BREATHING ROOM

It isn’t writer’s block, quite. In fact, the word counts make me look entirely productive: more than 5000 over the span of two nights. And when I say “over the span of two nights,” that’s exactly what I mean. This morning I went to bed at 7 am. Yesterday it was 6:30 a.m. Both times I fell asleep in absolute defeat. I have wrestled the essay two nights running and I am losing.

I want to write about why I live where I live. In the 1970s, “Why I Live Where I Live” was a regular column in Esquire Magazine, each one featuring a different writer. I read them avidly. The two that stick with me are those written by Annie Dillard and Harry Crews, both of whom lived in places where I too had lived. I’m not sure you would have recognized either place if they hadn’t named them. In the course of trying to coax the piece into shape, I re-read Harry’s column. It rambles all over the place too. Esquire notwithstanding, maybe it’s the topic that doesn’t work. Still, just like a dog with her teeth into something, I don’t want to let go.

Where we live is sometimes dictated by necessity, sometimes by whim. (Occasionally you have to wonder if fate intervenes. Why did I pick up and move to Montana, a place I’d never even visited? And then I was stuck there. For years.)

Whether or not you are at home there is at the heart of the matter. I chose Montana and lived there 18 years, but I was never a Montanan. I spent a decade in Boston, but found no peace there. However that city influenced me, it’s since washed off like a watercolor. (Well, maybe some driving habits remain.)  I wasn’t even a citizen of the one place that did feel like home, and couldn’t claim it as anything but borrowed. My whole life was like something out of Goldilocks. Too hard, too soft, too small, too large, too hot, too cold.  Until now.

So why can’t I write about it? I love this town, but when I try to organize those thoughts on paper, they read like something creative from the Chamber of Commerce. When I try to talk about how we came to be here, the essay takes on that terrible pedestrian narrative – “and then, and then, and then.”

Harry Crews said one of the reasons he lives in Gainesville is because three hours away there’s really good fishing. I like horse racing, but I don’t live in Dayton because it’s three hours from the Kentucky Derby. If “really good fishing” was the criteria for living somewhere, you’d think Harry would have moved closer to the beach. Of course, he lived in Gainesville because he taught there, just as we live here because we chose the extraordinary public performing arts high school for our son.

Why I think I’ll stay for ever and always is a whole different question. And for that matter, Harry has long retired from the University of Florida, and yet he lingers quite near there, in Melrose. I lived Gainesville as well; three times. In utero, as a little girl from age 2 to 6 and again when I was 17, and I returned for college. I don’t go near Gainesville now, it’s clearly my geographical tar baby and I’m terrified I might get stuck.  And when I left there in 1980, I didn’t even glance back.

I did take a couple of classes from Harry Crews, though. They were upper-level creative writing courses and I never should have been allowed to sign up. Lucky me the computer didn’t kick me out and neither did Harry. We used to meet at night. We’d have an assignment to read and then we’d talk about it. We’d turn in our papers to Harry and he’d return those that were already graded. I don’t think we ever talked about each other’s writing, and so much the better. We really only cared what Harry thought. One night, after we’d read Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” he asked me to tell the class what I thought about it. So I told them. “A brilliant story,” I said, “but I didn’t really care for it.” (Which I still think is an entirely legitimate opinion.)

Well, Harry was on that like white on rice. “Didn’t care for it! Little Miss Coed here doesn’t care for the great Kafka!”  And so on. Really, I suppose I should have figured that it would have been one of Harry’s favorites. I’d read all his novels in high school, and a love for Kafka should have come as no surprise. I sat there and listened while he raved and tried not to cry.

At the break, I went up and asked for my story. If you didn’t pick up your work, he threw it out.

“Name?”

“Larkin Vonalt.”

“Oh yeah. The one with the people wandering around in the middle of the night.” He shuffled through a few more papers. “Here it is.”  I could see he’d marked it with a B. He paused, though, before handing it over. Leaning back in his chair he looked at me as if he was seeing me for the first time.

“Are you kin to Larry Vonalt? He drew the word “kin” out three beats.

“Yes, I’m his daughter.” Harry slapped the desktop so hard people in the room jumped.

“Well, how the hell is he??!! We were the dearest of friends. You tell him, you tell him the next time you talk to him, you tell him Harry Crews sent his luvvvv.”

Well, I did tell him of course, and my father called Harry and they had a fine old time rekindling their graduate school friendship.  What I learned from Harry over the next two semesters was how to not flinch. It has served me well. I wish I could learn from him now how to say why I live where I live.

Why do I live where I live? There’s the history of course– the brothers Wright and their bicycles, their friend, Paul Laurence Dunbar and his poems. Jane Reese and her camera, John Patterson and his rowboats (yes, yes cash registers too) Esther Price and her chocolates. There’s the Federal Courthouse where Lincoln spoke, and damn near every president after  him. There are the 3000 creches at the University of Dayton and the 104,000 inhabitants of Woodland Cemetery, itself a National Historic Landmark. Every mover and shaker Dayton ever had is buried there– but the most visited grave is that of a boy and his dog.

There are the long straight boulevards of fine houses and the cobblestone streets, and the river, like a great grey ribbon curling through the town. Great old industrial sites dot the town, factories and warehouses and great hulking ruins. There are fountains in the river and a skating rink in a park downtown and a baseball stadium where the minor league team boasts the longest sell-out record of any professional sports team. Colored lights flicker underneath the bridges.

