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2004
Chattanooga Times-Free Press Columns by Dana Shavin History Repeats Itself and So Does Dad, November 21 Sometimes Ignoring Signs of Change is Good for You, October 10 Discovering your roots when you least expect it, August 29 What I Did on my Summer Vacation, July 18 Fortune Cookies Tell it Like it Is, June 20 House-hunting Leads to Heart-finding, May 23 Sometimes the Worst Thing turns out to be the Best Thing, April 25 Talking to Dog Proves Easier than Talking to Family, March 27 Unplanned Visit Brings Back Memories, February 29 The Going is Tough but the Getting There is Sweet, February 1 Things that Go Bump in the Night, January 4 |
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I must be growing up. Three weeks
ago I had an anxiety dream that I forgot to vote. I think the dream was visited upon me by my deceased father, who wrote books about history and so couldn't understand my lack of interest in it. "It's history," I would say, as if this explained itself. "It's YOUR history," he would say, like ownership would ignite a hunger for a past I'd never known. Thankfully, it really was just a dream. At 8:30 a.m. on November 2 my husband and I drove to Pond Springs Elementary School to cast our votes in what would become the largest national voter turnout election in our history. At the little defunct school in the middle of arguably nowhere, a line had already formed. We took our places with forty other people, an unimpressive number until you consider that in eight years of voting there, we have never encountered more than three people in line. As we waited our turn, the sky started to mist. The woman behind us wanted to leave. We knew from the news that inclement weather in the mid-west and up the eastern seaboard was going to be a potential deterrent to voters. The question on everyone's mind was, of course, which voters? Thirty minutes later, our votes cast and the sky already clearing, we left the school and got into the truck. Almost immediately I felt it--the familiar rush of emotion, the "Oh, no!" feeling I get just before I can no longer hold back tears. My husband was slightly alarmed. Nothing had happened--we hadn't fought, we hadn't seen a dead dog--so the tears were a mystery. "What is it?" he asked. "Voting," I sobbed. "It's overwhelming." It is embarrassing to admit that I never voted until I was well into adulthood. I couldn't see the point, I'd say, or else I would mumble something about not keeping up with politics. It went deeper than that, of course. Feeling that you have a say in things begins when you are little. If no one is listening, or if your siblings are louder, eventually your voice gets lost. The first time I voted, I almost fainted. With the punch of a chad I participated in a global conversation that, for most of my life, I didn't believe I had the right to enter. Suddenly, mine was a voice heard around the world. Suddenly, ownership of the process, and of the result, belonged partly to me. My father was right. I was, and always had been, a part of history, whether I realized it or not. Now I was in part its engineer. Hence, the near-fainting. This time, as we drove on to work after voting I wiped my eyes and slapped on my peach-shaped "I'm a Georgia Voter" sticker. I had joined in the great big conversation again. As had happened the first time, the world seemed suddenly personal. That night my husband and I went to a friend's house to watch the returns. As the tallies trickled in, we ate a potluck dinner and reflected on what the results would mean for all of us. "The world is a big boat that turns slowly," someone said philosophically. "Have another brownie," someone else said pensively. At home later that night my husband and I got out of bed twice to watch the still-incoming returns. The flickering of the set reflected off of our faces, a ticker tape of numbers and states marching across our foreheads. On each of our laps a small black dog settled in deeper. As we sat in the glow and watched the results unfold, I wished my father could be here to see it. Not the election, not the returns, but the miraculous insertion of history itself into some previously unopened slot in my life. For a minute I almost felt like I was sitting in his lap, and I could hear his teasing voice say it was about time I got interested in something besides dogs and horses. He's right, it is about time. But it takes a lot to change history. |
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My husband said something that
appalled me the other night. We were talking about building a house at
the back of our little farm, an idea we kick around every few months
when we've exhausted conversation about which of our dogs is cuter,
Annie or Shark. (Annie wins on girlish charm, Shark on false bravado.)
