Looking down into Lake Superior from a high bank above the water. Photo by P. DuPont.

P made her annual trek to Menominee for my birthday, and we spent a day in Munising, on the southern shore of Lake Superior. It was beautiful, and I was delighted to prove to her that the U.P. does have mountains (as I call them) or at least rolling hills. Below are two views she took of ”Miner’s Castle,” a sandstone formation on Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Hills or mountains aside, there are some great natural sights in Menominee, too.

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SOS

Before P got here, I had to renew my driver’s license, in person, at a Secretary of State (SOS)’s office. I wanted to get an “enhanced” driver’s license so I can walk amongst the Canadians on their own soil if need be. There’s an SOS office about a mile from my house, so I figured it would be easy enough to bop in there with all the required documents in plenty of time to get the new license before my birthday. The office shares a little building with Stephenson Bakery—one of many odd juxtapositions around here.

I set out at 3:00 in the afternoon on a Wednesday, but I arrive right in the middle of their Wednesday lunch hour. (All other days, it’s 12:30-1:30.) I take care of some other business downtown despite the beckoning bakery, which is leering at me through its windows as if to dare me to come in for just an itty-bitty snack. (“You’re already here,” it seems to be crooning, “and you have to wait anyway”), but I am resolute. I go home empty-handed and empty-mouthed.

I come back at 4:30, there’s no one in line ahead of me, and a pleasant young woman wearing purple eyeshadow greets me. I’ve put all my documents in a plastic envelope, so I start dumping everything out on the counter and then discover, O damn!, that I took my wallet out when I was doing the other errands and didn’t put it back. I gather everything up again and head back to the house. I run upstairs (I use the word “run” very loosely), and my wallet isn’t where I usually keep it. Damn again! Then I have a terrible feeling. I run back downstairs and check the plastic envelope, and there it is, hiding below the fold as it were! What an idiot. I drive back down to the SOS and start presenting my documents again. I haul out the “Notification of Birth Registration” that I’ve been carrying around for just shy of 65 years. Purple Eyeshadow brings it to a faceless bureaucrat in a back office who, after making a phone call, sends her back to me with the news that they can’t accept it, because it’s not a true birth certificate, it’s only a “souvenir.” Who would want to keep a useless piece of paper that doesn’t even prove your baby exists? My parents, that’s who. It’s an original, highly creased and yellowed document with my whole name, place and date of birth, my parents’ names, and a “State File Number.” On the back in big capital letters it says, “IMPORTANT—READ CAREFULLY.” It states that my birth certificate is permanently filed in the Bureau of Records and Statistics, Michigan Department of Health, Lansing 4. The following clinches it, in my opinion: “This notification should be carefully preserved. It is a valuable document” [my emphasis].

But no, it’s not good enough for the SOS. Eyeshadow tells me I can go down to “the courthouse” and get something-something that’s more official. (I don’t even know where the fucking “courthouse” is, there’s an old one that’s been there since the Cleveland administration, and then there’s a new set of municipal buildings about a mile away.) I yearn to tell Eyeshadow to “bite me”—yeah, I know she’s just doing her job, but I’m too pissed to care—but I just sigh dramatically and roll my eyes and hand her my old driver’s license and my brand spanking new Medicare card. She says I can’t use the Medicare card as proof of my Social Security number, even though the number on my Medicare card is my Social Security number with an apparently distracting, corrupting   “-A” at the end of it. She starts telling me what I need to give them to prove what my SSN really is, but I curtly turn and barge out of the office. I almost head into the oh-so-conveniently located bakery (is that why they’re still in business, to cater to the pissed-off citizenry who can’t produce acceptable documents?)—but I’m beyond even crullers at that point. And that’s saying something.

I get home, look for the metal file box of my Mom’s that I can’t remember the contents of, and—lo and behold—discover that I have a “real” certified birth certificate in a nice folder that I got back in 1986 when I needed one for some reason. Who knows if a 1986 certification will stand up to the high standards set by the SOS, but it’s the best I’ve got.

Now I know how Barack Obama feels—well, except for the wars and the Republicans and stuff.

I have received dozens of communications from the Social Security Administration over the years—all those statements that verify that in my first year of full-time employment I made a grand total of $4,104. So I pull out the file and start going through it. And guess what? The SSA is loath to put the recipient’s full SSN on their documents, because they want to “help prevent identity theft”! Great! Looks like they will also “help prevent the SOS from giving me a driver’s license.”

I finally come across two documents mailed to me by the local SSA office in Marinette. One is a computer printout, not on any letterhead, that states “MY NAME IS…” and “MY DATE OF BIRTH IS…” and “MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER IS….” This “IMPORTANT INFORMATION” about my “CLAIM FOR SOCIAL SECURITY RETIREMENT INSURANCE BENEFITS” is signed by a “Mrs. Seefeldt,” but I’m not at all sure that this document will hold up under the intense scrutiny of Purple Eyeshadow and her shadowy boss.

The other document is a “Voluntary Withholding Request,” a “Form W-4V” (the SOS instructions say that a W4 form is acceptable for proving SSN). This form has been filled in by computer, but couldn’t I have gotten hold of a blank form and filled in the LYING, CHEATING FALSE INFORMATION myself? There, in black and white, it says: “2. Your social security number,” and indeed my actual social security number is typed in there as bold as anything, without the offending “-A” from my Medicare card. But the form is red-stamped “COPY.” Will a mere copy be acceptable to Eyeshadow, Shadowy Boss and the SOS her- or himself? We shall see.

After perseverating on it for a few days, I realize I have to get this taken care of sooner rather than later. But I dread going back there. I envision a string of irrational demands that I can’t fulfill. I mean, how do people with falsified documents do it? I was born in this very town, and I have “proof” galore that I am who I say I am. But finally I go back, and it couldn’t have been easier. Eyeshadow waits on me again, and when she sees me I think she gets a little tense, doesn’t look me in the eye as she says, “What can I do for you?” Yeah, I’m that much of a badass, I had sighed at her and didn’t say thank you. First thing, I say, “I’m sorry about the other day,” and she says that’s OK. Then it’s like we’re best friends, we’ve been through so much together and I get to show her the calm, sane, reasonable person I am down deep, and I can see she appreciates it. When I tell P this later, she wonders how this faceless, eyeshadowed bureaucrat would even remember me. Honey—this is not the San Francisco DMV, it’s down and personal, or UP and personal. Like once when I approached the deli counter at Angeli’s, and one of the clerks asked me, “Do you want egg salad today?” and I’m a little taken aback. Why does he remember me? It’s hard to know how personally to take these commercial interactions. I’m usually “nice”; I strive to have a persona that makes the clerk think, when she sees me coming, “OK, this one doesn’t cause any trouble,” but I think I prefer being anonymous. My new documents meet the high standards of the SOS and Eyeshadow and her now visible boss, who looks to be about 23 years old. I feel ancient, but not quite as ancient as the really old woman at the other window, who is surrendering her license. When asked if she’s an organ donor, she quips that no one would want any part of her body anyway. I have to say, I can relate to that. Oh, she meant after she dies. I had not been looking forward to the eye test, but it’s a very quick matter of reciting the perfectly legible letters displayed in a little machine. Likewise, the photo-taking is innocuous, you stand right there a few steps away from the counter, and Eyeshadow tells you to smile if you want to, which I appreciate. The picture comes up on the screen and she asks if I’m happy with it or do I want to try again, and I say that it’s not going to get any better than that… she chuckles… she’s probably never heard that one before… yeah, right… and indeed it’s probably the best driver’s license photo I’ve ever taken. For the next couple of days, as I do errands around town, I feel almost attractive. We finish our business, she tells me to have a nice day, I say “You too,” gather my stuff together, and surprise her by saying “Bye!” She founders a bit—does no one else have the decency to utter a friendly farewell?—again says “Have a nice day,” and voilà, I have rehabilitated myself in her eyes, and in my own.

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patient does not wish to share…

Had my annual visit with the handsome Dr. T. The front office person always asks me if I want to authorize anyone to call them to get information about me, and I get confused and always say no. They have my power of health attorney, or whatever it’s called, on file, but they never seem to want to trust what they already have, it all has to be new. So I had to sign a paper that said, “PATIENT DOES NOT WISH TO SHARE ANYTHING WITH ANYBODY.” I think that’s a bit harsh.

Dr. T. is his usual charming self. He congratulates me on my 25-lb. weight loss and says he’d smile bigger but he’s afraid he has a piece of carrot in his teeth. My laff of the day.

Then he kind of takes the wind out of my sails about my 0% calcium-in-my-arteries test result from earlier this year, because there can still be “soft” plaque and I still have high cholesterol. So I have to double down on my cholesterol medicine.

