I've been Bruced. Bossified. Springsteenized.

Bruce Springsteen has provided the soundtrack of my adult life, thanks to the Guy That Got Away, a sweet New Jersey boy I dated back in my Calvin College days. It was 1980--five years after Born to Run, the iconic, amazing single and album that vaulted Springsteen into rock history and put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week. But in 1975 I was only 15.  "Born to Run" actually didn't make it at first onto regular radio; Springsteen didn't leap the boundaries between "rock-that-critics-adore" and "rock- that-young- unaware- Midwestern-teens-listen-to" until 1980, with The River. 1980--still four years before Born in the USA. So, until The Guy That Got Away, I didn't know Springsteen, hadn't a clue. But The Guy, well, he was from New Jersey, and he was clued-in. He volunteered as a dj on our college radio station--broadcasting to the dorms and dining halls of Calvin College, not a huge gig, mind you, but still--and I would sit there through his sessions with him. The radio station protocols were strict: every hour had to include a certain number of minutes of "Christian rock." The Guy, bless him, hated Christian rock, so he would carefully search out Christian rock songs whose duration matched those of Springsteen singles. He'd play the Springsteen, and then enter the Christian song in the log. I have to tell you, in the context of Calvin College, this was downright subversive. Of course, no one ever noticed, since no one ever actually listened to the college station. But in the grand scheme of things, it didn't matter. The Guy gave me Bruce. And I've had him ever since. Bruce, that is. Not The Guy. Which also, in the grand scheme, turned out not to matter. My mom used to say there was a lid for every pot. Actually, I think there are several. Plus pots change shape over time, and so do lids. And sometimes, you know, you just cram that sucker on there and command it to fit.

Back to our main story.

In all these years, I've never seen Springsteen in concert. There was this and there was that, never in the right place with enough money and enough time. But last night, he was in New Orleans and I was there, in the right place, at the right time, with a paid-up ticket.

It was good. It was very very good. Sometimes life is very simple and very sweet. Not often. But sometimes.

And I believe in a promised land. . .

I am not an Anglophile

Watching "Antiques Roadshow," waiting for "Doc Martin."

A friend in England once introduced me to her neighbor as a "complete Anglophile." I was stunned, and rather horrified.. An Anglophile? Me? No way. Anglophiles are like antiquarians. . . you know, crazy people, those folks who bore everybody at parties.

I am not a boring party person. I"m a British historian.

Oh dear. Not a very convincing argument.

Strange, isn't it, how one ends up doing what one does? I ended up in British history because I had to pick a senior honors thesis advisor, and  I was having a really rough time, and the British historian at Calvin was a kind, gentle man who looked like he carried peppermints in his pockets. So, I chose him instead of the famous French history guy or the cool U.S. social history guy or the serious ancient history guy. It had nothing to do with the subject; it was all about the guy. At that point in my life I desperately needed a grandpa, and Henry Ippel was it. I wrote my honors thesis, and that became what I submitted with grad school applications, so of course I ended up in British history. Happenstance, really. Just a lonely fatherless girl looking for someone to care about her. And here was this aging British history professor, such a decent man, who was willing to play the part. In such arbitrary ways, one's life gets decided.

And so, arbitrarily, as a result of a kindly college professor who never actually offered me a peppermint, I've spent much of my life studying, reading about, thinking about, living in the British Isles. I know more about British politics, social life, intellectual developments, popular and high culture, than I do the Southern American counterparts, even tho' I live in southern Louisiana. Ostensibly. But can one really live in a place when one spends most of one's time thinking about somewhere else?

After more than 20 years, I still find the South an alien place. I can't figure it out; I'm constantly stumbling, careening into no-go areas and horrified by what I uncover. Would I have embrace my area of study with such passion if I'd been able to live my life in, say, Chicago? Dunno. Life didn't happen that way. All I know is that when Keith is out of town, I switch on the Baton Rouge public radio station in the evenings: At 9 pm, the BBC World Service comes on and stays on all night long. I go to sleep, and I wake up through the night and finally in the morning, to these beautiful, comforting British accents. Strangely, the sound of home.

