In other news…. I’m starting to look like Barney Frank. Pray for me.

***
My sister K and I went to Green Bay the other day. It was her last week of layoff until May, when she’ll have the whole month off. Sounds great, but of course it’s involuntary and she doesn’t get paid, except for unemployment. She needed to get a laminator cartridge, and I needed a new vacuum cleaner—have to keep my “cleaning lady” happy. (Don’t tell my niece I called her a cleaning lady.) I could have gone to the Sears in Marinette, a tiny little place, not even owned by Sears anymore, but they probably wouldn’t have what I wanted, and besides, I’m always looking for an excuse to go down to G.B. to eat at El Sarape, on the east side. I’m the chauffeur, and whoever comes with buys lunch. (“Comes with” is a Midwesternism that is interesting for its seeming lack of object; the “me” is silent. [But “I” won’t be silent on the topic of unsilent objects later on in this issue {don’t you just hate it when I tease you like that?}]). Usually, when Barb is along (she’s teaching today), after eating we’ll drive around town, trying to remember how to get anywhere that isn’t on Mason St. I have an excuse, I’ve been away, but considering they’ve been coming here all their lives, my sisters have only the faintest grasp of the geography of their closest thing to a big city. But they eventually remember where Military Ave. or Oneida St. is, and they’ll say, “Take a left at the top of that hill.” And I’ll look around, like, hill? what hill? And I have to bite my tongue not to disparage their idea of what a hill is.

I tell everyone about El Sarape, but Mexican food is a tough sell around here, unless you count Taco Bell, which I don’t. But when I was getting my teeth cleaned recently, I hit the jackpot. Not only does my hygienist love Mexican food, but she didn’t know about El Sarape. So we went on and on (or she did; I had my mouth full of her metal scraper, mirror, and gloved fingers) about burritos and enchiladas and whatnot, and we both got hungry, which is frustrating when the object of your gluttony is 50 miles away. Strangely, my hygienist’s name is Carna. Carna Asada, perhaps? Just free-associating, sorry.

Carna has to make small talk when she’s picking away at my teeth, of course, so she asks if I’ve had any “getaways” since I saw her last. She temporarily vacates my mouth. I never know what to say when the stock question, “So… going anywhere? been anywhere?” comes up. “No” seems a little curt. So I say, “My whole life is a getaway.” Carna laughs and says, “Don’t rub it in, Mary!” This cheers me up for some reason. Well, I know the reason. My droll comments don’t always get a reaction, let alone a laugh. And also, what I said is true.

The very next day, I have to go back to the dentist for a 2.5-hour appointment so Dr. A can begin work on my new bridge. (Do you think I could get TARP money for that?) He sawed off the old bridge and extracted the broken tooth under it a few months ago. I have him trained to be super-sensitive to my dental anxiety, so when there’s any work to be done that involves drilling, he gives me a prescription for Valium. I arrange the appointments for days when K can drive me there and back. (Must have an escort.) So the next day I show up having downed my 3 Valium, and they fit the NO2 apparatus over my nose (I’ve never felt anything from the nitrous, but the barrier of the apparatus helps to distance me emotionally from the goings-on), and headphones so I can listen to a Moody Blues CD, having decided last time that the Beatles are way too sprightly for the bummer experience that is getting orally penetrated by one or more people. I spend the requisite amount of time feeling ironic about listening to some of my favorite music from the early ‘70s way up here in the ‘00s and under very different circumstances. I don’t know if it would be wise to smoke dope before undergoing a day at the dentist, and I doubt I’ll ever know—unless there’s an upsurge (a surge, even) of support for dental marijuana.

Anyway… where was I? Nowhere very interesting, but I’m going to tell you anyway. I’ve come to trust Dr. A a lot, and I’m treated like a queen when I’m there, but let’s face it, it’s not a pleasant experience. As is always the case, I’m being stabbed with the assistant’s sucker, and she seems to be sticking a piece of rebar in there too, as Dr. A works away with his drill and pliers or whatever. I can’t really identify all the things in my mouth, and I can never catch sight of the assistant’s hands, I just know that several inanimate objects are trying to go down my throat, like a logjam about to break up. I have to flag Dr. A down at one point so I can take a little breather. My thoughts through all this are truly mad, and I don’t know if it’s the Valium, though I don’t think it works that way, but I go from feeling like I’m being waterboarded (not a laughing matter, but who said it was?) to thinking that if they really wanted to take my mind off what they’re doing, they’d rig up some sort of vibratory stimulus down in the forgotten region below my neck, below my… well, you know.  It’s the logical extension of their trying to make me so comfortable that I’m not even aware of being there, right? I’m surprised they don’t have someone giving me a shoulder rub or reading me bedtime stories. There are lots of visual distractions that aren’t all that interesting to look at after an hour or two—cute mobiles (skiers, sailboats), panels over the fluorescent light fixtures that simulate clouds in a blue sky on one and colorful fish on the other, and someone’s kid’s colored-in newsprint tooth suction-cupped to the window. My dentist in San Francisco had a TV monitor that played a continuous loop of movies without the sound—Cinema Paradiso, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or Mr. Bean Goes Bananas (don’t know real title, don’t care). Mostly, the movies were a pleasant distraction, if Dr. P would let my head turn just enough to see the screen, but he was always tipping it back toward him. I’m easily confused by plot under the best of circumstances—I need sight, sound, and a friend to tell me what’s going on—so without any of those things I’m really lost.

After an hour and a half, the drilling is done and I’ve half-swallowed the goop out of at least three different metal trays. (In dentistry, you get more than one chance to make a good first impression.) Usually, this is the hardest part for me, but I know to think about my nose and not the idea of a handful of slime sliding down my throat. So this time—multiple times—I don’t gag or twitch or otherwise dislodge the tray, and the impression is declared a success. It seems like a good time to request a bathroom break, and as they remove all their equipment and sit me upright so I can gather my wits and climb out of the chair, I turn to Dr. A wearily and say, “I feel like I’m doing all the work.” To his credit he laughs—“What?”—but he has this comical look of confusion on his face. So I shrug and spread my hands and acknowledge that I know he’s “helping, but still….” Is it the drugs talking again? Maybe he thinks so, but no, it’s just my natural drollery (as opposed to the earlier droolery) coming out. The assistants are easier to joke with, either because they’re women and in a subservient role and therefore feel it’s their job to humor the patient, or because they’re women and know what’s funny when they hear it. I also point out to Dr. A that I had to do “half” of Carna’s job the day before, because she couldn’t get the floss threader under my lower bridge and I had to do it for her. Sometimes I wish I had the brazen confidence (and maybe a loud, jolly laugh) to be perceived as obviously joking instead of this deadpan delivery, but I’m not sure the droll ever get to be anything other than what they are: super-serious, super-subtle, super-misunderstood.

This isn’t what I was going to write about. Remember when I started out by saying that K and I went to Green Bay? Well, when we were happily chowing down on our enchiladas, K suddenly asked, “Do you ever regret moving back here?” I didn’t have to think twice. “No,” I said, “do you?” (ever regret my moving back here). She says no, but she clearly has something on her mind. She says she and hubby MP have talked about moving to Florida when they retire… and it would be ironic if I moved back here to be with family and then family moved away. It took 5 full days for this to hit me. What if I were left alone here, with only one nephew and one niece to make the occasional obligatory phone call or visit to check on their old auntie? My other “relationships” in town would hardly be enough to nurture my fragile sense of belonging. Several people seem to like me, but no one has shown any sign of inviting me over for a BBQ or out for a drink. The core unit here is the family. Even when there are 13 brothers and sisters and half of them hate the other half, they don’t usually replace estranged family members with non-blood-related friends. Our family is one of those with more people unaccounted for than are held in the family bosom. One of my cousins “might” be in prison in Colorado. One of my nephews “might” be in jail in southern Wisconsin. One of my uncles left for California, was thought to have married a girl with the same last name, and was never heard from again. A father of six split to Texas “to start a new life” and makes the occasional phone call to his unhappy children. If you subtract the moved-away and divorced adults and the children who have gone with the mother, my family unit consists of Barb, K, MP, one nephew, one niece, one nephew-in-law, and 2 kids. And that’s kind of stretching it, because I rarely see the kids.

