Out of the Cube

Cloudy on the coast

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough. ~ Groucho Marx

I picked up dinner last night to bring home, and when I got out of the car, the wind against my body felt familiar in a very old way. Clouds and mist lay in roll over over the higher peaks of the Rockies, and my brain reached into its childhood depths and said, "The coast is socked in." This is California-speak for "The clouds have rolled in and the fog is creeping down beach-town sidewalks and pushing into the Santa Cruz mountains and pretty soon your neighborhood will shrink to just the houses two doors down and you'd better  get yourself inside, turn up the heat, light a fire, because the fog will follow you out of the car and up the walk, and if you don't shut the door really fast the mist will creep in on the tail of your shirt and the cuff of your pants and blur the living room sofa with cold."

Yes, all that in the few seconds it took for my brain to register the fortress slopes of the Colorado Rockies, and if those clouds signify a socked-in coast, then the 1200 miles of cities and desert,  Sierra Mountains and the wandering rivers and creeks and well-mapped highways are also awash in fog; if so, we're in big trouble.

In those few seconds, I was 30 years younger, living in a suburban tract home with a husband and two kids. Oh, the brain is a strange thing, but not just the brain: my body went back in time as well, tensing in the cold wind, expecting the damp fog.

Lately I've been wondering about aging and how we integrate the changes in our bodies as we age. Dad and I talk about this all the time.

Dad: I like talking to you, Verna.

Me: Yeah? How come?

Dad: I don't often get the chance to talk to someone my own age.

We laugh. OK, I remember old radio programs and what San Francisco was like in 1948. I'm almost old enough for Medicare and I'm already on Social Security, which he thinks is funny and then he's appalled to be reminded that he has a senior citizen daughter. He says he's not really aware of his age unless he looks in the mirror, and he hates what he sees because it's not how he pictures himself.

Yeah, I get that. One day I was in one of those Big Box stores, on a mission to find something, lost in my thoughts, and I looked up and saw a short, plump, gray old lady scowling at me. I was walking toward a mirror. Jeeze Louise, put me in polyester and sit me down in a rocking chair! That was NOT me!

I talked to Aunt Hazel on her 87th birthday. She's my role model for aging well. She plants trees on her land around the house, trees that will reach maturity long after she's gone. She rides the mower, plants corn and harvests it, cans and freezes fruits and vegetables, makes pies, knits like a fiend, runs around all over Terre Haute where she has lived her whole life and knows everyone. And she is beautiful, not only in my eyes.

Dad says: Hazel always was the pretty one. No, not just pretty. Beautiful.

She doesn't see the beauty we see, so we remind her, even Dad in his Mr. Cranky-Pants way will say. "Yep. It's true, Hazel, no sense denying it."

What if we never looked into a mirror? How "old" would we be? When we look into a mirror, we can't see what other people see. It's like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: The very act of studying  a thing changes the thing being studied. All we can see when we look in a mirror is a view of ourselves looking into a mirror: unanimated and probably looking for faults.

I'd love to be able to go out into the world with my sense of self intact and never have a thought about how I look. I want to accept all of the ages I am inside, which really just means honoring body memory. Last night, standing by my car in a windy parking lot, I was 34 years old, and in those few seconds I was richer, deeper, more firmly myself - not because I was having a memory but because I was so fully present with the wind and cold that the memory could even come into my body.

No sense denying it.

Sometimes I think I have too darned many pens.

Every Friday I read Aimee Heckle's column in the Camera. She writes about fashion. One look at me and you'd wonder why I would read such a column. Here's why: I love her writing. It is said (I can't remember by whom) that any content is interesting when written by a good writer. I offer her blog link. Give her a read: http://boulderandthebeautiful.com/

When it's cold like this, in the minuses, the snow squeaks under my boots and the tires of my car talk to me as I make my way down my snowy street: You're OK here (crunch crunch), whoops, slow down (squeal shiver slide), now downshift to get out of this - I SAID DOWNSHIFT! Damn!

The rhythms of connection

For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of wind in the night reeds.
~ Loren Eiseley

I have a bit of a cold and have taken the offensive with herbal remedies, rest, and staying warm - which means I've canceled plans to go out of the house (the temp was 3 degrees when I woke this morning). My housemate has been trying to be quiet so I can rest, even when I'm here on my recliner reading and answering email. I felt alone, not in the way I usually crave, as in "I want time alone!" but in a way that feels lonely, so I asked her not to be quiet for me. I am comforted by the sound of her shuffling papers in her room and coming and going as she does laundry and takes care of her household tasks. Ah, that's better!

