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mary’zine random redux: #23 July/August 2002

October 21, 2009

This is shaping up to be a very scattershot issue (scattershot: adj: broadly and often randomly inclusive). I’ve been ricocheting off the walls, shrapnel flying everywhere. Duck and cover if you must, but keep on reading.

longtime companion

This year Pookie and I will celebrate our 15th anniversary. It’s my longest hetero relationship so far—heterospecies, that is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not into bestiality….

who you callin a beast?

Ah, it’s my better half. Wanna go outside? Wanna go outside? Less go outside!

[exit Pookie]

There, that was easy. He’s got some sort of project going in the back 40. “Back 40” usually means 40 acres, but in our case it’s 40 inches, if that. (I just measured it, and it’s 36.) Basically, it’s a narrow strip of hard ground, 3 x 10 ft, between the concrete patio and the fence. My Danish farmer grandfather would be scandalized that I get by on so little contact with the land. Pookie has been building something behind the honeysuckle that, to my untrained, eye, appears to be a pile of stones. (I can’t help thinking of it as a burial mound and wondering, for whom?) Maybe it’s a Zen thing, a process rather than a product, his own little meditation space, though, frankly, he can meditate just about anywhere. At least that’s what he tells me he’s doing.

I bought Pookie one of those “kitty grass” plants for him to munch on. It was even organic. He could have eaten better than I do. But no, he wouldn’t touch it. So I took it out of its little black plastic pot and put it outside, thinking maybe Mother Nature would take over and do something with it, maybe make a little kitty forest or at least a lawn. Far be it from me to… what do they call it? dig in the ground and… oh yeah, plant anything. But time ran out for the kitty grass, and now it’s just sitting out there, a cube of dirt with bleached-out leaves/blades/whatever sticking out of it. In fact, it looks just like the Wilson volleyball that Tom Hanks painted a face on in “Castaway” after it had been sitting around for about 4 years. It did cross my mind to make a face on the side of the dirt cube, but even I thought that was going too far.

Pookie, of course, can spend hours lounging, exploring (disappearing into the thicket of honeysuckle vines), or piling stones in the back 36 and then come in to do his business in the litter box. That’s OK; better he not get the idea he can go just anywhere. But the other day, after a particularly extended session of rock-piling, he got up on the pile and…

don’t you dare!!! or ill tell them about the time you…

OK, never mind. Let’s talk about our anniversary. I’d say we’ve had a good 3 years. What’s that old joke, “My wife and I have been happily married for 3 years; unfortunately we got married 20 years ago”? But in our case, it was the first 12 years that were kind of rocky. (Hmm, could the rock pile be a metaphor….?) I felt that I never really bonded with him, whereas little Tweeter was the light of my life. But after he almost died of that bladder infection (see mary’zine #2), everything changed. He still throws up all over the place, sheds buckets of hair, shits off the side of the box (“No, Pookie, you’re supposed to think outside the box, not shit outside of it”)… but I feel deeply connected to him. When I  look into his eyes, I feel as if there’s a great intelligence looking back—Pookie and me… in the Mystery. As Krishnamurti said, “When you and another person [cat] are in the same place at the same time, are there really two? Or is there just the One?” (I’m paraphrasing wildly.) So we have these profound, sweet moments, and then I’ll have a little fun with him by rocking him gently back and forth with my foot and saying, “I could crush you like a bug!” in a really cheerful voice, and he’ll look at me deep from behind those luminous, intelligent orbs and he has no need for human speech, it’s all in the eyes. “You talkin’ to me? … You talkin’ to me? … I’m the only one here. You must be talkin’ to me.”

the genius of me

Apropos of nothing (but that’s never stopped me before), here are a couple of my Great IdeasTM. I’d like to run them up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.

•   Great IdeaTM #1: I wish Ford or one of the other automotive-behemoth-manufacturing companies would have a contest called “Name This SUV” for their next monstrosity. I’m pretty sure I could win with… Land Shark. Think of the possibilities. It would only come in black, with one of those ‘50s-style grills on the front, the ones that look like snarling teeth. A fin on top. And a trompe l’oeil paint job on both sides depicting fish, surfers, and Volkswagens scrambling to get out of the way.

•   Great IdeaTM #2: A store, website, or designer fashion line for Dykes Like MeTM who are tired of trolling men’s departments for simple, comfortable, colorful (or plain) shirts and pants. But these clothes would fit women, including those of us d’un certain âge. What a concept—duds for the non-girlie-girls! You wouldn’t have to be butch to buy them, but it would help. Just think what DKNY could do with this—just scramble the letters a bit. My name for this stroke of marketing genius? Mister Sister.

Yes, I’m brilliant… except when I’m not…. Read on….

war with … huh?

It was July 4, and since nothing closes on holidays anymore, I was out shopping for some Frappucino and other staples. I had just pulled into the parking lot of United Market, and for some reason I had the BBC World News on the radio. I wasn’t really listening, but suddenly I registered the words “… recent attack.”

Of course, I had subliminally taken in all the vague warnings about how the terrorists might strike again on the Fourth of July—as if they would feel the need to attack us on a day that’s meaningful to us, or to engage in symbolic posturing at all. After Sept. 11 there was a flurry of speculation about the numerical significance of the attacks. People played with numbers—flight numbers, dates, latitudes and longitudes—and instead of putting 2 + 2 together to get 4 (they hate us; they really hate us), they came up with… 11. Aha! Eleven! Eureka!

(I can just imagine the terrorists, last summer, trying to book flights that would not only be going cross-country and carrying maximum fuel, but that would provide these numerological fanatics with all the important clues to read the secret message.

“Which flight did you want, sir?”

“Oh, anything going to the coast that would spell ‘Afghanistan’ on a telephone dial.”

But let’s get back to the BBC. The reporters’ voices are agitated as they breathlessly announce that they have just received an exclusive report from New York saying that Hawaii and the Philippines have been attacked! We won’t know for a few days yet if the United States will go to war with… Japan??

My head is in 2002—July 4—7/4—11!—struggling in mental quicksand. “Well, Hawaii is in the U.S.—maybe the terrorists decided to blow up an island. But why the Philippines? And I sure haven’t heard anything about hostilities with… Japan??

And then, of course, I realize I’m listening to a rebroadcast of reports from 1941 about Pearl Harbor! But why now? What a thing to play on Independence Day! Are the British still trying to get back at us for that?

I sit in the car feeling like an idiot. I’ve had my own personal little “War of the Worlds” moment. (“War of the Worlds” was the 1938 radio play that started a panic because people thought Martians had landed in New Jersey.) Well, at least I didn’t run into the store crying, “The terrorists attacked Hawaii!”

***

This slow-grasping-of-the-obvious may or may not be a sign of early senility, but I’ll tell you what is. The other day I drove up to P’s house in Novato, parked in the driveway, and popped the trunk with the lever inside the car instead of opening it with my key, as I usually do. I got out and went back to get my tennis racket and noticed that the trunk was slightly open. And I thought—swear to God—“Why is the trunk open? Did I drive all the way from home like that?” And then my brain cells kicked in and I remembered that 4 SECONDS AGO I had popped the trunk. By now I’m used to walking into a room and forgetting what I’m doing there—I can handle that—but I’ve been known to get up from my desk chair to do something and forget what I was going to do before I’m even fully upright. I’m beginning to see why old people live in the past—the past is on the hard drive, but the present is on an unlabeled double-sided floppy disk you can’t even read on your Power Mac G4 because it requires high-density… (An unexpected error occurred because an error of type whatchamacallit occurred. Save your work and abandon metaphor now.)

So, while I still have my wits about me (they’re around here somewhere, I just know it), let’s get serious for a minute.

the rough beast returns

One day I was driving home from Woodlands Market (that’s all I do all day, is drive from one grocery store to another), and my radio was again tuned to NPR. Fortunately, the BBC was occupied elsewhere—maybe chasing down old recordings of the Battle of Gettysburg. (Oh yes, serious.) A local left-wing talk show, Working Assets, was on, and the guest was Todd Gitlin, NYU professor, formerly of UC Berkeley. He was talking about the difference between patriotism and nationalism, a distinction that the usually bright politicos on the Left seem incapable of making. Nationalism is the gung-ho belief that your country is superior to all others. But patriotism is about the bond you feel with your fellow countrymen (countrypeople?) and the public servants who put their lives on the line for you every day: your firepeople, your policepeople, your soldierpeople. That seems legitimate to me, and that’s  why I have an American flag sticker on my car—not to rally ‘round the Bush Man’s warlord tendencies and crimes against humanity but to express my solidarity with my fellow (and gal) Americans, who are not predominantly racists and xenophobes and corporate criminals, but regular people who don’t deserve to die for the real or perceived sins of the government.

I was pretty sure I’d seen an article by Mr. Gitlin in the S.F. Chronicle a day or two before. So when I got home I started pawing through the recycling bags. I had to pee, it was way past my lunchtime, but I was determined to find it. When will I learn to clip these things when I come across them? Well, sometimes I do, but those are the ones that pile up on my dining room table and get covered over by Lands End catalogs and coupons for Silver Screen Video and Mr. Handyman until they finally float to the surface, old and faded, and I wonder what I thought I was going to do with “Science makes strides toward relief for restless leg syndrome.”

Finally, voilà! The headline is “Anti-Semitism masquerading as activism”; the article first appeared on motherjones.com. I e-mailed the author asking permission to reprint his article, and he replied on the same day:

Thanks very much. I’m delighted that you want to send the piece around and you have my enthusiastic permission.

Todd Gitlin

Professor of Culture, Journalism and Sociology

New York University

***

“The Rough Beast Returns, by Todd Gitlin, June 17, 2002

“The email sent out last month by Laurie Zoloth, director of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, was chilling on its face.

“ ‘I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled “canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license,” past poster after poster calling out Zionism = racism, and Jews = Nazis,’ she wrote—and the details only became more shattering from then on.

“I read Zoloth’s words with horror but not, alas, complete amazement. Eleven years ago, during the Gulf War, across San Francisco Bay, the head of a student splinter group at Berkeley addressed a room full of faculty and students opposed to the war, spitting out venomously, ‘You Jews, I know your names, I know where you live.’

“The faculty and students in attendance sat stiffly and said nothing. Embarrassed? Frightened? Or worse—thinking that it wasn’t time to tackle this issue, that it was off the agenda, an inconvenience.

“Far more recently, two students of mine at NYU wondered aloud whether it was actually true, as they had heard, that 4,000 Jews didn’t show up for work at the World Trade Center on September 11. They clearly thought this astoundingly crazy charge was plausible enough to warrant careful investigation, but it didn’t occur to them to look at the names of the dead.

“Wicked anti-Semitism is back. The worst crackpot notions that circulate through the violent Middle East are also roaming around America, and if that wasn’t bad enough, students are spreading the gibberish. Students! As if the bloc to which we have long looked for intelligent dissent has decided to junk any pretense of standards.

“A student movement is not just a student movement. Students, whether they are progressive or not, have the responsibility of knowing things, of thinking and discerning, of studying. A student movement should maintain the highest of standards, not ape the formulas of its elders or outdo them in virulence.

“It should therefore trouble progressives everywhere that the students at San Francisco State are neither curious nor revolted by the anti-Semitic drivel they are regurgitating. The simple fact that a student movement—even a small one—has been reduced to reflecting the hatred spewed by others should profoundly trouble anyone whose moral principles aim higher than simple nationalism—as should be the case for anyone on the left.

“It isn’t hard to discover the sources of the drivel being parroted by the students at San Francisco State. In the blood-soaked Middle East of Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon, in the increasingly polarized Europe of Jean-Marie le Pen, raw anti-Semitism has increasingly taken the place of intelligent criticism of Israel and its policies.

“Even as Laurie Zoloth’s message flew around the world, even as several prominent European papers published scathing but warranted attacks on Israel’s stonewalling of an inquiry into the Jenin fighting, the great Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago was describing Israel’s invasion of Ramallah as ‘a crime comparable to Auschwitz.’

“In one of his long, lapping sentences, Saramago wrote in Madrid’s El Pais (as translated by Paul Merman in The Forward, May 24):

“ ‘Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner.’

“Note well: the deliciously deferred subject of this sentence is: ‘the Jews.’ Not the right-wing Jews, the militarist Israelis, but ‘the Jews.’ Suddenly the Jews are reduced to a single stick-figure (or shall we say hook-nosed?) caricature and we are plunged into the brainless, ruinous, abysmal iconography that should make every last reasonable person shudder.

“The German socialist August Bebel once said that anti-Semitism was ‘the socialism of fools.’ What we witness now is the progressivism of fools. It is a recrudescence of everything that costs the left its moral edge. And, appallingly, it is this contemptible message the anti-Semitic students at San Francisco State chose to parrot.

“We are not on the brink of ‘another Auschwitz,’ and to think so, in fact, falsifies the danger. The danger is clear and present, though not apocalyptic. It’s no remote nightmare that synagogues are bombed, including the one on the Tunisian island of Djerba, famous for tolerance, an apparent al-Qaeda truck bomb attack. This happened. It is no remote nightmare that hundreds of Palestinian civilians died during Israeli incursions into the West Bank. This, too, happened. The nightmare is that the second is being allowed to excuse and justify the first.

“Laurie Zoloth wrote: ‘Let me remind you that ours is arguably one of the Jewish Studies programs in the country most devoted to peace, justice and diversity since our inception.’

“But anti-Semitism doesn’t care. Like every other lunacy that diminished human brains are capable of, anti-Semitism already knows what it hates.

“This is no incidental issue, no negligible distraction. A Left that cares for the rights of humanity cannot cavalierly tolerate the systematic abuse of any people—whatever you think of Israel’s or any other country’s foreign policy. Any student movement worthy of the name must face the ugly history that long made anti-Semitism the acceptable racism, face it and break from it.

“If fighting it unremittingly is not a ‘progressive’ cause, then what kind of progress does progressivism have in mind?”

***

This is where I wanted to tell the story of King Christian X of Denmark, who, when told by the Nazis that Danish Jews must wear the yellow star of David, said that he and his family would wear the yellow star also, and that all the Danish people would be encouraged to wear it—thus expressing their solidarity and making it difficult to identify the Jews. I’ve been known to tell my Jewish friends that “my people saved your people,” because Grandma and Grandpa Larsen came from Denmark. But it turns out this story is just another urban legend. I found the following on the Web, written by King Christian’s granddaughter, Queen Margrethe II:

“One of the stories one often hears about the Occupation, and which I persist in denying each time I hear it, is the story about Christian X wearing the yellow star of David as a demonstration during the Occupation. It is a beautiful and symbolic story, but it is not true. I do not mind it existing or being told, but I will not support a myth, even a good one, when I know it isn’t true, it would be dishonest. But the moral behind the story is a far better one for Denmark than if the King had worn the star. The fact of the matter is that the Germans never did dare insist that Danish Jews wear the yellow star. This is a credit to Denmark which our country has cause to be proud of: I think this is an important fact to remember. The myth about the King wearing the star of David, well, I can imagine that this could have originated from a typical remark by a Copenhagen errand boy on his bicycle: ‘If they try to enforce the yellow star here, the King will be the first to wear it!’ — I don’t know whether this was the actual remark, but I imagine it could have been how the myth started. It is certainly a possible explanation I offer whenever I am asked. To me, the truth is an even greater honour for our country than the myth.”

However, there was a mass escape of Danish Jews from Nazi-occupied Denmark to neutral Sweden, organized by the Danish resistance. So maybe I can stand by my claim that my people saved my friends’ people. And regardless of urban legends, if worse comes to worst, I’ll be out there on the front lines wearing my “Gone Gefilte Fishing!” cap and wielding the souvenir “Danmark” letter opener Mom brought me back from the Old Country—

“Gai kakhen afenyam!”* I’ll cry. “Mæke my däy!”

*Yiddish for “Go shit in the ocean!”

***

One of Todd Gitlin’s sentences that really struck me was: But anti-Semitism doesn’t care. Like every other lunacy that diminished human brains are capable of, anti-Semitism already knows what it hates. I think of that sentence when I hear that we have to change our foreign policy so the people who hate us won’t hate us anymore. Which is somewhat like a woman saying, “I must start wearing old rags instead of these provocative dresses so I won’t get raped.” If it were that easy to avoid rape, we’d all dress like me. But the rapist doesn’t care what you’re wearing, and the Islamic fundamentalists, or at least the ones whose handiwork we’ve seen, don’t care what our policies are. It works better for them if we’re Satan’s spawn. They’re not interested in walking hand-in-hand with us to make a better world. Just because oppressed peoples have legitimate claims against our government doesn’t mean that the terrorists are working on their behalf. Can we hold two ideas at once? The Bush administration is fucked AND there are fanatics who will stop at nothing to destroy us.

***

In a recent column in the Chronicle, Jon Carroll quoted part of a New Yorker article:

“A lot of contemporary culture seems to take the form of the opinion piece: you read the first paragraph—sometimes you read just the title—and you don’t have to continue, because you know exactly what is going to be said. Everything is broken down into points of view, positions on a curve. If you’re off the curve, or if you pay no attention to the curve, no one seems to know how to understand you….”

Carroll was writing about the flack he’s taken for what he wrote on September 12, 2001. He was “essentially the only person in the mainstream press” with his particular take on the attacks:

“I had not trusted the Bush administration before Sept. 11; I saw no reason to change my mind. I feared an unwise war; I feared John Ashcroft; I feared anti-Muslim witch-hunts…. I had not waved the flag and asserted the essential strength of our nation, nor had I called for revenge.”

I was in complete agreement with his column that day and thought it was gutsy of him to write what he did. I thought the same about Bill Maher (even though I can’t stand the man) when he got in trouble for disputing the use of the word “cowardly” for the terrorists who flew into the buildings. Freedom of speech much? I thought that was a given.

But were either of these guys “off the curve”? Seems to me they were on a well-traveled curve—the one that curves to the Left. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) The Left’s curve—conflating mass murderers with oppressed peoples and predicting the death of democracy—is just as predictable as anything the Republicans are saying. The most common ending to letters to the editor decrying our “loss of civil liberties” is “What’s next?” The Domino Theory was a big joke back in the ‘60s—we mocked the anti-communists for thinking that if we didn’t stop the Reds in Vietnam, they’d proceed directly to Dubuque, Iowa. But now dominos are falling all over the place in the minds of the Fuck The War people, who don’t seem to see any difference between Then and Now. Isn’t there a weird kind of low-self-esteem/self-centeredness (“The U.S. is the piece of shit around which the world revolves”) in assuming that the only reason any group or sect would want to destroy us is because we’re BAD? Do we really think the terrorists would back off if we all just marched for peace and learned more about Islam? They’re not negotiating with us. Have they made any demands besides “DIE”?

And because I love the word “conflating” so much, I’ll use it again. While writing this, I realized I was conflating the U.S. terrorism issue with the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Unconsciously, I was seeing the two as the same problem, interchangeable, and maybe they are. Innocent people are being killed all around. And the seeds are certainly the same. When you fight with your neighbor or hate people who are different from you, you’re a freakin’ Johnny Appleseed of violence.

But there’s at least one very big difference between Israel and the U.S.: We are surrounded by (a) water, (b), Mexicans who come here in droves, not to kill us but to work, and (c) Canadians who do the same but walk unnoticed among us. And look who Israel is surrounded by. Like us, Israel is not always true to its democratic ideals, but it’s also not deserving of extinction.

***

So that’s my rant du jour, my scattershot, my meandering curves, my reactionary politics, my failure to get with the program and condemn the Jews for being racists. I have sympathy for both the Israelis and the Palestinians, I really do. But those activists at San Francisco State have gone too far. With that sweet Scandinavian blood in my veins, I can’t help wishing for all my Danish-descended sisters and brothers to join me out there at 19th Ave. and Holloway, 100,000 strong in our “Gone Gefilte Fishing!” caps, fulfilling the promise that King Christian would surely have carried out if history had gone the other way.

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mary’zine random redux: #12 March 2001

October 20, 2009

You wouldn’t believe what I go through when I’m writing this ‘zine. On the one hand, I respond to whatever has been brewing in me that insists on coming to the surface, whether I want it to or not—like the seXXX issue. In that way, writing is like painting—whatever is pushing comes out, I can’t stop it. Hm—guess it’s like birth, too. On the other hand, I’m increasingly aware of having an audience, and the part of me that wants to please my readers tends to flutter around the delivery room, agonizing over what the baby’s going to look like instead of just getting the thing born. Will it be funny enough? interesting enough? deep and light in the right proportions? Will anyone else care about my precious philosophical spelunking, or will the triumphant consummation of pages of meticulously reasoned insights go unread on the back of a toilet or under a stack of magazines?

A friend of mine told me early on that she thought I was “generous” for writing the ‘zine. I was surprised by that word and told her honestly that it felt more like being selfish—like, look at me, read me, see me. She said “Oh,” and I wished I had kept my mouth shut. The problem with “telling the truth” is that there’s no guarantee that anyone else will (a) like it, (b) relate to it, or (c) care. And so, in writing the ‘zine, I’ve had to talk myself into the necessary writer’s delusion that there’s nothing I can do about that and therefore it’s out of my hands. I’ll just concentrate on breathing and pushing and let you decide how you feel about the funny-looking creature that emerges.

pookie’s higher self

I learned recently that Pookie is afraid of the rain. I don’t mean being out in it, I mean hearing it on the roof. I don’t know why I never noticed this before—maybe it’s a new development. To me, the sound of rain is restful, so when I see him slinking past me, moving slow, looking fearfully right and left, I can hardly believe it’s rain related. But it is, as I saw when it started hailing one night. He looked terrified, crouching in a corner, hugging the wall as if he were being pelted with bits of ice. I doubt that he’s ever experienced rain directly, though I know he wouldn’t like that either. If I want to totally mess with his mind, I have only to flick a few drops of water at him when my hands are wet and he’s taking up more than his fair share of the kitchen. I’m not proud of myself for doing this, but it’s a cruel streak I can’t seem to control. I actually remonstrate with myself afterward: “You are baaad,” but I can’t stop myself from grinning wickedly at his startled attempts to discover where the water is coming from while he frantically licks at his back. But he doesn’t even know the rain on the roof is wet—what bothers him is the sound and the fury, signifying—something—I don’t know what.

When I first noticed this strange behavior, I tried to pet and comfort him, but he wasn’t assured in the slightest; he just turned his head anxiously away, looking toward the ceiling and the rattling windows. I tried to hold him, but he doesn’t like to be held at the best of times, so he tolerated that for about a minute and then I had to put him down (as in “on the floor,” not… down down). I even tried to reason with him, making little reassuring cooing sounds and explaining that he was perfectly OK and nothing bad would happen to him. Obviously that was pointless, but it’s weird how you always, with animals, revert to human reasoning when direct interspecies communication fails. “If you just stay out of the kitchen when I’m making dinner, you won’t get flicked with water, will you?” Or: “You’re not wet, are you? The rain isn’t coming in, is it? Then what are you afraid of?”

Coming upon him hiding in the downstairs bathroom, the only room with no windows, and feeling helpless to do anything for him, I felt like Pookie’s Higher Self. Like any higher self, I could see the big picture; I could see that he lives in a fine shelter (if I do say so myself), one that’s sturdy and reliable, and that he’s safe no matter how afraid he might feel in the moment. But the fear takes over the lower self, and there’s no reasoning with it. I don’t even know if I believe in higher selves, but if they exist, how powerless they must feel to help us, how loving they must feel toward us….

When the rain stops, Pookie forgets all about his earlier terror and is happy to curl up in his sheepskin-lined bed with its attractive Southwestern motif and dream his mysterious dreams… or to gaze at me with love-besotted eyes, head at a tilt, hoping for any crumb of Divine Love I am willing to bestow upon him… at least until I drag out the vacuum cleaner, and then his pea brain goes into action again and he assumes the terror position under the dining room table.

Pookie knows only love and fear. Maybe he’s not so different from his “higher self” and oh-so-complicated mistress after all.

God spelled backwards

Dogs have been in the news and on my mind ever since the horrific death of Diane Whipple in San Francisco. When simply walking out of her apartment, she was so viciously mauled—by a dog that was on a leash held by one of its owners—that by the time the police arrived, the body was naked and there was hardly any evidence of her clothing, just little bits of cloth and a ton of blood. Someone said to me that that incident probably didn’t help my fear of dogs any. I said the dog didn’t give dogs a bad name as much as its owners, a married couple, have given people a bad name. They blame the victim and take absolutely no responsibility for the attack, show no remorse. (In one telling detail, the owner on the scene didn’t get around to checking the victim’s pulse afterward, because she was busy looking for her keys in the blood-soaked hallway.) There are so many disturbing aspects to this story—the prison attack-dog-ring connection; the “punishment” that only bars the owners from keeping dogs for the next 3 years (no criminal charges have yet been filed); the fact that the victim’s female partner can’t sue for wrongful death because they weren’t legally married (and of course they couldn’t get legally married)—that to me, the dog itself is a crucial but almost secondary element, like the smoking gun or bloody knife wielded by a murderer. If I’m going to extrapolate from dog stories to life, I’d rather do it with the following….

The universe is infinitely correlated.

—Deepak Chopra

I am not a dog person, to say the least. If dogs were as standoffish as cats, I wouldn’t have any problem with them; I could admire their finer qualities from a distance. But then dog people wouldn’t like them, and we’d see a lot more ferrets running around. Pot-bellied pigs, something like that.

Dogs seem so intrusive to me; they’re always invading my space. And they have way too much saliva. To me, cats are a thinking person’s animal, because they have a little dignity (except Pookie when he wants his tuna-flavored laxative, but even then, he keeps all four feet on the floor). Also, cats can entertain themselves, usually by napping.

I think there must be a bad-dog incident deep in my past. In the only recurring dream I’ve ever had in my life, which I had around the age of 6, a dog was biting me, and I would wake up with a pain in my side. Maybe this dream-dog was a metaphor for darker, more sinister invasions of my space, I don’t know. Anyway, back in those days in our small town, and especially out in the country, people didn’t keep their dogs inside or control them in any way. And they certainly didn’t “walk” them—the dogs walked all by themselves—or ran, rather. You simply couldn’t ride your bike or walk past a dog in its yard without its chasing after you, snarling and barking. Were these dogs “all bark and no bite”? Maybe, but they terrified me. On the other hand, we had a gentle collie named Dollie, but I bonded better with our cats, Smokey and Mickey, and with our parakeet, Tweetie Pie, who used to sit on the rim of my glasses and peck at my teeth. I loved feeling his soft feathers against my cheek.

Anyway, this is not supposed to be Mary’s pet history, this is a dog story, so let’s get on with it. I was walking home from Unicorn Printing one day when I saw two little brown dogs running at top speed from the Circuit City parking lot straight toward the road. Yapping, ears flapping, they were the very picture of joyous doggy abandon. I froze. Somehow I knew exactly what was going to happen, even though traffic is light on that part of Bellam Blvd. The dogs crossed the median strip and ran into the other side of the road, and that’s when I heard the thump and the yelp—one dog had been hit. The driver, an older woman, just kept driving. I don’t think she noticed she’d hit anything. In that moment, I wished with all my heart to be somewhere else, wished I could just keep walking and let someone else deal with it. But I was the only pedestrian around, I had no choice.

I crossed the road and stood over the dog, not knowing what to do. She was still alive and obviously in pain. In a few moments, a young guy in a station wagon with a big dog in the back stopped and got out. I was so grateful, I could have hugged him. I asked him if he could take the dog to the vet—I figured he must be a dog lover, unlike me—but he said he didn’t know where the vet was, he didn’t live around here. So I made a split-second decision and offered to go with him. At that moment, a truck driver stopped and gave us a towel to wrap the dog in, and we got in the station wagon and took off. I held the dog on my lap; she was so smooth and so small. (Don’t ask me about breed, I have no idea.) I had one of those wild, irrelevant thoughts you have in an emergency—that I was lucky it wasn’t a big dog, that it wasn’t bleeding on me or thrashing around or trying to bite me in its distress. For that matter, I was lucky with the driver. This guy was young and personable; what if he had been big and scary-looking; what if it had been a carload of guys? I’ll take dogs over carloads of guys any day. How far did my Good Samaritan responsibility extend?

From the moment I first saw the dogs running, I felt like I had stepped into another world. I guess this is the nature of emergency. Time slows down; you find you can’t use your brain so good. Everything seemed to happen on cue—me alone, helpless with the injured dog; then the guy in the car, the guy in the truck, the decision to move. It all felt overdetermined, like a dream or a fairy tale, or like a play—as if I were only saying my lines, even though I had no memory of having tried out for this part, let alone rehearsed it.

The driver introduced himself as Paul, and I directed him to the East San Rafael Veterinary Clinic, where I take my cats. As we slowly crept down Francisco Blvd. in the rush hour traffic, I could hardly believe what I was doing. There I was, in a moving vehicle, with the two creatures I fear most in the world: Man and Dog. Two dogs: Paul’s big dog was standing in back of me, literally breathing down my neck. I kept moving my head away, but it didn’t seem appropriate to say, “You know, I don’t really like dogs. Could you get this beast away from me?”

The ride was taking forever, as the little dog panted softly in my lap. At some point, I realized someone would have to pay the vet. I mentioned this to Paul, and he didn’t say anything. I took this as a bad sign. I was willing to pay my share, but he was in this as deep as I was. When we finally pulled into the vet’s driveway, I got out and walked quickly toward the door, carrying the dog. As I was about to go in, I realized Paul wasn’t behind me. I had a moment’s panic. I had left a folder of original art from the publisher I was working for on the floor of the car. What if Paul, having got me there, decided to take off and leave me to deal with the vet bill? I would have no way to find him. And would someone who would do a thing like that try and track me down to give my stuff back? All this flashed through my mind in a second. Paranoid much? Well, yeah. But I guess Paul was just tending to his own dog—or having a quick talk with his conscience—because in a moment he came and joined me.

The dog died just as we got her into the examining room, and I burst into tears. I generally hate crying in front of men, because I think it reinforces their feeling of superiority. But my take on male-female relations will have to wait for another time. The vet said the SPCA would take care of the body, so that let us off the hook about paying.

I asked Paul if he would drive me back, and he said of course. On the way, we talked about how fast death can strike and how ordinary our respective days had been up to that point. I had been on a routine photocopy run; he had been shopping at Circuit City. We were both supposed to be home by now, sitting peacefully at the computer or thinking about dinner. How Rude is Death? I asked him to let me off at the scene of the accident—I had a momentary, reflexive fear of letting him see where I lived—but he insisted on driving me the rest of the way. I’m happy to report that he didn’t come back later to sexually assault me or burglarize my home. (I think it’s important to acknowledge all the times my fears don’t come true, rather than just forget about them and go on to the next one.)

I was shaken by the experience, which transcended my personal feelings about dogs—even threatened to change my personal feelings about dogs. Mon Dieu! Or: Mon Ueid! (Dieu spelled backwards.) The next day I went for a walk in the hills above Dominican College, and I saw the threat of death everywhere. Up ahead, a little dog stood in the middle of the road, barking furiously at me. I thought for sure a car was going to come speeding around the bed and hit her. A little farther on, I saw a deer with her big ears tuned to the sound of distant barking. I stood still, not wanting to scare her into the path of danger. Suddenly, a big dog came loping up the road toward us. My feelings were a mob scene. Was I afraid for myself, for the deer—or for the dog? Who was at risk here?

The deer bounded across the road and away before the dog spotted her. The dog’s humans called to him from down the hill, and he crashed through the woods toward their voices. I was left standing there alone, on full alert, like a guardian of the animal world—St. Mary of Assisi—but with no power to stop Death from striking again.

For the next two weeks, I kept reliving the moment when I saw the two dogs running toward the road. At my next therapy session, J said I had had a traumatic reaction, and we worked on it somatically for the whole hour. Afterward, she got this pensive look on her face, the way she does when she’s about to say something about herself and isn’t quite sure if she should cross that boundary. She said that the session had been a gift to her. She was leaving for Honduras that afternoon to help train trauma workers to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch. She hadn’t actually done the trauma work in a while, so my experience gave her the practice right when she needed it. It seemed like such an unlikely connection, from the dog dying in my arms to the hurricane victims hundreds of miles away. But there it was. I felt honored to be a conduit for such a connection—a reminder that our actions have consequences far beyond what we can see.

It was as if that one brief moment in time—when my premonition of disaster was confirmed by the awful thump of tire on flesh and bone—had set off a series of ripples, like a pebble dropping in a pond—as if everything in my world were now being touched, in one way or another, by what had happened. And yet this event was so minor in comparison to more personal losses I’d experienced. Maybe that’s why the ripples were more visible—I wasn’t as deeply involved, so I noticed them more. I felt like I was getting a glimpse of the mechanism behind the “infinite correlation” of everything.

