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2008
Chattanooga Times-Free Press
Columns by Dana Shavin
A Change of Address
Means Moving On |
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A funny thing happened last week on my way to the studio: I forgot I had moved. By the time I remembered, I had already missed my turn, and was well on my way to the old place downtown. This surprised me. In the past I have not left eras behind gently, and here I had moved without a painful and protracted goodbye–so thoughtlessly as to be able to forget, for a moment anyway, that I had moved at all.
But even if the move came easily, the packing did not. For ten years I have treated my art studio like an extension of my home, only without the laundry and property taxes. In the studio I stored, along with the expected paints and canvases, art books, and assorted glaze chemicals from a past life in pottery, the personal effects of my life unrelated to art: letters and emails from family and friends, psychological testing materials from a fifteen- year mental health career, and, one of my most telling finds, boxes of cancelled checks that charted the course of my life through half of my thirties and half of my forties.
I found the check my husband and I wrote for our first piece of original art, a plaster sculpture of a woman in a chair. I found the check I wrote for the downpayment on my house; it was followed closely by checks written to fix the roof and patch the front steps. I found the checks I wrote to the vet, over five years’ time, trying to keep my lab alive, and later, my hound. There was the check I wrote for my wedding dress. And then there were the myriad checks written for cigarettes and therapy—essentials that kept me functioning in a job I disliked–interspersed with check stubs from the disliked job that barely covered the cost of my cigarettes and therapy.
And there were the checks that signaled the beginning of my art career: checks written for my pottery wheel, my kiln, my classes at Chattanooga State, and entry fees to shows. I found a copy of the first check ever written to me for the purchase of my artwork, a set of wheel-thrown pottery dishes. There were the checks I wrote to cover the cost of canvases when I switched from potting to painting. And, of course, there were checks written for studio rent, so I’d have a place to spread out and grow, take chances with new materials, and, in ten year’s time, be able to look back and see that I’d built a career.
I destroyed the checks, but not without trepidation. As the movers emptied my studio and I saw my life on Market and 8th Street coming to a close, I wondered: what if, in ten years’ time, when I look back over my checks from the previous ten years, I wish I had kept the checks from the ten years before that, to remind me how my life gave birth to itself? Those checks were a record of how things shifted, and a testimony to the shifts within the shifts—I left the job and soon after I was no longer writing checks for cigarettes, or for therapy; the lab and the hound died of their old-age diseases and were replaced by other dogs; I married; my heart expanded and filled with love; our house expanded and filled with art. It is hard for me to move on, to trust that the path doesn’t disappear in my wake just because I’ve gotten further down it. But I know that whether I forget or remember all the details of my history, they will always be with me in the mosaic of my present. It seems like a long time ago that I moved into the downtown studio on the 7th floor with the huge windows, and discovered that I could keep tabs on the traffic crawling through the ridge cut, storms moving in from the west, helicopters swinging through the sky, and fire engines racing through the heart of town. I love my new studio on Frazier Avenue, but I will never forget the gold elevators, my ex-landlord’s kindness, or the early days of self-employment, when I didn’t know what time to arrive in the morning, or when to go home at night. Much has changed since I moved into that first studio, and much will change again, in this new pieced-together present, just a few miles away from the old, but soon to feel a world apart. |
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Recently I was sitting at dinner with a friend ten years my junior. Talk got around to travel, and she mentioned that she and her husband had just returned from India, where they’d spent three weeks doing whatever it is people who go to India do. I listened enviously. Finally, I made an embarrassing confession, certain my friend would be kind and understanding.
“I’ve never been out of the States,” I said.
Horror crossed her face. “My God,” she said, her eyes narrowing to slits. “How OLD are you?”
So here’s my next confession: I lied. I have been out of the States. Several times in fact. I just haven’t been anywhere that seems hip, or to merit dinnertime conversation with a thirty-five year-old who has just returned from three weeks in India. I’ve never stood in awe at the Louvre, for example, or tucked a little prayer into the Wailing Wall. I’ve never been overcome with emotion at the Vatican, or kissed in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. I have, however, been to the Canadian horse races at Assiniboia Downs, slept in the living room of a woman named Fiona in Toronto, and felt humbled and insignificant at the International Peace Gardens. I have also fainted in Mexico City, fallen out of love in Puerto Rico, and ridden a horse across a dry, cracked plain in the Dominican Republic.
I was ten when my parents took me to Santo Domingo. My father had a travel writing assignment, and we were put up in what was, as I recall, a well-appointed hut in a lush, tropical resort area with tall forests of cane growing right outside our door. It was sunny, hot, and quiet every single day, a virtual paradise for honeymooning couples and CEO’s of large corporations whose hearts threatened to predecease them if they didn’t get some rest.