I’ve written a lot about my personal experiences and outlook on this site, but now I feel like revisiting some of the influences on my reading, writing, and editing life. Maybe “influences” is the wrong word, implying that external forces shape who we become. Ever since I read that Picasso was kicked out of school at the age of 10 because “all he wanted to do was paint,” ¹ I’ve found it fascinating to look back at the “acorns” that have turned me into the tall, strong oak tree I am today. Ha! Anyway, the point is, I’m not an existentialist (“existence precedes essence”)—first, because it’s a bleak world view that seems peculiarly male (all abstract, Man Turned Hero in the Face of an Uncaring Universe sort of thing), and second, because I do think we are born with an “essence” that manifests throughout our life. When looking back from the vantage point of great age, or even medium-great age, I think it’s possible to see that, in a way, things were meant to happen the way they did. “Meant to happen” is a loaded phrase; I don’t mean that an old man in the sky decided what sort of life to give each of us and marked all the plays on the blackboard with X’s and O’s like John Madden and then BOOM that’s who we are. I see it more as if an internal engine or fire (a fire engine?) pushes us to blaze or blunder down a path that we appear to create as we go, but that is truly driven. We see it after the fact, when it manifests. Until then, we can only perceive the fog of the so-called Future as we stand on the edge of the ever-Present cliff, every nanosecond new and impossible to predict but also in some strange way making total sense.

I once asked my painting teacher if the painting—the paper with the paint on it—“mattered.” Her answer: “It does and it doesn’t.” Which sounds like a non-answer, but I knew what she meant. In one sense, the process you go through while painting is what matters the most, but what shows up on the paper is the mirror to which you respond, stroke by stroke. And later, looking back at your paintings can help you track your journey—at least in theory. My paintings, many of which I have framed and hanging on my walls, still seem as mysterious to me as when I painted them. They radiate feeling and intensity but don’t necessarily give up their secrets. Which is fine with me.

Likewise, one’s individual life matters and yet it doesn’t. In the grand scheme of things, we are but dust in the wind, and other song lyrics from the ‘70s. From what we can tell from this side of the life/death divide (if there is a divide, or only a full stop, a colon, or even an em dash—who knows what punctuation will ultimately define us?), we may matter to a few or multitudes of other people, we can accomplish magnificent things for which our name will live on forever (J. Christ, S. Jobs), or we can be known to only a few, but deeply known and loved. We will live on in their hearts until they too pass on, and then at some point, if we don’t make the history books, there will be nothing left of us. But as we are living it, Life is everything, no matter how small its manifestation appears to be.

I don’t remember my mother reading to me, but I know I must have had Little Golden Books, because the way my stomach drops when I see the illustrations on the paperboard covers with the gold spine, it’s a sense memory from way back, from little Mary Lou still intact within me, like a nested doll.

When I was very young, my aunt Dagmar gave me a book called Dear Heart. The only thing I remember about it is the sentence, “You can’t be too careful.” I puzzled over what this meant. It was the first time I remember thinking about language and wanting to know how it worked. Later, I spent the summer after 7th grade pondering the use of the subjunctive: if I were, not if I was…. It was definitely a WTF moment, if only that expression had existed at the time.

Over the years I visited Spies Library every week, taking out the maximum number of books, and I was finally let up in the adult section around the age of 12. I already had my heart set on going to college, so I found all the books I could that had college as a theme. It seemed like the most glamorous life.

The first witticism I remember making was when I was 10 and hanging out with my cousin Donny. He gave me a cherry Lifesaver, and while I was still savoring it, I announced that I had to go home (next door). I half-seriously told him, “I hate to eat and run,” and he laughed. It was the first time I felt the power of humor, and the inkling that I might be good at it.

(When P was visiting, I often had to point out that I was joking. She said she used to be able to tell, but now I don’t have an “affect.” I said, “I’ve never had an affect,” but it’s possible that I’m taking “deadpan” to an extreme: merely dead.)

Some of the most significant reading I did was in the World Book Encyclopedia, which my parents bought me when I was in the 5th grade. I would read the difficult entries and practically will myself to understand them. It’s exactly the same way I now approach the editing of scientific manuscripts, especially when I’m not familiar with the subject: take one word at a time and just figure the damn thing out.

In 6th grade I heard about something called Pocket Books, which was a publishing company that sold books for fairly cheap. I had never heard the term “paperback,” so I went into a dime store and asked if they had any “pocket books.” So they ushered me over to the ladies’ purses. I was so disappointed. It must have been that Christmas that my mother somehow got her hands on a publisher’s catalog and ordered me a large box of paperbacks, in all styles, reading levels, and subject matter, from Elephant Toast to Robinson Crusoe to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Call of the Wild to Journey to the Centre of the Earth (possibly my favorite book of all time) to Julius Caesar. It’s the single best gift I received in childhood, from a parent who could barely afford to put food on the table. I guess that goes a long way to making up for her ghostwriting my autobiography the year before, come to think of it.

At that point, the library couldn’t hold me. I wanted my own books. In 7th grade I had to start going to the high school, about 2 miles from home. I usually took the city bus, which cost 12 cents each way. But when I discovered that Everard Drugs sold paperback books on a revolving rack, I would walk to school and back and save the bus money until I could afford the 25- and 35-cent books. I got some pretty racy books, because I hadn’t yet learned how to judge a book by its cover. (Or maybe I had.) I remember reading about a boy who showed a girl his “wiener,” and I haven’t felt the same way about hot dogs ever since.

I joined the Detective Book Club, subscribed to the Saturday Review of Literature, and devoured all the reading assigned in my English classes, except for Charles Dickens, whom I hated at first read. BLEAK House, good choice of adjective, Charles. Once, I brought one of the Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason) books to school—The Case of the Calendar Girl—and this cute boy who would never have talked to me otherwise asked to look at it. Of course I was thrilled, but he was obviously just looking to see if there were any dirty parts in it. There weren’t.

Just as often as I would happen upon a classic like Seventeen by Booth Tarkington, I was drawn to books based on TV shows. My 9th grade English teacher, Mr. Eidt, who had also been my mother’s teacher (so you know how many decades he had on him), shamed me when he did a locker check and found a Leave it to Beaver book in mine. I turned the shame inward but didn’t understand exactly what was wrong with it. It was like being pre-sexual (though I was already post-)—you’re just going along, doing what feels good, and suddenly the Adult World starts judging.

I joined the Adult World when my friend Jerry turned me on to The Catcher in the Rye. I still have my original paperback copy, which might be valuable by now, but I went through and underlined all the funny parts; one doesn’t have a sense of “This will be worth cash money someday” when one is 15. It’s a cliché now, but I cannot overstate the significance of that book to my world view. I was done with Beaver and Wally; started reading “real” books and listening to Bob Dylan records. I had no idea that I was falling into step with my generation. I wasn’t aware of having a generation. But when I got to Michigan State a few years later, there was a whole culture, counter to the established one, that felt tailor-made for me.

In high school I joined the debate club, a really odd choice because I hated public speaking. I had a serious crush on the debate coach, Mr. Malechuk, so maybe that’s what motivated me. There is no more dreaded memory in my life than the mornings I had to get up before dawn and prepare to spend a winter day being driven to Houghton or some other way-northern town to (a) throw up and (b) debate. We won most of our debates, but I truly hated doing it. My specialty was taking the negative side, which may have been inevitable given the “Mary Mary quite contrary” mantra that I still hear to this day. Inexplicably—again—I took the $100 I had inherited from my grandfather and rode a Greyhound bus downstate to MSU one summer for a week-long debate clinic. Did I tell you this already? Well, long story short, my assigned debate partner broke his leg on the first or second day and got to sit out the rest of the week, while I had to take both affirmative and negative sides in every debate and got no credit for it whatsoever. I don’t remember much else about the experience, except that (a) a girl named Lois Lust was teased mercilessly about her name, and (b) the predominant flora on campus, especially around the student union, exuded the smell of loneliness. I’m not trying to be poetic, it was the oddest thing, like having synesthesia. That smell followed me through the 5 years I later spent there, and I can recall it perfectly to this day. Oh, and (c) the bus ride home was hell on wheels, because a dirty-old-man/evangelist sat next to me and tried to molest me in the name of Jesus… because I had to “open my heart,” you see, and he had to “help” by touching my oh-so-conveniently located heart-area. I didn’t dare speak up, tell the driver, or anything. It was just one more in a series of impositions that I had to endure, and that I never questioned.

I wrote a column in the Maroon News, the high school paper. It was a Herb Caen-esque gossip column that featured little news tidbits and jokes about my classmates. Just about the only words Nancy Hartz said to me in high school were about my question of who had dropped a penny during nap time in kindergarten and made the whole class stay after because she wouldn’t confess. It was her. I think she enjoyed being singled out like that. It was my first foray into ‘zine land, another territory that didn’t yet exist, except in the “inarticulate speech of [my] heart” in the words of Van Morrison.

Except for the kindergarten mystery involving Nancy, my jokes were often at the expense of others. I also drew comic books, many of which also made fun of friends and classmates. It was very satisfying to make other kids laugh that way (I was too shy to talk), and I never considered the effect on the kids I made fun of. I hope I have grown out of that unconscious cruelty by now. Humor can be a way to keep people at arms’ length. I’m not sure that’s the right way to describe it… something about keeping myself safe and separate, unimpeachable—protecting and distinguishing (simultaneously hiding and showing) myself.

In my senior year, I placed fourth in an essay contest with the theme, “What Freedom Means to Me” (my angle: I don’t know, because I take freedom for granted). The top 5 winners had to recite our essays into a microphone and be re-ranked according to the effectiveness of our oral presentation. This moved me from fourth to second place, surprisingly. Then we all got together with Mr. Eidt to polish our essays. The first place winner, Vicky Lundgren, who was beautiful and “rich” (middle class), had written a good essay, but her last sentence was clunky. I don’t remember what the problem was, but I suggested a slight rewording and impressed the heck out of Mr. Eidt… until Vicky persuaded me to tell him we didn’t want to read our essays to the whole school in assembly, and he never spoke to me again. That’s when I learned about the fickleness of “mentors” who drop you if you ever dare to question them. (I’ve experienced this many times through the years.)

