Dreaming of Havel

Today Vaclav Havel died.

It's strange, isn't it, to feel bereft when a stranger has died? I never met Havel; I know very little about his personal life, his likes and dislikes, his quirks and complaints, what he loved and what he loathed on a quotidien level. But I do know what he loved and what he loathed in the cosmic sense. I know about his decades of resistance under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia; I know his published work; I know his political career and his commitment to individual freedom; most of all, I know that when it mattered, this ironic, Frank Zappa-loving playwright did the right thing. Again and again and again.

So, I won't apologize for the fact that I, now and again, have erotic dreams about Vaclav Havel. He was one extraordinarily sexy guy. I imagine he'll keep appearing in my dreams. Damn, I hope so.

Christmas cards

So here's my recipe for a perfect Christmas card writing evening:
Mix together til nicely blended:
1 husband out with buddy to basketball game,
1 16-year-old out doing whatever he does that I'm sure is perfectly legal and safe and will look great on his college applications,
1 bowl of lentil soup on the boil,
1 bottle of white wine nicely chilled,
1 really bad but in a good way movie on tv (in this case "What a Girl Wants" with Colin Firth).
Add
a heaping spoonful of My Grades Are In and I'm ignoring everything else that's way overdue.
Sprinkle in lots of Good Golly It's the Weekend
and
Thank You God It's Finally Gotten Cold Outside, to taste.
Pour into Really Cute but in an Ironic Way Winnie the Pooh Christmas Cards.
Garnish with one totally amazing family Christmas newsletter.
Really.

Tho' it's best not to drink the whole bottle of wine. The addresses get a tad sloppy; the messages rather more so. Just sayin'.

Nativity Sets

I am sick. Massive quantities of phlegm sliding down the back of my throat, a downright impressive chesty cough, a sore throat, an ear ache. . . yeah, the whole shebang except, dammit, no fever. And without a fever, one is not truly sick and one cannot really take time off without feeling that one is a total slacker. So one pretends to work while feeling really shitty and put-upon.

Rather than continuing to whine in this annoying way, I will, instead, turn y'all over to another blogger, who has posted the 27 Worst Nativity Sets of All Time. These are truly wonderful. Enjoy and be blessed:
http://whyismarko.com/2011/27-worst-nativity-sets-the-annual-growing-list/

Road Trip

I have survived 14 1/2 continuous hours  in an aged Honda Civic with my 16-year-old son. Sounds like a reality show, but no, no show, just reality. The secrets to my survival? A constant stream of junk food, an iPad, and headphones. For him, that is, not for me: Numb the hulk with electronic stimuli, stopper his mouth with copious quantities of saturated fat and an alarming abundance of sodium, and all  is well.

I used to aspire to be a Good Mom. Now I just hope to make it through til morning.

Mold Removal

Thanksgiving Eve Day. A beautiful cold Chicago morning, with a pale blue cloudless sky. I love cold. I love trees stripped of leaves and lawns turning brown and flower beds dug up and hunkered down, waiting for snow. I love chunky sweaters and thick socks and lined boots and puffy ski jackets.

It was 80 degrees in Baton Rouge when we drove away. I should never come north during the winter. Denied long enough, my winter soul ices over, settles down in a hard lump, kicked into a forgotten corner of Me. But back up here, that lump expands and explodes; icycles sliver through and shred all the bits of southernness that stick and cling, like mold, building up over time and distorting the shape of Me.

It hurts.

And what's the use of getting Me all clear and uncovered, when we're heading back south on Sunday? Easier and less painful to stay moldy.

Vibrators et. al.

I like to think, despite having hit the Big 50, that I'm not totally out of it. But maybe I'm deluded. I subscribe to fab.com: daily email alerts to specials on groovy independent design items. Mostly funky kitchen stuff, tee shirts, jewelry, furnishings. But yesterday's selection included a firm specializing in beautiful vibrators. Okey dokey. No problem. Except there was this vibrator that I just did not get. Meaning, no, I didn't buy it, but also, I just didn't understand it. It was shaped like the profile of a hand flashing the peace sign. So, umm, two fingers. . . I dunno. . . I"m so confused.

Vibrators in general confuse me. Does that make me a Bad Person? A Failed Sexual Being? Uptight? Clueless? See, a mechanical thing is, well, mechanical. Uniform. Constant. These qualities do not seem to me to be the best suited for physical pleasure. Maybe I'm weird, but the thing is. . . . I vary. Sometimes a slow gentle touch, sometimes a vigorous  approach .  . . the days change, the moods change, the needs change. So . . . a responsive human finger seems much more efficient.

All of which has gotten me to thinking about masturbation. Would I be a different person had my mother not assured me that masturbation was sinful and that God frowned on it? If I hadn't sat in church and when Rev. Witte said that on Judgment Day all our secret sins would exposed--like a movie running in front of the world--I just died inside, thinking of me and my pillow, on this giant global screen?

I was determined not to do that to my kids. When Owen was little, he liked to wear these colored long underwear sets that I got from some organic kids catalog (when you called to place an order, there'd be all these babies crying and half the time the woman taking the info--yes, yes, this was Way Back Then Before Online Shopping--would say, "oh wait a sec, have to switch to the other breast;" it was a Very organic baby catalog company). Owen liked these sets because they were soft and comfy, no itchy seams or tags, and he could pull them on himself and, best of all, he could be Robin Hood in green, the Red Power Ranger in red, a Ninja in black, etc etc etc.

All of which was fine and fairly cheap and Owen was adorable; the only problem was that the long underwear did allow him very easy access to Down There. And goodness, he enjoyed getting to know Down There. So I developed this mantra: "That is a Bed and Bathroom Activity." See? No judgment, but also doing my job to socialize my kid: Look, baby, you can't be doing this in public.

And on the whole, it worked. Owen's all grown up and he does not pleasure himself in public. But there was this one day . . . my then 16-year-old niece Anne was living with us for the summer and serving as our summertime nanny. She had taken Owen to the video store (remember those? before Netflix? you'd wander around and around and around, and there's be all these movies, and you couldn't find anything you hadn't seen or he hadn't seen or that you both wanted to see?). There they were, little Owen, teenaged Anne,  in line. Anne looks up and the two guys about Anne's age at the cash register are giggling and snorting. Nothing too unusual in that, but then one of the boys looks right at Owen and say, "Go for it, man!" Anne looks down and there's Owen with his hands in his pants. Without missing a beat, she says in a loud, firm, loving voice, "Owen, that is a Bed and Bathroom Activity!" At which point the boys behind the counter practically pass out with laughter and Anne turns brilliant red and wonders how many different ways she can make me suffer.

Big Foot

I read once that the only two body parts that keep growing throughout one's entire life (apart from parts that grow due to weight gain, that is) are the nose and the feet. Could this be true? Surely not. Wouldn't all old people have humongous noses and gargantuan feet? And yet. . . I swear my nose is expanding at an exponential rate. And my feet. . . well, I used to be a 6 1/2 or a 7, depending on the style and brand. Then I moved into a 7 1/2. OK, I thought, sizes shift. I mean, I used to be a 6  in clothes but now I'm a 4, even tho' I'm almost 20 pounds heavier, so umm, maybe shoe sizes went the opposite direction. Could be. It's possible. But yesterday $500 worth of Zappo's boots arrived at my door. How I love Zappo's. You go click click click on your laptop, and a couple of days later, there it is, this enormous box filled with gorgeous boots. Except in this case, the box bore a bounty of absolutely gorgeous boots sized 7 1/2  that are all too damned small.

Maybe sizes shifted downward again.

Or maybe I'm suffering from some sort of menopausal or seasonal foot swelling disorder thing.

Or maybe it really is true. One's feet do keep growing. One will soon have to walk like a clown, flipping and flopping in one's boat-like feet.

Better order a bunch of size 8 boots and enjoy normal (ish)-sized feet while I can.

Into the Gap

I just realized that today is Nov. 6, which means yesterday was Nov. 5. (See, I may be in menopause, but I'm still as sharp as ever.)

The Fifth of November--how could I have forgotten? I feel like I've betrayed a fundamental part of my family's history. Not "my family" as in "my lineage." We're all Dutch, nothing to do with Guy Fawkes Day or the Gunpowder Plot, nothing interesting or important in my family lineup, just a bunch of impoverished Calvinist mud farmers from Drenthe. No, by "my family," I mean my real family: Keith and Owen and Hugh. And by "history," I mean our history, our past, our life in England.

Our first Guy Fawkes Day, or "Bonfire Night" as most people in Manchester called it, was quite a revelation. I had lived in London in November and so expected something along London lines--a few firecrackers, some film clips of bonfires in vacant lots on the evening news. But Bonfire Night in our working-class neighborhood turned out to be something more akin to a night in Baghdad during the U.S. invasion. The explosions began early and just did not stop. At one point, a cascade of bottle rockets came whizzing into our back garden (aka back yard) and slammed into the kitchen door, but that was small beer compared to the bombs detonating all around us. To my utter amazement, this society--which did not allow anyone to purchase a 12-capsule pack of ibuprofen without first listening to a lengthy lecture about the proper use of painkillers, which had banned lice-killing shampoo because of the damage it could do if overused, which did not have Jungle Gyms in its school playgrounds because of the potential danger--this society allowed the purchase and recreational use of major explosives without any apparent control or limit.

By sunset, when we were supposed to show up in a neighbor's back garden for a genuine bonfire and BBQ, four-year-old Hugh was as close to catatonic as one can be without being thrown into a hospital bed. At this point in his young life, he was acutely frightened of loud, sudden noises (so strange, given his own capacity for noise-making). If a balloon popped in Hugh's vicinity, he would go silent and freeze, his body rigid, his big dark eyes staring fixedly ahead. Even the possibility of such a noise reduced him to rigidity: the mere sight of a balloon or a party popper was enough to transmogrify all his liveliness and curiosity and endless chatter into something closer to severe autism.