Our property slopes downward, and so we have talked about building up;
that is, making the house tall by having several levels so we can still
enjoy our views of Lookout Mountain and Taylor Ridge. We were sitting on
our back porch with the aforementioned cute dogs when the words tumbled
out of his mouth like a muddy waterfall: "We probably won't want all
those levels as we age," he said. I'm sorry, what? Last time I looked I was forty-two, not eighty-two, and while there is nothing wrong with planning for comfort, planning for infirmity is something else entirely. I'm not sure what my husband has in mind but I for one plan to be taking stairs two at a time when I am in my fifties, sixties, and beyond (and I plan to start very soon). When I think of our fantasy house I think of wood and glass, high ceilings, a loft design, and a tiny cozy writing studio on the very top floor. I do not envision one of those ski-lift style stair helpers swooping me up from behind and depositing me unceremoniously on other floors with a hairnet in my hands and a missing phrase on the tip of my tongue. I told my husband I was a little disconcerted by his plans for disability. It isn't his plan, he said, just something we might want to think about. Life doesn't always unfold the way we think it will. Things happen. While I appreciate his candor and his tendency to think ahead, I must say I'm now a little anxious. Not about the house per se--we'll either build or we won't, but if we do, my half will have stairs that don't move--I am anxious about the fact that while all the media is pronouncing fifty the new thirty, my husband is pronouncing forty the new eighty. To be fair, let me say I am not immune to feeling the age creep. Sometimes when we are both in the bathroom getting ready for work we will look up from our respective hygienic maneuvers and catch sight of ourselves side by side in the mirror. He throws his shoulders back and sucks his stomach in. I inflate my chest and hide my hands. Without parents handy your mortality is reflected in the face and body of your partner, particularly when you are exactly the same age. What is happening to him is happening to me, and vice versa. We know this, although we haven't said as much. But it is part of the reason we put our best face forward in the mirror, hide the telltale indicators of each other's march toward the inevitable. We recently took a trip to Peoria, Illinois, where stoplights alert pedestrians and drivers alike of impending signal changes by ringing. Throughout the streets of downtown Peoria the ringing bells sound day and night. I found them not only annoying, but downright unsettling, like an alarm I could never turn off. I asked a native Peorian if the near-constant ringing bothered him at all. "The ringing?" He paused to consider the question. "I guess I don't notice it any more," he said. I suppose it's possible to get so used to the ringing bells of change that you just don't hear them anymore. Call it false bravado, but while I know I won't always be forty-two (for example, next month I will be forty-three), I refuse to plan for my own weakened state. I like to think I'm going to march blindly into the intersection of my young self with my old self as if I cannot hear the warning signals, and I just hope I don't get broad-sided by some forty year-old in an eighty year-old junker. |
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There's a commercial on TV that
really bugs me. It opens with a young woman in sophisticated clothes
talking about her first visit to her boyfriend's parents' home. She is
saying to her friend, "Can you imagine? Me on a farm, with MY
allergies?" Just then there's a flashback to images of the farm in
question and the young woman romping with glee in a field of
spore-harboring weeds, riding on a tractor through asthma's hometown of
hay, and clumsily snapping peas on an open porch where, it is implied,
armies of allergens make a steady march across the floorboards in search
of a receptive mucus membrane. But the medical aspects of the
commercial are not what bother me. I am bothered by the broad, clichéd
strokes with which the boyfriend's farm-dwelling parents are painted:
the big burly father who obviously works the land (you can tell because
he wears plaid) and the frumpy mom with the colorless hair, shapeless
frock and falling-down socks. I am also bothered by the portrayal of this plastic family's immediate acceptance of the girlfriend who might as well have been from Mars. We can tell she is immediately accepted because the father picks her up and twirls her around when he meets her, and the mother shoots an adoring look when the young woman fumbles her snapping pea. At night she makes the whole family laugh, and they are thrilled to have the delightful asthmatic visitor from another planet who obviously makes their son very happy. (We know this because he does not act in a Levitra commercial). Clichés, all clichés. Cut to Chicago, July 2004. A dark-haired woman in a loud floppy green hat and red sneakers is standing at the mouth of her art show tent looking out at a sea of other dark-haired humans, all of whom are walking and talking to their dark-haired companions. Their voices are a little loud and so are their clothes, and come to think of it so are their pocketbooks and their shoes. When they enter a tent to look at the art, there is no pretense of friendliness. What they are isn't unfriendly exactly; it's more like a familiarity that seems to need no friendly introduction. When they like something, they tell you. Ditto when they don't. It's a little unsettling for my farm-raised husband, who is more accustomed to kindness at all costs (think twirling a visitor). But for me, it's like coming home. Everyone looks like me. Everyone sounds like me. Everyone dresses like me. Suddenly it hits me: I could act in a commercial where someone visits my family, and we are all effusive, raucously dressed, stirring a pot of chicken soup and talking about the sales at Marshall's. I am a cliché. I just never knew it until I went to where the rest of me lives. It is an eye-opening experience. I don't have kids, I live in the country, and I am not affiliated with a synagogue, so I don't often mingle with other Jewish people. I often feel like the asthmatic from Mars only without the delightful personality and the willingness to snap peas with a woman who can't keep her socks up. But in Chicago I was one of the crowd. I fit in. People talked fast and dispensed with me quickly, which I appreciate. They asked personal questions, and I understood that this is how Jewish folks establish common ground: by finding out where their acquaintance's parents' parents are from and then moving on to a discussion of bowel habits and where to get good bagels. I like this. There is something elemental, something unapologetic about the immediate intimacy of the Jewish world. I like it because I grew up with it. I get it. I AM it. Of course, there is something unsettling as well about realizing that all your life you've been programmed to act and look and think in certain ways. It challenges your belief in your own uniqueness. Suddenly you see how nearly every food choice you've ever made and every life decision you've ever agonized over was determined by your heritage and not by your overly touted free will. It's mind-boggling. It's so mindboggling in fact that it makes me want to take a 40-year walk in the desert just to mull things over. |
