FAIREST OF THEM ALL

A few weeks ago I came across a tiny little object that left me feeling most vexed.  It was a bathroom scale the size of a postage stamp. Well, it was a miniature plastic toy bathroom scale, in pink. With the weight permanently set to read at 110 pounds.  Barbie’s bathroom scale.

I’m not militant about Barbie. I had Barbies as a child. They’d been given to me in 1968 by a friend of my mother’s when her daughters finished playing with them. My mother used to leave the whole black vinyl trunk of them on the front steps at night hoping someone would steal them.  I bought Barbies for my stepdaughters and I’ve amassed a vintage train case full of them and their silly outfits for our 4-year-old granddaughter to play with when she visits. I realize that Barbie sets forth an entirely unrealistic role model for little girls, but I give little girls enough credit for imagination and good sense to know not to base their life expectations on an 11″ plastic doll.

But a bathroom scale for the leggy blonde? That just struck me as particularly insidious. Barbie is designed on a 1:6 scale, what’s known in the industry as “playscale”.  The proportions for Real Life work out like this: she’d be 5’9″ tall, with a 36-inch chest, an 18-inch waist, 33-inch hips and a body mass index of 16.24, which fits the weight criteria for anorexia. A study at Finland University’s Central Hospital revealed that Barbie would lack the 17 to 22 percent body fat that women require in order to menstruate.  She does not need a bathroom scale.

Yet Mattel issued a play set “Barbie Baby Sits” that included a book called “How to Lose Weight” with a page that instructed “Don’t Eat!” Two years later, the play set “Slumber Party” included that same “book” and also a bathroom scale which permanently read 110, about 35 pounds underweight for a woman 5-foot, 9-inches tall.

Little girls do grow up hearing their mothers complain about diets and needing to lose weight. In fact, in Sweden (where there is no childhood obesity epidemic) a study at Uppsala University revealed that one-out-of-five seven-year-old girls believed that she needed to lose weight. In 2009, the British Journal of Developmental Psychology reported on a study conducted at the University of Central Florida which found that of the little girls studied, age three to six, half of them thought they were fat.

In 2008, the New York Times published a story on a study that had just been posted in the German medical journal, Deutsches Artzeblatt International that interviewed 7000 girls aged 7 to 12. The study asked the girls to rank themselves on a scale that included Far Too Thin, a Bit Too Thin, Just Right, a Bit Too Fat, and Far Too Fat. 75 percent of the girls were in a normal weight range, but half of those girls (of normal weight) thought they were too fat. It gets worse. Normal weight girls who felt they were fat scored as poorly on Quality of Life and Self-Esteem tests as those girls who truly were obese; and they scored worse than obese girls on tests regarding family relationships.  The same story noted a 1999 study by the American Dietetic Association that found 55 percent of American girls 7 to 12 years old wanted to be thinner.

It’s not much of a stretch then, to imagine a little girl playing with Barbie and the Barbie bathroom scale and telling her anorexic doll “Oooh, Barbie you’ve gained weight! No dinner for you tonight, you little piglet.”  This is seriously screwed up.

As a child I was pretty active, busy with dogs and horses, and by the time I was in my teens, sailing and skiing. I don’t remember thinking I was fat. I did have a friend in high school who was carrying a few extra pounds– and I mean a few– I look at yearbook pictures of her and she does not look significantly fatter than the rest of us. If she was teased about her weight, I don’t remember that either, but what I do remember is how hard she tried to diet, existing for weeks at a time on carrot sticks and Tab.

The anorexic daughter of friends lived with us for a while, while I was in high school. Ruthie was a few years older than me and her arms were as big around as the core of a paper towel roll. Her parents had put padlocks on the cupboards and the fridge. Still, Ruthie would manage to eat whole sticks of butter or an entire pound of raw bacon and then vomit it all back up again. She was always trying to kill herself by taking overdoses of aspirin.  She was trying very hard to look just like David Bowie in Aladdin Sane.

One of my worst and most-embarrassing moments regarding weight stems from an evening at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. I was writing for a cutting-edge punk rock magazine, Dogfood, and I was 20 years old. We’d just interviewed the headlining band,  Psychedelic Furs before the show and now I was sitting in the balcony with the band watching the opening act, Romeo Void. I was absolutely thrilled to be sitting next to Richard Butler, the raspy-voiced lead singer, replete in pleated trousers and silk scarf. On stage, Romeo Void was playing their hit “Never Say Never” (famous for 15 minutes for the refrain “I might like you better if we slept together”) Richard was enjoying himself immensely, shouting down repeatedly at the singer “Fat Chicks Suck!” What were the rest of us doing? We were laughing hysterically. Every time he yelled it, we all rolled with laughter. I was laughing so hard tears streamed down my face.  Now there’s no way that Deborah Iyall could have heard him across a theatre of screaming fans, and she was sort of Rosie O’Donnell plump. But when I think about that evening I am ashamed.

Payback would come for me sooner rather than later. A few months after that evening I moved to Boston.  I’d married in a rush (to get in-state tuition, we told everybody) and not surprisingly the marriage fell apart in pretty short order. Boston is a cold town, and I’m not talking about the climate. I may have been hip in the south but that didn’t count for shit in Massachusetts.   I was studying performance art, which is all about laying one’s self bare (sometimes literally) and surrounded all the time by people who were prettier, skinnier, cooler.  My nominal husband was staying out all night and I was staying home by myself eating buttered egg noodles.

When I looked in the mirror I saw a fat girl-woman. It didn’t help that Bob would not touch me at all if he could help it. In retrospect I was probably twenty pounds overweight, but on the Boston art scene that meant I was invisible.  A friend of mine wrote recently about his time in Boston: “One of the things I hated the most was the absolute lack of positive energy, lack of drive and ambition, the lack of wonder about the world that always existed in that city. I have lived all over the world– that place just sucks the life out of people. I have never, for one second had any regret for leaving.”  He was in a band, for God’s sake, he was popular. Reading his message was like long-won vindication.