I sensed that there were many ripples that I would never even see. For instance, I wondered what had happened to the other dog, the companion to the one that had died. We hadn’t given that dog a second thought as we rushed the injured one off to the vet.

awakened from a catnap… to the sound of one dog barking…

Two days after the therapy session, I was taking a nap and was awakened by high-pitched barking outside my window. It sounded familiar—I ran to the window to see, and sure enough, it was the surviving dog from the accident, playing with a little girl. My heart was pounding as I debated what to do. I saw the little girl and the dog go around a corner to a row of units across the way, so I quickly got dressed and went to find them.

The Vietnamese woman who came to the door spoke little English, but I felt pretty language-impaired myself. In halting, shy sentences, I told her about the death of her dog. She thanked me and said, “We love her very much.” I was touched by that; I wanted to say, “So do I!” But my mind was racing with conflicting thoughts—Why do you let your dogs run in the street?! I pointed out where I lived, and after more smiling and mumbled phrases—“Sorry” and “Thank you”—I left. I wasn’t sure if I had gone over there to give something or to get something. I wasn’t sure what had been exchanged, if anything. But I was left feeling hyperaware of the connections that were still being played out—and hopeful that my showing up at her door had touched her in some way.

There were a few more ripples—like the time I was driving on my street and the surviving dog ran in front of my car—almost turning me into the inadvertent killer instead of the would-be savior. I felt a weird sense of responsibility to that dog, as if it were now up to me to keep him alive. Or the time I saw a neighbor boy trying to get the dog to attack a baby bird. I went out and talked to the boy and “saved” the bird—put it up in a nest in a nearby tree, out of harm’s way—checked on it later and it was gone. What had happened to it?

The two dogs and everything connected with them had assumed larger-than-life significance to me. The more ripples I saw, the more I looked for. I wanted to see the workings behind the façade. But I suspect that I mostly wanted proof of my own importance. I had placed myself at the center, and I wanted to know that there was a reason for my participation in the “original” experience—as if it only started when I came on the scene.

Of course, the ripples became more faint with time and then “disappeared.” But I’m sure I was witness to only the tip of the iceberg of those ripples—a metaphor I am not going to apologize for, take it or leave it—for example, who knows what effects the experience may have had on Paul’s life?

I first wrote about this incident a couple of years ago, so I have been going back and revising my account—adding details I didn’t have room for before, looking for any new perspective I may have gained with the passage of time. And as I did so, I started to get a little nervous. This is what I find so intriguing about writing. All writers say that you learn what you think by writing, and that’s certainly true for me. I may start out with a clear idea of what I want to say, but the more I stay with it, trying to make it truer and truer, the more my thoughts and feelings change. Writing is a lot like painting in that way; it takes you deeper.

I finally realized what was making me nervous. What if the death of the dog meant nothing to Paul except as a little story to tell his wife at dinner? What if the ripples started and stopped with me—meaning that all the connections and coincidences I had seen were products of my overactive imagination? What if I was choosing what to notice and what to ignore because I wanted to believe that Deepak is right, that the universe is infinitely correlated and thus my life and death, my time on this earth, are of vast importance? But what if “infinite correlation” means that everything is equally important because even the smallest thing is necessary to the whole? Then I am exactly as important as the bird flying past my window or the ants planning their next assault on my kitchen.

There’s no doubt that there are connecting threads running through all our lives, sometimes visible, sometimes not. But I seem to have an investment in collecting the proof of those threads. I want to believe that “when bad things happen to good people”—or to good dogs—there’s always a reason, a lesson, a connection, a guarantee of meaning. I wield my Deepak Chopra quotes and my metaphors and my synchronicities as if I can reduce the universe to fit in my little cup, rather than face the Not Knowing—the great, uncomfortable Void of that moment when nothing has yet been revealed, when anything can happen.

When I stood over that injured dog in the road—unprepared and inadequate—utterly without resources—sure only that I was not the right person to deal with a doggie-mergency because of my firmly held pet preferences—I was all unknowingly experiencing the moment at which Creation happens. It’s the moment when the past is of little help and the future is no help at all. Time deserts you, and you go forward on sheer instinct, purely responding to what has been put in front of you. It’s only afterward that you gather the bits of evidence and set about proving to yourself that you’re part of an immense, intricate puzzle, that there’s some bigger hand at work, moving you here and there, making your life worthwhile. But does being an intricate part of the puzzle increase one’s significance or diminish it? If the bird flying past my window is also an intricate part of the puzzle, then which of us is expendable? Neither? Both?

We say we want freedom, but we want safety—which is to say, knowledge—even more. We want to bargain with the universe—“I’ll do this good deed if I can be assured that the man won’t kidnap me and the dog won’t bleed in my lap.” But when this situation with the dog went down, choice was taken away from me—my preferences and personality and history became irrelevant—and I entered the Not Knowing. I could have kept walking, and Paul would still have stopped, and the dog would still have died. Do I have to imagine a mini-“It’s a Wonderful Life” to figure out the difference I made? Why is it so important to think I made a difference? Why isn’t it enough that my life has its face value, like every other life? Do I have to be trivially, remotely related to disaster victims in Honduras (as opposed to directly and meaningfully, like J) to feel that I deserve to be on this earth? Why this constant quest for meaning? Why that word “deserve”?

I do believe that Not Knowing is the greatest gift we humans receive, but it’s the sort of gift (to steal someone else’s joke) that when you receive it, you say to God, “You shouldn’t have.” Like most of us, I do everything I can to avoid such moments, to avoid being in the new, the now, the unrehearsed. I live in the past, in repeat experiences, looking over my shoulder, assessing the tracks I left behind. All I know is what I see receding in the distance behind me, as I marvel at what has already come and gone.

***

Over the years, I have adopted many ways of organizing experience into meaning. I discovered politics in the ninth grade, enamored of John F. Kennedy’s idealism (my mother scoffed at my innocence, said all elections were rigged; only with the Bush-Gore election have I begun to wonder if she was right); took a sharp turn to the right when I became a devotee of Ayn Rand and a would-be voter for Barry Goldwater (I was a little too young to vote when he ran on his “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” platform); drifted left in college, gravitated toward SDS, though I never actually joined; voted for Eldridge Cleaver when I finally turned 21—one of the few acts of my youth that I sincerely regret.

In Maryland in the early ‘70s, I met Peggy at a small college where she was a student and I was a librarian, and we became part of a leftist, faculty-led political group. She and I were the first known gay couple on campus, and we lived with two professors—a Greek communist in exile from the junta and the first radical feminist the college had ever seen.

Politics were important to me—the U.S. government was not only waging war on the Vietnamese but also killing Black Panthers and college students at home—but the political construction of reality didn’t satisfy my deepest needs for meaning. For one thing, there was no room for psychological factors in our analysis, so you had to fit your personal life into the cracks of the bigger picture. As “working class dykes,” Peggy and I had an edge in that world, even though our friends knew absolutely nothing about the working class despite their interest in Marx and Mao. And the group became increasingly sectarian, obsessing about the errors of other leftists—those bloody Trotskyites! One night when we were hanging out, drinking wine, we played a kind of political parlor game. As part of the game, we had to reveal our deepest wish. I knew better than to say “to be happy,” so I said something to the effect of “The communists will take over, and there will finally be peace and justice in this imperialist hellhole of a country.” That was my belief system at the time, but on some level I knew I was slanting the truth, that something was missing.

After Peggy graduated and we moved out to California, we were cut off from the political climate in which we had met, and we were exposed to other mindsets, to say the least. Exploring this new world, I took a drawing class, and the teacher turned me on to the Seth books—Seth was a nonphysical being who was channeled through a woman named Jane Roberts. I became enamored of the metaphysical realm as a kind of backlash against those years of leftist political indoctrination, and my worldview took a 180-degree turn.

Because of the—for me—radical idea that “you create your own reality,” I spent a lot of time overinterpreting everything that happened to me as a kind of personal message from the universe that I was creating. (If I was creating it, then why would I need to get messages from “myself”?) Once, I grabbed my cat Radar to keep him from attacking another cat, and he bit me on the hand. It didn’t take me long to notice that the wound was in exactly the same spot where my baby sister was touching my hand in a photograph of us from 1954. Somehow, I saw the picture as (a) a premonition of the wound-to-come-some-22-years-later and (b) a vision with which to heal myself. It was as if the universe was winking at me with every image, every juxtaposed word, object, or experience. And so I turned everything into symbolism, the “higher meaning” being much more important to me than the direct experience. I suspect I have not made much progress in this area.

I moved on from Seth when I discovered painting for process, or, as it is also described, painting as a spiritual practice. The beauty of painting is that it’s nonverbal (though I can get plenty verbal about it), and so there is one place where I don’t really know what’s going on, and I don’t have to. But the desire to understand my life and my place in the world still exerts a strong pull on me, as witness this ‘zine.

In essence, I think I have been a “meaning machine” since birth. I was having philosophical debates with myself at least by the age of 8 or 9, if not before. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in this. Kids are seeing everything new and haven’t yet learned to either accept the essential mystery of existence or create a belief system with which to wrassle the mystery to the ground. But I remember clearly the moment in which I “popped into” this reality. One day my father, a master of clichés—he lacked the legendary gift for language of our Irish ancestors—yelled at me, “Wake up to the fact that you’re alive!”—by which he wasn’t making a metaphysical point, he was merely expressing his irritation with my slowness in bringing him his coffee or rolling his Bugler cigarettes. I had heard that expression from his lips many times before—along with other golden oldies like “I’m going to knock you into the middle of next week!” or “I’ll knock you for a month of Sundays!” or “I’ll give you something to cry about!” He never hit me, but he threatened me constantly, as if he could raise welts by the sheer repetition of words. Maybe that is an Irish thing, I don’t know.

But that day I heard the words “Wake up to the fact that you’re alive” literally, and I went Poof! and realized that I was alive! It wasn’t that I had never been self-conscious; I had always been extremely shy and hated being the center of attention. But I had never been consciously aware of my existence before, and it was quite an amazing revelation. I am alive, on this earth. I am ME. Whoa.

***

So the ripples from the death of the little brown dog go backward as well as forward, because everything I’ve ever experienced—my physical birth, my metaphysical birth into self-awareness, my choice of college and profession and partner, my move to California, my decision to walk instead of drive to the copy center—brought me to that place and time where I saw two dogs running toward the road. And I wasn’t even at the center of that event, except in my own mind. There’s an infinite number of centers and an infinite number of ripples from each center and each interaction between centers and all around the peripheries, going in all directions at once. It’s not possible to trace all the ways in which any of us affects the world, old Jimmy Stewart movies notwithstanding.

A few pages back, I asked, “Why this constant quest for meaning? Why that word ‘deserve’?” Well, “deserve” is certainly a useless word. I’m alive, whether I deserve to be or not. It’s a gift. And my quest for meaning is also pretty useless, because “understanding” will never really prepare me for the future. Not Knowing will find me again, and then I will be just as bereft of resources as I was when I stood over the injured dog—as it should be, because Creation demands complete surrender to the moment. You lose yourself in that moment because your “self” is not much good to you then. Greater forces are at work, and need to be.

So I do my backward looking not as preparation for the future, as if I could study for the test of life, but because it’s in my Buddha-nature to do so and because I enjoy doing it so much. This realization is gold in itself, because it’s my habit to disparage my desire to look for meaning. It’s my habit to disparage myself for being the kind of person I am rather than some other, undoubtedly better kind of person, the kind who likes to travel to foreign countries or jump out of airplanes, as if only the exotic and the extreme can bring the New, when the New is all around us every day, in both the simplest and most complex forms. Gee, I feel like Dorothy returning from Oz.

It was an extraordinary thing in my life that a little brown dog took her final ride on my lap and died in my dog-disparaging arms. I don’t have to justify or explain this—though I’ve enjoyed trying—and you don’t have to care—though I hope you do. After all my careful analysis and ripple-tracing, I have only one thing to say: Wake up to the fact that you’re alive. We are all the pebble dropping in the pond, and the ripples we send go on forever.

birdsong

Birds know the rain is coming. They gather excitedly on lawns, and as I walk by, they release themselves in clouds of chirpy panic, flustering and fluttering ahead of me. In the trees, other birds are outlined clearly against the latticework of bare branches. They are as still as a painting, secure in their visibility. But the birds in the dense bushes come rushing out of hiding to escape from me. Strange to think that safety can be found in exposure, and that danger can invade one’s hiding place.

Birds saved me once. Rejected in love, lost in suffering, I looked out the window at the desolate rain and was astonished to see hundreds of birds. They covered the lawns, the street, the tops of cars, the telephone wires; they burst into and fled the scene, filling the sky. It was a powerful sight that shocked me into sudden happiness. My heart felt too small to receive this benediction—but the benediction remained, perched like a bird on a wire, carrying me through the next days of sorrow with a tiny smile and an unfamiliar feeling of hope.

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mary’zine random redux: #18 November 2001

October 12, 2009

It’s really hard to maintain your natural humility and lack of pretence when you’re being praised for your articulateness, your humor, your honesty, even your grammatical and typing skills. I’m speaking of Pookie, of course. My condo isn’t big enough for the three of us anymore—me, Pookie, and Pookie’s ego. The way he struts around here, you’d think he was the next Alice B. Toklas. I know he’s thinking, “Don’t kid yourself, they’re only reading this rag for my stuff.” But hey, I’m not proud—whatever works.

I have to admit that when I first realized Pookie was getting into the computer and making unauthorized additions to the mary’zine, I wasn’t too happy about it. One literary genius in the family is enough, don’t you think? Also, it seems to me that his style is highly reminiscent of mine. (Dare I call him a copycat?) I know that imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, but he’s never shown any interest in flattering me before. Maybe he just has a highly developed sense of irony and enjoys mimicking my style to show that it isn’t all that hard to do. I’m a little concerned that he might get so good at it that he will gradually take over more and more of the ‘zine and even sign his name to stories I’ve written! If you start seeing a “P” or an “oo” working its way into the masthead, you’ll know something’s up.

But I’m not too worried. After all, who owns the means of production? Who brings home the Eukanuba Moderate pH Nutritional Urinary Formula? Who wears the clothes in the family? I rest my case.

On the other hand, there’s no definitive proof that Pookie, is, in fact, writing those extremely clever and creative passages. We have only his word for it. Everybody knows how easy it is to get writing samples off the Web these days. Now I know how those literary detectives who are trying to figure out if Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare’s works must feel. It’s quite a puzzle. If Pookie didn’t write Pookie’s works, who did?? Some say there’s a dog in the neighborhood named Francis Bacon who’s been seen wearing a carpal tunnel wrist support, so who knows?

One interesting thing about “Pookie’s” writings is that he tends to lapse into Yiddish whenever he gets upset. I don’t know who taught him “oy gevalt,” but if he starts throwing around words like “farmischt” and “ferklempt,” you’ll know he’s an imposter. I mean, he’s as goyish as I am.

hey I know you kvell when they laugh at my jokes.

OK, buster, I’ve had genoog out of you today. There are important matters to be written about. Say good night, Pookie.

good night pookie.

[Editor’s note: Watch for Pookie’s upcoming column, Mews of the Day. The name was MY idea.]

[And to think I used to call Rita Mae Brown a sellout for giving up her life as a radical lesbian separatist to write mystery novels with her cat Sneaky Pie Brown. Now look at me—mouthpiece of Pookie McKenney. Pookie Pie McKenney? I’ll have to work on that.]

living in the ground ‘00s

I don’t know why, but every time I try to write something serious about the World Crisis, I end up writing about Pookie instead. I guess, in such stressful times, one wants to tap into the timeless… the eternal verities… the cat jokes.

For example, Pookie has been affected by the tragedy in an unfortunate way. He’s taken a sudden dislike to Persian cats. (Thanks to the selfless friend who gave me that line but doesn’t want the credit [or the blame].)

Last time, I talked about my conflicting feelings about displaying the American flag. Well, I finally gave in and bought a decal for the back window of my car and stuck it next to the gay rainbow flag. Then I put a small sticker of the Statue of Liberty on top of the rainbow flag. Thus is my layered and nuanced support of both my country and my chosen cause conveyed in the grand tradition of bumpersticker politics. However, I cut the bottom off the American flag decal where it said “God Bless America”—I couldn’t go that far. It’s not that I don’t want God to bless America, but I don’t like the implication that we’re the only ones who should be blessed. No country is an island (?)—well, we’re not, and 9/11 was definitely our wake-up call.

For years, I’ve had a plastic Godzilla sitting on the back of my washing machine. (No reason—you should see the rest of my house. For example, there’s a life-size plastic skeleton sitting behind a semicircular desk in the living room; it sports a University of Michigan baseball cap, the skull t-shirt I used to wear all the time, and a cross necklace, and its skeletal fingers are resting contemplatively on the book Demolition Angels by Robert Crais.) A couple months ago, when I was decluttering my sand tray room, I decided to put a wooden Buddha on the washing machine next to Godzilla. For weeks they just sat there, passively coexisting as if they were mere objects sharing space. Then it occurred to me to move them so that they faced each other. Suddenly, the spark of truth—the monster of aggression threatening the peaceful monk, and the laughing Buddha raising his arms in blessing and in welcome. The scene struck me as a microcosm of each of us in the world—our aggressive, selfish, survival instincts—the reptilian brain—constantly at war with our transcendent awareness of who we really are (We are stardust, we are golden And we got to get ourselves back to the garden [sorry, I’m having a marijuana flashback]).

When I went back in the house after creating the sticker tableau on my car window, I realized I was holding the sticky “God Bless America” strip from the bottom of the American flag decal. Impulsively, I stuck it on Godzilla’s back. And thus my bumpersticker sensibility acquired yet another layer, another nuance. The special aggression of nationalism (God Bless US) faces off against another way of looking at the world, as maya, as illusion, as beyond the duality of nations and of concepts.

And if you think I’m contradicting myself (“yay America” vs. “America = monster”), well that’s why Art attracts me more than Politics. In Rumi’s famous words, “Beyond right and wrong there is a field; I’ll meet you there….” It’s also what makes this country great—and maddening at times. You and I are free to express our layered and nuanced, sometimes contradictory feelings, whether artistically or politically. (How much do you think I love the phrase “layered and nuanced”?) And that’s the side I have to come down on, when all is said and done.

[Sidebar: A few days after adorning the car window with symbols of my current belief systems, I found the following words [?] written in the dust on the trunk of my car:

CV STROY DER CHPin

This message bothered me for days—what could it mean? Perhaps “I have put anthrax in your gas tank”? or “Down with the California Highway Patrol”? A neighborhood kid told me it means “I am a Guatemalan,” but a Spanish-speaking friend said it’s not even Spanish. I wanted to believe the Guatemalan explanation, the patriotic sentiment of a stranger far from home and thus somewhat in keeping with my sticker sentiments, but I guess it will remain a mystery.]

But to get back to my point, if I had one. Little did I know that the decision to display the flag was the easy part. This isn’t a perfect society, by any means, but I’m finding a faith in “America”—the essential decency of our people and our values—that I haven’t felt since I heard JFK’s “Don’t ask what your country can do for you” speech. (Are they sending patriotism germs through the air????) It’s embarrassing to be having these feelings. I don’t know what to make of them and don’t really trust them. On the one hand, it feels strangely liberating to be set adrift without an ideology to fall back on (Kelly, I’m mixing my metaphors on purpose), because I also don’t want to be thrust into the camp of those who are pro-USA-at-all-costs.

I think a lot of people are struggling with this. I got an e-mail from K, with whom I worked at the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Michigan 30 years ago [gulp], where I used to argue with the faculty about capitalism and where I got in trouble for writing SUPPORT BAM (Black Action Movement) on my timesheet. In her e-mail, K mentions having a conversation with her husband about hanging the flag.

…he had a feeling after 9/11 that he wanted to hang our 4th of July bunting above the front porch (why we even have one is beyond me… plus we live at the dead end of a dirt road a football field away from the dirt road and NO ONE can see our house). I told him that something about that really didn’t sit well with me—the flag and religion were too closely entwined and didn’t he understand that I was a product of the late ‘60s when I was ashamed of my country and its flag and considered moving to Canada?… The arrival of your zine helped me further sort out some of my feelings.

She goes on to say,

By the way, a VERY LIBERAL sister of a friend of mine fell off a ladder on September 12 trying to hang a flag over her cement drive and broke her shoulder/arm in three places.

Let that unfortunate person’s accident be a lesson to us all. It can be downright destabilizing to mess around with a powerful political symbol you’re not familiar with. Would this have happened if she’d been hanging a “Free Tibet” sign?

One of the unnerving things about getting older is that you are sometimes forced to realize that ideas you’ve been taking for granted since your college days might need a bit of readjusting. It’s like keeping the same hairstyle for your whole adult life—making it easy to distinguish the bouffant-haired ‘50s beboppers from the long-haired ‘60s radicals. (My hairstyle only dates from the early ‘80s, so I’m ahead of the game.) It’s especially weird for the “Times They Are A-Changin’” generation to see that all times change, not just the ones you want to be done with.

Personally, whenever I see one of those bumperstickers that say, “Question Authority,” I always write “Why?” on it.

—quoted in Author Unknown by Don Foster

“Question authority” is the classic bumpersticker distillation of my generation’s politics. I’ve been questioning the authority of the U.S. government since at least 1966, but in recent weeks I’ve realized that there are other forms of authority that can be just as insidious. The Left is not always right just because its adherents claim to walk the high moral ground.

It’s not that I’ve changed my basic political inclinations, but I’m finding it difficult to apply them to the current crisis. My point is that those who “question authority” seem to have only one model for what authority is—the parent/high school principal/college administration/government model. But it’s also important to question your own assumptions. My friend Z has a bumpersticker on her car, “Don’t believe everything you think,” and I say Amen to that. If you believe everything you want to believe, you’re going to pass along “untrumors” (now I’m channeling Herb Caen), such as the one that CNN used decades-old footage of cheering Palestinian children after 9/11. The alternative theory is that reporters threw candy up in the air to get the pictures they wanted. This may be true, for all I know, but I think that the desire to believe this kind of thing, the idea that everything’s a conspiracy, should be questioned also. God forbid that people should refrain from dissenting—I haven’t gone off the deep end and drunk the Kool-Aid yet. But all “authority” is not out there.

I have been known to pontificate about how I’m waiting for the concentration camps for gay people to open, because I wouldn’t put it past the Christian right, if they gained enough power, to take such an extreme stand. One fundamentalist’s “infidel” is another fundamentalist’s “queer.” Different scriptures, same bigotry. But I now question this cynical hyperbole on my part. It might be more dangerous to inflate the enemy’s influence than to focus on the essential decency of people. It’s tempting to believe the sky is always falling, but how wearisome to live in a state of such mistrust.

Even paranoids are right twice a day—oh no, that’s clocks.

—me

(Hold your applause till the end.)

Back in the day, another popular saying was “Even paranoids have enemies.” And it was true—the FBI files that came to light after the Freedom of Information Act showed us that they really were spying on us. But I think the reverse is also true: “Even those with enemies can be paranoid.” Panic about anthrax is one thing, but the prevailing panic on the Left about how we’re in imminent danger of losing all of our freedoms seems just as counterproductive. “As long as we still have it, I’m going to make the most of the First Amendment….” I assume Stephanie Salter was speaking figuratively when she wrote that, but still, there’s a lot of this rhetoric going around. Does it mean I’ve been brainwashed if I have more faith in our country than that? Granted, it was chilling to hear the infamous “Watch what you say” comment from the White House, but I do believe that dissent and free speech are so integral to our traditions that they will not be eliminated so easily. I can’t convince myself I live in a police state just because I don’t agree with everything our leaders say and do. There are plenty of real police (or fundamentalist) states in the world that wouldn’t tolerate half the freedoms we have.

America Freaks Out

(The Daily Show’s answer to “America Strikes Back”)

Contrary to popular opinion, 9/11 did not sound the death knell for irony, and humor once again saves the day and our sanity. (One of the writers who famously announced the death of irony later said, “I was misquoted. I said the age of IRONING is dead.”)

On The Daily Show, a cast member is purporting to give a report about the anthrax scare while headlines run under his talking head, as they do on CNN. At first, the headlines are straightforward, and then they get increasingly silly.

MAJORITY LEADER DASCHLE RECEIVES LETTER CONTAINING ANTHRAX • AL QUEDA VOWS NEW ATTACKS • FBI WARNS SOMETHING BAD TO HAPPEN SOMEWHERE SOMETIME • WHITE POWDER FOUND ON DONUT IN ST. LOUIS • STORMS BATTER NEW ENGLAND—LINK TO TERRORISM STILL UNDETERMINED • CIA: THAT GUY SITTING ACROSS FROM YOU ON THE BUS LOOKS A LITTLE SHIFTY • A FRIEND OF THIS GUY I KNOW CONFIRMS HIS GIRLFRIEND TOLD HIM THEY’RE PLANNING SOMETHING IN A MALL OR SOMETHING • OH F—K, WHAT WAS THAT SOUND • SERIOUSLY, DID YOU HEAR A SOUND • “THE HORROR, THE HORROR”—KURTZ • POLL: 91% OF AMERICANS “WANT MOMMY” • CHICKEN LITTLE: “THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!” • OH GOD OH GOD

Then there’s a “fight” between the reporter and the teletyper, and after a while the report continues and the headlines are back:

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE JUST WONDERFUL WITH LOLLIPOPS AND RAINBOWS AND HAPPY FEELINGS FOR EVERYONE • BUNNIES ARE CUTE, CUDDLY, AND COMFORTING

OK, so I quoted that whole bit just so I could use the line WHITE POWDER FOUND ON DONUT IN ST. LOUIS.

***

And who do you not want to be right now? Members of the thrash metal rock band Anthrax. (“When bad things happen to good band names…”)

“Rock me, B. anthracis!”

***

Some people are still trying to solve the “mystery” of 9/11. One of my editor friends wrote me this:

…got an email a while ago about the numerology of it, how everything comes down to the mysterious number 11:

Sept. 11, or 9/11 or 9+1+1 = 11

Sept. 11 is the 254th day of the year: 2+5+4 = 11

After Sept. 11, there are 111 days left in the year

The Twin Towers, standing side by side, always looked like the number 11

The first plane to hit the towers was American’s Flight 11

New York was the 11th state to join the Union

There are 11 letters in New York City, Afghanistan, and The Pentagon

etc., etc. …

Tup [her husband] chimed in, “Yeah, and the other flight was 77, which is 11 only with funny hats.”

floating down de Nile

I’ve been writing this issue over the span of several weeks, and I find that my interest in political analysis (a fancy term for “trying to figure out what the hell I think”) is on the wane. It’s a new phase. As time goes on, I view the daily headlines about bombing and anthrax scares with a strange sense of detachment. I’m not getting bombed. I’m not getting anthrax. Disaster and grief seem so mid-September. Why is this stuff still happening? Maybe the Zoloft is turning me into a nation of (1) sheep. Or maybe it’s saving me from useless panic and anxiety. I seem to be in denial, and it’s the only place I can be right now. Didn’t the president (note to self: I’ve never called him that before) say we’re supposed to get back to normal? Well, I’m back to normal. Why do I feel so guilty?

In this mood, I go to my weekly painting class, less sure than ever about what is going to come out of me. For those of you just joining us, I paint at a studio (www.ccesf.org) where the focus is on the intuitive process, not on “making art.” Thus, we don’t plan what we’re going to paint or try to make it look a certain way. We talk about “what wants to come into the painting” or “what wants to be painted.” Sounds kooky, but it works. Sometimes we paint what’s going on in our lives, and sometimes it’s all just a big fat mystery. Sometimes life is a big fat mystery. Since 9/11, I had painted the events only once—a fast painting of people falling or jumping out of the towers, because that image was haunting me. It felt good to paint it—sometimes what we’re most afraid to feel turns out to be more manageable when we get it out on the paper.

So on this day I start a large painting of myself, letting the brush go where it will, going with the flow, as they say, and I’m somewhat surprised when I paint a few small airplanes at the top of the paper. Then I paint some dead bodies at the bottom. I’m just painting, without a lot of (identifiable) feeling. Finally, some “anthrax bugs” come in, flying at my head, along with a couple of “terrorists” shooting me and grabbing me from behind.

On my second painting, I know I want to paint myself standing on top of an airplane, waving a flag. It feels good, feels right. It’s a relief not to have to make sense of it. The plane is red, white, and blue—starred and striped like the flag—and it’s dropping three bombs, one labeled U, one labeled S, and one labeled A. I have a flag in one hand and a bomb in the other, with a short fuse burning. My heart has tubes coming out of it. Bodies are falling from the sky above me—they feel like they’re from the World Trade Center—and underneath the plane, more bodies are falling—these feel like they’re in Afghanistan. When I describe it, it sounds conceptual, as if I were making a (confused) political statement, but I swear, it just happened as I painted and watched.

Now I’m on a roll. I’ve been painting for an hour and a half, and I’m in the zone, just letting it all come. On my third painting, I start with three black airplanes flying across the top, dropping bombs. Dead black bodies are piled at the bottom of the painting, and I’m standing on top of them, looking up, holding an American flag in each hand. Red tears are coming out of my eyes, and my heart again has tubes coming out of it. This time, yellow light is streaming out of each tube onto the dead bodies below. My body is white, heart is red, eyes are blue. Nice symbolism, but again, it just happened. I notice later that the way I’m holding the flags (one up, one down), I look like I’m flagging the winner at the Indy 500. No clue what that’s about, but fortunately it’s not my job to know. Time is up, so I’ll finish this painting next week.

So those are the images, but they don’t tell the whole story. As I said, we aren’t painting to make art or to make a statement but just to be with ourselves, to explore without judgment. When I sit down with everyone in the group afterward, I feel strangely whole in a way I haven’t felt since 9/11. I feel as if I’m everyone I painted—the victims, the terrorists, the bombers, the bombed Afghanis—and, being everyone, there is no need to figure out which “side” I’m on or what I think about “revenge versus justice.” Even the image of me standing on the dead bodies, holding the flags, looking up at the planes—it doesn’t make a coherent political statement, but it says something true, I think, about how we are each “all of it.” Feeling whole, I feel both big enough and open enough to embrace and embody all the contradictions that the mind can’t begin to resolve.

Looking around the studio and talking to my painter friends, I find it fascinating to see how differently the 9/11 events are being expressed—some people are painting fast, violent images of bombs and bodies, and some are painting slow, detailed scenes of men in turbans and rippling flags, or close-ups of the World Trade Center flames, or just pages and pages of black tears. I would love to see an exhibition or a book of these paintings. They’re like the paintings of traumatized children—forget “art,” this is pure response. And yet there is a beauty and a power in these spontaneous images. We paint with the simplicity of children but with the emotional depth and complexity of adults.

I heard an interview on “Fresh Air” with a photographer who’s taking pictures of the World Trade Center wreckage. His aim is to make the pictures absolutely starkly clear and to have them enlarged so much that you see the things themselves without anything getting in the way—no interpretation, staged effects, special lighting, etc. It struck me that we painters are doing exactly the opposite—we’re not trying to capture the image objectively; instead, we’re expressing what’s in our hearts and souls. It’s not about the event “out there” but about our human response. So each painting is individual and yet archetypal, because we’re responding without manipulating the image—so (come to think of it) maybe it’s a little like what the photographer is doing after all. Each painting is a product/snapshot of the human heart, without anything in the way—no interpretation, staged effects, special lighting, etc.

The photographer said something else, about how in late afternoon the smoke and the pink light from the sunset and the red drapes hanging on nearby buildings make this scene of devastation look utterly beautiful. He said he couldn’t fathom how beauty and horror could be so entwined. It struck me as a perfect argument for the existence of God.

Make of that what you will.

chat mystérieux

Scenario 1

I am coming downstairs. Pookie is in the kitchen eating his expensive, pH-controlled cat food, a good 25 feet away. As soon as he hears me on the stairs, he flees the kitchen like a wanted man and either cowers under the dining room table or makes his way around the perimeter of the living room, crouching and scurrying like a Marine on a mission, finally taking cover behind an armchair. If they sold camouflage suits for kitties, he’d be the first one in line.

Scenario 2

I walk into the sandtray/storage/litterbox room to put a bottle in the recycling bin and come face to face with Pookie. A look of stark terror crosses his face, as if I’m the one-armed man and he’s The Fugitive, Richard Kimball, about to go over the waterfall. He makes a mad dash for the door, barely escaping the fate to which I surely would have consigned him. I have yet to figure out what that might have been.

Scenario 3

I am coming up the stairs, carrying a heavy basket of laundry. Pookie is lying on one of the stairs, stretched from one side to the other, taking up every inch of space. As the basket of laundry hovers precariously over his head, and as I grunt in an unladylike manner while struggling to find a foothold on the stair he so lordily (is that a word?) occupies—and failing that, as I straddle the stair and him and attempt to hoist myself and the basket up to the next step, risking life and limb—he looks up at me with the bemused, dispassionate gaze of a direct descendant of Buddha’s cat and begins methodically licking his right paw.