As a freshman in college I was placed in an advanced English class with 10 or 11 students, one of whom was a 10-year-old boy genius (now a grown-up computer guy, gasp). I loved the professor, Perry Gianakos, who gave me an A+ on a paper I wrote about Death of a Salesman that apparently changed his mind about whether American literary characters could be tragic heroes according to Aristotle’s definition. I also joined the campus newspaper and wrote headlines that I then cut out of the published paper and mailed back to my favorite teacher, Ruth, eager to show her how well I was doing. I wasn’t really interested in journalism, though. I took many creative writing classes but never got the hang of making stuff up. In lieu of writing fiction, I wrote long, detailed, spirited letters that another of my mentors deemed belles lettres. Another precursor (unbeknownst to me at the time) of my eventual writing style.

Going to library school was a desperate measure designed solely to keep me in academia for another year after college. I went to the University of Michigan but disliked Ann Arbor and hated the so-called graduate-level classes. I was a radical brat and a terrible snob. One of the professors wrote on my evaluation that I “did not present a professional image and should be interviewed in person.” What, knee-torn blue jeans and surly looks weren’t considered professional?? It was 1969! Years later I met him at an ALA convention where I was accepting an award for a friend, and he said, “Oh, so you’re Mary McKenney.” My name had become quite familiar to librarians because of my reviews and articles in the library press. I still looked pretty much like I had in library school, but that was the beauty of the counterculture. We could have it all: do what we wanted, dress like we wanted. That has been my credo ever since.

I had to have a work-study job to pay my way through library school, and the UM library didn’t have any openings, so I was lucky enough to (“meant to”?) land an editing job in the Bureau of Business Research. I turned out to be good at it, and my non-librarian fate was (nearly) sealed. After classes and work, I wrote short reviews for Ted S., a professor who compiled several editions of his book From Radical Left to Extreme Right. I was thoroughly enthralled by underground newspapers and comix and loved writing about them. He paid me $5 apiece for the reviews, and when I asked for a raise he lectured me on how it was supposed to be a labor of love (sure, but he got royalties). The same thing happened when I wrote for Bill K., a library publishing professional who edited many reference books, including Magazines for Libraries. He didn’t pay me much more for longer reviews, and he dropped me when I asked for a small raise. I learned that I rarely get what I want by asking for it. A dubious-sounding lesson, but it seems to be true in my case.

After library school I couldn’t face the thought of working in a library, so I accepted a near-volunteer position at Carleton College (Northfield, MN) on a previously student-run publication, Alternative Press Index. In some ways it was a dream job: I spent most of my time in my tiny office reading underground papers and corresponding with volunteer indexers. I had an attic room in a house owned by the college, and I was thrilled to be living my dream of working in the counterculture. It paid $15 a week, plus government surplus food  (canned bulgur: you haven’t lived…). The dominant credo of the time was to have no distinction between work and life… which is where I am right now, come to think of it. (I don’t know why I’m throwing the word “credo” around.)

Thanks to a radical publication called Vocations for Social Change, I got an actual library job at St. Mary’s College in Maryland, where I hobnobbed with the student and faculty radicals and became infamous for being one of the first “out” lesbians on campus and then for being fired and starting a student revolution (actually, I was a just figurehead wrapped in an enigma). I’ve written about this, too, so I won’t repeat it. I wasn’t really cut out to be a librarian. The mantra of my fellow librarians, even the radical ones, was “information.” I never cared that much for information as a goal. Weird that I ended up editing science, which is sort of the ultimate in information.

P was an older student at the college, and looking back it seems like a fateful moment when we passed each other on a country road, at dusk, no one else around. We knew of each other’s existence—we were the campus feminist matchmaker’s dream, an “angry Navy wife” and a “virgin dyke”—but didn’t speak. I can hardly believe that that was 40 years ago. After she graduated, we moved to the Bay Area and lived with her grandmother and great aunt for several months. We found jobs, moved to the City, and climbed the respective ladders in our professions.

I could go on and on (and already have), but that’s enough for now. For some visual relief, I present two photographs, taken by P (of course), of her cat Maddie.

A few postscripts:

• In one day’s mail recently, the only two things I received were a check for my editing work for $105 and a water bill for $105.11. I told P, who commented, “You’re losing ground.”

• The other night, I dreamed about my h.s. teacher Ruth (whom I recently found out has died). Unlike all previous dreams of her, this one was completely gratifying. She gave me a beautiful pin with my name on it, and I wept and hugged her 3 times. It felt upon awakening that I was giving myself back to myself, in a way. She gave me a great gift back then. My mistake was in confusing the giver with the gift.

• ¹ Remember there was a footnote way back there? J. Hillman and M. Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse.

• Below: View outside P’s new house. OK, so Oregon has some pretty sights, too.

Mary McKenney

It was my first time in a doctor’s office since the spring of 2000. The nurse’s first order of business was to weigh me—while I was fully clothed and wearing wooden clogs. So I figure 10 pounds of that were not me. Then she took me to an examining room where there were two chairs against the wall to my left, and she told me to sit in “the first seat.” Have I mentioned that I sometimes feel like Rain Man without a feel for numbers? Here is exactly what passed through my mind when faced with this seemingly simple command: Well, it depends where you start counting, doesn’t it? So I did a rapid calculation—too rapid for the ordinary human brain to comprehend—and chose to sit in the farther chair. This made perfect sense to me at the time, but of course she meant the chair closer to me, i.e., “the first seat.”

It’s as if my brain responds to cues that are completely generated from within. A person of normal intelligence would immediately know that “the first seat” was the first one she came to. I, on the other hand, had to turn it into a complex binary equation-cum-philosophical query into the order of numbers, and I don’t even think there is such a thing. In the 2 milliseconds I spent trying to work this out, I did not take into account the situation and the environmental cues, such as the fact that there was a small table next to “the first seat,” where the nurse was obviously going to sit to take my blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate. But no, I was operating in an intellectual vacuum. And I felt like an idiot when she made me move to the other chair. Now I contend that mistakes like this may be evidence of high intelligence (I’m only half joking): People with “smart people’s disease” see ambiguities where the average person sees only the obvious. I’ll bet you that if I were editing IQ tests today, I’d find many such ambiguities, as I do in papers on cardiac surgery or asthma. “Book-smart” people are often mocked for lacking in common sense, and this may be part of the explanation. Look at me, turning lemons into lemonade! I know I sound terribly full of myself, but I readily admit that my E and S Q’s (Emotional and Social quotients) are sadly below average.

I hasten to clarify that people of high intelligence who have no trouble distinguishing the obvious from the inexplicable are blessed with a refined sense of their surroundings and should be thankful instead of judging me for looking for a silver lining.

I’m not sure if the following is evidence for or against my theory. Lately I’ve been noticing that I use the phrase “didn’t occur to me” an awful lot. I bought a product at Mighty Pet that you add to your cat’s drinking water to keep his teeth clean or give him better breath or something. The directions said to add a capful of the stuff to 16 oz. of water. I didn’t have a big enough water bowl to hold 16 oz., so I bought a bigger bowl, but my cats wouldn’t drink out of it. My sister Barb asked if I tried putting half a capful into 8 oz. of water, and I had to admit it “didn’t occur to me.” One day I locked my keys in the car at a farm market. When I told P about it later, she said, “Good thing you have AAA.” And I thought, Damn! It didn’t occur to me! (A nice policeman helped me out.) Even after this realization, I started to worry in advance about my Jeep’s gears freezing in the Green Bay airport parking lot while I’m in San Francisco for the painting intensive in December, like they did last year. Finally, I remembered, Oh, yeah, if it happens again I can call AAA! I haven’t used my AAA card in 20 years, and somehow I had stopped connecting the $48 annual fee with actually needing the service.

Am I embarrassed to be making these revelations? Yes, a bit. But I’m more interested in observing the wormholes in my personal “brainscape.” (That word, which I thought I made up, is actually the name of “a database for resting state functional connectivity studies… [for] mapping the intrinsic functional topography of the brain, evaluating neuroanatomical models, and investigating neurological and psychiatric disease.” The website has a drawing of a brain with colored splotches on it, and it looks like a painter’s palette! Think of the connections!) I’m not a scientist, and I couldn’t be more surprised at what I ended up doing for a living (editing for scientists). Quirky writing and metaphorical exploration are much more fun for me.