The only consistent gathering of this little clan is on holidays and every Friday night, when the four adults over 50 eat a takeout supper together and watch TV or a movie. What’s weird is that I usually spend the entire week from Friday to Friday needing no personal attention from them whatsoever. But when I imagine life here without them, it feels completely different. In an ideal world (=unlimited $), I might move back to the Bay Area. But the world is not ideal, and I do like living here—thank God for that. I know there’s no point worrying about it now—retirement for my sisters is still several years off, and farther still if the economy doesn’t recover. It’s just weird to think that I left here long ago, partly to be done with family, and now I may end up being left by them.

My aunt Judy—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—oops, too late—who’s just a little older than me and was one of my best friends as a young child and a pre-teen, still lives here, but she’s made it clear that she’s not interested in me. It’s my own fault, because whenever I’ve seen her over the years, I clumsily try to connect by reminding her of when we used to play “office” with some old business forms someone’s dad gave us. It’s always the thing that comes to mind when I see her. (Playing office was really fun, although I couldn’t tell you exactly what it entailed.) But then she always says, “And now I’m doing it for real,” i.e., she didn’t go to college and has been doing administrative work in the factory where my sister K does… the factory work. For all she and my other aunts know, I’m just a bookish snob who fled to California and stayed away for 30+ years. (Well, most of that is true.) One of my cousins once, with a touch of resentment in his voice, asked, “If you live in California, why don’t you have a tan?” The obvious answer—“I don’t go outside that much”—didn’t seem to satisfy him.

I suppose it doesn’t help that I was attracted to another aunt, Pat (one of Judy’s six sisters), when I was in the process of coming out in the early ‘70s, and I probably wasn’t too subtle about it. Pat was very glamorous and sexy, had a deep voice and a rich laugh. She lived in Madison and married a Jew (a first—and a last—in the family) named Norman Goldberg who invented something for NASA in the 1950s. The fact that we were blood-related didn’t faze me in the least. She might even have been my first Woman Crush. When I was 6 or 7 and she and her first husband lived across the highway from us, my cousins and I would splash around in their kiddie pool, and I remember one day, for the first time ever, feeling self-conscious about not wearing a top. A harbinger, perhaps? To this day, hearing a woman with that kind of voice, that laugh, brings a smile to my face, though I no longer project my half-naked thrill at Aunt Pat’s attention onto every such woman I meet. Therapy, folks. It really works.

By the way, getting back to my earlier topic, did you know that researchers in the field of dentistry always say “oral cavity,” never “mouth”? Maybe they think it sounds more scientific. But couldn’t it be confused with, you know, cavities? One of my clients is in the School of Dentistry at UCSF, but she never writes about the oral cavity, only the vaginal cavity (as it were), in its role as the purveyor of the placenta.

I have nowhere else to go with that, so I guess I’ll move on.

twitter me shimbers!

I’m a late bloomer in most things, so I’ve just recently surrendered to the inevitability of Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere.

Twitter turned out to be a disappointment because no one I know seems to use it. At first I was “following” well-known people like Tiny Fey, Mika Brzezinski, and Frank Rich, but of course they didn’t want to “follow” me back, so what was the point? Mysteriously, Terry Gross from “Fresh Air” (NPR) started “following” me, and I couldn’t figure out why until I remembered I had contributed $50 to saving her old shows that were disintegrating on magnetic tape or whatever old-fashioned medium they had been recorded on (as if today’s soon-to-be-old-fashioned medium is any more protected from Time’s ravages). So at first it felt like some kind of weird compliment to be “followed” by Terry Gross, but I really doubted she was actually reading my occasional tweets, written in the spirit of one who puts a note in a bottle and throws it out to sea. Actually, the bottle-note would have a better chance of being found and read than my Tweets-to-No-One. Then a couple of people unknown to me started “following” me, but there was absolutely no way of knowing who they were, someone called “sjm39665” or whatever, so I eventually stopped everybody from “following” me and stopped “following” anybody. I have to admit I still check it every now and then, just in case, by some miracle, my notes in the Twitter bottle have washed up somewhere and been read and savored by a stranger on the other side of the computer screen.

Facebook is more satisfying because most of my “friends” there are friends in real life. I initially thought I was too old for this newfangled mode of sociability: Notifying my online friends “what I’m doing right now” seemed really lame. (I fully accept that I am lame, but that’s not the point.) The young are excused for things like writing cute comments on other people’s virtual walls, but the boomelders (boo-melders? no, boom-elders) feel a little silly about it. And I wasn’t sure if my godchild, for example, and her gazillion friends would all abandon the site en masse because people her parents’ age were trying to take it over, like we do everything else.  But Facebook is booming with sprightly oldsters using it to get back in touch with old friends and acquaintances. Let the kids have their impressive roster of friends and display photos of their exotic trips and make obscure references to great parties they’ve danced and gotten high at. Jealous? Mais non. I wouldn’t take my youth back if you handed it to me on a silver platter. Here’s a little couplet I penned:

Life’s best-kept secret is being “old.”
There’s so much more to it than the fearful young are told.

For a while now, I’ve thought I could die happy, nothing more to prove, etc., etc.,  but I’ve finally found something to live for. No, I don’t want to travel around the world or jump out of an airplane. I want to post all the back and future issues of the mary’zine on my blog, editorite.com (you’re here!). Last year I paid $200 to get hosted, or whatever they call it, by a company online that gives you templates and instructions for creating your own website. And I bought the rights to maryzine.net and marymckenney.com. Alas and alack, I found it to be the most frustrating, confusing process I’ve ever tried to master. I really didn’t care about having a fancy site anyway, so when I happened to come across WordPress.com and saw that they offer free blogging (and just $15 to take “WordPress” out of the URL), I jumped at the chance. I managed to post several issues of the ‘zine (t)here and even uploaded a photo of the nearby shoreline that Peggy took when she was visiting me last fall. But now, when I want to do a few extra things to make the site easier to navigate, I’ve realized that I am not an intellectual heavyweight when it comes to even such soft-core technology. (Self-knowledge: better late than never.)

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs on WordPress.com (and millions in the world), so my puny output does not equal even a grain of sand in the grand scheme of things. But my attitude is, as long as the mary’zine is out there and available to anyone who wants to find it, or merely trips over it, then I’ve done my bit. Once it’s out of my hands it’ll have to sink or swim on its own. And I’m not going to stand there on the beach and watch its tiny form get farther and farther away. Hasta la vista, baby.

Well, that’s the theory anyway. In reality, I’ve become obsessed with checking the stats and seeing how many views it’s gotten. The problem is, the stats are pretty meaningless, because there’s no way to know, first, if it’s really other people viewing it and not me somehow not logging in right so that the computer thinks I’m a fascinated reader instead of the frustrated author. And if all those numbers actually represent “viewers,” there’s no way to know if they went there on purpose or by mistake, spammed their way to it, went and didn’t like what they saw, or what. (The stats say that someone got to my site by searching for the phrase “peed in my bed,” so what the hell does that mean? [but yes, that phrase does appear in #17]). So I’m obsessing over nothing, which is not an unfamiliar feeling for me. I announce each new(old) posting only on Facebook, so my huge posse of NINE friends must account for all the viewings. Who knows?