I lost my dog here for nine days. Everyone wanted to help: letter carriers, A.T. & T. repair crews, UPS, the Police Department, the Sheriff’s office, college students, homeless men and women. A local mover and shaker wrote about her in his blog. Days went by without a word. It was like she’d fallen off the edge of the earth. The hardest call each day was to street maintenance, to see if they’d found her body. When she was finally spotted, five miles across town in a wooded area behind the Hospice, nearly the entire staff became involved in our reunion. I’ll never forget the euphoria that swept over me as she raced into my arms, and I’ll never forget the UPS man dancing a little jig on my front porch that afternoon, upon hearing the good news. “The guys are gonna be so  happy to hear this, we’ve all been looking for her.” When I brought pastries to the hospice to thank them again on the anniversary of her return, the whole story was written up (badly, but it was a sweet gesture) in the Dayton Daily News as if the return of a lost dog is a story that ought to be newsworthy. Something like that can make you partial to a town.

Just a few weeks ago they named one of the bridges across the Great Miami River the Richard Holbrooke Memorial Bridge after the late American diplomat.  In 1995, Holbrooke brokered a peace treaty here in Dayton  that ended the Balkan conflict. He wrote about Dayton in his memoirs:

There was also a real Dayton out there, a charming Ohio city, famous as the birthplace of the Wright Brothers. Its citizens energized us from the outset. Unlike the population of, say New York, Geneva or Washington which would scarcely notice another conference, Daytonians were proud to be part of history. Large signs at the commercial airport hailed Dayton as the “temporary center of international peace”. The local newspapers and television stations covered the story from every angle, drawing the people deeper into the proceedings. When we ventured into a restaurant or a shopping center downtown, people crowded around, saying that they were praying for us. Warren Christopher was given at least one standing ovation in a restaurant. Families on the air base placed “candles of peace” in their front windows, and people gathered in peace vigils outside the base. One day they formed a “peace chain”, although it was not quite large enough to surround the sprawling eight-thousand-acre base.

When I read that out loud to my husband, I have to stop for a second to regain my composure. Why should that make me cry? It’s not sad. That’s Dayton for you. Not always the most sophisticated, perhaps, but hopeful and optimistic and caring. Even when the city keeps getting cut off at the knees– the departure of GM was dreadful, but NCR leaving by far the worst betrayal. (No doubt John Patterson rolled over in his grave several times.) Even when that happens, the city is like a scrappy little terrier– up on its feet and ready to go.

But when I try to write about it I get tangled up in keeping all the details straight and carefully drawing each line on the dot-to-dot. I try to keep my own story in there as well– after all, it’s supposed to be why I live here, not why those other 142,000 do. (Or a million if you want to count the outlying areas.)

I’d like to tell the story of the drunk guy that helped us unload the moving truck the hot August night we arrived here, or the woman who lived across the alley from us and her beautiful daughter and how the daughter died one night while they were making dinner. Or the man across the street who helped us carry a treadmill up the stairs and the stricken figure of a dog to the car, has cut the grass, strung the lights, and borrowed every tool we have, all the while keeping us apprised on neighborhood gossip. There are still so many things I don’t want to forget. But I just can’t seem to make the words cooperate.

It’s nights like that where my skill as a writer is less than useful. The sentences are pretty. They scan well. The metaphors are clever or apt. But it’s all so boring I can hardly stand to read it out loud to myself. Two nights of that is about enough to make me wild with despair.

Now comes the question of what to do? This experiment, this 30 Days Notice, was supposed to be neatly tied up and put away two days ago, on the 30th. I cannot seem to climb over this one piece and there are still two more lying in wait on the other side. Am I supposed to just give up and walk away after devoting two days of my life to it? Or should I go on wrangling the sentences until at last they move forward together? Maybe I just say forget it about the other two stories and move on to the next thing, closing down 30 Days Notice two days overdue instead of four?

I needed breathing room to sort it out. I used to sleep on this sort of thing, but I’m so exhausted by the time I fall into bed in the morning, that the sleep is hard and dreamless.

So today I let myself breathe a bit, hugging my sides like an exhausted runner, and I made some decisions.

I’m going to save “Why I Live Where I Live” for another project. It may take 10,000 words to tell that story. Or a hundred thousand. There will be one more piece here tomorrow and after that, a little wrap-up. And though the curtains are coming down on this show, I’ve left the stage door open– and I’ll leave a note with directions to the next theatre. One of these days I’ll figure it out, and then I’ll tell you how it is that I came home at last.

 

AMBIENT LIGHT

A Writer Talks About Photography

My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 126. It was under the Christmas tree for me when I was six years old. The first photo I took with it was of a pen full of hound dogs, neatly foreshadowing the hundreds, nay, thousands of pictures I’ve taken of hound dogs since.  It made little square pictures, all of them fuzzy because while Kodak was making these dandy little cameras for middle America, they were outfitting them with the cheapest little plastic lenses ever. It was like making a photograph through the bottom of a plastic wine glass.  Did we even realize how awful they were?  Looking at these snapshots now really is like looking at your own hazy memories, everyone is no more than a suggestion.

Eight years later the Christmas tree once again bore photographic fruit. This time it was a much nicer camera, a Rollei B35, at the time the smallest 35 mm camera made. The “B” is for “Belichtungsmesser”– a lightmeter, which was built into the front of the camera. (You can see a B35 in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Melinda Dillon used one to take photos of the landing of the spaceship.) I didn’t have the opportunity to take a picture of any spaceships, but I did photograph chocolate shops in Brussels, friends eating herring outside the Hague, and a shot that showed early promise– I turned around and got a photograph of the hordes of tourists all taking snapshots of the Notre Dame.