Forget Sneaky Pie Brown. This is a mystery.

By the way, His Royal Highness has informed me that his preferred nom de plume is now Pookemon. I have created a monster.

[Mary McKenney]

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mary’zine random redux: #27 March 2003

October 3, 2009

a winter’s tale (or two)

I wake up at 6:30 a.m. and it’s cold in the house (my condo in San Rafael, CA). Thermostat is almost down to 50. I open the blinds. There would be frost on the pumpkin if there was a pumpkin. Brrrr! Put a sweatshirt on over my pj’s, turn up the heat, and settle down at the computer with my daily allotted half-full glass cup of coffee (i.e., the cup is made of glass, it isn’t just a metaphor).

There’s late-night e-mail from my sister Barb. Lately, her subject lines are variations on a theme: “–3 degrees,” “Wind chill factor of –15,” and the extremely chilling “–24 degrees this morning.” I’ve taken to calling her “Brrrrrb.”

In my world, the chill is short-lived. By the time my workday is under way, the sun is shining and the birds are chirping their unfinished symphonies. It’s another beautiful day in paradise.

I feel guilty when I write this to Barb:

I thought of you today when I was walking to the store to get a newspaper with only a t-shirt on (well, pants and shoes too). The sky was perfectly blue, not a cloud in sight.

She takes it in stride, though. She and K must have inherited those sturdy peasant genes. I was always a wimp.

Do not miss your chance to blow.

—Eminem

Barb’s e-mails to me go more like this:

First time on the snowblower this morning. I stepped out early enough to get my garbage and recycling by the alley to be picked up and realized that if I was going to get out, I would have to do at least minimal snowblowing. We had about 5 inches of snow and it was the heavy wet stuff. Freezing rain had also started. I hopped on the tractor and blew my way out of the garage and did the back sidewalk enough to get the mailman to my back door. I then blew my way to the front walk. I saw Shirley had her driveway plowed but not her front walk, so just kept going past her house. I had gotten that far and there was nowhere to turn around, so I did the entire block. I turned around in the street and blew snow off the sidewalk on my way back too, making the path wider. I then tackled the driveway and part of the side of the house. The plow had already been through so had the nice little mound of packed snow they always leave to contend with.

And only then does she hop in the truck to drive to the middle school where she teaches math and science.

After burying my garbage cans [I’m guessing she accidentally buried them with blown snow, she didn’t actually go out there and dig a pit and throw them in], I dug them out, put them away and headed off to work. As I was driving there, thankful I had 4-wheel drive, the radio said it would have cancellations in a few minutes. They played one song, then another song, and I kept thinking, “Hurry up or I am going to make it all the way to school before I hear what has been canceled.” Just as I got to the unplowed school parking lot and saw no teachers’ cars there, they announced school had been canceled.

In my safe, warm haven thousands of miles away, I entertain myself with the image of my baby sis on the John Deere tractor-snowblower, bundled up in her long wool coat and Skip’s red snow hat (known as a “chuck” for some reason, and often referred to as a “condom hat” for a soon-to-be-obvious reason) with a full head-covering and an opening just big enough for her eyes and nose. The hat sticks way up high on her head so she has an attractive floppy knitted top of the head thing going on—or the condom look, if you will. They can see her coming for miles. She “blows out of the garage”—in the movie, she’d be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he wouldn’t open the garage door first—and barrels down the street, spewing snow right and left. Or maybe it only blows one way, what do I know. No place to turn around, so she keeps going. She’s like Santa Claus without the toys, blowing down the streets of town to make the way safe for little girls and boys, the elderly, her fellow Northern-Americans. In my fantasy, she’s picking up speed. She’s got grit, and also pluck. She’s determined to do the whole M&M loop (M = Marinette, WI, & M = Menominee, MI). She blows down Cleveland St. to Pierce, heading for the Hattie Street Bridge by (the long-closed) Scott’s Paper Mill.

Crossing the bridge into Michigan, to M’s twin frozen city of M* [see “Footnotes” below], she blows up 10th Avenue past the courthouse and jail, up to First Street, turns toward the marina and band shell, perhaps waving gaily to the guys ice fishing in their shanties out on the bay. Past Menominee Paper Company, over the Menekaunee Bridge and past Marinette Fuel and Dock, where she sees a ship unloading pig iron, salt, or coal. “Hiya boys, how’s it hangin’?” Then past Waupaca Foundry (where son-in-law Aaron works) into Menekaunee**. Where there are docks there are men, and where there are men there are bars, so she blows a path past Helen’s Edgewater Bar, Rei Tec Bar, Mike and Jean’s Bar, The Cactus Bar, The Aloha Inn and The Corn Crib, all on the same block, on the same side of the street. (Shelly’s Beer Depot is across the street, in case all the bars are hit by lightning or you just like to drink at home.) Fortunately, Barb didn’t inherit Daddy’s alcoholic gene, so she’s not tempted to stop in at the Aloha Inn for a bottle of Blatz with a paper umbrella sticking out the top. But she’s gettin’ tired, mighty tired, and she’s covered with snow (like they say, don’t spit into the wind, especially when it’s coming out of a tractor). Finally, she comes up the home stretch past Barbaraland to home sweet home, completing the loop, and is greeted by the mittened applause of neighbors pouring out of their houses with steaming mugs of hot chocolate in hand*** to warm up our heroine.

“Footnotes”

*In my “research” for this little fantasy, I discovered that the “Twin Cities” have been upgraded to the “Tri-City Area.” I couldn’t imagine what the third city could be, so I asked Barb. She said it’s Peshtigo, about 10 miles south. (So two of the Tri-Cities are in Wisconsin. My U.P. references are going to take a hit.)

**Ah, more research is called for. Menekaunee used to be a rogue village of squatter fishermen and other hardscrabble folk that was later annexed to Marinette. A “working class haven,” it has its own flavor and is still sometimes referred to as Fishtown; the residents call themselves River Rats.

***This is just a fantasy, OK?, so I don’t know how they could be applauding while holding steaming mugs of hot chocolate.

Ah, for the zines when I felt like riffin’ ‘n’ rappin’… I could have done some serious language damage to that story, with words like snow and blow to work with. “Doncha know I gotta go out and blow, cuz I’m goin loco from the snow, it’s piled up so…. On second thought, NO, fergit this snow shit, it’s frigid as a Frigidaire out there, that’s it, I’m gettin’ out of this place ‘n’ save my frozen face. Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the snow blows, it blows for thee, no more for me, you dig?”

Unfortunately (?), I’m not in the mood at the moment. But give me time.

Barb also writes:

My fingers are kind of numb right now. I just spent the last 20 minutes going in and out of the house trying to get LaMew from a cat fight that would have kept him out in the cold too long.

Compared to LaMew, Pookie is a pussy.

***

On a serious note, Barb tells me our cousin Jerry has died.

Apparently he had frozen pipes during that cold snap we have been having. He was found under his trailer, apparently electrocuted himself trying to thaw out the pipes. He wasn’t found until 3 days later and was frozen and blue.

Holy Christ! This is the same cousin who passed out in a cornfield one night 25 or so years ago and got frost bit so bad they had to amputate both his legs. How weird is it that the two major catastrophes of his life involved freezing? But here’s the saddest part:

Deb got a call from the funeral home. It seems they took Jerry’s phone/address book to find a relative and all the names he had, had phone numbers that had been disconnected. They found Deb’s number in there [they were neighbors] and called her to see if she could find a relative. Turns out her mom works with an ex-wife who put them in touch with someone [his current wife?] in South Carolina.

Barb kept watching the paper for a funeral notice but never saw one. Jerry’s estranged brother and sisters apparently had no interest in picking up the body, straightening out his affairs, or even claiming his stuff. His car still sits out in front of his trailer, covered with snow.

This just in:

Apparently the wife who lives in the Carolinas wanted to be done with it all as soon as possible, so she sold the trailer and all of its contents to the people who own the trailer park for $3000…. the pictures on the walls were even left behind. Talk about wiping out the existence of a person.

***REST IN PEACE, JERRY. I HOPE HEAVEN IS WARM AND DRY.***

I showed my therapist J some pictures of my sisters and their families, and she saw the resemblance between me and Barb right away. (K looks more like our wild Irish aunts.) What’s more startling is that our humor is so similar. She was 9 years old when I went away to college, so I don’t think she got it from me. And I don’t remember any of us being funny at home. Mom loved comedy on TV and in books, so we were familiar with Bob Newhart, Vaughn Meader (he impersonated John F. Kennedy in the early ‘60s—a short-lived career), and several Jewish comedians— Herb Shriner, Shelley Berman, Sam Levenson, Allan Sherman. (Interesting ethnic attraction, considering she was a sheltered farm girl from the upper Midwest.) So most of our humor was imported—or else I’ve forgotten the witty banter that kept us all in side-splitting laughter all those years.

A friend of mine sent me one of those lame Internet questionnaires that ask about your personal preferences—books you’re reading, favorite color, have you ever been in love, etc. I filled it out and sent the survey with my answers to Barb. She filled it out too and sent me her answers. One of the questions was:

DO YOU SLEEP WITH A STUFFED ANIMAL?

Here is Barb’s answer:

Only after LaMew has eaten a rabbit and wants to sleep it off, but not often.

I love that her humor sneaks up on me so that I almost miss it. One day I wrote to her,

Sometimes I wonder what our home life would have been like if Daddy hadn’t gotten MS. His alcoholism would have progressed… Mom might have divorced him… you might not exist….

Barb replied,

I wonder if Mom would have been as hard and controlling, using the guilt factor on us kids, or you kids as the case might have been.

When I LOL’d to this and asked her if her humor reminded her of anyone, she answered, “Yes, I noticed the similarity, sis.”

I used to be concerned about Pookie taking over the mary’zine, but I think Barb is a much bigger threat. She starts by wheeling in the Trojan horse, getting her notable quotes quoted by the horseload, passing along greetings to J—my J—who says she’s getting to know my sister from her stories and bon mots, and then one day, POOF: barbie’zine. Well, maybe she’ll quote me once in a while.

Some more U.P. news, and then I’ll try to think of something in my Left Coast life that’s compelling enough to share.

We had a triple shooting in Stephenson this weekend…. One of the women was the former librarian’s daughter. Apparently it was a husband-wife breakup with the wife’s friend (librarian’s daughter) there as a mediator while the wife got her things out of the home. They thought the husband was gone. He was not, ambushed them and shot them with a shotgun. The wife is in critical condition, the husband shot himself after shooting them and is dead, and the librarian’s daughter has buckshot lodged in her head they are not going to remove. More excitement in small town U.S.A.

Mom used to work in the library in Stephenson (Stephenson is in the U.P., 27 miles north of Menominee; it is not yet part of the Multi-City Area) and knew the buckshot’d woman. People get murdered in California too, of course, but they’re mostly just folks you read about in the paper. Back there, pretty much all the tragedies are up close and personal, you either know the people involved or you know someone who knows them. I remember a horrible event from about 30 years ago. There were four or five (or six) brothers who worked on neighboring farms, and one day one of the brothers went down into a cellar (?) or an underground tank (?) or something to check on a gas leak (?) or whatever (they don’t call me Storyteller for nothing; OK, they don’t call me Storyteller at all). He didn’t come back up and didn’t respond to their calls, so another brother went down to check on him. And so on, and so on…. and in the end, all the brothers went down there and died, like, within minutes. I’m not going to be so cruel as to suggest that brother #3 (at the very least) should have figured out that it wasn’t a good idea to follow #1 and #2 down there, but maybe it’s one of those male-bonding things. There was a picture in the paper of the wives of these brothers being interviewed for the story—can you imagine what a shock it must have been? And I remember thinking they looked… not unhappy. But no one in my family knew them, so that kind of shoots the whole premise of this paragraph.

Oops, the computer is checking my e-mail and blows the siren that announces I have mail. And guess who it’s from?

LaMew seems to be interested in this chicken commercial with a blacked out breast area. The chicken walks around and the commercial says showing large breasts on TV is prohibited in some states except when it’s in a sandwich.

Which reminds me. Pookie likes to watch TV and will recognize animals on the screen. Mom once sent me a made-for-cats video that shows real birds and squirrels in the videographer’s backyard. Pookie was fascinated by these larger-than-life creatures. But I was surprised the other night when he recognized a CARTOON of a cat…. and there was no identifying kitty noise. I was impressed. The big lug is smarter than I thought [oops better start dumbin down again she could be on to me]. This gives me paws… I mean pause… where did that come from? [heh heh] Soon after Pookie came to live with me, I came home from work one day and the TV was blaring. The remote was on the bed, so I figured I had left it there and he had accidentally stepped on it…. But now I wonder…..

fan mail from some frozen flounder

Just to show that I can cannibalize e-mails other than my sister’s, I finally heard from my old friend K—oh dear, there aren’t enough letters in the alphabet to go around; I’ll have to call her KM—who lives in lower Mich. She chimes in with:

… your last THREE ‘zines have provoked me to want to really write to you, for a zillion reasons—and you will probably hear from me soon. The U.P. connection…. wow. The first of your U.P. ‘zines came just as we were giving a U.P. party! ….

So now I can’t wait to hear what on earth a “U.P. party” is. Guys in lumberjack shirts eating pasties? Video showings of Anatomy of a Murder and Escanaba in Da Moonlight (both filmed up there)? The partygoers speaking in strange tongues?: “I s’pose, eh?” (The Canadians get all the credit for the “eh” thing. The U.P. is truly the forgotten land.)

***

Well, I’ve done an honest accounting of recent events in my life and have come to the conclusion that nothin’ much is happening here, so I will merrily merrily row my boat back in time and tell you a story. Yes, it comes from her.

I asked Barb if she likes margaritas (mmmmm—margaritas). So she lays this memory on me:

Back before I got married I had a margarita experience:

Jennifer K. and I went out with a couple of guys for the evening; me with my then boyfriend, Dean, and she with the Hunka Hunka Burnin Love guy that I wished I was with, Mark. I had 3 margaritas that night as we danced the night away. I was driving a big old heavy Chevy. We dropped off my boyfriend first, then dropped off Mark. Made the mistake of turning onto 10th Ave. which was undergoing street repair at the time. On gravel first and then came to the barriers. “Oh,” the slightly inebriated me said, “we are at the end of the construction already,” so I went around the barrier. After traveling for about a half a block, I came to a dead stop. What on earth was that in the middle of the road? It rose about 2 feet above the road. Focusing in, we discovered it was the railroad tracks, and when I looked to my left, discovered the manhole cover was also 2 feet in the air. I was in sand, and when I stopped, my car sunk like a stone up to the floorboards. Jennifer laughed so hard, she fell out of the car.

We walked back to Mark’s house, what else could we do at 2 in the morning. We woke his parents, they weren’t too pleased. The 3 of us then walked back to my place. I lived in Pollock Alley at the time…. This was down by First Street mind you and my car was near the old Red Owl store on 10th Ave.

We had breakfast, crashed, and slept until noon…. Jennifer was going to drop me off by my car…. We got there and the place where the car had been was all smoothed over. Only one lone guy was there and I went up and asked if he knew where my car was…. He just grinned and said it was at Holiday Wrecking. I called them and asked how I could get my car back. $10 [Ed. note: !!!] was the answer. That day was payday, but Jennifer had to get back to Green Bay, so I had to ask Babe, my boss, if I could get my check early, as I had no money, and then had to explain why. She gave me the money to get my car along with a lecture.

[Barb was working as a bartender at the time. She was a tough cookie, took no shit from the biker patrons. P and I were visiting once when they brought a band into the bar and she sang some Three Dog Night songs… Jeremiah was a bull frog… She could belt ‘em out pretty good.]

I got my car, Jennifer went home, and I stopped at a friend’s house. “Oh, you’re the one they’re looking for. The cops were trying to find the owner this morning, and went to your old address in Marinette.” I had just moved to Menominee. Scared that they would come to Hodan’s while I was working and haul me away in handcuffs, I went to the CopShop and asked them if they were looking for me. “Why, what did you do?” was the question. “That was my car on 10th Ave. this morning.” He just smiled and said, “If you ever do that again, just make sure it is removed by 7:00 in the morning.” Relieved, I thanked him and walked out.

Do I like margaritas? Oh yeah. Can I handle them? Oh no.

***

For a while I couldn’t figure out why I was so focused on life back there in “Wish-Mich,” as we have taken to calling the Two-State Area. My life here is fine… finer ‘n frog’s hair, as my father would have said. There’s really nothing to tell—in therapy, as well. I tell J I’m swell, and I don’t have to sell her on that, she can see and feel that I’m in a deep well (well, she said “pool” but that’s cool too). She helped me see that I’m not in my head, it’s all somatic, almost automatic, this response to my changed relation to my family. I might not be ready for this task, to write about the blast from that long-ago past. But now I see that if things aren’t all happening at the same time, they might as well be. This is the mental snowblower, the mind eff’er: “past” is just a word we use to separate perceived realities. We all know that memory is fallible, our brain is malleable, our thoughts not believable, I know it sounds inconceivable that the past can actually, literally, change, or rather, it doesn’t change, there is no “it,” it’s all inside us. So not only do we not remember things as clearly as we think, but even if we do remember images that we have set in concrete, gaining a reality much more defined than when they were “real,” our error (my error) was to think that what I remembered was even true at the time. We pretend there are no limits to our perceptions, but my childish conceptions were just points on a Tri-City map. Barb and K and Mom and Dad each brought their own realities to bear, making a rich, confusing stew of points of view. So where is the truth? It’s got to be deeper than our experience, which is fleeting as all get-out until we codify and build a monument to our flimsiest recollections. We call ourselves survivors, but do we even know what we survived? They say that at a wedding it’s the bride’s day—for the bride. For the usher, it’s the usher’s day. We each represent maybe one molecule in all the simultaneous happenings that happen just in our own little spheres. At the age of 4 as we’re driving through Chicago and I call “Nigger!” out the window, I’m as proud as when I connected the pictures of Dick and Jane with the words in the book. That was my “reality.” I knew nothing of the reality of those urban people of color just trying to get through the day in early 1950s USA.

My point, in case you missed it, is this: We are all just as ignorant “now” as we were “then” about all the other points of view through which the world takes on its hue. Obviously, I have learned a thing or two, but there are always just a few more blind spots in the way of enlightenment.

So with every e-mail I get from my sister, and every story from her past, or our shared past, or the present as it is lived in that working class haven or hell, depending (again) on your point of view—nephew Joshua on strike from Marinette Marine, times are lean, he’s getting bags of groceries from local churches, the odd job doing drywall and all, it’s so much like the life I recall but lived in different ways by all…. I see now that the narrow thread I have clung to all these years, through all these me-mories, a thread called My Life, is no more enduring than the wispy web of the spider above my bed. And somehow that is such a relief. It tells me the past is wide open, there’s no ground beneath my feet, nothing to cling to and no need to cling to anything. The past is just as mysterious as what we call the future, which is only “past” or “present” from a different point of view. If you’re standing high up on a hill and see two trains far away, each coming toward the other on the same track, and you somehow notify each of them to stop because a crash is imminent… are you “seeing into the future,” or do you just have a different perspective?

Which brings me to… WAR. I’ve been compartmentalizing like crazy from down here in my deep well or pool, call me a fool but I surface reluctantly and wonder what my place should be in this worldwide multidimensional drama that is unfolding.

I don’t want to write a polemic about it—there are plenty of other people shouting and arguing and taking sides and looking down on each other—the ugly American, the arrogant French, the self-righteous Arab, the embattled Israeli, and throw in the mix North Korea, India, and Pakistan… where does it end? (Canada?) There are infinite points of view, not only of nations and of factions within nations, but between our hearts and our minds, and vice versa, not to mention the many divisions, seen and unseen, within ourselves.

The peace activist and the war criminal have the same heart, like it or not. All conflict comes from that heart, on different scales and levels of power, of course, but in essence it’s the same. It’s us vs. them, me vs. you, it’s that well of feeling you call on when you’re almost crushed by an SUV that’s wandering back and forth across lanes while its driver chats obliviously on a cell phone, or when you want to kill the woman ahead of you in the checkout line who waits until she has heard the total cost of her groceries before digging into her purse and finally coming up with a checkbook and starts laboriously writing the amount and double-checking the checker’s total and showing her ID and filling out the checkbook register in complete detail. Is it better to fume at a fellow ordinary human than it is to massacre hordes of people? Of course. But that division is where it all starts. I am not like you. You’re different. I’m good, you’re bad.

We band together with others on whatever (shifting) basis, be it family, school, town, country, mode of transportation, political party, age, sex, skin color, sexual orientation… all the myriad ways we find to group ourselves into “self” and assign others to the limbo of “nonself.” (Sure, our immune systems do that too, but we’re supposed to be better than our biology—aren’t we?) The SUV driver says, “The only thing that matters is that my family is safe.” What s/he’s really saying is, Who gives a shit if I kill someone else’s family in a fender bender? The only thing that matters… is me! Then there are the people with their Baby on Board stickers, like Watch out, I have procreated! P had a near miss with another car once, and the woman passenger shouted out the window, I’M PREGNANT. Oh, excuse me, I should have divined the state of your uterus and pulled over to let you pass undisturbed by my nonpregnant ass.

I have had a car cut in front of me and the driver gives me the finger when I honk my outrage; then he roars off and I actually hope he crashes. Naturally, one doesn’t want to “own” these feelings so instead we project them this way and that, like human snowblowers. Don’t care where it lands, just get it out of here.

“Peace” is always “out there,” thwarted by someone else’s behavior or beliefs. Whenever we blame external forces—even if those forces are the clearly demented George W. Bush and cronies—we create “war.” But we think “peace” is only about governments, treaties, settlements. It’s something high and holy that can only come from the top down, negotiated by our leaders, never mind the little “wars” that get people shot to death just for taking someone else’s parking spot. My parking spot—Our land—I was here first—God is on our side—You started it. Every “political” argument is circular. I’m the victim here. No, I am.

The oxymorons are all around us. Angry peace activists. Environmentalist SUV drivers. No war for oil [bumper sticker on gasoline-powered cars]. Animal rights activists advocating the killing of defective human babies [Peter Singer]. Hate-filled Christians.

One day in a supermarket, I noticed a woman who was all prissy-lipped staring at another woman who had offended her in some way, like maybe brushing past her or leaving her cart in the middle of the aisle. The offending woman was completely unaware of her transgression, and I could see the wheels turning in the head of Prissy Woman, “You bitch, get out of my effing way.” So, because Offending Woman didn’t offend me, I’m free to judge Prissy Woman, like, Get a life, Prissy Woman, and then of course, I remember how many times I have done exactly the same thing, and I wonder who’s watching me judge Prissy Woman for judging Offending Woman. It’s a total merry-go-round, what goes around just keeps coming and going around, no way to get off the ride until, maybe, we take the Bible’s advice: Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye (Matthew 7:5).

But here is humanity’s dirty little secret: it is pleasurable to hate. Rage, anger, and annoyance—the large grievances and the petty—take us off the hook of our own transgressions, but they also just plain feel good. To see the driver who cut in front of you get pulled over by the CHP. To hate the slow driver ahead of you, and in the next minute hate the tailgater in back of you. We have endless opportunities to stoke this pleasure. And what is the alternative? We don’t even like to think about what it would mean to abstain from the unholy joys of resentment and revenge. So we sweep our own culpability under the rug—our spitefulness, our tailgating, our honking and finger-giving at the too-slow and the too-fast, our anger directed at our parents, neighbors, Bush, Saddam, Al Qaeda, right-wing Christians, peacenik lefties, Zionists, towelheads. We truly live in a “pluralist” society/world, you can’t keep up with all the targets of otherness that are presented to us each and every day. We’re addicted to being pissed off, to blaming, to finger-pointing, to imploring “How can I miss you if you won’t go away?” (Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks).

So yeah, “fuck the war” out there but what about “fuck the war” in my own vengeful heart? When does that become the truth that sets us free? Are we going to wait until the aliens come (the outer space kind; the Mexicans are already here) and we can all band together because we have magically, under pressure, turned all humans into self?

We get annoyed when other people act as if they’re the only ones who count—because, deep in our faithless hearts, we believe that we’re the only ones who count—we and whoever we have included in our circle of “us.”

That’s the only problem I have with “family.” It can be a wonderful thing, a respite from a hostile world, a source of comfort and support—but it also encourages the belief in us vs. them, self vs. nonself, family (community, religion, country) vs. non-.

Ahem. And now for something completely different….

working on my (t)issues in therapy

One of the unexpected by-products of therapy for me has been my invention—or discovery, depending on how you look at it—of a new art form. I don’t have a catchy name for it, but I’m open to suggestions. Simply put, I am reclaiming the magic of spontaneous expression through the humble medium of… Kleenex—the tearing and twisting of; see also soggy mass. This Kleenex Kreativity (too kute?) is a bit like very flimsy origami, except that the resulting creations are not your conventional waterfowl, your cranes, your flowers—no, they are natural, intuitive expressions of my subconscious or, as I like to think of my subconscious, the stream of humanity through which all KreativityTM, Kleenex or otherwise, flows.

This most ephemeral art form always ends up in the trash, which is fitting, because in my artistic expression I am as the wind, the passing clouds, the morning mist, here today, gone at the end of the session. In fact, I liken myself to the artist in the movie “Rivers and Tides,” who creates artworks from materials found in nature. He goes out before dawn and pastes twigs together with his own spit to make a sculpture, say, and as the sun rises (or the illusion thereof), its warmth dries the spit and his twig sculpture falls apart. Then he moves on… though not before photographing his “temporary” art for posterity. I know exactly how he feels—the thrill, the challenge of kreationTM is worth the inevitable destruction by the same natural forces that drove him to kreateTM in the first place—“the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” (Dylan Thomas) or, in my case, the force that through the white fuse drives the ghost, the angel, the Arab, the little person with a big head and flimsy legs, the finger puppet, the ring with a twisted 0-carat diamond on top, the je ne sais quoi. (Note to self: must change name of art form slightly to avoid action by Kleenex attorneys. I have not yet kreatedTM a Kleenex attorney, but if you put 100 monkeys in a room with 100 boxes of Kleenex, I’m quite sure that at least one practitioner of law would emerge.)

Is this deeply spiritual but impermanent art what Freud had in mind when he encouraged free association in therapy? Did they have Kleenex in his day? Maybe not. I’m sure he would have seen the possibilities in this telling construction performed by unconscious fingers while the head of the person with the fingers sheds copious tears and tells her story of woe. A self-generated Rorschach test. Sometimes the KllenxKreationTM-to-be doesn’t get crumpled and twisted, merely torn, and then what arises are the ever-popular eye slits and mouth through which I peer at J and stick out my tongue as she valiantly attempts to make a serious point. Or the fingerless glove that allows me to waggle my digits provocatively. If I haven’t made it clear, I have no idea this kreativeTM activity is going on until, as the tears dry on my cheeks, I look down and gaze in wonder at the delicate (or soggy) KlenexKreationTM that has sprung to life through the grace of God and the Kimberly-Clark Corporation.

Therapy is Process. You could not do Therapy without Kleenex, ergo, KlienxKreativity Is ProcessTM, or so I humbly submit.

Donations for the purchase of raw materials, preservation of the artwork (I’m starting to think there could be a book in this), and possibly a website and future Museum of KlnxKreativityTM are always welcome.

[Mary McKenney]

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mary’zine random redux: #14 May 2001

September 14, 2009

Well, it’s been a quiet month in Lake Nobegon….

Have been watching all the hair fall out of my head—unexpected bonus of female aging. Bald pate will go nicely with the goatee that’s springing up.

Been to the dentist 8 times in the last 3 months, for bridgework. Would sell firstborn to pay $3,000 bill but unfortunately never bred.

Made my first purchase of Efferdent to clean the new partial denture. Wonder if they still make Serutan (“Nature’s spelled backwards”), a kind of elixir for the elderly. Will have to pay closer attention to commercials from now on.

Walked down to Macy’s in Union Square after last appointment. Fashion, fashion everywhere and not a thing to buy. There’s DKNY, but where’s DYKE?

Best compliment I’ve gotten all month: “You are like a well-worn sweatshirt.” Baggy, I presume.

Read in the newspaper that cats need a “job” to avoid stress. Obediently went out and bought Pookie a cat dancer—feathered mouse (?) dangling at the end of a plastic stick. $7.49. Cat dance? Fat chance.

Then spent $46 on special veterinarian-approved food and powdered food additive for his dry skin. Hunger strike could last a while, considering his fat reserves.

Am doing my annual caffeine detox. Down to 1 cup of green tea and 1 Excedrin per day. Robert Downey, Jr., I feel your pain.

Work continues to be educational. Learned that rats do not have a gallbladder.

Computer is on its last legs—well, it’s 18 months old, which is about 65 in human years. Screen freezes if I try to print and chew gum at the same time.

And that’s the news from Lake Nobegon.

ptsd

I received a plaintive request from a faithful reader, Kathy T., who wants more Pookie news. I tell Pookie all the time that he is becoming a celebrity and has to start taking his fan base more seriously—by giving me, his underpaid publicist, more material. He merely squeaks—doesn’t even bother to meow—and heads for the other room to lie on cardboard.

So I’m forced to dig for stories. He wouldn’t like me telling this one, because what happened was an assault on his dignity, as most things that happen to cats are. But that’s the beauty of living with an animal—they’re illiterate, so you can write anything you want to about them.

PTSD stands for post-traumatic stress disorder, but in this case it also stands for Pookie’s Traumatic Spa Day. I give Pookie a bath every 14 years whether he needs it or not. Actually, that’s not quite true. When he was 7 or 8, he escaped from the patio somehow. Unable to handle the terrible responsibility of freedom, he hid under a nearby car for hours, as I roamed the neighborhood calling his name. When he finally managed to make enough of a pathetic squeak to let me know where he was, I had to crawl under the car and drag him out. Of course, he had big oil spots on his head and back. I didn’t know about kitty day spas then, so I changed into some old clothes, grabbed a big towel, and took him into the bathtub. I didn’t have any special cat soap, so I used Joy dishwashing detergent for its grease-cutting properties. I was prepared to do battle, but he was actually quite docile as I soaped him up and then rinsed him as best I could, using a washcloth and a basin of water.

Well, we both lived through the experience, but I didn’t want to repeat it. For years now, Pookie has had a skin problem that gives him something like kitty dandruff. (Oh my God—was it the Joy?) I’ve asked a couple of vets over the years what I could do about it, but they weren’t much help. One said, “Feed him table scraps,” and I had to laugh. Honey, we don’t have table scraps at our house. Also, because he’s longhaired, he tends to get a lot of mats, and doesn’t enjoy my yanking on his fur or coming at him with scissors. The situation got even worse after his you-know-what was cut off. He has to pee like a girl now, and his private parts—or I should say, his no-longer-private, no-longer-parts—tend to dribble. Things got pretty desperate, olfactory-wise. (His personal hygiene in general leaves much to be desired. He does his fair share of self-cleaning, but often I will come upon him sitting in the middle of a room with a dazed look in his eyes and one back leg sticking up in the air behind his ear. Either he’s contemplating the mysteries of existence, or he forgot what he was doing.)

So anyway, after much agonizing indecision, which is—face it—how I live my life, I decided to take Pookie to Cat’s Cradle, a feline grooming and boarding place in San Rafael, to be shampooed, combed, clipped, fluffed, and folded. I was dreading it—partly because I was embarrassed to have such a grungy cat and partly because he has been known to shit and piss in the carrier on the way to or from the vet’s, as his personal signature of disapproval.

The setup to this story is a lot longer than the actual story, which was like a dream come true. I dropped him off at Cat’s Cradle at 8:30 a.m. and picked him up at 1:00. He was soft and clean as a kitten, and the spa lady didn’t even make me feel guilty about the gross factor. She did tactfully give me some suggestions for how to deal with his skin problem.

The boarding part of the operation is right up front behind glass, and it looks very pleasant. They even have special accommodations for the non-user-friendly felines. So it seemed possible that I could send Pookie on an extended spa holiday the next time I go on vacation, instead of forcing my friends to make daily pilgrimages to the house to maintain his royal lifestyle.

I was thrilled to have this experience over with and to be able to touch Pookie without washing my hands afterward, but the down side was that he went into a serious funk. It took him 2 or 3 days to recover—he just hunkered down in his bed like a meatloaf or a sphinx, staring straight ahead, with his purr switch on Off. I felt guilty—and had second thoughts about the vacation idea. But he came around eventually, and now if I could just get him to eat his pricey food with the dry skin helper on top, and to do his “job” by dancing for the feathered mouse (instead of lounging on his side, batting casually at it while I do all the work), we might just live happily ever after.

laughterbation

In a year that has not been the greatest for me so far—on so many levels—I had one really great day a few weeks ago. It was truly ordinary in most ways but felt so different. (1) The main difference was no headache, or at least only a small one, of manageable one-Excedrin size. (2) Got new work—a book by an old acquaintance who synchronistically reappeared in my life. I’ll tell you about her sometime. (3) Got a great e-mail from one of my Austrian authors. I had edited a paper for his colleague, and the colleague was “really happy” with my work… so Philipp wrote: “We are all happy you exist!” and there was just something so touching and uplifting about his invoking my existence; I mean, there are presumably other (better?) reasons why I exist, but it was nice to know that I make a difference to someone way on the other side of the world. So I spent the afternoon stretching my brain editing Philipp’s paper on intensive care unit statistics (he’s English-challenged, and I’m statistics-challenged, but we’ve managed to get all his papers published in good journals so far) and finally collapsed on the bed, bone- and brain-weary but with that great feeling of an honest day’s work finally over.