Owen so desperately wanted to attend the bonfire. On the whole, life in England was just one long misery for him, so desperately, stupidly, I tried.
--Where was Keith? Usually, at this point in our lives, at some church meeting or service or event, given his position as pastor of four Methodist congregations in Manchester, but surely not on Bonfire Night? No, definitely not, and yet. . . he's not there. In these memories, he's not there. Maybe I'm transferring all those times in Manchester that he wasn't there to this particular night. I honestly can't say. But in my memory, Keith is nowhere to be found.--
All on my own, then, I jollied poor Hugh along. There must have been a hiatus in the bombing, because he did walk over to the neighbor's, and Owen was so thrilled, so enchanted with the darkness and the sense of rules being broken and the utter edginess of the night. But almost immediately the whistles and bangs began again and Hugh couldn't cope. Our accommodating, if puzzled, hosts had no problem with keeping Owen but he pleaded with me to stay; only eight, he still wanted/needed/flourished in my company. When I headed out the gate with Hugh in my arms, Owen just stared at the ground and refused to say goodbye.

And then came one of the most surreal walks of my entire life. Down this dark lane (was it dark? surely the streetlamps were on? yet I remember it as so dark) I carried my eerily silent Hugh, his body stiff, his eyes glassy, while all around us things zoomed and shrieked and zzzzed and banged and boomed.

Such a strange night. The next two Bonfire Nights were much the same: Owen eager to join the anarchy, Hugh driven deep within himself, while I sought somehow to encourage the one and comfort the other, and felt myself falling, slipping, tumbling down the gap between the two.

New Light

I've been looking for a new lamp for awhile and so was delighted to see that my niece today posted a link on her Facebook page to a real possibility: a vagina lamp. (Check it out: http://www.regretsy.com/2011/11/04/cervix-with-a-smile/). But what really tickled me about this lamp was the notation above the picture, which says "Filed in  Decor, Vaginas." I had no idea there was an entire category of vagina decor. I guess I really don't get out enough because I thought my only option was a Georgia O'Keefe flower painting. After all these years of enduring phallic symbols everywhere (especially in Baton Rouge, where the state capital building really should have a condom put on it, it's such an obvious erect penis), I am delighted that vaginas are getting some, um, face time.

Human-Scale

As I mentioned in the last post, I had a family wedding in Atlanta last weekend. My first visit ever to Atlanta, if one doesn't count the airport, which of course one shouldn't. Gah--the idea that folks might mistake O'Hare for Chicago. . . Anyway, I have to say I was distinctly unimpressed. I did expect to be impressed, I really did. I mean Atlanta--home of the New South, an Olympics venue, the place where all the young movers and shakers seem to spend time. But the downtown was so dead, so utterly empty of people except for a few bewildered tourists like us, so lacking in urban edge, that I felt perfectly ok sending my really-not-much-to-be-trusted 16-year-old and his 13-year-old cousin off on their own. They had a great time getting sick after sampling 60 different kinds of Coke at the Coca-Cola Museum. As a result, Hugh is now a passionate wanna-be Atlantean. "We should move here!" he enthused.

Damn. One more thing dividing me from my son.

We made the mistake of staying in the Westin Peachtree--the highest hotel in the western hemisphere in "an iconic downtown location," according to the website (how weird is that? the hotel isn't "iconic," just the location?), but according to Wikipedia, actually only the second tallest all-hotel building in the western hemisphere. So who do you trust, Westin or Wikipedia? Ah, the dilemmas of life in the internet age. Designed by renowned Atlanta architect John Portman, the Westin Peachtree is the embodiment of modernist alienation and elitism. Now mind you, I love modernist architecture; I'm a Chicagoan, for pete's sake, and any Chicagoan worth her organic seasalt is a fan of modernist architecture--but the thing is, Chicago accustoms you to modernist architecture done well, done right, done with respect for the humans who will inhabit it and the society that will swirl around it. Ah, Mr. Portman. You should have spent more time in Chicago. Your hotel, Mr. Portman, sucks. Excuse the highly technical language there, but it just really sucks. Your hotel makes its guests feel they've just booked a weekend in a parking garage--except most parking garages are far more easy to find one's way around in and, frankly, far more attractive. Your hotel is cold and uncomfortable and dehumanizing and godawful ugly.  It is staffed by fine and friendly people, all of whom wear a look of terror and doom. They know they cannot compensate for the physical ghastliness of the place and that their tips will reflect this fact. But at least they haven't absorbed the hard lines, the unforgiving nature, of all the concrete around them. Still, my tips were miserly. I couldn't help it. Everything around me demanded unkindness, a heart of stone, a heavy boot. Orwell, oh Mr. Portman, what Orwell could have written about your hotel.

And the thing is, Mr. Portman, you don't actually have to travel way up north to Chicago. Just go down the street to the High Museum of Modern Art. There's a splendid building, a wonderful example of modernist architecture done with feeling and sensibility and a basic humanity. Go wander around there for awhile. It will do you good. It certainly did me good after being subjected to the brutalism of your hotel.

So now I'm home, in my 1930s Craftsman-inspired, Chicago-tinged, totally funky Baton Rouge house. It's crumbling around us, but it's a lovely house, a house for human beings. And when I go to work, it's in a crumbling 1930s building that is part of the original LSU campus--a lovely building, tho' slowly disintegratiing due to years of budget cuts and deferred maintenance. Despite the exposed asbestos and the paint shards that fall on my head, I love Himes Hall. Like my house, it was built to human scale. So, Atlanta, thank you. And thank you, too, Mr. Portman. Thank you for reminding me of what I have. Unlike so many people, I get to spend my days and my nights in physical environments that I find sustaining and restorative. And as I begin to realize that there really aren't all that many days and nights left, not in the big scheme of things, such things matter. Life is too short to be spent in concrete.

Longing for a lubricated life

I had a family wedding in Atlanta last weekend. Three days away from home, and then six days in recovery. It didn't used to be like this. I used to be able to break routine and then slide right back in. It's as if the post-menopausal vagina (dry as all get-out) becomes a metaphor for one's entire post-menopausal life. No easy sliding. No just slipping in and out. Sigh. I miss a lubricated life.

A Headache Day

A Headache Day.

A day spent on auto-pilot, waiting til the absolutely-must-do stuff is done, so one can go home, take drugs, and vegetate in a darkened, quiet room. A day punctuated by deep breathing sessions and self-massage and failed efforts at self-distraction.

If I were a more spiritual person, I would use these days to deepen my journey toward God. I would use these days to remind myself what life is like apart from God and how every pain-free minute is a moment of grace. I would use these days to develop empathy toward the suffering. At the very least, I would use these days to cultivate a grateful spirit, to be thankful  that I have a job that allows me to go home in the middle of the day and crash.

I aspire to be that person. But I'm not there yet. Instead, I am grumpy and pissed off. I have Plans, goddammit! Things  to do. People to impress. Books to write.Plus, I hate hurting. I really do.

A couple of years ago, I actually took almost an entire semester's sick leave, in an effort to solve the Headache Problem once and for all.  I spent the months on a futile quest to convince my insurance company to pay for my treatment at a headache clinic ("We can only pay for treatment within the network area." But there are no headache clinics here and my doctor says-- "We can only pay for treatment within the network area."), waiting on hold for various lab techs and doctors' secretaries (not, by and large, happy individuals, I discovered), and keeping a headache diary (basically a fulltime occupation, as you have to log everything you eat, every shift in the weather, every activity you undertake, and every little twinge of pain with details RE the locus of the pain, the type of pain, what you were doing when the pain ensued. . . You become completely self-obsessed. You spend all your time watching and documenting yourself. It is Not Good for You. Jesus, I am sure, would never keep a headache diary.) I spent obscene amounts of money on massage therapy, physical therapy, chiropracty, various types of yoga, hormone testing, neurologists' visits, vitamins, and herbal supplements, Gregorian chant cds, and massive quantities of drugs. I alternated ice packs and heating pads. I watched "What Not to Wear" and discovered I was wearing it.  I still had headaches.

So I try something now and then--a round of acupuncture here, a set of stretching exercises there, an occasional consultation with a new doctor--and none of it makes a difference and I muddle through. It's just that days like today seem very muddley, not a lot of through, you know? Except at the end there's this gentle guy who rubs my neck and makes me dinner and lets me go to bed at 8:00 without laughing at me and seems to be ok with muddle. And that helps me through. Which seems enough, for now.

On the Streets of Baton Rouge

I was bruised and battered
And I couldn't tell what I felt
I was unrecognizable to myself.

Springsteen fans, and anyone cognizant of important music in the 20th century, will recognize the above as the opening lines of "The Streets of Philadelphia," a beautiful song featured on the soundtrack of the movie Philadelphia with Tom Hanks.

The movie, as I imagine most of the world knows, is about a guy with AIDS, early in the AIDS epidemic (if you haven't seen it, you should; really). So why are those lyrics playing over and over and over in my head this Sunday night, as the weekend draws to a close? I do not have AIDS. No one I know has AIDS. I know that AIDS is an enormous global crisis, one that I should pay more attention to.

And I will. Truly. I promise.

But right now, I can't. I'm too bruised and battered. I can't tell what I feel. I'm unrecognizable to myself.

I'm not on the streets of Philadelphia. I'm just here, at home, in boring ol' Baton Rouge. (Tho' I gotta say, gumbo vs. cheese steak?? Gumbo wins, hands down.)

The thing is, I've just spent the weekend with Hugh. My 16-year-old son. And, all I can think and hear , the only thing that seems to make sense of the chaos in my heart and the churning in my gut and the ache in my skull is that song:
I was bruised and battered
And I couldn't tell what I felt
I was unrecognizable to myself.

Who do I become when I am with him? Who is this horror? This hectoring, righteous, ill-humored, rigid soul? And who does he become? My beautiful boy, my charming, funny, cheeky, handsome guy? How does he transform into this rude and cruel and self-centered hulk, this mass of IWantIDemandINeed WhatIsWrongWith YouYouAreSoFuckingLame?

When Hugh was 15 months old, I went to London for three weeks to do research. And when I flew home, Keith was there with both boys to meet me in the airport. And Hugh reached out his chubby little arms, smiled, said softly, "My mama," and nestled close.

My Hugh. Baby, where are you?

Grants

I spent most of this week on the utterly soul-destroying task of writing a grant application.