By 1986, Bob and I split and I moved across town. I’d finished with school and had a job with people I liked, and even found some kind of modicum of self-acceptance, and was doing my best to hold onto that with both hands. I hadn’t lost the weight, but I still looked fine in my little boots and black tights, vintage dresses and leather jackets. One afternoon I was walking through Kenmore Square, when a homeless man called out to me.

“Hey, hey, c’mere, I want to tell you something.”  As it happened this wasn’t just any homeless man, this was Mr. Butch, a minor celebrity in Boston. (Honest to God.) That didn’t matter, I tended to give money to panhandlers when I had some in my pocket, and anyway I was curious as to what he had to tell me. So I stepped towards him. He leaned in closer and pointed his finger at me. “I want to tell you that you’d look human if you lost fifty pounds.”

Twenty-five years have passed since that moment on the sidewalk, and I still vividly remember how I felt like I’d been physically smacked. I reeled away, angry and embarrassed. I kept telling myself “He’s a homeless jerk, why do you even care what he thinks?” but my own voice was not enough to quell the unsolicited opinion from a stranger.

The funny thing is that I did lose weight– fifty pounds and then some, and I was horrified at what a pig I’d been. I swore I’d never put that weight on again. I was working at a tony art museum, going to openings in tiny little black dresses and tall shoes and everyone was so nice to me.  Women wanted to be my friend, men wanted to fuck me. I had never been so miserable. I don’t have many photographs from that time, it seems I sent them all to my mother. But when I look at them I can’t really find myself there. I look gaunt, not slender. Even when my mouth is smiling, the rest of my face isn’t.

I didn’t make a conscious decision to gain weight, but I did find a man who loves me for all the important reasons and we had a child and we live in a culture that celebrates every occasion with food. Within ten years I’d gained back every ounce and then some. There are times that I am self-conscious about my size and shape, but I guess I don’t care enough to do anything about it. Last summer, I went back to Prince Edward Island, where I’d gone to high school, after being away for 31 years– and yes, I wish I’d been thinner. Not that anyone said anything, but you know, everyone wants to make a triumphant return.

There was just one thing. I was invited for drinks at the plush waterside home of a man who, when we were in high school, had been my first serious boyfriend.  Our parents were friends and our high school romance went on for three years. My parents were terrified that when he went away to college that I would run away to be with him, and indeed I did plot that for a time.  So, now decades later, we are having a pleasant evening over a glass of wine in his living room with him and his wife. At one point their adult daughter appeared on the scene, and asked “Who’s that?”  Her father responded “This is Larkin. She went to Three Oaks at the same time I did.”

I should have called him on it, but I didn’t. Instead, I went back to the motel that night wondering if I’d shown up looking like Kate Moss if he would have claimed me then. Really, though his inability to be honest with his daughter, and his dismissal of me says more about him than it does about me. It just makes me happy that I married the man that I did, and that all those fervent high-school prayers went unanswered.

We continue to be sold the message that thinner is better. Even some of  Sports Illustrated‘s swimsuit models look like they could use a meal or two or ten. Every few months the media reports the death of another fashion model from causes related to eating disorders. Britain has taken the steps of banning print ads that show women who are dangerously underweight. Milan, one year, would not let models participate in the annual show who did not have a “normal” body mass index. (You have to wonder if designers had to take to the Italian streets to find those women.) But that seems to have been a novelty for that year alone.  It’s a mystery why designers want to use women built like clothes hangers to show their season’s offerings anyway. I mean, why not just use a  hanger if that’s the look you want? Or why not design clothes for women of a healthy weight?

It’s worth noting that these models don’t actually look like women, they look like children. A size zero model (which is among the current industry standards) has a waist measurement of 56 cm, which is the same size waist as an average 8-year-old child. Isn’t using sexually provocative advertising featuring women that look like pre-pubescent children feeding into the burgeoning problem of pedophilia? Men are sent the message that this is what they’re supposed to be attracted to, and women are sent the message that voluptuous is grotesque.

For years it’s been rumoured that Marilyn Monroe wore a size 16 dress. While the rumour isn’t true, what is true is that the iconic actress, at five-foot five, had a weight that fluctuated between 118 and 140 pounds. For years, she had been the epitome of sex appeal, yet the scrawny Elizabeth Hurley (an English model most famous for being Hugh Grant’s one time girlfriend) is known to have said “I’d kill myself if I was as fat as Marilyn Monroe.”

How did we get to such a twisted measure for the value of a woman? Men aren’t judged solely by their appearance, and even when their appearance is considered, they can still be deemed attractive (especially by themselves!) even when they have pot bellies, thinning hair and pasty white legs. And that’s as it should be . Surely that kinder appraisal ought to be extended to the fairer sex too, using more important facets like intellect, compassion, talent, and insight as the measures of someone’s worth rather than just their physical appearance?

I know that there is an astronaut Barbie, and a NASCAR Barbie and Pillow Talk Barbie, and veterinarian Barbie. It’s amazing that she can do all those things while dangerously underweight. I just hope to God that our daughters aspire to share those achievements rather than Barbie’ body mass index and 18 inch waist. But in either case, Barbie’s bathroom scale has got to go.

Maybe Sex for Christmas

Best Read Late at Night

Writing about sex is troublesome for me. That’s something of a puzzle, because I can (and do) talk about sex: at the dinner table, in public, in casual conversation, in bed. I’m not shy that way. I said something mildly scandalous in that realm this afternoon while we were all sitting in the livingroom drinking cocoa. My husband muttered his protestations about propriety, to which I responded “What? This from someone who put something called ‘Lady Monkey Butt’ in my stocking?” I think the cocoa shot straight out of my mother’s nose.

But when it comes to writing descriptive narrative about sex, I can’t quite get it together. The rhythm eludes me, the delicate balance between the vulgar and the poetic. In December 1940, Henry Miller received an offer to write erotica for a “collector” for a dollar a page. He tired of it in short order, and his friend and lover, Anais Nin took up the slack. She never met the “collector,” but the intermediary, an art dealer, would tell her “The old man likes it. But concentrate on the sex, not so much poetry.”

