or did not grow, and spoke knowingly about sun and shade, beneficial insects, dead-heading and design issues. I stared helplessly at the cat on the bench. At forty and female I should have words for spiritual spaces like gardens. More importantly, I should have feelings for them. Instead I am a kid in hiking boots at a dressy party. I can see the problem but I can't seem to fix it. When we came in from the garden, my friends stopped to admire the china cabinet. My anxiety spiked again. I thought back to my trip to Pottery Barn, the one that had yielded enough silverware to feed a nation but only two plates and two bowls. Some things you just can't force. Dishware--owning or appreciating it--is one of those things. Having the qualities you always thought you should have is another. |
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Ever since I can
remember, I wanted to grow up and live on a farm. It was a strange dream
to my mother, who lived out her childhood in a high-rise in New York
City, and raised her own family in Atlanta. My father, born and raised
in Chattanooga, understood the calling a little better. Long after he
died I learned that, as a child, the Chickamauga Battlefield had been
one of his favorite playgrounds. There were no animals to tend or
gardens to grow, but it was rolling pastureland, which, in my mind, made
it a farm waiting to happen. In my childhood farm fantasy, I was the steward of horses, dogs, and chickens. A farm was what I dreamed about as my peers matured into people considering marriage and children. It was the thing that would complete me, accompanying me into adulthood and old age with both permanence and freedom. Let the city dwellers suffer houses stacked like dominoes and the view into someone else's back yard. On a farm, life is a very individual thing. When I was in my thirties, I bought a house with a few acres of pasture. Like my father's battlefield, I saw it as a farm waiting to happen. I moved in with my dogs and soon added two horses. All I lacked was a passel of chickens. Recently I went to work on my husband. "Chickens," I began, "would give us fresh eggs. They eat bugs, and they're a natural alarm clock." We had been to an art show in Key West a few months earlier and he'd gotten a kick out of the free roaming chickens. I planned to bring them up in my argument, if necessary. My husband, who grew up on a real farm, did consider the idea for a full nanosecond. Ultimately, however, he felt that chickens were a bad idea. I would want to name them, he said, and once I named them I would want to bring them in during a storm. I was heartbroken. "How about a goat then?" I asked. Before I could extol the virtues of goats, none of which I actually knew but was prepared to make up on the spot, my husband nixed this idea as well. "What about chickens then?" I said. It was the ancient bait and switch trick, but with a twist. My husband dropped his head and shook it in resignation, which I took to mean victory was mine. I called my friends with the excess chickens and told them to bring our birds. Last Saturday evening the chickens arrived. It turns out my friends were only able to snare a couple of roosters, but I didn't care. We set them free in the pasture and watched them strut. As I tossed around names in my head, I realized that my childhood vision of farm life had slipped happily into place around me. I had chickens. My life was complete. It turns out that, as I was extolling the virtues of chicken ownership to my husband, I overlooked a few crucial facts. For example, roosters, best known in storybooks for announcing dawn, do not, outside of storybooks, understand the concept of time. To a rooster, when dawn will arrive is anyone's guess. This means that a rooster can and will crow pretty much ceaselessly throughout the whole day, and by crow I mean screech and by day I mean night too. The first night of chicken ownership I was awakened by what sounded like my two roosters standing on either side of my pillow and announcing loudly to one another, across the abyss of my face, that dawn was arriving. It was 2:40 a.m. Five minutes later, dawn arrived again, and five minutes later, again. Dawn arrived so many times that first night that by the time it really was dawn I was so exhausted I overslept. And another thing about roosters. If the neighbors really did warn us, as my husband insists they did, that not only are roosters disruptive and dismissive of time but they also wreak havoc on gardens, I don't remember it. As it turns out, they are as much an enemy of spring lettuce as they are of sleep. Now I lay awake in the wee hours, mourning the fate of my arugula. In the morning I will find it yanked from its bed in the service of a worm-crazed rooster with another announcement to make. Suffice it to say, none of this entered into my childhood vision of farm life. Perhaps I'll bundle up these roosters and take them to some other unsuspecting city girl with country dreams. |