Now, for those of you grant virgins out there, let me just point out that not all grant applications are the same. I, for one, don't find applying for money for my own research to be spiritually annihilating, I suppose because I get to witter on and on about ideas that I care about and it's kind of a kick to try and make some group of unknown folks care about these ideas too.  (Perhaps I ought to note that for all my wittering, I'm amazingly bad at getting said funds. Which is why I am, and will always remain, an associate rather than a full professor. Not that I mind. Really. No, no. It's just my allergies. Something in my eye. A problem with my contacts. Really.)

This week, however, I was applying for "enhancement funds" for one of the undergraduate residential colleges at LSU. Don't get me wrong: I do care about this project, as much or more than I care about my own research. I mean, frankly, I research and write about British Victorian and post-Victorian religious culture. Not exactly gonna change the world, is it? Whereas this residential college, well, it won't change the world, it won't even change LSU, and it sure as hell won't change Louisiana where we just re-elected the horrific Bobby Jindal as governor by an embarrassing landslide. . . .but it might just change the lives of a few LSU undergrads. These residential colleges are a way of somehow sneaking the harmony and elegance and coherent community of a small liberal arts college experience into the cacophony and chaos of a huge state university. I had a wonderful, life-transforming and yes, even mind-altering (without hallucinogenic drugs!) experience at my liberal arts college and I passionately want the same for my hungover, disengaged, football-addicted, parochial, and utterly lovely students. (I mean, take this final sentence from one of my upper-level student's essays: "A new period began during this time, it has come to be known as the Victorian period, named after Queen Victoria, who ruled at the time." How unbelievably, utterly lovely is that?)

So, why then, did I find the experience of writing this grant so personally and emotionally and existentially devastating? Because, dear ones, winning the grant demands that the applicant demonstrate that the project will acrrue calculable economic benefit to the state of Louisiana. And tell me, how does one quantify, how does one calculate, the economic benefit of encouraging well-rounded, globally aware, internationally engaged, intellectually vital, politically active young folks?

I'll tell you. One makes stuff up. Not out of whole cloth, mind you, but one does grab meaningless numbers and one marshalls one's skill at crafting words to make those meaningless integers appear to carry profound weight.

I hate playing this game. A good liberal arts education, which is what I had--thank you Mom and what was then the Social Security dependent's benefit (axed by Reagan but not before I'd used it for all four years) and Calvin College and Northwestern University and an impressive array of underpaid, incredibly committed professors--teaches intellectual honesty. I betrayed that education in an effort to obtain at least some of the benefits of that education for some of my students. Sigh. How perverse is that?

Consequences

Teenaged son is miffed. To put it mildly.

Teenaged son does not  understand why, if the school has already inflicted a punishment (a draconian punishment, he would say, if he knew the word "draconian," that is, which I doubt as it does not surface very often on reality tv--ok, yes, I'm miffed too, to put it mildly, and as a result inclined to be incredibly bitchy and judgmental and downright snarky) for his transgression, we should then feel it necessary to reinforce the punishment at home.

"What's the point," he says. "You're not teaching me anything."

"Consequences, Hugh," I say. "You do stuff. You set things in motion. There are consequences."

"That's stupid," he says. "I've already learned what I need to know. There's no point."

Ah, darlin'. If only it were that simple: You fuck up; you learn; you move on; no consequences.

Sadly, it doesn't work that way. Just ask Shakespeare. Or the captain of the Exxon Valdez. Or the drunk drivers who wake up on Sunday morning to discover corpses in their rearview mirror. Or all those boys, all those girls, who suddenly find themselves facing parenthood. Things happen, my love. Things that last. Things that change everything.Things that matter.

A simple declarative sentence

"I fucked up."

A fine sentence. The simple declarative. The clear subject. The active verb. So much better than "It got fucked up" or "I was fucked up." And when you're a mom of a teenaged son who has had a wee bit of trouble with that whole personal-responsibility/ choices-have-consequences thing, this simple three-word sentence, articulated by said son, is a thing of transcendent beauty. And unbelievable pain.

When Hugh was little, I used to worry I had some version of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. Munchausen by Proxy, for those of you who do not watch tv medical dramas, is a mental illness. Individuals with Munchhausen's deliberately make their children sick, to the point of injecting them with poisons and such like, so that they can garner attention and sympathy. Now, let me make it clear: I never ever did anything of the kind to Hugh, nor was I ever tempted in any way. I mean, dammit, unlike many of my friends, I didn't even resort to Children's Benedryl to make the kid sleep. But--I did, actually, enjoy it when Hugh was ill (which he rarely was, and never seriously.) Illness ratcheted Hugh down a few notches; when Hugh was sick, he became like other children. Easier. Gentler. More even-keeled. Less hyper. And  yes, more enjoyable.

So, this last week Hugh was home. He'd fucked up. And he knew it. And, wonder of wonders, he admitted it. It scared the shit out of him. And like when he was little and running a fever, he was lovely, with all the teenage aggression and hostility and don't-touch-me and what-do-you-care dammed up, forced into the holding tank by his desperate need for us and our unconditional love.

It was awful. To see him in such pain. To know how much "I-fucked-uppedness" hurts. To want to make it right, to make it go away, and yet to know you can't. This is his business. All you can do is watch. And love. And hope.

Flummoxing Netflix

I suppose it's an indication of the limited, somewhat pitiful life I lead that one of my greatest pleasures is flummoxing the Netflix computer.

Netflix (which is, for those of you living on another planet, the extraordinary dvd-by-mail company that has wiped our strip malls clean of video rental stores) keeps track of what you order and then suggests other movies you might like, the results of a complex algorithm about which I once read a really interesting article but of course can no longer recall any of the details or even any of the significant facts. (Gimme a break. I'm a middle-aged woman in menopause.)

Anyway, humanist that I am, I find the idea that I can be reduced to an algorithm profoundly disturbing. Thus it gives me great delight to know that I regularly give the Netflix computer conniption fits. But "I" in this case isn't actually just me. "I" embraces both my sons, for both of them know my Netflix password, and both of them regularly stream Netflix movies to their computers. (Me, I prefer the old-fashioned, out-of-date dvds that come in the cheery red envelopes.) The result of this password/account sharing is, from the Netflix computer's point-of-view, one really weird customer who enjoys indie movies about suicide, anything Jane Austen, and adolescent comedies about farting, vomiting, and masturbating. You should see what comes up under "Our Recommendations for Facing-50."

Tho' it does dawn on me that we have here the makings of a great reality tv show. A kind of American Idol for filmmakers: Come up with a movie that will please this Weird Person. Must be set in Regency England and contain a brooding but appealing aristocratic hero and a spunky but still gentlewomanly heroine, must also contain a suicide and weird camera angles and lots of awkward silence and an alienating soundtrack, while also being a rousing  and earthy comedy containing frequent references to body exhalations of all sorts. An Oscar awaits.

Queen for a Day

I came home from teaching, threw my bag in the corner, and shouted, "If I were Queen of the World for a Day, I would ban all straightening rods, straightening creams, and straightening blow-outs for all time!"

Keith looked at me, nodded, and immediately left the house.

Pitiful, isn't it? What sort of person chooses hair straightening as the thing that must be eradicated to make the world better? Not hunger? AIDS? Malaria? The Tea Party? Glenn Beck? And really, truly, I'd get rid of all those first, if I were Queen. Absolutely. It's a promise.

But I've had it with straight hair. For years now, I look out at my classes, and all the white women look absolutely identical. Same shoulder-length straight hair, seat after seat after seat. Absolutely utterly the same. It's weird. Creepy. Downright Orwellian. When I first started teaching, lo, these many decades ago, I had trouble tellling the white guys apart. They all wore baseball caps and sat in the back row and threw down their pens whenever I used words like "patriarchy" or "gender" or "femininity". The women, however,  were easy--some had short hair, some long, some in between, in a wide range from downright nappy to board straight. Jennifer stood out from Jessica; Alison could never be mistaken for Emma. Now the women in my classes look like they've all been cloned by some alien mastermind out to take over American universities. There's the occasional rebel with a variety of piercings and tattooss--but even she sports that same damned straight hair. I can't stand it. How am I supposed to tell Taylor from Dakota from Hannah from Jordan from Katelyn from Michelle from Holly? And good lord, what's wrong with a little curl? the occasional spontaneous bounce? even, God forbid, a wee bit of frizz now and then?

Scarlet Letter

I'm an adulteress. I've been unfaithful to my Hair Guy.

He's a great guy, and he's been incredibly good to me. Time and time again he squeezes me in that very day when I, frantic and fed up with the tangle atop my head, call and whine. He constantly tells me how great my hair is and how cute I am. I'm 51. I am no longer cute, but sitting there in that chair, he makes me believe it, for a few minutes at least. And, when he heard that we were having to send Hugh to boarding school, he gave me a free cut. "I know the budget's tight," he said. "Consider it my contribution to Hugh's future." This is the amazing Hair Guy that I have betrayed.

But, well, my hair hasn't been looking so good, you know? Not a lot of excitement. Same ol' same ol'. It seems like Hair Guy no longer understands me. We've grown apart. I just, I just want something more out of my hair. Is that so bad? so wrong? Is that too much to ask?

No, of course not, I told myself, but Hair Guy and I will work it out. We just need to spend more time together, work on our communication skills. We've both invested far too much to end it all now. So I told myself.

Until last week when I went to pick up a cafe' au lait at the coffee shop on Chimes Street just outside of campus--and just down the street from Eutopia Hair Salon.  In a moment of madness, overcome by my passionate hatred of my hair, I veered off the sidewalk, rushed up the steps, threw myself inside, and blurted, "Do you take walk-ins?"

One mid-morning caffeine-deprived loss of self-control. Oh, the self-loathing. The regret. The "if only" and "I wish" and "if I just would've"s.

Except I gotta say, I've got one funky cool haircut. I really like this cut. I may well love this cut.

I've booked my next appointment at Eutopia. So the question is, does a really great funky haircut distract from the scarlet letter on my chest?