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I remember waking up one lovely
summer morning and asking my father why he was putting on a suit. "I have to go to work," he said. "Work?" I asked in disbelief. "Aren't you off for the summer?" It's that time of year again, time to do away with suits and work and think instead about vacations. My personal favorite was a road trip I took, Georgia to California by way of every desert in between, with my husband, a mattress, and a CB radio that had never, to anyone's knowledge, been functional. We drove practically nonstop. My husband drove in fifteen-hour chunks, the longest he could go without getting sleepy. After fifteen hours I would take over and drive for as long as I possibly could before getting sleepy, which was usually about thirty minutes. At the end of fifteen hours and thirty minutes we would find a campsite, crawl onto the mattress in the back of the truck, and sleep for four long hours before getting up and starting all over again. On day three, something beneath the hood of the truck exploded. We were somewhere inside the Mojave desert, on a secondary road that boasted no life with the exception of tiny prehistoric lizards and a wandering donkey. It was 117 degrees, some sort of record even for the Mojave. My husband lifted the hood. "See anything?" I asked. He reached into the engine and jiggled something. "That's not loose," he reported back about the thing he had jiggled. "What is it?" I asked. "I don't know, but it isn't loose," he said confidently. We pulled out the CB radio, unfurled several hundred thousand feet of cord, and plugged one end into the cigarette lighter. We huddled over the radio, listening hopefully for sounds of life but all we could hear was something like ocean waves breaking on a distant shore. With no other choice, we got back in the truck, turned the key, and waited to see if it would explode again. To our surprise the engine turned over, and whatever had blown up lay quietly dormant. Greatly relieved, we resumed our course. We talked, we sang. After five minutes, we began to sweat. A short time later perspiration rained from our foreheads like a summer squall. We rolled the windows down, then up. It was cooler with them up. Soon the truck began to function as a sweat lodge, and dehydration masquerading as spiritual clarity set in. We had insights we might never have had, made commitments we might never have made. By the time we realized it was the air conditioner that had exploded, we had already reinvented ourselves and were well on our way to reinventing lots of other people we knew. The following day, sweat soaked, newly enlightened, we came upon a curious sight. There, at the California state line, stood a lone phone booth in the road. My husband and I looked at each other suspiciously. If one of us admitted to seeing it, then the other could, too. "What's that?" my husband asked, his dry mouth barely wrapping itself around the question. "Phone booth," I said. Two word sentences were our limit. Any more and our lips bled. "Someone's there," he said. "Check point," I said. My husband opened his window, and new heat rolled over us. "Where are you from?" asked the woman inside the booth. "Georgia," said my husband, blinking hard against the heat and sun. "Georgia," she said knowingly, like the state was a joke we were all in on. "Do you have any fruits and vegetables?" she asked. My husband and I looked at each other. Did we have any fruits and vegetables? Was she nuts? Did she think Georgia was some kind of barren, windowless desert like the one we were currently crossing in agony? My husband's brain started to sputter. Of course Georgia had fruits and vegetables, but could he name them all? Why did she ask? Did she have a list against which she would check his answers, and did everyone have to name the fruits and vegetables of their native state before they could gain entrance to California? Exhausted and confused, he began to name what he could. "Peaches," he said definitively. "And, ah, plums." "Squash," I offered. I had often grown squash myself in Georgia. "Kumquats?" My husband wasn't sure if kumquats were native to Georgia or if our local grocery store flew them in. "Grapes and tomatoes," I said, but he disagreed with me about the grapes and so we took a minute to discuss it quietly. We decided to retract grapes. By the time we realized that the border guard wanted to know what we had with us, not what Georgia's farming capabilities were, she was already smiling and waving us across the state line. I like to think that in her quiet moments, which are many and long, that guard still thinks about Georgia and our impressive harvests. It's something she might not know about were it not for us, a little dehydration, and the hypnotic drawl of a long quiet highway. |
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I like to think that at some point
in everyone's life, a fortune cookie--or maybe even a series of
them--will light the way. Maybe not when they are most needed or
expected, but at a time that is nonetheless opportune. Eight years ago,
on the brink of quitting my job at a local mental health center to open
my own psychological testing business, I got a sudden inexplicable
hankering for Chinese food. I have always liked Chinese food, but
inexplicable hankerings were generally reserved for low-level
nutritional substances that didn't actually qualify as food, such as
pixie sticks or rainbow sherbet. To cure the craving, my boyfriend at
the time--now my husband--took me to his favorite Chinese restaurant. We
ate with gusto, then lazily picked apart our respective fortune cookies.