“So I began to write tongue-in-cheek, to become outlandish, inventive, and so exaggerated that I thought he would realize I was caricaturing sexuality,” she wrote in her journal. “But there was no protest. I spent days in the library studying the Kama Sutra, listened to friends’ most extreme adventures.’Less poetry,’ said the voice over the telephone. ‘Be specific.’”  Anyone who has spent a moment (or more, or less) reading the dreck that passes for contemporary literary erotica can tell you that the stuff “without poetry” has an ugly crudeness that works opposite its desired effect. Just like certain marital aids, if you apply it long enough, you will eventually arrive at your intended destination, but you won’t have enjoyed the journey much.

Nin’s stories, on the other hand, are brilliantly balanced, progressing steadily in their long waltz to culmination. In “Artists and Models,” (an 8500 word story from the collection, Delta of Venus) she wrote:

“When she stood by the big iron bed, waiting, he said, ‘Keep your belt on.’ And he began by slowly tearing her dress from around it. Calmly and with no effort, he tore it into shreds as if it were made of paper. Louise was trembling at the strength of his hands. She stood naked now except for the heavy silver belt. He loosened her hair over her shoulders. And only then did he bend her back on the bed and kiss her interminably, his hands over her breasts. She felt the painful weight both of the silver belt and of his hands pressing so hard on her naked flesh. Her sexual hunger was rising like madness to her head, blinding her. It was so urgent that she could not wait. She could not even wait until he undressed. But Antonio ignored her movements of impatience. He not only continued to kiss her as if he were drinking her whole mouth, tongue, breath, into his big dark mouth, but his hands mauled her, pressed deeply into her flesh, leaving marks and pain everywhere. She was moist and trembling, opening her legs and trying to climb over him. She tried to open his pants.

As we truly only know what goes on inside our own heads during sexual congress, I couldn’t possibly say if that description of response is universal in any way, but it is damn close for me. As she develops the story over time, the language changes, growing coarser, more urgent. (You’ll have to go looking for that yourself. If I read too much, I’ll be distracted, and this project will be abandoned for the night.)

When I was a senior in high school, I’d translated an interview with Nin from the French Vogue for a class. It was a fascinating piece and it noted the titles of two books of short stories that had been recently published. I asked for them for Christmas, really having no idea what they were. My mother had a look at them in the local bookshop and demurred. When I discovered them for myself my freshman year in college, I was relieved that she hadn’t bought them for me. Not that it was an act of censorship (my parents were never like that) but it would have been a weird gift to get from your mom.

For a long time, I didn’t even try my hand at writing erotica. Even garden variety love letters felt forced and false– I found that I was cribbing from “real writers” like Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds to express myself. Then about ten years ago, a friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. She is a jazz singer by trade and of course, she had no health insurance. So we had a Valentine’s Day fund-raiser for her. I was fairly well noted in my own community then, and I offered to contribute an original one-copy-only signed erotic short story for auction. To sweeten the deal I included a plateful of handmade bittersweet chocolate truffles laced with cayenne.  (I was sure of those, I knew they were sublime. The story was another matter altogether.)

I’d seen how many other writers had handled sex scenes and often cringed. I feared and expected that same response to my own efforts. I may be able to fuck you on top of a car in a National Park but I can’t write about “throbbing members” or “moist folds of the flower” without giggling. Even if you can’t hear me giggling  you can read it between the lines.

So auctioning off this story was a little like auctioning off one’s knickers, and I felt a bit shamefaced all night long. A local architect bought the truffles and the story for $75, and I still turn slightly pink when I think about it. Maybe he just ate the truffles and threw away the story, I never heard. The climax of the evening was a celebrity spelling bee, star-studded with the local literary luminaries. And me. (This is Livingston, Montana we’re talking about. If you throw a rock in the street, you’re more likely to hit a writer than not.) Damned if I didn’t win– and the Calcutta style betting had me as a long shot. Among that group were numerous men who were a bit notorious for their sexual adventures and proclivities.  I wasn’t known for my sexual proclivities, I was married.

Well, I guess they were married too. I understand the problem, though. People fall in love with writers. They underline phrases on a page. They utter “yes” when some passage resonates. If the writer is similarly in love with themselves, it’s easy to succumb to this society of mutual admiration. Thank God I have a patient husband, and luckily I haven’t given him too many instances to be patient about. I have been told, more than once, by more than one man that I am the “manliest woman (they’ve) ever met.” It is meant as a compliment (coming from a man, after all) and I take it as such.  What they are acknowledging is a temperament that is neither squeamish nor shrill, along with somewhat masculine appetites: good whiskey, raw oysters, rare meat, sporting dogs, leather, European cars, and bawdy jokes.

I had a friend in college, another writer, who could match me stride for stride on most of that, though she had a real predilection for the most ridiculous pumps. Starting in college, and continuing for about twenty-five years, she maintained an affair with a man we both knew. He was tremendously ambitious and in time, tremendously successful. Eventually, her husband -working in the same field- found out, and was understandably furious. In turn, he took up with a woman he’d just met at a fundraiser, and eventually left my friend and married the woman he’d turned to. What happened next ended our nearly 30 year friendship: this beautiful, intelligent woman chose to wear a scarlet letter– not the “A,” you might expect, but “V,” for Victim. It’s invisible of course, but it colours her every action and decision. I couldn’t believe she’d grown up to be such a hypocrite.

Twenty-five years of sex without being compelled to make a partnership isn’t love, it’s just sex. She could have saved her marriage and the pain she embraced (and visited on her three kids) by just owning up to it when it was discovered. A mistake, but one that she compounds with self-righteousness. But then, that’s the golden question, isn’t it?  Is it more egregious to be in love with someone (and never act on it) or to engage in a sex act with someone you don’t love? I don’t know the answer. In a perfect world this would never come up, we would each be forever satisfied with our spouse, and no other person would make our pulse quicken. Years and years ago, we had a pastor who was kind of attractive in that “Jeremiah Johnson” way. He had a very plain and unhappy wife, and I imagine he’d wrestled this question more than once. He said one day “To be attracted to someone is human nature, but you don’t have to act on it.”  So that was his answer, and it’s fine advice for keeping a happy home.