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A couple of weeks
ago my husband and I drove to Atlanta to have lunch with my mother. At
the time, war was heavy on our minds, and I was struggling with
something like survivor guilt, acutely aware of the fact that while I
paint and write stories, soldiers half my age were sleeping with guns
and hoping to make it home. Overhead in the dark restaurant, a
television broadcast urgent updates; below we struggled to see each
others' faces in the flickering light. It occurred to me that it had
been this way for weeks, maybe even months: everything we did, we did in
the shadow of war, in every face we saw, there was the same flicker of
uncertainty. When we got home that evening, there was a message on our answering machine: my uncle's small dog, confused and ill, had run off three nights earlier. He was too feeble to get far and yet they could not find him; hours into their search it began to seem as though he had simply disappeared. The following morning my husband and I went to my uncle's house where we split up into a search force of two. We understood that a body was what we were looking for, of a dog that had followed the message of instinct: to go away from home and die quietly in the woods. For two hours my husband and I peered under bushes, sheds, and houses. We squatted and squinted in the damp cool underbrush where every now and then a thin shaft of sunlight teased its way through the tangle of vines. We willed the little dog's dead body to show itself in the dimness, to reveal itself for what it was: the end of hope for two people whose lives had, for twelve years, wound inextricably around his. Our search turned up nothing. We sat with my uncle and aunt in their kitchen for a while, and talked about things other than the dog. When we left we took with us a pool of grief that spilled over into the vessel in which I am collecting sorrows for the still-young year: my sister-in-law lost both of her parents in February; I marked the fifteenth anniversary of my father's death; the after-effects of war dominate the airwaves; reporter David Bloom, a trusted and reassuring face of the news, died suddenly, mid-life. If the world can claim its most vibrant in the same breath it claims its ailing, then how do we know which goodbye to say when we are simply headed to work? Add to these aches the weight of a small dog missing, and a boat close to sinking takes on water. In reading about the effects of negative events on our lives, I came across the following quote in this month's Harper's: "The arrow fits exactly in the wounds." Borrowing Kafka's words, the essay suggests that our consciousness of events that will change us predates the events themselves. I think about this and about my vessel of sorrows, about how it is that, for me anyway, grief begets grief. Sorrow erodes me; it builds new paths on top of old ones that already can't contain its spoils. After that, how easy for the twisted campaigns of fear and despair to find a toehold in the downward shifting sands. In a sense, they were already there. Three weeks into it, the war has ended and the dry whisper of summer is in the air. Beneath a canopy of trees I mow a path through our pasture so my own dogs can find their way. While I am outside, my uncle calls with incredible news: their dog is back home, nearly two weeks after he was lost, thanks to the kindness of a stranger who found him wandering. His voice on the phone is joyful, even as it breaks with the emotion of disbelief. When I come in from the field, I listen to his extraordinary message, and smile for the first time in what seems like weeks. Somewhere inside me, a rocking boat stills itself. |
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Last night my
husband informed me he is writing a book. I had a few questions right
off the bat: Was the book about me, loosely based on me, or inspired by
me? And if not, could I be written in? Because the simple fact is, if
I'm going to suffer the drama, the upheaval, and the teeth-gnashing that
is required of me while he languidly spills his prose, then I at least
want to be immortalized. As it turns out, the book is not about me. In fact, the "book" is really just an idea for a book. But it's a great idea and I think that, even if he can't figure out how to make me the heroine, he should write it. The title of it is Are You Happy Yet? and it's about how we are forever upping the stakes of happiness, usually at the expense of enjoying our lives in the moment. He got the idea from his uncle, who emailed him to say his forty-eight year-old son-in-law Greg had taken a job in the frozen Midwest tundra "but only for eight years," after which he would be able to retire "and really enjoy his life." Granted, age fifty-six is not too old to start enjoying yourself. Some might argue is it precisely the time to start--kids are grown and gone, you have more financial freedom, and presumably you've already required the requisite toys of your forties, including a large screen TV and a Dremmel