Pookie got on the bed with me, which he usually only does in the evening for TV-watching purposes. I let my mind go (which some would say I did a long time ago) and started thinking about the hilarious interview with Mike Myers that I had seen the night before on “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” Just thinking about different parts of it got me laughing. James Lipton, the interviewer, had complained about a hysterical takeoff that “Saturday Night Live” had recently done of him. He said they got it all wrong—they did him with a British accent, and “I don’t have a British accent, I’m from MICHigan, for Christ’s sake!” And so I laughed when I thought of the SNL takeoff, which I had seen, and then I laughed at James Lipton’s umbrage and at Mike Myers’ deadpan agreement that the takeoff was completely off base, and Pookie looked over his shoulder at me and went “Errkk?” because my laughter was shaking the bed and making him bounce, and that made me laugh all the harder, and I told him it was like putting a quarter in a massaging fingers bed, and that made me howwwl till I was rolling back and forth, unable to speak. It was a laff riot of 1, if you don’t count Pookie, and I don’t—that’s one thing about cats, they have no sense of humor. Then I thought of the word “laughterbation,” which set me off again, and finally Pookie jumped off the bed in disgust, and even that was fuel for the funny fire. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that helpless kind of laughter by myself before. It’s happened with Peggy, and it used to happen all the time with my sisters and my mother—the four of us would be falling-down, pee-our-pants laughing over something completely silly while the brothers-in-law looked on, stone-faced—which made it all the funnier, of course.

When I finally settled down, I felt thoroughly refreshed—much more so than after the other –bation. So I have to agree with Reader’s Digest that laughter is truly the best medicine. If you have no moral objections to self-pleasure and want to try a little laughterbation yourself, here’s a suggestion. Get thee to a used bookstore and look for a copy of How to Massage Your Cat, which is inexplicably out of print. [2009 update: It was reprinted in 2003 and is available on Amazon.] It’s the funniest book ever written (and illustrated). These laughing jags are one of God’s greatest gifts. Laff on.

white like me

At the beginning of this issue, I invoked Lake Wobegon, the innocent fictional town of funny-talking people that Garrison Keillor made famous. And I got to wondering if he has ever told a story about racism in Lake Wobegon. Something tells me no—it’s not exactly the stuff of humorous anecdotes. But the good Lutherans of the far North—despite little in their surroundings to indicate that any color of person other than pinkish exists—pass racist beliefs on to their children as surely as they pass family stories about the Old Country and the recipe for abelskiver. These are my roots. My people were not the slaves, and not the slaveholders either, just the ignorant (not innocent) bystanders….

My earliest memory of being aware that there were “differently colored” people in the world was when I was about 5 years old and my parents and I took a car trip to Oak Park, Illinois—a suburb of Chicago—to visit my aunt Dagmar. We were driving through a part of Chicago where all the people on the streets were dark-skinned, and I gleefully called out from the back seat, “Look, there’s a nigger!” My mother, horrified, turned around from the front seat and hissed at me—“Shhhh!” And at that moment, the complex conditioning that is instilled in white people in America took root in me, at least on a conscious level. Obviously, the seed had been planted sometime earlier when I first learned the word and matched it to the dark face. What’s strange is that I don’t remember ever learning that word—and there were no dark faces in my town to match it to.

I remember a couple of other details from that trip to Oak Park. Having been told that we were going to ride the El, which was “a train in the sky,” I told my friends to watch for me in case we flew over our neighborhood. In Chicago we attended a live TV show, and from my seat in the audience I thought the camera was trained directly on me. I wasn’t happy about being there for some reason, so I spent the whole time scowling at what I thought were the viewers at home. I mention these two little misunderstandings because it didn’t take me long to figure out the nature of El trains and the fact that TV cameras pretty much focus on the stage. But no one ever came forward and said to me, “You know, ‘nigger’ is a bad word, not because it could get you beaten up on the streets of Chicago but because it’s demeaning to perfectly decent people.”

As to where I learned the word, I figure someone passed it into my lexicon when I read Little Black Sambo. Then there were Brazil nuts, which were routinely called “nigger toes,” and the childhood chant, “Catch a nigger by the toe, when he hollers let him go….” I’m deliberately using that shocking word when it’s the word I mean. It’s not that I think we should ever become comfortable using it, but I think we sweep the reality of the slur under the rug when we resort to the coy and disingenuous “N-word”—as if it’s a joke or something cutely naughty.

Later in life, I became aware of the origins of this early conditioning when my aunt Doris and uncle Sonny came to visit me in San Francisco. My aunt matter-of-factly announced upon arrival that they had had to drive through “niggertown” to get there. I was horrified, of course, having moved into a more genteel world by then, where you knew to disguise your nasty thoughts with nice language, or you didn’t admit you had nasty thoughts in the first place. This is why white working-class people are scapegoated for their racism—they aren’t more racist than the higher-income classes, they just don’t coat it with nice words. This is one reason they’re called that other ethnically demeaning term, “white trash,” which is considered completely acceptable in this age of careful, “sensitive” language—don’t say “Pollock” or “dago” but feel free to dismiss millions of people as “white trash.” Don’t get me started—oops, too late—but I think this term is still in use because it lets people project their racist feelings obliquely on a safe target—can’t mention race but can get all high-and-mighty about white people who “have no class”—in that double meaning that says so much about how poor white people are viewed. (“In our society, money is equated with virtue”—Jon Carroll, S.F. Chronicle; “The upper income classes tend to be highly intelligent and to have highly intelligent children….”—letter to the editor, S.F. Chronicle [substitute the word “privileged” for “intelligent” and we’ll talk].)

Ahem. Where was I?

Not that derogatory words are the only way to insult people of color. Once when I was back home visiting my family, my 12-year-old nephew wanted to sit in the front seat of the car with me, whereupon my sister told him, “No, Mike—black folks sit in the back, white folks sit in the front.” I noted the change of language—was that progress?—but was horrified by the same old sentiment. I launched into a diatribe—“What are you teaching your kids?”—and she got (justifiably) pissed at me. To her, it was a completely benign saying, a “joke.” In lecturing her, I was playing the insufferable older sister who goes away to college and comes back with strange sensitivities and high-falutin’ ways. I was the privileged one with a middle-class job and a middle-class social conscience to go with it, while my sister stayed in our hometown, raised two kids, and worked (still works) at a strenuous, noisy job in a factory making couplings. In this situation I knew I was “right” in one respect but wrong in so many others.

***

Strangely, I don’t remember hearing any anti-Semitic comments when I was growing up—not even “They killed our Lord.” To me, Jews were the chosen people as portrayed in the Bible and remained that way in my mind even after I stopped reading the Bible. They were the people my father fought for in WWII. And quite literally, “some of my best friends” have been Jewish. I know anti-Semitism still exists—that it’s a strain of “emotional bacteria” that will probably never be completely eradicated—but I don’t understand it. And I wonder if that is largely due to not having been exposed to that form of racism as a child. Also, I just thought of this: My mother loved Jewish humorists like Sam Levenson, Herb Shriner, Shelley Berman, and Allan Sherman. I can’t think of any black performers she liked, except maybe Bill Cosby.

***

As I try to come to terms with this difficult topic, knowing that there’s no point in writing about it if I’m not going to be truthful, I feel like I’m pushing a shopping cart with a defective wheel that keeps pulling to the side. It would be so much easier, in a way, to write about growing up working class, or about being a woman or a lesbian—I could get on my high horse and harangue you about how middle-class people, men, and straight people have oppressed my sorry ass. They say you’re supposed to write about what you know, right? I don’t even have any black friends—my experiences with actual black people have been so marginal, it’s embarrassing. But I figure that sometimes you have to write about what you don’t know so that your admitted ignorance can be a beacon to others similarly without clue. And in the process, you reveal what you do know, which is how you see the world, for better or worse. Then, if the shoe fits, other people can wear it too.

After I decided to write about racism, I came up against a lot of fear. It was difficult to think about exposing myself in that way. What if I revealed more than I intended? What if people took it the wrong way and didn’t catch all the nuances of how I’m not actually a raving racist, I just think like that sometimes? Perhaps if I had more Pookie stories to tell, I would have convinced myself to save this heavy topic for a later issue. But I kept thinking about what the painting teachers say when you get stuck and don’t know what to paint—“Did an image come to you that you rejected?” And so, even after I decided to play it safe and write instead about gay marriage and other things homo (“The Evolutionary Importance of Gay People”), something kept nagging at me. Then I talked to J about it, and I came away knowing I had to push that edge. So, even though my shopping cart keeps wanting to turn onto safer ground, I’ll just keep wrestling with it, if you don’t mind—just as I wrestle with the feelings and contradictions of being white in this society, or at least white like me.

When I e-mailed a friend that I was trying to write about this topic, she wrote back, “I understand your ambivalence about committing ink to racism… it IS loaded for people, and there is SO MUCH PC-ness around it. Makes me afraid to move.” And it’s just this paralysis, this fear of “moving”—of saying or doing the wrong thing—that makes it all the more important, I think, for well-intentioned white people to talk about racism. Even if we use all the right words and shun all the wrong ones, we know the nasty secrets of our heart and of the thought process that keeps racism alive. Personal feelings are only a small part of the reality, of course—but as we used to say in the ‘60s, “the personal is the political.” So it’s a place to start.

One last disclaimer: Obviously, there are many different groups that make up the color and culture spectrum. I’m focusing on black people because they seem to provoke the most complex feelings in those of us who are a whiter shade of pale. But let me recommend a fascinating book about the “history of multicultural America”—A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki. I was surprised to learn that the Irish were oppressed by the English long before the concept of skin color evolved as a way to divide and conquer. So class distinctions may be even more deeply embedded in our collective psyche than racial ones. As I’ve heard it said, few white people would object to living next door to Colin Powell—but blue collar workers in neighborhoods of a certain income level are another story altogether.

***

I told myself that in writing this, I was going to stick to my personal experience and leave out the polemics, but I’m not having much luck with that. I happen to be a born polemicist. Even though I also love to schmooze about my adventures in the grocery store aisles and my close encounters with a certain kitty cat, get me near a political topic and I start lecturing. Well, I cannot deny my Buddha-nature. Please humor me for a few more pages….

***

I know how hurtful it is to sensitive black men to see white women cross the street to get away from them, clutching their purses to their bodies as they glance over in fear. So when I see a black man walking toward me, I not only refuse to do that, but I make a point of saying “Hi” to show that I am not that street-crossing, purse-clutching scared white woman. Sometimes when this happens, I feel there’s a genuine human moment of connection between us that can be read on more than one level—(a) I’m just being neighborly and saying “Hi” like I would to anyone else; and (b) I’m conveying what I believe to be a richly layered awareness of the cultural norm and my refusal to participate in it. And yet, it becomes such a self-congratulatory thing, and inevitably condescending, as if I’m doing him a huge favor by not running from him on sight. I’d rather not see everyone through the frame of race, but it seems inevitable, and I figure you have to start somewhere. So I say “Hi.”

It’s one thing when I see a friendly-looking black man in my own neighborhood who’s out for a walk just like I am. But it gets complicated when I feel in any way threatened as a woman. The culture has taught white women that dark-skinned men are more likely to rape us. This is a statistical untruth, but the perception is hard to shake. When I was in college, I was painfully aware of Eldridge Cleaver’s statement in Soul on Ice that raping white women was rightful revenge against the white man. This disturbed me, to say the least, but I didn’t question its validity—partly because of a prefeminist lack of self-respect. If class distinctions may be older than the arbitrary concept of race, how old is the belief in the inferiority of women? Old as the hills, and alive and well today.

So it’s hard for me to sort out in any given situation—say, on the street at night—who has more to fear, me or the black man. My whiteness isn’t going to protect me from his physical superiority—but historically, at least, my pale sisters had a lot of power over his dark brothers through the evil of false accusation. And my “white skin privilege” permeates my life, though the benefits are mostly invisible to me, just as men’s various entitlements seem natural and unremarkable to them.

I imagine a cartoon in which a black man and a white woman are approaching each other on the street. Both are scowling, and the thought bubble above the black man’s head says “White oppressor!” and the bubble above the white woman’s head says “Male oppressor!” We see through our own particular lenses, always. It’s as if humanity is a giant Rubik’s cube, hopelessly scrambled. No wonder we find it hard to move. I knew a young white gay man who thought I was a guilt-ridden ‘60s dinosaur for being anti-racist—he couldn’t get past the “rudeness” of black teenagers on the bus who called him “fag.” He could see the injustice done to him but refused to see all the ways in which their lives were completely circumscribed in comparison to his.

***

A few years ago, I was shopping at Macy’s in The Village—an upscale shopping center in Marin—where I always stick out like a sore thumb, or think I do. Marin is the first or second wealthiest county in the U.S., which means that I mostly feel like a fish out of water—or a fish in a fishbowl—something to do with fish, anyway. I seem to straddle genders and classes, and Marin is not really a good place to straddle.

So I’m riding down the escalator in Macy’s, wanting to get this shopping trip over with. I gather my courage to go browsing in “young men’s streetwear,” where I may get smirked at but where it seems to me all the “normal” clothes are. (OK, so I straddle ages, too.) I look over, and there’s a black man riding up the escalator just across from me. Although it’s not that unusual to see black people in Marin, there’s something about the fact that I’m feeling self-conscious about my own misfittedness, and I register that he’s the only nonwhite person I’ve seen in the whole store. Anyway, a blinding number of synapses fire in my brain. The ones I can catch are:

(1) Since I have immediately identified him as a fellow outsider in this situation, my first impulse is to smile at him, as if he would instantly read my smile as “Aren’t we just the biggest sore thumbs in the place?”

(2) I quickly suppress this impulse for fear of being rejected in my attempt at frivolous bonding. He may fail to discern (or appreciate) how different I am from all the other white people in the store.

(3) Worse yet, he may be all too aware of my differentness. Remember the cartoon I imagined above? In this version, the black man’s thought balloon could be saying: “White oppressor!—Dyke!”

(4) This projection makes me feel potentially judged by him, and so in defense I judge him right back. I’m afraid to imagine what the thought balloon over the white woman’s head says now.

(5) In half a second I have gone from feeling like a “sister” on some minor, all-oppressed-peoples-unite level to feeling like just another pathetic white liberal who seeks out the approval of black people in order to convince herself she’s not a bad person. (“I may be white, but I’m not like them!”)

My glance at this man and the flood of thoughts that followed—even my desire to initiate a friendly, complicitous fellow-outsider look—simply reeked of racism, not because I wished to run him out of town or burn a cross on his lawn but because I looked at him and immediately defined him by his blackness and then proceeded to trip out on all my stereotypical reactions. I wondered what it would be like if the thoughts of all the white shoppers in the store, upon noticing this man, were broadcast over the PA system—what terrible detritus from our sordid racist history would we hear? Even if a small number of the shoppers were perfectly comfortable with people of color, and even if a fair number were so lost in their own quest for consumer goods that they wouldn’t notice if the Harlem Globetrotters slam-dunked their way through the perfume aisle, I still think that the buzz of assumptions, reactions, and defenses precipitated by years of racist conditioning would be deafening. My last cartoon fantasy—every white person in Macy’s with a different racial slur in their thought balloon, maybe a few that have gratuitous “compliments” like “Hey, I LOVE Stevie Wonder!,” and the balloon over the black man’s head saying “HELP! I just came in here to buy a tie!”

***

What is a ‘black person’?

—J

The best advice I ever got about how to approach the thorny problem of actual contact with a person of color was from the late Pat Parker, a Bay Area poet. In “To White Girls Who Want To Be My Friend,” she wrote, “Forget that I’m black/Never forget that I’m black.” This is contradictory on the surface, but it makes a lot of sense to me. So when I interact with a “black person” (J’s question rings in my head whenever I say that), I hold both attitudes in my mind at once and hope that by not trying to deny any part of what’s going on in me, I will be able to receive the truth of the person.

When I worked at UC, there was a black man named Bernard in my friend Liz’s lab. Bernard was huge and didn’t smile much, and I was completely intimidated by him. Because Liz liked him, I tried to be friendly despite my self-consciousness and his lack of response. One day I made him laugh, and that broke the ice. After that, we would stop and chat when we saw each other in the halls. What surprised me at first was that he couldn’t seem to make enough disparaging remarks about white people—everything was “crazy white people” or “crazy white women.” But he said these things cheerfully, so I went along with it. I sensed something was going on, that I was being tested. And as I continued to respond not with outrage—or with flight—but by laughing or shaking my head, the remarks faded away. I think he was conveying that I couldn’t just treat him like an honorary white person and be “color blind” and act like his race was irrelevant or taboo. (“Nice people don’t talk about things like that”—an attitude I’m very familiar with from the gay angle.) People who are different from you don’t want to be whitewashed (so to speak), they want to keep their identity and be accepted and treated decently—which I think is what Pat Parker meant by her paradoxical statement.

***

I was listening to “This American Life” one Sunday on NPR when they interviewed an African American woman who had moved to Paris because the French seemed free of racism, at least compared to what she was used to in this country. (It sounded great; I wish there were a place like that for women.) She talked about the time that she and her friends tried to push to the front of a line at a Paris theater and the French people yelled at them and made them go to the back of the line. She liked this, because it showed they were being treated like everyone else. She and her friends had routinely pushed to the front of lines in the U.S., where, she crowed, “White people are afraid of us.” She apparently regretted her candor, because she added, “Maybe I shouldn’t say that.” And my immediate thought was, “That’s right, you shouldn’t!” I felt a surge of resentment, because it hit too close to home. It’s painful to feel the wrath of the downtrodden—and to be mocked, besides! But when I feel that way, when I feel unjustly (or justly) accused and labeled, I take a cue from the men I respect—bet you didn’t expect me to say that—who are able to acknowledge the righteous anger of women without becoming defensive or going on the counterattack. I think that’s the first step toward healing an ancient rift.

***

I like to read a murder mystery.

I like to know the killer isn’t me.

—Erasure

A few years ago, I saw “Rosewood,” a movie based on a true story about white southerners in the 1920s who burned down an entire town and killed all the black people who lived there.

It made me sick to watch it, not only the killing itself but the laughter and excitement of the white men as they went about their business, proving their superiority. I had a sudden, sickening realization that they were exactly like the Nazis—in their hearts their hatred was the same, regardless of the local, unorganized nature of the American version.

I found myself trying to pick a safe place to land in all this. I wanted to blame the men, because I’m a woman, but it was a woman who (in the movie, at least) put the whole thing in motion by lying about a black man having raped and beaten her. I wanted to blame the southerners, because I’m from the north, but as I’ve said, some of my northern relatives could have been in the front lines. In one scene there’s a group of white people by the river singing hymns and baptizing children. I had a jarring moment when I saw them all standing there, nice and clean and dressed up, holding babies, because they could have been my family, my town—my sweet aunt and uncle, referring casually to “niggertown.”

So my mind buzzed on, not wanting to have any part of that disgusting heritage, not wanting to accept that I could ever have feelings like that. But when I first moved to my neighborhood, groups of Hispanic men used to gather under the big tree outside my bedroom window every day and in the middle of the night, talking and drinking beer—leaving behind all their trash. It got so that I hated the sound of Spanish. I knew that what I was feeling was racism—extrapolating the actions of a few to the entire ethnic group. At the same time, I felt vulnerable as a woman living alone, in a neighborhood where, over a period of months, three of my windows were broken, my condo was burglarized, and my car was vandalized. So I felt like a victim in my own right. Would I have felt free to stumble drunkenly and loudly through the night, as those men did? Would their wives have felt safe gathering outside a stranger’s house, drinking beer, playing a radio? The very thought of women doing those things is ridiculous. On the other hand, I was living alone in a three-bedroom condo, making a good salary—not holed up in a small apartment with 8 or 10 other people, begging on the streets for work. It’s the Rubik’s cube again.

Watching a movie, when I’m safely distant from the bad guys and they’re showing a sanitized picture of the good guys, it seems obvious. There must be evil, it must reside over there—in Germany, in the south, in men, in gay bashers, in rich people. I’m adept at putting the dividing line wherever I can land on the side of the innocent.

Despite my efforts to the contrary, I feel dishonest. Always trying to show (to others, to myself) that I am good. Hating the bad people. Hating the bad in myself. Hating people who hate. Or not even admitting that I hate any of that. Going toward the light. Trying to project an image of compassion when inside I am burning with anger and resentment. Projecting, always projecting, so the bad things will stay over there.

***

p.s. This issue is brought to you in part by Copy Central, at which I won my second “fishbowl gift certificate.” I have put my business card in their fishbowl only twice and have won both times. Or maybe it’s just a marketing scheme in which they pay off everyone who bothers to put their card in. (As always, I am suspicious of good fortune.)

[Mary McKenney]

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mary‘zine random redux: #34 Winter 2006

August 23, 2009

the late, great Pookie

In memory of Pookie  1987-2005

a cat who thought (and often pooped)
outside the box

Dear Friends,

As most of you know, Pookie has passed over. I had agonized over the decision of what to do and when to do it—hoping in vain that he would die peacefully in his sleep like his predecessor Radar—but when the time came, it was obvious. There was no recovering from end-stage renal failure, and he had lost at least half his weight. Which was considerable. I could see the misery in his eyes.

So I finally faced facts and took him for one last trip to the kindly Dr. V, who gave him the “humane,” dignified end that we do not extend to our fellow humans. You can understand the reasoning there. If euthanasia were legal, you could go to the doctor for a routine physical and come out dead! You’d take your child in for a booster shot, and BAM. Dead kid. No telling what would happen. Better to let people with no hope of recovery suffer unspeakably and long. When my mother was kn-kn-knocking on heaven’s door, I talked to the doctor about “letting her go.” She had a living will and had made it very clear over the years that she didn’t want any extraordinary measures taken to keep her alive. In response to my tentative question about how to go about this final act of mercy, the doctor announced that he wouldn’t help me “kill” her. Then he turned and stalked away.

But I digress. Sort of. It’s true that every new death of someone you love gets strung up on the same line of heartbreak as all the others, whether human or animal. There’s no point questioning your love for a “mere cat” versus your tortured ambivalence about She Who Gave You Life. There’s also little point in reminding yourself (or, more likely, being reminded by those who want to comfort you) that “he/she had a good life.” Yeah, what’s a good life got to do with it. It’s a rough transition all the way around.

But yes, Pookie had a good life, and he survived the Northern USA Jeep Tour of Summer 2004, so don’t cry for him, Argentina. And don’t cry for me. Regrets? I’ve had a few. But we had some good times, me and the Pook Man. The images of his last days are slowly being replaced with memories of earlier milestones. He never wanted to be picked up and held. So one day I started a campaign to pick him up several times a day and then put him down the second he struggled. This regimen seemed to have little effect, until one day I was sitting at my desk, and I saw a tentative little paw reach up to my chair. Pookie had finally realized that I was going to respect his limits. The big lug made himself comfortable on my lap, and that’s where he spent a good part of his days thereafter.

***
However, in the midst of death comes… you know what… that perpetual renewal of innocence and love and hope that refuses to believe in its own eventual demise…. that relentless, miraculous cycle of the seasons and generations… that crazy engine that fuels us all… Life! Introducing…

a tale of two kitties

One of the highlights of my summer was when my friends P&C came to visit me from Oregon. P had been here before (she drove one leg of the Jeep Tour, if you recall), but C hadn’t. They were my first visitors from my “other” life. I had a great time showing off my big house and some of my childhood landmarks—houses where I had lived on North Shore Drive and Bay de Noc Road; the sparkling blue water of the bay off Lake Michigan; the marina swimming with boats; the 1940s feel of factories, smokestacks, and unidentifiable structures that make up the shipyards and paper mills; more water as the river merges into the bay of one of our Greatest Lakes; the woods and farmland of my youth, much of it long since invaded by developers—and, of course, Henes Park, with its groves of trees, sandy beach, and distant view of Door County, Wis., on the other side of the water.

The three of us had a great time hanging out and driving around. We even drove up to Escanaba along the same shoreline immortalized in the James Stewart movie “Anatomy of a Murder.” Of course we joined the gang for Friday night fish fry at Pat & Rayleen’s, where I felt absurdly proud to introduce my friends to this boisterous sea of humanity that I now call home. The place was jumpin’, as it always is on Fridays. The scene is like a teen hangout, except most of the customers were teens in the ‘50s. These are your factory workers and waitresses, not your doctors and lawyers. God knows where they eat. It took me a long time to realize that these truly are my people, and that there’s more to them than their jobs or the stereotype of the pale-faced, a-few-extra-pounds-around-their-middle American.

At K and MP’s house later, we played cards and laughed our heads off. P and MP really hit it off, so they were slinging wisecracks back and forth, and we all agreed it was the most we’d laughed in a long time. Again, I felt proud of both my friends and my family, and a little incredulous to see two of my worlds meet with such a great outcome (“fantasy colliding with destiny,” as the Chron horoscope used to say).

On Saturday morning, P&C got up very early to make the round of rummage sales with K and Barb, while I slept in. A few hours later, P came in and asked for a box and a blanket. “What for?”, I asked, though I already had a suspicion. Of the cats I’ve had in my adult life, only one did not come from P. She has a kind of animal magnetism (sorry) that attracts the stray, the abandoned, the abused. And guess who she goes to first with each new-found foundling? Years ago, she found Radar in a ditch, and she got Pookie from her sister, who had rescued him from a cat-hating neighbor.

Sure enough, P and C had gone for a walk around Henes Park and had found two little gray kittens playing on some rocks on the bay side.

So we gathered some supplies, including some leftover chicken and bacon to use as bait, and I drove her over to the park, where C was keeping watch. It immediately started to rain, and the kittens scurried into a hole under the rocks. Drizzle turned to downpour. After getting no help from animal control (not working on the weekend) or the police (“nothing we can do”), P—who is not known for her patience in other circumstances, such as while driving or working on a computer—sat hunched in the rain for more than an hour, talking infinitely tenderly to the frightened felines and finally coaxing them out.

P1010063

We put the kittens in the downstairs bedroom, as far away from Pookie as possible. I called Barb to see if she knew someone who would want a pair of adorable, soft, shimmery all-gray kittens with faint stripes on their tails. But I could already feel my resolve melting. I wanted to spare Pookie the indignity of having to share his final days on Earth with these “fuzzy grey intruders,” as Susan L has dubbed them. But the more I watched them chase and tumble over each other—so sweet, so innocent, so ungrateful for their rescue (they just thought they were having a day at the beach)—the more I became convinced that it was Fate. I was going to keep them.

For several weeks, their innocent joy permeated the entire house, except for about a two-foot radius around Pookie. I had given him his own room so he wouldn’t have to go up and down the stairs, but I didn’t want to close him off entirely. So with the natural boundary violations of the young, the kittens used his litter box, drank his water, and ate his food while he sat hunched on a table by the window glaring at them and occasionally throwing me a baleful glance. It was written all over his face: “How could you?”

But eventually the tension eased. One day I found the three cats curled up on my bed, cheek to cheek to cheek. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant—did the kittens invade Pookie’s space and curl up with him, making him look like a willing participant? When he woke up, his expression was a little like that of a soldier taken hostage in a foreign land and being forced to pose with his captors to convince the Americans that he is being well treated. Pookie wasn’t holding up a newspaper showing today’s date, but I could have sworn he was extending his middle claw in imitation of the U.S. soldier’s classic expression of “Don’t believe them—I am being treated like an animal!”

It took a while to decide what to call the new arrivals: Fred and Barney, Cisco and Pancho, Ranger and Tonto? My first choice for one of them was actually Cisco, for San Francisco, but for some reason I kept saying Costco. That simply would not do. Costco and WalMart? Shopko and Target? Finally, I settled on Luther and Brutus—Luther because… I’m not sure… and Brutus because I wanted to be able to croon, “Et tu, Bru-TAY? Et tu? Et tu?”

Of course, to this day, I keep coming up with names I should have given them: Lost and Found… Ruff and Tumble… Yin and Yang. Caesar and Brutus would be a better pairing than bringing poor old Martin Luther into it, though I wouldn’t have wanted Brutus to actually slay Caesar if they somehow managed to live up to their names. (When I told 9-year-old Summer that I had considered calling one of the kittens Caesar, she exclaimed, disbelieving, “Like the salad?”)

In a land of Fluffies and Mittens, Brutus and Luther do seem like rather grandiose names, but I already did the “cute” thing with Pookie, and I was willing to overcompensate. At this point, I could easily rename Brutus “J.D.” for “juvenile delinquent,” because he gets into trouble 99% of the time he’s awake. Luther, on the other hand, is a real peacenik. I don’t think he’s going to start a new religion, but he’s calm and rather saintly, if I may be permitted to borrow that most un-Lutheran-like term.

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter… they both think their name is Sweetie Pie.

Remember when I wrote about my two-tigers-on-the-roof dream? I thought it meant that some unknown direction was going to manifest for me. I have to admit, it has occurred to me that the tigers were the harbingers of these two furry sweethearts. But that would be really shallow and literal, wouldn’t it?… even though I could totally see Luther lying placidly on the top of the roof while Brutus breathed down my neck with diabolical thoughts about how close I was to the edge.

P1010003Pookie

Pookie and one of the young whippersnappers (it was months before I could tell them apart)

I never knew if Pookie grew to like having Brutus and Luther around, or if he just resigned himself to the inevitable. But he didn’t have to sleep on the bed with the rest of us, and he didn’t have to let them drape themselves over him. On the other hand, he wasn’t always in the mood for their antics. When Brutus would play-attack him, Pookie would often buy time by holding him down and licking his head while he tried to remember his anatomy. “Let’s see, the carotid artery is…. yes!” CHOMP. The kittens were not at all deterred by this tough older-brother love.

I have to admit that the kittens helped me push Pookie’s encroaching mortality to the back of my mind. Youth and beauty are so seductive—a great distraction from death. Their siren song is the clean slate, the fresh start, the illusion of forever-young. The kittens always smell fresh and clean, no matter what mischief they’ve been up to. They have no blemishes, no warts ‘n’ all, no existential angst, no baggage, no childhood trauma. They are so not me! And so not Pookie! The kittens embodied the illusion that there is always a fresh start, and I received that lie gratefully. I didn’t yet have to face their loss… though I would look at Luther stretched out in my arms, his head flung back, his eyes closed, his mouth turned up in a permanent smile, purring like mad while I stroked his soft tummy… and he would open his black-and-rootbeer-colored eyes to gaze at me from the depths of animality, as if wordlessly conveying the wisdom of the ancient pharaohs(’cats)… and my heart would sink as I realized, these two shall pass.

When I relayed this touching thought to K—that their deaths would bring me the same sorrow I was experiencing with Pookie—she hesitated for a second and then said, “Not necessarily.” I didn’t know what she meant at first. Then I did the math. Oh. You mean, if they live to be as old as Pookie, I’ll be as old as Methuselah, or (more likely) dead and gone? Wow. That had never occurred to me. I guess I thought that the key to immortality was always getting a new cat after the old one died, because everyone knows humans outlive their pets.

The love of the young and the innocent is easy, rewarding, and fun—while the love of the old, the oily, the flaky, and the grumpy is shot through with pain. But when I let myself stroke Pookie’s head and feel the pain of loving that which is not eternal…. I felt how precious it is to experience the love of the imperfect, and the pain of the loss to come. It digs deeper into the heart, clawing at our wish to avoid the reality of death and loss. We had a history, Pookie and I. There wasn’t always perfect communication between us, but when is that ever true in a relationship? I miss him so much.

*

*

*

pookie’s goodbye

hello dear friends, and goodbye.

as you may know, i’ve been sick for quite a while… and now it’s time to go.

i’ve had a good life, especially the past year in this nice, quiet place called Menomimeow or something like that.

and so, if you’ll indulge me… [clears throat]…

and now, the end is near;

and so i face the final curtain

my friend, i’ll say it clear,

i’ll state my case, of which i’m certain.

i’ve lived a life that’s full,

i’ve traveled each and ev’ry highway;

and more, much more than this,

i did it my way.

regrets, i’ve had a few;

but then again, too few to mention

i did what i had to do

and saw it through without exemption.

yes, there were times, i’m sure you knew

when i bit off more than i could chew.

but through it all, when there was doubt

i ate it up and spit it out.

i faced it all and i stood tall

and did it my way

i’ve loved, i’ve laughed and cried.

i’ve had my fill; my share of losing.

and now, as tears subside,

i find it all so amusing.

to think i did all that.

and may i say – not in a shy way,

no, oh no not me,

i did it myyyyyyyy…  wayyyyyyy.

thank you, thank you.

pookie has left the building.

remember…  that which is never born can never die.

love always,

pookie

*

*

*

the obligatory cute cat stories

The new kitties are the light of my life. Also, they are often the pain of my ass.