I was already cast in bronze as a writer. Of course, I planned to be an actress and took to my high school stage as the Fiddler in Fiddler on the Roof, and Mrs. Smith in The Bald Soprano. I couldn’t sing well enough for the big roles in the musicals (the Fiddler, you might remember, is not Tevye, but a mute) and when I was cast as one of a dozen nuns in the Sound of Music I hotly told the theatre teacher, Don Oickle, that I couldn’t waste my time with such things. Which was probably the truest thing I ever said in that room. I was already editor of the school paper, after all, and for the first time ever I had an English teacher who both recognized my talent and raised the bar so high for me, that for the first time in my life I was having to work at writing.

I liked my camera, but I didn’t  think of it as anything other a means of recording memorable events, and always on slides. My stepfather had a very nice camera, a Leica IIIf from the 1950s and he shot (exclusively) Agfa slide film, so I shot Agfa too. We had a lovely Rollei projector and a good slide projected across the room can make a breath-taking image. They’re just a little inconvenient to casually leaf through. In time I started experimenting with different films, taking “artsy” photographs with an array of strange film from Ilford. I remember well a series of “eggs on a table top” that all came out cyan. My first year in college I stretched myself with the camera, shooting in the rain, at the beach, and all kinds of scandalous images that I’m surprised the local photo place deigned to print.

These were, however, good enough to get me into art school. On a trip to New York before I went off to MassArt, I “borrowed” the  Leica, and shot several rolls of the Chelsea Hotel, including a wonderful portrait of the famous hotel’s famous manager Stanley Bard. The Chelsea (in those days anyway) was very plain. Radiator pipes that banged all night long, narrow beds with thin blankets. But the wrought iron staircases were extraordinary, and the lobby was resplendent with boys in leather and raccoon-eyed girls, the celebrated and the notorious, cheek by cheek. I think that week is probably when I first started to use the camera as a different way to see. When I (ahem) “returned” the Leica, I left a roll of film in it, about half the exposures gone. I understand that when my stepfather went to pick up “his” roll of photos that he was quite bewildered by half of what he got back from Eckerd’s.

At Mass Art, I studied with Nick Nixon, who must be one of the most patient people alive.  My little Rollei had long since packed up (salt water and whatnot is hell on cameras) and with the first installment of my student loan, I bought an Olympus OM10 with a motor drive and two lenses.  Nick’s work is unflinching, capturing the beauty in the faces of people with AIDS,  people in nursing homes, the blind, the sick . . . and thank God, school children and city scapes. I wanted to take photographs like that, but I was shy about approaching people, so I shot almost exclusively with the telephoto lens. Yeah, it was a cop-out.

Even worse, I couldn’t get a grasp on exposure– I struggled with the light meter and most of the time just ignored it. I still can’t tell you exactly what “bracketing” or “matrix metering” is.  I understood why it was difficult to shoot a photograph of a black horse in the snow, and what to do about it, but I couldn’t explain it to you.  I suppose that’s like a writer who never bothered to learn to spell. It’s not that I meant to be disrespectful and careless. I was just in a rush to get the photograph. Somewhere I read a statistic that professional photographers believed that about five percent of the shots they took were successful. Five percent! That was one in twenty. I could produce a reasonable photograph one time out of twenty, well, most of the time.

I started in filmmaking at MassArt, drifted to photography and then upstairs to the Studio for Interrelated Media– “Performance Art.” There I built installations, made tape loops, shot film, and piled them all together to tell a story. Even though I was using various visual arts techniques to produce the finished piece, at the core all of my installations was the essence of it all: writing. I might have been running from words, but they were chasing me down.

The Olympus with telephoto lens and motor drive weighed in at nearly three pounds– which is a lot to carry on your shoulder day after day. Though I kind of hated to give it up, years later I finally packed it away in a box on the shelf for a much lighter Nikon SLR.  I was a long hold out for film. I’d see film stock from different companies disappear forever and each time would die a little  inside. Every time I had film developed, there was grousing about the expense. I understood the transient nature of a computer file though. Formats change, things disappear, they can’t be read down the line.

Daguerreotypes from the 1830s are still very much with us. Henry Fox Talbots “calotypes” of prints made with a silver solution fixed with salt still exist. You can make new prints from very old glass negatives. I love old photographs, particularly those of dogs, but also of family. My grandfather was an avid photographer and chronicled his family’s life with a medium format Speed Graphic, which belongs to me now. I have a photograph of Grampa, when he was just two years old, sitting on the lap of his grandmother, Elizabeth Tressler, who was born in 1837. So here’s a photograph taken in 1910 that is of someone I knew very well, well into my adult life,9 in the company of a woman who was born 125 years before me. I look at this image and I am connected to her. I can see that connection– he’s sitting on her lap!

I hated to change over to a format as tenuous as a computer file, and if the risks of losing the image weren’t bad enough, there was the trouble with capturing the image. I’d used friends’ digital cameras, snapping a picture for them at school functions and the like. There was no mistaking that lag between pushing the button and the shutter opening.  That  might be fine for taking pictures of a house or a tractor or an African violet, but what about shooting dogs, horses, children? You’d never be able to capture anything. They’d be long gone before the camera even cooperated.

Well, you know what comes next right? Nikon made a digital version of my beloved SLR, and it had no shutter lag. So I capitulated and agreed that the camera should be under the Christmas tree for me, 39 years after my first Instamatic. It’s been wonderful. Given that I never did master the technical aspects of photography, the digital format allows me shoot dozens of images to get the one I want.  This year, as part of a fundraiser, I used it to take pictures of pets with Santa Claus. I know, having had my owndog’s picture made with Santa Claus, that it’s usually one shot and you’re done. Not for me. I photographed each dog, as many times as necessary, until each owner had an image that made them smile. We would have gone broke trying to be that accommodating with Polaroid film.