As I recall, my boyfriend's cookie delivered some sort of bland general
advice that was as appropriate for a death row inmate as it was for a
six year-old starting first grade. My cookie was different. The message
it imparted was specific, and it was personal. Executive Ability, it
said, Is Prominent In Your Make Up. The reference to me, and my new
testing business, was obvious. I saved the fortune and taped it to my
desk the next morning. About a week after receiving that first message, I got a hankering for Chinese food again. Toward the end of my meal I sucked down the last of my lo mein noodles and cracked open the obligatory cookie. I unfurled the note. You Will Be Unusually Successful In Business, it said. I got goose bumps. I looked around the restaurant. I half expected to see Donald Trump winking at me from the other side of the gently bubbling aquarium. I tucked the fortune in my pocket, and taped it to my desk the next day. A week later, uninterested in the food but with a hankering for a new message, I dragged my boyfriend out for Chinese again. I ate quickly and broke open the cookie, my hands shaking as I smoothed out the tiny white tape inside. You Have An Important New Business Development Shaping Up, it said. I ordered two more and smashed them open with my fist. Your Business Will Assume Vast Proportions, said one. You Are Careful And Systematic In Your Business Arrangements, said the other. I shoved all three fortunes into my pocket and left the restaurant in haste. The pressure to succeed was starting to wear on me. I never got another message about my testing business, and I ran it for a little over a year. It turned out that, contrary to the cookie's assertion, executive ability was not exactly prominent in my make up. And, were I to be truthful, my business did not assume what one might call vast proportions. I did all right. I got from one year to the next without suffering debt or undue unhappiness. But it happens that, by the time I got the fortune cookie that announced Be Prepared To Modify Your Plan, I had already begun to do just that. I was already moving away from testing and in the direction of an art career. This was what you might call an important business development, but suddenly the Chinese had nothing to say on the matter. By the time I got the message Don't Give Up Because The Best Is Yet To Come, I had begun to doubt my artistic abilities and also whether the Chinese were still paying attention. I was considering the possibility that true fortunes, like, dogs, knew when you most needed them, and presented themselves accordingly. It's been a while since I got a fortune that was obviously penned just for me. I've missed the commentary. I crave the spin, the utter fabrication of events, the knowing assurances of prosperity or fame or health or luck. It all felt so real somehow. What fortune cookies always knew that, say, tofu red curry with basil does not, is that, deep down inside, we are all fascinated by the anonymous ponderings that lie curled in the belly of tiny crunchy things. I worry that the days of the individualized fortune have gone, and that in their place is some kind of Wal-Mart-style forecasting of futures: one size fits all, no future too small but none too big either. And then! Think Of The Danger While Things Are Going Smoothly, said the fortune cookie I got over the weekend. MY cookie, the cookie penned just for me. Because it happens that I do exactly that! I create worry from solitude, find something horrifying about tranquility. I almost always think of danger when all is well; it happens in fact to be my favorite time to think of danger. Oddly, I was reassured by this bit of dour advice. I may be unhappy, I thought, but at least I am known. And that, I think, is fortunate. |
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Early
this spring it hit me. With one of my closest friends moving away and
another building a house that could house my house, I had no recourse
but to propose the obvious: "Let's move," I said to my husband. "Let's
find what we've been missing." My husband greeted the proposal with trepidation bordering on despair. He remembered the last time I said, "Let's move." It was roughly ten years ago and it resulted in weekly forays down rural highways in search of something that could not be bought. I was young then. I did not understand that my search was not for a house, but for that elusive thing called home. Which was why long days looking at real estate invariably had crying at the end of them. "I won't cry," I promised my husband. And so once again we set off down rural highways, just like in the scene ten years ago: windows down, me sitting cross-legged in the passenger seat dreaming of dog-safe car-less vistas, the kind of privacy where you could entertain the cast of Friends without anyone in the neighborhood suspecting you're having a party. The house I dreamed of would be bigger than the one we currently own (if only because to build them smaller they need special equipment) and it would have a kitchen large enough to host a party without having to seat the overflow guests in the laundry closet. For several days, I did in fact keep my wits. I was downright positive about the whole endeavor. One peaceful predawn morning as my husband lay sleeping I perused the internet for possible homes. It may have been my lack of sleep, but every house I clicked on looked promising, looked like somewhere I could stretch out and accumulate things I didn't need just because I had the space for them. With calculated excitement I woke my husband and presented my findings in order of price range. We narrowed the choices down to one, and went to look. I won't lie. The house had some advantages. It was closer to downtown than where we currently live, and the kitchen did not compete for space with the washer and dryer. It sat high on a hill with neighbors on only