Long, long ago I loved one particular man fiercely, and that love went on for years.  We spent quite a lot of time together, but we never, ever touched. Not in passing, not on purpose. That’s kind of hard to do– think about all the times you lay your hand on someone’s arm, or hug them, or shake their hand, in the most casual and platonic manner. When we were talking (and God, we talked a lot) the air seemed to shimmer around us. People noticed. I never touched him. He never touched me. I don’t know if we were afraid that once we crossed that threshold that we wouldn’t be able to stop, or if we would spontaneously combust. Or both. It’s all long over now, but the question still hangs. I’m not sure if you can help yourself in those situations though– do we even choose them? And certainly you can decide with whom you will take off your clothes and fall into bed.

So each night I fall into bed with the man I married nearly twenty years ago, when I was just a slip of a girl, all elbows and sharp edges. That first ache to close the distance between two humans is ancient history now, a shared common image, family folklore. There is comfort in knowing the roadmap of his bones as well as my own, and joy in the occasional surprise.  Now, older, rounder, I am less pleased with my own over-upholstered body, but when he whispers you are so beautiful, it carries the ring of truth. Perhaps not to anyone else anymore, but to him, there is still a loveliness in my soft flesh. Allowing for cricks and kinks, the architecture of connecting is familiar as breath, this goes here. Just for a moment we are pliant as newlyweds, bending, arched, couldn’t stop now if the Pope himself walked through the door. Then, like stepping from  the Tilt-a-Whirl, we take a minute to regain our bearings. Pillows are adjusted, plumped, the quilt is smoothed. We settle together like spoons, witless into sleep.

CRASH

I knew this day was coming. I knew even before I started this project that I would reach a point where I would want to just to blow off the writing and crash. This is that night.

First comes the bargaining: it’s okay, you can go to bed and get up early and write, who will know the difference? Then comes the crankiness: why even bother, who even cares, why do you write this crap?  Then there’s the worst: the whining. I am so tired. I just want to lay my head down, I just want someone to rock me to sleep, I just want . . .

The truth is that I’m tired because I’ve been cleaning my house. How lame is that? The house is not that bad– it’s not like we’re in the running for an episode of Hoarders or anything. But there is a lot of stuff to sort through, and in the past I’ve just stuffed it in that closet or stowed it in those boxes or put it in the corner and thrown a festive tablecloth over it. It’s time to finally figure out where everything goes and put it there. We’ve been here for four years after all.

To compound my to-do list, Christmas is around the corner. And we’ve invited folks over. What is it about humans that makes us decide to replace the front door glass, paint the back door, install a new kitchen island and sort out the dresser drawers (underwear with holes to the trash, underwear with shot elastic to the trash. Hell, put it all in the trash) when we have an absolute no-fail, no wiggle-room deadline.  We must be nuts.

And I am tired. My back is a little achy, I have a paper cut, I need to do something with my hair and good God, it’s nearly two in the morning again? I am peering up over the edge of fifty and I guess it’s okay to be tired.

But before I can ramp up a full-fledged pity fest, I remember. One of my friends was just diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer. She’s optimistic, her doctors are optimistic, she’s going to do her best to beat this. Still, one of our mutual friends was already spinning out a eulogy over dinner.

Eulogies are being written for the sister of one of my high school classmates. She drowned last week while on vacation in Mexico, and my friend struggles daily with authorities in another country  to have her sister’s remains brought back to Canada.

Last week, another friend joyfully announced her remission from leukemia and in the next breath said she was going in for more chemotherapy to keep it that way, and the way she said it  made it sound like she’d decided to go to Michigan for the weekend or something. She must be so very tired, but she is determined.

The near constant severe headaches plaguing yet another friend turned out to not be Lyme Disease (her original diagnosis, which would have been bad enough) but a godawful thing called Fahr’s Syndrome. When she told me in an email that this was what she was facing, I had to look it up. When I saw what it said, I wept. There is no treatment for this progressive neurological disease. Unlike my friends with cancer, she cannot get better. She and her husband have two daughters not yet in high school.

So who am I to even feel weary? My friends are the most amazing people, and I am humbled by their strength. If they want to pitch a fit sixteen ways to Sunday  surely that’s their prerogative, because life really is so damn unfair. It is not for me to whine about having all this to do, and wishing I had another week to spin my wheels. It’s not for me to complain that I can’t fall into bed because I will not be dissuaded from this relatively modest project of writing something everyday. I didn’t even say that I had to write something good.

Dear readers, please say a prayer for Audrey and Marilyn, for Stacy and for Sue.  Know, too,  that I am counting my weariness and minor aches and pains like blessings. Tomorrow is another day, and one of those tomorrows I am going to sort out my schedule to get the writing done first.

But for tonight, I really do have to crawl into bed. I am so sleepy I don’t think I can write one more

 

 

 

(word.) 

 

O Time in Your Flight

Here we are again, nearly one in the morning and I am face to face with what I feared. Well, fear’s not the right word. I do believe I’ve finally arrived at a place in my life where I am not afraid of anything. But this is my Achilles’ heel, and I am sitting here looking at it, just as if there’s an arrow buried there.

Before me lies The Assignment. But along with the wool shawl draped around my shoulders is the very real and heavy cloak of fatigue. I wrote until three a.m. I had day chock full of other responsibilities and the promise to myself that I will write everyday hangs over me. And I have written everyday– not just 500 word blog entries, but 2000-word pieces set out in some kind of halfway thoughtful and coherent manner.  But here we are, almost too tired to focus, with dawn racing up on the other side.

I should have started earlier in the day, but in all fairness, I didn’t always start on time when I had deadlines. More than one night I wrote through the night, all night. One morning the editor came in and found me asleep with my head on the desk, long columns of paper hanging from the ceiling around me. It had been a very complicated story and the outline was twenty-seven feet long.  I was nearly 15 years younger then, and I had better stamina– and I still had the same problem that plagues me now– time  management.

One of those years that I was at the paper I made a Christmas card that featured a photograph of  me at age 5, with a too-small bathrobe and wild hair, standing in front of our Christmas tree. Around the border of the card read the opening two lines from Elizabeth Akers Allen’s (1832-1911) poem, Rock Me to Sleep: “Backward, turn backward, O Time in your flight; Make me a child again just for tonight!”