None of my photographs has ever stopped anyone in their tracks.  Well, one maybe. In 1998, a friend and I spent 9 days crossing Wyoming on US 20. One evening, I took some photographs of an old fire truck parked under a sodium vapor lamp at the aptly named “Hell’s Half Acre.”  They were slides, and some of them were pretty fantastic. I chose the best one and entered, for fun really, in the Gallatin County, Montana Winter Fair. I should have had copies made, but I didn’t. Imagine how surprised and delighted I was to find that the photo had been named “Best Overall Photo” at the fair and “Grand Champion.”  When the fair was ending and I went to pick up the slide, and some other prints, my ribbons and prize money, none of it was there. Someone else had picked it up. At first I thought it must be a mistake, but as no one came back with them it was pretty clear they’d been stolen. You had to wonder about the man who usually won the photo contest at the fair, if he could be that small?  They reissued the prize money  and rosettes but the picture was lost forever and now Hell’s Half Acre itself is gone.

I take lots of pictures of the place I live, my family, some of the food that we conjure up in the kitchen, and of course, the dogs. One schmuck, an acquaintance, posted online a series of photographs he’d taken of Dayton. They could not have been less flattering. They weren’t even honest, just bad snapshots of parking lots and vacant houses and the quality was horrible– they might have been taken with my old Instamatic. When I shared my own photographs of Dayton with him he said they were the “typical yuppie bullshit” and called me a name. Another person looked at some photos I’d taken along the river  in Mississippi and saw in them a condemnation, when really that was not what I meant at all. So I think I’m not very successful in using photographs to communicate.

What I am good at is that I can make a great snap shot, an informal portrait. I can take a picture of a building or a harness horse or a carnival ride and make you go “Hm, that’s interesting.” No one’s ever going to want to buy them and put them on the wall and that’s fine with me. They work for me as illustrations, something to make the stories bigger. Photography for me was always about seeing, and writing is about feeling. Each photograph may indeed be worth a thousand words, but when I look at a compelling image, the journalist’s old maxim rises up in me: who, what, where, when and why. I see the photograph and I hunger for the details.

The noted photographer Shelby Lee Adams was a close friend of my late father’s. He is best known for his images of Appalachian family life, and those images are stories just begging to be told.  There has been an ongoing controversy about his work and whether or not it is exploitive of its subjects.  These people are poor, to some they might even seem grotesque– but surely no more (and perhaps less) than the homeless on the streets of L.A. or New York, or the babies with AIDS that Nick Nixon photographed. Or the children made famous  by Diane Arbus’ work. If we look at a photograph of another human being and it makes us uncomfortable, do we then deem it exploitive? Utter nonsense. When I see Adams’ photographs, I don’t feel pity or compassion or contempt– I feel curiosity. I want to know more about what’s going on in the picture, how these people are related to each other, what the circumstances are. It’s not up to me to judge their lot in life, but I greatly appreciate the glimpse into their world. When Dad was alive we used to look at these images together and he would explain to me what he knew about them. He and his wife were invited to go to Kentucky for a “Dinner on the Ground” with Shelby and came back with more great stories to go with these faces.

I like to take photographs, but I am not a photographer. I’m a writer, so I want to use words to tell these stories, but a single image catapults that person into our lives front and center, if only for as long as it takes to turn the page.  Over my desk hangs a large print of “Chester and His Hounds,” which Shelby Lee Adams made in 1992, and when I glance  up to really look it, it always makes me grin. But then I always had a thing for pictures of hound dogs.

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.

A Letter to Yo-Yo Ma

Six years ago today, my father died. In the years since, I have written this letter in my head many times, as I have wanted to tell you what a profound and lovely part your recording Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone had in the last days of his life, and how it continues to connect us to him even now.

My father, Larry Vonalt, was chairman of the English Department at the University of Missouri at Rolla. I wouldn’t have mentioned that except that teaching was such an intrinsic part of everything he was. He was very interested in film, and loved music, though he himself was not particularly musical.  When my son Julian turned five, Dad suggested that we sign him up for cello lessons, and offered to pay for them. Julian’s father is Chinese American and Dad noted that Julian could look to you as an excellent role model. Surprisingly, we were able to find a cello teacher in Livingston, Montana. We bought our son a half-size cello and he began to learn. He did not turn out to be a virtuoso, or even very disciplined, but he stuck with it for several years.

In the meantime, my father was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. He took an optimistic view and we followed his lead. We should have seen that if the disease didn’t destroy him that the treatment surely would. In January of 2005, they took out the larynx, robbing him of his voice in an attempt to save his life. He went on teaching, using a little box that buzzed when he held it up to his throat to “speak.”

That summer Julian, then age 10,  and I went to spend a few weeks with my Dad and stepmother. Julian dragged along the cello– now three-quarter size. We have dozens of photographs Dad took during that visit of Julian set up in the livingroom, all knees and elbows, glasses sliding down his nose, lost in concentration as he played. He would play until he made a mistake and then he’d say “Wait, I messed up, let me start again.”

In September, Julian turned 11 and among his many presents was a copy of Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone, a gift from my mother. I don’t know when Julian started playing it, I don’t even remember hearing it until I finally heard it, if that makes any sense. We had learned just before that there was nothing more to do for Dad’s cancer. I don’t know if they told Dad to get his affairs in order, or if they suggested an amount of time that he might have left. All I know is that one day late in August he’d sent me an email asking if I wanted his poetry books, and when I read that I began to sob.

My husband and I went with Julian out to Seattle one weekend in November. Driving home on a gray Sunday afternoon, through the Bitterroot mountains of western Montana, Julian leaned forward and asked if we could play the CD that my mother had given him for his birthday. I said sure, and he handed it forward. For the next four hours, we listened. We listened to it through the dying light of evening, and we listened through the star-spangled darkness of a Montana winter night. If we spoke at all, it was only a word or two. My husband stopped to put gasoline in the Volvo; Julian and I remained in the car, listening.