By the way, in case you’re put off by the idea of reading things you presumably already read 8 or 9 years ago, I’ve posted one “best of the mary’zine that never made it to print” fantasy called “the art of housekeeping.” I fear there will be no more “bests” because I’ve already cannibalized most of my life to feed the maw of the mary’zine beast.

I googled myself recently to see if my blog showed up in the results, and there was one entry that really surprised me. I had gone on Netflix to complain about the fact that they had mailed me an instant-watch movie (i.e., it was free to watch on my computer at any time, at no extra charge). And since I’ve downgraded to receiving only 1 movie at a time, it seemed like a complete waste of time and postage. Netflix now has no way to write to them except about the topics they deem appropriate. But I found a place to make a “comment,” and the comments were mostly about the fact that you can’t write to Netflix except about the topics they deem appropriate. So I posted my comment about the pointlessness of sending me an instant-watch movie, not expecting a reply because none of the other comments had one. But there, among my Google results, was the answer to my comment! It was bizarre. If I were a paranoid schizophrenic, it would have seemed like proof that the computer was monitoring my every thought. And for a kid who thought the TV was watching her when she was 4 years old (though in my defense, the children’s show host on the TV told me as much: “Susie, Johnny, Mary, do the Clean-Up March! I can see you!”), it wouldn’t be much of a leap to think the computer monitor also monitored her. (Sodden thought: Do today’s paranoid schizophrenics still use aluminum foil to ward off unwanted transmissions?) Anyway, the answer to my Netflix question was that, since I had left the instant-watch movie in my queue, they of course mailed it to me, because some people… blah blah blah.

Actually, I was joking about the paranoid schizophrenics, because of course I know nothing about them, but I’ve been watching the antics of the Leftover Republicans—the weirdos left on the scene after the criminals were booted out (criminals = Bush, Cheney, etc.; weirdos = Michele Bachman, Michael Steele, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, etc.)—on the Huffington Post, and there was one video of a gathering where the right-winged nuts were planning their “teabagging,” and this guy stands up and starts shouting about the brainwashing that the government and the schools are doing. “Take your kids out of college, they’re being brainwashed!” A woman off-screen yells, “Burn the books!” and the camera guy or reporter asks her, “You’re not serious, right? Which books would you burn?” And she says, “The brainwashing books!” And it’s either hilarious or scary-as-hell that these odd, one-winged birds are getting their feathers in a bunch because of… what? “Raised taxes”? What? I’ve gotten a slight increase in take-home cash, and I’m sure most of them have, too. I don’t know if we’ve underestimated these people, or if they’re just Nature’s way of preferring absolutely anything to a vacuum.

So…. I’d like to have more friends on Facebook, but most of my real-life friends are too old or set in their ways or just have better things to do than to mess around with an online “community.” I understand the reluctance to expose oneself to possible scammers, spammers and other evil-doers out there, but it’s too late anyway, your every move is being filmed and recorded, your purchases are being monitored and exploited for targeted advertising, and putting your name on do-not-call lists or wearing a tinfoil hat isn’t going to keep anyone from finding out everything about you if they really want to.

family circus

Nothing’s changed. I still love you… oh I still love you, only slightly, only slightly less than I used to…
—The Smiths

I think that writing about my sister in the last issue actually helped me retreat a bit from my obsession to change things (people) that cannot be changed. The last two Friday nights with the peops have been quite pleasurable. I’ve found myself suddenly thinking, during the WBAY newscast (for some reason, Wisconsinites are killing one another in record numbers) or the inexplicably selected Disney channel (why are we watching “Herbie Fully Loaded”? MP is the remote controller and often dozes off—or fakes it—and we “girls” sit there like compliant bumps on a log because, in a way, watching TV with them really is just watching the TV, a value judgment-less activity similar to looking out the window and seeing who’s driving by and then somebody saying, “There’s Brian” (cop friend of MP’s) or “Look, Al and Doris are back from vacation, they’ve been gone 2 months!” It’s life as a passive observer, one of my favorite (non)activities. At one point the Dish TV repair guy finally shows up (K has been waiting in the “window” for 7 hours), and then we watch him go in and out of the house several times and then cheerfully declare that he’s authorized to switch the “622” to the “722,” and then MP, for no reason I can fathom, moons us (not the Dish guy, he’s in the next room) like the 10-year-old brat he really is. Boy, this paragraph is getting complicated. I’ll try to find the thread. Oh yes, in the midst of all this I’ll suddenly think, “I feel completely calm inside, I neither want something in particular nor don’t want something in particular.” This is progress, yes? Or I’m becoming slowly lobotomized. Either way, it allows me to take part, or not, in the family dynamic without my previous self-consciousness (I am the smart one, I must educate the familial masses or at least shame them), to the point where I get up to go to the bathroom and MP asks, as he always does, where I’m going, and, having used up all the standard, noncreative responses (“to the bathroom”; “nowhere”; “crazy, wanna come with?”), I stop at K’s Easter display in the bow window and put my arms around the two 4x-life-size plush rabbits and pretend to whisper sweet nothings in their large floppy ears, then throw a plastic egg at MP and another one down the hall for the cats Putty, Orfie, and Psycho to chase down. At some point (MP is laughing his head off; my sisters are probably shaking theirs slowly from side to side) I think, “This is so dumb,” but it really doesn’t matter. If your brother-in-law can show his bare ass or belch and fart simultaneously while pretending to be asleep, I guess I can do a spontaneous pantomime with the celebratory rabbits without caring a whit what anybody thinks. Later, I’ll get retroactively annoyed at things my sister has said, but in the moment I feel liberated from being the Judge Judy-like arbiter of what these other blood- or marriage-related folks are up to. They are not me! I am not them! Hurrah! To paraphrase Krishnamurti, I am in the family but not of the family—or at least slightly less than I used to be.

pronouns, pro-verbs

I want you to want me.
I need you to need me.
I’d love you to love me.
I’m beggin’ you to beg me.
—Cheap Trick

When I was retyping the Sept./Oct. 2001 issue of the mary’zine for my blog (once again: You’re here!), I was struck by the repeated pronoun “you” in the poem by W.S. Merwin. Here’s the last stanza:

with all the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

“Thank you” is the recurring refrain, but the poem is titled just “Thanks.” And I started thinking about the “you” in “thank you.” I doubt this is Mr. Merwin’s interpretation of his poem, but it occurred to me that one can be a grateful, awestruck, life-loving, morally, ethically, and emotionally honest human being and not be invested in there being a “you” in the form of God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, or “the Universe.” Like the “me”-less Midwesterner’s “come with,” is it possible that “thank,” or “love”—like “be”—can be an intransitive verb, that is, not requiring an object?

It’s understandable that the first people—and the second and third and fourth people through the millennia—had to find a way to explain natural phenomena such as birth, death, thunderstorms, and crop failure, and, not having advanced to such concepts as “synchronicity,” naturally looked up to the sky (source of rain and sun) and imagined a Being or Beings somewhat like themselves but of course a lot bigger, Someone or Something they could exhort through ritual—prayer or sacrifice—when they wanted some control over their lives. And I suppose they started with different Beings, one for each identifiable phenomenon, until eventually someone thought to conjure a One God who had control over it all.

Note: This is not an anthropology lecture, so don’t expect a sophisticated historical analysis, OK? I’m riffing.