Neighborly

The dog next door is barking. The dog next door is always barking. I have actually contemplated buying a pound of raw ground beef, lacing it with rat poison, and tossing it over the fence. Except I don't throw very well and we'd probably end up with blood dripping down our side of the fence and glops of poisoned meat all over the flower beds. The thing is, I like our neighbors--the human ones. They're good-humored, good-hearted folks, just, you know, with a dog problem. So I grit my teeth and swallow hard, avoid the meat section of the supermarket, and try to focus on being thankful for my own quiet dog. He may be prone these days to bleeding and vomiting, but he's not a barker, bless him.

Plus my hunch is that the folks next door with the incredibly annoying dog often have to grit their teeth, swallow hard, and hold themselves back from sending us a nice neighborly plate of brownies flavored with arsenic. In fact, I fear that everyone on the street, or actually two streets since we occupy a corner lot, is having to do a lot of teeth-gritting and insult-swallowing these days, for we have become Bad Neighbors. More precisely, we have become The People Who Do Not Take Care of Their Yard.

I blame Keith. Now, "Blame Keith" is the default mode in most areas of my life but honestly, the yard has always been his thing. When we married, he had a condo with a small back yard, in which he'd fashioned a series of raised flower beds and vegetable plots. I had spent years as an apartment dweller, with nary a potted plant to my name. So he kept doing the gardening and lawn care, and I didn't. And when we moved to this corner house with its large front yard, side yard, and back yard, Out into the Wild he went, encircling the house with serpentine beds, laying out an enormous herb garden, experimenting with lettuce, planting perennials, grappling with ground cover, trimming, digging, culling, mulching, mincing, dicing, slicing, pruning, cultivating, and whacking away,

And then he changed jobs. And now he's far too busy, far too intellectually and emotionally and physically engaged in his work, to have time or energy or interest in the yard. And here in the semi-tropics, where plants grow several inches overnight and veritable armies of insects wage constant warfare, even a momentary lapse of attention allows nature to thrust in and take back its own. On our beautiful street, a boulevard lined with live oaks and a variety of flowering bushes that guarantee splashes of color all year round and a series of carefully cultivated lawns running in front of wooden porches, our yard stands out--and not in a good way. It's like the students who stumble into my 8:40 class at 8:55, their hair greasy and clumped, traces of last night's pizza still on their unwashed faces.

I get these moments, when I look at at the tangle out there and think, "I could do something about this. I should do something about this." And then I think, "why?" The homeowner gene seems to have passed me by. I realize I'm incredibly fortunate to own a house, but I've never found it in the least bit interesting.

So. The dog next door barks. Our weeds grow. I grit my teeth and my neighbors grit theirs. We meet periodically for drinks and remind ourselves how much we all actually like each other. And someday soon, I hope, we'll move. Maybe the new owners will be enthusiastic gardeners. Deaf enthusiastic gardeners, even. And all manner of things shall be well.

Pigs' Ears

My dog is dying. Maybe.

He's had two tumors--bone cancer--in his paw, and a toe amputation. And now he's on painkillers, and the vet says he has to stay on painkillers the rest of his life. Which means, I think we can assume that the vet believes my dog will be in pain the rest of his life.

Massive moral dilemma. Serious self-examinations.

Surely it's best to send Rowan gently into the good night, painfree evermore. Except. . . I take painkillers. When I don't, I hurt. Yet I like my life. I enjoy it. I would fight really really hard to keep it. If any higher life form were to decide that I'd be so much better off dead, I would resent it, to put it mildly. So if Rowan needs drugs to get him through the day, is that so bad? He's done his doggy duty; all he asks is to sprawl on the rug next to us, take the occasional quick walk, and chomp down a regular supply of treats.

And then. . . what if there's a part of me that wants the dog to die---no, no, I am not that bad, but what if there's a part of me that just can't cope with what it means for the dog to keep on living? The part of me that's sick of mopping up the regular piles of vomit. That retches at the sight of his mangled paw. That clenches at the sight of the blood splotches winding their way throughout the house. That crumbles when he looks at me, trusting, in pain, sure I'll fix it.

I dunno. How do you judge when life is no longer living? Especially when it's not your life, but a life entrusted to you?

Rowan still likes pigs' ears. Is that enough? Is that a life worth living? How do we decide? Must we decide? I dunno. Maybe a nice crunchy pig's ear is all one can really expect, all one should really want, from life. I look at my poor mangled dog, and I just don't know. But he's still crunching. Damn. More than I can say for myself on many a day.

Declaration of Intent

Earlier this week Keith and I and a group of friends went to hear Neal Conan from NPR's "Talk of the Nation." Conan has always struck me as incredibly witty and sane so I figured it would be a great talk. It wasn't. It wasn't bad, mind you, but Conan said nothing that we all didn't already know. Of course, maybe I hang out with an incredibly sophisticated, educated, and articulate crowd. Anyway, afterward, everyone headed to one of the friend's houses for drinks. Except me. I went home to bed.

I do not like being The Person Who Goes Home to Bed. The person who has trouble staying awake past 9 pm. The person whose first reaction to any kind of invitation is to think, "Do I have to?" The person whose idea of an especially good time is to be alone with a big bowl of vegetarian chili and a Doctor Who episode.

All evidence to the contrary, I really am not that person. The real me loves to spend time with good friends. The real me has a passion for politics and intense conversation. The real me enjoys exploring and engaging and experimenting. It's just that the real me has somehow gotten encased in, swallowed up by this carcass, this husk that seems to consist of nothing but aches. Every morning I wake and make plans, blueprints, reallly, for how to construct the day so that I am really me. And every day the husk makes a mockery of those plans, distorts the blueprints.

And it's really pissing me off.

My yoga instructor ends every class with this meditation: breathing deeply, she intones, "Embrace, affirm, accept your body, just as it is, just where it is, here and now, at this moment." Right. Not a chance. There's me and there's the husk and between us is the line in the sand. I have had it. I hereby declare war.

Bitter Woman

Keith is watching football. LSU vs. West Virginia. God. I hate football.

I shouldn't be bitter.

I'm not. I Am Not A Bitter Woman.

The thing is, we had a very short courtship. So it came as something of a surprise that I found myself married to a sports fanatic. Somehow, this fanaticism just hadn't really surfaced in the months, umm, weeks, of our pre-marriage romance.

You might think that as the younger sister of five older brothers, I was prepared for Sports Fanaticism. But my big brothers were more into cars and cigarettes and beer and drugs. We were Cubs fans, because my much-loved grandma was a Cubs fan. And being a Cubs fan went well with beer and cigarettes, frankly-- add a hotdog with mustard and relish, and Life Is Good. But football?? Dad watched the Bears on Sundays in the depth of winter when he could laugh at "those idiots" floundering in the snow. And my brothers were far too stoned to care.

So, here I sit, with this man who cares intensely. Who actually just now said, as he moved the chair so he could be right in  front of our rather small tv, "Can you see?"--as if I cared. But he can't imagine I don't care. Which is so sweet. And just so damn weird.

Weird as it is, I'd be ok with it, if it were just LSU football. I mean, I get obsession. Obsession is ok. I have my obsessions. Doctor Who. Bruce Springsteen. And everything Paul Newman has ever done. And I ritualistically, fatalistically, follow the Cubs, as part of my birthright. So, if Keith were simply obsessed with LSU football, really, I'd be ok with that. But, here's the deal: I thought The Game was this afternoon. Because Keith spent the entire friggin' afternoon watching football. But that was other football. Gettin' ready football. Preparatory football.  Foreplay football.

Keith is watching football. LSU vs. West Virginia. God. I hate football.

And yes. I Am A Bitter Woman.

This I'd Like to Forget

So, the thing is, I lied in my last post.  Not "lying" as in "actively making stuff up"--everything I wrote was true; we did go to a tiny Greek island  and we did have an amazing experience--but "lying" as in "consciously omitting big chunks of that experience."

The truth, the whole truth. . . the whole truth is hard.

Like that friend that Owen made? The one who made him feel ok once again? What I didn't write was that when we returned home to Manchester Owen wrote and tried to phone this boy several times. He never responded. Owen was devastated.

And Hugh's jaunts out and about the village? The whole truth demands that these jaunts be set against our previous 48 hours in Rhodes. An entirely unexpected stay (a storm prevented us from taking the boat to Halki as planned), it caught us without any preparation. We ALWAYS prepared before going anywhere with Hugh, who could have been the poster child for ADHD at that point in his young life. So as we wandered about  Rhodes, trying to fill the time, Hugh kept running away from us. Keith was of the mindset that, well, he'll be fine, let's not worry about it.Right. A five year old. In a friggin' foreign city. A friggin' foreign city filled with insane Greek teenage boys on mopeds.  Fiinally, frustrated and furious, I lost it and began screaming at Hugh while I smacked him on his bottom--right on a busy sidewalk. A cluster of Greek women, witnesses to my breakdown, clucked in horror and shook their heads. I hated them with an intensity I am still ashamed to admit to.

And the entire Greek idyll needs to be reframed in the awareness of the the fact that we never ever worked as a family. I know all siblings fight: I have six of my own. But, as anyone who has spent any time with Hugh and Owen together will testify, "sibling rivalry" in no way adequately describes my sons' relationship. They have rarely interacted like brothers, rarely played together, rarely enjoyed each other, rarely hung out--and never ever looked to the other for comfort or companionship, never even bonded together in an alliance against us. A constant strain, a source of deep grief, the antipathy between the two of them of course simply intensified on family holidays as they had to endure each other for hours and days on end. I remember a good family friend spending some time with us on one such vacation and then turning to me and saying, "Why do you do this? This isn't good for any of you. Just stop it. There's no law that says you all have to vacation together." It took me a long time to give up, to stop it, as she advised. I did, eventually. The four of us have not traveled together since 2002. But that was after Greece.

And then there's the constant fact, the thread that weaves through my adult life: I didn't sleep for the entire trip. And I had a headache every single damned day. So that hilltop abandoned monastery that Owen climbed to? He wanted me to come along. He begged me to come along. But I didn't. I was too fucking tired.

The whole truth.

But surely it's better to forget it, isn't it? Owen is a beautiful man and Hugh is on his way to becoming one. They still loathe each other, but I guess that just as there's no law requiring family vacations, there's also no law requiring brothers to like each other.

This all started with olives. And if every time I eat an olive I want to remember the four of us, eating and laughing together, on a Greek island, rather than all the rest, that's ok, isn't it? All those surveys showing that people become so much happier omce they hit their 50s--I'll bet forgetting plays an essential, probably the central, role there.

