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Three Little Words That Say I Love You
Fear and Loitering in Chattanooga
If it Ain’t Broke, Break It

The Stress Of Making Nothing Into Something
                Taking a Bite out of Women’s Lib     
Separate Vacations Speak Volumes--Or Say Nothing At All
Not Everyone Loves Going to the Movies

Three Little Words That Say I Love You

First let me say that I love my mother. We’ve had our run-ins, of course.  There was the time my seventeen year-old boyfriend spilled a five- gallon vat of vegetable soup in her refrigerator, my fault because I was no doubt in the bathroom brushing my long tresses for the umpteen- millionth time that day, leaving my hungry suitor to scavenge for his own lunch.  One clumsy grab sent hundreds of tiny carrot cubes and shriveled pellets of peas swimming like stranded sailors in an ocean of tomato broth that overflowed the fruit crisper, and puddled into the floor.
 

And there was the time when I was thirty-two that I failed to stop my older sister from organizing a surprise 60^th birthday party for our mother at an exclusive Atlanta restaurant.  My sister invited ten people my mother had stopped speaking to twenty years earlier, then stuck my mother with the bill.
 

“How could you let this happen?” my mother growled over the phone at me from two hundred miles away.  At which time I turned to my fiancé to play the “Is This Really My Fault?” game, in which he listens patiently to the accusation at hand and then weighs in brilliantly, which is to say, in my favor.
 

“Not your fault,” he said, about the dinner party.  “It was your sister’s gift.” 
 

But lately there’s something new between my mother and me, an interaction that is benign but confusing. It is this: at least once a week, she calls me from Atlanta and asks, in a voice raw with alarm and bordering on panic, “Where ARE you?!”
 

The last time she did this I was at the grocery store. Initially, her alarm frightened me; it sounded as if she’d been trying to get through for days, and I imagined her poor fingertips, ragged and blistered from the action of dialing and redialing. 
 

“At the grocery store!” I said. “What’s wrong?!”  Nothing was wrong, and we went on to have perfectly appropriate chit-chat as I searched for value-priced Great Northern Beans.
 

The reason I think my mother’s panicked “where are you” is something other than concern for my whereabouts is because she does not, in general, worry about me. Not really. Case in point: last week when I called to chat, she confessed that the day before she’d seen an incoming call on her phone from Tresevant, Tennessee, near my husband’s hometown of Bradford.
 

“I immediately thought you’d had an accident and were stranded and were calling me for help,” she said.  
 

“And you didn’t pick up?” I said.
 

She laughed guiltily.
 

So I’ve decided that, “where are you?” isn’t really a question about where I am, literally, at the moment of her call. I think my mother is asking something infinitely more complex, that can’t be answered in a single sentence, or by referencing geography. Call me crazy, but I think the answer my mother seeks is a deeply personal and philosophical one. Thirty years post-vegetable soup fiasco, as she turns eighty and I  enter menopause, I wonder if her question is more along the lines of, ”Where ARE you in the grander scheme of things?  Where are you in your relationship with me? Where do we stand, after all our years as mother and daughter, having swiveled through years of blame and more years of forgiveness, decades of struggling to find the right distance, then losing the distance it was so hard to cultivate, then finding it, blissfully, again? Where, exactly, in our journey together, ARE we?
 

My mother called me yesterday to tell me about her latest foray to TJ Maxx, a favorite haunt of ours.  “Where ARE you?” she asked suddenly.  
 

 I was on my way home from North Chattanooga, but that didn’t seem to be the point.
 

Next time she asks, I’ll simply say, “I’m right here, talking to you.” Which, for forty-eight years, is where I have always been, and where, with luck and patience, we’ll always be.    

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Artists are like children. We play with paint and clay, are dazzled by strange textures, and will cut anything to see what it looks like smaller. We barrel our way through show season like it’s the school year, spending more hours in our van with our artwork in nine months than some people spend with their families in the same amount of time. Like summer-obsessed grade-schoolers, our brains hum with impatience, as we pine for those few months of freedom when we’ll be able to paint or make things that please only our own eye. Or maybe even rest.

But last November, when show season ended, I did something I’ve never done before. I sealed up my paints and pushed my easels into the corners of the studio. My plan was to finish writing a book I’d been working on for five years. My mentor assured me I’d be done by March.