one side. A stand of trees cradled the house, and a view of the mountains was suggested to the east. But as I walked the property, an unexpected wave of sadness passed over me. I didn't love the house. Worse, I wanted to love it but I didn't know why. I thought about one of my favorite childhood books, in which a boy suddenly switches his loyalty from his trusted and steadfast pony Little Black to a headstrong, impulsive, larger steed named Big Red. In Big Red the boy saw something he thought he was missing: adventure, risk, power, speed. But when he gets into trouble with Big Red, it is Little Black who saves the day. I craned my head in case the answer to the house question hung somewhere overhead. An ugly intricate network of power cables laced the sky. Some of them hummed. "What do you think of the house?" asked my husband, coming up behind me. "Well, I really like certain things about it," I said in my brightest voice, as a lake of tears threatened to explode from my eyes. "So let's go home." Later that night I told my husband I was through house-hunting. "So soon?" he asked. We were sitting on the sofa in our impossibly small den, each of us fighting for leg-room. I told him about Little Black and Big Red and how sad it always was when the pony got left behind. I was explaining the part about Little Black getting vindicated in the end, how satisfying it was when he saved the boy from near-drowning in an ice hole because he, unlike Big Red, was light enough to walk on the frozen pond. How the boy learned about loyalty in the space of one week, and realized what can happen if you forsake a known good thing for a flash in the pan. "I get it," my husband said. And now it is late spring. Tiny green peaches are dropping in the yard and the dogs are eating them as fast as they fall. The lettuce is bolting. There's a snake in the pasture that worries me no end, and the laminate in the bathroom is unsticking. Just outside the kitchen the roots of a tree no one can name are threatening to unseat the house. But those are just the externals, the things that keep us guessing, wondering if things are different anywhere else. I've decided it hardly matters. If I've learned anything, it's that home isn't a place you find and move in. It's much more active than that. Home is the trusted pony you ride across the ice floes and the barren places. Small though it may be, it carries the weight of our hearts. |
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It's amazing to me how one
decision can help define the rest of your life. When I was twenty-six,
my father died suddenly. I was stunned. It wasn't that I didn't know he
was sick; it was that I didn't think he could die. Sure, he'd struggled
with cancer for four years, been in and out of the hospital and on and
off drugs for treatment. But die? Death was for distant relatives,
anonymous people with very bad luck, and the elderly. It was not for my
father, and certainly not before we'd come to some agreements. Like that
"halter tops" were not the same as "bras" and twenty-six was not too
young to date. After my father died, I did what any denial-minded recently de-fathered twenty-six year-old woman would do: I quit my job, gave notice to my landlords, said good-bye to my boyfriend, my girlfriends, my co-workers and my neighbors, and moved to a town where I didn't know anyone and I had no plans for my future. My new home was a one bedroom apartment over a two-horse barn in the outer limits of Alpharetta, Georgia. I traded rent for horse care, but other than that I had no job. With my three dogs, a Honda and a clean slate, I was ready to start a new life, one that happily did not involve death, humans, or unnecessary attachments. For several weeks, I was fine. I adjusted to my new surroundings, got to know the horses, built three doghouses and a picnic table, and learned my way to the grocery and feed stores. I fed the horses, cleaned the stalls, rode the horses, and fed again in the afternoons. I was still sad of course, grieving for my losses in some indirect way that involved a steady diet of peanut butter and decorating with black-out curtains, but I told myself the move was a good one. And then an interesting thing happened. A few months into my regimen of isolation and peanut butter, the liberation I had engineered began to feel restricting. I started to think about what I had left behind. If I stood at the end of my new driveway and jumped up and down I could get a glimpse of some distant mountains, but I missed having them in my backyard. My boyfriend visited on weekends but my weeks were long and empty. I missed my girlfriends, my landlords, my old yard with the tangle of trees and the way the trailer shook when the dog scratched. The only thing I didn't miss was my job, but I did miss feeling useful and having a bank account. As the novelty of revamping my life wore off, I realized that perhaps I had made a mistake: perhaps treating loss with further relinquishment was not the right thing to do, no matter how sure I was at the time that pain plus sacrifice equaled relief. At the end of four lonely months, I called my old landlords and begged to return home. I found a new job, called my friends, and reunited with the mountains. I swore off peanut butter and let in tuna fish. I got back to the real business at hand--grieving for my father--and let go of the childish notion that changing where you are changes who you are. Soon after returning to Chattanooga, I called my mother about some unhappy incident, some way I was bored or not feeling up to par. "You know," she said, "you could still be living in Alpharetta." Without my realizing it, my time in Alpharetta had become the standard against which the rest of my life would be framed. "Alpharetta" has become a catchword for unhappiness, plans awry, grief and loss and desolation and bad decisions. In some odd way, it became the best thing I ever did, allowing me perspective and by showing me what it is to have none. And so I dragged out the Alpharetta comparison again this past week, when show rejections dovetailed with writing rejections in the mail and delivered themselves to me two and three at a time. My racquetball game went down the tubes and the dog urinated on the slip cover and just when I thought I couldn't take it anymore, taxes came due. "It could be worse," my husband reminded me. He's right. I could be twenty-six and on a long, misguided mission to cure what ails me by treating what doesn't. Thank God for Alpharetta. |