When we arrived at our little farm, I got out of the car, unlocked the door, walked into the house and booted up the computer. I did not even take off my coat. When I found the CD on Amazon, I ordered a copy to be sent to my father by next day mail.

By some miracle, they actually got it to him on the next day, and the email I received read “Thanks for the Yo-Yo Ma CD. I like it very much. I’ve always liked the music Morricone did for spaghetti westerns, but I had no idea it could sound like that. The piece from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly reminds me of that t-shirt you sent me when you were in school in Boston. You know, the one that says ‘The Good, the Dad and His Money.’ Thanks again. Love you guys, Dad.”

We drove from Montana to Missouri see my father for the last time that December. When we walked in the door, he was listening to Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone.  He listened to it every single day we were there. Sometimes his wife would go to put on something else and he would shake his  head. No, he wanted to hear the Morricone.  He was failing quickly. He went into the hospital briefly to have a feeding tube placed, and he wanted to hear the music in the car as we drove him home. It was on all the time. It was as if that music gave him the courage to accept his own death, which was coming for him, whether he was ready or not.

You’d think we’d all have grown to hate it. You would think that none of us would ever want to hear it again. But we went on listening. On the 17th of December, we went back to Montana, promising to return in a few weeks. The doctors assured us he had at least that much time. Hospice made it possible for him to stay in his home, but on the morning of the day after Christmas, pain management became problematic. The ambulance came to take Dad to the hospital, and when they closed the door, Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone was still playing on the stereo.

His wife called early in the afternoon to say that he probably wouldn’t make it through the night. I did my damnedest to find a way to get there. They’d hold the only flight for me leaving Billings, Montana if I could get there in the next 40 minutes. But Billings was 120 miles away. My husband said “Just get in the car, I’ll drive you straight through to Missouri.”  Missouri,  1481 miles away. It might as well have been the moon. Julian put on the CD and we sat together for the rest of the day. When the call came at 8:30 that night to say that my father had slipped away, we were still listening. If we’d gotten in the car to drive there we would have only made it as far as Denver.

I did go back the first week in January. That evening, as we sat down with a glass of wine, my father’s widow put on the CD. Perhaps I looked stricken, because she paused and said “Oh, I’m sorry, wouldn’t you rather not hear this?”

My voice cracked when I answered her. “It’s fine. Please. I’d like to hear it.”

“I just couldn’t bear to lose the music too,” she whispered.

Julian stopped playing the cello. He said that after his Grampa’s death it just made him too sad. I only listened to Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone in the car, because hearing it was so intensely painful and so intensely beautiful and it forced me to embrace my grief. Sometimes I cried so hard I just had to pull over to the side of the road until I could regain my composure. It’s a funny thing because even though I was so sad, the music made me feel connected to my father, as if when I listened to it we were still together. Ecstasy of the Gold was particularly difficult because it always reminded me of that dopey t-shirt, and it was the track I listened to the most.

Not too long after we left Montana for good and moved to Ohio so that Julian could attend a performing arts high school. He was admitted to the 8th grade after auditioning for creative writing. One day, though, he stopped to talk to a boy carrying a cello case– and the boy invited him to try out for the orchestra. Julian was pretty rusty– it had been two years since he’d even picked up the bow. But he did try out and they did accept him, and he did make his way up through the ranks. He’s a senior now, and his major area of study is music.  He plays the cello every single day, sometimes I fall asleep hearing him play into the night. He has two private teachers, plus the cello instructor at the school, and daily orchestra practice. I imagine he will play the cello for the rest of his life. We have talked about the music from Ennio Morricone’s films, but of course, the printed score is not available to the public. When I hear him picking out passages by ear, I don’t know if my heart will break or burst, but I know my father would have been very proud of him.

With time, the grief has eased a bit, it’s less ferocious. I can listen to Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone now without falling apart, and I do choose to listen to it quite often still. Thank you so much for making this wonderful recording that allowed my father music for his last days with us, a score by which to leave this earth,  and years later, still a way of staying in touch. It has been a most remarkable gift, and we are forever grateful.

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.

BUTTER

In the second grade, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Opylacz, we made butter. We gathered around her desk to watch her peel open the carton of cream , pouring a thick ribbon into a sparkling clean glass mayonnaise jar. The metal lid was screwed on tight and then the jar was passed from hand to hand, each of us shaking it. One of the little girls in the class put a real shimmy into it, shaking allover with abandon and we laughed. It seems we shook that jar all afternoon before anything began to change, but of course it wasn’t nearly that long. When the transformation began, we were transfixed– in the bottom of the mayonnaise jar was a pale yellow fist of pure butter and a few ounces of palest buttermilk. We returned to our desks and awaited our reward, a Saltine liberally spread with the butter we’d just conjured out of a jar of cream. On the other side of the room a shy girl in a murky green dress declined the cracker, whispering “No thank you I’m not allowed” when Mrs. O stopped at her desk.

When I bit down on the cracker, it was as if I was tasting butter for the first time. The cracker crumbled in my mouth, but the butter was like sunshine on my tongue, sunshine and silky warmth. When I got home from school that afternoon I waltzed into the kitchen slamming the door behind me and demanded that we make butter.  My mother thought I was being silly and sent me up to change my clothes. In those days she might have bought “real butter” if we were having company for dinner, or if  a recipe demanded it. Otherwise, it was a pallid tub of Blue Bonnet or Parkay.