It goes without saying that they are impossibly cute. They both retrieve whatever I throw for them—wadded-up Trident gum wrappers, caps from water bottles, stray items they’ve liberated from my sand tray collection (a little green plastic soldier, a gray rhinoceros)—and will bring the retrieved object back and drop it at my feet to throw again and again. I’ll be sitting barefoot at my desk, and I’ll feel something soft pushing at my foot. I’ll lift up my big toe, and a furry paw will push a gum wrapper underneath it. If I’m downstairs, they’ll bring me water bottle caps to throw, because they make a satisfying noise on the slick linoleum kitchen floor. When the cap goes skittering across the floor, the two cats slide after it on their “stocking feet” and slam into the cupboards on the other side.

For the most part, Brutus is the action figure, and Luther is the watcher. Along with pieces of paper and fluff and the odd styrofoam peanut, they have lots of toys, including a carpet-covered “teepee” I bought for Pookie years ago that he never used. (I had wildly underestimated his size—he couldn’t even fit his head in the door.) Until they too outgrew it, Brutus and Luther loved playing in and on it. Late one night, Brutus was in the teepee going wild, while Luther sat watching him (or rather, watching the teepee). Brutus managed to hump the teepee all over the floor (from inside, mind you), and then occasionally he’d stop and stick his paws out from underneath, trying in vain to get Luther to play along. Then there was more teepee humping by the invisible hand of Brutus. Finally, he gave up on the paws and lay on his back and stuck his whole head under the teepee and gazed up at Luther, thinking, I’m sure, that that major effort would be enough to entice his brother to join in. It was not.

Then there was the Washing Machine Caper. Brutus will get into anything that’s normally closed but suddenly reveals an entry point—cupboards and closets, the dishwasher, the refrigerator, the toilet, the shower, the freezer (I have witnesses), the dryer, the washing machine. One day I’m trying to get the wet clothes into the dryer while keeping Brutus from climbing in with them. Put clothes in, take cat out, put clothes in, take cat out. Finally, all the clothes are in, but suddenly I don’t see Brutus anymore. Did he succeed in getting into the dryer? No. Then I hear something jingling. It’s one of their long-lost jingle balls. It’s coming from behind the washing machine. Oh-oh. I spend the next 10 minutes trying to coax Brutus out of there. Luther tries to help by sticking his arm between the washing machine and the wall and stretching as far as he can (which is not far). There’s a long silence. Finally, I hear some frantic scrabbling, and Brutus’s head appears over the back of the washing machine. He’s barely hanging on, and his little face is contorted like he’s lifting 1,000 pound weights. I carefully reach back there and grab him under his armpits and pull. Rescue is successful, and he lives to caper another day.

I paint, therefore… ?

Seeker to guru: “Is there life after death?”
Guru, “Who’s asking?”

Intuitive painting is paradoxical. You paint what you “feel,” but feeling is not what it’s about. What you feel is, at best, a tiny window in a door with no sign to identify it. You can call painting a doorway, but the room it opens onto has no walls, no floor, and no “you” once you enter.

So how do you know when you’re there? You think you know. You associate “connection”—being there—with feeling spacey, blissed-out, like you could stand there forever painting red dots or black lines. You may feel like you’re painting on snakeskin instead of paper. Images can come while you’re making other plans. The brush in your hand boldly goes where the mind cannot follow. But you have enough mind left to assess the situation, and you think: Aha! I’m there!

So naturally, when you’re feeling something else—stuck, stupid, or sleepy—you think you are not in that room, you can never get there, you have been denied access, you have dropped the key down the drain. You could stand there forever enumerating all the horrible things you are and are not, things you cannot do—except the teacher wants you to keep going. It’s as if you’ve come to the edge of a cliff, you’re afraid to look down, and someone says, “Just keep walking straight ahead, you’re fine.” But there is no ground beneath your feet and, to be sure, no wings either. How can you keep going when you have nothing, are nothing? Paint goes on the paper, but it means nothing. You have abandoned all hope, ye who have entered here. You ask the teacher, “Will I live through this?” and she replies, “Who’s asking?”

Then time somehow disappears, and the teacher comes by again and peers into your face. (She barely glances at the painting.) You register that she’s there, but before you can open your bag of sorrows, she says, “You’re beaming!” And you realize, yes, how strange, I’m not just smiling, I’m beaming. But how can that be, I’m not even aware of feeling anything, let alone anything that warrants this sort of facial reaction. I vaguely remember complaining about nothing, but this is different: There is no nothing, and there is no anything. There is no everything! And I feel great!

***
Some version of this mysterious transformation happens every time I paint, which is why I keep going back to it, over the protests of my rational mind. So…. in December I braved the snow, the rain, and the tiny airplane seats once again to attend a 7-day painting intensive at the Painting Studio in San Francisco.

As always, painting was a mystery from day to day… and this time the biggest mystery was, “Why isn’t it giving me anything?” In the sharings I didn’t have that OH MY GOD THIS IS INCREDIBLE sense of being One With All That Exists. I didn’t go out into the world at the end of the day and have surprising encounters with strangers or be struck by odd insights and metaphors. I didn’t feel STONED.

Back when I started painting, I remember most of the sharings being dominated by people (including me) saying things like, “Well, first I painted blue… then I painted red. Then I felt like painting black, so I did.” In this intensive, I noticed that the younger people did the same thing, except it was more along the lines of “First, I felt terrible, then I felt better, and now I’m afraid I’ll feel terrible again tomorrow.”

It occurs to me that the painting process unfolds as a more or less consecutive fascination with (a) color, (b) feelings, (c) God, and (d-z) _____(?). I feel like I’m standing at the edge of the cliff of (d). Which is not to say that I’m beyond God—au contraire! I’m just saying that conventional images of the Unknown, while very powerful, are not the thing, or the no-thing, itself. “God” is a continuing mystery, not a symbol or a destination. And painting keeps pulling us deeper into that mystery… a kind of spiritual archeology.

The only hint of the STONED feeling was one night when I was driving Terry back to the flat she was staying in and I had the sensation of wanting to sail straight through a red light. It would be a beautiful ride, I thought, on that brilliant red beam. Of course, I caught myself in time, but it freaked T out. She’d holler “RED MEANS STOP!” whenever another red light was coming up, but by then I was over that, I was going to stop for it, but I wanted to stop in the space between the two crosswalks, which would be in the middle of the intersection. “Ha ha,” I said to T when I explained this latest impulse, but I don’t think she appreciated that one either. After I dropped her off, I turned right onto Bush St. and was startled to see four lanes of headlights coming toward me. Oops, one way, wrong way. But despite the slight mental confusion, I was able to slam into reverse and back up and around the corner like a pro.

It was odd, because I drove all the hell over the Bay Area that week—S.F., East Bay, Marin—and felt supremely body-confident in my abilities at all times. When T was with me, I admit she did save me from a few tiny mistakes, such as not seeing a pedestrian in a crosswalk (when I was inching forward from a full stop, craning my neck the other way to see the traffic amid the chaos which is Mission St.). To take the edge off T’s possible imminent panic attack, I joked about what I’d say if I ran over somebody. “Oops! Oopee!” We laughed. For me, it was gallows humor. For T, I think, it was a lot more gallows than humor.

See, now you’re getting the wrong impression. I probably shouldn’t have said anything. But the proof is in the absolute 0 fatalities caused by me.

I have always had something to say about painting. I probably know as much about this kind of painting as anyone. I’ve been writing and talking about my experiences with this process for 26 years. The mary’zine came directly out of the writings I used to share with fellow painters. I wrote a book called Who Paints? which was rejected by Jeremy Tarcher because it wasn’t “how-to“ enough. Actually, it wasn’t “how-to” because there is no “how-to.” I’ve always tried to describe the what and speculate about the why, but how is the question on everyone’s lips.

This time I wasn’t able to identify or articulate anything that was happening to me. I had very little to say in the sharings, other than “I don’t know what happened!” I’m used to knowing (or thinking I know) exactly what I’m feeling, in great detail. But on the last day, I’m sitting there blubbering hot tears, and all I can say is, “I DON’T KNOW! I have no oPINion!”

***
When I got back home, BK and I had a couple of long phone conversations. I was troubled by this new development. I thought painting had taken me “somewhere,” but I had no clue where. I had no log or memory of my experience. And what good is experience if there’s no one there (meaning me) to experience it? If the guru says to you, “Yes, there’s life after death, but the ‘you’ as you know you won’t be there,” is that going to be comforting? I think not.

I asked B, “What’s the point? I spent 7 days painting and I’m left with nothing, no insight, no feeling, no words. How am I supposed to write about it? I can’t just write ‘I don’t know’! Is this where I’m headed, to have not only words but actual experience taken from me? What’s the point of nothing?” As we talked, I thought of Archimedes, the ancient Greek who discovered the lever: “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I’ll move the world,” he said. Uh huh. That’s what all of us are looking for: a place to stand outside the world of our own lives so we can be a witness to our existence. By definition, Archimedes can’t stand outside the world or outside himself. “I don’t mind dying,” some part of us says, “but I want to stay and watch the funeral.” The mind is all about being included. We want to have a division of labor between the observer and the observed. All those stories of near-deaths when people report looking down on their own bodies on the operating table help us believe in a hierarchy of Self… an ordinary self (one for daytime, a somewhat fancier one for evening)… a higher self… a self who will survive death… and, of course, ultimately… the self we call “God”—the supreme version of our self, in whose image we are made (because we have made him and us ourselves) and with whom we will live out eternity in the best of both worlds, like a very grand version of a performer standing on stage basking in the adoration of the multitudes. If the world consisted only of our self and other parts of our self watching our self, what a wonderful world this would be!

To put this nutty idea in a nutshell: I want to be One with Everything yet remain conscious, self-aware, separate, individual, a body and mind with a name, thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

Over the years I’ve learned to give up the product or “result”—the look of the painting—for the process—the intuitive trust in following what comes to me. But what if I have to give up the process, too? If the process replaces the result (as in, “I feel different and spacey, so I know I’m in process”) then how is it process anymore? I thought giving up the look of the painting was the whole sacrifice. I didn’t know that I continually make process into result and don’t need paint and paper to do it. Like turning wheat into chaff or gold into lead, I’m a master at reverse alchemy. I mean, not just me, but virtually everyone who gets to (d) on the Painting Progressometer. But of course the Progressometer is just in my head, no more real than my thin air beyond the cliff analogy.

When I was painting and not knowing what was happening, “I” was not there. And “I” did not wake up with a feather on my pillow to prove that my dream of connection had really happened. Some people make bargains with their loved ones: “Whoever dies first, let’s have a signal so the ‘living’ one will know the ‘dead’ one is still there.” I often wonder if, every time I wake up from a dream, I’ve “died” to the other people in the dream, and any deal I might have made with them to drop a feather or ring a bell becomes moot because I don’t remember them and they never existed anyway! What if that’s the knowledge we wake up (die) to? We cannot let go! We must be here forever, even if there’s no here here! Krishnamurti said, “Death does not matter,” and how could it, if we are “that which is never born and thus can never die”? We are so tied to the person we think ourselves to be, to the world we believe we inhabit, like Shakespeare’s players upon a stage. Have we learned nothing from a century of post-Newtonian physics? What we see is not what we get! We aren’t really living on a ball suspended in midair! Space is not empty, people! There are waves! Black and white holes! Cosmic worm buses! Curvy space and no time to speak of! Dimensions beyond our ability to perceive them!

***
I was not at all unhappy to leave the big city behind and return to my l’il piece of small town America. As attracted as I am to the restaurants, bookstores, and progressive radio stations of the Bay Area, you can’t beat a little retreat on the shores of Lake Michigan for natural beauty and sheer livability.

My first encounter with the locals after arriving back in town was with a man outside the post office. He got to the door first and opened it for me, saying, “Here you go, Pops.” I went in, sort of laughing, sort of cringing, and said, “Thanks.” From behind me I heard, “Or ‘Grandma’, as the case may be… Your voice gave you away!” I confirmed that “Grandma is more likely.” He scattered “sorry”s in my wake as I went inside. When I was done with my brief errand and started to leave, he was at the door again and again opened it for me. I asked what he was going to call me this time. He was still flustered, and mumbled something about “the 21st century” and how he “can’t tell [men from women] anymore.” Are we supposed to wear our vaginas on our sleeves now? I told him it was OK, I get that a lot—”But at least I usually get ‘Sir’—not ‘Pops’.” I was perfectly good-humored about it, but I’m not sure he could tell. Deadpan Mary. He was especially confused because, thinking I was a younger man, he had called me “Pops” to teasingly imply that I was older than him so needed the door opened for me (he looked like “Dr. Zhivago Moves to the U.P. and Feels Right at Home,” so I couldn’t tell how old he was). As I walked off to my car, he trailed a few “thank you”s behind me and said, “Some people don’t communicate so well.” I felt bad for him. I said, “Thank YOU” but later I wished I had said something a little more straightforward, like “Thanks for apologizing, but it’s really OK. I appreciate the effort.” I think he did communicate well, if communication is getting across to a stranger that you’re sorry, confused, tongue-tied, or just plain overwhelmed by the changing times. Most people wouldn’t bother. See how complicated ordinary life can be?

***
Yes, the Bay Area is muy beautiful. But not even the view of the Golden Gate Bridge with the fog coming in beats the view out my “loft” window. It’s winter now, so it’s mostly monochromatic—gray, black, white—with touches of color: swaths of pink and orange at sunset, and every possible shade of blue on a sunny day. Walking around the park the other day, I sang to myself, “Monochro-o-ome, you bring us such nice… stark colors, I want to take a pho-o-tograph, oh Mama don’t take… my monochrome away….” (If you don’t know what song I’m referring to, you’re way too young to be reading this.)

Someone builds rock “sculptures” all through the park—rocks piled in artistic and physically improbable ways. I think someone else comes along and knocks them over, but the rock-artist is not deterred. OK, so s/he’s not Andy Goldsworthy or even Christo, but I love the shapes of the peaked piles sitting there all un-naturely-like right next to nature and made of nature.

On the bay side are snow drifts piled up along the shoreline, then a frozen band of ice with snowmobile tracks on it, then the dark blue water in the distance. The land curves almost back on itself from the center of town, so I can look south and see a couple of tall smokestacks, a church spire, and a historic Michigan lighthouse. It would be pointless to compare this view with the view of San Francisco as you come out of the Waldo tunnel, but I think a great heart view trumps a great eye view.

Whenever I drive up M-35, along the same route I walked to get to kindergarten and first grade back in the long-ago, I feel a strong tug deep in my abdomen, as if I’m being pulled down by the great magnet of land and memory. I have as many bad memories as good ones associated with that stretch of road—like the retarded, adult-sized boy who stood in the path of little kids who were trying to pass by on their way to school (me) and roared like a monster and tried to grab them (me)—but they’ve been coalesced and compacted, like compost or dinosaur sludge. At this point, they’re part of the earth’s crust. How much crust does 59 years make, as compared to millennia? Anyway, it’s all part of the marytime history of this place, and when I say I feel grounded, I really mean it.

the U.P. in the media (an occasional feature)

The stats won’t support the theory, but don’t some parts of the country just seem more conducive to murder? Michigan’s cold and remote Upper Peninsula comes to my mind….
—Marilyn Stasio, in the New York Times Book Review

I’m all about “cold and remote” these days, and yet, strangely, I have no immediate plans to murder anyone! Wisconsin, on the other hand, seems rife with baby-throwers-out-of-cars and wife-killing suicide-committers. And of course the worst crime of all (as spelled out on a huge billboard across from Lloyd’s factory): “A baby does not CHOOSE to DIE,” with a big cute face of a 2- or 3-month-old. If it was going to be born to the people who would later throw it out of a car, it might think twice. It would be interesting to see a billboard of an enlarged bit of tissue with the motto, “A cell does not CHOOSE to DIE.” But actually, it totally does; it’s called apoptosis; and a very large percentage of would-be fetuses are naturally aborted in the first trimester. Did GOD ask THEM if they CHOSE to DIE?

Just down the road is another billboard with a huge image of Jesus in his blonde, blue-eyed form and the slogan “JESUS LOVES YOU.” Strangely, he’s looking off to the side, not at ME at all. OK, now I have to tell all my billboard stories. One that I’ve mentioned before is the handmade “Jesus Is Lord Over Menominee County.” There’s one on the road we used to live on and another one on M-35 heading north out of town. That one now has “Over Menominee County” painted out. Is someone saying that Jesus is NOT Lord here? I mean, what’s wrong with “Pray globally, proselytize locally”?

[bloody hell! sometimes I hate the sodding interwebs! … oh… now it’s fixed… never mind!]

faulty remembrance of things past (was it a madeleine? a chocolate chip cookie? or just a stale piece of toast?)

It’s disconcerting, when you think you have every moment of your childhood emblazoned on the All About Me scrapbook of your mind, to run into people you cannot remember whatsoever. One day K, MP, Barb and I were leaving Mickey-Lu’s (have I told you about their flame-broiled burgers with flame-toasted bun, pickles and ketchup, plus a pat of butter, all wrapped in white butcher paper and plunked down on your little table or booth? Mmmmm…… Mickey-Lu’s) and a woman excitedly called out to us, “Is that MARY?” Oh shit. I backtracked, looked her over, couldn’t place her or the older woman with her. K said, “You remember Sharon A. and her mother? They used to come over to see Mom and Dad, and you and Sharon played together.” I wracked my brain. I could not tell a lie. (I could not think of one.) “Uhhhh….. no, I’m sorry.” So Sharon, her smile dimming noticeably, and K and Barb regaled me with details of that apparently unforgettable friendship. “I’m sorry, my memory is good but it’s short!” (When in doubt, rely on a proven platitude.) Then, idiotically, I say, “But it’s nice to see you…. again….” Shit. I couldn’t understand how K and Barb, 6 and 8 years younger than me, could remember these people so vividly when I had never even heard their names before. I vowed that if that sort of thing happened again, I’d fake it.

Recently, I got my chance. I got a UPS delivery one day, and the driver hesitated before handing over the package. Finally, he said, “Do you remember me?… We graduated together.” Oh shit. I take a stab in the dark. “Uh … Don ….?” No. “Tom Cort,” he says. The memory of the disappointed if not crushed Sharon A. flashes through my mind. “Oh yeah! Hi!” and I even give him a little hug to cover the lie that is probably neon-lighting up my face. He said he had recognized my name on the package and thought, “Could it be…?” And I’m thinking, how would he know me if I didn’t know him? I thought I was completely invisible in high school! “Nice to see you again!,” I exclaim, with way too much enthusiasm in my lying voice.

***
It occurs to me that I should stop seeing myself as a stranger in a familiar land, but, frankly, I don’t want to give that up. Every sense is heightened when you’re continually pinballed between the past and the present and the strange chemical mixture of the two. (Chemical pinball. You’ve never played?)

I wonder if there’s a science fiction book or movie out there with the premise that… OK, I’m thinking along the lines of Gulliver’s Travels, in which Gulliver is tied down by the tiny Lilliputians. Let’s say a friendly giant comes along to help some l’il townspeople with their quilting bee, and suddenly s/he finds herself woven into the fabric of their lives—literally. They display the completed quilt proudly in the town square, and if you look very closely, you’ll see the outline of our giant practically indistinguishable from the threads and crazy-quilt patches of the rest of the design.

If physicists can have a string theory, I can have a thread theory.

Like my reimagined Gulliver, I’m slowly becoming embedded in the fabric of my family. We have our Friday night get-togethers, our drop-bys, our holidays. I don’t get to see the little ones that often—everyone works full-time or goes to school, so contact is sporadic. It’s a lesson in taking the long view.

Belatedly, I want to tell you about an e-mail I got from Maria of NM last summer. She had been reading an article by Garrison Keillor (Prairie Home Companion) and he mentioned how interesting it is to listen to small-town radio stations in the Midwest. He gave as an example, “Barb calls in to say thanks to everyone, Pookie has been found.” Maria was all excited, thinking it must have been my Barb and my Pookie. But no, there are apparently parallel Midwestern universes out there, where Barbs and Pookies and Mares live out their lives in blissful ignorance of other dimensions of being. In fact, they live as you and I do… with strained comprehension, arbitarily exercised compassion, magnets pulling this way and that, and memories good but short.

[Mary McKenney]

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mary’zine random redux: #9 December 2000

July 20, 2009

I read the following letter in Miss Manners’ column the other day and was quite shaken by it.

IMPERSONAL LETTERS WORSE THAN NONE

Dear Miss Manners: Recently I’ve received letters without any personal touch. These writers discuss activities, life and the future, but never mention personal views relating to the recipient and never answer questions nor issues raised in past letters to them. It is not a one-time thing. One young writer has sent five such communiques—four pages each, informative, insightful, incisive, but with zero “sharing” and/or a sense of one-on-one communication. This may help high-track movers fulfill their social responsibilities to communicate with others, but to the recipients it becomes another sample of Christmas-letter indifference and laziness.

This letter is real. However, I have fabricated the response I wish Miss Manners (who instead agreed with this misguided soul) had made.

Gentle Reader: Get over yourself. Not everything is about you, you, you. These impersonal letters are called ‘zines. The high-track movers who write them work long and hard to make them informative, insightful, and incisive. Kwitcherbellyachin’. If you want “sharing,” get a dog.

But seriously, folks, thanks for renewing. My audience is small but very hardcore. Speaking of hardcore, I was going to surprise (shock) you with an X-rated issue this time, but then I realized it’s December, the time of little children and sugar plum fairies, the time of that other X—the one who put the X in Xmas—and I decided to postpone the profane revelations for now. Consider this a naughty tease.

Of course, an X rating would have been one way to distinguish the mary’zine from those other mimeographed (aesthetically speaking) “Christmas letters of indifference and laziness”—but this way you’ll have something to look forward to—out of morbid curiosity, if nothing else.

Xmas-wise, I mostly turn a blind eye to the goings-on and just wait for it to be over. I fully support the Buy Nothing movement and would like to extend it to Do Nothing. I get so tired of all the hype about how well (or badly) the merchants expect to do this year—now with the added suspense about whether people will continue to buy via the Internet—with follow-ups after the 25th on how well they did do and what it all means to the continuation of Western civilization as we know it. But I have to admit, I’ve had some lovely Christmases, spiritual ones, mostly with people who weren’t Christians, come to think of it—where we were able to touch into what Deepak Chopra meant when he said, “We are not human beings with occasional spiritual experiences, we are spiritual beings with occasional human experiences.” This is a place I often touch through painting, and maybe that’s what I miss when I look around and see so much hoopla about commerce and so little of the contemplation and reverence that should be the basis for a holy-day of a major religion.

But just on the level of navigating the highways and byways, I always breathe a sigh of relief on January 2. Back to real life, when I can go out and buy socks or toothpaste without fighting the frantic holiday crowds. Funny, when I had a job, I used to get really depressed in January—all those nice paid holidays were over. Now I don’t get paid for holidays (or sick days or vacations); I work 6 days a week. I bill by the hour, so I only get paid for the time I actually work (vs. the average 4 hours of work that most employees do in an 8-hour day); I have no guaranteed income—I have to accrue it $100 or $300 at a time and hope that the work will keep flowing my way; and—guess what—I’m not only happy as a clam but my favorite day is Monday and my least favorite day is Friday. How’s that for weird? I can’t really explain it. My world has been turned on its axis, and it seems to suit me just fine.

Being self-employed isn’t for everybody, and frankly, I’m surprised it’s for me. I don’t have nerves of steel. I’m not super well organized. Discipline is not my middle name. I love working at home, with no one looking over my shoulder, but it’s a constant struggle to keep the tide of household distractions from washing away the sand castle that is my daily accrual of Billable Hours. When you work at home, home becomes this enormous sinkhole of energy and demand. You wouldn’t think so if you saw my house, because it’s not like I spend much time cleaning it, but all my stuff is here, and it calls to me. The washing machine calls to me to put a load of clothes in while I’m fixing my morning snack of peanut butter and rice cakes. The cat box, the cat dish, the cat water bowl, the cat—all of them call to me to take just a minute or two away from that fascinating manuscript about the phylogeny and evolution of low-G+C gram-positive bacteria and scoop, feed, water, or pet. My bed calls very loudly from the next room, especially after lunch—Maaaaary, you are getting sleeeeeepy. I don’t dare open the mary’zine file until my workday is done, because I’ll get sucked in and won’t even notice the hours slipping by.

I do miss having coworkers to hang out with, but I try to take up the slack by e-mailing my colleague Ellie on the other side of the continent. Mostly, we talk about the project I’m currently working on for her, but there’s always room for a weather report (S.F. and D.C.—always opposite), a story about the family (her) or the cat (me), or a joke about George W. Bush.

And of course, Pookie is always a force—sometimes for good, sometimes for eleven smatterings of throw-up across two rooms, which I found when I went downstairs today. He mostly likes having me around, but sometimes I think he sees me as the retired husband who’s always underfoot. He’ll be resting quietly—lounging on a piece of cardboard, as if it’s the finest satin sheet—and I’ll go up to him, all cooing and petting. He’ll crack one eye open, and his look says it all: “Don’t you have work to do?” But sometimes he really seems to get a kick out of me. He likes it when I sing and dance for him when a good song comes on the radio. One day I was doing my serenade routine, singing along to a catchy new song with my arms spread wide, addressing him at high volume—which always makes him perk up, if only to look for an escape route—and I suddenly realized that the lyrics coming up were: “BE my… beeee myyyy… pussycat…pussycat…” and I collapsed in giggles. He gazed at me, pretending to be captivated by my performance, but I knew he was thinking, “Somebody’s bipoooooolar….”

People who work regular jobs have no idea how fast a day at home can fly by. I used to picture myself going out for breakfast, dawdling through the hours I saved by not commuting. Ha! I swear there must be a special subsection of the theory of relativity that covers the paradox of Home Time vs. Job Time. At my job, it was all about finding ways to relieve the boredom—talking to coworkers, running in the park, going for coffee, playing computer solitaire. I still watch the clock at home, but it’s for the opposite reason: Damn, I’ve only worked 1.5 hours this morning, and it’s already time to go for my haircut—or to the dentist—or shopping for dinner—or going to the ATM, post office, Fed Ex, library, bookstore, drug store, or a million other destinations. Suddenly I’m Errand Girl. When did I used to do errands? Did I even have errands? Now, errands are my life. When Home isn’t calling me, Stores are calling me. Life suddenly wants me to be everywhere but at my desk working, and all I want is to be at my desk working. It’s insane. The few days when I have food in the house and have no appointments or other reasons to go out, I’m in hog heaven, if hogs liked to work.

And at the end of the day, I’m like Silas Marner, counting up my gold coins. I guess I would feel more secure having a regular salary, but there’s something about having to earn it one drachma at a time that adds a little spice to the working life. When my job ended, I honestly thought I was going to end up a bag lady. Who would have thought I’d enjoy living on the edge?

ferry tale

If you do not compare yourself with another, you will be what you are.
—Krishnamurti

So can you stand to hear another travel story? It’s pretty exciting, and I don’t want to overstimulate you.

I recently had a birthday. I had decided that this year on my birthday, I was going to take the ferry from Larkspur to San Francisco, no matter what. I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 27 years, and I had never taken the ferry, except for a short jaunt on the Tiburon ferry to Angel Island many years ago. I have wanted to do this for a long time but kept putting it off, mostly because I was afraid I wouldn’t know where to buy my ticket, where to board, where to get off, what to do after I got off, etc. Face it, I am a big chicken, sQUAWWK.

But my trip to Massachusetts (zine #8)—mundane as it may seem to a seasoned traveler—taught me that, first of all, one person’s comfort zone is another person’s scary unknown. Risk is relative. Some people, crazily enough, would find it scary to write a one-woman ‘zine and send it to all their friends. Ha-ha-ha! And some people, sad to say, find the thought of any form of travel that is not conducted from behind the wheel of one’s own car quite daunting. So let’s not judge.

One of my projects in middle life has been to learn the belated lesson that, when you try something new, mistakes are not only surmountable but inevitable. So when I planned this birthday ferry trip, I gave myself permission to make all the mistakes I needed to. I decided it would be a fact-finding mission, an initiation into the mysteries of watery public transportation. I wouldn’t have to do anything earth-shaking (which is the last thing you want to do in S.F. anyway) or glamorous upon arriving on the far shore—just getting there and back would be enough for this maiden voyage. If I managed to walk around for a bit and find a place to eat lunch, that would be the icing on the birthday cake.

It was a good thing I had given myself this permission, because my first mistake was to think I could blithely drive up to the ferry parking lot at 10:00 a.m. on a weekday and park. What was I thinking? The commuters fill the place up by 8:30. A uniformed man turned me away but said I could probably find a spot across the road at the Marin Airporter lot. Fortunately, I had parked there for the Massachusetts trip, so I knew what to do. It was a relief to hustle back on foot (threading my way through the acre of cars), find the ticket window, and still have a little time before they let us board. Just that little victory left me feeling flush with success.

On the ferry, I immediately headed for the outside deck. There was less chance of getting seasick out there, and the main point of the trip was to enjoy the view of the bay and the skyline, smell the sea air, and all that. Within minutes, I was joined by a youngish guy wearing shorts, polo shirt, and baseball cap and carrying a knapsack. He asked me if this was the only deck, and I said I didn’t know, I’d never ridden the ferry before.

“Oh, so you’re a tourist too?”

“No, I live here, but I’ve just never….” I trailed off, embarrassed.

To my surprise, we fell into a conversation. I asked where he was from—he had a Spanish accent—and he said “St. Louis.” So much for assumptions. Marty said he loved the Bay Area but that he wouldn’t want to live here because of the way Latinos are stereotyped. He told me he had been driving around lost in his friend’s car that morning, looking for Larkspur Landing (he had driven over to Marin from Oakland! And I had been nervous coming from a couple miles away!) and he had ended up on that strip of Bellam Blvd., in my neighborhood, where Hispanic men gather every morning, hoping to get a day’s work. He had gotten out of his car to ask a passing pedestrian how to get to the ferry, and before he could finish his sentence, she had said, “Yes, this is where you stand.” Obviously, she had assumed from his accent that he was one of the day laborers, even though he was dressed like a tourist.

Marty said to me, “I was offended by that. I am an educated man. In St. Louis, I am treated with respect.” That surprised me, because I would have expected California to be a more hospitable place than the Midwest for any person of color. My assumptions were crumbling fast.

But I immediately understood the seeming discrepancy, and I told him about how, in the Midwest, no one would look twice at me, but here, in the supposed gay mecca, I get harassed all the time. He couldn’t believe it. Turns out he was gay, too (my gaydar had failed me), and he wanted to believe that San Francisco was the Shangri-La he had always thought it to be. But it was exactly as he had been saying about Latinos. The more exposure you have as a minority, the more crap you’re going to get. I think I really burst his bubble.

Marty said he owned three doughnut shops in St. Louis and paid $400 a month rent for a 2-bedroom apartment in a nice area. I oohed and ahhed but politely didn’t say, “But you have to live in St. Louis.”

So we talked all the way across the bay, and the ride was over much too quickly. He had a big day planned—even though rain was threatened, he was going to take BART to the Castro, rent a bike in Golden Gate Park, and ride to Land’s End to check out the nude beach. He hugged me and said, “I hope everyone is as friendly as you are.” I almost choked. I guess it’s true what they say about travel—even 30 minutes of travel a few miles from home—you can be whoever you want, because no one knows any different.

After we landed, he took my picture, and I decided to accompany him up Market to Powell St. So we found the Embarcadero BART station, bought tickets, and descended to the lower level. I had shared with him my near-native knowledge of the BART system, except that I had gotten it confused with Muni and gave him entirely the wrong directions. Fortunately, I realized my mistake in time, though I felt like a complete idiot. (Fact-finding mission, I had to remind myself. Fact-finding means you can’t get the facts until you find you don’t know them.)

On the train, he mentioned that he was always looking for a boyfriend, and I teased him about meeting me instead. He said, “I don’t talk to men, they’re too intimidating.” I said, “I don’t talk to lesbians, either.” We cracked up. Despite gender, age, and ethnic differences, we were totally in synch.