tool. But it begs the question my husband's book seeks to address: is happiness really just down the road for Greg? Or is it a fictitious construct invented by a society invested in making us work harder and longer for elusive, never-to materialize rewards? My husband's best-seller would argue that happiness is available for the taking, by any one of us, right here and now. When I was in my teens, my sister and I had one goal in our lives: to find what we lovingly called "the perfect pair of jeans." Granted this was not a high-level goal like gaining early admission to Georgia Tech but neither was it simple. The perfect pair of jeans weren't just flare-legged, form-fitting, strategically faded hip-huggers with a 34 inch inseam reasonably priced at $16.99. That would have been easy. The jeans we sought were veritable prophets, divining for us the complex riddles of age thirteen to eighteen. These jeans would grow us up, make us popular, make us thin, and make us scholarly. Because this was such a hard-working pair of jeans, we combed the racks at TJ Maxx for years, trying on and casting off the ones that only made us thin, for example, or a little bit scholarly. Sadly, we never found the perfect pair of jeans. As you might have guessed, the ones we sought didn't come in a 34 inch inseam, only a 32. And so we were destined to forever seek but never find fulfillment. It's everywhere, this promise of nirvana just around the bend, and it begins when we're little (if only I had a Tommy Tunes karaoke Sing-Along set, THEN I'd be happy), continues through our teenage years (if I only had an MTV contract, THEN I'd be happy), and it hardly wanes in adulthood (if only I could retire on my salary as the rock star I never was, THEN I'd be happy). The problem is if we actually get one of the things we think will ice our cake, then we change the flavor our preferred icing. "Are you happy yet?" the world asks us, to which we reply, "Sort of, but if I only had (you fill in the blank) THEN I'd really be happy." I still do it. In spite of what I know about the myth of contentment just around the corner, I often find myself at TJ Maxx scanning the racks for those prophetic jeans. I'm pretty sure that if I keep looking, I'll find them, especially since I am now willing to settle for a 32 inch inseam. Sometimes though, when I come home from work and the dog with no tail is wagging his rear to beat the band, the forsythia is in bloom, the writing is going well, and the house doesn't smell too bad, it will hit me: I may not be scholarly and I may not be privy to cosmic secrets, but if I'll stop scanning the horizon for something else, I'll see that, in this moment, I am wearing the perfect pair of jeans. |
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In the last three
years, I have done some things I thought I would never do. I sold my
beloved old pick-up truck, home to so many memories of my road to forty.
I bought soy milk, got married, and invested in a good moisturizer. I
got political. I got gray. But most surprising is this: I got fitness.
I am a work-out geek. My earliest memory of exercise is at about age eight, trailing along behind my mother and her best friend as they made their daily three mile trek down our road and back again, arms swinging mightily at their sides as they worked out the weighty issues in their lives. I kept up only when the conversation turned interesting, which is to say whenever I heard my name mentioned. Other than that I was more concerned with the slap-slap of my own bare feet against the pavement and the speed at which a cherry Kool-pop melts in its little plastic sleeve on a hot summer day. Like most of my female friends, I grew into an almost immediate dislike for high school Phys. Ed. I despised trading my bell bottoms and peasant shirts for the fitness equivalent of a sports onesie, an all-in-one polyester shorts-and-top set that did no favors for the figure of a young teenager who had seen a few too many Kool-pops. I detested running endless cramp-inducing laps around the edge of the low-lying soccer field in the cold morning air, then lining up ankle-deep in dew to learn to shoot a bow-and-arrow or throw a shot-put, as if these were skills I might someday fall back on. My senior year, when both P.E. and Math were no longer required, I gleefully folded my shorts onesie into a tiny square, tucked it into my Applied Geometry textbook, and said goodbye to organized exercise and right angles forever. Or so I thought. Five years into real life and stressed out at work, I re-entered the world of exercise to help myself cope. I found a night job cleaning a large horse barn, and for ten happy years toiled nightly in the underworld of manure and wood shavings. When I moved away I bought a treadmill and set it up in my living room, but eleven minutes into my first run I was so bored I considered the possibility that my thoughts were being systematically destroyed by the magnetic field underneath the rotating mat. No amount of pulsating