Then we moved to England and butter came to stay. The kitchen of our stone house at Buckley Hill was 300 years old, heated (somewhat) by an AGA coal stove and refrigeration limited to a tiny fridge, about two cubic feet. No matter, butter would stay cool on the counter on a day in high summer. Bread came from Pogson’s, unsliced and crusty. We’d saw off hunks of it, and carefully piece out bits of butter over the bread. The bread was no match for cold butter, but the combination of the two was sublime.  Pogson’s was also the source for “butties”– ham butties, cheese butties, jam butties. As a bakery, the atmosphere there was considerably warmer and their butter spread beautifully over the slice of bread, a thin gold sheen topped with ham, or cheese or whatever it was you wanted. That was it: bread, butter, and something. It was the best kind of food heaven — simple and perfect. Even now, if I am so lucky to have good bread and a good meat I’ll use just butter to wed the two. Otherwise, you have something that just tastes like condiments.

I’ve never brought margarine into my house. Even when I was so poor in Boston that I had to sell records to In Your Ear in order to buy groceries, I always made the grocery money stretch to buy at least a single quarter-pound stick. My first husband had grown up with Fleischmann’s margarine. When we moved in together, he fell in love with butter. He’d put a whole stick of it in a pot of brown rice, which meant there was one thing in the pot worth eating. That much butter made the rice almost palatable. Occasionally, he’d lift the lid of the butter dish, slice off a pat and pop it in his mouth, like a chocolate.

All of the best comfort foods are better because of butter. Butter in a little golden pool melting into clam chowder. Butter seeping down through a bowl of perfect southern white rice. Folding the melted butter into grits, watching it spread gently across a pan before laying in the eggs, or mushrooms, or sweet onions. Butter in a little pot for lobster. Oh, God.

The popularity of butter and oil coincides roughly with the development of spoken language. According to A History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, the Indians of Vedic times (1100 BC) invoked butter as a primordial deity: ”Tongue of the Gods, navel of the immortal, let us praise the name of butter, let us maintain it with our sacrificial homage . . .” the Rig-Veda reads. “As a wild steed breaks through barriers so does melting butter caress the flaming logs and the fire, satisfied, accepts it.”

In many cultures, the offering of butter became a form of prayer. In Tibet, where a rancid cheese-like Yak milk butter was mixed with tea for consumption and spread on statues for worship, they also would simmer dead lamas in boiling butter prior to embalming them; a custom that only ended with the Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1951.

Ancient Romans and Greeks were less enthusiastic about butter, considering it a food of the “northern Barbarians,” an opinion probably influenced by butter’s rapid spoiling in the Meditteranean climate.  The Greek comic playwright Anaxandrides referred to Thracians, on the northern edge of the Aegean sea, as “the butter eaters.” (A real laugh and a half those Greeks.) But in the first century Pliny the Elder conceded that butter was “the most delicate food among the barbarous nations.” There were some physicians in early civilizations that considered that butter had medicinal properties, and Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat writes that it was “Not for nothing did Little Red Riding Hood take her grandmother a little pot of butter.”

Scandinavian countries were involved in the exportation of butter as early as the 12th century, and texts from Iceland document prayers around 700 AD to the God of the Forge, Gobhin, to watch over the butter . In medieval Ireland, firkins of buried butter were left to ferment in the Peat Bogs. This “bog butter” was more cheese-like in consistency and so immune to putrefaction, that some still exists in museum collections. By the 1500s, the Roman Catholic Church allowed for the consumption of butter during Lent, and within the century, melted butter had become a popular sauce for meat and vegetables among the English.

In “The King’s Breakfast,” A.A. Milne charmingly describes the popularity of butter with a member of the monarchy. The King requests butter for his breakfast, and it is suggested by the Alderney (the cow!) that he might prefer marmalade instead. In the end, he gets his butter:

The Queen took
The butter
And brought it to
His Majesty;
The King said,
“Butter, eh?”
And bounced out of bed.
“Nobody,” he said,
As he kissed her
Tenderly,
“Nobody,” he said,
As he slid down the banisters,
“Nobody,
My darling,
Could call me
A fussy man -
BUT
I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!”

In the 20th century, the consumption of butter in the western world has declined, due to the popularity of margarine, first introduced in the late 1800s as beef tallow worked with milk.  I’ve eaten margarine. Friends serve it and what can you do?  It was thought for a period of time that margarine was healthier than butter, until we sorted out “trans-fats” and how terrible hydrogenated oils are for our well-being.  Margarine puts up a good front– they’ve figured out how to make it look like butter, but as soon as you put in your mouth, there’s no mistaking that greasy mouth-feel. It’s always such a disappointment– like kissing someone for the first time and discovering that they don’t really know how. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, my ass.

Missing is that glorious slippery spreading warmth on your tongue, that sense of langour, that delicate pale yellow perfection, that prayer. Butter is an offering, a culinary spell, bliss.  And margarine? Well,  margarine is just margarine.

These days I’ve been fortunate to have a first class ciabatta to serve as vehicle for my butter, but because I’m never happy, now I find the butter is not good enough for the bread. I’ve been practically living on toast. I love toast in all of its varieties– I can sing the praises of toast made from Wonder Bread if called upon– but this is really fine bread. This is the kind of bread that makes people feel humble and grateful and I think I’ll make another piece of toast all at once. It deserves better butter.

Better butter. The very concept takes my breath away.

SURRENDER

 

I just can’t do it, not tonight. I give up. Consider this my unconditional surrender. I finished yesterday’s piece at six in the morning, after writing through the night. By then my son and husband were up and I thought I could clear the hurdle that is the oppressive desire for sleep, and I stayed up. Until 9:30 anyway and then I fell down in my bed, with my shoes still on for God’s sake, and slept until two in the afternoon. It wasn’t enough, and by the then half the damn day was gone anyway. More than half.