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A few nights ago I had a dream
that my dog spoke. Of course, as anyone with a dog knows, dogs talk all
the time. But in my dream Shark actually said my name. Below is a
transcript of our conversation, verbatim: Me: "Hi Shark." Shark: "Hi Dana." What blew me away in the dream was not that Shark had developed a language center and the complex ability to vocalize. It was his sudden fundamental understanding that "Shark" was his name and, correspondingly, "Dana" was mine. Apparently this was enough fodder for one fantasy, because immediately after having it, I woke up. In the future, I am hoping that the discovery of canine language and abstract reasoning abilities will prompt me to have somewhat more in-depth conversations with my dog. I would like to ask him some things I've been wondering about, for example, "When it's just you and me at home, are you appalled by my table manners? Given your choice of colors, would you still be black and white? You appear to be happy, but deep down inside, is there a small part of you that's crying out to be understood? Do you ever pause in the middle of licking your feet and think 'Eww, I'm licking my feet'?" Compared to real or imagined communication with my dog, communication with my family of origin is a lot less straightforward. A few weeks ago my husband and I were trying to make plans to meet my mother for breakfast on our way through Atlanta. He wanted to eat at the OK Café just off of I-285. In the same shopping center is Goldberg's Deli. Because I know my mother well, I told him I would lobby for the café but to expect a counter offer of the deli. What actually happened took us both off guard. "How about the Pancake House?" suggested my mother, who has never eaten a pancake in public in her life. "She came back with the Pancake House," I told my husband. He sighed the same beaten-down sigh that signaled the end to our chickenless farm last summer. "I should've known better than to send my ideas into the Jewish Triangle," he said. Finally, he's learning what it is to be Jewish in my family, where the most agreeable conversations take place on answering machines and reality isn't a prerequisite for reasoning. The Jewish Triangle is where ideas, suggestions, plans, and feelings are funneled into the inner sanctum of my control-loving family where they are quickly and savagely lost at sea. My husband's family is not like this. Where he comes from, suggestions are like welcome commands. When he was ten years old, my husband suggested that he and his parents stop using a cramped back bedroom as a den and move instead into the spacious living room they reserved for occasional guests. Within thirty minutes their seldom-used formal living room was transformed into a casual hub of family activity, and everyone marveled at their newfound digs. This would never happen in my family. Where I come from, just walking into another room requires a statement of intent, the correct shoes, and a signed commitment not to touch the thermostat. Even then someone would probably suggest you would rather nap than change rooms. Once you understand how the Jewish Triangle works, you are well on your way to staying afloat. The thing to know is that nothing is taken at face value. You cannot suggest a book, a movie, or a trip without suspicious stares, feigned horror, or fifteen renditions of the "Are you kidding?" game. In my family, a "firm plan" to meet at noon is just a theory, and a great idea is akin to a conspiracy. On the matter of food, "Keep kosher and never eat pork" means "Only eat pork when you are at Provino's," and "Never mix meat and dairy" means except when you think it would complement the bacon. My husband is finally catching on. Sometimes we even get a perverse pleasure out of throwing ideas into the Jewish Triangle and watching as they fight the undertow. I'm not sure why it's so enjoyable, except that our only other entertainment is the occasional talking dog. |
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It isn't every day you get to meet
yourself coming and going. Last week on our way home from an art show in Florida, I talked my husband into making an unscheduled stop. We were still many hours from Chattanooga but I had a mission: I wanted to get a glimpse of my past. Because of my famously bad sense of direction, it took a while to find it. But after perusing the downtown streets of tiny Tifton, Georgia, my husband snapped my picture on the front porch of the three story brick building that once housed Midstep Intermediate Care Facility, a halfway house for recovering addicts and alcoholics. This was where, twenty-one years ago, I began my professional career as a therapist. To hear the highway tell it, Tifton is now a "High Speed Internet Town." Red lettered signs boast its technological prowess for miles, so that by the time you arrive, you expect to have your own dotcom company waiting for you. When I moved there from Atlanta, Tifton wasn't quite so cosmopolitan. But a job with the state that paid almost a thousand dollars a month and a rent-subsidized apartment four long hours away from my parents was my idea of success. If I could convince my prospective employer that I was worthy of the job, it could all be mine. When I told