Finally we bade each other farewell, and I got off at Powell and started walking in the direction of Folsom St. I had cut out a newspaper article about restaurants in the city and decided to try to find a place called Mo’s Grill. It turned out to be inside Yerba Buena Gardens, a fact it took me quite a while to find. But I felt so proud of myself when I was finally seated at a table by the window. My favorite singer, Van Morrison, was singing “Brand New Day” in the background, and I smiled to myself, an in-joke in my crowd of one. I had arrived, I had navigated my way across miles of water and city sidewalk to this oasis of urban delight, and I couldn’t have been more pleased.

Unfortunately, the Dramamine I had taken “to be on the safe side” in case the bay was choppy started to take its toll on my energy level, so I decided to head back to the Embarcadero right after lunch. I passed by the Museum of Modern Art, so I went into the gift store and bought myself a t-shirt—hypocritically, since I have zero interest in what the “art world” is up to these days—then wound my way through the lunchtime crowds—9-to-5’ers, eat your hearts out—and retraced my steps to the waterfront. For the last two blocks I got drenched by a sudden rainstorm and instinctively cringed from the rain until I realized it didn’t matter if I got wet—I was wearing my new microfiber, weather-resistant jacket.

By now I felt like an old hand at this ferry-riding business, but I congratulated myself too soon. After handing over my return ticket, which I had carefully placed in a special compartment of my satchel, I sauntered around, waiting patiently to board. I was pleasantly full and not unpleasantly doped-up from the Dramamine. A uniformed man came along and said the Larkspur ferry would be leaving “all the way to the end of the pier,” so I marched down there, suddenly full of myself and my new travel smarts. Way before the place where the ferry was docked, there was a little closed gate barring the way, so I blithely lifted the pole that kept it in place—proud that I saw instantly how it worked—and was immediately yelled at by the ferry workers, “Go back, go back! Close the gate!!” as if I had wandered onto a firing range. Trying to maintain my cool, I replaced the gate pole in the slot and turned to see about 15 people behind me, people who all knew to wait behind the gate and were no doubt thinking what an idiot I was. But who knows, maybe there was someone in the crowd who would have done the same thing and was giving silent thanks that I had gotten there before she did. Soul sister, this mistake’s for you.

I enjoyed the ride back to Marin. This time I was alone on the deck, so I got to watch the S.F. skyline, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the beautiful storm sky. It started pouring rain halfway across, so I went inside, where it smelled like a bus and was full of silent, world-weary—or at least ferry-weary—commuters working on their laptops. I went back outside as soon as the rain cleared. The sense that I could move, change my mind, make decisions, not know in advance what seat to take or what gate to go through seemed terribly liberating, though of course only on the tiniest of scales, and mostly in principle. I am not yet ready for India.

Half an hour later, we arrived in Marin, home sweet home. Trudging through the parking lot, across the pedestrian bridge, and over to the Marin Airporter, I was exhausted and my feet were killing me, but I was feelin’ fine… until I got to the counter where I had to give the man my parking stub. Oh oh. I had thought I’d put it in the special compartment of my satchel, but no, that was the ferry ticket. I started frantically looking through my bag, with a horrible sinking feeling that I had somehow managed to drop my parking stub instead of my ferry ticket in the ticket receptacle at the ferry. If I showed the airporter guy my ferry ticket, would that convince him that I had made an honest mistake and didn’t have to be charged for 30 days of parking?

Me: I don’t seem to have my ticket.

Him [with the most impassive face I’ve seen since Mt. Rushmore]: I need it.

What made it 1,000 times worse is that he was the same guy who had witnessed my losing of the bus pass when I went on the Massachusetts trip. I was even wearing the same clothes. Surely he wouldn’t remember me, surely this sort of thing happens all the time? He continued to stare at me, giving nothing away. Finally, I pulled the stub out of my jacket pocket, where I had carelessly stuck it instead of preserving it in a special compartment. Thank God. Thank you, thank you, beneficent God Almighty.

I can’t help it that everything in my life is a big deal. And actually, there’s an up side to that. If the smallest venture out into the world is difficult for me, then even a small adventure will reap great rewards. It’s that relative-risk thing I mentioned earlier. I see it as a kind of emotional homeopathy. Other people have to jump out of airplanes or climb mountains or seek out dangerous rivers in the jungle to have a feeling of adventure. All I have to do to push the envelope is to lose a ticket or go through the wrong door. My skydive, my mountaintop, my Amazon river is all around me. I’m just living on a smaller scale than some people—like that species of moth or butterfly that only lives for 24 hours.

In my defense, I’ve faced many big challenges on my own—I’ve moved to other states, bought a condo, had a successful career, started my own business—and, of course, I live alone, which creates all sorts of opportunities for bravery—but in some perverse way, the small unknowns can be more daunting than the big ones.

the heart of creation

…when I picture my mother playing the piano, I think of a stillness, a pinprick of a place inside her that is profoundly still. I wonder if a sublime quietness is at the heart of creation.
—Jane Hamilton, Disobedience

But the unknown can get even smaller(bigger) than taking a public conveyance across small waters. Change and movement can be, quite literally, a walk in the park. I went to painting class one Wednesday morning and started a new painting. I had no idea what to paint, so I started with myself—a peach-colored blob for my head and peach blobs for torso and hips, and longer peach extensions for the limbs. I was supremely not knowing what to do, but for some reason my guard was down and I wasn’t too worried about it. I just let it develop any way it wanted to. One thing led to another, and I ended up in a kind of trance state, painting my internal organs—stomach, heart with tubes sticking out, plus lots of imaginary organlike structures, none of which followed any rules of color or shape or function. I spent two and a half hours painting this strange body, or rather, letting it paint itself.

In the group sharing afterward, I felt stoned, deeply touched. I looked around, and everyone in the circle looked like a heroin addict after getting a fix—but it wasn’t lassitude, it was a deep, quiet presence. No one was preoccupied with being somewhere else, no one was putting on a façade or resisting the silence.

I’ll never get over how strange it is that when you go deeply inward, you connect up with everyone else who is deeply inward. You’ve all been in your own worlds, literally with your backs to each other, for 2 or 3 hours, and when you stumble out of the painting room and try to find words to express what happened, you find you can just look in people’s eyes or make a tiny joke, and you’re all right there, together, as if you’re all the same person with many different faces. Strange that it takes diving into your uniqueness to discover your commonness with others on a heart level. This is what the “creative process” is about, not what ends up on the paper.

It’s not that painting always manifests as this stoned bliss of connectedness, but when it does, it’s a gift. On this day, the afterglow lasted for hours. I didn’t want to leave the studio, but at 1:30 I couldn’t ignore my hunger pangs any longer. So I went off to get my usual burrito and eat it at my usual spot—Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. But what wasn’t usual was that I wasn’t in a mad rush to get home to take a nap or check my e-mail. I felt like I was in love with everyone I saw—it was as if everyone was a walking archetype, vulnerable and simple—part of the human family. The young people, the old people, everyone so perfectly themselves. In some cases you could see the pain etched in their faces and in their posture. This one bent old woman walked toward me as if pushing into a steady wind—well, it was pretty windy that day, but she looked like she’d been pushing for a long time. I ached for her in a way that (needless to say) I don’t usually allow myself to do. We think it would drain us to feel so connected to other people; we don’t realize that that connection is what keeps us alive. What’s draining is to insist on our separateness.

It was a beautiful day in San Francisco—cool and sunny, with a fresh ocean breeze that ruffled the treetops and filled my lungs with cool air—and I lost all unfaithful fantasies of moving back east. After I ate my burrito, I walked around the lake, loving every sight and smell. I wanted to drink it all in—the cloudless blue sky, the ducks floating peacefully in the water, the trees moving in the wind. It’s not that I felt like a different person—I was aware of my usual reactions—but I couldn’t be mad at anybody, even the woman who went into the men’s bathroom by mistake because she saw me coming out of the women’s. I walked toward a sea of pigeons on the sidewalk, getting ready to be annoyed at the man who was feeding  them, but just as I was about to gear up for my internal diatribe, I came closer and we looked at each other, and I was struck by the kindness in his face. He was wearing green scrubs; there was an old woman in the car, dozing in the front seat with the door open while he fed the birds. Was he a nurse? I took all this in in a millisecond, and then I smiled and said “Hi,” and he smiled beautifully back at me. Was this his usual smile? Was he just naturally sweet? Or did I give him something to which he was responding? It was the briefest possible encounter. Is it really possible to make a difference in the world with just a smile at the right moment? It’s so easy to think of all the times our kindness or generosity fails to transform a moment or to have any effect at all—but I suspect we don’t even know, most of the time, what sparks we emit or what encouragement we give just by being aware of each other.

It was like that—magical—all afternoon. I didn’t even mind the other cars on the road. The radio kept playing all these sweet songs—“What If God Was One of Us?”; “Let go your heart, let go your head, and feel it now….”; U2’s “Beautiful Day.” I was going to take a nap when I got home, but there was work for me by e-mail. So I spent 2 hours editing a business plan for a biotech startup instead, and even that didn’t bother me. I just felt grateful for having a successful business and having the freedom to schedule my own work and take time to drive to the beautiful city and paint gory, beautiful self-innards, and see my beautiful friends and feel that deep connection that seems so elusive and yet is so available, why do we not always feel it?

To me, that day was a day spent traveling, though I walked in the same steps I’ve walked many times before. It wasn’t about covering miles or discovering cultural differences. It wasn’t about being a stranger in a strange land—except, perhaps, the land of Love. It wasn’t about bearing discomfort or proving one’s fortitude. It wasn’t about going out at all, though I felt I extended myself. Mostly, it was about opening up to the vast world that lives inside of us. It’s not a world you can buy a ticket to, you have to have faith and be a little diligent about gaining entry. Sometimes travel isn’t about conquering the world or confronting strange customs or difficult terrain—it can be about making a small inroad on your own sense of isolation, and discovering that the world will come to you.

[Mary McKenney]

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mary’zine random redux: #33 Summer 2005

July 19, 2009

I’m slouched in my big red comfy armchair, enjoying the luxury of central air conditioning and trying to decide if I should (a) edit the paper on cytomegalovirus that came in last night, (b) take a nap (I’m halfway there, if you really want to know), or (c) eat lunch. Pookie is lying next to the chair in front of the heating—or in this case, cooling—vent. He hasn’t been feeling well, so I’m not sure why he wants to be blasted with cold air, but if any creature knows what it wants, it’s the Poo man.

pookie’s seizures

Pookie has had a rough time of it lately. I took him to a new vet to see what condition his condition was in. He’s been in renal failure for about a year, and lately he’s been having “seizures.” (I think they’re actually more like “episodes of loss of motor control,” but I’ll call them seizures anyway.) I’ll hear a thump! and look to see that he’s fallen over, limbs spazzing, body contorted. I scoop him up and hold him close for a minute or two until the spasms pass and he can get down and wobble off on his own. There’s a definite advantage to being a cat in this situation, because he just goes on with his life, leaving me to worry for the both of us.

The other cats in my family tree go to a clinic in Marinette, but Barb had told me that the best vet there, Dr. V, had recently retired, moved to Green Bay or something. Besides, I wanted to find one in Menominee to cut down on drive time…. specifically, drive time with unhappy mraw-ings from the back seat.
I didn’t have much hope, because Barb and K had both said that the vets over here mostly work on farm animals. Cows? In Menominee? I saw cows and horses every day while driving down the freeway in Marin County, and haven’t seen so much as a chicken here. When I told K this, she exclaimed, “Well, we don’t keep them in town!”—like I’m some hick who lets the pigs sleep in the dining room.

I checked the phone book, and lo and behold, the Bayshore Veterinary Clinic is barely a mile away. I called and made an appointment and brought Pookie in later that day. I hate going to the vet, partly because I’m embarrassed that Pookie’s fur is so matted. I pull clumps off him all the time, but I feel like the little bird that comes once every thousand years to the mountain and takes away one grain of sand, and when the whole mountain is gone, that’s when eternity will begin. When Pookie’s clumps are all gone, eternity will just be finishing up. I once took him to a professional, who got him de-matted all right, but he wouldn’t speak to me for 3 days and I hated to think of what she did to him to keep him from scratching her eyes out.

While we wait for the vet in the examining room, his assistant, a middle-aged woman, is checking Pookie out. I can tell she’s judging me for not having good cat hygiene, because she takes a comb out of a drawer and holds it up like it’s a rare artifact known only to the Rosicrucians, Veterinary Division. “You can get them at Kmart,” she says, helpfully. I say I have one, and she’s all disbelieving, “You DO?” Just then the vet comes in, and guess what? It’s Barb’s Dr. V! He hadn’t gone to Green Bay, he’d only migrated over the bridge. I mention Barb’s name, and he remembers both her and her cat and goes on to regale the assistant with the story of LaMew getting shot in the elbow.

Dr. V goes to work on Pookie, sticking a thermometer up his butt while checking his internal organs (?) by squeezing up under his belly. Pookie’s butt is in the air, his back legs are helplessly straddling Dr’s V’s arm, and his face has a look of complete horror as he realizes he has become Dr. V.’s bitch. While this is happening, the vet assistant is taking the comb and gently wisping it over Pookie’s back, removing approximately one cubic millimeter of fuzz at a time and dropping it carefully into the wastebasket. She has the decency not to say, “See how easy it is?” but this also robs me of the opportunity to counter with: “Yeah, well at home there’s no one to distract him by CRAMMING THINGS UP HIS ASS.”

Dr. V doesn’t know if the “seizures” are related to the renal failure; they could be a sign of “kitty dementia”—uh-oh, me and Ruth Fisher, sisters in bondage to the mentally ill—so he gives me a mixture of amoxicillin and prednisone to squirt into Pookie’s mouth twice a day. Oh joy. Oh frabjous joy.

After a few days on this regimen, Pookie starts vomiting and leaving little piles and dribs and drabs of diarrhea on my nice oatmeal-colored carpet. He’s also listless and unsocial, and I find him curled up in odd corners of the house, like next to the vacuum cleaner (his mortal enemy) in the downstairs bedroom. If I’m around when he has a seizure, I pick him up and press my face against his furry head and try to remember the feeling for when I don’t have him anymore. It occurs to me that I’ve been living in a state of grace for the last few years, since his near-death from a bladder infection, when I hardly cared whether he lived or died. If he had gone to his Maker then, I doubt that I would have felt more than relief. No love = no pain. No wonder so many people go that route. But I was given the gift of his return, along with the blessing and the curse of love, and now it hurts like hell to think we may be coming to the end.

baby robins

But where there is illness and the knowledge of certain death, there is also birth—three little robins on top of a light fixture on my back porch, in this case. Mère and Père Robin take turns bringing the little ones worms, which they drop into the gaping mouths that seem too big for their wobbly, fuzzy little           heads. I’ve never seen a bird family this close up. You haven’t seen beady eyes till you’ve seen a mother bird guarding her babies. And the feeding ritual seems a bit strange. Mère or Père flies up to the nest—the babies have had their heads sticking straight up and their mouths wide open for a good 30 minutes already—and drops a big wad of wriggling worms into one of the mouths (“Here, hold this”) and then takes them back a bit at a time, makes worm mash out of them, and feeds the other big mouths.

But gosh, the kids grow up so fast. One day the strongest of the three babies—its chest starting to fill in with orange tufts—was standing at its full height, flapping its wings like crazy. I hoped against hope that I was about to witness baby’s first flight, but apparently it was just a dress rehearsal. Can you imagine spending the first weeks of your life in a tiny spit-glued grass bowl with two siblings who are getting bigger by the day like you, and Mom comes home every night and squeezes in, too…. and then all of a sudden, you realize… “I’m born to FLY! I’m going to spread my wings and leave this two-bit nest behind!” Can you imagine the relief?  A few days later, the babies were all gone, and I was surprised at how let down I felt. Empty nest syndrome, indeed.

I’m flattered that the robins chose my porch to start their family on. It makes sense, though—I provide quite the little birthing center out there: fresh water, an ample supply of dry food (seeds) and wet food (the aforementioned worms), and, of course, shelter—everything but flying lessons and foot massage. And then there’s the “garden.”

The people I bought the house from had an aboveground swimming pool. So when they moved and took the pool with them, I was left with an unsightly patch of dirt in the lawn. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, so K suggested I plant something there. We went to Erik’s Garden Center early one rainy Monday morning because she needed to buy her spring plants anyway. I was a little hesitant, because “Mary Mary quite contrary I may be, but don’t ask me how my garden grows, because it don’t grow shit.” But I was soon excited by all the different colors and types of plants. I ended up buying two hanging baskets of petunias—pink and white for the back porch and purple for the front porch—and, after much deliberation, two broccoli plants and a creeping phlox. (Because I follow my intuition, that’s why.)

K told me what fertilizer to get, we dug up the weeds in the dirt, and she planted the three little plants. Unlike the hard, dry piece of ground next to the patio at my condo in Marin, this dirt is really good, and we dug up many worms. More bisected worms than whole ones, but don’t they regenerate themselves? (Oh, the things I don’t know.) K saw some little maple treelings growing against the foundation of the house and said I should take them out. So I pulled them up by their roots and planted them in the dirt patch also. I never really expected them to live, so I planted them only about 4 feet apart. Could be interesting. Future generations can tell the story of how the hapless old lady who used to live here came to have Siamese-twin maple trees in her yard.

The robins aren’t the only satisfied customers out there. The bird bath is as busy as a public pool, and little birds flutter through the white-barked birch tree mocking the  jays and blackbirds that are too big to dine at the small feeder hanging there. There’s a whole flock of little birds that enjoy taking sponge baths in the 80% of the “garden” that has nothing but dirt in it. They squiggle themselves down and around until they’ve made a cozy indentation and then wriggle all over getting dirt under their wings and all over their bellies. Then they frolic in the broccoli forest or sit on top of the leaves and bite holes in them. I wonder if they’re completely delusional (look! it’s a lake!) or if they’re evolutionarily inclined to want to be covered in dirt.

home girl

One of the happiest outcomes of my moving here, so far, has to do with nephew Josh, K and MP’s younger son. K was having a rummage sale to which a lot of us had contributed our junk, and we were sitting around on lawn chairs in the driveway waiting for customers. Josh was feeling down because his dream of buying a house seemed to be on permanent hold. He and wife Jana lived in a trailer, and there was barely enough room for them to turn around. Even though Josh makes relatively good money as a ship welder, Jana works at Wal-Mart, which, ‘nuff said. They’d been looking at houses, all just out of reach financially, and were starting to think it would never happen.

I had bought MP’s original Ford Model-T running board, which is solid polished wood with a metal inlay. Josh offers to take it out to my Jeep, because it’s hella heavy and he’s a big strong guy. While he does that, I double-check with myself to be clear about what I’m about to do.

As he’s coming back from the Jeep, I go to meet him and say, “Let’s walk.” We walk around the corner, and I ask him exactly how much he needs for a down payment. It’s unclear, because he doesn’t know what they’ll have to pay for a house, what they can get for their trailer, etc. I explain that I don’t want to lend money to family: I don’t want to risk disrupting relationships if for some reason they can’t pay me back. Then I pause significantly and add, “But I’d be willing to give you $5,000.” He’s apparently having a delayed reaction to this news—or doesn’t trust his ears—because he says, “But then I’d have to pay that off, plus my other debts, and….” I stop and put a hand on his arm. “Josh. I’ll give it to you.” He starts to say “Noooo,” but mid-vowel I can tell he’s not going to waste time protesting. He wraps me in a big bear hug. “Thank you, thank you!” “I love you, Josh.” “I love you, Aunt Mary.” Then the music swells, and… wait, there’s no music. But I still feel like I’m in a movie.

This happened on the last day of April. I was surprised at how quickly they found a house they liked and made an offer on it. I guess you’d call it a “fixer-upper,” though they don’t use that term here—fixer-uppers are pretty much what you get. It’s in a pleasant neighborhood in Marinette, centrally located and not too far from K and MP. And it’s on Mary Street! When Josh tells people that I “made it all possible,” I quip that his moving to Mary St. was one of my conditions. I think they know I’m joking. And here’s another twist. When I moved back here last fall, Josh bought me a button that said “Mary is my homegirl.” Are we impressed with these tidbits of synchronicity, or what?

I’m thrilled that I was able to help them out. It feels a lot better than when I donated $1,000 to the Menominee High School scholarship program and found out the scholarship was awarded to the daughter of the financial advisor to the school district.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to handle having money when so many in the family are living from paycheck to paycheck. I haven’t really figured it out, so I just take it case by case. It’s still awkward to give a sizable gift to someone who can’t afford to reciprocate. I wonder if the saying “It’s better to give than to receive” isn’t the moral lesson we think it is, but rather a simple fact. Giving is a joy—though I realize it’s not everyone’s idea of a good time—but it can feel complicatedly ambivalent to receive: There can be shame that you can’t reciprocate; confusion about whether you’re supposed to try to reciprocate or merely accept the difference in circumstances; and fear that the other person’s generosity is masking an expectation or a form of one-upmanship… like now you owe them, regardless of what they say.

I think the economic disparity between me and other members of the family is still an issue, but I’ve realized that I can’t control anyone else’s feelings, I can only try to be clear about my own. I truly believe that it’s not important how much a gift costs—what’s important is the intention behind it. But we all grew up poor, and that can warp your sense of worth.

welcome to the dollhouse

Speaking of giving, one of the many things I appreciate about my sisters is that when they go rummaging, they’re always on the lookout for things I might like. Mostly, they’ll bring me crystals, crosses… anything different, colorful, or shiny to hang in my big windows. One day Barb called me from my driveway—that’s how she circumvents my request to “call before coming over”—and said they had a surprise for me. I had once mentioned that I’d like to have a dollhouse to make “dioramas” in the little rooms. Well, they had found a metal dollhouse that was exactly like the one I had as a little girl! I couldn’t believe it. I briefly wondered how they knew it was like the one I’d had, but of course!—they had played with it too—one of many hand-me-downs from me, first-born. I was touched that they had ceded it to me instead of one of them claiming it for herself or for a grandchild.

Late one night I felt inspired to do a sand tray (sans sand) with it. At first I was a little intimidated by the emotional baggage represented by this dollhouse. The fact that I was “playing” with it 50-some years later, a few blocks from my then-home, was a little mind-boggling, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a “Twilight Zone” episode with this plot device…. doo-doo-doo-doo…. Woman plays with childhood dollhouse… After she puts all the dolls in it, they come alive and she becomes the doll! OK, Mare, get a grip.

So I started putting things in the rooms. It was physically more difficult than I’d expected, because, man, those rooms are tiny, and I’m so much bigger now. Duh. And I was really self-conscious at first—I was afraid I was going to keep such rational control of the imagery that I wouldn’t be able to forget myself and just let it flow. But sand trays always take you somewhere you didn’t know you were going to go, so I just… went.

In one of the upstairs bedrooms, I put three little pink rocking chairs in a row with a “bomb” in each one. (Me and my sisters?) A baby lay on the floor in front of them, and a red rubber skeleton hand edged into the room. Men (action figures, a.k.a. dolls) were climbing the sides of the house, trying to get in the windows, which have little open squares cut in the metal, so their arms reached through. In the bathroom I put a skeleton on top of a pile of knives. The living room filled up with tangled red wire, with a soft plastic skull stuck in the middle. A rescue squad vehicle sat halfway into the room. Little green soldiers on the outside took aim at the house.

I put a little pink baby on a makeshift bed in the other bedroom, surrounded by empty blue rocking chairs and a couple of skeletons standing like sentries at the front opening. The baby felt like my little brother Mike who died of leukemia. At that point I knew I was emotionally engaged. I put another baby in one of the rocking chairs, with no idea of who it could be. I didn’t worry that I was orchestrating the scene anymore, because my crafty conscious mind had let go. My “story” had been successfully interrupted, and I could do anything.

I put men climbing on the roof and trying to come down the chimney. One man was caught in a kind of metal mesh cage. There were chains hanging off the roof, black and red wire coming out of the chimney, a large skeleton hand, snakes, and an old light bulb filament. I wrapped the house in long strings of white beads. Long black rods poked through windows and bifurcated some of the rooms.

By now, the only room that had nothing in it was the kitchen. My parents weren’t even represented (details, details)… but all my energy was going to my brother. So into the kitchen went a little yellow crib with a baby in it, red and white flowers, a red plastic heart, and gold Christmas ornaments. The feeling of doom from the upstairs rooms (and the roof and the windows and the whole house, actually) was changing, and I felt a deep, unexpected pulsing of joy in my chest. I grabbed a small jointed skeleton with blue rhinestone eyes and laid it on the floor in front of the crib, and the “sand tray” felt somehow complete. It was then that I noticed that the skeleton had lost one of its eyes. My heart skipped a beat… then another. My brother had blue eyes and had to have one removed when he was a year old. I had often painted him with one closed eye and one bright blue one, and the image has always stayed with me.

This is what happens in the creative process. The mind holds on as long as it can, and then it lets go like a tired swimmer slipping under the waves. From the mind’s point of view, all is lost. But the giving in allows the power of the Mystery to take over. And then the mind has the grace to acknowledge and even feel gratitude for that all-embracing force and the surprising gifts it brings.

Actually, the feeling of getting in touch with the creative force, the Mystery, is not limited to “art.” At times I feel strongly—almost supernaturally—touched when I’m out in the neighborhood or even driving and fully take in the green of the big leafy trees, the lush carpets of lawn, the yellow-green light during a half-sunny/half-darkblue-stormcloud daytime thunderstorm. At those moments I feel swathed, or swaddled—held or holding, I hardly know which—by everything that is. I’m all alone and yet so big—amorphous—that there’s nothing and no one outside “me.” Just as when I’m in the creative flow, I’m only another form through which the prism of sensory experience is being filtered.

July 4

On the weekend before the Fourth of July, I asked Barb if she and Brian and Deb and the kids were going to have a cookout down in the park. She consulted Brian, who thought it was “a great idea.” So Barb went and bought most of the food, and Brian got a pork roast to grill for shredded pork sandwiches. I thought it was just going to be the six of us, but when I arrived, Deb’s brother and his girlfriend and their baby, two friends of Brian’s with their kid, Brian’s live-in and visiting kids, Barb’s daughter L and her husband with their two boys, and K and MP were all there. Deb’s nephew Devon, who’s barely 4 years old and small for his age, was making big circles around the park on a tiny motorcycle. MP was helping Brian dig up some dead rose bushes. Women bearing food were streaming into and out of the house like a line of ants.

K thought she should be helping set things up, but I told her we should take advantage of our elder status and sit out on the deck and have a drink. I’m a terrible influence on her.

Before the food was ready, it started raining, so they set everything up in the garage. The smokers stood at the open garage doors smoking and looking out at the rain. The radio was tuned to the oldies’ station, where every song seemed chosen for the weather: … listen to the rhythm of the falling rain… pitter patter pitter patter… oo-oo-ooh…. We sat on folding chairs awkwardly eating hot dogs and deviled eggs and chips and cupcakes on paper plates on our laps and trying to keep track of whose drink was whose. The kids—I think there were nine of them altogether—raced around the garage, weaving in and out among the adults, who were themselves constantly up and down getting food or going into the house or to their cars for something. Food and drink were spilled, napkins distributed, and second helpings helped. When the rain let up, Sarina and Devon went out and threw rocks at the puddles across the road. I went out to watch and realized that when I’m around kids, I constantly think something awful is going to happen—they’ll hit the neighbor’s cat with a rock… they’ll get too close to the road and get run over—and I’ll be left standing there, powerless. (Why this should be is a whole ‘nother story.)

While we were eating in the garage, I felt like a ghost—or close enough to a ghost, socially speaking, not to quibble about whether I was actually alive or dead. I felt like Scrooge watching the world go by without him (The Ghost of Great Auntie Present). None of the middle generation, the late-20- and early-30-somethings, so much as glanced in my direction. And how could I blame them? They have their kids and their houses and their jobs and their future to worry about. Deb’s family is unusually close-knot (ha! Freudian slip—close-knit), and all the brothers and sisters and the parents are in constant touch and routinely babysit each other’s kids and help build each other’s garages, redo bathrooms, whatever needs to be done. They’re like a giant, well-oiled family machine. It struck me that “family” is inclusive by being exclusive. Barb is one of the grandmas and Brian’s mother, but K and I are fairly expendable twigs on that limb of the family tree. I figure my only hope for feeling comfortable in that situation is to get in solid with the kids. Kids’ attention is fickle at best, but if I have enough one-on-one time with them, I’ll at least have a real connection there and not just be Grandma Barb’s peripheral “sister from California,” whose story is rapidly becoming yesterday’s news.

Here I am talking about connection, but I want contradictory things. Time goes on and one adapts, even to a miracle. But I want to retain the “disconnect,” the “synaptic gap,” the cognitive dissonance of wow, can you believe it, between life as I knew it a year or so ago and life as it appears to me now. I want to be immersed in the experience, but I also want to stand a little apart to maintain an awareness of what’s really going on here… what’s the deeper meaning there…. how does the past inform the present or the present redeem the past…  I’m interested in difference—the strange blessings and contradictions of life—and in trying to express what I see.

At one point, Barb says to me, “This is all because of you,” and I think, You mean no one else thought to have a Fourth of July BBQ? Odd, since I hate the Fourth of July! I’d just wanted to eat hot dogs and deviled eggs.

the grand-nieces

As much as I enjoy the grandkids, I’ve resisted babysitting them. As a teenager I hated being responsible for other people’s precious darlings and was beset by paranoid fantasies (if a man comes to the door claiming to be a relative of the parents, do I let him in or run and hide under the bed?). So I told Barb that I would invite the kids over for a sleepover in my attic room sometime, but she’d have to come with. Over the summer, when they’re not in school and their regular babysitter isn’t available, Barb has been watching them one day a week. I’ve taken to dropping by, taking them out to lunch, and playing a game or two until I desperately need to return to my solitary (big red comfy-chaired) existence. On one of the days that Barb was supposed to have the kids, she had an appointment, so I agreed to watch them for the 1 or 2 hours she would be gone. As the time got nearer, I began to regret my decision. I was afraid I’d just sit there in previous-babysitting-trauma-induced paralysis, one eye on the clock, too stiff to talk, let alone be an engaging companion–slash–loving great auntie.

The first 5 or 10 minutes alone with them were pretty much as I’d expected, until I realized that kids inhabit worlds of their own, and there wasn’t anything special I had to do. Sarina suggested playing dominos, so we did. We played the game where you start with double nines and progress through the double eights, double sevens, etc., until you run out of numbers. We had only got through the first couple of sets before both kids were lying face down on their chairs and playing the game from the floor. To give me a domino to play on the table, they had to go through numerous contortions to get the right one on the table and slide it over to me without being able to see. This gave them the giggles, and they kept up a chatterfest under the table about I know not what. At one point, Summer calls up from the floor, “Aunt Mary, look in the drawer.” I was sitting at the end of the table where there’s a small drawer, so I opened it and found the domino Summer had placed there. Gee, talk about resourceful… I guess when you challenge yourself to play dominos on two levels, you have to think on your feet, er, stomach.

When they got bored with that game, Sarina wanted to play Bingo, so she and I did that while Summer made bead bracelets. Bingo lasted about 5 minutes. Sarina won, so I think it was a case of quitting while she was ahead. Then she brought out Chutes and Ladders, which I knew was a famous kid’s game that I must have played before, but for some reason I couldn’t get the hang of it. The kids thought that was hilarious, especially when I tried to move my piece up the chute or down the ladder.

Next, it happened to be less hot than usual that day, so we went outside so they could play on their jungle gym. They showed off all their acrobatic tricks on the swings and with the hanging rings and did cartwheels on the lawn. I know it’s a cliché, but wow, the flexibility in their thin limbs! Their unflagging energy! Part of the jungle gym structure has ladders and a simulated “rock climbing surface” to climb up to a kind of treehouse, so I made a feeble attempt to follow them up while they squealed, backing up to the opposite side of the platform as I grabbed at them while teetering 12 inches off the ground. This led to their christening me the Lava Monster. (Don’t ask me why Lava.) They went running through the yard, and every move I made in their direction evoked genuine—or fake/genuine, if you see the distinction—terror and screams. I did indeed feel monster-like, roaring and occasionally grabbing hold of a passing arm and wondering what a Lava Monster was supposed to do if she caught one of them. Their shrill screams made me drop them pretty quickly anyway, so as to prevent permanent hearing loss (mine).

Finally, the grandma cavalry arrived. Though I hadn’t been having a bad time, by any means, I was grateful for the rescue. Barb was just in time to take us all to lunch at the Downtown Sub Shop in Menominee. On the way, we saw K and MP riding around in their truck, and they joined us for ice cream.

The kids have another “Aunt Mary,” their mother’s sister, so when we were driving back from lunch, Summer said, “There’s our ‘normal’ Aunt Mary’s house,” and Barb cracked up while I howled. “Normal?!” Poor kid just meant “as opposed to ‘Great Aunt Mary’.” Summer had endeared herself to me earlier by saying, “I hate not knowing things.” I really like smart kids. Four-year-old Sarina is smart too, but she’s still illiterate. I’m looking forward to being in their lives for a long time to come.

the flagpole of now

Pookie started feeling better when I stopped giving him the medicine. He still sits on my lap at the computer and watches the screen avidly as the colorful symbols of Alchemy pop up and move around. He still scratches my knees bloody trying to make himself comfortable. We’re taking it one day at a time, or I am. He’s just living.