While it isn’t a literary masterpiece, it is a remarkably forthright and sentimental song about aging, loss, and how in some ways we are eternally children longing for the comfort of our mothers. (You can read it if you like, it is linked above.)  I am extraordinarily lucky to still have my mother with me on this side of the abyss, as sharp and wonderful and difficult as she ever was– and still one of my very best friends.

She’s much more disciplined than I ever was. Over the years, she’s written a number of novels and a couple of those novels a number of times. I don’t seem to be able to crank out anything more than about 2000 words. Or less either. I say that half in jest, but I just don’t know if I really have a book-length project in me. And book-length projects are about the only thing that gives you any  breathing room in the writing game. Writing magazine-length pieces is sort of like trying to breathe through a snorkeling tube.

My father and I once had a terrible misunderstanding about self-discipline. We were in a restaurant in Livingston, Montana. It no longer exists, but while it existed, it was one of the finest restaurants in the world. A white-linen tablecloth place with Malpeque oysters and well-aged beef and a fantastic wine list in a dusty cow-town. In the summer the place is full of tourists and movie-stars, but in the off-season, it was our own kind of Shangri-La. You could close your eyes and imagine that you were somewhere else– until you struggled out the door into the wind.

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving. The day before we had organized a community Thanksgiving dinner for 700 people, built entirely on donations and sheer hard work, and it was the best kind of magic. Those were the days when I felt that my very being was knit into that community. My father and his wife had flown in for the holiday and Dad was a big fan of Russell Chatham’s Livingston Bar and Grille, and we went there for a fine dinner, along with my husband,  Dad’s wife and my mother.  We weren’t quite to dessert when Dad suggested that Julian, then six years old, should take martial arts lessons.

I said we were concerned that Julian wouldn’t understand the philosophy behind the craft and would just use it as an excuse to kick people. I can still hear myself saying this. I remember thinking it was a fairly clever dodge, a foil for the real reasons that I didn’t want Julian, my half-Chinese son to sign up for Tae-Kwon Do or Kung Fu or the like. (What those reasons really are don’t require enumeration here.)

My father leaned across the table and hissed “It would give him something you’ve never had– self-discipline.” Had he hauled off and physically slapped me I wouldn’t have been any more shocked. I hadn’t lived with my father since I was 10– his responsibilities as a father had been taken up by someone else. I regarded him as my friend and since I was a little girl I had put him on a kind of pedestal. In the way that girl-children often do, I had been his protector.

“Dad, I write more than 5000 words each and every week for publication– that takes some self-discipline,” I offered up, a kind of half-hearted self-defense.

“I want some respect!” he roared  back.

Heads turned in the restaurant. The wait staff stayed in the shadows. I backed up in my chair, set my linen napkin on the table and walked out. I was out the door into the cold before I began to sob.

A friend who lived nearby drove me out to the farm, and my husband and mother and son arrived a little while later, Julian fetched from the sitter and still sleepy in my husband’s arms. My mother took a glass down from the cupboard and poured in a couple of fingers of Maker’s Mark and said without the slightest hint of irony- “You know how your father gets when he’s drinking. He thought you were ridiculing him.”

“What?!  Well, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care what he thought. I don’t care if I ever see him again,” I said, the sob rising in my throat.

“Remember the year that your father took off to write the Berryman book?” Of course I did. I was 9 years old. My father was working on a book about the poet, John Berryman, when Berryman fell (“leapt” being far too active a verb) from a Minneapolis bridge. While the death was shocking, it also made the timing of Dad’s project exquisite. If he had only finished the book.

“Well, because he didn’t finish the book, he wasn’t qualified to apply for tenure at Wesleyan. He’s never really finished anything.”

When I said that I wrote 5000 words for publication every week he heard “I write 5000 words for publication every week, unlike you.” Except that of course, I never said that. I wouldn’t have said it. I didn’t even think of it. My father was an accomplished  man in many respects, and an extraordinary English professor. I adored him. And when he was dying, I came to understand why he didn’t finish the Berryman book.

It fell to me to pack up his office at the university. In his office filing cabinet, there was an inch-thick file for every Berryman poem. Every one of them, and Dad had analyzed and researched each poem until there was nothing left there but dust. This writing business takes more of a delicate hand than that and once you have overworked the research, the magic isn’t there anymore. There is simply nothing left to write.

The brutal treatment for laryngeal cancer had robbed my father of his speech, and he communicated by way of a half-size yellow legal pad. When I went up to the hospital to ask him what he wanted me to do with those files, he scribbled “Pitch them.” I didn’t pitch them. I packed them up in cartons and dragged them home to Montana, along with the yellow note, my own cautionary tale.

You know the part of this riddle I still have not figured out? What made him so mean to me that night, anyway? Was there some reason he thought it was okay to attack his grown-up daughter in a nice restaurant? I tried to address this with him before he died, but by then it was too late to work it out. My father has been dead for nearly six years and I am still doing my damnedest to forgive him this. I’ve gotten close, but his behavior is still as inexplicable to me as if he’d been kicking a friendly dog.

So there’s a fair bit of baggage for me on this self-discipline stuff, at least a steamer trunk or two. Tonight I didn’t have it in me to write about any of the subjects I’ve made notes about (why obituaries should be more frank, the importance of stopping at stoplights, why I live where I live) and though I did glance at a web-site with writer prompts (Oh my God, no wonder there’s so much dreck out there) those too were discarded without a moment’s consideration.

Instead what we have here is really the whole raison d’être for this exercise: keep moving, keep writing, don’t let my dreams get stuffed into filing cabinet drawers. There are stories out there that still desperately need to be told.

LET EVERY BELL RING

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Last Christmas was the very worst one ever. I couldn’t quite figure it out. There had been Christmases past that were poorer, lonelier, more bizarre. There was the year I knocked over a 100-year-old Chinese man with my mother’s cast-off Chevy Citation. (He lived.) Or that first Christmas in Montana when I only knew six people and none of them invited me over. Though I had no decorations, I picked up a bedraggled fir tree from an abandoned lot on Christmas eve (the sign said free) and set it up in a bucket of water in my apartment, festooning it with snowflakes cut from typing paper. Or that Christmas six years ago, when my father slipped away from us, unmooring me in ways I could not even fathom.