techno rock or Seinfeld re-runs could make my time spent on the treadmill any less dull and so I switched to walking my road at night, which was slightly less boring but dark half the year. I then went to walking the Walnut Street Bridge at lunch, but this winter when it got so cold, I did the unthinkable. I dug my sports onesie out of my Geometry book and did a 360. I joined a fitness club. If you are new to the indoor fitness scene, it is easy to think that you are the least athletic person in the building, and that the penalty for your lack of athleticism is fit people staring at you. I have since discovered, however, that the walls in the weight room are mirrored, and that for the most part people stare at their own reflection while they work out. If you have never seen what you look like lying face down on a sweat-covered bench struggling to lift forty pounds with the backs of your ankles, you understand how it is that other people cease to command attention. It is because it is endlessly fascinating to watch your own body agonize under the weight of disuse, all the while dressed in something you ordinarily reserve for sleeping alone or sick days. Sometimes when I am working out I think back to high school and those daily treks to the field where my body would be called upon to do what it most didn't want to do: jog, sprint, jump, swing a golf club, insert itself between a flying ball and a net, just to name a few. It's no wonder that it took so many years to join the ranks of the fit-by-choice. Hopefully this work-out routine will stick. And if they ever declare math the great anti-aging tonic, I suppose you'll find me in front of the mirror flexing my calf muscles and doing long-division on the insides of my biceps. |
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There's a reason
Charles Schultz was one of the most influential writers of our time.
Through his characters he spoke plainly in language we all "got," on one
level or another. As a child I was taken by the thoughtful musings of an
irreverent long-eared dog, while as a teenager and adult I found myself
increasingly identifying with the angst-ridden little bald guy. One of
my favorite exchanges between Charlie Brown and Linus went like this: Linus: I guess it's wrong to always be worrying about tomorrow. Maybe we should think only about today. Charlie Brown: No, that's giving up. I'm still hoping that yesterday will get better. Shultz had an uncanny way of illuminating what was on our minds and in our hearts and making it palatable the way a dream imparts information to us in code: with such subtlety you hardly know you've been spoken to. This morning my husband and I were talking about how our lives have changed since 9-11. I said I had had, for the past year and-a-half, a vague sense of disbelief and of doom. I say vague not because I am not clear about what I doubt and fear, but because there is a part of me--the Charlie Brown part, I suppose--that is still hoping the events of 9-11 might un-happen. It's ridiculous, I know. Cartoonish. And yet who doesn't, in his dreams, wish to awaken from a reality that suddenly feels too harsh, too unbearable, too real? I remember that when I was young what scared me most was the thought of growing old. I wondered, in a horrified, helpless sort of way, how old people could stand it. What was left for them, I wondered, at forty, fifty, and beyond? On the surface they seemed to still enjoy the particulars of their lives--work, a beautiful day, a trip to the beach--but as their looks faded and their gait slowed and their clothes lost that trendy edge, I simply could not fathom how they carried on with any sense of purpose. In Charles Shultz's world, adults didn't even have a voice, much less a visual presence. This is what I thought my fate would be once childhood deposited me, fully grown, outside the fold: I would be rendered useless, voiceless, invisible. I would spend the rest of my life longing to un-do the cruel past that had relegated me to a seemingly futureless future. To my grateful relief and surprise, the future, now that I'm here, looks a lot less like a dead-end road than it did thirty years ago. Even with everything that's happened in the past year and-a-half, even with the frightening specter of war hanging overhead, even with my childish desire to somehow change for the world what's already been mourned, still I am beginning to see how it is you can age without feeling that the years only take away. Thankfully, time grants the gift of perspective. Without that, our progression through the years would be little more than the colorless romp I originally expected it would be. So I am thinking Charlie Brown was right. That the idea isn't, like they taught me in yoga, in therapy, in meditation, to simply live in the present. Maybe the little bald guy was onto something when he advocated against leaving the past in the past. Even if yesterday doesn't bear repeating, how can it not bear reconsidering? When I look at it this way, I see that the things that happen in my private and public world enjoy a kind of timeless reflexivity, enriching and informing not only what happens next but what happened before as well. Because the ladder of our days requires that we climb first upon all earlier days, it is easy to see where Charlie Brown might have been going with this. We should keep alive the tragedies and the triumphs of yesterday because the wisdom of tomorrow depends upon them. If Charlie Brown had ever gotten to be forty-one, he might have said it this way: while you can't actually improve on yesterday, yesterday, if you let it, can improve on you. |