This I believe: that one is better off forgetting the whole truth.

This I Believe

National Public Radio runs this periodic bit called "This I Believe," where ordinary and sometimes not-so-ordinary folks talk about what they believe--not always, or in fact, not usually, in the religious or dogmatic sense, but rather, in day-to-day life. Fill in the blank I believe in __________.

Everytime I hear one of these segments I think, "I believe in. . . olives."

This concerns me. What sort of person believes in olives? What does that mean?

So,tonight, fueled by a couple of glasses of wine, I intend to find out. Here goes.

I believe in olives.

I believe in the memories they conjure, of a tiny Greek village on the tiny island of Halki close to the Turkish coast, and of a magical week spent there when the boys were little. Once sustained by diving for sponges, Halki's population turned to honey cultivation after an epidemic wiped out the sponges. Then the honey bees died, and now --or then; this was 11 years ago--Halki survives solely on the tourist revenue generated by a small English company specializing in "unknown Greece."

Our time there was magical--a villa on the harbor, with our own steep descent into the water, and this little village containing nothing but the bakery where we bought our breakfast pastries, a beautiful church, an ice cream parlor, an assortment of tiny houses and five other tourist villas, one souvenir shop, one minscule grocery store, two beaches (one with a donkey and one without), and four harborside cafes. Every day, two decisions to make: where do we eat lunch? and where do we eat dinner? Not that it mattered; each of the cafes offered the same stunning view, the same just-off-the-boat seafood, the same heavenly feta cheese, the same to-die-for tomato and olive salads.

In Halki we sent 5-year-old Hugh off every morning to collect the bread and pastries for breakfast. He was so proud, so pleased to be off on his own, trusted with money, able to wind his way through the stone streets and across the church courtyard to the bakery. The villagers loved him, with his dark brown skin and curly brown-black hair and big brown eyes. In just one week, he chrmed them all, the quiet priest, the cranky young cashier in the souvenir shop, the old lady at the bakery, the fishermen in their boats. 

In Halki ten-year-old Owen, lonely and beaten down after a year being bullied in English state schools, met a friend, a fellow Harry Potter fan. They climbed up to an abandoned monastery and talked about Hogwarts and Owen remembered what it was to be ok.

I eat olives and in the salty tang and the soft yet firm texture, I taste sunny days and spiced lamb and a friendly donkey and a fresh breeze across the harbor and my boys. Happy. Thriving. Laughing.

This I believe. In olives. And my sons.

Ordinary People

September 11, 2011. Listening to the memorial service at Ground Zero. Former President Bush reads from a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to a woman whose several sons died in the Union army: he has no words to comfort her in her loss but  he hopes she will accept the gratitude of the Republic that her sons died trying to save.

Bush reads this letter to an audience consisting of the family members of individuals who died in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Presumably they are to infer their loved ones died to save the Republic.

But, umm, is that what they were doing? Saving the Republic? I thought they were getting coffee, settling down to another day at the desk, riding the elevator, leaving the train, reading the paper, making a phone call, checking their email. . . just doing the ordinary things that ordinary people do in their ordinary lives.
Not the Republic's Saviors. Just ordinary people going about their ordinary business on what they assumed would be an ordinary day. Isn't that the tragedy? the horror? the crime? That they weren't soldiers on a tour of duty, let alone knights on a quest? They were just Jean and Bill and Pablo and Irina and Melissa and Miguel and Tony and Noreen. Just folks. Secretaries and janitors and clerks and salesmen and brokers. 

Maybe one, maybe several, maybe several hundreds of those that died that strange, horrible morning died thinking of the Republic. But I doubt it. I'll bet the last thing every one of those folks in the Towers thought of was incredibly ordinary--maybe a husband of average looks, intelligence, and prospects; a child not destined for greatness; a mom who looks just like countless other old ladies; a set of memories of a life filled with the mundane. But the mundane is where we, the ordinary people, live. Add up the mundane and it's our lives. And by God, dear God, please God, in all the mundane there is so much that matters. Why, then, reach for rhetorical abstractions, why disguise ordinary people as willing warriors in some kind of national crusade?

I haven't a clue what "the Republic" means. But an ordinary day in an ordinary place with an ordinary family and ordinary and friends? Oh, yes, I know what that means. It's worth all the world.

Hisses and Yowls

We got a new kitty. I thought Wimsey was lonely and needed a playmate, now that the Peeing Kitty has been banished to the outdoors, and there at the vet's was this tiny, friendly, adorable orange tabby. So I brought Marple home.

Total disaster. Unlike Wimsey, tiny, friendly, adorable Marple comes equipped with rapier-sharp claws which he has yet to learn how to retract. He frenetically, ceaselessly, desperately pounces on Wimsey--playwithme comeoncomeon playwithmeplaywithmeeeee. Wimsey loathes him and our household now pulsates with hisses and yowls.

I watch them and I remember the summer I was ten, when we took a family vacation to the Ozarks. My two oldest brothers had grown out of such trips but my parents insisted that the third in the line-up, 16-year-old Jeff, come along. It was of course the Dark Ages of family travel, long before mini-vans or house-sized SUVs, with no in-car video players or headphones or iPods. Jeff just had to sit and endure us all, two younger brothers and two younger sisters and of course Mom and Dad, for the entire two-day trip down from Chicago. I don't think he ever spoke. He certainly never smiled. Once in the Ozarks, we settled into two adjoining hotel rooms on the second floor overlooking the outdoor pool--the three boys in one room, 7-year-old Cheryl and me and my parents next door--and several days of morning jaunts and afternoons playing in the pool. Except for Jeff, who hunkered down in the hotel room, where he read Popular Mechanics and engaged in lengthy masturbation sessions. (The automobile obsession I knew about at the time; I only learned about the autoeroticism much much later.) Jeff's sullen refusal to join in the family fun drove us younger kids crazy; we'd periodically pounce on him--playwithusplaywithuspleeeese-- but no matter how hard we tried, all we got was a bunch of  hisses and yowls.

16-year-old Hugh is home from school for the weekend. He arrived at 5:00 pm Friday night, put down his dirty laundry, picked up the car keys, and headed out to hang out with friends. We agreed he could spend the night at a friend's house--with Tropical Storm Lee bucketing down on us, it seemed a sensible plan. Except he didn't come home til 6 pm the next day, and only when we called and insisted he do so.  "We want to see you," we said. "We want to have dinner with you, talk with you, spend some time with you." Much hissing and yowling on his side; increasingly desperate pouncing on ours: Playwithus playwithus comeoncomeon itwillbefun you'llseeyou'llseeee. . .

Empty Nesting

One week to the day of our new life in the Empty Nest. Or so folks keep saying when they hear that not only has Owen returned to college in Oregon (a normal, expected development) but that Hugh is now in boarding school in Mississippi (a really weird, say what? kind of thing). But I'm uncertain. Is it really Empty Nestdom, given that Hugh can come home every weekend? Shoot, it takes me three days to clean up the chaos he leaves behind, and then it's just a brief breath and here he is again, in all his six-foot, 200-pound, chaotic adolescent glory. Not really an Empty Nest as much as a temporarily-vacated-but- soon-to-be-reclaimed-and-reconquered-and-laid-waste nest.

And here I am in the nest, amidst piles of extra tee-shirts and mismatched socks and unnecessary jackets and too-tight khakis as well as bikes and stuffed animals and torn posters and old sports medals and other boy leavings, and I'm online checking Hugh's grades and calling him to remind him to wear his retainer and worrying that he's going to have headaches because he left his contact lens behind and I'm writing myself notes to fill and mail Owen's prescritptions and to check airfares so Owen can come to a family wedding in October and I'm wondering if he has a toaster and a crockpot in the house he's now sharing and should I ship those and is he remembering to irrigate the holes left by his wisdom teeth surgery and I'm reminding Keith that we need to check on the revisions to Owen's financial aid package and did he write the second check for Hugh's youth group trip next summer and and and-- good lord, for an empty nest, it's pretty cluttered in here.

With apologies to Martin Luther

So Hugh is now in boarding school. Catholic boys' boarding school. The Brothers of the Sacred Heart, to be precise. Hugh's "prefect" is one such Brother. In his first year at the school, Brother T is a 60-ish, homely, gentle, other-worldly kind of guy who fatally admitted to Hugh during check-in at the residence hall that he had purchased his very first cell phone just a few days earlier. Oh dear. Do Catholics still believe in Purgatory? If so, then I imagine Brother T will have shaved a considerable amount off his purgatorial allotment by living in close quarters with a group of 16-year-olds for a year.

Hugh reported the following rather bizarre cross-cultural/generational encounter: In the middle of one of the introductory hall meetings with  Brother T, one of the boys farted very loudly and of course all the other boys began to snicker and moan and generally descend to being, well, boys. Brother T responded with indignation. Such a public display of a private need was, he informed his little flock, the sign of gross ignorance. A boy who farted out loud would end up "flipping burgers" for a living, the brother warned, if he didn't shape up and rein himself in. Brother T then shifted into confessional mode: "Take me. I haven't farted out loud since 1972. Now I admit, it probably has caused me some trouble with my digestive tract, but it's been worth it."

Oh. Wow. Suddenly I realize how totally not a Catholic I am. Since Hugh told me this story, I've been farting loudly and with great gusto. Never before have I linked passing gas to Protestant principle, but now with every public butt burp, I feel I'm striking a blow against asceticism and the damage it has done to Christians for centuries.

Here I fart; I cannot do otherwise.

Dreaming

According to one of my social worker/counselor friends (I have many--I reside in a social worker-friendly habitat), every person in my dream is actually me. Same for you, by the way: she says that everyone in your dreams is actually you, some facet of you, some aspect of you that needs attention.

I dunno. I mean, I see the therapeutic possibilities, but take the following: Several days ago I dropped off 16-year-old Hugh at boarding school for the first time, an action about which I was and am profoundly ambivalent. "Boarding school," in my world, translates into "CODE RED! CODE RED! Family breaking down!" Or, more succinctly: "This mom is Bad." So that night, I dreamt.