Did I mention I was ten?
For me–and therefore for my parents–it was a nightmare. After three days of listening to me prattle on about how bored I was, aborting my repeated forays into the cane forest to rattle the vegetation, and being roused from (what seemed to me) an endless parade of naps, they hatched a plan to rid themselves of me that, in any other decade, would have sent them to prison for life. They took me to a horse barn, thrust me in front of a twenty year-old Santo Domingan horse groomer, and announced they’d be back for me in 5 hours. What came next was an incredible thrill: galloping full speed astride a lean bay mare, with a deeply tanned man who was, in the retelling at school, a little bit in love with me.
The travels that followed were similarly dramatic. I was thirteen when I went to Mexico City as a drummer in my high school marching band. In an attempt to keep kosher for Passover (which entails avoiding leavening in all its forms as well as some starchy vegetables, and ice cream), I devised a diet consisting entirely of pineapple and eggs. Three days into the trip, I fainted on the bus en route to a marching gig.
At seventeen I traveled to Puerto Rico with my college boyfriend and his father and sister. Again there were long stretches of pineapples and eggs, punctuated by dramatic, bikini-clad fights over how to spend our time and whether to let his little sister hang out with us. By the end of the trip I was so sick of tropical fruit and the fun I was supposedly having that I couldn’t wait to get back to my snowy school campus and resume my studies.
And I was an adult by the time my husband-to-be and I traveled to Toronto and booked a room at a bed-and-breakfast, only to find that the “bed” part was just a room in someone’s house, and the “breakfast” part was a box of cereal and a quart of warm skim milk, which we ate while our hostess, Fiona, leaned sleepily against the stove, smoking and fidgeting in her bathrobe.
In spite of, or maybe because of, my travel history, I am determined to try again. I am proud to say my husband and I have even gone so far as to get passport applications. Italy is first on our list, mainly for the wine and boots, followed by Greece for the artichokes, France to try and set the record straight, and finally, if there’s still time, India–so that next time I’m dining with some precocious thirty-five year old, I’ll have something to add to the conversation.
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I sent a birthday card to my high school best friend on her 46th birthday. As I recall it had a picture of 4 firemen jumping out of a cake. On the inside it said, “They’re here to put out your hot flashes.”
This was so hilarious to me I couldn’t wait for her to call and say she’d gotten the card and loved it. When she did, we launched into the usual back-and-forth talk about what the year ahead held for us. “Hiking and belly dancing for me,” she said. “Insomnia and night sweats for me,” I would have said, had I been paying attention to my own body’s warning signs. It turns out that hot flashes are only hilarious when they’re someone else’s.
Now that I’ve done some reading about menopause, I know it can be a sad time of life for some women, particularly those who never had children. For me, menopause is like the old joke about going to a restaurant with bad food, and complaining that the serving sizes are too small: even though I never wanted children, it bothers me to know I’m no longer fertile.
But the worst part about menopause is that I’m becoming a little crazy. Maybe it’s the fact that I wake throughout the night, pretty much every night, on the twelves. Or maybe it’s because, as a lifelong cold person, I’m a little freaked out to find myself, like my mother before me, naked and fanning myself with the freezer door, shrieking, “It’s a SAUNA in here!” But really I think the problem is that, as you age, the things you hold dearest crystallize in your mind, crowding out more flexible, worldly thoughts. For my husband’s great-uncle, who loved cars, it was the story of fixing a certain Ford Mustang whose diagnosis had eluded the repair shop. According to my husband, this was the story his uncle told and retold for nearly twenty years, leaving every detail, including that “aha!” moment when he finally figured out the problem, intact.
Last week at an art show, I remembered my husband’s uncle. I was sitting in front of my painting booth waiting for business, when a young couple ambled past with a black cocker spaniel. I smacked my husband on the arm and pointed to the couple with the dog so like ours. He smiled appreciatively. I, on the other hand, ambushed them.
“We have a black cocker!” I said excitedly, crouching in front of the dog’s face. At first the young couple appeared happy to hear it. It was when I stood up and pulled out my phone to show them evidence that they began to exchange looks. Deeply embarrassed by my own actions, I was still somehow unable to stop the progression of doggie show-and-tell.
“This is Shark on the bed,” I said, cringing inside as they politely pretended to fawn over a picture I knew was too dark to make out. “He’s an American cocker. I found him on the street nine years ago.” I scrolled on to the next picture. “This is Bella. She may or may not be a cocker. She came from the Humane Society.” I scrolled to the next. “And this is Brie, Bella’s sister. She’s an English cocker. My dog Annie. . . ” I began, and then I stopped, because even though it has been almost a year since we lost Annie, I am still unable to talk about her without sobbing, and I am not yet so crazy that I would sob in front of strangers.