He’s living, and I’m thinking. In fact, I’ve been thinking about thought. Many years ago, I heard an amazing talk by Krishnamurti in which he said that time, thought, and fear are all one thing. I noticed with Pookie that if I stay completely in the present with what’s actually happening, I don’t have all the anxiety associated with my projections into the future. He’s on my lap now, he’s purring now, he’s scratching my knees bloody now. Anything that I imagine might happen—or worse, believe will happen—is completely unreal, hypothetical. Several years ago, I spent months playing out in my mind the imminent death of my little black cat Radar, who had feline leukemia. As it happened, he died peacefully in his sleep, with his head butted up against a wall, and I had a friend visiting who helped me bury him, quite illegally, in front of my apartment building. I didn’t shed a tear. It was all just what it was.

So here’s how I picture time = thought = fear. We are sitting on a flagpole (whether it’s all the same flagpole or we each have our own is beyond the scope of this discussion). No, I’ll simplify and say I am sitting on a flagpole, which is the present moment, what is. If you think about it, there’s no flagpole “back there” (past) or “up ahead” (future), because it’s always now. I may think about “tomorrow,” but when “tomorrow” comes, it’s today. No way to get off that flagpole unless we’re sent into space and come back 200 years later while aging only 2 weeks on Earth. I don’t even want to get into that.

OK, so I’m sitting on the flagpole of now, and because of evolutionary developments in the brain, I can imagine things that aren’t real, i.e., aren’t happening now, on my flagpole. When we imagine those unreal things, we are extending our reach beyond the flagpole, forward and back, but those extensions are completely imaginary, a product of our brain capacity. Brain development, per se, is a fine thing, because it can be useful to have a memory (of the best season to plant crops, say) and to make reasonable predictions (if I plant corn now, I’ll have some in late summer). And yet, all that is pure speculation; everything that actually happens is happening now. Late summer may never come, capiche?

When we project these speculations into the “past” or the “future,” that is the nature of thought. We can think about what’s happening, but the thought is never the thing itself. Obviously, that’s also the nature of time, because projection in thought, by definition, is in time and not in the present moment.

Here’s the crucial bit, which is what I realized with Pookie. It’s impossible to have fear in the present. We think we do, but really, fear always comes before or after the fact. In the moment, whether it’s confronting a snake on the path or holding the poor cat while the vet “puts him to sleep,” there’s nothing but this flagpole, then this flagpole, then this flagpole (which are all one flagpole, you understand).

(I sure hope my flagpole analogy is holding up, because if not, you’re probably feeling really irritated right about now.)

So…. everything that our brains project (or “remember”) into the air in front of or behind our “flagpole” is the same thing: thought = time = fear.

QED, n’est-ce pas?

Pookie’s having up to three “seizures” a day now. Be in the moment for him, in whatever way feels right to you, would you?

[Mary McKenney]

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mary‘zine random redux: #32 May 2005

July 10, 2009

I’m killing time while the installer from Drees Electric is here wrestling with my new dishwasher and garbage disposal. Plenty of butt crack on display, but I avert my eyes. For the first half hour he was here, I assembled one of my new steel “retro shell back” lawn chairs. It felt oddly companionable, the two of us grunting over our respective tasks. When he came back up from the basement at one point, I was sitting in the chair, and he laughed. “You finished your project!” I felt so butch.

I got up at 7:00 (having gone to bed at 3:30) to be sure I was ready when the installer came. There were lots of cars outside, and I saw that the people across the street were having a garage sale. Around here, garage (aka rummage) sales start at the crack of dawn and end before lunch. The woman who lived there died recently, and the house has already been sold. I’m waiting on pins and needles to see who’s going to move in. I’m officially an old fuddy-duddy now, hoping for quiet neighbors with no children… or motorcycles…. or beat-up cars…. or Kid Rock records…. well, I’ll just have to wait and see. [Update: I’ve spotted a baby and a young blonde woman, and neither of them looks like a Kid Rock fan.]

My official status as an old fuddy duddy was conferred on me by a young woman at Curry’s IGA the other day. She’s checking out my groceries and wants to know, “Are you a senior citizen?” “NO—NOT YET!” I exclaim, all flustered. Then I think for a few seconds. “How old do you have to be?” “55.” “Oh, OK then, I guess I am” (mumble mumble).” I didn’t even check to see how much being old had saved me.

Spring has almost sprung, and a senior citizen’s fancy turns to thoughts of… “Hmmm, I won’t be able to use the garage as a second refrigerator much longer.”

The ice in the bay has finally melted, the snow has long since receded, and the birds are flinging themselves to and fro, filling the sky with their rich cacophony. The grass is growing, but the trees are just barely budding. I’m looking forward to longer days, open windows, and the sweet, earthy smell of spring (if they still have that). I’ve often thought that people who proclaim their love for “the seasons” are just making lemonade out of ice-cold lemons. But of course now that I’m walking a mile in their moccasins, I can understand the sense of antici….

pation. The snow melts, the brown lawn looks forward to new green growth, and suddenly the future’s so bright I have to wear shades.
(I’ll have to be patient, though. My sister Barb informed me that it snowed on her birthday one year—May 16.)

Our mild winter was a piece o’ cake for me—except for the icing on the cake, if you get my drift. I ended up buying “snow chains” for my boots but lost one of them in a snow bank the first time I wore them.

One of the things I love about being here is having kids in my life—though they’re more of a delicacy than a main course since I moved out of Barb’s house. That didn’t come out right. I don’t get to see them as much, is what I mean. I do get to hear all the stories. One day 9-year-old Summer, 5-year-old Sarina, and 50-year-old Grandma Barb were playing “airplane.” As the self-appointed flight attendant, Sarina asks Barb what she wants to eat. Barb says, “Bacon and eggs.” So Sarina goes off and comes back moments later with her “bacon and eggs.” Then she asks Summer what she wants to eat. Summer starts to say, “Bacon….” and Sarina cuts her off: “We’re all out of bacon.” The kid’s a quirky genius, I tell you what.

I may have mentioned this before, but I love watching the birds and the squirrels. I don’t know why people expend so much time and effort to keep squirrels from eating. This morning one of my regulars, whom I’ll call Hurly, came running through the yard and spooked a flock of blackbirds, who lifted up en masse into the branches of the nearest tree. This freaked Hurly out, and he plastered himself against the tree with his back to it. It reminded me of that Far Side cartoon where the deer is standing upright behind a tree as a hunter prowls around in the background. The deer is thinking, “What have I ever done to this guy? Think, think!” Hurly stayed there until the coast was clear and then went about foraging for sunflower seeds. Then a garbage truck drove by, and Hurly scrambled to the top of a nearby utility pole. I worried he would fry himself on the high voltage wires, but he just clung to the pole like a squirrel chameleon. When I looked again, he was gone.

One day I saw Hurly (or Burly, I can’t tell them apart) scrounging for seeds under the bird feeder. Then I looked about 10 feet over and saw a chickadee trying to get at the peanuts in the squirrel feeder. Hmmm…. Isn’t nature supposed to be smarter than that?

Now I glance out the window and see a big ol’ robin in the bird bath…. fluttering this, fluttering that, stopping to take a sip of bathwater now and then. I expect it to start washing under its “arms” like a Disney cartoon bird. I change the water in my two bird baths every day—that’s just the kind of nature lover I am. I take an absurd pride in attracting a large, diverse population of birds—robins, red-wing blackbirds, chickadees, bright yellow finches, blue jays, woodpeckers, mourning doves, and some I can’t identify. I’m even mildly offended when some of them start grazing in the neighbors’ yards. What have they got that I haven’t got?

Just this morning, I saw that a robin is building a nest on my back porch. I’m excited to be a birdparent-to-be.

The gulls can be a pain. They swoop down on the garbage bags that get put out every Friday (we’re not allowed to use cans) and can cover a wide swath of road and yard with orange peels, coffee grounds, and fluttering store receipts and sandwich wrappings. I don’t get mad, I get Glad. (That gives me an idea. Product placement in the mary‘zine? Have your people call my people.)

On the first day of daylight saving time, I became aware that the din from outside was deafening—the raucous cries and sweet melodies of large and small birds filling the sky. So I went outside and sat in the sunny chill, my jacket wrapped around me, trying to remain still so that the birds who had been flying in and out of the yard would forget I was there. I imagined them gathering in a tree across the street to assess the situation. “Have you noticed that big thing over by the fence? Has it always been there? Have you seen it move? I could have sworn it did. Could it be one of those lifelike sculptures by what’s-his-name, the artist who makes those “people” sitting on park benches? Oh heck, let’s go for it. I’m starving.”

Naturally, Pookie loves watching the birds as much as I do. His motives may be less pure, but he’s harmless. The few times I’ve let him outside, he spends most of his time under the back porch, sniffing the dirt for God knows what. And of course the birds, having the advantage of flight, make themselves scarce until we go back in the house.

Pookie seems to like his new home, but it’s hard to tell. He has the advantage of long-term, short-term, and middle-term memory loss so is not demonstrably grateful for having a permanent, spacious home after last summer’s uprootedness and cramped quarters. He has his own mysterious routines. He’ll be sleeping in the little sitting room downstairs when I come down to the kitchen to make something to eat. Within a minute or two, without fail, I’ll hear the click-click of his toenails as he plods across the kitchen floor toward the stairs, not even turning his head to look at me. Hi, Pookie! Bye, Pookie! The only time he seeks me out is after he’s done his toi-o-lette. If I’m sitting at my desk, he’ll come to me and insist on being picked up. If I ignore him, he’ll try to climb the desk chair, and the poignant urgency in his big green eyes makes him impossible to refuse. Unfortunately, his recent activities are evident in his wet nose, water dripping off his chin, stray bits of cat food in his whiskers, and some suspicious moistness down below. I haul him up onto my lap and try to continue working (or playing) while he proceeds to groom himself and either fall fast asleep, numbing my legs under his considerable weight, or toss and turn and dig his claws into my thighs, and gaze up at me accusingly, as if I should know what’s bothering him. At some unknown signal, he starts hoisting himself up for real and I know it’s time to put him down on the floor. I try to remember to say, “Want to get down?” rather than “Want me to put you down?” because you never know what they can understand.

Being as how I’m getting up there in age and might not be able to climb the stairs at some point, my sisters have pointed out that the staircase is wide enough that I could have a lift installed, like the one Tony Soprano’s mother creaked up and down on. Pookie is no spring chicken either, so I’m envisioning a smaller lift for him opposite mine. Then, when he hears me get in my lift and start moving down, he can hop into his lift and go up, ignoring me completely as we pass each other in our respective quasi-invalid apparati.

Speaking of getting old (do old people speak of anything else?), Barb and K and I reference the following joke often.

Three elderly sisters live together. One sister goes upstairs to draw herself a bath but calls down to say she doesn’t remember if she was getting into the tub or out of it. The second sister starts up to help her but realizes halfway up the stairs that she doesn’t remember if she was going up or coming down. The third sister scoffs at both of them. “I hope my memory never gets that bad,” she says, knocking on wood. “I’ll be right up as soon as I see who’s at the door.”

So when any of us has a “senior moment” (even though I’m the only one who gets money off for being old), we’ll say, “I have to see who’s at the door.”

I first heard that joke after Skip’s funeral when several of his old-guy relatives were sitting around Barb’s kitchen table. One of the guys was telling the joke, but I wasn’t paying attention—I was making myself a ham sandwich. (Food always trumps conversation.) When he got to the part where the third sister knocks on wood, he rapped sharply on the table. Hearing that, I went to the door to see who was there. I couldn’t understand why everyone howled at that. Life imitates art, I tell you what.

peaceable kingdom

So it’s been eight months since I moved back to my hometown, and almost exactly a year since P and I (and Pookie) set out from San Rafael to start this grand adventure. I have written about the wonderful discoveries, the synchronicities, the house falling into my lap in the nick of time, the three road trips, the settling in, the beauty of this very different but familiar landscape, the ritual eating of fried fish with my peeps every Friday, and the sense of being home in all possible meanings of the word. (However, I must get the obligatory food criticism off my chest. Dear Midwesterners: mixing macaroni with mayo, cheese, and bacon—even if you add broccoli and call it “broccoli salad”—IS NOT SALAD.) Now I sense that the next phase is beginning, and I don’t mean the birds and the green buds of spring. In some ways, the initial thrill—the delirious speculation about what this big change is going to mean—is gone. You just can’t sustain the sense of novelty, the inevitable illusion that your new life will be so different and so wonderful that you will become, basically, a different person. The illusion that a change of place equals a change of self is common, I suppose—all those Westward ho! pioneers, those back-to-the-land hippies, those frozen retirees relocating to Florida or Arizona…. Same for getting a new job, a new partner. Starting over—it’s the American illusion, I mean dream.

But illusion is a paper ship on a very deep ocean. When “the thrill is gone,” we think we’ve failed. Miscalculated. Been tricked. “That person I was so in love with has changed!” “I’m having the same problems here as I did back there!” We don’t have much social support for seeing what lies beyond the illusion of a new beginning. My favorite image of this is the women’s magazines’ fantasy of the housewife greeting her husband at the door naked, wrapped in Saran Wrap, hoping to put some spice back in their marriage. As if novelty—a continual rekindling of the illusion phase—is the only way to renew: a paper ship in a wading pool. But I think it’s not an accident that relationships begin with that honeymoon attraction that seems all-pervasive yet is only the barely scratched surface of real connection. Illusion is a way to get us moving in a direction we might otherwise not attempt. And once we’re at our destination—that ill-thought-out, happily-ever-after “ending”—that’s when the new seeds and weeds start to sprout.

Much of this insight is due to a dream work session I had by phone with Jeremy Taylor,  a teacher, counselor, and minister whose brilliance is surpassed only by his compassion. Two of the three dreams I told him had the theme of my being aware of something behind me that I wasn’t quite able to see. (Something unconscious this way comes.) In one of these dreams,

I’m sitting on a roof with my legs hanging over the side. Higher up on the roof lies a placid-looking tiger who looks like he stepped right out of one of Edward Hicks’s “The Peaceable Kingdom” paintings. But then I become aware that another tiger has come up behind me and is so close he could touch the back of my neck. I fear I will be eaten, or thrown over the side. But he doesn’t touch me.

To Jeremy, these images signify a new phase to come. He’s been right so many times in the past  that I have to believe there’s something to it. I don’t know what the new challenges, the next phase, will be about, but it seems unlikely that the ramifications of moving back to the place of my difficult childhood would be limited to the surface pleasures of carefree adulthood: the fish fry? the nice park? birds and squirrels in my yard?

I had another “can’t quite see what’s behind” dream the other night.

I’m in a painting class, and I have to keep asking the teacher (a man) to come look at my painting. Finally, he does, and he seems to approve. But he leaves before I can turn the painting over and show him the painting I did on the other side. I keep asking and asking, getting more and more depressed, but I wake up before he comes back.

I’m intrigued by all these dream-teases. I’m enjoying my peaceable kingdom—more about that later—but I’m curious to see what’s next.

fantasia

What I’m trying to convey here is not that I’m dis-illusioned, or that “the honeymoon is over boo-hoo,” or that I’m sitting here with family but no friends wondering, “What was I thinking?” I’m trying to explore the fault line between imagining the future and then arriving there. Tomorrow inevitably feels different from today. Tomorrow = I’m going to paint a mural on the walls and ceilings of my attic “cave.” Today = I think I’ll play another game of Alchemy. I’m trying to be honest about the sometime mix of blessings in any new venture.

Recently I received an e-mail from A, an old painting (and dancing) friend. She had enjoyed the tale of my move and shared her own synchronistic trail that had taken her to Paris, where she now lives for a third of the year, does some teaching, and has lots of friends. She went on to say that her son graduated with a master’s degree in literature from Stanford and is in a touring rock band. Suddenly, my little adventure seemed tame indeed. I wrote her back, “…man oh man, you really put my little U.P. life to shame. Paris! A literate son in a rock band! I know we each have our own path, but STILL…”

For a brief moment it felt so unfair. Why does she get Paris, and I get a little town no one’s ever heard of? Well, I wouldn’t actually be suited to her life, and that’s the point, n’est-ce pas? But it was disconcerting to have that moment of raw envy, as if what’s right for me isn’t good enough if I spot something more alluring over there. But that’s illusion again, a siren song trying to distract me from the real. A few people have written to say how happy they are for me—and I believe them—but the word “envy” does come up sometimes. “I’m slightly envious of your relationship with your family,” etc. But wishing for someone else’s good fortune is meaningless. If only I were a people person! And could speak French! And liked to travel! It’s a good reminder to see that fantasizing about someone else’s life—based on assumptions and wishful thinking—is different from actually living that life—as is fantasizing about your own. But at least with your own, you’re proceeding on your own path, clearing the brush in real time. “I can see clearly now, the rain is gone; I can see obstacles in my way….”

By moving here I escaped from certain aspects of my life in the Bay Area—the crime and noise in my neighborhood, most notably—just as I escaped from Menominee a long time ago. And now here I am again. Which is the frying pan, and which is the fire? So far, being here is more like being in the top half of a double boiler… warmly melting into chocolate. Mmmmm….. chocolate. Once again, I’ll just have to wait and see.

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When I was staying with Barb last summer, I marveled at my heretofore unknown adaptability. I actually liked people dropping by and kids poking me with questions. I liked the sense of being ready for anything—working on a dining room table amid layers of clutter, with a TV on in the background… sleeping in a room without a door… not able to cook and barely able to find space to make a sandwich in a kitchen in which every surface, including much of the floor, was piled high with stuff—some in transit, some seemingly in permanent residence. In certain respects, my sisters and I are sharply divided between the “Larsen side” and the “McKenney side.” Barb and I resemble each other in looks, but K looks more like our McKenney aunts. And Barb and I do not have the gene that would cause us discomfort if we noticed that the juice box and half-eaten cookie that one of the kids left on the fireplace ledge three days ago was still there.

Conversely, sister K, as a teenager, vacuumed out the coal bin in the basement with Mom’s good vacuum cleaner. Neat freak from day 1. I’m just sayin’.

One day Barb asked her son Brian to haul away an old recliner, because she had bought a new one. He moved it out to the kitchen and said he’d take it to the dump “this weekend” (it was Monday). The recliner sat there in the dead center of the kitchen floor for the rest of the week, and we not only lived around it, we made it into an “art space”: One day I propped a frog planter (a planter in the shape of a frog, not a planter in which to plant frogs) in the chair, put sunglasses on it, and stuck a small American flag in the crook of its elbow. Barb picked up on the game immediately, and we had fun with it all week. One night before we went out, I noticed a full bottle of Zima in the hands of the frog, and I duly chuckled as I went out the door. When we got back, the bottle was empty. (Barb had switched them at the last minute, ho ho.) When Brian saw this strange tableau, he said simply, “I don’t get it.” But here’s what’s strange. Brian took the chair away on Saturday, and when Barb and I got home that night, we walked in the back door right into the kitchen, put our bags and purses down, and didn’t notice that the chair was gone. Being oblivious to one’s surroundings has its advantages.

Anyway…. while I was thinking that I had changed, because I enjoyed the people interruptions and was able to handle the household chaos, it really only meant that I had learned to cope and adapt—which is no small thing, but not the same as “Now I want people around me all the time so I can go with the freakin’ flow.” So when the movers arrived from California and I was able to physically move into my house, it was as if I was letting out a breath I’d been holding for months. I had done it. I was here. My life was my own. And when Barb called a couple days later, waking me up from a nap and wondering if she should come over right after school so we could go out for an early supper, I snapped. Like a twig. NOW THAT I HAVE MY OWN SPACE I NEED TO BE ALONE FOR A WHILE, I announced. I was probably as shocked as she was at this sudden reversal. I had been keeping it together, and I was now in a state of collapse—mental and physical exhaustion. In addition to unpacking and getting my rooms arranged and making to-do lists as long as my arm, I had to reorient myself, mentally incorporate the rest of my being into this new situation. All last summer I had been visiting—on a vacation doubling as a fact-finding tour, a trial living situation. At Barb’s I had been a guest. I did my best to fit into her schedule, but it wasn’t my schedule. I had brought part of my life with me, but most of it was still back in the Bay Area. I was dealing. It wasn’t real.

When I was finally here, safe within my own four (×10) walls, I could no longer be a houseguest in Barb’s life. I had to start erecting movable fences, establishing boundaries. Call before you come over! No, don’t call, I could be napping! Clearly, I’m not the only one who has had to adjust. Barb is a people person. I, on the other hand, can barely deal with one snooty cat. We’re working it out…. but there’s more….

on the fault line

Jerry Falwell is in the hospital. His condition has been upgraded from “critical” to “judgmental.”
—joke heard on the radio

Barb and I are apples that fell off the same tree, and not very far from it. Mom could be both tactlessly critical and punishingly silent. Unsurprisingly, some of that has rubbed off on us. The main difference is that I can talk to Barb about it and get a considered response from her rather than anger or the silent treatment.  (In therapy a few years ago, I was pissed at J one day and wouldn’t talk about it. I started to leave without saying good-bye—that would show her! J said, “Why don’t you just be angry at me? It would be less hurtful.” I replied, “This is anger where I come from.” I have to commend J for sticking by me through 12 years of that kind of thing.)

When I first moved here, I announced that I would try to refrain from correcting anyone’s English. (I like to think of myself as hugely tolerant. Where I got that idea, I don’t know.) But of course I couldn’t stick with my good intentions. I’m shocked by some of the accepted usage around here: “Me and my girlfriend went shopping.” “Him and her don’t get along.” “Do youse know what you want to order?” So, yes, I admit it…. I’ve been known to offer an alternative pronunciation or word choice now and then. I always think that the valuable information I’m imparting makes up for any temporary offense I might cause. Yeah, right. My sad excuse is that I’m critical for a living. (I’m judgmental on my own time.)

For her part, Barb does not always notice that she’s treating her perfectly capable adult sisters like the 7th graders she has to deal with all day long. With her teacher voice and sense of God-given authority, she’s a force to be reckoned with. She takes me to Menard’s in her truck to buy a ladder, because it won’t fit in the Jeep. As I haul the ladder first through the parking lot and later into my garage, she can’t resist telling me, oh, four or five times, the right way to carry it. As with her students, she thinks she has to keep repeating an instruction until the person “gets it right.” And like me, she doesn’t always question whether her help is needed or appreciated.

K, on the other hand, is so afraid of hurting anyone’s feelings that she tries to keep the peace at all costs. Here’s a trivial example. We all keep each other’s favorite soft drinks on hand. It’s almost ritualistic. You walk into someone’s house, and the first order of business is, “Want something to drink?” For years, Barb thought that K liked Dr. Pepper, but I found out that she preferred Coke. She had never said anything to Barb because Barb never had Coke in the house. But Barb was specifically buying Dr. Pepper because that’s what K would drink when she was over there. It’s a little bit like “Gift of the Magi,” don’t you think? OK, not so much. But K is such a sweetheart that it’s hard to know what’s really going on with her. With Barb and me, our faces tell the story even if our words don’t.

We all enjoy telling our respective horror stories about Mom’s insensitivity, but it’s harder to see what we ourselves have internalized or are reacting to. The good news is that we have an opportunity to become more emotionally real with each other—to the extent that we each want to, of course—a lesson Mom was not able to teach us.

in the mix

While anticipating the unknown future hinted at in my dreams, I’m enjoying the heck out of my peaceable kingdom, my old people’s neighborhood, my huge house (just right for one person and her catty companion), the physical safety I’ve never felt in a sustained way before, the leisure of being semi-retired (I work when work is sent to me, but I no longer go looking for it), the long quiet nights when I read, play Alchemy on the computer, listen to “Loveline” from a radio station in Seattle, or pull matted clumps of hair out of Pookie’s back. But when the spirit moves, I can also bust out the jams in my jammies… turn up the speakers and dance to the delirious, pounding music of the Chemical Brothers at 2:30 a.m. in my blue-and-green-lit loft.

Now that I can afford high-speed Internet, a monthly subscription to audible.com, and 99 cent songs from iTunes, I am hugely enjoying my media palace. I am tuned in and turned on to a degree I never knew before. I’ve discovered whole genres of music—some with no label other than “alternative” (to what?)—more than 400 songs on my laptop and easy transfer of music and books to an iPod shuffle or an Otis media player. I started building my electronic library with favorite artists from my college days—Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Four Tops, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Mimi and Richard Farina, Tim Hardin)—the familiar and comforting tunes of my youth. But then I branched out musically in all directions, thanks to iTunes, Salon.com (free downloads), KCRW (musically eclectic public radio station in Santa Monica—I’m now supporting three public radio stations: two in California, one in Wisconsin) and other sources, and now I have a musical accompaniment to any mood. I’ve discovered Thievery Corporation, Bloc Party, French Kicks, Gang Gang Dance, Supreme Beings of Leisure (hey, that’s me!), Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and Shivaree, to name but a few.

Somehow I got turned on to dancerecords.com and discovered endless subgenres of dance music: Deep, House, Sexy, Funky, Chunky, Jazzy, Techy, Tech, Techno, Tribal, Tech Step, Hard Step, Deep Tech, Neuro Funky, Deep House, Acid House, Chunky House, Funky House, Chunky Tribal, Tribal Techno, Tribal Tech House, Funky Deep House, Electro House, [inhale!] Electro Tech House, Progressive, Progressive House, Progressive Tech House, Progressive Breaks, Techy Progressive House, Deep Ethereal Progressive, Deep Progressive Trance, Peak Hour Progressive House, Rockin’ Teck-Step, Hardsteppin’ Bounce, Smoothed-Out Teck-Steppin’ Funk, Funky Peak Hour Beats, and the ever-popular Liquidly Funkin’ Drum & Bass Beats.

I swear I did not make any of those names up.

I had heard a song (oh excuse me, a track) by “DJ T” (remix by “Random Factor”) (I have no idea who these people are, assuming they are people) that I liked. I didn’t realize until after I’d ordered the “album” that I didn’t know exactly what I was getting—CD? LP? MP3? ABC? 1-2-3? you and me? I had become accustomed to downloading—acquiring substance/essence without the bother of storing a physical object. But what arrived was a record in a plain black cover sleeve. Then I realized, oh yeah—that deep chunky funky stuff is played in clubs by hip-hop DJs. Here I was, a civilian—and a “senior” one at that—buying the beats beloved of large crowds of stoned-out youth. I liked the thought of the Bay Area hipsters at dancerecords.com seeing the address on my order and speculating, “D’ya suppose there’s a happening turntablist scene in—what’s the name of that place?—Menominee?”

I suppose “senior citizens” through the ages have resented the assumptions made about them by the young-who-believe-it-will-never-happen-to-them. But it seems worse now, since my generation is the first to have the luxury of indulging our youthful interests far into our dotage. Many of us, of course, are still getting stoned and listening to Crosby Stills Nash Young and Increasingly Decrepit. But I got tired of the ‘60s music scene decades ago and prefer the punk and new wave of the early ‘80s and, more recently, electronica, hip-hop, and “alternative” (Iron and Wine, Milosh, Nick Drake, the whole “Garden State” soundtrack—good movie, by the way).

One of the sad things for me about leaving the Bay Area was losing the ability to listen to the Saturday night marathon on Live105 known as Subsonic—all electronic and hip-hop and mash-ups and remixes until 4 a.m. One Saturday night before I left, I called the Subsonic DJ to find out the name of a song I had just heard (“Callin’ Out” by Lyrics Born). Impulsively—feeling all girlish and shy—I told him that I loved the show. On further, ill-considered impulse, I told him I was 57. His reaction was predictably condescending. “Oh, so you’re one of those ‘rockin’ grandmas’!” Uh, well, I suppose—I’ve never reproduced, but yes I am of that older generation. But “rockin’ grandma”? Is it possible for me to feel any less like a rockin’ grandma? Subsonic’s producer, another child, was also on the line, and he pipes up, “We don’t care who listens!” Then the DJ says, “I hope I still dig new music when I’m 57!” (thinking to himself, “I’ll never get out of my 20s alive”).

And yet, how can I be offended when I was known, back in the day, to utter the cliché, “Don’t trust anyone over 30”? It’s laughable now (my godchild is 30), but I understand the impulse to reject the old folks, the so-not-with-it, the irrelevant—move along to your ice floe, gram and gramps, it’s our turn now, we scoff at your moldy oldies, we resent your great booming numbers while we’re stuck with single-letter generational names… X, Y… Z? and then what? the alphabet and the world both come to an end?

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Part of what you do in the illusion phase of a life change is to think that every little thing that happens is significant. Because the events leading to my move had been so dramatic while seeming precariously coincidental, I started expecting that every ripple from a stone thrown in my little pond was going to lead to something big. Sometimes the stone just plops down, no discernable ripples at all.

I’ll give you a few examples. One night last fall, after the peeps’ weekly fish fry, I stopped at Angeli’s on the way home to pick up some groceries. I was wearing my Cody’s Bookstore (Berkeley) t-shirt. As I was leaving, a man came up to me and said, “If you’ve been to that bookstore, what are you doing here?” So I explained that I had recently moved back from the Bay Area, and we stood in the parking lot and talked for several minutes—of course I had to ask what he was doing here, too. Turns out he’s a playwright and theatre director at the UW-Marinette campus. He had interviewed at Sonoma State but eventually wound up here. It was from his time at Sonoma State that he “recognized” me (i.e., my type) from the “t-shirt and the haircut” (code for Big Dyke).

I asked him where the nearest bookstore was, and he said, “Madison.” I thought he was joking—Madison is 150 miles away—but apparently not. He said he had gone to an estate sale just that morning that had an unusually large collection of books. He told me where it was, we said good night, and that was that.

The next morning I went over to the estate sale and there were indeed lots of books. I called Barb and she came over, too. We started talking to the two sisters who were clearing out their father’s house after his death. One was a lawyer and the other was a psychiatrist. I said to the shrink, “Oh, I’m looking for a psychiatrist who specializes in psychopharmacological management [to prescribe my Zoloft].” She says, “That’s what I do!” Perfect! She gave me her card, which announced that the focus of her practice was on women and children. Was this synchronicity or what? The only problem was that she was based in Racine, which is even farther than Madison. But she said she was thinking about coming up to Marinette to see patients a couple days a week. The four of us chatted away, all mutually intrigued by each other’s professions and getting along famously.

I bought an armload of books, Barb bought an armload of books plus some chests of drawers, and the lawyer promised to have another grouping of books ready for next week’s sale; she said she would save any old Hardy Boys’ books she found for me. The following Saturday we showed up for the second installment of the estate sale. The lawyer met us at the door and said they hadn’t had a chance to get the books sorted. Barb picked up the chests she had bought, and the lawyer promised to call one of us when they were ready to sell more things. We never heard from her. I tried to find the psychiatrist in Racine, but she had moved from the address on her business card.

It’s not as if we had been deliberately misled. Things happen. These were ordinary interactions, pumped up by my insistence on thinking “everything happens for a reason.” Those linked episodes with the playwright, the lawyer, and the psychiatrist (they sound like characters in a play by Sartre—or a joke about 3 people walking into a bar) were apparently self-contained, a pool of possibilities that, for whatever reason, never turned into a stream or a rippling pond. (I have since found a psychiatrist—in Oshkosh, 100 miles away. Fortunately, I like him.)

Similarly, my supposed burgeoning friendships with the bank manager and the city tax assessor—both smart, engaging women—never came to pass. The tax assessor never called me back after I contacted her a couple times, even going to the extent of sending her the issue of the ‘zine that included my story of meeting her. I’ve noticed that people can get really weird about what’s said about them in print, so maybe it was horribly inappropriate of me to identify her by name blah blah blah.

I did have lunch with the bank manager, but it was soon obvious that we weren’t on the same page, friendshipwise, despite having had some interesting conversations and lots of laughs in her office. It seemed more like a customer service gesture on her part—the bank paid for lunch. (Yes, that would be the first clue.) I gave her a copy of that same ‘zine. When I asked her later what she thought, she said my writing was “interesting.” End of story. So what did I expect? I expect the universe to present its sunny face to me at all times, why do you ask?

Years ago, when I had chronic back pain after my mother died, I found a wonderful chiropractor/healer and, through her, my therapist J, after a series of “coincidences”—recommendations acted upon or not, scheduled and canceled appointments, and a frosty-sounding psychologist who was too busy to see me. Looking back, it all seems “meant to be.” That’s fine for looking back, but I always want to know, what do I do now? Life’s combination of “lack of ultimate control” and “necessity to act despite that fact” is frustrating, if not downright diabolical.

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Here I am, already over my usual page limit, and I haven’t described the most jarring note in my hometown hit parade. Read on.