This madness has gone three weeks straight. Last night wasn’t the hardest. Tonight isn’t even the hardest, but this is the night when I am the most fed up with myself. I have managed to write everyday, but I have failed (spectacularly, I might add) at putting the writing first. With all due respect to Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass, this is life out of balance. The writing is supposed to come first. I don’t know how to put it first. By the time I get up in the afternoon, I don’t even want to see the keyboard. I am tired of my own opinions, I am sick of the sound of my voice.

Everything aches. Even though I have a wonderful Aeron chair, one of the best inventions known to anyone who has to sit at a desk for hours– I tend to lean forward on my elbows, shoulders folded like an accordion. One night I got out of the chair, poured myself a glass of Maker’s Mark, turned up the music (Seal’s covers of great soul songs) and stood in the doorway, listening, humming, singing a snatch of this song or that one, until it was four in the morning and I really had to write something. I’m not sure that’s building a work ethic.

Today, after Christmas shopping with my mother, and finally addressing the issue of 500 lights on the naked ten foot tree in the living room only to find the lights had been rolled backwards onto the reel, so the plug at the very end was the female version– so the tree’s been undressed; and after listening to my son talk about his final exam in algebra, and after talking to my aunt and my father’s widow about my decision to not go to the extended family Christmas party on Friday, after the taking of toast and tea (thank you T.S.E.) do I have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? I do not.

I started at it. A few weeks ago I found a tiny pink bathroom scale, about the size of a matchbook. Guess who it belongs to? Barbie, of course! Of all the weirdness surrounding Mattel’s iconic doll, this was the thing that struck me as the most sinister. The weight is perpetually stuck at 110, which is about 35 pounds underweight for a living doll of Barbie’s proportions. I could just picture some little girl saying “Oooh, Barbie, those pants make you look fat! No Christmas cookies for you, you little sow.”  Say what you will about Barbie, she does not need to be on a diet. I sketched out the draft, and checked out a few other columns about the nefariousness of Barbie’s “weight problem” and watched a video for the first Barbie commercial in 1959. But I just don’t have it in me. I have reached for the reserves, and dear reader, those are empty.

There’s a little list pinned to the bulletin board next to the desk, with prompts for 17 more stories. There are only 9 days left to go in 30 Days Notice– so they’re not all going to make it. Some of these stories really do deserve to be told, but by the time I get to the writing, after all the day-to-day nonsense that populates my life (and yours too, and his, and hers, and theirs) after all that, I don’t have what it takes to do those topics justice. So I push them around on the plate and feel discouraged. I am so damn tired.

So I am going to go upstairs, unbuckle my shoes, pull off my clothes and crawl into bed next to my husband and go to sleep. We’ll see what tomorrow brings. I’m sorry.

 

 

 

 

AFTER

I could have been done with this hours ago.  The luminaria have all burned out. The guests have all gone home. Every living soul in the house is sound asleep. I’ve just sat here for three hours barefoot at my desk, in pajamas and a wool pullover because the house is cold at night, daydreaming.  In the shower I thought I knew what I was going to write, and I might still write that, just not tonight. Tonight I am something beyond tired– gone long past sleepy to something else. Even now, I’m just noodling away at this. There’s no story here, folks, move along.

It was a good party, our first in probably a decade. I don’t even remember which one was the last one. I think it could have been the year that I started out for Bozeman before dawn to pick up a last few things and the car shuddered to a stop on the pass when the gas lines froze. By the time someone stopped to help me, I was beginning to be hypothermic. The person who lifted me from the driver’s seat was an extraordinarily kind snowplow operator. He set me up in the cab of the plow and drove 15 miles straight down the hill  to the Bozeman ER .  In the emergency room, they rolled me up in layers of heated blankets, changing them out as they cooled.

That year, we put the party off for a day. There were times this week that I wished I could push back the start time a day or two or ten– and yet, we were reasonably presentable when the first guests stepped through the door. Presentable, but still cooking. Maybe that was an excuse. It gave me something to do with my hands, cutting up cantaloupe with woeful inelegance. It made people come to me, rather than making me choose. I think I’m a little rusty at this hostess business.  I was thrilled to see each one of those folks walk through the door, though.

William Faulkner once said “Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.”  I don’t think I’m quite there. (This is probably a relief to my husband as I understand old Bill was pretty difficult to live with when he was writing. And damn difficult when he wasn’t.) It’s getting better though– at least there is writing is going on. It may not be good writing, but it’s got little legs all the same.

Unlike Faulkner, I’m not willing to just dump everything else in my life. I would just as soon find time for  making eggnog for my friends; taking the coats, and bottles of wine and gingerbread from their arms; hearing about their children, and dogs and political campaigns. Even if finding the balance means too many late nights trudging along one after the other. I’ll get down to the business of the writing tomorrow, and might be able to transform that into something worth reading.

In the meantime, I’m just going to sit here at my desk, enjoying the kilim under my bare feet, remembering a splendid evening with friends, the magic of the lanterns in the garden – until I’m too sleepy to do so.

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.) 

 

BABY TONY IN HEAVEN

Even with the air-conditioning going full blast, the truck is hot and the drive along I-20 out of northern Louisiana monotonous. It’s the end of Labor day weekend, and evacuees from the gulf coast are traveling north to escape Hurricane Gustav. When I left the motel in Monroe, a number of families have already set up camp in the parking lot.

We turn north out of Vicksburg on Highway 61. It runs along the Mississippi river from New Orleans to Minnesota. From the 1920s through the fifties, it was an important trail for blacks leaving the deep south for better prospects in Chicago.  The New York Times‘ music critic Robert Shelton wrote: “Jazz came up the river. Blues came up the river. A lot of great basic American culture came right up that highway and up that river.”