And, as humans became scientists and learned about bacteria and other invisible causes of outward effects, we modified our belief systems. Some went the way of “there’s nothing but material reality, even if some of it requires special instruments to see or understand,” and others maintained that there must be some overarching force, a Being who created material reality. And now, more than a hundred years after Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” some of us have the same abject desire for a kind of ultimate security, some greater meaning with which to frame our lives and answer the question, why? Why me, why here, why now? People who argue for “intelligent design” believe that there must be some One who created all this—as though the mystery and magnificence of nature, including human consciousness, could not possibly be explained in any other way. This is what you call wishful thinking. Despite everything we know about curved space, elastic time, and quantum mechanics—probably the merest A or ½ A of the alphabet that makes up our physical world(s)—we have a childish desire to inflate ourselves to immortality as the progeny of either a literal Father/Mother God or a vast, knowing Universe that somehow sees our every move and raises us one. (Poker metaphor.) When something profound or amazing happens that we can link with earlier events, we feel that our lives are somehow synchronistically monitored from afar, or within, pick your adverb. Like noticing 11:11 on the clock more often than chance would suggest, we pick and choose what we consider meaningful and ignore the rest. If we dream of Grandma the night she dies, we ignore all previous dreams of Grandma and choose to believe that this one is a sign of some greater, meaningful communication. And that allows us to hope that we will see Grandma on “the other side”—that nothing truly ends. Anything to beat the one unbeatable foe (besides taxes), because, if death is truly the end, we are thrown back on our own wits, our own meager existence that is dwarfed by the vastness, the multiplicity, the Mystery.

epilog

I thought of something when I was writing about my brother-in-law. There’s an earthiness to working class life that is disturbing to people who weren’t raised that way—as if polite language and holding one’s pinkie up while sipping from a cup of herbal tea (as opposed to guzzling from a can of Mountain Dew) are the epitome of “class.” Conveniently (for them), the word “class” is used to mean both (a) personal integrity and grace and (b) having been born into a family who already had money, regardless of how it was acquired. So “class” = “having more money” = “being superior to the peasants who sell us our cars, or make tractor parts in our factories, or bring our consumer products to market in big, noisy, trucks.” There is a basic belief in this country (but not often acknowledged, unlike in class-conscious England) that if you work at a low-paying job it’s because you’re not smart enough to get a better one, or that (like gay people) you somehow chose that “lifestyle.” If you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you enjoy advantages that are completely invisible to you—you’re taught (maybe not in so many words) that you just deserve them somehow. And though you may understand that something ugly is going on when it comes to race… that racial minorities are disadvantaged for lots of reasons having nothing to do with the character or intelligence of individuals…  you still might group together lower-class white people as “trash” because… well, because you can.

Class isn’t just about money, it’s about different ways of life and different expectations, different opportunities, different goals. Being working class is as clear-cut a distinction as being a racial minority. Like the glass ceiling that keeps women from rising higher, at least in the numbers that would correspond to our actual intelligence and talent, there’s another kind of ceiling—plastic? something cheap and unprestigious—that separates the doctors, the lawyers, the doctors’ wives, and the lawyers’ wives from the people who work in grocery stores or hospitals or make boxes on an assembly line. But there’s so much wealth below that plastic ceiling—in personal dignity,  in intelligence (yes!), in humor and hard work and basic goodness. And they toil in obscurity, either out there in public—waiting on your ass, obeying your orders—or behind closed factory doors or far away in the bean fields.

And yes, I lose my sense of humor when I talk about this, because it’s so galling. And I struggle with my own attitudes learned while trying to fit in, in those higher strata, trying to fake being one of them, denigrating myself because I wasn’t raised with the things money can buy, like nice clothes, good dental care, the poise that comes with exposure to polite society, access to wealth and opportunity through business or social connections, the security of expecting an inheritance or marrying into money—various forms of a financial cushion upon which to rest my sweet ass. As much as I complain about my family’s provincialism and set myself apart because I know things they don’t know and have lived in places they’ve never seen, now that I walk among them (no Messiah complex intended), I feel more comfortable in my body and in my life. I’m no longer a fish out of water, just a fish that looks a little like Barney Frank and cracks up the other fish sometimes, annoys them often, and enjoys the hell out of the stream of life.

[Mary McKenney]

To use the lingo of the day, this is a ‘zine, not a newsletter, and it’s content-driven. (In the new world order, writers have become “content providers.”) That means there won’t be a lot of snazzy design elements. I’m just a content provider sitting at a keyboard, hoping someone out there will want to input my output. I don’t have a web cam trained on me at my work station, or even a website to send you to. So 20th century. [2009 update: Well, it only took me 9 years to get a website.]

The other day I woke up, stumbled downstairs to make coffee, and turned on the radio. I had forgotten to change the station away from NPR (I’d rather hear music in the morning than reports on starving refugees), so the very first sentence I heard was, “Time does not exist.” I mulled this over as I squinted in the bright kitchen light and poured the water for coffee. The speaker went on to say that, although we constantly make the inference that there was an “earlier” and will be a “later,” there really is no such thing—everything that happens is really like a snapshot. I turned off the radio and trudged back upstairs to check my e-mail. Sometimes the Unknown is just pushing too hard for comfort, and I have to bring myself back to the simple truths: Coffee is good, time is a useful construct, and we are just floating in a great big Mystery anyway. (Literally! I woke up one night with the in-my-body stark realization that we live on a BALL suspended in midair!)

I am an editor and I work at home, alone. I listen to the radio, watch TV, read books, have the occasional out-of-house experience, and think many profound and silly thoughts—all of which I have plenty of time to process between work sessions. Let’s face it, I am easily amused. And I like to share my observations and quirky thoughts, preferably in writing. I write a lot of e-mails, but something in me wants to go to the next level. I write about painting for the painting group every couple of months, but there’s a lot more buzzing around my brain. You are about to find out just how buzzy it is in there, and I hope it doesn’t come as a shock.

I’m not terribly interested in the conventional Writer’s Way, which is to send one’s hopeful prose stylings off to publishers or magazines, trying to fit someone else’s profit-driven idea of what people will read—how about another article on baby boomers turning 50? If this is a copout, I will find out: Truth has a way of getting in my face when I’m making other plans. So in the meantime, dear reader, I am undertaking this experiment, putting my literary toe in the water and waiting for further instructions. These pages are snapshots of my reality and of the nonexistent time in which I wrote them.

You are a hand-selected audience, and this reaching out is a gift. If it’s the kind of gift you could do without, like the crocheted Kleenex box covers your grandmother sends you, please politely decline further mailings. If you are in favor of remaining on my list, I welcome your comments, questions, requests, petty complaints, and personal anecdotes. Feel free to share these writings with anyone who might be interested. I am not much of a self-promoter, but if any of you enjoy promoting others, feel free.

This first issue consists of three personal favorites from my writing archives. Enjoy.

***
Y2K (how passé did that term seem by about January 4?) was, to not coin a phrase, a wake-up call. I’m grateful that the uncertainty about what was going to happen on 1-1-00 moved me to buy some extra cans of chili, assorted energy bars, enough water to take up most of my downstairs bathroom, a sleeping bag, and a duffel bag, which I packed with items that seemed, on December 31, to be at least remotely useful should I find myself in a Red Cross shelter or hiding out in a friend’s spare bedroom. The bag is still packed, as I’m reluctant to dismantle the preparedness fantasy. It’s such a great feeling, this illusion that exactly the right emergency will happen in such a way that I’ll be able to make a clean exit with this nice new shiny nylon bag containing many of life’s essentials, including aspirin, toothbrush, and a printout of my address book. I was looking for something in it the other day, and the extent of my preparations was embarrassing. Some t-shirts and pants I don’t usually wear, that’s OK, but a roll of toilet paper? two radios? I tucked the bag back in the space between the nightstand and the dresser—maybe someday it’ll come in handy, along with the crowbar and the light stick, the extra pair of shoes, and the all-important wrench for turning off the gas (a necessity in the event of eaRthQuaKe). Oh, and then there’s the paperback book I bought especially to keep in the bag, by an author I don’t read anymore because she’s so gory—Patricia Cornwell. I guess I figured that in an emergency, huddled over a plate of beans on a cot somewhere, I’d be grateful for the diversion of a story about rotting corpses being autopsied.