The couple moved on, and I returned to my chair by my booth. A little spark of heat, like the lighting of a match, went off in my brain, and within seconds I was fully engulfed in the flame of a hot flash. I fanned my belly under my shirt, piled my hair on my head, and held a bottle of water to my chest. Ten minutes later, two women walked by with two cocker spaniels in tow. Forgetting everything I’d learned in the previous interaction, I rushed to greet them. “I have cocker spaniels!” I said, crouching down in front of their dogs. Just as I was pulling out my phone to show evidence, it rang, and the women fled.
That evening in bed, as I was recounting my behavior to my husband, he just shook his head. “It’s bad business to do that at an art show,” he said, and while I knew he was right, I also knew his life hadn’t devolved into lying on packages of frozen chicken to keep his brain cells from turning to ash. An hour later, sirens pierced the night air, and somewhere in my menopausal brain, a dream of firemen bloomed in my head. “They’re here to put out your hot flashes,” my subconscious quipped. I woke, sweating and headachy, but had to smile. In my dream I’d pulled out my cell phone. “This is Shark,” I was saying to the firemen. |
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There’s an old saying that if you don’t like the weather in Texas, wait ten minutes. The same holds true for graduations. If you don’t know someone who’s graduating, just wait a few minutes, because graduations are no longer just from high school or college. My nephew just graduated from middle school. My niece graduated from elementary school. In an hour, I plan to graduate to lunch.
When I was in elementary school, we didn’t “graduate” to high school. On the last day of seventh grade we brought little autograph books and purple pens to class, and scrawled long, heartfelt notes to our friends, vowing to love them forever. Following this, we went home, embarked on a long, boring summer, then, without fanfare, started high school three months later. One month into high school, we had no idea where our autograph books were, and we hated everyone we’d vowed to love forever.
But the roads to college, I suspect, haven’t changed much since I was young. Some kids, with the help of their parents, investigate their options thoroughly. They research schools, have discussions with school counselors, and visit prospective colleges. Some do a little research, send out several applications, and go where they’re accepted. Still others deal with unsupportive parents who thwart efforts to attend college because they themselves did not attend.
My husband attended a small rural high school in West Tennessee where so few kids graduated, much less went on to college, the discussion almost never came up. A few weeks before the end of his senior year, a school counselor said, as much to make conversation as anything, “So what are your plans after high school?”
“I’m going to college,” my husband said. “College?!” the counselor yelped. “Do your parents know?”
It turns out his parents did not know, but were happy to hear the news.
I attended a large public high school in Atlanta where most of the kids graduated and most went on to college. Even so, my college selection process unfolded like a B-rate movie with no director and a comically inexperienced actress. Chronically unhappy through high school, I convinced my parents to let me attend summer school so that I could graduate six months early. One sultry night, hunched over my mother’s broiled chicken and sitting across from my work-weary father, it suddenly occurred to me that unless I came up with a post-high school plan, I was doomed to await the call to broiled chicken and a weary paternal presence in perpetuity. I got up from the table, went into the bathroom, and sat down, fully clothed, on the toilet. In my lap was my brother’s four year-old Guide to Colleges and Universities. I closed my eyes, fanned the pages, and let my finger land in the “B’s.” When I looked down, four words jumped out at me: Bard College Early Admissions. I walked back into the kitchen.
“I’m applying for early admission to college in New York,” I said. I helped my mother wash dishes, then went to my room and wrote for applications. I was sixteen.
Two months later, the acceptance packet from Bard arrived. Ecstatic, I celebrated as only a sixteen year-old can: with a box of donut holes and a midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. In the weeks that followed, it occurred to all of us that I would be leaving for college in three months. I went on a diet. My mother made more broiled chicken, and my father squeezed my face a lot.
“You need to get some information about the school,” my mother said one night as my departure date drew closer. “Call someone.” “What information?” I said. “And who?” “Call a current student. Find out about your dorm.” “What do I ask?” “Find out how many outlets there are in your room.”
So I called the school, which put me in touch with a matriculating male student. He did not know the number of outlets in the room. I didn’t have any other questions, so finally I just said, “Do you like it there?”
“No,” he said.
And that was that. Six months later I flew home from Bard to watch my friends graduate from high school. When the ceremony was over I went home with my parents, ate broiled chicken, and packed to return to Bard.