“March? Really?” I said, my voice squealing like a teenage prom queen. I brimmed with gratitude at her confidence. I burned with ideas at my computer. I wrote with bravado, and revised with gusto.

One month later, unrest set in. I called my writing mentor with a plan.

“I want to get certified as a life coach,” I said. I would continue to write full-time during the day, and would study for my certification at night. By mid-year, I could have a private practice. This wasn’t some hair-brained idea I’d hatched out of frustration, I assured her. I’d been thinking about it for hours.

“You promised you’d just focus on the book through March,” she said.  

I sighed, put away the life coach application, and went back to writing. But my bravado had cooled. Revision was a chore. Was there not ONE sentence in my three-hundred page (already twice-revised) manuscript that could stand as it was? Still, I kept at it, ruthlessly hacking away at my prose to make way for better prose. At the two-month mark, I read a thrice-revised, finished passage to my husband. He listened carefully. Then he gave me some ideas for revising it further. I laughed a snorty laugh and rolled my eyes. What did he know? He’s a photographer, not a writer.

I sent the passage to my mentor, who had obviously been talking to my husband, because her suggestions were the same as his. Not only that, she was frustrated with me. “You seem to have lost your way,” she said.  

The next few weeks were a blur. I took a trip to Puerto Rico, attended my niece’s Bat Mitzvah luncheon, hosted a reading at my house, took the old dog to the vet for X-rays, and invented a soup. But what stands out is that talk with my frustrated mentor, after which I cried for more hours than some people spend with their children over the course of an entire summer vacation. Did I mention that writing is hard, and apparently requires more than simply shoving your easels off into the corner?

And now, show season is breathing down my back like a feared and revered bully. It is the second week of February as I write this, and I have one hundred-eighty pages to go on my manuscript. Although I won’t meet my mentor’s March goal, I’m happy to report I am back on the horse, trotting down the write-and-revise trail at a fairly steady clip. Barring anymore distractions and ill-conceived ideas--like starting a new career while balancing two others—I  might just cross the finish line before everyone I know is too old or too dead to care.

 
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If it Ain’t Broke, Break It

Last week I broke a bowl. It was an oversized green cereal bowl that I didn’t care that much about. Until, of course, I broke it, at which point it transcended its bowl-ness and became the story of my life.
 

But I’m getting ahead of myself.
 

About a week before I broke the bowl, I was spring cleaning. I went through my closet, bravely tossing adored but tattered sweaters, misshapen boots, and jeans so snug I never should have bought them in the first place. In my kitchen I weeded out Tupperwares that would always smell like tomato sauce, disappointing gadgets (like the Cuisinart that promised, but never delivered, cuisine that was the least bit artistic), and tired dishware. As I held the green bowl over the give-away bag, its life flashed before my eyes.
 

My husband and I bought the green bowl at Pottery Barn eight years ago, a few weeks before our wedding. We showed it to his mother, thinking we wanted place settings for ten just like it, but after living with it for a few days, changed our minds and opted for handmade pottery. The green bowl became my husband’s everyday cereal bowl. Eight years later, I was ready to move it on.  It wasn’t our wedding china, after all. Rather than evoking romantic or even sentimental memories, all it evoked was the realization that my husband ate a gargantuan amount of cereal every morning. I lowered the bowl into the give-away bag. Immediately I was visited by overwhelming sadness and self-loathing, the same feeling I had when I realized, at age twelve, that I would always be taller and weigh more than Davey Jones. I pulled the bowl out of the bag and put it back in the cabinet.

A week later I was washing dishes when the dogs got into a squabble. I turned to see what was the matter, and the green bowl flew from my hands and shattered in the floor. I looked worriedly  at my husband. 
 

“Oh well,” he said, then got a broom.
 

Which was when it hit me: the green bowl was dead to us. Not only that, it was possible that it had been dead to us for years, but we simply couldn’t let go. Now that it was broken, we had no choice.
 

It started me thinking. Once, I left a boyfriend not by leaving, but by finding a different one. Once, I left a job by getting fired, and once, I left another job by initiating a long, painful, self-destructive round of panic attacks. Once, I embraced my independence by becoming hideously dependent on someone, which ensured that he would leave me, thereby forcing me to be independent. Once, my mother gave me a gold ring with my initials on it, which I promptly threw on the ground and ran over with my bike.
 

            “Didn’t you like it?” she asked when I handed the badly distorted ring back to her.
 