Millicent's Cat

A couple of colleagues won some Big Awards this past week. I'm just so pleased; we all started in our academic careers at about the same time and it's just so thrilling to watch folks I knew at the very start, way back when, now reach the heights of professional success. Of course back then I aspired to those same heights and now I realize I'll never reach them, but that's fine. I'm content to sit on the sidelines, to know what it takes, to cheer on the winners.

Right.

I do wish I were such a person, that kind of good and generous person who can rejoice heartily and wholly in another's success, even while contronting one's own failure. I aspire to be such a person. I pretend to be that person. I say the words, go through the motions, follow the script.

You know, actually, I think I put on an incredible performance most of the time. Damn. I should have gone into acting.

I'll keep saying the words, honing the performance, trying desperately to own the character, to become the role. Maybe, in time, the magic will happen. Transmutation, transmogrification, the spell that will change me, completely and utterly, to that better soul.

Right now, tho',  I'm like Hermione crouching, horrified in the bathroom stall, faced with the fact that her plans have gone awry, that her preparations were insufficient, that she is not Millicent Bulstrode, but, sadly, grotesquely, Millicent's cat.

This, I didn't expect

Hugh said he needed a new shirt for prom. "What about that black shirt you wore to the dance last year?" I asked. He rolled his eyes, disappeared, and returned a few minutes later, with his neck bulging out of a much too-tight collar and six inches of his forearms extending out from the cuffs. "Right," I sighed.

"Hey," he said. "At least I'm not a girl and you don't have to buy an expensive new dress for every dance."

"Well, who says I would?" I asked.

Hugh stared at me, stunned. "What!? Are you serious? You really wouldn't do that, would you? Don't you know how important the dress is for a girl?" I laughed at him. He accused me of child abuse. I got indignant.

And there we were, arguing, fighting, practically pummeling each other over my failure to buy my mythical teenaged daughter a mythical new dress for her mythical prom.

Remember What to Expect When You're Expecting? And What to Expect in the First Year? Someone need to write What to Expect When You're Too Friggin' Tired and He's a Teenager.

Prom Night

So Hugh went to prom last night.

What a disappointment.

You know, I try very hard not to live through my children (it helps immensely that they're both boys--most of the time, quite frankly, there's a certain "ick" factor, which I'm sure is sexist but hey, teenaged boys are icky much of the time). The point is, I do try to establish boundaries, to make clear to them and me and everyone else that I have my life and they have theirs. . . .

Still. Prom.

I didn't go to prom. We didn't have prom. In my Dutch immigrant Calvinist corner of the world, drinking in moderation was fine and smoking was practically required for adult males, but dancing, card-playing, and movie-going belonged to the traditional trifecta of forbidden, sinful activities. (Actually, there was a fourth Sin: Freemasonry, but since no one in the Midwest knew what that was, it didn't impinge on our lives.) Now, by the 1970s, when I was in high school, both the movie-going and card-playing prohibitions had largely lapsed; my grandmother, in her 60s, discovered Shirley Temple movies on the local tv station's Saturday morning programming and again and again, she said plaintively, "I just don't understand; why were we told these were so Bad?" I imagine it was television that made the ban on movie-going utterly nonsensical. I don't know what happened to the card-playing; I just know by the time I came around, my parents played pinochle every week with several couples from church. Not poker, mind you, but cards nonetheless.

That left Dancing on the Forbidden list. We were allowed the occasional square-dance, but that was it. Certainly no Prom. Insread,we had the Junior-Senior Banquet and the Awards Banquet and Senior Night. "What did you do at all these banquets?" asked a puzzled Hugh. "Umm. We ate. They gave out awards. Like I got the Freshman Latin Award and the Sophomore American Lit. Award. And people sang. Sometimes there was a play." He stares at me. "Mom. That's pathetic."