But since then there have been holidays full of joy, surprise, and adventure. I’d reclaimed the holiday I love best. I only had to look back through the photographs of grinning children, exquisite lights, Christmas cupcakes to remember.

But not last year. I went through the motions. My mother came to visit. I made cookies for friends and neighbors. We had a lovely tree and nice presents and the whole time I just felt dead inside. I did not keep Christmas in my heart. Hell, I couldn’t find it with both hands. I was as cold inside as icy rain. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t snap out of it. No matter what I did to kindle it, there was simply no joy.  When the season blessedly shuddered to a stop, it was with relief that I packed away each ornament, every strand of lights, the singing reindeer. I couldn’t wait to be done.

This autumn they seemed to be cranking up Christmas even sooner. I understand that with the economy teetering that merchants must wring every penny they can out of holiday shoppers. I understand that for many this is what keeps their doors open the rest of the year. But still, I resented Christmas rushing in before Halloween pumpkins had even been carved, let alone extinguished. The sight of people skipping autumn for glitter and tinsel foretold that grim drumbeat. I muttered and grumbled about the commercialization of the holiday until the  middle of November, when I turned up the Christmas music on the radio and gave in.

I am determined to make this Christmas different. I can’t survive another one like last year.

I’ve started really looking at decorations, not just seeing them. Santa perched atop a Columbus, OH candy factory, a life-size nativity scene, or a crazy mess of mismatched twinkling lights and plastic reindeer that still manage to look beautiful glowing in the night. I’m humming along to every schmaltzy Christmas song on the radio. (Except for “Home for the Holidays,” I still can’t stand that one. I said to my son the other night that Frank Sinatra must have stopped mid-phrase during recording and said “What is this slop?”) If I’m alone in the car, I’ll actually sing.  I took a donation to the soup kitchen around the corner, along with three bags of children’s books, because they said they needed them.  Though I have a dozen rolls of wrapping paper left from previous years, I bought some new rolls, and threw the old wrinkled stuff away.

There’s been a particular kind of pleasure in finding gifts. Not extravagant gifts perhaps, or even particularly expensive ones, but the sort of thing that one might open on Christmas morning  feeling surprise and delight. (And if one doesn’t, one should keep it to one’s self. And no, I’m not going to tell one where I got it so one can return it for cash.) When we were first married I was so taken with having a ready-made family of a husband and his two young daughters that I produced literally a small mountain of gifts for them. If they weren’t overwhelmed by the sheer number of presents, which took days to open, they were certainly stifled by my insistence that everyone take turns to open their gifts. That was a tradition in my childhood, but I think I must have terrified the girls, who had only previously known the rip-and-shred model.

They didn’t get what they wanted either. The daughter (with the word processor she’d asked for) eyed with naked envy her sister’s American Girl doll. The worst flop though was Jingle, the Welsh pony mare that I bought for my younger stepdaughter, who was horse-crazy. Except that somehow I’d failed to notice that the horses she was crazy for were the ones in her story books and lining her shelves. She didn’t really want a real pony– that was probably my leftover Christmas fantasy– and the cocktail of her dismay and my disappointment made for a grim time.

My husband is a wonderful man in many ways, but gift-giving is not one of them. The first year we were married he went to Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve and bought a huge stack of  well, stuff. A copy of National Enquirer, a polyester nightgown four sizes too big, a colander, a VHS movie we’d already bought a few weeks before.  Last year, when pressed, he came up with one thing, a grape-colored cotton turtleneck. I’ve tried a general list of things he might choose from. I’ve tried a specific list of the very thing I wanted and that didn’t work either. After nearly two decades, I’ve given up. He is a generous man at heart and I can help him choose. Surprise is highly overrated anyway.

I know some people get really hung up on what they get from their spouse, which may explain why Lexus has the audacity to suggest that you might not screw it up if you give your wife a $40,000 car. My old friend Kate spent every Christmas and birthday in tears because her husband Jeff  had screwed it up again. Though I never said it, I often wished she’d just cut him a break. If the only way you can validate your marriage is by the measure of what swell gifts you’ve been given, that’s a little pathetic.  I did once love a man who gave quite magical gifts. The only problem is that he was a total narcissistic ass. Once I told him that I thought it would be wonderful to have the last words of James Joyce’s Ulysses (“Yes, I said. Yes, I will. Yes.”) engraved on the inside of a wedding ring. That Christmas he gave me that very sentiment embroidered on a  . . . wait for it . . . bath towel.

Which reminds me of the Christmas that my mother really wanted a guitar and my father gave her a recorder. My father got better at Christmas, even though for most of my life “Christmas with my father” was represented by an enormous cardboard carton of gifts that arrived one day in December. My parents divorced when I was 10 and my mother and I moved to England. That Christmas the carton contained the boxed set of George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass,” and all manner of other stuff one might send across the Atlantic ocean to your only child. Over the years the box contained a transistor radio, ice skates, horse books, cashmere sweaters, a Sony Walkman, a check for a Thoroughbred mare.  One year it held the wedding ring my mother had given him in 1960. I wore it on the middle finger of my left hand for fifteen years– until the day I married my husband and now he wears it.

In November of every year, my father would ask me for a list of what I wanted for Christmas. Over the years, with the addition of husband and stepchildren and our son, the lists became more elaborate, and I looked forward to making them. It wasn’t a matter of asking for something I wanted– though that was part of it. It was more like drafting a road map to Larkinland, full of clues and ciphers. It didn’t always work, because we are human, but it had its magic.  My mother would interject here, a little archly, that it did not make for much magic for the rest of my actual real-life family who sat around for hours watching me unwrap the things my father sent.

Then one Christmas Dad died. I don’t know if he hung on until the 26th on purpose or if it just worked out that way. It didn’t matter. We had been with him through the 17th, and went home to Montana because Julian was supposed to be in a school play and we expected Dad to live through January. The Doctors said he would. Was there a Christmas that year? I don’t remember. I’m sure we did something for Julian and his sisters. I remember that I absolutely could not stomach the idea of killing a living tree for something as superficial as Christmas, so we put up a little tree made of tinsel. When the call came on St. Stephen’s Day that he wasn’t going to make it, I couldn’t get to Missouri in time. The one flight was leaving in 40  minutes from an airport 120  miles away, and as it happened, even if I’d been on the plane I wouldn’t have made it in time.