In my dream, Hugh is a baby again, a chubby little guy in a onesie sitting in a baby carrier and sucking his hand. I go through a doorway into an empty room and put down the carrier, then turn back to the first room to get the rest of my things. I get distracted; there are lots of people; I have to answer questions; it's hard to push through the crowds. . . and when I finally make it back to the room where I set down Hugh, I discover it wasn't a room. It was a train car, and the train has left. He's gone and I can't find him. I'm screaming and running and trying to get someone's attention--I've lost my baby! I've lost my baby!-- but no one listens and he's gone.

Now, should I read that dream as telling me something about two different aspects of myself? Couldn't it be, isn't it, simply about me and Hugh, about the incredibly complicated love a mom bears for her teenaged son, about this new phase we find ourselves in?

And then there are my favorite dreams (so much better than the baby-losing ones). Often set in a place from my past--the house I grew up in, my high school gym, the alley behind my aunt and grandmother's two-flat in Cicero--in these dreams, my dead ones are alive, as they were at their best. But I'm me, now. These dreams are always ordinary--nothing horrifying or unsettling. Just ordinary, apart from the fact that 51-year-old me is hanging out with my 44-year-old dad or sitting over coffee with my 70-year-old grandma or shouting at the latest inane antics of the Conservative government with my much older beloved professor in his London flat, except we're now much closer in age.

Should I be embarrassed to admit that, superstitious as it may sound, I view these dreams as, well, as essentially visits? OK, yes, I should be embarrassed. I know that. While I do believe in some form of afterlife, I don't believe the dead come visiting. Really, I don't. And yet. . . the fact is that I experience these dreams, these moments outside space and time, these splashes of amazing grace, as just a bit more time, another chance to visit with the folks. The key is the ordinariness of it all.

Well. . . maybe also that I don't fuck anything up, that I don't get distracted, that I don't fail to see something crucial, that I don't lose any babies. I spend time with folks I love and I get it right.

Hey, Hugh, I've been dreaming about you. I'm dreaming I find you, baby. I'm dreaming I get it right.

Astigmatized

Annual eye check-up today. Sick and tired of hunting for reading glasses (which, let me hasten to point out, I need only when I have my contacts in--when my contacts aren't in, I can read just fine--'course my contaccts are always in because without them I can't see more than a foot in front of me but hey, nothing actually wrong with my reading vision, dammit, I'm not that old, I'm just near-sighted, like all us nerdy young people), I demanded those new omni-vision disposable soft contact lenses--the ones that  combine close-up, medium, and far-away vision--you can see everything all the time and then you just throw the damn things away and pop in a new pair.

So my friends tell me.

I wouldn't know. My eye doctor won't let me have them. Apparently my astigmatism is too pronounced. I'm doomed to reading glasses--to the fruitless rummaging through my handbag only to remember that of course I took that pair out at breakfast, to having to ask Keith read restaurant menus aloud to me, to having to stop lectures and ask students what time it is because I can't see the numbers on my watch or  my cell phone, to apologizing at meetings because I can't read the agenda, to gormlessly squinting at receipts trying to decipher where I'm supposed to sign. . . . to being a friggin' totally annoying utterly stereotypical old lady. Sigh.

Lavender

Our marriage has come of age. Yesterday was our 21st wedding anniversary. You'd think you'd know someone after 21 years. I thought I did, anyway. And then, this afternoon, in comes Keith all excited about the great big package that came in the mail. "Look," he says gleefully, and I look and I think, "Good lord, who is this man?" There, on a bed of those crinkly paper gift-bag stuffing thingies, lounged several large bottles of Essential Oils lavender products--oils and lotions and shampoos and what-not.

Really?? He actually initiated, took time out to, went to the effort of, buying Essential Oils products? Honestly, I thought there was some kind of rule against such a thing, that one could only get this sort of stuff as a present, usually from people who don't know you very well and so haven't a clue as to what to get you. "Yeah," he enthused, "don't you remember we got some once from Anne? And I really liked it so I went online and there was this website!"

Years ago, I got tenure. And I stunned Keith by coming home and announcing that now I was going to enroll in a cake decorating course. It totally threw him for a loop. He couldn't get over it: how could he be married to me and yet have no inkling whatsoever that I had some inner desire to learn how to make icing roses and fondant animals.

Maybe this is why, ideally, we marry for the long haul. So we can keep shocking each other. So, anyway, excuse me. I have to go coat myself in lavender oil.

Let's Shed Less Light on That Subject

After weeks and weeks of making do with the bit of natural light that comes through the bathroom window and the bit of artificial light produced by two small sconces on either side of the mirror, I finally got around to persuading Hugh to haul in the ladder and replace the bulbs in the overhead fixture.

Dang.

New national plan: we'd both reduce our electricity consumption and prevent massive damage to the well-being of millions of middle-aged women by removing all the overhead lightbulbs in all the bathrooms in the United States. One small step for woman, one giant leap for womankind.

Mouse Murder

Hugh has murdered two mice. Not invasive, threatening rodent-y creatures, mind you, but harmless little pet mice. Last Friday he and his friend, fooling around at the mall, decided to buy a little spotted pet mouse for $2.98. They played with it awhile and then, bored, let it loose in the nearby empty lot--and thus doomed the poor petshop mouse to a quick yet assuredly painful death. When Hugh told me, I calmly, via the Socratic method and much gentle probing and careful guiding, led him to see how wrong it is to use a living creature and then discard it.

If only. Of course I went ballistic, shrieking and wailing at him about ethics and responsibility while he grimaced and sighed.

Three days later, Hugh brings home another tiny mouse. "It's a present for Lindsay," he says. (I have no idea who Lindsay is.) He sets up a box, complete with wood shavings and a little food bowl and a water bottle and lots of toilet paper tubes. Yesterday, he tells me that the mouse kept jumping up and biting him, so he let it loose down the street.

Depressed and disconcerted, I poured out the tale to my Nail Lady. (Increasingly, the nail corner of the salon serves as my confessional, and Laurie as my priest.) Laurie listened quietly, then put down her file, covered my hand with hers, and said gently, "You know, this doesn't mean he's going to grow up to be a serial killer."

Sedative or Stimulant

Have you seen those tv commercials for the new Infiniti car: "Luxury can be a sedative [snoring couple in plush leather seats of expensive car]. . . OR a stimulant [Infiniti zooms ahead through wild landscape]." Clearly we're supposed to opt for the stimulating Infiniti, but, umm, who buys Infinitis? I would assume, given the price range (upper $30,00-upper 40,000s--doncha just love Google?) and the style of the vehicle, that we're not talking 21-year-old guys but rather middle-aged folks. Like me, except with lots more money. Now perhaps money makes these folks not at all like me, a different species entirely. But if not, what a stupid ad campaign. Sleeping in those seats looks way more appealing to folks like me than zipping around those corners. We can always zip, but how often can we sleep?

Checklist

So, it's true, thought I, as I upchucked vast quantities of foul-tasting fluid in the wee hours of this morning: the "prep" for a colonoscopy is horrid. Definitely true.

I wasn't supposed to be upchucking the fluid, of course; I was supposed to expel it from the other end. Nevertheless, despite my body's refusal to follow instructions, the colonoscopy went ahead as scheduled. And, all you colonoscopy virgins out there, let not your hearts be troubled, be ye not afraid: there's light at the end of the tunnel. So to speak. Perhaps tunnel imagery isn't the best in this context. Anyway, the actual procedure itself is quite marvellous, because you get the most groovy drugs. I've felt wonderfully loopy and at peace with the world for much of the day. (And I now am the proud owner of a series of photos of my healthy colon. Blown up and framed, they'll add a certain something to the front hallway.)

Plus I feel like I can now check off another item on my To Do list for growing old(er):
Stop having periods. Check.
Start watching weight. Check.
Cover up the grey roots. Check.
Develop embarrassing expertise in skin care products. Check.
Routinize nose and chin hair maintenance. Check.
Get colonoscopy. Check.

My mother does not have and never had such a list. When I told her I had a colonoscopy scheduled, she was appalled. "Why? What's wrong?" And when I explained nothing was wrong, that this was simply standard procedure, she was even more appalled. "They can't make you, can they?" This is a woman who truly does not understand the concept of preventive medicine. She's never had a pap smear, and her one and only mammogram convinced her that she should steer clear of all such things forevermore. "Whatever you're going to die of, you'll die of," she says cheerfully.

She's 81 and only just stopped roller-skating. So much for checklists.

Conversations

A younger Facebook Friend of mine reported the following conversation with her 4-year-old:

K., while holding the iron token from Monopoly: Mom, who is Iron Man?
Friend: I'm not sure. Maybe a superhero? You should ask Daddy.
K.: I think he's a guy who irons any stuff that's in his way.

The commercial potential here is huge. Ironing Man could team up with Dyson Dude (sucks up wrongdoing while turning on a ball) and the bewitching, bikini-clad Mop Maid.

But this conversation also reminded me of Owen, about age 11. I was backing up the car; he was shooting baskets in the driveway. He walked over, motioned for me to roll down the window, and said, "You know that metal thing, that thing you heat up and rub it back and forth on clothes to get the wrinkles out of them, what's that thing called?"
"Um, you mean the iron?"
"Iron. . . Are you sure it's called an iron?"

We don't do much ironing in our house. Obviously.

Mom, the Microwave, and God

My mom believes God spoke to her via her microwave.

This was awhile back. My cousin and his wife had put their house on the market and my mom, unbeknownst to her children, had been thinking about moving (i.e. selling our Home, the one we grew up in, the place invested with all the memories, you know, that place). So Mom shows up at my cousin's house and when she discovers that her microwave will fit in their specially built microwave cabinet, she discerns a divine sign: This is the house God wants her to buy. And she does. And she's happy.

Does God speak through ordinary events, if not ordinary household appliances? Two days ago I received an email informing me that the publishing firm with which I've signed two book contracts has now cancelled its entire history list. Is this a sign? Is God talking? Is He/She/They saying (cue James Earl Jones voice, except maybe with some strong feminine/feminist undertones), "Oh, Facing-50, 'tis time to rethink your career?"

Or maybe 'tis time for a new microwave.