As I chart the waters at the horizon of the flat earth of my life span, wondering if I’m going to fall off the edge or pursue the horizon as it gets farther and farther away—or, less poetically, as I get closer to oblivion—I’ve vowed not to repeat my mother’s mantra in her later years, “It’s hell to get old.” She was talking not only about the body complaints but about the brain blips that I am now very familiar with, the “I walked into this room and now I have no idea what I’m doing here” natural loss of short-term whatchamacallit, memory. She died before she got dementia, thankfully. I hear that dementia is frightening, but would it have to be? I hypothesize (i.e., wishfully speculate) that it may be possible to keep one foot, or two tippy toes, on a safe spot while surrounded by confusion and loss of identity. Could I have myself a laugh while the aides at The Home tut-tut about my wearing panties on my head? Not knowing which chair to sit in will be small potatoes indeed. Could self-acceptance go so far as to allow one to celebrate being painted into a corner, having given up real estate but found the perfect place to preserve the brain’s eyes and ears and low-level functioning? My doctors and alternative healers never knew that I cured myself of agoraphobia and lower back pain through reading self-help books. So can I take my night dreams of death-acceptance and my autodidactic survey of self and my experience of painting beyond anything in the known world and create my own befuddled but privately cherished corner of the universe? I almost look forward to testing this out.

*

I’ve written before about having odd sentences pop into my mind when I’m in the twilight zone between wake and sleep. Recent example: “We had to resign from school all the way in.” And a more colorful one: “We would definitely become topless bitches.” What goes on in there?

*

You’ve heard of “Overheard”? Well, this is a new feature: “Overread.”  In Bob Dylan in America, Sean Wilhentz quotes someone saying that Dylan wasn’t stoned in a session, he “wasn’t hooked on anything but time and space.” Am I the only one who finds this  hilarious?

back to my body

Because I’ve been AWOL from the medical-industrial complex for so long, I now have to get lab work, X-rays, and a full physical, including a colonoscopy, a mammogram, and a vaginal invasion. Oh Lordy. The sky over the doctor’s office is dark with chickens coming home to roost. Back in 2000, my last doctor “visit” (as if you sit around chatting over a cup of tea: “How you been?” “Good… you?”) had culminated in gallbladder surgery, a shot in the dark by a doctor who had no idea how literal my mind-body connection really is. (When I googled “mind-body” to find the noun that goes after it, a listing on the first page of results was for “pole dance classes.” I decided not to try to figure out the connection—ah, the word I wanted!). Like a whole string of other physical problems that were actually based in emotional trauma, sublimation, ignorance, or stress, the tightening band of pain around my abdomen was still there after the gallbladder was gone, and I think in the past 10 years I’ve hoped that I’d meet my maker by getting hit by a bus or falling out of a window before I had to go back into the belly of the beast.

The reason I was finally forced to return was pain in both knees that came on all of a sudden as I was walking down the stairs. The pain lasted for 6 or 7 weeks, and I could no longer talk myself into the “That’s OK, I’ll probably die of bird flu before it becomes a real problem” avoidance tactic. My sister Barb likes her doctor, so I decided to go to him.

I tarted myself up by shaving my legs (first time this century) and wearing my “Olds Cool” t-shirt so he’d know I’m hip and happenin’ despite my chronological age. I had to run over to Walgreen’s the night before to buy a shaver. That was a waste, because I didn’t have to take my clothes off for the “visit,” and the hair is just going to grow back. It didn’t occur to me (there it goes again) to shave my armpits. For my physical, which is in a week or so, I’ll be sure to do all the appropriate personal grooming.

“Dr. T” is youngish—early 40s, I’d say—and a handsome devil. He assured me that “we live in America” so I don’t have to do anything he recommends. What a switch. Doctors used to browbeat us about giving up caffeine and losing weight, and airlines barely registered our existence. He dictated all my vital information into a recorder as I was sitting there so I could confirm or correct it on the spot. However, I suspect that he adds an addendum after the patient leaves, because he didn’t reveal his first impressions of me (“Patient is a 63-year-old woman with bad skin, dykey haircut, weird taste in clothes, and overweight due to wearing heavy clogs”).

In my provincial, West-Coast-leaning way, I had figured that doctors in the Midwest would be subpar because, Why would they want to live here? But so far I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the competence and friendliness of everyone I’ve encountered. I had spent several hours at the hospital—which they insist on calling “Bay Area” Medical Center (“BA”MC)—when my sister K (ironically) had knee surgery last month. It was one big happy family as RNs, LPNs, and MDs stopped by her room to say hi to the three members of my family who have been going to them for various ailments over the years. My sisters introduced me, and I’ve finally lost the label “sister from California.” I have gone native at last.

tech-no-no-how

I don’t have a smart phone, but it’s still a devious little thing. It lives in my pocket and connives to perform various functions when I am leaning forward, squatting down, or otherwise causing one of the buttons on the front of the phone to ping. It might turn itself off (then on), go to my contact list, try to send a text message, come this close to going online. Once at 4 a.m., I heard the telltale ping in my pocket, and I took it out to see what it was up to. Nothing was pressing against it, so I didn’t think my body language had sent any unintentional messages. When I looked at it, the screen was showing my contact list at M. P—. Before I could press End—like grabbing the cat before it escapes out the door—it rang. I press Talk and there’s nothing. I say, “M—“? and my sister K says, “This is his wife, can I help you?” But if I called him, why did my phone ring? I quickly say, “It’s Mary!” and we have a confusing back-and-forth about why are you calling, why are you calling? I explain that it was my cell phone’s doing. As we’re about to hang up, K says, “Thank you for not being ‘the other woman’.” We giggle and say bye. Later, MP refuses to believe that my phone called him all by itself. I have since learned that this is called “pocket dialing.” You would think that the geniuses at Apple or wherever would have come up with a way to prevent this. Flip phones are still popular on TV shows, because they make a dramatic and satisfying snik when they snap shut. But with my slide phone I pay extra every month for junk text messages (received, not sent) and “Casual Data Usage,” whatever that is.

Later that day, I force myself to leave the house and drive the seemingly interminable 5.83 miles (per Mapquest) to Shopko to get a prescription filled. I pull into the parking lot and find a spot near the door to the pharmacy. The car next to me is just starting to pull out. I get out of the Jeep, lock up, and turn to see that the driver of the other car is my other sister Barb. Now, this might not sound that unusual, but I rarely see anyone I know when I’m out and about. In the 6 years since I moved back to my hometown, I’ve run into K maybe 2 or 3 times at Angeli’s, Barb once before at Shopko, and MP a few times on the road, where we wave and grin maniacally at each other as we pass, as if it’s the most amazing thing in the world. (To defend myself against the charge of not recognizing my sister’s car, she got rid of the big purple truck and now drives a generic black SUV.)

So my brain puts these two unlikely events together—the errant phone call and the precise juxtaposition of Barb’s and my shopping trips, and I think, This has got to mean something. I’ve never really believed in coincidence. I’ve been determined to make sense out of the world (or, if necessary, impose sense on it) since I was first capable of wishful thinking. I’ve gone through periods when absolutely everything seemed like a message from The Universe. One day in the 1980s I found a dime on the ground in each of three different counties: San Francisco, Marin, and Alameda. Instead of just glorying in my 30-cent windfall, I set the parameters for significance. Surely there must be a meaningful pattern here? But then what could I do with that information? Unless some psychology grad student was going around dropping coins all over the Bay Area to study, I don’t know, dime migration, there was no way to decode the mystery. (Strangely, each dime had a little metal tag on it… now I’m just being silly.) I think a mathematician would say that each dime-finding was a separate event, with separate odds. But I insist on taking geography and time into account, making it one multi-event with supposedly low, low odds. This is why I’m not a mathematician: the rules! the absolutes! Plus, no feel for numbers.

It was lovely when I took Deepak Chopra at his word that “The universe is infinitely correlated.” I can’t know definitively that it’s not, but it’s suspiciously comforting, like the idea that Jesus is waiting for us up in heaven—or is he coming back here first? I’m not clear on that. I’ve had a long love affair with synchronicity, but it presupposes an order that is not necessarily there. So I’m down to not believing in anything, really—not in a nihilistic, depressing way, but just standing here on the edge of the Unknown, open to possibilities and opportunities, without trying to fit scenarios onto it like it’s a paper doll with infinite wardrobe choices.

*

Here in the U.P. and N.E.W. (Northeastern Wisconsin; I didn’t make it up), the stories keep rolling in. A formerly close friend of the family robs a Cash&Go (Check&Go? Well, Rob&Go, now) across the street from his house, to which he drives right after the heist. An ex-wife gets arrested for shoplifting at WalMart. A long-lost brother is discovered after supposedly jumping out of a 7-story building in California. The police have identified him from his fingerprints, but there is still some suspicion on this end that it may not be him because “it’s not that hard to fake fingerprints.” It’s not? I feel like I’ve lived such a normal, unassuming life up to this point, but back here in my “boring” Midwestern hometown these bizarre happenings are commonplace, as if the real action takes place in the middle of the country while people on the coasts sit around reading books and thinking great thoughts.

People around here divorce and move their kids to Madison or Texas while the other spouse moves also and then bemoans how far away the kids are. Or lives closer but resents being invited to the ex’s new place only to find that he is expected to babysit while the ex goes out. This is considered unconscionable, even after I retort that he’s the father. People take drugs and deal them, start fights in bars, go deep into debt (“How can you afford that trailer, Brian?” “Go into debt!” [an actual quote]), lose track of their grown kids. A 37-year-old man is estranged from certain family members over his involvement with a much younger cousin; he got out of that situation only to move in with a man he supervises at work and then took up with the guy’s 21-year-old daughter, who now lives with them. The roommate is threatening various things. The “drama queen,” as he is now known, calls home to Mama, who can only give him advice he should be able to figure out on his own.