“Congratulations, Graduate,” my father said. A little late, considering, but appreciated nonetheless. |
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It was sometime between the Abs of Steel infomercials and breakfast in bed with a USA Today newspaper placemat that I realized it: while I adore my husband and find him most entertaining, I still love—and I do mean LOVE--being alone. It shouldn’t have taken a steady diet of plotless TV and toast points at a hotel in Cleveland, Ohio to remind me, but marriage has drastically cut down on the time I spend by myself, thinking deeply and passionately about my own complexities (like why in the world my abs aren’t already steel when I eat at Greenlife practically every single day). Doing an art show alone in a strange city was all it took to jog my memory . The experience wasn’t easy. Shows are physical and travel requires a sense of direction, and I am famous for having neither brawn nor barometer. But it’s right there, within the struggle to find my way, that the core of pleasure lies. Being alone is a return to my pre-partnered state, when I got lost all the time, but reveled in my own self-sufficiency. I dreaded the solo Ohio art show. As it turns out, I should have. It spanned three ten-hour days, one of which contained rain and an impressive amount of lightning. Puddles formed in my booth, which grew into ponds which smelled like cesspools. Sales were slow. A woman tested her blood sugar on my desk. My tent roof leaked. I stepped on something sharp. Thirty hours later, exhausted and having eaten my weight in sugar coated almonds, I began dismantling my booth and walls, which are held together by an intricate network of steel pegs, metal braces, an assortment of large and small neon-colored bungee cords, duct tape, twist ties, and Velcro straps, and is held on the ground by four, forty- pound weights. After dismantling came a period of heaving, pushing and shoving of all tent pieces, braces, cords, walls, desk, and paintings into a rented white cargo van I was trying not to nick, bump, or smudge. All of which was done while tripping over the forty- pound weights hundreds of times. But I did it. Alone. After the art show, I took myself to a Chinese restaurant. As I waited for my order, I noticed a thirty gallon fish tank with a single, giant, yellow fish in it. Plastered to the back of the tank was a picture of “the rest of the ocean,” the world the fish was supposedly swimming in. As I sat there and watched the fish float aimlessly around, I got sadder and sadder, and not just because I had ordered “Seafood Three Ways.” I got sad because the fish had no companionship. The longer I watched, the more despondent he seemed to become, hovering at the side of the tank, yearning, I imagined, for company. It was almost more than I could bear. I was not, unlike the fish, truly alone. What I have in my life is selective aloneness, whereby my husband and I agree on a span of time when he will go one way and I will go another. Usually this is fraught with a certain amount of “pre-missing” of each other, whereby we question whether what we are about to do (go our own separate ways for an afternoon or a week) is really necessary and desired. Selective aloneness is the best of all worlds, because it has, at its end, selective togetherness. Just before my Seafood Three Ways arrived, I noticed that the short sides of the fish tank were mirrored. I was overjoyed! The giant yellow fish believed he occupied his space with a giant yellow fish! As I paid for my meal and planned out another happy, solitary night of infomercials, I thought about how the world is both full and empty, depending on where you look and how you maneuver inside it. And how, with any luck, the face you see in the mirror when you are most alone, is the face of your own best friend. |
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You’ve heard it before. If you’re over thirty, you’ve asked it before. “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” you say, shaking your head and gazing somberly into the distance. “Where does time go?” This weekend, as I was cleaning out my bathroom cabinets, I found out. It’s in a little red wooden box, behind the towels.
I hadn’t seen the box in years, and had no memory of tucking it away. I was curious: if whatever was in it was so beloved it required the safety of a hidden corner, why was it in a corner where it could only be rediscovered in the event of an unprecedented, pre-holiday housecleaning? In other words, potentially never? Then again, maybe whatever was in the box wasn’t something beloved, but just something I stuck in a hidden corner to get it out of the way.
I was nervous. By now, possible findings ran from the embarrassing to the sad to the mundane: perhaps this was where I’d stashed my first driver’s license picture, taken the year I refused to smile with my mouth open, believing it was somehow un-driverlike. Perhaps the box was filled with pictures of dogs loved and lost, or maybe it was where I kept Freddie Printz’s obituary, ripped from the paper that unbelievable morning of my 15th year, when I railed against whatever forces made a man with such incredible hair take his own life. Or maybe the box was filled with buttons, sealed in the smallest Ziploc bags ever made, that came with the purchase of decent clothes, as if I would ever, in a million years, put the buttons somewhere sensible, and then, when I needed them most, remember what place seemed sensible when I bought the clothes.
I put down the towels, leaned on the counter, and, without further adieu, opened the box. There, tucked inside, was the solitary symbol of my late twenties: a green and tan wristwatch with a picture of a horse and rider on the face. It was a watch I’d been pining for in the weeks before my twenty-seventh birthday. It was a gift from my mother, who, because she was in the hospital, locked in combat with colon cancer, sent my brother to the mall to get it for me.