Really? Maybe. I dunno. Hugh tells me that after the dances at his school, used condoms litter the floor; I think of those poor girls pressured into having sex in public and I am grateful that all I ever had to do was sit at a table and clap for the Senior Quartet.  Still. Prom. I alwas felt like I'd missed something, some quintessential American teenager experience. I mean, we banquet-going Calvinists hoped for dates, and we got nice dresses, and the guys brought corsages. But it wasn't Prom and we knew it. Not like in the movies and on tv. Not Like In Normal America.

So, yeah, pitiful as it is, as the boys got older,  I did think, "Prom! Cool!" Owen, however, refused to stay on script. I hinted, wheedled, and cajoled. I offered bribes. I tried guilting him into it. But no. Owen and his buddy Angela went to the Salvation Army surplus store together and bought Anti-Prom clothes for the dance and then decided WTF? and went to the movies instead.

But now it's Hugh's year. While Owen has always swum in the undercurrent, Hugh floats in the mainstream. He's definitely a Prom rather than an Anti-Prom kind of guy. And off he went, boutanniere in his lapel and corsage in hand. To my confusion and consternation, however, somewhere along the last three decades Prom has ceased to mean, well, PROM. Prom, for example, no longer requires that the the guys rent tuxes. No pink ruffled shirts. Not even a bow tie, let alone one of those adorable little vests. Proms no longer have Themes. No Underwater Enchantments. No Oriental Evenings. No Rockin' Back to the Fifties. Not even a Rod Stewart's Tonight's the Night. Parents do not gather to take pictures of the glamorous duo. Bashful couples do not sit together at a fancy restaurant before the dance, nor is there a post-prom lakeside party. Nope, once the dance was over, Hugh and his buddies drove to the 24-hour Coffee Call, while the girls wandered off to Waffle House.

Beware living on or through one's children. That road leads, inexorably, to the Waffle House. . . tho' I have to admit, I'm rather partial to their Pigs-In-A -Blanket breakfast plate. And those chocolate chip waffles with the whipped cream. They do a pretty good cinnamon roll too. . . . Come to think of it, maybe those girls were on to something, a crucial life lesson, the Moral to the Story, even: Dance with the guys and then dump them for grits and bacon and pancakes. One must make one's own Romance. And it's best when covered in whipped cream.

Sunburn

The last evening at the beach. No sunburn. Of course not. We have a beach umbrella. We retreat to the condo for lunch and reading and naps during peak sun hours. We use #50 sunscreen on our faces and #30 on the rest. Sunburn?? That is soooo Not Done. My one undisputed success as a parent is that blonde, blue-eyed, pale-skinned Owen did not experience sunburn until he was 17 and went to the beach with friends. Of course, he also assumed it was totally normal to swim clad in swimming trunks that went down to his mid-calves and a long-sleeved shirt and a pith-helmet-like cap that covered not only his head but his neck. Still, the point, the victory, is that he was 17-friggin' years old when he came home, pointed in horror to his deep red, just-about-to-blister shoulders, and said, "Mom, this really hurts. What is this?"

Such a contrast with my own upbringing, when it was simply expected that every summer I went to the beach, I got horribly burned, my temperature spiked, I was miserable, my skin erupted in blisters, I "peeled"--meaning I shedded vast swathes of skin that I could hold and drape along the furniture and wad into a ball--and then I emerged with "a tan," which we all assumed was a Good Thing.

My mom tells this heartbreaking story of my dad, taking his four older sons, all between age 2 and 7, to Florida for a week in the spring, to give my mom, home with baby #5 (not me--I was #6), a bit of a break. And after the first day at the beach, Dad shepherded his four little guys through the parking lot--and they were all sobbing. A gentle man, my dad, but come on, he'd driven the little rugrats all the way down from Chicago, all on  his own in the station wagon, and given him this splendid day on this magnificent beach and now they were all whimpering and moaning. . . WTF, man!. . . so he basically beat them into the car, oblivious to the fact that his sons, in fact, needed hospitalization, that the hot Florida sun had fried and crisped the white-as-white-can-be skins of his phalanx of little blonde Dutch boys.

God, I hate that story.