The saddest thing for me in this flurry of dissolution and dislocation is that I lost my connection with two of Barb’s granddaughters (who are sisters). They have different fathers and now live with their mother and another man who is not the father of their new little sister. When I saw them frequently, one of them told me she wanted to take an after-school gymnastics class at the Y in Menominee, but her parents said they couldn’t afford it. So, using Barb as a go-between, I offered to pay for the class. Word filtered back to me that she couldn’t go anyway, because she had no way to get there (2.74 miles). So I offered to pick her up at school and drive her to the Y, then back again when the class was over. It was only twice a week, and I had nothing better to do. There was no word and no filter after that, just a big silent door slam. Were they suspicious of my motives? That could just be my paranoia, but I’ll never know. I do know that people without money are innately suspicious of others’ generosity, seeing it as lording it over them. No one wants to be beholden. You have to have something of your own to believe that someone with more is not trying to humiliate you. With my grandniece, I just wanted to help out my extended family. But the family did not extend itself to me.

*

I love my mostly solitary life, but some days are packjam with human contact, and those are nice, too. One day I had delightful visits (real ones) with my niece Lorraine and my haircutter Lois. Later, I stopped off at Barb’s house to help her with a problem she was having with her computer. Then I lay down on her couch and found it overwhelmingly comfortable, so I stayed while we watched 5 episodes of “Nurse Jackie” and ordered a pizza. Finally, I stumbled on home to find an e-mail from a second cousin, Sharon, who was offering scanned images of old photos of my mother’s family. Over the next few days, we corresponded about the photos and traded family stories. It was slightly disconcerting to realize that I had never really thought about any of my ancestors beyond my grandparents’ generation. But here was evidence that I did not emerge full-blown from the forehead of Grandpa Larsen: a photo of my great-grandfather Pieter Larsen, sitting at a desk back there in the 19th century. It was humbling.

Although it’s perhaps natural to think of oneself as the glorious culmination of thousands of years of procreation, it also occurred to me that, in the great pantheon of life as lived by the great-great-greats, none of it has much to do with me. Let’s say I’m a drop of water in a tiny creek in a cow pasture. (My sisters and I played in one across the road from our house.) As that water drop, I’m all about the creek, the cows, the trees, the changes of weather. Then I find out about the rivers in the area—the Menominee and Peshtigo rivers and their tributaries, Wausaukee, Pike, Pemebonwon, Little Popple, Pine, Popple, Brule, Little Peshtigo, Thunder, and Rat. Then there’s Green Bay off Lake Michigan, and all the Great Lakes, and it just goes on and on. You could argue that, as a drop in a tiny creek, I am not a product of these larger bodies of water but an antecedent, and you wouldn’t be wrong—but if the creek dried up, the other bodies would not be affected at all. So there you have it: my watery analogy for the significance, to me, of my untold myriad of ancestors: I am but a drop (or a drip). So if I were found to be distantly related to, say, Captain Lars Larsen of the Viking Navy, it would add barely a molecule of significance to my life. I admit I’m curious about the McKenney line too, but I’m not going to search it out. I’d rather explore my more immediate influences—the creek waters of which I am a part, the stones in the creek, the cow pies—do they go in the creek too?—the spring flowers, buttercups, violets, the splashing of summer and the frozen rigidity of winter. My ancestors are part of the geologic/physiologic past that formed me, but I’d rather stay in the present than search for remnants of self in those long-ago, many-times-diluted family ties.

*

So, the X-rays of my knees came back with the diagnosis, “degenerative changes,” meaning arthritis. When I was having lower back pain for a year and a half in the early ‘90s, I read about a study in which the X-rays or MRIs of people complaining of back pain were no more indicative of degeneration than were those of people who had no pain. The inescapable conclusion was that doctors see structural changes and then attribute the perceived pain to those changes. The book that cured me of my emotionally based pain (Healing Back Pain, by Dr. John Sarno) includes several references to knees. So now I have my work cut out for me: If I can banish the pain in the next 2 weeks, I won’t have to get a cortisone injection and/or be crippled for life. The power of the mind (and the duplicity of the body) is strong indeed. But I plan to wrestle my errant brain cells to the ground, saving the few that will keep me babbling incoherently at The Home while chuckling up my sleeve in my safe corner, free to think and ponder the secrets of the universe to my heart’s content.

You are here. Which is “the first” number?

[Mary McKenney]

“You had friends in high school??” —my therapist J, sounding just a bit too incredulous

At the end of a 5-day painting intensive, a woman who was fairly new to the group said she had been nervous about coming. “I thought it would be like high school,” she said. “A clique running the ‘school’ and me on the outside like always.” I knew what she meant—you’re never too old to feel like a dorky freshman in a new group—but I wanted to say, “Honey, if this were like high school, I wouldn’t be hanging out with the popular kids—don’t worry about it.”

Back in ’61-’64, my friends Jerry and Gordy and I were on the cutting edge (in our own little small-town way) of the coming countercultural heyday that came to be known as “the sixties.” But the cutting edge is not always the place to be, when you see yourself as potentially infinitely cool for listening to Bob Dylan records, reading J.D. Salinger and the Saturday Review of Literature, and longing to have your own “pad” in New York City—while the rest of your little world sees you as three dorky musketeers, twerps in sheep’s clothing. The literary magazine we started as seniors—we called it Review IV because it was our fourth year of high school—hardly made a ripple on the local scene, but the aspiring poets who read our bulletin board notice at City Lights Bookstore in the magical city of San Francisco sent us their earnest young compositions, never the wiser about who we actually were. I still have the original submissions in a box somewhere, but unfortunately I haven’t unearthed any hidden gems from now-famous poets. Most of the poems we got from that ad were along the lines of “Here are a few of my favorite things/puppy dogs and sunshine…” (the women) or else raw cries of existential angst (the men).

I shouldn’t talk—I was writing truly terrible poetry at the time. One poem started, “All life comes in a-sordid colors.” I was so proud of that pun, I couldn’t really get past it. Unbeknownst to me, I actually made a start in the right direction when I wrote a long, free verse poem for senior English about going for a walk and finding a dead bird. Of course it was hokey, but it was at least from my heart and in my own voice. But pre-1965, the literary world was the ultimate boys’ club, and the boys were still caught up in the postwar heroic despair of looking for meaning in a meaningless universe. And believe me, dead birds were not the way to go. Jerry made such fun of the poem that I stopped writing poetry then and there. Not that he ever wrote anything, but he was a born connoisseur of literary excellence, just ask him.

Long before the days when student rebellion was as de rigueur as sock hops and football games, Gordy and I staged little defiant acts that centered, in those more innocent times, on dress codes. Being the girl, I played the supporting role. Boys were required to wear belts to school, and we all had to stand for the pledge of allegiance every morning. So Gordy rebelled against two birds with one stone. As the rest of us heaved ourselves out of our chairs for the obligatory nationalistic display, he ostentatiously removed his belt and handed it off to me. Then he slouched smugly in his seat while I stood there with my right hand over my heart and my left hand clutching this symbol of (Gordy’s) chains of oppression, feeling like a doofus in my mother-enforced frizzy hairdo, pink-rimmed glasses, and unredeemably dorky Montgomery Wards rust-colored skirt and blouse. As a teenager, the distance between how I felt and how I was allowed to present myself was infinitely large. I was primed for “the sixties” like you wouldn’t believe.

***

Jerry turned out to be gay. He’d had season tickets to the civic symphony since he was 12, which definitely made him “queer” in the general sense, but no one around there knew what “gay” was, least of all me. So all through high school I waged a pointless battle for his romantic attention. He was every bit the ugly duckling I was—painfully thin, unruly hair, glasses; his father worked in a print shop, and they didn’t even own a car—but Jerry was way, way above such considerations. He was my mentor in all things cool because he was so sure of himself, for no reason any of us could figure out. He was a terrible student but saw himself destined for great things. He moved to Indonesia right after college; he was a misfit here, but he lives like a king surrounded by nubile houseboys over there.

I spent so much time with Jerry—hatching our literary aspirations (I was going to be the William Faulkner of the U.P.), listening to classical records he got from the library to educate me—that my mother said to me bitterly when she came to pick me up one day, “Why don’t you just marry the guy?” I didn’t get it then, and I don’t get it now. I knew she was jealous of my crush on my English teacher, Ruth, but I know of no reason why she wouldn’t want me to be friends with this perfectly harmless boy.

Gordy, on the other hand, had a motorcycle and would take me riding while my mother fretted at home. This at least made more sense than her disdain for Jerry, but for someone who supposedly wanted me to have a social life—she’d counsel me before school dances (to which I went alone, of course), “Just walk up to a boy and say, “Hi! I’m Mary McKenney!”—she had a funny way of showing it.

Gordy was not gay but was so shy that it took me a good 15 years to realize that he had been waging a small battle for my romantic attention all through junior high and high school. Once again, my life takes on the aura of an O. Henry story. By the tenth grade, I bore the scars of years of being the ugly girl—boys making fun of me, snickering to one another when they had to dance with me during a “ladies’ choice,” Vernon Lemke holding me at arm’s length, one hand in my armpit to stave off any closer contact. So when Gordy became part of Jerry’s and my bohemian clique, I still saw him as the squirrelly kid who had pulled my hair and grabbed my purse in junior high. He had beautiful straight black hair, cut like the Beatles’, but he was short and swarthy (I realize now that he looked a little like Prince, but that look was way ahead of its time) and terribly insecure. We were both Jerry’s intellectual protégés, so in going after Jerry, I was, in effect, choosing the “alpha male,” such as he was.