friends I was interviewing for a job in Tifton, the reaction was the same every time: "Tif-ton! Why Tif-ton?" I ignored their sneers. "Tifton is the high-speed internet city of the future," I might have said, at which point, because it was 1983, they would have said, "What's the internet?" "How are you with relocating?" asked my prospective boss, early in the interview. I looked at him strangely. Wasn't I there for exactly that reason? "I'm great with it," I said. "But why Tif-ton?" he asked, not unlike every single one of my friends. This worried me a little. I doubted that interviewers in New York or Los Angeles asked their prospective employees, "Why New York?" or Why Los An-geles?" with a thin veil of contempt hanging over a portion of the city's name. Nevertheless, I was delighted to get the job and I moved to Tifton two weeks later. I brought with me everything I owned, which was several outfits, none of them appropriate for a professional job, and a pan. Then I got a cat. When my brother came to visit he felt there were a few things missing. "Where's your bed?" he asked. "Right there!" I said, pointing to a rectangle of floor on which a blanket was folded neatly. What do you eat off of?" he asked, scanning the kitchen. "Duh, I have a plate!" I said defensively, which was true. I had purchased a small yellow plate at the dollar store. Sometimes I wished I had gotten two, for times when one was dirty, but I was in the early budgeting stages of being on my own. I certainly didn't want to go into debt over dinnerware. That afternoon my brother and I drove downtown and bought a mattress at a thrift store. "You bought a mattress at a thrift store?" My husband was incredulous. We were in the general area of downtown Tifton where I thought I remembered buying the mattress. "It's ok," I reassured him. "It was a hospital mattress." At the time of purchase I thought this attested to its cleanliness. I have since discovered that this is not the case. "People DIE on those," our friends in the medical profession recently informed me. They went on to suggest that just because people die in a sterile environment it doesn't mean their deaths are sterile. Which makes me think this is why the cat would never sleep with me. Before my husband and I left Tifton to head home, I peeked in the window of the treatment center. The inside, while abandoned, was structurally intact: no changes had been made, nothing added, nothing taken away. I could see the stairwell that led downstairs to the kitchen where I learned to eat banana pudding and government-issue cheese. I could almost see into the main office off of which my smaller office sat. In a sudden flash of unexpected sentiment, my impossible youth came barreling back. Twenty-one years ago I set off on a mission of employment and self-sufficiency, and this three story building in the heart of Tifton is the horse I rode to the trail-head. I peeked in the window at my young self again, and if I hadn't felt silly, I'd have waved hello. And good-bye. |
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My friend Jack writes from Pennsylvania. He's painting
again, after a ten-year hiatus, and the results are less than pleasing.
"My first painting back and it stinks," he says. "I'm all over the
place. I finally decided I'm wasting my time." "I'm doing paintings of toilets," I wrote back. "Time wasted is subjective." I told him that for me painting is like navigating a gigantic ship whose controls don't correspond to what the ship will actually do. The harder I try to steer the more I know I need to let go. It doesn't make sense except intuitively, and sometimes it isn't fun. My husband, keeper of the apt metaphor, asks if I remember The Greatest American Hero, a TV show from 1981. The show revolved around a man who, on a trip to the desert, is given a red suit with super powers. Unfortunately, he loses the instruction manual that goes with the suit and so, for the duration of several seasons, he spends his time flying backwards, sideways, and into walls. Over time he gains a modicum of control, learns to harness the powers of the suit to some advantage. But it's usually iffy and almost always messy. Jack writes: "I guess it's all about the process," but it's evident from his tone that the "process" is not a pleasant thing. I know how he feels. People like to say it's the journey that counts, but usually those people have already arrived. I remember my father tripping over a crack in a sidewalk once and my brother asking, "Did that hurt?" My father, ever the pragmatic, said, "Well I'd rather not have done it." I'm guessing he watched his steps more carefully after that, but nobody really wants the pain that precedes awareness. Recently I was asked by a woman in Chicago to paint a portrait of her now-deceased dog from her most treasured photograph. Almost immediately upon receiving the photograph I hid it from myself, a fact I did not know until last week, when I went to start on the portrait. I searched the studio. I searched the studio again. I drove many miles home at lunch to search the house. I searched the pockets of coats I no longer wear, drawers I hadn't opened since 1994, and old knapsacks. My husband even searched the trash. At some point I was reminded of an old cartoon called "The Trouble with Brains," which detailed the many ways our brain works against us, for example by subjecting us to the uncontrollable urge to hum "Candyman" for days on end, or by convincing us, in a moment of compromised alertness, that the most logical place for us to put our car keys is in the freezer behind the seven year-old roast. The photograph was gone. I was devastated. I rehearsed calling the woman and explaining the loss of her treasured photo. I thought about how sad I would be if it were mine. I almost cried. And then an interesting thing happened. I started to think about how I had been avoiding painting