Anyway, I wrote the following true story several years ago, and it’s as relevant as ever. Still crazy after all these years.

1. preparing for the earthquake

I’ve been living in the Bay Area for 27 years, and for 16 of those years I was utterly unprepared for a major earthquake. Like a lot of other people, I would read the slew of articles about earthquake preparedness that ran in the papers every April (because that’s the month the ’06 Big One happened), and I would worry. I wouldn’t do anything about it, but I would worry. I didn’t like to feel so unprepared, but on the other hand, the fact that it hadn’t happened during the previous years made me feel somewhat justified in not having bothered. If you did everything you’re supposed to do in this life, you wouldn’t have time for anything else.

Finally, in April 1989 some company makes it easy for me by marketing a kit of the necessary items and displaying it at a booth where I work. All I have to do is pick up a brochure and order. When the kit arrives, I am thrilled; now I have all the necessary provisions and accouterments in one handy knapsack. I stash it in the trunk of my car and drive it around for the next six months. At last, I am prepared.

On October 17 at 5:04, I am about to leave work and go to the hospital cafeteria for dinner before my weekly painting class. Suddenly, the building starts to lurch. I grab onto my friend Rick and hold on. In a few seconds it’s over. Although it’s the biggest quake I’ve ever felt, I don’t take it too seriously. The lights go out in my building, the cafeteria closes, and there are little groups of people standing around listening to transistor radios as I walk to my car. But the sun is shining and everyone seems to be in a good mood. An earthquake produces euphoria after the initial terror, because it’s over very quickly and you find out immediately if you’re OK. My everyday mind keeps insisting that I still have to eat dinner and go to my class. It’s as if a little part of me is saving the knowledge, or foreknowledge, of what has happened for a later time. Soon it will say to me gently, “Sit down, dear, I have something to tell you.”

I drive to my friend Barbara’s house, which is only a few blocks away. She is home and glad to see me. We mill around, exchanging our little stories. Then I remember my survival kit. In high excitement, I go out to my car and retrieve the batteryless radio/flashlight I had specially ordered on the assumption that I wouldn’t have working batteries by the time the disaster came. Preparedness in action.

Back at Barbara’s house, I set about reading the instructions and cranking up the radio. The flashlight comes on, but the radio will only stay on while I’m cranking, and it’s hard to hear it over the cranking noise. I finally give up, deciding that I’ll try it again in a “real” emergency. Barbara finds her roommate’s Walkman, and we take turns listening at the headphones.

Then the foreknowledge starts growing wings and sprouting. A house in the Marina blowing up! Fires! Bay Bridge! I suddenly remember my two cats at home in Marin. What’s happening over there? I commit the sin of using the phone. The painting class has been canceled. I get through to some friends in Marin, and they agree to go to my condo and check on the cats. I’ll meet them there as soon as I can.

There are many stories of heroism from the earthquake. Mine is one of blatant self-interest. I lose my enthusiasm for sitting around with Barbara, speculating on bits of news. Suddenly I have to get home! I run to my car and head for 19th Avenue. By then it’s a sea of cars being parted at every intersection for the sea that goes the other way. All the traffic lights are out, and we have to rely on ourselves and others not to panic and create gridlock. I sit in the interminable traffic wondering (a) whether the Golden Gate Bridge is still standing, and (b) what I will do if I have to go to the bathroom. At what point do social conventions break down and allow you to pee in the street? Could I pee in the street?

I make it home in an hour and a half. The cats are fine. A large bookcase has fallen down, breaking some Mexican pottery. My friends and I eat burgers from Jack-in-the-Box and listen to the radio.

The next day I sit around in a complete stupor. What to do about lunch becomes a problem of enormous proportions. When I finally figure out that I can go somewhere and buy it, I leave the house without money. My brain is denying the news of some darker foreknowledge that is working in me.

I decide to step up my preparedness plan. I pack 3 days’ worth of old clothes and my sleeping bag in the trunk of my car, in case I get trapped in the city next time. I buy a regular transistor radio, two flashlights, and extra batteries. I close every barn door through which a horse has gone.

Over the next year I am struck now and then by the nagging thought that I’m not quite as prepared as I should be. For instance, what if I were separated from my car keys? They could be buried in rubble on the floor beneath me as I sleep. (I would—hopefully—end up on top of the rubble—with just the small problem of the roof over my head being really “over my head.”) On the first anniversary of the quake, I step up the plan another notch. I imagine being at home when the Big One strikes, with just enough damage that I won’t get buried but will need to evacuate in 15 minutes. I make a little stockpile of clothes, radio, flashlight, and shoes next to my bed. In a closet I pack a bag of food that will be slightly more palatable than the energy bars in the survival kit: a box of Raisin Bran, some crackers, two small packages of trail mix they gave me at the blood bank, three of those sealed-in-a-bag dinners that will last forever, some dried chicken noodle soup and hot cocoa that are past their expiration dates, a gallon of water, and a third of a bottle of vodka that I’ll never get around to drinking otherwise. I attach a note reminding me to retrieve the bag of processed cheese, mixed nuts, Hershey bars, and extra batteries I’ve stashed in the freezer. I put the two cat carriers in the closet too, with 3 days’ supply of dry food and a plastic dish. What about litter? Well, I’ll try to grab one of their litter boxes if I can. I put two portfolios of my paintings in the closet, choosing them out of the many I will have to sacrifice. What about valuable papers? My will, passport, credit card information, addresses, photographs? How can I be sure to find stuff I use every day, like my checkbook, money, sunglasses?

Suddenly I realize that I’m not just taking a few practical precautions in case I’m in the right place at the wrong time. I’m trying to create an entire parallel universe, duplicating my life with a weird combination of essentials and odds and ends, ready for any contingency but the one that will surely come. They say there’s a 60% chance of earthquake. Well, there’s a 100% chance of death. But that is foreknowledge that I’m not ready to taste just yet. I’ll keep building my stash, making my plans. I see myself living in the room nearest the back door, surrounded by everything I hold dear, wearing the sturdy boots and work gloves and dust mask, the cats ready to go in their carriers, listening and watching for the first sign of disaster so I can escape with everything, lose nothing. Yes, there I am, under the dining room table with the gas wrench in my hand, itching to get at those Hershey bars.

Prepared.

2. adventure day

Adventure Day was so-named because I spent it going to the dentist. Normally, going to the dentist is no big deal, but on this day I was in for a molar extraction and bridge-sawing, and, worse than that, I had to drive the Monster Truck into downtown San Francisco.

I was driving the Monster Truck because my car broke down because of some mysterious “fuel contamination” which it was taking AAA forever and a day to analyze. Fortunately, I had been able to borrow a friend’s Ford pick-up—an unassuming little thing from the outside, but high up in the driver’s seat I felt very butch, like I should be wearing work boots and a flannel shirt and smoking a cigarette. It also required me to be very Buddhist-like “in the moment” to do the fancy footwork on the clutch, be aware of the greater space I occupied, etc. Butch and Buddhism, interesting combination.

Much timing and thought went into this trip to the dentist. I awoke at 3:30 that morning, realizing that I was not about to drive the truck up the steep Gough hill—shades of 20 years ago when I had to drive a VW bug around the city and sweated out every slight grade that had a stoplight at the top. So I got up an hour early, drove to UCSF, where I worked, and parked in Golden Gate Park. I dropped some manuscripts off at the office first and then took Muni downtown to the dentist’s office. I just barely made it there in time, arriving at the stroke of 9:30.