I was so far from being able to imagine any boy being interested in me that I completely ignored the clues—that Gordy and I would lie on my bed in the dark, at his insistence (where was my intrusive mother?), listening to Bob Dylan or Peter, Paul and Mary records; that he gave me a wagon wheel he had burnt half-black with a torch and attached a rusty chain to (he was the artistic one of the trio—his bedroom had a fishnet draped from the ceiling, black walls, and lots of Chianti bottles with candles dripping multicolored wax all over them); that he once pulled his jacket over his head and threw a ring at me, in an apparent bid to make me his “girl.” I laughed it off, not having even the faintest idea that he could be serious. In my rare moments of feeling empathy for teenage boys in their quest for female acceptance, I think of Gordy. And even now, I wonder if I could be imagining the whole thing.

After high school, Gordy disappeared somewhere and later surfaced in Maui, where he lives to this day, as far as I know. Jerry and I both went to Michigan State; we saw each other on campus occasionally, but he had bigger fish to fry. He collected a series of beautiful, emotionally unstable gay men he took home to Menominee for visits, his mother glad he had so many “friends.” I learned about lesbianism from the first joke I heard in college. One roommate says to the other, “I want to be frank with you.” The other says, “No, I want to be Frank.” (I had to have this explained to me.) In my sophomore year, there were two lesbians in my creative writing class. I would see them walking on campus while surreptitiously holding hands behind their backs. I was totally creeped out and said contemptuously to Jerry that I had seen some queers. He was so deeply closeted that he didn’t say a word.

***

… she might well have wondered what there could be but a future of pain for a woman who cannot be a part of conventional society. Poor Elvira! Think of the anguish, being on the fringes of real life, not having a family, not producing roly-poly grandchildren, going from spiky-haired woman to spiky-haired woman, marching in so many parades, spending vast sums of money on therapy, keeping a houseful of cats. —Jane Hamilton, Disobedience

Then I fell in love with my roommate. BR (her name was Barb, but I don’t want you to confuse her with my sister) was a beautiful, voluptuous girl from Detroit who was acting out like crazy, in retaliation (I surmised) against her psychologist mother. She would sleep with men on the first date and then come back to the dorm and get in bed with me and weep on my chest. Unfortunately, we were total closet cases. We joked about “being Frank” all the time; we held hands, I sat on her lap, and she gave me excruciatingly so-near-and-yet-so-far backrubs, but neither of us had the nerve to go any further. When I realized what I was feeling, I looked up “lesbianism” in the library and was not put off in the least by all the declarations of “perversion.” (Remember, in 1965 no other interpretation was available, at least in mainstream sources. We have indeed come a long way.) I was already in counterculture mode and was relieved to find out why I had always felt “different.” Now I know that there’s a whole slew of reasons for my feeling of differentness, but at the time it was a liberating discovery.

My desire for BR was stronger than anything I had ever felt. My pursuit of Jerry and my crush on my English teacher were nothing in comparison. I can still see her creamy white breasts gleaming in the moonlight as she swept into my room, robe flying apart, but I could no more have touched her or spoken about my feelings than I could have flown to the moon—which we also didn’t know was possible in those days. All I could do was watch her and suffer in silence, letting Peter & Gordon’s song—“Woman, do you love me?”—express the unsayable.

BR and I planned to drop out of college after our sophomore year and move to New York City, where her autoworker stepfather could get us secretarial jobs in the union office. But in the meantime she acquired a boyfriend, Jim, whom she tried to get me to sleep with (Freudian much?), and went to the college counseling office for help in making her choice. The counselor told her to choose the man, and she did. She married and quickly divorced him, then married another guy. In one of her later letters to me, she revealingly said, “He’s fun, but he’s not you.” I’ll always wonder what would have happened if I had declared my interest. But something tells me I would have been just as unsuccessful with her as Gordy was with me. If you’re not ready for something, you can’t see it even when it’s standing right in front of you, its jacket over its head, tossing you a ring.

As it turned out, I dropped out of college anyway, but I didn’t run off to New York, I just hung around East Lansing with my remaining roommates, getting stoned out of my mind and celebrating—ironically—the Summer of Love.

***

If you come to a fork in the road, take it. —Yogi Berra

When I was in the tenth grade, a few of us nerdy types started a literature & philosophy club called PhiLi. We met in the popular kids’ hangout, a funky little restaurant at the intersection of Highways 41 and 35 that everyone called “The Pit.” We did not meet at the same times that the popular kids did. (Once, I was invited to The Pit by the popular kids after a rehearsal of the school play—I was a makeup girl, believe it or not—and I remember just sitting there frozen, speechless, having not the faintest idea of what to say to people who had it in them to be homecoming kings and queens.) In PhiLi, we read William James and debated some of the eternal questions, such as: If you’re walking around a tree on which a squirrel is scrambling around the trunk, are you also walking around the squirrel?… and … (of somewhat more immediate interest): Are we governed by fate, or do we have free will? i.e., did we each make a free decision to come to The Pit tonight, and what if we had come halfway and then turned around and gone home, would that mean it was fate that we didn’t come, or that we had exercised our free will?

The club didn’t last very long.

But the question about fate vs. free will is, of course, always with us, and I still wonder if the forks in the road we come upon really represent choices or if there’s some inner compass that causes us to forge ahead on our One True Path regardless of other so-called possibilities. Is my present life merely a consequence of not becoming lovers with BR, of not going to New York? Is it only because these things didn’t happen that I became a librarian, that I met Peggy in my first (and last) library job, that I moved to the Bay Area and started an editing career, that I was led to a fulfilling, creative life through painting….? To this day, I’ve never even been to New York. Is there a Mary in a parallel universe who lives in the Village, who became an editor in a publishing company instead of a university, who rides the subway instead of the ferry? Or was I destined to come to the Left Coast, to ply my trade and write my little ‘zine (far, far from the literary pretensions of Review IV)? It’s not as if these questions keep me awake at night, but when I’m between work assignments and have spent the afternoon napping and reading the latest John Grisham novel, and the sun is setting pinkishly through the window above my computer, and I have pan-fried filet of sole to look forward to for dinner (pan-fried for me by the chefs at Woodlands Market)… what the hell?

***

Lately, I’m continually bombarded with images from random moments of my past, as if I’m flipping through a photo album of my life, or spinning a wheel of fortune that lands briefly on this or that person or scene. I’m beginning to see why old people spend so much time thinking about the past. You spend your 20s and 30s building your life, having relationships and making a career—thinking you’ve escaped whatever gruesome childhood and adolescence you endured—and then when you turn 50 or so, there it is, staring you in the face again, demanding to be acknowledged, like a slo-mo version of your life flashing in front of your eyes. It seems as if the past doesn’t get more and more distant, as logic would dictate. It curves, maybe, like space, coming back around again, feeling like yesterday. Maybe when you die, your life is revealed to have been lived all in one “day,” all as accessible to you as what you had for breakfast this morning.

I was sitting at my desk the other day, editing a book about all the horrible things that bacteria can do to cheese, milk, meat, vegetables, grains, i.e., every food item we hold dear—there’s even a “cocoa and chocolate” chapter—and I had a visceral kind of insight, an undeniable sense that we think in terms of horizontal, i.e., time “going by,” linear, us floating in it—when actually our experience is vertical—nothing moves, we are like pillars standing in time, and what “happens” to us is all happening at the same “time,” like when the laser printer messes up and all the letters of your sentence pile on top of one another. We think our lives are like sentences, paragraphs, like we’re volumes in a great library of never-ending rows of shelves. But actually it’s as if there’s a plumb line going from God, down through our center into the earth and beyond. Everything’s happening on this line. All our experience is equally present (if a bit compacted), there’s no such thing as “movement.” Which is why, I suppose, we’re exhorted by the Buddhists to “live in the moment,” because there’s nowhere else to be.

I know this is abstract, but when I had this insight, I was thinking about our December painting intensive and of some of the wonderful moments I had with people there, and I realized that those moments are still alive—even the moments we had last year, or 3 years ago—they are not “lost in time,” any more than loving someone who lives 3,000 miles away is diluted because of the space between you. The profound experiences I’ve had are all here now; all the people I’ve ever loved (or not) are here, patiently waiting their turn in the line at the memory bank, ready to make a deposit or a withdrawal, nobody’s going nowhere.

It’s like nothing is ever lost. And maybe the body itself is the memory bank—the bricks&mortar/flesh&bone institution that organizes the experience. So maybe it’s not about choosing roads more or less traveled by but about simply being. I don’t think I missed out on my “real life” by not recognizing Gordy’s interest, or by BR not recognizing (or acting on) mine. I did finally meet someone, we recognized each other’s interest, and the laughs and tears ensued. Maybe it always looks “meant to be” when you look back on your life, but I can’t help thinking it’s a true perception. You start out as an acorn, end up as an oak tree; where does “choice” come in?