But Dad had no idea. No one had any idea. When the first #6 sunscreen lotion came onto the market in my early college years, I used it --much to the amusement and incomprehension of family and friends, who just couldn't understand why any rational person would employ such a radical sunblock and so ensure that she would remain such an incredibly unattractive shade of pale. I didn't want to be unattractive. I just hated the pain of sunburn enough to choose "ugly" over "in-need-of-medical-care."

And now I await my first skin cancer diagnosis. The fact that I've spent all of my adult life looking wan and washed out, eschewing the sun, this will count for nothing. I know this. I resent this. But I know this. I know skin cancer waits, lurking, bound to happen, the assured results of all those annual bad burns. The intervening years of copious suntan lotion and rigorous hat-wearing and assiduous shade-seeking will count for nothing. The fact that I've spent my adult years not at the seashore or beach but rather in libraries and offices and archives; the fact that I wear the same swimsuit for years, years and years, on end, til the elastic wears out, for pete's sake, because why spend money on something that one only uses for a few days each decade; the fact that I've never been Brown and Beautiful, the tanned Beloved One of high school dreams. . . none of this will count. I am doomed by biology, by genes and generation, by my blonde hair and blue eyes and alabaster skin (ok, sounds egocentric but one boyfriend long long ago called my skin "alabaster"; he turned out to be narcissistic and gay [not that I have a problem with gay, except when it's a guy who's promising to marry me. . .] but still, I stick by and totally claim the "alabaster"). My comfort: Owen does not, cannot face the same future.

Of course there's a certain irony at work here. Enormous colorful tattoos now cover most of Owen's beautiful skin, which I oh-so-carefully and consciously protected againt the sun's damaging rays. "I only go to reputable places," he tells  me. "Mom, it's organic ink. Totally safe. No problem." Really? No problem? Vast quantities of ink injected into his skin and "no problem"?

Dunno. What if I'd plucked off that long-sleeved tee-shirt, eschewed the #50 sunscreen, let him get totally burned as a boy? Would he regard his skin differently? Would he see it as more vulnerable? Limited? In need of care and protection?

I imagine not. Hell. I did my job. I protected what I was supposed to protect when I was supposed to protect it. The rest is up to him. Me? I gotta go check for moles.

Gather round, little children

My niece sent me a link to a hilarious post about the failure of "bikini condoms." Evidently women just did not flock to use a latex G-string panty with a "condom pouch," which I gather is something like an empty hotdog skin, hanging down between your legs, awaiting the male member. (Such a strange term. Is there a female member? Does the clitoris count as a member or is there some kind of size requirement?)

I'm disturbed that I had no idea there was such a thing as a bikini condom. In my defence: As soon as Hugh's adoption was finalized, Keith ran off and got fixed, so scared was he that we would become one of those legendary legions of couples who adopt and then immediately get pregnant.** And since I'm not inclined toward adultery, that means it's been 17 years since I've had to think about birth control in any personal way. But still, I keep track of all kinds of things that have little direct impact on me personally--dissent in Syria, the strength of Springsteen's marriage, what's hot in the West End and on Broadway, the gender disparity in literary awards--I mean, you know, I 'm alive, alert, aware. . . but evidently not so much on the contraception front. I just hate that.

But I'm even more disturbed by "In Bed with Married Women" blogger's description of the bikini condom as "a pouch-like tube (oh yeah), a belt reminiscent of grandma's old-timey maxi pads, and cream-colored latex, which we all know is the very sexiest latex color." It's the "belt reminiscent of grandma's old-timey maxi pads" that arouses such discomfort. Because I wore that belt. And I do not feel like "grandma" or in the least bit "old-timey", tho' maybe the fact that I did not know about the bikini condom completely undercuts my argument here.