I grew up in a household filled with kids. I am the oldest of seven, and there were always little kids and babies in my life. I shared a room with three sisters in a small house in South San Francisco where the fog and wind usually made outdoor activities uncomfortable, so I couldn't escape to the yard or a local playground when I needed time alone. I became accustomed to finding my Alone Place in the midst of sound that came and went in waves, from quiet talk in the kitchen to chaos in the whole house: TV blaring, babies crying, Mother yelling, doorbell ringing, front door slamming. 

I used this skill of shutting out noise when I went to college and sought out public places to study -  coffee shops and bookstores, for example, and never a library. It was too darned quiet in there. At home I often studied at my desk with the bedroom door open so I could hear my girls talking to friends or playing their music or making a sandwich.  I still like to have sound around me when I write or edit. I've known for years that I like having things going on around me, but I didn't realize until today how comforting it is to hear someone in the house when I am not feeling well.

One of my favorite memories from childhood is waking up on a (rare) sunny morning and hearing Dad mowing the lawn. Those were push-mower days, so the sound was rhythmic, like breath, like ocean waves. And I felt safe under the covers.

My friend Kath writes a blog about her cabin in the mountains where she also finds comfort in the presence of others; she is also an oldest sister of many siblings, and I wonder if that contributes to her sense of comfort and seclusion in the midst of a crowd. I'll ask her.

When my kids were little, my husband learned to fly, and when he got his night-flying certification, we would fly short jaunts after dark. It was there on those flights flights that I realized how much of the state I grew up in is unpeopled. Well, of course! All that farm land, all those orchards and mountains and ranches and vineyards. But I just hadn't thought about it until I could see it from above: the clusters of sulfur-gold lights and the moving beams from cars and trucks on the highways, leading into and out of vast areas of black. 

We are social beings, even those of us who often prefer our own company. On those dark flights I was aware of how we form communities of lights that ripple outward from a well-lit center, gradually fading into dark. Every now and then in the black landscape I'd see a smaller cluster of a few lights, and then sometimes a solitary light floating alone in the darkness. I wonder a lot about what it means to feel connected - to others, to nature, even to ourselves - and how we go about finding that level of connectedness that suits us. That search, too, has a ripple effect, has a sound as steady as a heartbeat - or a push mower on a sunny morning.

Tools, Talents, and Gifts

Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others...for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received. ~ Einstein

I went to a new hairdresser today, and because I was in a new environment, I tended to see things I wouldn’t have noticed at the place I used to go, like the row of aluminum hair clips clipped to the pocket of the black smock Tawny was wearing or the mirror for looking at the back of my head when she was done. I noticed how strong her nails were when she washed my hair, and I wondered if she had them done with the squared-off tip so she could use them for the scalp massage. While I was lying there at the shampoo station listening to oldies that took me back to high school (really oldies!), I was thinking about the tools of my trade and how different they are from hers: I have a desk, for one thing, and paper in about every form you can find it: tablet, notebook, loose leaf; spiral bound, perfect bound, pierced for easy tearing out; printer paper and lined paper and paper with a great texture for doodling.

Tawny knows all about shampoo and conditioner, hair care and skin care and right-down-to-the-scalp care. She probably wouldn’t know a complex sentence from a goose in the bush—and she doesn’t have to. And it’s a good thing no one ever asks me to cut hair because I wouldn’t know texturizing from fertilizing.

I used to think that doctors and lawyers and shrinks and academics were smarter than other people—until my husband became a  lawyer and I had to go to parties with people in those professions and found their conversation mostly as dull as the talk around a coffee table during a Tupperware party. The Tupperware ladies really knew their stuff and in a therapy session or at the operating table, I’m sure most of those shrinks/MDs really knew theirs. At the time I was attending lawyer parties and Tupperware parties, I was a calligrapher, but people probably thought I was stupid or dull because I couldn’t join in talk about whatever the heck it was they were talking about. Now if they had asked me about serifs or the origin of the alphabet, I’d have been the life of the party.

I feel a lot of respect and gratitude for the many services available to me that someone else is an expert at, like changing tires, for example. I’ve done it—once—and god forbid I should ever have to do it again.