since Christmas. How I had complained about burn-out, wanting more time to write, how I had been lured into and lingered over time-wasting sites on the internet. If only I could find that photograph, I thought, I would be ecstatic. I would stop bemoaning the artistic process, would gladly fly into walls in the service of finding my way. I would paint like the wind and I wouldn't slow down. Most of all, I would appreciate everything my art career affords me and mourn none of the things it denies me. I am not sure what possessed me to search through my bank statements. Probably the car keys behind the roast. At any rate, there it was, the treasured photograph of the treasured dog, tucked into an envelope that wasn't familiar, resting in a file folder I almost never open. How I brimmed with gratitude! How I forgave my brain! I started painting and I haven't slowed down. Whatever burn-out I felt has been superceded by relief, by appreciation for the job I have, which allows me to pursue, albeit in smaller doses than I might like, so many other things I want to do with my life, including writing. I feel lucky. Granted I tripped over the crack, but while I'd rather not have done it, the calamitous journey has made a gift of arrival. |
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It seemed like such a simple
question. The show was Jeopardy, the category was "Things in Common" and
the answer was: a picture, curtains, and blood. I had just sat down on
the sofa when my husband presented the challenge. He already knew what a
picture, curtains, and blood had in common. He had been paying
attention. "It's an obvious thing," he said. "You'll know it when it comes to you." What I heard was, "Kiss sleep goodbye, because you won't get any until you figure this out." Then he went to bed. I am no stranger to insomnia. Sometimes I lie awake nights wondering what will keep me awake on subsequent nights. Will it be a word game with an obvious solution that is more maddening for its supposed simplicity? (A picture comes from a negative, blood can be negative or positive, but a curtain? Usually I think curtains are a negative thing in a house, particularly the heavy, dark kind, but that's my opinion, not a fact…) Or if not a word game, then maybe I will need to mentally catalogue the number of shirts I own that have collars. (Six, if you count one green stretchy shirt that could double as a sweater.) Occasionally when I can't sleep I will remember something important that I would otherwise have forgotten if I hadn't been using my wee hours so productively, like that there is a dead cricket in the kitchen by the door. (A picture could also have red in it, curtains can be red, and blood IS red. I started to nudge my husband--it was1:00 a.m. and he was asleep--to ask if "red" was the answer, but I decided that the color solution was too contrived, that the answer was probably even simpler than that.) Many nights, fear keeps me up. Usually it is imagined things that scare me but sometimes the fear has a toehold in reality. Recently I put together an art show in a large, unheated, dimly lit space that had six electrical sockets off of which I was running fifty-five extension cords, including one tiny brown cord that powered a kerosene heater the size of a Toyota Camry. I worried alternately about fire, darkness, and electrocution. Along with fears of tragedy and failure I worried about propriety, specifically the question of whether Jews can or should wear red cowboy boots to holiday functions or whether this somehow demonstrates a lack of solidarity with Chanukah, which is primarily a blue and white holiday. All together, the impending art show was enough to keep me awake from September through most of December, so that the Things in Common question was a welcome change of pace. (A picture hangs on the wall, curtains hang, and blood can be suspended, which is kind of like hanging. Or is it just the plasma that can be suspended? Is being suspended the same as hanging? I concluded that since this required consideration of the finer points of language, hanging/suspension was not the "obvious" answer I was searching for.) And of course there is the ever-present threat of terrorism. So between al-Qaeda, the extension cord issue, the cricket in the kitchen, the cowboy boot question, and whether a stretchy shirt should be re-classified as a sweater, I begin to wonder how anyone can sleep. Some nights it isn't just fear that keeps me up. Some nights it is run-of-the-mill worry. For example, we have a new foster dog we are trying to place. Her name is Madonna and she is part beagle. The vet said she is healthy which my husband took to mean she could stay outside at night. So I packed the doghouse full of warm things: a layer of straw, two blankets, another layer of straw, another blanket, and then a wool blanket wrapped around--believe it or not--the entire outside of the doghouse, and a tarp over the whole contraption in case of rain. In the morning Madonna came out of her doghouse panting. "She's cold," I said to my husband. "She's panting!" he said. Still, it was enough to keep me up nights, so one afternoon I bought a crate and my husband agreed Madonna could sleep in the kitchen. That night we turned out the lights and went to bed early. After a few minutes staring into the blackness, I could no longer stand it. "She's lonely," I said. There was no response. My husband's soft breath rose from the bed and made a braid of sleep with that of the other two dogs snoring in the bedroom. Which is when it finally occurred to me: the picture wasn't necessarily, as I had been thinking, a photograph. It could be any kind of picture: a painting, for example, or a limited edition print, or for that matter, something a child would draw. I woke my husband excitedly. "Things That Are Drawn!" I said. I was almost asleep when I realized I hadn't phrased it as a question. |