I don’t know if anyone else is interested in these crackpot theories, these half-baked intuitive fantasies of what the world is really like. I suppose I could take a poll of my readers and see what percentage wants to read about: (1) cats, (2) travel, (3) food, (4) “physics,” or (5) sex (eek!), but don’t fence me in, you know? Sometimes I feel like a kitten chasing a ball of yarn, I just like to see it all unravel.

[Mary McKenney]

This is mary’zine #40, which means it’s sort of my 40th anniversary…. which I shall use as an awkward segue to another 40th anniversary that’s been in the news….

if you don’t remember the ‘60s…

I wasn’t at Woodstock, thank God. Instead, in the summer of ‘69 my friends Ralph and Kathy and I traveled in a station wagon from East Lansing, MI, to the Atlantic City Pop Festival and the Newport Folk Festival. Woodstock was 2 weeks after A.C., but Woodstock wasn’t yet Woodstock, if you know what I mean, and we figured we could see more acts at the twofer. I was incredibly miserable through the whole trip. First, I don’t travel well, as you may know. Also, we spent a day at the ocean as soon as we got there, no suntan lotion, nothing. My only concern at the time was the seaweed in my bathing suit. But by evening I was burnt to a crisp and became sick and feverish. If I had known then what I know now, I would have gone to the emergency room. I remember lying across several folding chairs in the back of the Newport concert while someone (I thought I remembered that it was Joan Baez, but apparently she wasn’t even there) sang her folksy heart out. The music was beautiful, the night was pleasantly cool, the stars sparkled in the vast night sky, but it was not transcendent, it was hell. You know how they say youth is wasted on the young? Well, it was wasted on me all right. The ‘60s were a great time to be young, but my youth was consumed by anxiety and depression, mostly in anticipation of the great void that was my unimaginable future. And Zoloft was not yet a twinkle in the eye of its Creator.

So all I remember of the festival itself is one afternoon small-group session with Pete Seeger and that nauseating night listening to _______. And oh, by the way, I don’t remember the dope helping my nausea at all.

We had no money, so we slept in the station wagon and then had to sneak into gas station bathrooms to clean up. We got chased away from a couple of them. We were as bedraggled as you can imagine, but I was still outraged at being stereotyped as a dirty hippie—I was a respectable college student! I had studied the philosophy of art! By the way, we didn’t call ourselves hippies, we were freaks, as in the Furry Freak Brothers. I seem to be the only one from my generation who remembers that. Also, “politically correct” was coined by the left about the right, and no one except squares ever used the word pot. I can’t bring myself to say it to this day—but I know better than to say “grass.” “Dope” and “weed” seem to be perennially acceptable. One is always trying to be “with it” without usurping the cultural hegemony of one’s youngers. Unfortunately, we oldies are going to be around for a while, boring them to death with our stories of youthful abandon and our all-around selfishness.

We also found a church that would give us free doughnuts, but we had to sit and listen to a Jesus-talk at the same time. It did not feel like a fair trade. Plus, I was still burnt and sick.

Tell me where are the flashbacks they all warned us would come.

—Jimmy Buffett

I’d feel bad about the lack of detail in this account, but you know that if you remember the ‘60s you weren’t there. I do have a few snapshot-memories, but those are notoriously unreliable. You can be thoroughly convinced that you remember something a certain way, but it’s been shown that the brain doesn’t go back to the raw data, it makes a copy and then every time you check the memory, it’s of that copy—and the copy itself can disappear or become corrupted. So the brain is less conscientious than a carpenter (“measure twice, cut once”). Even worse is that the original “memory” itself is unreliable, because our feelings color our perceptions. So the half-life of an accurate recording and copying of an event is vanishingly small. Thus we are nothing but layers upon layers of innocent deceit. The “self” is built from these dangling threads of amorphous, poorly focused conjecture.

A mundane example of what I’m talking about is a scene from “Mad Men” (best show on television). Betty and her young daughter Sally are out on the front porch when a policeman comes by to tell Betty that her father died. Both Betty and Sally are stunned. The policeman needs to know what should be done with the body, so Betty goes in the house to get her father’s papers. Everyone who discusses this show online seems to remember this scene as Betty going in the house and closing the door in Sally’s face. But when you watch it again, you see that Betty goes in the house, leaving the door open, and the policeman follows her in and shuts the door. Sally is left outside, but the door is hardly “closed in her face.” But the emotional truth of the show is that Betty is cold to her daughter and thinks only of herself; thus we believe that her neglect is manifested by physically shutting Sally out. Now, if our memories are that unreliable one day after watching a TV show that we pay close attention to and discuss with others in great detail, imagine how skewed the memories of our own lives must be.

To the extent that there are any verifiable facts in the following paragraph, I owe it all to the internets.

At Atlantic City, along with 100,000 other people, we saw Janis Joplin, The Chambers Brothers, Iron Butterfly, and a host of other famous acts, but those are the only ones I remember… Janis because she was Janis, and the other two because they had the longest, worst songs of the bunch: “Time Has Come Today” (“TIME……….. TIME……… TIME…………”) and “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” The place was incredibly muddy… probably not as bad as Woodstock, but still. One of my recurring miseries was having to use the filthy In-A-Porta-Da-Potties, which I wouldn’t have minded so much, but there was a long line outside each of them, and I had a shy bladder that made it impossible for me to go when anyone (let alone hundreds of anyone’s) was waiting for me. I also had a nausea phobia and became very nervous when I was packed in with all those people and couldn’t see a way out. Let’s face it, I was not cut out for the hippie/freak life. I happen to have the letter I wrote to my mother after the trip, so I eagerly reread it to get the, you know, lush, you-were-there, first-hand impressions. But alas, because I had written it to my mother, there was absolutely nothing of interest in it.

One pill makes you larger/And one pill makes you small/And the ones that mother gives you/Don’t do anything at all.

—Jefferson Airplane

My father had died that spring. What I remember about that was getting the phone call from my mother and then that evening sitting on my boyfriend’s—you heard me, boyfriend’s—lap listening to “Piece of My Heart” after taking some random pills someone had given us. We really didn’t care what they were—what difference did it make whether you got larger or smaller? The pills turned out to be downers—perfect for ambivalent grieving?

I’m surprised anyone lived through that time. Perhaps our saving grace was that it was all quite new; we were such innocents. I mean, on “Gentle Thursdays” we would run out in the street and hand daffodils to strangers, all proud of our peacenik ways. Yeah, it was dumb, but all kids do dumb things, that’s how they find out who they are.

So what does all this have to do with the 40th issue of the mary’zine? Nothing, why do you ask? It’s not as if I started writing it in 1969. What I was writing in 1969 was tortured fiction that drew on some tortured experiences I had had, but I didn’t know at the time that you could just write like you were writing a letter. I thought it had to be all formal and correct. Yet, at the same time, I was writing long letters to friends and was often told that my letters were fun to read. Ah… too soon old, too late schmart, as Mom used to say. Or maybe not too old in my case, because, well, here I am.

thought experiment

Now, I’m no scientist—more of a metaphysical autodidact—but I’ve been observing some interesting phenomena and putting 2 + 2 together. Not exactly sure what 2 + 2 adds up to yet, but hear me out.

First, all you folks d’un certain âge—born barely post-WWII—will recognize the continuing deterioration of one’s short-term memory. This used to be a joke. “I walk into a room and completely forget why I’m there!” This experience has become so common as to be unremarkable. But lately the short term is getting shorter and shorter. The speed at which my thoughts flash by and careen off the edge of the screen is truly awesome. I’ll think something, and then a millisecond later there is nothing, and I mean nothing. I have to really concentrate, trace my mental steps, or just stand in one place long enough to get that thought back.

I suspect that, at some point, that little gap—which may be empty of thought, but at least I’m there to notice it—will disappear, and I won’t even know that I had the thought, thus I won’t know that I can’t remember it. And that’s when it will get either scary or, I don’t know, extremely interesting. Maybe not so interesting when you walk into the kitchen, don’t remember why you’re there, don’t notice that you don’t remember why you’re there, turn the stove on… and walk away, letting the house burn down. But that comes later. Right now, you’re still in the phase where you walk into the kitchen, don’t remember why you’re there, retrace your thought-steps, think “oh yeah,” and turn the stove on. Everything proceeds normally from there, and you eat your supper instead of burning the house down—unless, of course, while you’re waiting for the spaghetti water to boil you walk into another room and forget why you’re there…. But my point is that, not only will the short-term memory go, but there won’t be any silent gap in which to regain your stride, get back on your track, and so on.

OK, hold that thought (if you can). My second observation is that my mind has a mind of its own when I’m tired. I’ll be sitting in my comfy chair reading a book or doing a crossword puzzle, and suddenly these sentences will pop into my mind, unrelated to the text of the book or the clues in the puzzle. The sentences are not my thoughts, nor are they talking to me. It’s more that my “signal” is being temporarily suppressed and other “channels” are opening up. It’s impossible to remember these little gems for long, so one night I wrote a few of them down after I “came to.”

“You were there for the gold feather.”

“I just don’t count on dogs being 4 or 5 months old.”

“They were horrible floors.”

“I’m not convinced these farmers are going to do any good.”

These sentences just came unbidden, as if someone (not I) were reading a book in my mind.