The other day I went to Lowe’s and found Charlie in the plumbing supply aisle. “Charlie,” I said, reading his name on his vest, “what would you do if your tub was very very slow to drain and you had already tried two doses of Liquid-Plumr?” He asked me a few questions and then told me to try two things. If neither of those things worked, he said to come back and we’d go to the next level. He didn’t sell me anything. In his view, his job was to help me fix a problem. I tried one of the things he told me and it worked. I was elated! I mean this: I was floating with happiness about the fix that did the trick, not because I no longer had to stand in a swamp while I showered but because someone who knew his stuff shared it with me in a way that did not make me feel stupid and it didn’t cost me a thing. 

Dad changes tires and fixes plumbing and puts up walls and takes down walls. He hangs shelves, wires lamps, cuts wood, shapes wood, chisels and clamps and glues wood. In short, he is a genius at doing the things that most of us have to hire someone to do. But when I was a kid, his job was washing walls and cleaning floors in big buildings in San Francisco. I always thought he could do anything around the house, and I was right. It didn’t occur to me that other dads couldn’t do the same. 

I cannot do those things that Dad can do. The last time I tried to hang a shelf, the molly bolt fell through the hole behind the plaster board. Dad shook his head over this, and then he said, “Oh well, I can’t do all those things you know how to do.” I’m glad he recognizes that I do have talents, even if I can’t even hang my own towel rack.

But back to Tawny and her pocket adornment: I am struck by how different our tools are, how varied our talents, and how wide the perceptions others have of us based on what we offer up to the world. Tawny made my day by focusing on what she is good at, which just happened to be my head and my hair. I am as grateful to her as I used to be the guy who collected trash when I worked at the Big Corporation. They make my life easier. They use their gifts in a way that is “paying it forward,” whether they think about it that way or not.

Tawny doesn’t need my writing and editing skills, so I will pay her gift forward to someone who does. Yes, we charge for what we do, but we give a gift in doing it well, in doing it with care and attention. And I’ll tell you what: I think that’s the secret to a happy life.

The Memory Holders

We live in our tales of ourselves . . . and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plots against our mortal souls. ~ Gregory Maguire—from A Lion Among Men

Who are we without our memories? And what happens when one of our Memory Holders is no longer with us? My sister Carolyn died over three years ago, and I still have moments when the thought comes into my head that I should call Caro and ask her, for example, “What was the name of that woman who lived up the street, the one whose son had both legs broken in the car accident?” Or like this, “Remember that time when Connie stuck a doll’s eye up her nose?” It’s not like the questions are vital, so having an answer really doesn’t matter, but what does matter to me since Caro died is that I’ll never get the answer if my own memory has jettisoned that bit of data or that story.

I’m reading a wonderful book called The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, and it’s about—among other things—story telling, how we perceive our world and imagine our lives and alter our reality through our stories. As I get older, I fear I’m losing the stories that anchor me to family, that anchor me to my own identity. And without Caro, I have no way to get them back. I have other siblings and we all still share many stories, but the ones Caro and I nourished are the ones that are fading.

I have been remarkably fortunate to be one of a large family and to not have lost a sibling until I was 61 years old. I took it for granted—of course I did—that we would always be a unit, no matter how much we are separated by geography or even by the wounds we don’t allow to heal. Now I may be losing another sister to that final parting. We haven’t been close. We rarely talk and we haven’t even seen each other in more than 15 years, but she is my sister, my family, a member of my heart community. I remember when she was born, how my mother didn’t tell her mother that she was pregnant again so soon after my little brother was born so that when my grandparents came to visit and saw my little sister in my mother’s arms, they were confused: shouldn’t this child be a year old? And a boy? Surprise! (And thus was born another story.)

When I go to Indiana now to see Dad and my brothers, we mention Caro, what she might have said, what she used to do, how we used to laugh. I don’t want to be talking like that about this little sister the next time I go. In fact, I want her to be there with us at my Dad's house, where she has never been—we have been that alienated from her. I want her to be healthy and funny and as grounded in family identity as the rest of us are. Maybe that family identity I hold close is a fantasy, but I’m not romanticizing anything here. I want her to be part of the bad-mouthing that goes on and the disagreements and the—in Indiana terms—slurs and snits and hissy fits.

I don’t take family for granted anymore, not since Caro died, and certainly not since my father got sick, and now this sister who, I am told, may not last six months. We haven’t seen her in such a long time, and maybe she’s not as sick as we think, but it doesn’t really matter, does it. She’s alive now, and it isn’t pending death that makes me think of her with sadness; it’s the reality of our alienation and the realization that soon all we’ll have left of her is story.