            “I love it,” I lied, “but unfortunately it’s broken now, so I can’t wear it.”   
 

             And recently, my husband had a conversation with a friend in which the friend declared he was through with one artistic aspect of his life and moving on to another.
 

            “Just like that?” I was incredulous. “Doesn’t he have to burn an important bridge, traverse the waters of burn-out, over-think his decision to the point where he’s no longer clear about his own desires, fail miserably at what he’s currently doing so as to have an excuse to leave, or become depressed and immobilized for years first?”
 

            “Apparently, some people just listen to their heart,” my husband said.
 

            What an idea. 

The Stress Of Making Nothing Into Something
 

I discovered the game “mahjong” on my computer a few weeks ago when I was too tired to read but not ready for bed. In case you’ve never played it, computer mahjong is a seemingly mindless game in which you click on two identical patterned tiles, thus making them disappear in a puff of simulated smoke. You keep this up until all the tiles are gone. It is simple yet addictive, like South Park cartoons only with better visuals.
 

I showed mahjong to my husband, and he was instantly enthralled. I watched him play a few rounds, thoughtfully stepping in with hints when he seemed to be at an impasse. This is how I can attest to the fact that spectator mahjong is, hands down, the most tedious, sleep-inducing activity on earth, stealing the honor right out from under televised professional fishing and webinars.   
 

A few nights ago I came in from a dinner engagement to discover my husband wide-eyed and shaky on the sofa. He had been playing mahjong for hours, and the stress of it had clearly taken its toll.
 

“Good news,” he said hoarsely. “I think I’m close to figuring out the strategy.”
 

Which quite frankly depressed me. It was like being told that before you can pet your dogs, you must first make a plan. Will you hug all three at once, Oreo cookie style, or separate them and hug one at a time? Will you scratch them under the chin, rub the fur in a nose-to-tail pattern, or keep your focus on ears? I just want to do what comes naturally. In the case of dogs, just get in there and get my hands on them. In the case of mahjong, just click some tiles and go to bed.
 

When I was younger, I sported a fundamentally uncompetitive nature. In elementary school I loved horseback riding, but hated the mock “shows” in which I was forced to participate. In high school I could volley a tennis ball for hours, but mention keeping score and I started hitting balls over the fence and into the highway. In graduate school, I loved nothing more than tossing around a volleyball, bluffing my way through misunderstood poker rules, and playing pool with my boyfriend and a few of our classmates at the local bar. One evening, happily shooting away at the eight ball, I turned around just as my boyfriend and my professor were shaking their heads.
 

“She just doesn’t see the angles,” said my boyfriend. My professor nodded sadly.  
 

Truth was, I did see the angles, but I’d quickly tired of trying to hit them. And anyway, wasn’t the fun of pool seeing what happened when you poked randomly into the cluster of multi-colored balls with a long, shiny stick? Turns out, not if you’re anyone but me.
 

I asked my husband not to talk to me about his mahjong strategy, because I think it’s possible that, in the years since graduate school, I’ve become more competitive. Didn’t I get an iphone when all our friends stuck with Verizon? I fear that if he tutors me in strategy, I will no longer be able to click tiles mindlessly, and will begin to think exclusively in terms of outcome. Which would promote mahjong from the brain-numbing, insomnia-busting time-waster it is to something that actually matters.  Then, at the end of my long list of daily to-do’s—finish a painting, get soy milk, take dogs to the vet, pay the mortgage—the game will hover over me like a threat: Important mahjong match tonight at ten! Carb load, and dress for comfort!
 

I just couldn’t take the pressure.

I should have been paying better attention. But my husband was out of town, I was trying to read a book on the back porch, and I was sleepy. I heard something fall, and although I made a quick loop through the house, with three panting, interested dogs on my heels, I couldn’t locate the sound. I returned to the porch and resumed my sleepy reading.
 

An hour later I heard another noise. By then I had moved from the porch to the kitchen, where I was concocting an obscenely large pan of tiramisu in honor of my husband’s return the following day. I ignored the noise and went to the pantry for cocoa. I saw that a box of cereal had fallen onto the dog food, and an empty jar lay on the floor. Beside the jar was a two- foot long snake.
   

I shut the pantry door gently. A snake in the house is never a good thing. People and dogs can get bitten. If the snake is poisonous, we can die. Complicating this particular snake/death scenario was the fact that I simply could not complete the tiramisu without cocoa. And so I scoured my brain for solutions.
 