Back in the #15 issue of the mary’zine, I wrote about desire, illusion, intimacy, and passion. One of my examples of illusion was BA, a friend from 5th grade through junior high. She never went to college, never got married, doesn’t even drive. She’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. The only time I’d seen her as an adult was at my mother’s wake, when I wondered why she hovered around me way past the usual two-minute paying of respects. To me, we had grown apart even before high school. So why did she keep bugging my sisters to get me to come home for high school and grade school reunions? After one of the reunions, she sent me pictures of the aging ex-fifth graders and our fossilized teacher in a greeting card with a teabag enclosed, saying she “missed” me. I never responded. Besides feeling no personal attraction to her, I saw her as the embodiment of everything I had left town to escape. I’ve always been afraid of getting sucked back into poverty, as if my pretence of middle-class living would turn out to be a temporary reprieve and I would wake up like a Cinderella who’s only dreamed she went to the ball. So BA was kind of my doppelganger—the alter ego of my underprivileged, small-town self, my “there but for the grace of God went I” if I hadn’t gotten scholarships to college.

BA was much on my mind as I made plans to move back here. This town wasn’t going to be big enough for the both of us! It’s relatively easy to reject a would-be suitor, but how do you tell someone you don’t want to be their friend? I had hoped to escape detection for as long as possible, but before I even got here, BA had heard about my move from my aunt, who works with K. BA tried to confirm the rumor by calling up my bro-in-law MP: “I heard Mary’s moving back here, is that true?” “News to me,” says MP with a straight face. Then one day K runs smack into her at Angeli’s supermarket, and BA again asks if the news is true—K admits it is—and in that case, “Where is she living?” My loyal-to-the-end sister says, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.” She explains that I’m “lying low,” am “kind of a hermit.” BA acknowledges that “after all those years in California, it’s understandable”—whatever that means.

So time goes by, and the new phone book comes out but too soon to have my name and number in it. Then the inevitable happens. I walk into Stephenson’s Bakery (which shares a small building with the Michigan DMV; there are lots of odd pairings like that around here), and there she is, talking to the counter person. As Barbara Havers—a working class detective in Elizabeth George’s novels—would say, “Sod bloody all on a toasted tea cake.”

As she turns to see who came in, I have that panicky moment of thinking it’s not too late to turn around and run out. Instead, I say, “B—?” “Yeah.” “Mary.” She is flabbergasted and thrilled. We sit down at a table to talk because I can’t bring myself to make an excuse to leave. She comments that I “don’t look that different” except for “putting on a few pounds.” (Thanks! I hadn’t noticed!) She speculates that I must live nearby. She’s still trying to ferret out my home base. I finally tell her, “I live out on M-35”—which, believe me, covers a lot of territory.

Then she launches the boat of conversation into Lake Memory. She reminds me that I was editor of the school paper in 5th grade. She still has a copy; do I want to see it? (Part of me is sorely tempted. Is this how Jesus felt with Satan in the wilderness?) BA rattles off several other facts, events, and conversations. But I don’t remember even one of the memories she is excitedly recounting. It’s truly a lesson in “eye of the beholder.” To me, she was a minor player in my life from ages 10 to 13 or so. To her, I was apparently some kind of touchstone. She keeps saying, “I’m just glad to know you’re really real!” In our dream work session, Jeremy suggested that she’s a lesbian who has been in love with me since the 5th grade. [insert “Jaws” music here] She clearly thinks synchronicity is working for her in this situation—that I’ve come back into her life for a reason.

After our excursion through the lake of stagnant memories, I offer her a ride home. Why? I don’t know. I think I’m a little intrigued in spite of myself. The old asphalt-shingled, hardly-any-windowed house she rents the bottom of looks like a contemporary of the shack of a house she lived in with her family across from the grade school. I think about my big, beautiful house by the water and the park. Damn, why do I feel so guilty?

She rattles on about how the house used to belong to a classmate who was a football star. Two other classmates I would never think of as an item—one of them is distantly related to me—live down the street. My aunt—who, in one of life’s little ironies, gave me the brushoff when I asked for her e-mail address—lives right around the corner. As BA gets out of the Jeep, I tell her I’ll call her sometime. It feels like a mistake as soon as I say the words. But what else could I say: “Have a nice life”? (Am I being the architect of my own downfall here?)

I know I’m not responsible for BA’s being born into an extremely poor family, without the resources (or the smarts or the will) to go to college or to make friends easily. Back in junior high, I clung to any other girl who was willing to hang out with me. She did too. And then I went and changed, moved on, found people to love and be loved by, and situations where I could thrive. And yet—if my high school English teacher Ruth ever moved back here, I would be delirious with hope and expectation. I don’t like to think about that. I’m different. I’ve seen the world. I don’t have to cling to childhood relationships. Do I?

A few days later, BA is walking by the middle school and sees Barb coming out. She yells to Barb to wait up and then tells her about seeing me. Here’s her assessment of our little chat in the bakery: “I think she’s lost and is searching for her childhood.”

Huh??

Barb reminds her that I have my own business and that I edit scientific manuscripts from all over the world.

BA says, “Yeah, she mentioned that.”

Then she tells Barb I gave her a ride home: “I’m not from California—I don’t care who sees where I live.” She adds, hopefully: “She said she’d call.”

So what now? I’ll just have to wait and see what’s on the other side of my painting, what the tiger at my back has in mind, and whether BA—strange link between my then and my now—is successful at finding me and either convinces me to attend the next school reunion or murders me in my bed. Life is a mystery.

Au revoir.

[Mary McKenney]

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mary’zine random redux: #26 January 2003

June 28, 2009

I’m like a book. I want to be read.
—D. Dworkin

merry lu’s holidaze

Dear friends and home-ies, I want you to know me,
my Christmas, December, intensive (remember?),
my old friends and new, and relatives too,
but all of it’s swirlin’, I ain’t no Merlin
magician gone fishin’,
can’t tie it all neatly in parables sweetly,
so forget the flappin’, hold off on the rappin’,
I’m about to stop rhymin’ and see what’s been happenin’….

I feel like I did when I saw my therapist, J, a few days after the 7-day painting intensive. There was so much to tell her that I veered between fast-talking the details and throwing out a few insights like a lifeline to a drowning man, but the only one drowning was me. She thought I was in the middle of something, and I thought I had already gone through it, even though I couldn’t say exactly what “it” was. We almost didn’t make it, she was trying her hardest but I was way out there,
past her lifeline and mine, or maybe the drowner was throwing the line
to the one on shore and wondering what she was waiting for.

The rhythm is still with me, can’t stop it or drop it,
so please bear with me while I make the transition,
I’m rockin’ my chair but can’t get transmission,
I wish I could mind-meld, directly deposit
the thoughts in my closet, but I guess that’s what language is for,
to awkwardly say what no man has said before…

***
I’m still straddling two worlds, like a tale of two cities, or make that one suburb and a remote small town, which in its own way is also the center of everything. What is remote to one is birth, life, and death to another—so there’s really no such thing as remote, or even “other,” just gazillions of centers all dancing on the head of a pin with how many angels.

My sister K has read all the ‘zines now and passed them on to hubby MP. After reading “Lost weekday” (#11), about going to the dentist and pukin’ and peein’ myself (her favorite story, go figure), she and Barb and I got to bond in a sisterly way over our shared peed adventures. Barb writes:

K said she feels our lives are pretty mundane but you probably enjoy knowing that we pee our pants too, and you are normal in that respect.

I love that my main claim to being normal is that I pee my pants.

MP is reported to have “mixed feelings” about the ‘zine (he was shocked, shocked by what I was into when Mom was trying to get me to drink coffee), but he keeps reading, so way to go, bro!

Later, Barb reported that, after reading them all,

MP said to tell you, you don’t need a psychiatrist because you have us. Then again maybe you do because you DO have us.

Everybody’s a comedian.

***
My Christmas was very different this year. Usually I bah-humbug my way through December and then, on Christmas Eve, literally at the 11th hour, I get suddenly sentimental, turn on the choral carols on the radio, and wish I had done more for my fellow human. This year I got started early by sending a check to Barb to buy presents for my little nieces and nephews. Only problem is, I forgot about the ones I haven’t met yet, so it’s eight not four little ones, but B stretched the check to cover them all. P&C, my usual Xmas cohorts, were out of town for the holiday, so it was a vicarious Christmas chez Maree and Pookee. Late Xmas Eve, I got an e from Barb, who described in great detail the planning, the giving, the receiving, the smiles, the surprises, the love, the love. About the little ones:

I made sure the kids knew which presents were from their Great Aunt Mary and it was repeated several times with Wyatt saying “This is the Aunt Mary I haven’t met yet,” and Summer triumphantly announcing, “I have.” … You were even talked about when they were sitting in the kitchen eating their lunch after all the present opening was done.

It’s weird knowing these people, having them know me, as if I’ve gotten remarried and started a new family, except the new family is pretty much the old family with a few deletions and several add-ons. P thinks I’m “in love with the idea” of having reestablished the connection with my UPeeps; sure, I do love the idea, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. I always knew the connection was there, it was just a matter of the planets getting realigned or something. It’s not about “going back” in any sense, back in space or time, it’s about being right where I am and letting the treasure that’s been there all along reveal itself. (I hope I didn’t use that exact same sentence last time, but if I did, c’est la vie, déjà vu, tant pis, pommes frites, oo la la.)

It’s no surprise to me that my sisters are generous and funny. It’s just that I was trying to put my own jigsaw puzzle together over here, not realizing that my pieces were part of the mixture, fitting neatly into the bigger picture created by my family, my friends and neighbors, my town, state, and country, my world, my universe. I’m only one center, just a renter who thinks she’s an owner, we’re all on loan here, but it’s still all mine and all theirs and theirs, multiplied multiple times… but finally I get it, the dimensions are infinite, the holographic whole is at once a goal and a done deal, nothing to reveal, just return to the One from which we all sprung, our ashes to AshLand or dust to rust. Doesn’t mean I have an answer to take to the bank or save me from cancer, no book deal or contract or stardom or fame, just me and my name, my rhymin’ so lame, the ‘zine, the queen-of-the-table game, it’s all the same. Wave or particle don’t really matter, we’re neither here nor there but everywhere. No doubt. Love in, love out.

***
This Christmas I went on a tipping spree. That’s dollars, not cows, for you Wisconsinites. I figure that rewarding the working people will have a ripple effect. Jon Carroll has an annual column in the Chronicle about his own invention, the Untied Way. It’s “untied” because it’s random. You take as much money as you can spare out of your bank account and give $20 bills out to the first however many people ask for money on the street. This is fine. I’ve had some good encounters on the street myself, when I gave willingly and not out of fear or guilt. A couple months ago, I came across a guy selling the Street Sheet in downtown S.F. He was sitting in the doorway of the (closed) restaurant I had wanted to eat lunch in. He was polite and cheerful, and when I passed him two or three times over the next half hour, we greeted each other and he told me about Lori’s Diner up the street, where I ended up having lunch. I had given him a dollar on our first encounter, but he was exuding such good cheer that after lunch I went back and gave him $10 “for the next 10 people who don’t give you anything.” He was inordinately pleased, considering it wasn’t exactly a fortune. But it felt to me like a true exchange, as if we were rewriting the equation of desperate beggar + reluctant passerby = resentment all around. This was more like real person + real person = humanity.

But at Christmas I refocused my efforts and gave extra (or first-time) tips to the person who delivers my Sunday Times, my pleasant and conscientious mailman, a couple of waiters and valet parkers, my new haircutter, and even my favorite grocery store clerk (Nanette at United Market—tell her Mary sent you). The wind might get taken out of my sails when I have my taxes done and realize I’ve been thinking of all the money in my bank account as mine, when a large portion of my income this year didn’t have withholding taken out. But I still like the principle. It’s only a few dollars extra to me, but it’s meaningful to them, in both tangible and intangible ways. If a smile can send someone on her or his way with a lighter step, think what $20 can do.

***
The first song I heard when I turned on the radio on Christmas morn was by the Flaming Lips:

Do you realize… that everyone you know someday will die?
Do you realize… that we’re floating in space?
Do you realize… the sun doesn’t go down, it’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning ‘round?

I’d have to say Yes, Yes, and Yes, but it’s good to be reminded. The next song was some cock-schlock by a band called, with eerie accuracy, Disturbed. I switched to Alice and then to KALW, but they were all choral and Crosby, so I had to disrespect the Bing and settle for a silent morning. Decided to compose my own soundtrack on the Mac: ‘Zine attack!

December was especially notable for all the human contact. I was with people for, like, 10 days straight! I handled it pretty well, but I did have to bail on a brunch in Tiburon because I was starting to come unglued. Terry and Jean were here from Massachusetts, and they had to cancel their trip up the coast because of the rain, so we got to spend more time together. It was fun, fun, fun till Daddy took the T bird away (and the J bird). Besides the daily lunches during the intensive, we dined with Diane L. and Diane D. at Garibaldi’s in the city, and T, J, and I had our farewell dinner at the Buckeye in Mill Valley, where I take all my painting lovelies. I wore my blue hair for the occasion, praying it wouldn’t rain—blue rivulets running down my face, not the look I’m going for. We had a sweet-sorrow good-bye, but it’s so much better to be sorry to see someone go than to be relieved you’ve got your blessed solitude back.

***
Next fall, P&C will retire early, move to Oregon, and spend their declining years reclining in a house they bought on the Rogue River. P has been trying to get me to move up there too. When I complain about the Caveman ambience of Grants Pass (Caveman Motors, billboards with Cavemen dragging Cavewomen by the hair, etc.), she counters that I could settle nearby in the more refined community of Ashland, the Shakespeare festival place.

P is the executrix of my will, so every year or so I revised my detailed instructions to her regarding the distribution of my worldly goods. But I’ve never figured out if I want to REmain or CREmain, as it were. So one night I say to her, “I still don’t know what to do about ‘the body’.”

P (casual as can be): “I’ve already decided.”

Me: “Oh?”

P. “You’re going to Oregon.”

I howled, “That is SO against my EXPRESS WISHES,” and she just laughed.

A few days later, when T&J and I were having our farewell dinner (smoked pork sandwiches, onion rings, chicken salad, butterscotch crème brûlée), Jean said she wished they could put me in their suitcase and take me back to Massachusetts. I had just told them the story of P hauling my assh to Oregon, so I said, “Maybe you could get P to split the ashes with you.” Ha ha ha. One of them pointed out that I’d be happier with them because they live in ASHFIELD, get it? It only took me 2 days to realize the alternative is ASHLAND, so I’d say it’s a wash. That doesn’t even take into account my sisters’ possible wishes. Barb, in fact, protests, “Why Oregon? What is in Oregon? Will I have to say Mary gone to Oregon?… Or will it be Mary moved her ash to Ashfield?”

Quiet geek in Lake Oregon… Has a nice ring to it.

Barb pointed out that there are still three family plots in Riverside Cemetery where Mom, Dad, and baby Mike are buried. Mom’s ashes are tucked in at the foot of Mike’s grave, so there’s plenty of room left for me to have my “space.” I’m considering it. Having overcome my anti-hometown sentiments, I’m verging on the gung-ho (ya think?).

In fact, this just in… I’ve made my decision—or the decision that was a foregone conclusion unknown to my former illusion has come into view: Post-this-life, I’m headed back to the U.P. to rejoin my original nuclear family, yes, the prodigal electron comes whirling back into orbit, knowing, finally, that it can be the orbiter and the orbitee, hello Menominee!

It seems appropriate that I’ll end up getting’ down with the three people I’ve painted over and over for the past 20+ years, and not always in a flattering light. If there’s an After to this Life, I hope they’ll understand. When I get to the bright light at the end of the tunnel, I don’t want any angry ghosts on my hands. Part of my rap-prochement with the past is realizing that the key elements that have “defined” my life are not the deaths, the illnesses, the poverty, the illicit touching, the adolescent pain, the adult relationship pain, the pain the pain the goddamn pain. Flip the foreground and background—like that picture that looks like a death skull one way and a woman brushing her hair the other way [so sexist, but never mind that]—and you see the love, the sacrifice, the generosity, all the quiet invisible parental intangibles that created the offspring of William H. and Louise L. McKenney, and all the lives that have sprung off from each of us (in utero or de facto), and you know that the good far outweighed the bad.

***
The 7-day painting intensive was amazing, as always, packjam with insights and outtasights, real painters and painted realities, mysteries and surrealities, connections and discords, selfs and others, sisters and a coupla brothers, I’ll never do it justice so let’s just take a look at some highlights and lowdowns.

I was the only one it mattered to, and then I wasn’t there anymore.
—Polly

This line has stayed with me, because it’s one of the best descriptions I’ve heard of what happens in painting. You spend the day obsessing about this, that, and the other thing—not knowing what to paint, not liking what you painted, what’s going on in the room (“Everyone is into it but me”), what about this relationship or that work problem, what’s for lunch, will this day never end, etc. etc. Brain diarrhea, wontcha put me out of my miserrhea? And then… “you’re not there anymore.” Can you relate, dear reader? You’re not unconscious, you’re fully aware, you just aren’t “there,” Gertrude Stein-wise, in that petty, whiny little ego way with its long self-life and short half-life, it’s only half-living but we think it’s all there is. When we factor in the life after, our petty little head don’t want to be dead. No more ME. All we want is to continue to live (will there be a surge in the basic séances when the Boomers start moving to Ash Land?), but what if release from the body is like cracking through the egoshell and suddenly you’re “gone” but you still be with all the Gods chillin’?

After painting all day, when we’re all aglow, neither here nor there with our souls laid bare, all epiphany, happily happily, do we ever want to go back to the angst and torture of “nothing to paint”? No, we don’t. So why cling to our earthly fling, spend 80 years obsessing about this and that (and the other thing), knowing it matters only to us and then we aren’t there anymore but we’re so much more? What more could we ask for?

One day in the sharing, Pi-te (one of the sweetest men on earth) waxes poetic about the arrangement of flowers in the studio bathroom. He had followed the blooming of the gladiolas throughout the week and describes the buds, the careful unfolding, the luscious colors. The rest of us are thinking, “Geez, I never noticed any of that! All I see in there is the ordinaire, the “12 double rolls same as 24 regular rolls,” not exactly poet matter. Finally, Kate comes up with the answer. “He pees standing up!” The flowers are arranged behind the female behind, and the double (same as twice as many undouble) rolls provide the only distraction besides urinary satisfaction.

We have our laffs, that’s for sure.

As always, some strange things happened during the intensive. It’s like you don’t even know yourself after a few days of painting. The firm grasp you’ve been keeping on your identity starts to crumble, and you realize that your true self has no need to grasp—and there’s nothing to hold on to anyway. At various times I got agitated when I thought I had no reason to, and then was perfectly calm and collected when by rights I “should” have been upset. I got tired of hearing one of the painters harp about judging: “I judged, am judging now, trying not to judge, the judge says this, the judge says that, all is judgment, oops I’m judging again.” It was as if judgment were her identity, her badge or excuse, her comfortable pool of helplessness in which to wallow and never change because there would always be something to judge—it’s an endless loop, the judger is the judged, the observer is the observed (so that’s what Krishnamurti meant!), how would she ever see beyond it? I couldn’t stop myself from saying some of this in the sharing, in a shaky voice, not wanting to attack anyone but needing to say something, and everyone ignored what I said (or, I suppose, had their own things to say, imagine that) so I had to jump in later and say that I felt “hung out to dry” and that I “hated everyone” in the group for not responding. The general consensus was that I had merely been “thrown back on myself,” which is one of those things that sound good in theory but suck when it’s happening to you.

Barbara, of course, points out that I’m doing the same thing that I find so irritating about this other painter (I, too, am judging the judge), and says it’s useful to look at what we see in one another—or, to quote Byron Katie, “Judge your neighbor.” Use the judgment. You can only see in others what already exists in you.

One of the hardest things for me to deal with during a long intensive is not being able to nap at will. I’ve been spoiled rotten by working at home and setting my own schedule. So if I can catch a few winks in my car or on the couch in the sharing room after lunch, it really helps. I was sound asleep one day when a fellow painter, with the very best of intentions (thinking I may not have intended to go to sleep—clearly, she doesn’t know me very well), spoke my name softly and touched me on the shoulder. I CATAPULTED off the couch, yelled JESUS!, and my glasses went crashing to the floor as I rapidly tried to assess what was going on. As I sat there for a moment, head in hands, trying to bring down my heart rate, my FP (fellow painter) apologized profusely, but I was amazed to discover that I bore absolutely no ill will. I didn’t have to force myself to be polite for her sake, or overcome (or indulge) my true reaction. She said, “I made a mistake!” and I said (hardly recognizing myself), “It doesn’t matter! It’s like in the painting!… It’s all right, really, I’m not mad at all.”

This isn’t about my being a “good person,” it’s just something that happened. I never knew that things like that could go right through you, I’ve always held tight to any slight while believing I had no choice but to fight. When I told this story later, someone said we need to “work on” those reactions in our daily lives, and I found myself saying NO. No work! Not about working! It happens! It happens to you or through you when you are being truthful and not banishing the bad feelings. That’s why painting “works.” As Krishnamurti said, “The very fact of being aware of what is is truth. It is truth that liberates, not your striving to be free.” Painting truthfully (though difficult), sharing truthfully in the group (though more difficult), and especially being truthful (and true) to yourself takes you out of the realm of trying (to be a better person), working (on your issues), and processing (personal interactions). Instead, you feel irritated whether it makes sense or not, you feel forgiveness and love whether that makes sense or not, you paint what you paint and judge it or not, and it’s all part of what is, nothing special, no preference. You want to drive the train with your engineer brain, but Life maintains a seamless, trackless terrain. I guess it’s what the Buddhists have always said. Krishnamurti again: “Remembered truth has no value; you have to discover it each time. But each time you discover it, it’s the same.”

***
Let’s get back to my post-painting therapy session with J for a moment. Having struggled through most of the hour unable to be in the present, consumed with the past I wanted to present to her and even wondering, scarily, if I’d come to the end of therapy, I say, “I feel as if I used to sit in the audience in the dark theater and watch the movie [Life] on the screen. Now I’m in the movie, people can see me from all angles, I can see everything in 3-D too, and I don’t know what role I’m playing or where the story’s going.” No wonder I was having trouble knowing which character, action, or plot line to describe to her, like a movie reviewer in the middle of the show instead of the middle of the row.

I felt more in touch with J (and myself) after that, and it was past time to go, but I still wanted to show her my paintings from the 7-day. She loves to see them, and I don’t feel constrained in my prah-cess by allowing another’s eyes to gaze upon them. So I showed them to her in order and explained how I had gone into the intensive knowing I wanted to paint my sisters and maybe even my whole new-old family. I did paint B and K right away, but it didn’t feel anything like I thought it would. I had assumed that the warm loving connection from real life would flow onto the paper, but instead I stood there, thinking, “Who are these people?” When I paint my parents, they’re recognizable to me as images projected by me. But I couldn’t tell what I was projecting onto my sisters; it was as if I had painted two strangers. Both Barbara and later J thought this “mystery” mirrored my ongoing discovery of K and B as adults. It’s intriguing.

By day 2 or 3, I had started painting bodies from the inside out—first the bones, then fat, then flesh, with the skull staring out from the face. It was so intense that I felt like I was in one of those movies where someone’s trapped in a room and the walls are starting to move toward each other. I illustrated this to Barbara with my left hand in a fist meeting the irresistible force of my open right hand. She said that instead of fighting the intensity, I needed to SPLAT. No clues on how to accomplish that.

Barbara teaches like a Zen master, stopping at nothing to jolt us out of our mental ruts. She asks where more skeletons could be on my painting, and I point out that all the bodies already have them. She inquires innocently, “Oh? Can only bodies have skeletons?” I’m thinking, Yes. There aren’t even any more things to put skeletons in, and again she asks, “Can only things have skeletons?” At that point I give up and paint a “blob skeleton” inside a random shape. And somehow that propels me into painting the molecular structure of the people’s faces. Don’t ask me how.

On the final painting, I don’t start with my sisters, I start with me, and I’m big, with arms stretched wide at shoulder level. Skeleton + fat + flesh, I construct myself on the page with intense blue eyes, open mouth, strong golden lights beaming out of my heart tubes, more golden lights emanating from my midsection, which is intricately organed and celled, molecularly dense, no wispy spirit for me. The image feels so alive that I think it could almost get up and walk off the paper. (That would be a good excuse for taking a break: Can’t paint, my image is out having a cigarette.) I find myself retreating to the sharing room, where I take a deep, fast nap. The intensity is what we all say we want, and then when we get it, it’s almost too much to bear. Finally, I paint my parents on either side of me, pale-fleshily, looking at me dubiously. Who is this person who came out of us?

As I’m showing the paintings to J, she turns to that last one, and she is blown away! “We should have looked at this sooner!” she exclaims. She can’t get over the difference in the way I’ve painted myself. “And you say you’re not in the middle of something??” She mentions the wire sculpture “body” I made years ago: the exoskeleton constructed in wire on a floor lamp doubling as the spine, with a plastic skull, a rubber heart, ribbon- and bead- and flower-spangled innards, and skeleton hands. I had shown her a photograph, and she had marveled that it looked so much like my real body’s somatic posture, downward-sloping shoulders and all. So now she’s gazing in amazement at this painting, contrasting it with the earlier wire soma, pointing out the strong shoulders, solid bones, steady beams of light, intense gaze, so full of life yet self-contained.

What’s especially weird about her referring to the wire sculpture is that it had fallen down recently, and I had reluctantly decided I would have to take it apart. The skull was cracked, the chain and red skeleton hand had fallen off the heart, the yellow fluff that was a “flame” in the chest wouldn’t stay put, and the “neck” (a glob of Sculpey modeling compound to hold the skull on) had dried up and fallen off, so that was that. Nothing lasts forever. I thought it was sad at the time, but after what J said, I realized it was stunningly appropriate that my “old self” would crumble just as the “new self” was asserting itself on and off the paper.

Writing about this is tricky, because in the prah-cess we know not to comment on people’s paintings or to take any of the content to mean anything about us—not to mention the hubris of declaring ourselves to be shedding the old and becoming the new. The paintings are like light traveling for millions of years on a journey to nowhere in particular. By the time light is visible from Earth, the star it came from is dead and gone. So, in our case, what ends up on the paper—which to an “artist” and the “art”-worshiping world is the whole point—is really the detritus, the shed skin of the snake of creativity. The real art is in facing the Void with honesty and vulnerability.

Also, technically, the painting isn’t “finished,” meaning I haven’t gone to the very end and squeezed every last drop and dot out of it that I can. Which makes what happened next even stranger. (BK, avert your eyes!)

J says the painting moves her deeply—I can even see tears welling up (usually that’s my job)—and I’m moved by her response. There is a difference in my body/mind/being, and most of that difference stems from the work we’ve done together. So it feels perfectly natural when she says, If there’s any way I could get a copy of this… to say, I’ll give it to you. She protests at first but finally says simply, “I would be honored.”

I’m “breaking all the rules,” of course—I have never given away a painting before, especially one that isn’t finished. But as Barbara would surely say, There really are no rules except the ones we create, and we learn by testing them.

As so often happens when I start the hour begrudging the “artificial” format of therapy, questioning its usefulness at only 2 hours a month, something unexpected and perfect has happened. I had felt worlds apart from J, and then—SPLAT. I had assumed that the SPLAT, when it came, would be a collision, like a KO in the third round, but instead it’s a beautiful moment, so light, so effortless. At such a moment, I’m in love with life—the surprise and depth of it, the endless mystery, the light traveling toward us as though drawn onward by our grateful eyes.

***
On the last day of the intensive, Kate has the idea of getting a wedding cake for Terry and Jean, who were ceremonially united in domestic committed partnership (or something like that) in Vermont earlier in the year. Of course it wasn’t a “real marriage,” as it would be if they were a man and a woman who met in a bar in Las Vegas and got hitched the next day by an Elvis impersonator while jumping out of an airplane—oh no, how could their love and 20 years together possibly be “real” compared to the inherently holy union of male + female?? [end rant]

So there was much secrecy and whispering and plotting, and we searched in vain for two little bride figures for the cake. Kate says we can draw the figures instead, so she comes to me in the afternoon and asks if I’ll do it, and I say, “No, I can’t draw!” We look around, trying to think who among us can draw—pretty weird, for a painting group. Kate finally recruits Pi-te, and he does a wonderful job. Kate cuts the figures out like little paper dolls (they’re naked with rosy red nipples, a nice touch) and arranges them on the cake with flowers, and at the end of the day brings the cake out while we sing, “Here come the bridezzz…” and it’s great to watch Jean and Terry looking around in confusion, like “Who…?” It was a wonderful moment, especially because it wasn’t the work of a cultural subgroup honoring their own, it was just friends honoring each other.

heavy petting

Pookie has a new forbidden pleasure, and it’s all my fault. He often comes up beside me when I’m working and makes this little squeaky meow, so I pet his head, murmur some sweet nothings, and go back to what I’m doing. That used to be enough, but then he started presenting himself back end first, and one day when I was feeling especially generous I scratched his back down by his tail, and he got all blissed-out and tried to lick himself on the chest (not sure what that’s about). I frequently comb him with a spiky comb that’s like a bed of nails with a handle, and he likes that too, but there’s something about my stumpy fingernails that really gets him going. And I, being picky about where my stumpy fingernails have been, get all icked-out and have to wash my hands immediately—or at least rub them on my pants. (I’m Ms. Cleanliness-Is-Next-to-Godliness unless I don’t feel like getting up.)

Also… don’t tell the IRS, but… I think my home office is being “repurposed.” Pookie seems to be rallying his forces for a coup, or a koop (pook spelled backwards, huh, huh?). All his stuff used to be out in the hall, but I see it’s now spreading like a virus into my official tax-deductible work territory—his bed, tissue paper, toys, cardboard, catnip heart, ribbons, combs, chair (with towels, for on and under), ad infinitum. I admit I have a hand in this, because he doesn’t have any of his own (hands, that is), but he must be beaming commands into my brain or something (ha! yeah, right). And it’s not as if I have a lot of extra room in here. As I approach my desk, I have to negotiate several noncarpet surfaces: swishy, slippery, crunchy (sounds like the 7 dwarfs), spiky (that bed-of-nails comb is hell on bare feet), and that’s not even counting the litter crumbs, the clumps of fur, the kitty vomitus, and even the occasional turdlet. I ask you! When he starts running around the house frantically, I know there’s something hanging out of his ass that he can’t dispose of in the usual manner.

Well, I could go on and on, right, Pook? But let’s wrap this baby up and put it to bed.

[mutter mutter] get no privacy whatsoever.

jump around! jump around, jump up and get down!

Long Night’s Journey into New Year’s Day

3:00 a.m.: I’ve been listening to party music on Live 105 since 8:00 and don’t want to go to bed and miss any of it. It’s the perfect mix of every upbeat song you ever knew and loved, or didn’t know and get to discover, from the ‘50s to the ‘00s, a whole lifetime of the rock and the roll: James Brown, the Kinks, a dash of disco, Abba, the Clash, Sex Pistols, Oingo Boingo, the Cure, hip-hop, rap rock, electroclash, techno. The oldies are goodies, and the creativity of the new is awesome. Sampling and remix and turntable DJ’in’—it’s recycling that sounds like anything but—the perfect re-use of the musical environment, like a spangly new jacket made out of old tires. They play a techno remix of the Eminem song in which he proclaims, “Nobody listens to techno!” and of course that line is sampled over and over until the joyful irony imprints itself on yer dancin’ jones and yer party bones.

3:30 a.m.: They play an infectious hip-hop number called “Jump Around!” and I can’t help myself, I haul my middle-aged ass out of my chair and get out on the tiny dance floor (again, don’t tell the IRS)—“Jump around! Jump around, jump up and get down!” Pookie, who’s sprawled in the middle of the action, gives me the evil eye—it’s the middle of the night, for Christ’s sake! But I think he secretly enjoys it, and, besides, love it or leave it, eh tu, Pooké?

Next there’s a rap by a guy named Humpty who likes women with big butts. (By the way, when did the ass become so popular?) There’s a dance with this one, too, called the Humpty Hump, but I think I’ll humpty hump my derrière off to bed instead.

Love, Emelem

hi youse guys… ksjf87ffnvks*jlf.. what did she do, oil the wheels on this *@!&k% chair? first of all the pook-coup has already happened.. ive got her doin my biddin. I lift my eyebrow, wait do I even have eyebrows, never thought about it before. I twitch my whiskers and she scratches my back or gets me fresh tissue paper to lie on and thinks its her idea!!! im nuthin if not diabolical—eee-ah-hahaaaa!!!!!! have u noticed ive been practicin on the shift key, I almost have it mastered, just wait til I start typin in ALL CATS {oops, freudy-cat slip, oooh I crack myself up, teehee!}

No doubt! Pookie, butt out!

[Mary McKenney]

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