No wonder the loss of memory, the loss of story, is so profound. The time may come when memory is all we’ve got.

Outside The Market on Larimer Square, December 1999*

What's past is prologue.
~ From The Tempest, Shakespeare

A big truck downshifts with a clatter of metal. A cluster of small brown birds flutters to a perch on the back of a metal paper-clip chair and hop to the table top to examine my blueberry muffin. When I put it in a paper bag, they defect to another table, another morning coffee break.

An elderly couple passes, he in a gray beret, she with gray-blond hair pulled into a loose bun. They are talking about art. I hear the words “gouache” and “technique.” She nods vigorously before turning her face to the sun.

Young women pass wearing tight turtleneck sweaters, flared wool pants, big chunky shoes, and then a man in a sports coat and tie, another in a blue and orange Broncos jacket.

It’s not so cold, but we didn’t know that when we woke early to frost riming the windows and roofs, melting into a slick of wet where the sun reaches out in thin rays though thin cloud. So we’re wearing coats and scarves and hats.

Cars pass in a constant stream on Larimer Street, a bus with a deeper thrum, a truck with a narrow whine.

On NPR this morning they talked about Cubist art at the end of the 19^th century and Cubist influence on fashion, but they don’t talk about what legacy the 20^th century may leave as we pause on the threshold of a new millennium, and I am curious: Art? Music? Verse? Cinema? All this coming and going on Larimer Square on a workday morning, shadows moving and shadows still, shadows growing shorter in time's march toward noon, and then they’ll lengthen as we put one foot in front of another, leave this moment behind as we step into the next, so fluid that all of our efforts to measure and immortalize time seem so silly in the passing of another bus, the fading of another shadow, the ultimate reach of another day moving toward inevitable night.

* From a notebook I kept a year ago.

Scene from a Post Office

What is real and what is imagined? And what is the difference?

The woman in the post office is surly, a short little gray-haired person in a tweedy wool coat and sensible shoes. She won’t pay the price to have her boxes shipped. “It’s too much,” she says. “I won’t pay it. Give me back that form my daughter filled out.” The daughter steps back, dissociating herself from the disgruntled fog that now emanates from the counter. “See you outside,” the daughter whispers, not adding, “Mom,” as if we don’t know. The mother doesn’t react, maybe doesn’t even hear her, as if this is a scene they’ve played out many times at many places. “I used to love coming here,” the short gray woman says, gathering her packages to her chest, “but not anymore.” She pulls her coat closed with one gnarled fist. One package is addressed to Des Moines, the other to Tampa. What will she do with them? Replay her frustration at UPS? At FedEx? Take them home and unwrap them, carefully folding the brown paper and inserting it neatly into a drawer with the flattened aluminum foil and rinsed-out plastic produce bags? Will she and Maureen, her daughter, march to the car in silence and will Maureen spew at her or cry? I imagine the rest: They get in the car, slam the doors, and the mother dumps the packages on the floor by her feet. “You always embarrass me, always. Why do you do that?” and the mother tightens her small mouth into a smaller knot. “Don’t you talk to your mother like that.” Her left hand slices the air, palm flat. “Just drive, why doncha,” and she turns her body to look out the window. “I’ll drive, all right,” Maureen thinks. “I’ll drive you straight on over to that nursing home where they sedate nasty old ladies.” The mother sits staring out the window, which she is almost too short to see out of, her nose level with the top of the door. Her coat is buttoned to her throat and she clutches her black patent leather purse against her chest, both hands so tense the blue veins pop up like earthworms blindly digging their way to the surface.

My cat, my pal, my partner

You can't own a cat. The best you can do is be partners.
Sir Harry Swanson

My cat is dying. He's 15 years old and has been my silly companion for 7 of those years. Before that he belonged to my ex-husband, and when Jim died, I took Big Guy and called him my own. At this moment he is lying on his favorite rug sleeping and dreaming his kitty cat dreams. I expect that he will take his last breath before morning.

I could have taken him to the vet to be "put to sleep," but he is not in pain, and I know that putting him a crate and hauling him to the vet would have been hard on him. I wish we were as humane with people.

So I have been giving him kitty love and burning a candle for him. He's been a good companion, and sleep is his favorite thing. So there we are.

Big Guy sleeping in the sunshine. Spring 2009