I could borrow some cocoa from a neighbor. I could go to the store for a whole new can (as I had just bought a new can, this seemed silly). Or, I could close my eyes and reach into the pantry for the existing cocoa, thereby testing the old theory that if you can’t see something, then A: it does not exist, or B: it cannot see you. I opened the pantry door and peeked in. The snake was coiled, its tongue flicking. I shut the door. I would have to call my neighbor’s husband, Bobby, and ask him to remove the snake.
 

Which is when my women’s lib sensibilities kicked in. I am a child of the sixties. Women of that era do not call men to take care of them. I decided to call my friend and dog-sitter Beth, who once called to tell me, in the kind of serene voice I reserve for reading poetry out loud, that she had removed a snake from my laundry room.
 

“What?!” I screamed over the phone. “You whated a what from where?!” Unlike Beth, when I am under duress, my language skills devolve. Last week I watched, horrified, as a friend stood unknowingly atop a fire-ant hill. As a million angry specks ascended her sneaker and made haste for her ankle, all I could do was jump up and down, point maniacally at the ground and scream, “Thing! Thing!”
 

“Throw a towel over the snake, and then grab it just behind the head,” Beth advised. Only she had laryngitis, and so what I heard was, “This is no time for women’s lib. Call your neighbor!” And so I did.

 Armed with a rake and a mop, my neighbor Bobby and I coaxed the snake into a bucket, and Bobby released it a half-mile away at the creek. (Later my mother would ask why I hadn’t put the snake on Petfinder, and worked harder at getting it a real home).
 

“Did you freak out when you found the snake?” my husband asked the following night, his mouth full of cocoa-dusted tiramisu.
 

While it certainly was a surprise (in general we reserve our pantry for extended families of field mice and the occasional cricket), what has stayed with me is the incongruence of it all. The  discovery of something as primitive as a reptile when you are making something as urbane as tiramisu is hard for me to make sense of. Not to mention there was that waving of the women’s lib flag while deep in the throes of baking for my husband.
 

Forget snakes; that’s just downright scary.

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Separate Vacations Speak Volumes--Or Say Nothing At All

In August, my husband and I will celebrate our ninth anniversary. This doesn’t sound like much, until you add those nine years onto the preceding twelve years we spent trying to decide whether or not to get married, and if so, whether to marry each other. Barring our first year of marriage, which I pretty much spent ruminating about how to get divorced (because as it turned out, that little piece of paper that meant nothing meant something), things have been going pretty well. I chalk it up to the fact that I am a joy to live with. Intensive marital therapy and the numbing effects of red wine don’t hurt either. And even though things are going relatively well, my husband and I did something this summer we thought we’d never do.

We took separate vacations. 

Of course, when you put it like that, it sounds terrible. Like couples in restaurants who eat in silence supposedly because they are so comfortable with each other, the separate vacation is the hallmark of the quietly crumbling marriage. The neon sign announcing that there is a vacancy in your heart. The last thing you do before you pack the silver and call the lawyer.  

Or so people would have us believe. While this was my first time driving off in pursuit of fun without him, my husband and I have of course been apart on many occasions. He often goes to art shows in large, lovely cities while I stay home and mourn his absence by seeing friends, plundering TJ Maxx, and making myself elaborate seafood dinners.

Inevitably, an artist friend will approach my husband at one of his shows and, upon learning that I am at home, inquire about our marital health.

“Is everything OK?” the artist friend will ask, the look of concern in his eyes clearly suggesting that a husband traveling solo spells rotting nuptials. My husband explains things.
 

“We live together. We eat breakfast together every morning. We ride into work together every day, where we share a studio. We eat lunch together, ride home together, eat dinner together, watch TV together and go to bed together.”

 At which time the artist friend’s concern turns to pity and he walks away shaking his head.

My mother also used to worry about our separate travels. “Aren’t you lonely?” she would ask, in a small voice meant to convey how lonely I supposedly was. Often I couldn’t hear her because my music was too loud, my friends were giggling maniacally in the background, or it was a message she was leaving on my cell phone, because I was simply too engrossed in the shoe department to be bothered.

“And aren’t you afraid, being alone in the house?” she would ask, from her alarm-secured, dead-bolted, neighborhood-watched, police-patrolled, thrice-robbed Atlanta home. “After all, look where you live.” Where I live is out in the country with a demographic my mother believes is evil as evidenced by too much time to grow corn.  