So far, so good. But my careful planning and mindfulness broke down as I found myself lowered into one of the rings of dental hell. First, the chair was moved back and down until I was practically standing on my head, and my gentle dentist loomed over me with two fistfuls of gleaming instruments. After innumerable shots of lidocaine, he set to work. The assistant seemed to be new, and I had a feeling she’d been warned that I’m “sensitive.” (A strange idea my dentist got from the fact that I broke down and cried the first time I met him.)

Time becomes ALL PRESENT TENSE from here on.

I detect a note of panic in the way the assistant is handling the sucking tube—she stabs at my inner cheeks, searching for saliva that isn’t there because it’s hidden on the other side of Dr P’s hand and the giant doohickey that is propping my mouth open. So I am being stabbed and sucked on one side while rivers of saliva cascade down my throat on the other. As I am about to drown in my own juices, I manage to call time-out (by struggling and grunting… ever the lady) and get myself into a sitting position and swallow—no easy feat with the doohickey in place. I am crying and trembling. I suspect some of the trembling is due to the lidocaine, but that doesn’t make me feel any more dignified about it.

After a brief respite, I’m lowered back down into my rightful position as helpless infant. Dr. P goes to work again in my unnaturally small mouth with several steel instruments that clang against each other, bang my teeth, and split my lip. The assistant sucks and stabs while the dentist yanks and tugs, crooning, “Pressure, Mary, pressure, pressure….” This reminds me of the Jimmy Cliff song, as if he’s about to burst into reggae, and I want to giggle. But being in the dentist’s chair is like being in the womb again, no way to express yourself.

I am desperate to laugh, sing, shout, do anything but sit there immobile with my mouth propped open with a 5-pound door stop. Buddhism comes to my aid again, bringing me the phrase, “Chop wood, carry water.” This helps keep me focused, or at least in the chair, in an Isness/Suchness kind of way. I try to think of an appropriate verb/object to complete the phrase. “Chop wood, carry water, yank teeth”? Nothing quite works, but it gives me something to chew on besides Dr. P’s glove.

My next attempt at self-possession is to tell myself it’s Adventure Day, after my favorite Wonderful World of Walt Disney episodes. For some reason, naming it helps me bear it. “I am in pain. Well…. it’s Adventure Day. I can handle anything on Adventure Day.”

I must return to the PAST TENSE for a moment, to achieve some therapeutic distance.

The actual extraction (the bridge-sawing turned out to be a piece of cake) was horrendously painful. All time stopped. Unfortunately, it stopped at exactly the moment of greatest pain. If this had been a movie, there would have been a 5-minute close-up of my gaping mouth, my bulging eyes and gurgling throat, Dr. P. crooning as sweat popped out on his brown, struggling and wrenching and twisting as if to remove a vertebra from my spine, and, finally, the sound of a redwood crashing in the forest where, as luck would have it, there was someone to hear it fall because it was falling in her mouth.

I had naively thought I’d be able to go back to work after this experience, but I quickly see the folly of that as I stumble out of Dr. P’s office with my chipmunk face and bloody gauze and NO-CAFFEINE-YET incipient headache. (I had forgone my usual morning coffee so as not to be at the mercy of my bladder.) I then have to take the Muni back to work to collect the truck but am insanely, undeservedly lucky that there are no delays or incidents, despite a mental landscape that is ripe for trains being derailed or homeless drifters falling onto the tracks.

So I make it back to UCSF, scurrying into my building through the basement entrance like a rat, feeling totally incapable of using the left side of my brain or face. I do the very barest minimum of chores: fill out my time sheet, deliver some chapters to a coworker, collect the mail. When forced to speak, I emit strange vowel sounds and scurry away, hiding my swollen, bloodied cheek from the humans.

At last I take the long walk back to where the truck is parked, carrying a heavy satchel full of new manuscripts. With every leaden step, as my cheek bulges and my gauze leaks, as I slog through gelatinous gray air (caffeine withdrawal coming on fast), I repeat my mantra: “Adventure Day, Adventure Day.” (“Chop wood/carry water” is now a thing of the past, I am stripped to the bare bones of inspirational thought.)

I finally arrive at the Monster Truck, and Adventure Day continues as I hoist and shift and crank and roil my way through tourist traffic, including a scary moment on the Golden Gate Bridge—me in the suicide lane, a line of cars to my right with brake lights popping red, back ends shimmering as if they are about to slide over and shove me (Adventure Day Person) into oncoming traffic. With each mile, my discomfort, pain, and general leadenness become more palpable. By now it is after noon and I need desperately to eat but don’t know what I could eat, even if I had food, since I am unable to part my jaws. I ask myself, “What would go good with the taste of blood?” Finally, I detour to Real Food for a protein juice smoothie, the perfect thing for sipping through clenched teeth. I fight on through the heavy air, the streets filled with hurtling vehicles, the constant shifts and clutches of Truckness Being Suchness…. Adventure Day… Adventure Day….

Finally I arrive home and therein begins my recovery, almost imperceptible in its beginnings and yet complete in its potentiality. Caffeine withdrawal defies a whole thermos of coffee to have the slightest vessel-expanding effect—and yet I know that it will not fail me, it is The Answer. Coffee has not taken me this far only to drop me now. So I dip, I slurp, I savor. And I am home, I am Free. Adventure Day has come to an end….

3. story looking for an ending

And they wonder why some people take everything so personally….

At the time of this story, I worked in San Francisco and lived in Novato, a town about 25 miles north of the city. One day on the way home from work I stopped to do some shopping at Macy’s in San Rafael, which is about 15 miles north. (These distances are relevant later on.) So I’m walking down 4th St. in downtown San Rafael, and no one else is anywhere to be seen except for this old man sitting in a wheelchair. He calls out to me, and I feel there’s no way I can just ignore him, so I stop to see what he wants.

He wants something very simple—for me to wheel him down the street to the hardware store to buy an alarm clock. I really can’t say no. I think it’s partly because my father was an invalid for a long time, and every man in a wheelchair reminds me of him. So I wheel him to the store and he asks me to wait while he picks out a clock. This process seems to take forever, but he finally makes a purchase and is then ready to be wheeled back to the corner (I think). I notice as we leave the store that various passers-by are greeting him as if they know him and throwing little smirks my way. This troubles me.

He then mentions that there is one other store he would like to visit, and I know I am caught. He knows I can’t say no, and he is going to be merciless about it. I push him around the corner, but we encounter some construction on the sidewalk that forces us into the street. I am now feeling like a character in a Greek tragedy (or at least a Roman melodrama), acting out my personal fate, pushing this stranger in a wheelchair through rubble, past cars that are rushing by just inches away.

Our shopping tour goes on for about an hour, maybe less, but time has become meaningless. I have been here before, held in some strange man’s sway, unable to break the social fiction and step out of the script he has written for me. Years before, a black man in Ann Arbor had kept me in “conversation” in a parking lot for what seemed like hours. I remember being rooted to the spot, waiting for a pause in his monologue that would allow me to say I really had to be going. He never paused (duh!), and I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt him, even when he told me about the Swedish stewardess who liked his “blue dick.” I had learned somehow that pretending nothing was happening was the best means of survival. I have no memory of how I got away.

Back in the present moment, the last stop is a liquor store, where the old man buys a bottle of vodka and asks me to help him hide it in his clothing. I am dissociating by now, unable to assess what’s a reasonable request and what isn’t. Is this the equivalent of the “blue dick” moment? I’m finally nearing the end of my patience, and I decide this is it. I’ve done my bit.