We went up  Highway 61 as far as Greenville, noting the first legal liquor store in Mississippi (the Jigger and Jug Package Store, which opened in 1966) and stopping for a hamburger. We’re on the west side of Greenville now, so we just meander over to State Highway 1, heading north through miles of cotton fields and sleepy little towns like Rosedale, Gunnison, Alligator.

Just north of Round Lake, a roadside shrine catches my attention. There is a life-size painted plywood silhouette of a little boy waving, and a little red chair. In the ten seconds it takes me to decide to stop, I’ve traveled another 800 feet. I find a place to turn the truck around.

“What’s going on,” my 13-year-old son asks sleepily, awakened by the change in momentum.

“Nothing, I just want to look at something.” He sighs and closes his eyes again. The roadside memorial consists of a large cross, a couple of concrete angels, the little red chair painted with the words “Baby Tony,” a hand-lettered sign that says “Pray for My Mama” and about a hundred red and white bicycle reflectors.

I am interested in roadside shrines. It seems strange to say that I admire them, given that they are landmarks to someone’s heartbreak, but the impulse to erect them feels entirely right to me. One mother said that she felt closer to her daughter on the narrow median strip where the girl died than in the cemetery where her body was laid to rest. “This is where her spirit left this earth,” she explained, and that is explanation enough.

My husband has no patience for such things. He is a champion of getting from point a to point b in the most efficient way possible and we would never stop, let alone turn around and go back for a pile of stuff on the side of the road. But when I am traveling alone (or with my kid) I often stop. I’ve photographed dozens of them, but the results are always flat. The energy that’s there can’t be captured by the camera, I suppose. I go on trying, though and I am composing a photo when an SUV stops alongside the truck.

A woman gets out of the vehicle and hurries towards me. There’s a twinge of anxiety– have I trespassed? Have I done something to offend?

“Hello! Hello!” she calls. “This is my grandson’s shrine, Baby Tony. I made this for him.”  She is standing in front of me now, a woman in late middle-age, her salt and pepper hair pulled off her face into a tidy bun, still in her denim dress and flat shoes from church this morning. “I am so glad you stopped!”

We chat a little about the shrine, and she asks if I have time to come back to her house for a minute. It would be easy to say no, I really have to get on the road. It would be prudent to say no, wouldn’t it? My husband would be stunned that I would even consider saying yes. But she looks so hopeful I find myself saying “Sure, you lead the way.”

Baby Tony’s grandmother’s home is a tidy one-story house I’d passed a mile or so back.  Other than the marquee in the neighbor’s yard (“Have you robbed God? You robbed him of tithes and offerings. Repent for Grace”) it seems entirely unremarkable.

“Come this way,” she says, “I want to show you something.” She sounds quite urgent and I hurry after her around the side of the house. There, in a grove of trees is a trampoline and around the trampoline are dozens and dozens of red tricycles.

“After Baby Tony died,” she says, “people just started bringing them to me.”  There are  67 tricycles arranged  one after the other in a large rectangle. Some face left, others face right. There’s no significance to the number, Janice says. Sometimes there are more, sometimes there are less. When she’s been given a particularly nice tricycle, she has passed it on to a child that didn’t have a trike. “That’s the way Baby Tony would have wanted it.”

One of the tricycles is cream-colored and quite old; the others are all red and white in various states of repair. Some are entirely covered in rust. An orphaned tricycle tire hangs on the handlebar of a neighboring trike. Her daughter and grandson had been over to the house the night before the accident, she tells me. Baby Tony was three years old.

“I was sitting in my chair and he was sitting in my lap. He was such a sweet little boy. His mama said to him, ‘Come on Baby Tony, we got to get home to make some supper for your Daddy.’  He leaned up next to me like this and he said “Gramma, I’m going to see God tomorrow.’ I just didn’t know what to say to that, but my hair just raised up like this on my neck, see. When Baby Tony and my daughter were about to go out the door, he ran over and held his arms up for me to pick him up. When I did he put his little arms around my neck and he said ‘Pray for my Mama.’”

And on the next day, there was an accident. Just a single car, just a little ways up the road. Her daughter drifted to one side, overcorrected, left the road, and rolled. She spent weeks in the hospital, but Baby Tony was killed immediately. The first tricycle was there in Janice’s yard when she got home from the hospital that night.

It wasn’t every day, but at least every week, that another tricycle would appear. Some old, some brand new. She knows the details about some of the trikes, but others are more obscure, arriving in the night, or when she is away. She started lining them up along the edge of her yard, and as the line grew, she had to turn a corner and then again, until the never-ending parade of tricycles was complete.

“It’s very peaceful out here,” she says. “And if I feel sad, I come out here and it feels like Baby Tony is still with me.” She excuses herself and goes into the house, returning a few minutes later with a much-larger-than-life painting of a little boy in a Hawaiian shirt. He looks like an old soul, I think. “This is Baby Tony!,” she says, and her voice is full of joy.

I’m astonished to see that I’ve been there for an hour, and I still have to get on up the road to Memphis. I give her my address and promise to send her a copy of the photograph of she and Tony in the garden of tricycles.

“Oh, please. Wait just a minute,” she says and runs into the house. When she returns she puts a golden pear in my hand. It’s heavy– plaster, I think. “You are supposed to have this,” she says. Pears– the symbol of motherhood and immortality. I thank her for the pear and for taking the time  to tell me about Baby Tony.

“Oh no,” she says, “thank you. Thank you so much for stopping.”

I climb into the truck, waving at her as I back out into the road.

“What was all that about?” my son asks, awake now. We are passing the spot where Baby Tony left this earth and I explain that the lady was the little boy’s grandmother. “Oh, that’s so sad,” my son says. He picks up the pear. “I can’t eat this, can I?”

“No, it’s not real.” If I didn’t have the photographs, it might all have been a dream.