“Getting married was scary,” I tell her “Next to that, the threat of crime is downright quaint.” 

And so it was that in June I piloted my little rental car west and north of Philadelphia to rekindle my relationship with two old, beloved friends, while my husband piloted the art show van to Chicago, and then flew home, where he mourned my absence by playing marathon golf, eating a bucket of cereal every night for dinner, and obsessively changing channels on the television set whether he wanted to or not. At some point during a break in the eating and golfing, he called to say he missed me.

And amazingly—or not—I missed him too. Next up is our traditional anniversary dinner at Canyon Grill.

We’ll be the happy couple not speaking. 
 

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Not Everyone Loves Going to the Movies

 I have this little problem with movies. I don’t enjoy them. This is not something you can say without people looking at you like you’ve just declared that kittens are evil, or that you hate the beach or think outlet malls aren’t fun. But I can’t help the way I feel, and I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember. It did not start with going to see Star Wars with my mother when I was sixteen and realizing two hours later that our bottoms were wet from the seats. I did not enjoy movies prior to that, and for a number of reasons. One is that I daydream relentlessly, and so have a hard time following even simple storylines. Another is that I have a keen sense of smell. Like an odor savant, once I acclimate to the intoxicating popcorn aroma, I am bombarded with the noxious scent of a hundred or so humans off gassing everything from clothing to perspiration to whatever they happen to be munching on.  As if that weren’t bad enough, this morning the news informed me there could be bedbugs in my theater seat.

But my problem with movies isn’t just the theater experience. It’s that, if the movie isn’t exactly what I want it to be—and let’s face it, every movie can’t be Lost in Translation or Leaving Las Vegas or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Phantom of the Paradise—then the experience leaves me unhinged and unhappy.

Case in point: last week my husband and I went to see Eat Pray Love, with Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem. This is the movie based on the book of the same name. I enjoyed the book. Elizabeth Gilbert is an immensely likable narrator whose difficult decision to split from her husband and her ensuing search for comfort and meaning was evocatively portrayed. Enter Julia Roberts and some schlocky screenwriting, and the result is the movie version of complexity: Beautiful Face plus Beautiful Scenery plus Available Male equals Life Figured Out.   

Who wouldn’t walk out of this movie craving their own dirty divorce? What woman wouldn’t drive home with scenes of Bali huts dancing in her head, throw open her front door to the crushing smell of three indoor-dwelling dogs, and, ala punk band The Talking Heads, scream,  “This is not my beautiful house!” while her husband, after two lovely hours with Julia, likewise laments, “This is not my beautiful wife!”?

Don’t get me wrong. I love Julia, and if in the future an agent calls me to say Julia is going to play me in my blockbuster memoir (loosely titled Don’t Eat, Don’t Pray, Don’t Love), I will be overjoyed. I will not tell the agent that I am morally opposed to Julia playing me because her beauty will eclipse my ponderous story of pain and misery. Instead I will jump up and down in my smelly little house and forget about the deeper messages my memoir is trying to convey. I will forget altogether that I want to be taken seriously as a writer.

Recently I was perusing an old diary in an attempt to jog my memory about a relationship I had in my twenties. On August 28, 1985, I logged the following entry, quoted here in its entirety: “Severe and horrible depression. Details later.”

There are two problems with this entry: one is that almost all of my diary entries from age twelve to age thirty-three are some variation of this sentiment, and as such, it brought nothing new to the table. The other problem is that, in spite of the promise to myself, no details followed. None! There was no elucidation, either the next day or within the next decade, as to what, on August 28, 1985, was causing me to be so despondent.

Which I think is my problem with movies. Seduced by the promise of emotion and drama, I find myself endlessly searching but rarely finding the real answers to the questions movies posit. Severe and horrible depression? Thank you, Leaving Las Vegas screenwriter, for allowing Nicholas Cage to follow through on his plan to quietly drink himself to death. But no thank you, Eat Pray Love screenwriter, for glossing over the hard stuff in Liz Gilbert’s book. By the time Julia finds Javier, the “Love” part feels one dimensional. It’s not fair to the book, nor is it true to the experience. Does Gilbert care? In my fantasy, she’s livid. “This ain’t no party!” she’s screaming. “This ain’t no disco! This ain’t no foolin’ around!”

Poor Liz. At least she got to be gorgeous.

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