Sensing this, he asks for one last favor: to be wheeled home. Figuring that this at least signals the end, I agree. By now, I feel completely responsible for this helpless man. It takes me days to figure out that he had somehow gotten himself downtown in the first place, and probably not for the first time.

“Home” is uphill from downtown. But I am still dissociating, still thinking the only way out of this nightmare is to follow it through. So I push him up-up-up to this huge institutional-looking building, and then he wants me to lug him up the steep stairs so the authorities at the wheelchair entrance won’t find the hidden vodka. I know I won’t be able to do that, so I go off in search of someone to help.

When I get back, he’s gone, and I am strangely annoyed. I feel more abandoned than released. Somehow, I guess I’ve been expecting to be rewarded for my efforts, at least with a thank you. I feel empty as I face the fact that I have again participated in my own victimization, waiting for the victimizer to let me go rather than take a stand myself. I walk back down to Macy’s and buy my sheets or whatever, and I drive home, berating myself for my spinelessness.

About a month later, on Christmas Day, I decide to go out for a run. It’s a beautiful sunny day, and no one, but absolutely no one, is out on the streets. If you remember my set-up at the beginning of the story, I lived 10 miles north of the scene of the encounter with the old man. OK, so I’m running along. Far up ahead, I see a small figure. As I get closer, I see that it is a man in a wheelchair. An old man. MY old man! Alarm bells are going off, and all I can think is, GET AWAY! As I approach him, panting and panicking, he calls out to me, “Do you know if Lucky’s is open today?” Of course he doesn’t recognize me. I fly past him, afraid that some magnetic force will catch me in his field again. “I don’t know!” I wheeze, as I sail by.

His angry old trembly voice floats behind me on the crisp air: “You wouldn’t help your grandmother if she was dying!” (Side note: why grandmother and not grandfather?) I run and run, and run around the corner, and run and run some more until I get home. I don’t leave the house for the rest of the day.

What I want to know is: What does this mean? I’ve spent enough time in therapy to understand boundary issues, the victim mentality, etc.; I think I would react more moderately in both situations today. But here’s the thing: If the second encounter had been with some other old man in a wheelchair, I would just see the obvious lesson: that an inability to say no when appropriate leads to extreme aversion to saying yes in the future. The fact that it was the same old man is what has me shaking my head. The story is overdetermined, like a dream or a fairy tale. Is it possible that waking life is that finely tuned?

I don’t know the ending to this story. I still think about the old man now and then and wonder if he’s lurking around the next corner, sent to test me again. More than that, I wonder how to live responsibly, consciously, in a universe that is paying such close attention.

***

Little brown bird sits half hidden
in a bush. The breeze ruffles
her feathers like leaves.
Subtle markings on her back
a perfect match for the dappled branch.
Then she betrays the camouflage
with a song.

[Mary McKenney]

I used to think, like Tom Petty, that “the waaaiting is the hardest part….” After mailing each issue of the ‘zine, I’m on pins and needles, waiting for the responses to trickle in. I’ve never yet managed to feel confident enough about my writing that I’m—like—whatever…. But after “mary’s first porno” hit the streets (see #10 January 2001), I was especially nervous. I had great fun writing that piece, and I thought it turned out fairly light and humorous, compared with, say, The Story of O. But you never know if something that’s funny or interesting to you is going to translate to anyone else. And the responses I received to that issue tell me that the beauty (or not) of every piece of writing is in the eye of the beholder. I always thought that if only I were a good enough writer, everyone would like what I wrote. And now I know it isn’t true. What the reader brings to the page is every bit as important as what the writer puts on it. This is huge, for me.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I discovered that waiting is not the hardest part. As it happened, the first response I got, two long days after mailing the first batch, was from someone I love and respect who was very uncomfortable with the porno story and said she would “never have gone there.” Instead of taking this at face value as an expression of her own feelings (which it was), I panicked. My blood ran cold, then red hot. It was my worst fear. I had crossed boundaries, broken taboos. I had offended my readers’ sensibilities. I had exposed myself, and now I couldn’t take any of it back. It felt like the biggest mistake of my life.

I didn’t know what to do. I had already mailed out most of the copies and was imagining that everyone I knew and cared about was cringing at my words and calling me a pervert. I pictured mouths dropping open across the land, one time zone after another. Why had I ventured out on such a creaky limb? What was I thinking? I planned all sorts of desperate measures. There were still eight copies to be mailed, and I thought about cutting that story out of those copies and pretending it was just a short issue. Restaurants and cats—let’s stay on safe ground from now on. I even thought of canceling my session with J that week. I couldn’t imagine facing anyone who had read that story. I spent most of the day in bed, under the covers, rigid with shame.

I tried to tell myself that people are responsible for their own feelings—that I was just the messenger bringing the message of their own shame or lack of it. But it didn’t really help. It simply wasn’t possible for me to believe that my friend’s response was hers alone. It triggered something too deep in me, too shameful, something of long standing—just as, probably, my story had done to her.

[2009 update: Recently, my friend asked me to send her the issue again, and she enjoyed it this time.]

***
Shame isn’t rational; it’s a powerful emotion, learned early. I can trace my earliest experience of shame (my earliest memory of it, anyway) back to the age of 4 or 5, when my cousin Donny and I—partners in pre-pre-pre-pubescent crime—were playing house. Husband comes home from work and finds wife taking a bath—naked, of course. I don’t know why we had chosen that particular scenario; we were much too young to have lascivious thoughts, and there was no touching. But I imagine kids play house in an attempt to manage feelings about the family, especially the feelings of powerlessness of being a child. And in a completely mundane sense, you don’t take a bath with your clothes on, and Daddy doesn’t come home from work naked! Anyway, when my mother came upstairs and found us like that, she completely lost it. I remember lying in bed later, banished to my room, hearing her turn away another friend who had come over to play: “Mary can’t come out now, she’s being punished.” More than the words, I felt the anger and disgust in her voice pour directly on my heart and brain, branding me. I was a tiny computer, processing the information: The body is bad. I have a body. Ergo, I am bad. (I was a tiny computer that hadn’t yet learned the classical logical fallacies.)

***
Back to the ‘zine. I e-mailed apologies to those I had addresses for and wrote notes to the rest. The responses have been incredibly affirming. I can’t quote from the wonderful phone calls I received, but here’s a sample of some of the mail (apologies in advance for the self-horn-tooting):

… I absolutely loved it; I laughed out loud the whole way through…. I hate thinking you spent one minute feeling you had to apologize. I guess that’s human nature though. And, just like painting, I imagine really putting yourself out there can result in major contraction and self-doubt as the mind scrambles for safe ground….

*

… I appreciate your writing about the taboos and daring to go somewhere most people wouldn’t dream! So keep writing!

*

i say hurrah for MMMMMMaaaaaarrry. you crossed a line. marched straight into the wilderness of our shames and humiliations and sang out loud in a  manner that for others like me the air opened up, creating more space for courage and play and fun. i could FEEL the fun you had writing the piece, and that was a flavor that gave me a passport to enter into a space that has been off limits to me. limits guarded by my own quivering fearful shamedness. hurrah hurray for mary….

*

Dear Editor w/Vulnerable Heart….. I thought your porno piece was a riot! I loved it….

*
No apologies needed. Your writing, as always and no matter what the subject matter, is bright, funny, touching, and engaging. You bring renewed life and validity to the inner personal world, carrying your readers through the intriguing maze of observation and reflection. How’s that for a review?! Carry on!….