My mother survived her cancer, and I wore the watch, lovingly and obsessively, as if there were a magical connection between her survival and my timepiece. And one day, I couldn’t tell you when or why, the watch just quit working. By then, I suppose, I was over my magical thinking, because there were no frantic phone calls to my mother to make sure she was still ticking. The watch went into the little red box. Years after that, the little red box went into the bathroom cabinet.
I went to find my husband, to show him the watch and tell him the story. He was in the dining room, counting make-believe people. For a week we had been arranging and rearranging tables, trying to figure out how to seat twenty for Thanksgiving. No matter how many tables we dragged in from the kitchen and the porch, and no matter how many other, theoretical, tables we added, we kept coming up with seventeen seats.
My husband was perplexed by the riddle of the finite seating. So I put down the watch, and we moved the tables some more. When we were through there were two long tables of different heights running down the center of the dining room, one mid-sized table spurring off from the center, and one small table against the wall. It looked awful, like someone had built a maze in the room with all blind alleys. We counted again. Twenty!
Riddle solved, I showed my husband the watch and told him the story. Then I put
it back in the red box, took it to the bathroom, and tucked it, along with my
late twenties, behind the towels. Maybe I’ll come across them in another fifteen
years, when I’m wondering, once again, where time goes. Meanwhile, my
mid-forties and I will be in the dining room, with my husband and twenty of our
closest friends and family, thankful for the time that’s right here. |
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We’ve gotten the dog a therapist. We probably should have done it a year ago,
when we adopted her, but we hoped the problem would just get better. The
problem, we now realize, is actually a host of problems, the kind that arise
when a dog is neglected to the point where her belly is dangling a pouch full of
cancer, heartworms are throwing a party in her chest, her six inch toenails are
competing for a Guinness World Record, and then she is dumped at the Humane
Society with a sister in similar condition, minus the cancer and the nails. In
comparable circumstances, wouldn’t we all need a little therapy?
At
lunch a few days after our first appointment, I told my mother and her boyfriend
about Brie’s therapy. They exchanged mirthful glances over their salads.
“This new generation,” my mother said, shaking her head. “Did your family run
for therapy at the first sign of problems?” she asked her boyfriend.
“Us? Lord no,” he said. “We just surveyed the carnage and quietly slipped away.”
They giggled, and we changed the subject.
According to the therapist, it is our job to make Brie understand that my
husband and I are the ones in control when it comes to feeding times and the
rights of guests to knock, dishes to shiver, and people in movies to entertain
their friends. A tall order when you’re dealing with a frightened dog whose
universe has for years felt in a shambles.
But
my husband and I don’t believe in quietly slipping away. We’re determined to
help her. As former therapists, we see this as an opportunity for growth—Brie’s
and ours. Since we know that behavior change often precedes insight, we know
that if we can change what Brie’s habits—waking us up at three in the morning,
rushing the door at every noise—and substitute saner ones, then maybe she’ll
come to understand that her world with us is ordered and safe.
Last week, after a therapy/training exercise that involved making the plates
rattle and then calming the dog, my mother called. She wanted to know what I was
making for Thanksgiving and what time to be at our house.
“One whole turkey, one turkey breast, cranberry sauce, greens,
salad, stuffing. Come at noon.”
“What?” she cried. “A turkey breast is much too small! I don’t know that we can
be there by noon! And oh no, not THAT stuffing!” She was referring to the
stuffing I’d made the year before that was, owing to the absence of onion,
unforgivable. “Please tell me not THAT stuffing.”
I
hung up and went to find my husband, who was practicing a dominance exercise
with the dog, herding her away from bits of kibble resting enticingly on the
floor. Brie, her sister Bella, and even our other dog, Shark, were all gazing
appreciatively, reverently, at my husband, the strong and able defender of the
door to kibble kingdom. I marveled at the sight, and wanted to kick myself at
the same time. How easy it was to take control, and yet how hard we’d made it
for all of us!
As
I watched the exercise for a few minutes, I thought about how we were already
seeing a change in Brie. She’s less on edge, and seems happier. She still rushes
the window at times, but doesn’t bark quite as much or seem as fearful. Her eyes
have softened, and she wags her tail more. I am impressed with how simple
changes in the way my husband and I do things are leading to changes in the way
Brie does things. Her therapist was right: an ordered outside world makes for an
ordered emotional world.
With that, I realized I needed to call my mother back. “A turkey breast is not too small, you can easily be here by noon, and yes, THAT stuffing.” back to the top |
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