I didn’t get over it. Yes, there had been holidays ”full of joy, surprise, and adventure.” I’d struggled for those, reaching up through a deep sea of melancholy.  But my grief stained so many things I’d loved about Christmas. And there was never another cardboard carton full of oddly shaped gifts wrapped with too much tape and witty clues written in Dad’s angular hand about the mysteries within.

The thing is that his death was really the last straw. My stepfather, HCB– the man who taught me to drive, gave me my first pony, my first pair of earrings, my first Martini– had died unexpectedly far, far away seven years before. When people die halfway round the world, it never feels like they’re really dead. They just feel gone. Though he’d never given me a cardboard carton full of stuff I thought I wanted, he’d given me self-confidence, determination, the art of debate, a well-honed sense of social justice and a trial run in grief. Christmas with HCB meant a houseful of people, a joint of  beef, the town brass-band playing “My Old Kentucky Home” in the kitchen, and the kind of gift you never knew you wanted because you did not know that it existed. And the very last time I saw him was at Christmastime, just before he went back to England, three years before he died. He and my mother came out to Montana to see us, and our brand new baby boy. He slipped me a hundred-dollar bill over dinner on Christmas eve. I had no pockets, so he suggested that I fold it up and put in my shoe.  He had long discussions with three-month-old Julian. He exclaimed over the square spot on the back of our hound dog. He sang bawdy English songs and Christmas carols and got on an airplane and went away forever.

Over Thanksgiving this year, a friend wrote that she’d enjoyed the best holiday she’d had in years, going out to NASA with a friend. She said that she’d felt down on every holiday since 1995 when her father died. 16 years.  A pet psychic once told me that my father  (in heaven,presumably) was so distressed by  my sadness– and that my dog was consumed by my grief, which the dog couldn’t  comprehend or understand. How large did I need this to be written?  It is, was, is time to get on with things.

So we go pick out a Christmas tree, one that touches the ceiling. I’m not sure I’d ever bring myself to cut down another tree, but when they’re standing outside the grocery store, they’re somewhat past saving. I’ve commandeered the guest room (which smells oddly like fruitcake– could that be a ghost?) for wrapping presents. I’m filling up a cardboard carton full of stuff for (as HCB would say) my “chosen” daughter and her children– that’s what he called me. Not his stepdaughter, but his chosen daughter, like he’d plucked me off a tree, or out of a lineup.

There are menus to be planned, Christmas cards to be written, school programs, carillon concerts, a trip to see the University of Dayton’s huge collection of crèches, even though I’ve seen them all twice before. There are photographs to take, of family and Christmas lights and friends, and scores of dogs with Santa Claus, a fundraiser for dog rescue. I think this is the year that we will turn our collection of plastic milk jugs into luminaria ringing the edges of the property.

I have learned something from my sorrow. Last Christmas was my fork in the road. I am not going to mourn for years to come. I choose life! I choose happiness. I am going to dance and sing (sometimes out loud even) and remember all the joy and sorrow in the past and look forward to both sweetness and tears in the days ahead. Let all the bells ring!  I am going to celebrate Christmas, falling open armed into the light.

WHY I AM CROSS WITH APPLE

And Why You Should Be Too.

I am a long time Apple fan. I have fond memories of the Apple Performa. I wrote some of my best work on a 1991 Apple laptop, a Powerbook 140 with an 80MB hard drive. I’ve put together whole newspapers on a G4. And yes, I wept when Steve Jobs died.

But I am cross with Apple, and you should be too.

We bought an iMac in 2007. I understand for the “Geniuses” at the “Genius Bar” that four year represents a fifth of their lives, half their adult tenure. It represents the whole span from trembling freshman to cocksure graduate. Yeah, I get it. But wait ’till you get to be edging up on the wrong side of fifty and four years will seem like no time at all.

Little did I know in 2007 that I was buying one of the notorious Shanghai  Factory W8 computers. Though it serves us well, it did develop a hiccup with the hard drive– but we lost only the email and little else. You kind of take that in stride, like having to replace a water pump in your car. It’s just one of those things.

Then the vertical lines came. First just one, off to the far left of the monitor, a single line of violet. Over the next weeks, it was two and then twelve and then twenty. It turns out that iMacs manufactured the winter of 2006 at Apple Factory W8 in Shanghai will all over time develop this problem of creeping vertical lines until eventually the entire display is obscured.  Eighteen months ago, Apple had a service memo on this problem, but since they now consider this not-quite-five year old computer obsolete, that memo has expired.

I went to the Apple Store with the computer in my arms and bellied up to the Genius bar. They agreed to see what they could do. A few days went by, a week. They were having a problem getting the part. On the tenth day, I got the call that the Mac was ready to be picked up. In the interim my husband had bought a Toshiba laptop. While I was grateful to have some kind of computer access, using that clunky little machine made me long even more for the gracefulness of the Apple interface.

We had the iMac at home for five days before the display started to wobble. Then roll, like the televisions of my childhood. Sadly, unlike those televisions, a smack to the side of the box did not fix the problem. So we went back to the Apple Store, this time tearful with frustration. The “Genius” is sympathetic. He’s one of the managers and he gives me his card. Give him a week, he says, and they will have it back to me good as new, including the foot that some unfeeling lout had left pen marks on the last time it was in.

When the iMac came home, it was indeed, good as new. This is not why I’m cross with Apple. This, too, is like one of those automotive mishaps that happens to your car and not to your buddy’s. Machines break. Just one of those things. No, the reason I am quite fed up with the Wonderful World of Steve Jobs is that they are intentionally selling us something with an artificially short shelf-life.  It used to be that when you bought a Macintosh it would still be functioning long after you’d outgrown it.  No  more.  If my computer were a food product, it would be fresh sashimi-grade tuna, excellent for 15 minutes.

Listen, dear reader, to my melancholy tale, for if  you have a Macintosh, this sad song is yours to sing as well.