Check-Up

My annual pap: My apparently always pregnant young doctor pries inserts large steel torture device, pries open my vagina, and announces brightly, "Yep! That cervix has definitely closed up shop!" I and my gone-out-of-business cervix potter on to my supposed-to-be-annual-but-I-putz-around-and-so-it's-more-like-tri-annual mammogram: The 17-year-old tech clamps my boob in a vise and then says cheerily, "Just hang in there!" I hang. Boobs throbbing, I proceed to my foot doctor. She's an optimistic soul, probably because she has yet to enter puberty, so I'm surprised when, after pushing my toe back and forth for awhile, she sighs and suggests more surgery. We settle for another cortisone shot into the toe joint. I hobble out.

On Monday I have my first colonoscopy. It's only fair. Wouldn't want my anus to feel left out of the party.

Blarney Trees

On the grounds of Blarney Castle sit the most amazing trees. Sigh. Yes, yes, Blarney Castle, I know, I know. Total tourist trap, shameful that we take our students there on what are supposed to be serious study trips but hey, the Young Ones demand it; they really truly want to kiss the Blarney Stone and, as a Young One sternly said to me, "Sometimes it's really fun to be a tacky tourist." And if you turn your back on the castle and head out into the grounds, the trees make the otherwise ridiculous Blarney admission price worth every cent. Centuries old with enormous trunks and limbs polished smooth and hard by wind and rain, these trees tower above and yet intertwine with and spread themselves all about the surrounding boulder-strewn hills and cliffs, so that rock and tree and sky blend into one.

I thought of those trees when I came home after five weeks abroad and discovered that my dog had shrunk.

Why is it that old age so diminishes us ambulatory creatures? Experiences and efforts accumulate; pains and pleasures pile up; we dwindle. My poor, pitiful dog.

Not that he sees it this way. Let loose amidst the  Blarney trees, he'd just pee on them and amble off to resume his endless quest for a chicken bone. 

I made the mistake of saying Never

In two weeks Hugh goes to boarding school. This is weird. We are not boarding school people. We are not upper-middle-class Brits, members of the East Coast elite, or a missionary family. We're not even private school people. We're not Catholic. But here we are, sending our son off to a Catholic boarding school. In Mississippi, no less. We are sending our African-American son to friggin' Catholic boarding school in friggin' Mississippi.

Damn. Parenthood has made us do, and become, strange things.

It Was Simple

I'm home after four weeks abroad with 34 undergrads. Home to my lovely husband and bright boys and lovable pets. Home with my good bed and thick towels and uninterrupted internet access. Home (amazingly) to temperatures lower than those baking much of the United States these last few weeks. 

Home. No more lengthy headache-exacerbating bus rides listening to America's Future discussing  where they drank last night, what they drank, how drunk they got, where to go to drink tonight, what to drink, and how drunk they hope to get.

Home. So why am I incredibly out-of sorts, ill-tempered, cantankerous, downright bitchy?

Perhaps it's the fact that I'm on Day 2 of the 17-Day Diet. Sadly, four weeks in the company of 34 undergrads is not good for the Facing-50s waistline. Every day one wades through mounds and mounds of french fries and gummy bears and candy bars and potato chips. . .  But, no, this bitchiness is more than just hunger, more than the grumpiness induced by having to forego bread and wine and chocolate. (Although, gotta admit, seeing those words in stark print-- bread and wine and chocolate, I am doing without bread and wine and chocolate -- sheesh, it really is enough to send someone over the edge, isn't it?)

Still, more than diet is at work here. I'd love to blame jet lag, but as an incurable insomniac, I've lived most of my life in a state of chronic jet lag, and actually I think I'm fairly good at it.

So, nope, not a matter of food or sleep deprivation. Instead, I do believe I am suffering from the loss of simplicity. Life for the last four weeks has been stunningly simple: a small suitcase, a series of barebones hostel rooms, breakfasts of tea and toast, and best of all, a packed and inflexible schedule. Everyday I got up and knew what I had to do and when I had to do it. I did it. And then I went to bed. Few decisions, limited choices, and oh! glorious bliss! no self-flagellation at the end of the day. No "I shoulda coulda"s.  No wondering at how little I achieved. No guilt at chapters not written, errands not run, chores not completed and checked off the List. No sense of failure because I didn't make phone calls or dinner or love.

Just me, Irish history, and 34 hungover undergraduates.

Simple.

Undergraduates in Ireland; or, Suburbanites Unleashed

Do sheep bite?

If I were a sheep, I'd totally want to live here.

We don't have sheep in America, do we?

How do you tell the difference between a sheep and a lamb?
     I think the lambs are the little ones. Except there are rams, too. I'm not sure how they fit in.

On a Cliff's Edge

Today three dozen undergraduates and I climbed through torrential rain, gale-force winds, and a steady slamming stream of tiny hail stones to a prehistoric fort perched on a cliff's edge at the very end of the civilized world. Just another typical day in the life of a typical European history professor. Sort of.

It's a good life, all in all. The pay is crummy but the perks are splendid. At least if you like fierce winds and dramatic rain and the icy cold that slices through your skin and settles deep within your bones. Which I do. Always have. It's weather with integrity, sharp-edged, clearcut, purposeful, direct. Not like the miasmic heat of the Deep South, the humidity that envelops you, the heat that first lures you in--"shush now," it whispers, "just slow down, have a rest, why don't you put your feet up and have a nice cold drink?"--and then warmly smiles as you slowly suffocate.

After I made my way down from the cliffs, I sat on the bus, my jeans completely soaked, icy cold against my skin. And just like a certain smell can suddenly catapult you into a memory so vivid, so present, that the lines of time and space collapse, so this physical sensation sent me spinning into Mrs. Wolterstorff's third grade classroom. Eight years old, just in from recess, the windows all fogged up, water beneath my desk puddling up as the snow embedded in my corduroys slowly thawed, the cold and clammy cotton firmly stuck to my thighs, my feet little blocks of ice within wet socks. This is not, actually, a happy memory. I was an extraordinarily grumpy child, and I sat there on my plastic seat, my hands so cold they burned, even my underpants soaked from the snow, and I glowered at Mrs. Wolterstorff. How in the world, thought my indignant eight-year-old self, can I be expected to concentrate on homophones and homonyms while my butt itches and prickles as it thaws?

I imagine many of my students, Deep Southerners born and bred, were asking themselves something along those lines today. But, the thing is, integrity is not comfortable. It cuts and chills and makes your butt prickle. Still, it's rather bracing when you're perched on a cliff's edge at the end of the civilized world.

High Maintenance Chick

Yesterday I turned 51--guess I should re-name this blog something along the lines of "Fumbling thru My 50s." Looking back on this last year, I'm not sure I've learned much to guide me through my next five decades. I have, however, changed. I have become a High Maintenance Chick.

I guess I took my first faltering steps toward high-maintenance chickdom a decade ago, when I first started coloring my hair. So it begins. A moment of impulse, a sudden desire for a bit more vibrancy, and there you are, committed to a lifetime of horrendously high beauty salon bills for roots touch-ups, highlights, lowlights, middle-of-the-road lights, plus of course all the necessary accompaniments like gels and waxes.

I might, however, have confined my maintenance to the region above my neck had it not been for my niece. It's all her fault. It was Anne who lured me on to the fast lanes of the high maintenance road by convincing me to join her for a spa pedicure. Pedicures are the crack of Chickdom. Once you've looked down and caught sight of your toes winking colorfully back up at you, callouses all filed away, heels glowing softly, you're done for, caught, addicted. From regular pedicures to weekly manicures is hardly a jump, more of a quick hop, really. Your toes look so good, it dawns on you that the time has come to stop gnawing on your nails and nibbling on your cuticles; you long to present to the world a hand not adorned with bleeding stumps.

It was also Anne who convinced me of the delights of bikini waxing. Once you've endured the hot waxing of Down There, slapping some more of the hot stuff on the brows and chin just seems, well, required. And what's the point of sporting shapely brows if they're so blonde no one can admire them? One must book a brow tint. And as long as one is having one's brows tinted, well, why not dye those long, thick, but blonde eyelashes as well? Suddenly, freedom from mascara seems a right rather than a luxury.

And that's it. If you're having your eyelashes tinted, that's it. You are officially a High Maintenance Chick.

Or at least, I am. Somehow, much to my surprise and discomfort, I find that I'm a 51-year-old HMC. This was not in The Plan. But the thing is, so many things have happened that were not in The Plan--some of them terrific, but many of them Decidedly Not--despite my best efforts to be Very Very Good. So now I'm not being good. Instead, I'm just feeling good. No plan. Just a lot of maintenance.

Looking for My Eyeglasses

Last week, I arrived at the Marriott, where I was staying courtesy of the publishers of the textbook I co-author. Tired, I popped out my contact lenses and reached for my glasses' case. Opened it up--horrors, no glasses. Arriving home several days later, I hunted high and low. No glasses. Contacted my mom, sister, and niece, all of whom had hosted me in the week before the Marriott trip. No glasses.

Damn. Am leaving in a couple of days for five weeks in Europe. Need glasses. Glasses are expensive, as they sport "graduated" lenses--no telltale bifocal line and the promise of clear near, medium, and far vision. (Point of fact: they only actually work for distance, and then only kinda, but if I lose a contact lens in the bogs of Ireland, the glasses are all that stand between me and utter fuzziness.) Am panicking.

Am about to give up, call up eye doctor folks for prescription, and fork up hundreds of dollars for new glasses. But happen to say to Hugh, "Hey, you haven't seen my glasses, you know, my real glasses, not my reading glasses, have you?"

Hugh says, "Just a sec." A minute later, he appears, my glasses in his hand. I'm delighted. I'd kiss him if he'd only let me. Instead, I gush and gloop. "Oh honey, you're my hero. Thank you thank you thank you. I can't believe you found them. What a relief. . . " and on and on. Hugh smiles and nods, like he's on the podium at the Oscars.

Then I think to ask, "Where were they? I thought I looked everywhere. How did you find them?"

And he says, "Oh, I knocked them off the end table by the tv a couple of weeks ago and then kicked them under the couch."

As one does.

If one is 16.

And male.

Evidently.

Bicycling in Central Park

I bicycled in Central Park on Saturday.