Ahh, the sanitary napkin and the belt. Gather round, little children, and let me tell you about long long ago, in the days before maxi and mini pad technology. (OK, yes, tampons did exist. . . but I was 10. I was just a little kid and my body suddenly transmogrified into this horrifying, alien thing sprouting hair in weird places and growing breasts and then gushing blood. Not until I was 17 and much more comfortable in my own skin did I relax enough to insert a tampon.) Fifth grade, then. A belt with little clips and a rectangle of cotton fiber with these tails on either end to stick in the clips. One size fits all, supposedly. . . which of course meant that rectangle jutted far in front and behind of my bottom. It moved. Not my bottom. The napkin. It moved. Ah, little children, remember that adhesive technology had not yet been invented, at least not in the realm of Ladies' Monthlies. The belt went around your waist, the pad was clipped on, and then, well, a 10-year-old kid did what 10-year-old kids do--swinging on swings, climbing the monkey bars, playing tether ball, rolling on the grass--and the pad traveled. I'd find it on my left hip, or all the way up my backside, poking out of the waistband of my skirt as I sat at my desk completing my spelling words.

So yes, little children, we have made progress. Despite the bikini condom.


**Factual note: couples who adopt are no more likely to have unplanned pregnancies than couples who don't. Really. There are stats and everything, except I can't find them. But you can trust me. I am a Reliable Source. Even if I am on the Internet.

Of Palms, and Processions, and Crown Roasts

Palm Sunday. Green branches waving. "All Glory, Laud, and Honor." Lots of Hosanna-ing.

But no children's procession. Sometimes my church does a children's procession. Sometimes it doesn't. We're the flexible, changeable sorts of Presbyterians. You know, mix it up. Keep things fresh. Surprise the punters in the pews. I imagine God approves, since He/She/They seems to enjoy surprises (earth-encompassing floods, the writing on the wall, Daniel and that lion, burning bushes, virgin births, the whole resurrection thing--this is clearly a God longing for a surprise party).

I might need a more predictable God. The thing is, I really really like the children's procession. I miss the children's procession. Palm Sunday just isn't Palm Sunday without it. I'd like to think it's for deep, spiritual reasons, not just the "awwwww" factor. See, those kids stumble down the center aisle, and they embody us, we questers of the Divine, in all our various stages and manifestations. You know, you've got the kid who races down the aisle, and there's always the kid the teacher has to carry, the little ham that charms the congregation, the totally serious one who is intent on waving that palm branch is just the proper, prescribed, Presbyterian way and who is visibly annoyed by all the non-conforming palm waving all around her (yes, yes, I do identify with that kid). . .

My all-time favorite Palm Sunday was years and years ago, a lifetime ago, back before marriage, before the Ph.D., before the move Down South--another time, another place, another life. A graduate student at Northwestern, I had joined the Presbyterian church in downtown Evanston. It was my first Presbyterian church, and my first (and only) experience of a distinctly swanky congregation. The kids in the Children's Choir, for example, were decked out in red choir robes, complete with the circular white frilled collars that always reminded me of those paper frills you put on a crown roast. (To contrast: in my current church, the kids in Children's Choir definitely gravitate to the Casual section of the Children's Department: shorts, tee-shirts, sweat pants, the occasional soccer uniform. . . ) As one would expect, the church had a fabulous adult choir, filled with paid professionals (which always struck me as cheating, somehow). So the choruses of "All Glory, Laud, and Honor" resonated throughout the faux-Gothic sanctuary with carefully articulated and beautifully modulated precision, as the robed and frilled children processed up the aisle waving their palm branches. They all then gracefully folded to the floor, to sit out the welcome and opening hymn, before singing their anthem. The minister, a young, good-looking charmer with a gorgeous wife and three lovely kids, stood up and began the Welcome portion of the liturgy, which centered on the theme of embracing the Prince of Peace. And at that point, the pastor's son--a sturdy, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, four-year old--flipped his palm branch around so he was holding the stick-like end, and proceeded to transform it into a machine gun and massacre the congregation: BUHBUHBUHBUHBUH. So much for the Prince of Peace.

I was the only one laughing.  Which is probably why I don't belong in a swanky congregation with children dressed up to look like Christmas dinner lamb chops.

All glory, laud, and honor
To thee Redeemer King;
To whom the lips of children
Made sweet hosannas ring.