After the disembodied sentences come images—dream precursors, if you will—unless, of course, I’ve jerked awake just as the book is about to hit me in the face, in which case I try again to focus, but before I know it I’m in la-la land again. The images that come are not static, it’s as if I’m watching a movie in my head. I have no idea what movie it is, and there’s no narrator to explain the action, it’s just—BAM—a man is walking into a room and sitting down, and a woman starts talking to him (or whatever). It’s actually more like I’m seeing it in real life, only “I’m” not there—except as the photographic substrate, blank screen, radio dial, channel selector, or what have you.

When I put these phenomena together, what I get is the gradual scrambling of the signal that portends the dissolution of the self. So the question is not whether the self will continue after death, but whether that flimsily constructed bundle of imperfect memories will last as long as the body does. “Aging” is the gradual deterioration of our conscious control (or illusion of conscious control) of our experience, our selfness, the thing we think is so solid and will forever continue to be. And so the loss of short-term memory leaves only the long-ago childhood or young adulthood memories in the bank, and so you withdraw… and withdraw… and withdraw…. No more deposits—they don’t stick around long enough—and there’s no loan officer for memory. At first you appear to others to be merely a boring old woman incessantly recounting her past. Then the signal gets scrambled even more and you’re mistaking your daughter for your mother or losing whole chunks of your life and all you have left are conglomerations of thought-like sentences such as “Those farmers aren’t going to be there for the gold feather” and eventually “thofa caret her gofea.” And they call you crazy and stick you in a home.

My strategy to avoid all this—as doomed as it probably is—is to keep a little corner of my brain swept clean—pristine and aware—so that I’ll always be able to hover just beyond the disintegrating moment and—like Archimedes with his lever having found a place to stand and starting to move the world—look you (or the nurse’s aide) in the eye and say, “Hey… I came into the kitchen to make supper…. Is this a flashback? Don’t bogart that joint. Mommmmmy!”

OMG, LMAO, TMI

(I hope someone leaves a copy of the Urban Dictionary in the ruins, so that future language mavens will know what to make of these increasingly ubiquitous acronyms; or maybe we’ll go back to using pictograms—or just grunting and pointing.)

My sister K recently accused me (gently, jovially) of “always going one step too far.” Obviously, she has no respect for the creative process. More and more, I want to push the envelope, say the unbidden, approach the forbidden. So much happens beneath the surface that we are supposed to leave unsaid. But along with my failing memory, I more and more lose control of what comes out (more about that later!). I do this most often when I’m joking around with my brother-in-law MP. When we’re there on Friday nights he always says to K, “You’re not watching ‘Monk’!” He really hates that show. But then he disappears into the other room when it’s time for it to come on, and K commandeers the remote and we watch it. So last week he pulls the same thing: “You’re not watching ‘Monk’!” So I point out the obvious, which is that he doesn’t really mean it, and then… I take it a step too far…. I call him a pussy (one of his favorite words for other people, and not the worst one). His response is immediate. He turns and glares at me, I gasp and cover my mouth and laugh, half to show I’m joking, half kind of scared that he’s really mad. Just before I said “pussy,” two roads had diverged in a yellow wood and I couldn’t stop myself from taking the one less traveled by. So then MP did the only thing he could to retaliate, which was to turn off the TV. I said I didn’t care, he said he didn’t either. K and Barb were not asked for their vote. Paradoxically, the sudden, relatively rare silence gave us sisters a chance to have a bit of conversation, which usually has to be conducted during the muted commercials or at a volume that must compete with the sound of TV gunfire and explosions.

That urge to veer toward calamity seems to be getting stronger. I think it’s always been there, but in the old days I was more likely to cry than to laugh my ass off. Is that a step forward? I increasingly don’t care. I’d say I don’t give a shit, but… OK, here’s as good a place as any to expose my deteriorating sense of decorum. There’s no way to tell the following true story tastefully, so I’ll just dive right in.

I leave K & MP’s one Friday night and stop off at Angeli’s to get a few groceries. I have no idea what lies in store for me, but I’m grateful later that it didn’t lie in store. Driving out of the parking lot, I feel the first tummy rumblings that tell me I’d better get home fast. I have made the tragic mistake of ordering Applebee’s version of chicken quesadillas—complete with processed cheese and mayonnaise—earlier in the evening. My house is only about a 10-minute drive from the store, but as always happens when I’m in a hurry, I get stuck behind every cautious old woman who’s not used to driving at night and every old farmer who thinks he’s out in the field on his combine.

The reports from my intestines are getting more and more ominous. I sense an imminent shit storm heading my way, and I don’t need a weatherman to know which way the shit blows. I clench, I curse, I pray. Well, I don’t pray, I’m not stupid. I try to hold on, mentally urging the sluggish old people in front of me to damn well shit or get off the pot! Bad choice of metaphor, but that is my world right now.

I make it home, open the garage door, ease the Jeep inside, attempt to gather my wits (and innards) about me, and take clenched baby steps into the house. The downstairs bathroom is just a few feet from the door, so I’m in luck. Or so I wishfully think. I step inside, and the floodgates burst, whoosh! The explosion is both impressive and expressive. I try to get my pants down, though clothes are no longer a barrier to nature’s call. I fumble with the toilet seat. Oh, look, the cats have arrived to see what’s up. What’s up is now out and about, all over the floor. They begin to investigate—probably wondering why I don’t use a convenient box of sand like they do. I have visions of their little cat feet traipsing shit all over the house. I struggle to stand up, and I waddle—pants around knees—to the door and shoo them out. I shut the door. I turn around. I cannot believe what I see. It is not just a shit storm, it is a shit massacre. There is shit everywhere. All over the floor. All over the toilet. Behind the toilet. Splatters halfway up the wall and in the sink. All over me and my clothes, which I guess goes without saying. Plop plop but no fizz, and no relief it is, except for the fact that this happened in my own bathroom, not in the middle of the supermarket. I could have been one of those crazy old broads who just lose it. It would be like the dirty hippie experience, only a thousand times worse, because at least dirty hippies are young. Being old is the vilest thing, and shitting yourself in public is the ultimate in indecent exposure. It’s a toss-up whether it would be worse than throwing up—in school, or at a dirty, muddy rock concert—but something tells me shit trumps vomit, or at least sees it and raises it one. (I think I just invented a new card game.)

So I’m standing there in this shitting field, this self-made massacre. I realize belatedly that in my haste I have left the outer door open, so I know Brutus and Luther are now taking a tour of all the dirtiest, dustiest, oiliest, spider-webbiest corners of the garage. Better than the shittiest, though. I am overwhelmed and almost succumb to hysterical laughter. But this is no joke. I gingerly step out of my pants and underwear and proceed, bare-assed, to use toilet paper and rags to clean up the mess. Nothing like this has ever happened to me, and no child or animal in my presence has ever comported itself with such wild abandon.

It takes forever, but finally, still bare-assed, I go out in the garage to find the cats, and they reluctantly come in with odd bits of lint and spider web sticking to their heads. I go upstairs and get in the shower. Ah, I am making progress. I do a shitload, literally, of laundry. Then I sit down at the computer and compose a short but graphic e-mail to my peops.

The next morning I get MP’s response. He and K had laughed so hard at my predicament that they nearly shit and pissed their own selves. Ah! The reward of truly reaching someone with my writing! I have opened up a Pandora’s box of new material, a brave new world of self-exposure not heard of since the prison diaries of Jean Genet or the confessional poetry of Anne Sexton.

Have I found my muse at last? Shit happens. Oh, does it ever.

And now, enough about me (as if).

truth takes another drubbing

As I may have told you, my sister Barb is not allowed to teach evolution to her 7th and 8th graders. She once used the word “evolved” in passing (as in “Humans have evolved to become much taller”), and one of the parents complained to the principal. So one day, for an assignment, she passed out cards that pictured famous scientists. The kids were to research the scientist on their card and make a report to the class. Too late, she remembered she had forgotten to take the Charles Darwin card out of the pack. Horrors! She didn’t know what to do, so she talked to the (jr. high) principal about it. The principal talked to the school superintendent and the high school principal. Then he checked the class list to see if the families of any of the kids were “staunchly Catholic.” There was at least one. So he told Barb to take the Darwin card back and give that kid a different one. She did as she was told, and the kid got Aristotle instead… who was a “humanist” but also a believer in God, so that was all right then. (Who says we don’t live in a theocracy?)

Evolution is only taught in the high school (but who knows with what equivocation). I asked Barb why the jr. high kids have to be shielded from such an important scientific concept, and she said because they’re too susceptible, too easily swayed at that age. In other words, by high school they’ve presumably been brainwashed sufficiently, and their minds will be closed to any teaching that controverts their parents’ prejudices. It galls me that kids have to be protected from actual facts but not from opinions, which religious views surely are.

As Barb was telling us about this one Friday night, I got outraged, of course. When I was done ranting, K told Barb she had done the right thing. “They [the kids] don’t have to know everything,” she said. My jaw dropped. Sometimes I don’t know who these people are.

***

So there you have it. My old woman memories, my DYI metaphysics, my shit capers, my impotent rage. I’ll be back next time with… I don’t know what. Life in the Midwest is what you make it, and I’m doing just fine. Don’t worry about my mental health. I am in close contact with the psychiatric profession, Oshkosh division… a stone’s throw (plus 2 hours by car) away.

Be well, my friends. And whatever you do, stay away from Applebee’s.