I realize that all over New York and New Jersey there are hundreds, no, certainly thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who would respond to that statement with something along the lines of, "Oh, how nice. Isn't that a pleasant outing?" Because, of course, they live there. And because thee live there, They Don't Get It.

Bicycling in Central Park is not just nice. It is not just pleasant. It's totally amazing, utterly cool, friggin' mind-blowing, fucking unreal.

Normal people do not get to bicycle in Central Park. We normal people, we live our normal lives in normal places like Paducah, Kentucky, or Lombard, Illinois, or Grand Rapids, Michigan or Lima, Ohio or Cedar Rapids, Iowa or Jenks, Oklahoma or Walnut Hills, California--or Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We, the people of Paducah and Lombard and Grand Rapids and Lima and Cedar Rapids and Jenks and Walnut Hills and Baton Rouge, we see people bicycling in Central Park in movies or on tv, and they look normal and ordinary like us, but we know they're not. We are not fooled. We are not fools. We see the difference. There is New York. And there is Us. We're prose, they're poetry. We plod in polyester, they soar in silk. We intone dirges, they belt out Broadway melodies. They eat food we've yet to hear of and get their hair cut in styles we 've not yet dreamt of and they laugh loudly at jokes we do not get and they swear with words we do not understand. Even the taxi drivers and doormen and waitresses and subway attendants bear the traces of fairy dust, that New Yorkyness.

So now I'm back in Baton Rouge. Normal. Ordinary. OK. But on Saturday I bicycled in Central Park. And life is just that bit more magical.

I Cleaned the Garage

Memorial Day.

I spent it cleaning the garage. I figured that on the scale of things one can do on this holiday designed to honor those who have died in the service of their country, garage-cleaning weighed better than shopping for a pair of black skinny jeans or curling up on the couch reading The Cookbook Collector (great novel by Allegra Goodman, by the way). Cleaning the garage seemed less self-indulgent, more, you know, disciplined, active, results-oriented, military. Particularly when one is cleaning the garage in south Louisiana, where the temperature by 10 am was 90 degrees.

Still, somehow, it did occur to me that sorting through old paint cans and tossing out broken badminton rackets was not quite what our national leaders had in mind when they created this holiday.

Although, actually, it's not all that clear what they did have in mind. For one thing, it's not clear who "they" were. According to some accounts, Memorial Day (originally called Decoration Day) started when Southern ladies began decorating the graves of Confederates soldiers with flowers. We do know for sure for sure that in 1868 General John Logan issued General Order No. 11, a command to decorate the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers buried in Arlington Cemetery, that by 1890 all northern states had recognized Decoration Day as a holiday to honor those who died in the Civil War, and that southern states refused to acknowledge the day until after WWI, when it became a day to honor the dead in all American wars. Now, think about what you have just learned, or perhaps already knew--although if you did know all that, geez louise, what kind of history nerd are you? I'm the ultimate history nerd, a history professor for pete's sake, and I had to Google that info. Anyone who just knows that kind of stuff needs to have sex more often. Really.

So where was I? Right. General Logan, Confederate-loving ladies placing flowers on Johnny Rebs' graves, and the Point of It All. Am I the only one who thinks it a bit strange that the origins of this holiday-- now officially a day to recognize and honor American military personnel, and particularly those who have died in combat to defend the United States-- rests in part or wholly in the South and in efforts to commemorate those who fought to destroy that Union of States that is the United States?

But, history aside, how is one properly to observe Memorial Day? When I was a small child, we'd always pile in the station wagon and head into the city to the cemetery, where we'd stand at my grandfather's grave for a few solemn moments--he was a Dutch immigrant, a garbage man rather than a soldier, but I guess Memorial Day made for a convenient duty visit--before careening out to look for evidence of gypsies in the grave yard: beer cans stacked high, plastic flowers, fried chicken bones.  And then it was off to Uncle Bud's or to the Deckers for good-hearted badminton games and Auntie Theresa's Sloppy Joes and grilled hotdogs and hamburgers and barbecued chicken and pototo salad and cole slaw and potato chips and brownies and popsicles, and the inevitable awful ride home, sticky all over, tired beyond belief, with an upset tummy. I don't recall any mention, ever, of the Fallen, or the Ultimate Sacrifice, or Those who Died so that We Might Live in Freedom.

I got more of that in high school, because I was in Band. Every year the Timothy Band marched in the Elmhurst Memorial Day parade. As I recall, we did a really spiffy, crowd-pleasing, marching version of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," and then we'd end up in the central park where we'd  stand, sweltering in our woolen black uniforms, sweat trickling down our backs, feet aching, desperate to be released, while some local dignitary dithered on about Patriotic Duty,  and the smell of grilled chicken wafted through the air and babies screamed and kids shouted.

Still, I guess the point is that we did Something Special. We stepped out of our routines and in so doing, we said, "This Is Important." Maybe we weren't too sure what "this" was. Still, we celebrated it the way humans do--by downing tools, by eating til we were sick, by letting go and laughing lots and grabbing on to what makes life livable.

And today, I cleaned the garage. And I think, maybe, I kind of missed the Point of It All.

Just fine

I spent the last week in Chicago.

This is Not Good. It's akin to a recovering alcoholic taking a wine tour of southern France, or an addict deciding to vacation in an opium den.

I live my life in Baton Rouge and I am fine. I made my peace long ago. It's the Deep South and it's suburban and it's damned hot and it's provincial and parochial and politically primeval. . . but it's fine.

Until I go back to Chicago. And then it's. . . not fine. Because suddenly there I am, once again. Me. The Me who fits, who belongs, who gets it, who can explain it; the Me-in-embryo who stared out of the windows of our family station wagon during our tri-annual visits from the western suburbs into The City and thought, "I'm going to make this mine" And I did.

And then I lost it.

But I'm fine. I've made my peace. I have a great life. Keith and I enjoy satisfying jobs and the support of good friends in a very livable city. I bike to work along a lake filled with egrets and gigantic turtles and squabbling ducks. I while away the hours in an excellent local coffee shop. We live in, and can afford, an amazing house in a charming, tree-lined, historic neighborhood. We enjoy world-class drama, courtesy of LSU. We have a decent public radio station. A good airport. Easy access to New Orleans. A regenerating downtown. An . . . a . . .

Shit.

Chicago, it is not.

I'm fine.

But who wants to be fine? Just fine? I want to laugh so hard that I pee. I want the el. And the Cubs. And the ferocious wind off the lake. Brick bungalows. Plump parkas and deep dish pizza and hotdogs without the blasphemy of ketchup. Hispanic groceries jumbled against Korean take-outs and Serbian Cultural Centers and Polish bakeries. The flat Chicago aaaaccent. The breathtaking beauty of skyscrapers' reflections in the Chicago River. The startling combination of the accelerated metropolitan pace with genuine midwestern friendliness: "Hey, you OK?" And mostly, that adrenalin rush, that sense of yes, that smooth slipping into a place I always wanted and I always knew was mine.

But I'm home now. In Baton Rouge. It's fine. I'm fine. Just fine.

Binary Parenting

Son #1.

Owen came home from college with a suitcase full of unwashed clothes. It’s not that he expected me to do his laundry—my one Absolutely Right Parenting Act was to teach (and require) my boys to wash their own clothes once they entered middle school.

So anyway, Owen came home with a bunch of dirty clothes because he’d run out of money for the washing machines in the dorm. Pleased to have him home, I scoop up a heap of utterly rank jeans and corduroys and say, “I’ll start these in the wash for you.” Owen leaps up. “Noooo! Not those jeans!” I pause.

“They have holes in the crotch,” he explains. “Washing makes the holes bigger. So I never wash them.”

“Owen,” say I. “It's time to buy new pants.”

“Why?” he asks, utterly perplexed.

Son #2.

I find a pile of clothes that Hugh plans to try to sell to Plato's Closet, a teen clothing resale shop. In the pile, right on top, sits a brand new flannel shirt, tags still on, that I'd given him for Christmas--that, in fact, he'd picked out for Christmas. I demand to know what he's thinking.

"Well, it's about to be summer so I'm not going to wear a flannel shirt," he says in one of those "like totally, duh" tones of voice.

"Hugh. We have closets. Save it for next year," I reply.

He stares at me, horrified. "Like I'm going to wear last season's clothes!"

Grading II

Still grading final exams. Universal suffrage seems more and more like a really bad idea.

A student in my "Western Civilization since 1500" class thinks that Germany failed to defeat the Soviet Union in World War II because Hitler insisted on mounting the troops on elephants for the invasion.

Really.

I suppose she sat there, probably hung over, terrified of failing, knowing nothing, and somehow, in some mysterious way, a little glimmer, an inkling, a scrap of a fact, a ghost of a memory drifted down and settled in. Something about a commander whose name started with an 'H' and who suffered a terrible military defeat.

Hannibal. Hitler. Ancient Rome. The Soviet Union. All in the past. A bunch of dead guys. History.

Grading

I'm grading final exams and therefore, inevitably, I am depressed and out of sorts.

And then I hit this line in a student's paper: "If these secularizing trends continued, martyrs would be a dying breed."

I love my job.

The Problem with Bicycling

I've been bicycling to work, a fact of which I am ridiculously proud, considering it's only a 2-mile ride between home and the university. On a bike path. Along a lake. In the flatlands of south Louisiana. Still, temperatures are already in the upper 80s down here, so I do sweat. And thus have the right to feel proud.

I thought that the sweating would be the huge problem with biking to work, but there's still enough of a morning coolness and a light breeze that it's ok. So far, at least, I don't walk around all day smelling like a pile of dirty gym clothes.

But I do walk around with Really Bad Hair. This, I had not anticipated. If I wear the helmet, I look something like a tonsured Gene Wilder. If I decide to risk brain injury for the sake of my vanity and forego the helmet, I show up looking like the mad scientist in the Back to the Future movies. Today it was so bad that I actually stuck my head under the faucet in the ladies' room before I went to class. It didn't help things much. Instead of looking like a crazy old lady, I looked like a wet and crazy old lady. Ah well. It all keeps my students amused or, at least, bemused. The Batty Bicycling Prof. You know, the one with the hair.