My old iPod had developed quirks; it no longer saved playlists, it wouldn’t charge sometimes, then it would.  So last month I bought a new iPod. Just went into a store, chose the color (graphite) and the size (8 gig) and walked out. Went home and plugged it in. Up popped a message that this new iPod could not sync to my music library because it needed iTunes 10. So I went to download iTunes 10 and I got a message that iTunes 10 required an operating system of at least OS 10.5. Dammit. The iMac came with Tiger (Mac OS 10.4.11) installed, with only 512 MB of random access memory.

I was not a happy camper. But I had work-related things I had to produce on the computer, so I set the iPod aside for a few weeks. There were other hints that I was going to have to upgrade. The system was crashing more often. Mozilla Firefox wouldn’t download the newest browser. I couldn’t even have more than one application open at a time. I grew to hate that spinning beach ball, and its implied message:  ”Please continue to hold.”

It’s the number of generations out of date that becomes the sticky wicket. Since Tiger had leapt on the scene, it had been outpaced by Leopard, and then Snow Leopard and finally Lion. Panther? Who remembers Panther? Once you are three generations out, my friend, you are toast.

I couldn’t upgrade to Leopard because Leopard too is regarded as obsolete. So I bought the upgrade to Snow Leopard 10.6.8.  Of course I couldn’t install Snow Leopard because the computer didn’t have enough memory. So I bought 2 gig memory sticks and installed them.  Now I’ve spent an extra hundred dollars to make the iPod work, but I was still feeling philosophical about it, and quite pleased with myself for having mastered the installation of memory and software upgrade.

Until I went to use Photoshop. No dice– and okay, it was Photoshop Elements 2 (from 2002!) and I can see that it might be time for an update there. Lucky me, the newest Photoshop Elements 10 is on sale for fifty bucks. Then I had to scan a document to send in an email to someone. The printer would not function. Okay, maybe I didn’t plug it in. Nope, it’s plugged in, and I try printing something– that works just fine.

Hours go by as I search out an upgrade for the HP driver to restore the functionality of scanning, copying and faxing. Finally, in one line of text, buried deep in a document, after downloading several installers, I read that the Officejet 6110 is not compatible with Mac OS 10.6 and above. I’m not feeling so philosophical anymore. But I put on my coat and go out into the rain and buy a new printer. Now we are up to $220 out-of-pocket, just to sync the damn iPod.

The worst is still to come.

Years ago, when I produced a weekly newspaper in a little town in Montana (on a Macintosh G4, remember?) I used the graphic design program, Quark Express 2.  It wasn’t cheap, but it was intuitive and I grew to love it. I can make anything with Quark! I can make you something that looks like a dictionary page, or a wedding invitation or any kind of printed matter (or web page) you can think of. I have a thousand beautiful fonts. It is exquisite. In 2007, I bought Quark 7 for the new iMac, thinking rightly that the one designed for the Linux-based operating system was not going to be happy in the new Intel based system.

Beloved Quark. I know Quark like the road map home. I can run Quark in my sleep. It is familiar and comfortable, second nature now. On Wednesday, I designed an announcement that needed to be mailed the next day. The program seemed to run a little slow, but nothing indicated that there could be a problem lurking. I even downloaded a new font to use. When I went to export the file to be printed, it crashed. And crashed again. And crashed a third time.

So I start reading. Various forums indicate a problem with a certain kind of fonts. Quark themselves say that running Quark 7 with Mac OS 10.6.8 is not supported. There are no free or low-cost upgrades. I have a very long “chat” with a Quark customer service representative who recommends downloading the free 30-day trial of Quark 9.  I download it, copy the document and it crashes again. It’s not even finding the Helvetica font for Pete’s sake! I wade through Apple support documents and download both “upgrades” or patches for Snow Leopard. I make an appointment for a phone call with Apple support. It is after three in the morning when I go to bed, defeated. I have spent five freaking hours just trying to make Quark run. If I have to actually upgrade the program (and it looks that way) it will cost $300.

In the  morning, while waiting for the Apple “Genius” to call me, I re-design the announcement in Word. God, it’s ugly. Are they called “Geniuses” on the phone too? Whatever. The boy on the phone is very sweet and assures me that I’ve done all the right things and that it should work. He listens, a little bemused at my complaints that the computer is “not that old!” and offers as a platitude that his parents are still using a Mac “even older than yours, but mostly just for word-processing.”  Sigh.

He gives me a case number and suggests that I reinstall Snow Leopard. I haven’t done it yet. I don’t hold out much hope that it will work– and if it doesn’t, then I have more decisions to make, and probably more money to spend. Maybe I can move iTunes and Snow Leopard to an external hard drive and go back to my nice quiet life with the Tigers.

There’s one more insult.  Snow Leopard isn’t the most recent Mac operating system, that’s Lion. And guess what? My computer won’t hold enough memory to run Lion, so when Snow Leopard is completely obsolete (two years? three if I’m lucky) I will have to buy a new computer. So whatever upgrades and improvements I invest in now, I can be certain that they won’t work in no time at all.

Would you buy a dishwasher with that kind of shelf-life? Even if you only spent a few thousand dollars on a car, you’d expect it to go on for several years. If I spent that  much money on a painting or a sculpture or a desk, I’d expect to have it for the rest of my life.  Even a purebred puppy lasts ten to twelve years. Yet Apple blithely expects that we will shell out another two grand every five or six years just to be able to update our iPods and check our email.

God forbid you actually use the iMac (or Macbook or what-have-you) in a professional capacity as a writer or designer or photographer. Not only do you have to pay a lot more for that software, you can be certain that Apple will make sure that it is useless in the time it takes a reasonable wine to mature.

I never thought it would be Apple that would have me crying for consumer protection, but that’s where we are.  Though it’s Apple that has made my life topsy-turvy this week, all the computer companies are equally malevolent in this aspect. All of them should be required by law to insure the functionality of their software for a minimum of ten years. Ten years would be acceptable. Go on making huge strides in development, make more wondrous machines, but make sure you don’t abandon your earlier creations in the dust.  And Geniuses, you’ll get old too, and you’ll see in time that four years is no time at all.