*

I was saving my mary’zine to savor with Sunday morning coffee, but the note I received today carried the imperative to learn the nature of your distress. I was sorry to hear that one person’s reaction to your recent edition caused such remorse that you felt compelled to apologize to your readers. Then I think, perhaps the apology wasn’t directed to your entire readership. Maybe I am on the list of “questionables.” If such is the case, please edit my name from that database, as I’m a true blue Mary McKenney fan. Your stories may be unique, but the feelings, and quite often, the experiences, are universal. Please, don’t stop taking risks with your writing. Please don’t stop exploring, and please keep sharing. Always a grateful and appreciative recipient of “mary’zine”….

***
Now that I can hold my head up again and face my adoring public, I can see that it was a liberating experience to write that story, because I unburdened myself of one of my darkest secrets: Yes, I used to be a librarian. But seriously, folks. As I replied to the last person quoted above, “In the past few days, I’ve learned a lot about the isolation of shame, and about the beauty and generosity of people like you who have welcomed me out of that isolation.” To hear so many strong words of support was like being welcomed back into the human family, from which I had exiled myself—to my own bedroom, to lie in the dark, being punished. My mother is gone now, but the software lingers on.

To be fair, not everyone was wildly appreciative of my story. One person bemoaned the fact that I had put the image of *n*s l*ck*ng into her head for the better part of the day. Actually, it was probably the worst part of the day. She said she wouldn’t want to pass this issue along to any of her friends who have small children. I agree wholeheartedly. You must treat the mary’zine as a controlled substance. Keep it out of the hands of precocious preschoolers, nosy fifth graders, randy teens. Avoid sharing it with the frail elderly, the weak of heart, the humor-challenged. Keep it away from homophobes, right-wing fundamentalists, cat haters, the mentally unbalanced, the stark raving mad, and anyone who’s likely to come after me with a gun. Other than that, please share the ‘zine (the blog) with your friends. Do your part to make the mary’zine (the blog) an underground sensation.

See, with the mary’zine, you never know what you’re going to get—hard-hitting news, human interest stories of compassion and rollicking humor, shocking revelations. Well, not so much hard-hitting news, I guess, unless you consider it news that my cat likes tuna-flavored laxative. Oh, and by the way, he l*cks his *n*s regularly.

lost weekday

Here but for the grace of God go you.

If it had been up to my mother, I would have had all my teeth pulled when I was 13. She herself had gotten full dentures at the age of 30, so to her it was just a matter of time, and why wait? “You know,” she’d threaten, “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Dr. NEM [Name Escapes Me] decided to pull them all and get it over with one of these days.” I was terrified whenever she talked like this. I thought frizzy hair was bad? I thought having pimples was bad? Try starting high school with FALSE TEETH. I lived in mortal fear of the dentist. Everyone in my family had bad teeth, but he held me personally responsible for every cavity. And the bastard did manage to pull most of my back teeth, but I escaped with the ones you could see. I had to eat like a chipmunk for years.

As an adult, I’ve had to endure countless hours in the dentist’s chair, making up for Dr. NEM’s handiwork. In the mid-‘70s, I had long bridges installed in all four corners of my mouth, and they have required continual maintenance over the years, usually involving ghastly feats of mechanical engineering. The record so far is 7 STRAIGHT HOURS in the chair as the valiant Dr. Johnson tried mightily to save a tooth by doing a root canal but had to give up eventually because it kept crumbling under the drill. By the end of the 7 hours, I don’t know who was a bigger wreck, me or her. I think we were both ready to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge—me with my mouth locked wide open, her leaning over me with the drill, making one last stab at saving the tooth.

Dr. Johnson quit the profession soon after that, I hope not entirely because of me. My current dentist, Dr. Potter, is a worthy successor. And he knows when to quit. When I went in for yet another root canal recently, he sawed off the bridge, examined the offending tooth, and declared it hopeless and pulled it instead. Unbeknownst to me, this was the high point of my day.

Dr. Potter is a great dentist and also one of the kindest men I’ve ever known, but he tends to say things like, “Let’s get Mr. Tongue out of the way” as he comes at me with yet another new contraption to stick in my mouth. I’m always on the verge of hysterical giggles when I’m there anyway, and that kind of remark doesn’t help. This time I beg him for a Valium or something to calm me down—apparently he doesn’t believe in nitrous oxide—and he gives me a pill called Atanol. I think it should be called Notatall, because it doesn’t do much—except I find it slightly easier than usual to deal with the tray of goop he puts in my mouth to take an impression for the new bridge. To keep from gagging, I have to YELL at myself (internally, of course), “Think about your nose!” for the 2 or 3 minutes it takes for the goop to set. He also gives me a high-dose “cocktail” of ibuprofen and acetaminophen before he pulls the tooth. And of course I’ve had several shots of Novocain. I neglect to tell him I have already taken two Excedrin that morning. I am better stocked than your neighborhood pharmacy at this point.

Getting on toward lunch, I start to feel a little weak, so I drink two small cartons of soy milk I have brought with me. I congratulate myself on my foresight. Dr. Potter finishes up and I leave, feeling a little sick to my stomach. The soy milk went down pretty good, but it comes up even easier in the restroom of the Sutter-Stockton garage. Also, my body chooses this moment, this place and time, to let me know that I now have urinary incontinence while barfing. Nice. My pants are soaked, so I get a plastic bag out of the trunk of my car to put on the driver’s seat. I pull out of the garage into the pouring rain, praying to make it home without further incident. I make it out of the city and through the rainbow tunnel into Marin, but by then it’s hailing, and I’m not feeling so hot. So I pull off at the Spencer Ave. exit above Sausalito and throw up in a paper bag. I look out the window and vaguely register that there is snow on the ground. I feel like I’m in a dream. A police car cruises slowly by. I wonder if they do police escorts for nauseated dental patients. I kind of hope he’ll stop and ask me if everything’s OK ma’am. I could use a knight in shining armor about now.

Suddenly, I realize the bag is leaking. I grab a newspaper to put under it, but not before my urine-soaked pants get dribbled on. Believe it or not, this sounds more gross than it felt at the time. There was a surreal quality to the whole thing, a kind of state you get into when it’s all about survival and you can’t afford to dwell on the gory details. I spend so much of my life worrying about things that could happen, and then when something does happen that I could never have anticipated, I just do what I have to do. It’s reassuring, in a way.

So I get home, throw up once more for good measure, and crawl into bed. I feel like I have had a day of chemo. Every time I get up and try to eat something—some nice hot soup, some nice hot tea—I feel too sick to finish it. Strangely, the only thing I’m able to eat all day is some leftover rice and lemon chicken at 8 p.m. Go figure. I sleep all night and get up at 5 a.m. feeling great.

I drive to Berkeley for my 9 a.m. therapy appointment. J has read the ‘zine by now, so we spend the whole hour talking about masturbation and other sexual topics. Before I wrote that story, I hadn’t used the word “masturbation” in 8 years of therapy. I have since used it approximately 82 times. It’s liberating. On my way home, I sing along with the Divinyls on the radio: “When I think about you, I touch myself.” I tell you, it’s everywhere.

I know this whole sex thing seems like a tempest in a teapot to some of you, but we don’t get to pick and choose our challenges. Sometimes it’s about telling it like it is and risking offense by “oversharing.” Sometimes it’s about enduring—improvising, surviving—when you thought you knew what the big challenge of the day was going to be. Root canal? Forget it. You’re going to spend the day losing your bodily fluids in a freakin’ hailstorm. And I have a feeling the challenges are not going to decrease as I get older. Time is accelerating—the past is bumping up against the future—and events are accumulating meaning like a snowball rolling downhill. Let’s get Mr. Tongue out of the way, shall we? It looks like it’s going to be a wild, wild ride.

[Mary McKenney]