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Because I have kept journals since
I was twelve years old, I have a record of every major and minor
decision I have made in my lifetime. If you have the capacity to forgive
yourself, this kind of record-keeping is invaluable. If you do not, it
is best never to open such documents. The truth can shame you or it can
change you, but if you write it down, it can never be completely lost on
you. On a certain day in my twelfth year I made the decision to hop on my horse and go for a ride. It was the same decision I had made almost every other day that year, except on that particular one, I made the decision to do it helmet-less and bareback. Along a narrow strip of road in a woodsy north Atlanta neighborhood, I nudged my horse into a gallop, oblivious to what lay ahead: a stop sign obscured by tree leaves that neither my horse nor I would see until we ran headlong into it. My journal entry that day was written by my older sister, and it is a list of answers to questions I could not remember asking, and so asked over and over: "You are in West Paces Ferry Hospital ICU," she wrote. "You fell off your horse and hit your head on the pavement. You have a concussion but you'll be home in a few days." As promised, I went home three days later, a line of nylon stitches sticking out of my sore head. While I had come to no conclusions about the accident, my parents had. They concluded that I would always wear a helmet when I rode my horse. I still do. Sometimes it takes the obvious to make you do the obvious. On a certain day in my eighteenth year, I made another ill-fated decision. I decided that, since I was in college, it was time I learned to smoke. My reasons made perfect sense: I would look older, people would respect me, and I might lose the ten pounds I had gained over the preceding year. I could hardly wait to begin. I decided to start by rolling my own tobacco. I did this, according to my journal, because it was labor intensive, and I believed that if I made smoking effortful, I would not become addicted. I would also (I wrote) not smoke in places where people might look askance at someone rolling something and then smoking it. This meant I would not smoke in restaurants, shopping malls, or the homes of people who didn't know me. My journal reports that my tobacco-rolling days lasted only about two months, because, just as I had thought, it was effortful. Too effortful. I would replace rolling my own tobacco with purchasing Marlboro Lights, "but only from machines," I wrote, "which will make them harder to buy impulsively." That plan was sacked the first day I found myself without quarters. It was then that I drafted my final and most successful plan: I would purchase any kind of cigarettes from anywhere and smoke as much as I wanted everywhere I went. This one stuck. By the time I was nineteen, I was a two pack a day smoker, and this I would remain for fourteen years. At age thirty-two, with roughly twenty-five journals and 200,000 cigarettes under my belt, I finally came to a new conclusion. My father had died of cancer six years earlier; my mother had survived cancer but not without sacrificing important organs in the battle. My workplace had banned smoking indoors. One day I found myself standing behind a very ugly building in very ugly weather sucking down my fifth cigarette of the hour in the company of people I did not care for. Ignoring the signals to quit smoking was like throwing myself head-first off a horse in the middle of a busy street. I went home and told my journal I was finally getting out of the road. The next day I called my doctor and got a prescription for the Patch. The day after that, I had my first cigarette-less day in fourteen years. That was 1993. The thing about smoking, and not smoking, is this: when I smoked, I was just smoking. But when I quit, I made a decision that, unbeknownst to me, would change the direction of the rest of my life. I discovered that I couldn't give up cigarettes and keep everything else the same. I wound up quitting a lot of things that had been bothering me: I quit my job. I quit living in dumps. I quit hanging out with people I didn't like just to have smoking partners. Most importantly, I quit thinking that I didn't have choices in the important matters of my life. In short, I envisioned a new life story, and in return, I am rewritten. |