All I Can Say

#97: Human potential obliterated

There was a car accident over the weekend: teenage driver lost control of car and crashed into tree. The driver and passenger were not seriously injured. But the back seat passenger, who was 17 and the older sister of the girl in front, died at the scene. I heard about the accident yesterday and it pulled at me the way these stories always do. But today I discovered I actually knew the girl. She was in N’s karate class a couple of years ago, and I knew her mother. Seconds after the accident, her younger sister called her parents on her cell phone screaming for their help. They rushed to the hospital in terror — but believing both their girls were at least alive. There they learned that their daughter was dead.

Is there a worse moment for a soul to endure?

Every parent considers this horrifying possibility from the moment his or her first child is born. What if? What if? What if? That nagging mantra that runs on a continuous loop through the subconscious. The older the child grows, the louder it gets. I know that the really scary years are ahead of me, but still I can’t ignore the reality that anything can happen at any moment.

A few weeks ago I was grocery shopping with G. I observed an older woman coming into the store; she looked familiar to me and something made me pay attention. I recognized her then as the wife of someone I had worked for many years ago, when I first came to Maine. Part of that family’s narrative was that they had lost their beloved youngest child, Lee, to brain cancer, more than 30 years ago. His father displayed a picture of this boy standing at the helm of a sailboat, and I always studied it when I was in his office. Lee was a solid looking, smooth-haired boy in shorts and a polo shirt. He wore glasses. He had been an avid hockey player, and a few years ago the family bequeathed an outdoor skating pond and pond house to the town in their son’s memory. Every time I take my kids there to skate, I think of that photograph of Lee on his father’s boat, and I think of who he might have become.

That day in the grocery store, Lee’s mother didn’t recognize me, but I watched how her eyes went straight to G. I understood that she always noticed boys everywhere she went, summoning her own child, who she last saw in 1974, when he was around G’s age. And I understood that this loss would always be the defining event in her life. How could it be otherwise? I placed my hand protectively on G’s head.

I know it’s not possible for those of us who have never lived it to comprehend the grief of losing a child. It must be the cruelest suffering, the deepest sorrow, the most devastating pain — from which one can never truly recover.

It can never be made sense of.

It’s every mother and father’s living hell.

#91: Crippling beauty

A friend and I took our daughters to see Madame Butterfly last night. I was only vaguely familiar with the storyline, and N really knew nothing about this opera. To summarize, a young and innocent Japanese girl marries a scoundrel playboy American who has no intention of honoring the marriage. She gives up everything — her livelihood as a Geisha, her religion, her family and friends. After a few rapturous weeks, he leaves her and does not return for years, during which time she raises their child and waits, in poverty, for his ship to sail into the harbor. One day it does come in, but he has his new wife with him. When he learns of the child he had with Butterfly, he and his wife ask, for the child's sake, to take him back to America where the new wife will raise him as her own. Butterfly obeys this request, and then stabs herself in the heart with the same knife her father had used to commit suicide. End of story.

This morning JH came into the kitchen and greeted N “Good morning, Butterfly.” (Clearly he didn’t really know the storyline, either.)
N (aghast): “I’m not Butterfly. I’m not dead!”
Me: “And you’re not a doormat, either.”
N: “Doormat? What do you mean?”
Me: “Well, Butterfly was very sweet and obedient, but she allowed that awful Pinkerton to walk all over her, as if she was a doormat. She didn’t stand up for what she wanted and deserved, did she?”
N: “No.”
Me: “And that’s why her life ended in such a terrible tragedy.”

A couple of days ago, I was telling her about the practice of footbinding in China. I just finished Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, and footbinding is a central and fascinating theme. I explained to N how they would bind a six or seven year old girl’s feet so that the toes would fold under, the bones would break and dissolve, and the feet would never grow bigger than about three inches. The novel described the gruesome process and the horrifying pain in detail, but I couldn’t quite conjure a visual (a three inch foot?) until I Googled it and found these hideous images:

Part of the allure of the bound foot of course was the symbolism that the girl's spirit was bound, too. A girl who could withstand (sorry, bad pun) this kind of mutilation proves herself to be obedient and subservient above all else.

Watch how they hobbled when they walked. Tragic.

I started thinking about other cultural extremes of beauty that deform and weaken the body:

This young girl cannot hold her head up without her stack of gold coils, a new one added each year.

And closer to home, there are Meg Ryan’s unfortunate new trout lips:

   
Who knew they'd be so sought after, but here are Christie Brinkley's version of the runaway bride eyes :

And (candy from a baby) Michael and LaToya Jackson’s twin mutilated noses:

I don't even know who this woman is, but she is one of the most artificial-looking human beings I've seen since Anna Nicole:

Is she (or her plastic surgeon) kidding with those boobs?

N wanted confirmation that footbinding is no longer practiced in China, and I assured her it isn't.

No, we've got plenty of modern fixations to work on.

#89: Screening

Last night instead of sitting down with my family to eat dinner, I went out and had a facial. This was an excellent alternative to dinner, even though it was dark and cold when I left the house, and I was tired and really would rather have just stayed at home. But it’s always the case when I feel this way that I have enriching experiences. And the facial was relaxing, soothing, and nurturing for my skin, which lately has been looking and feeling like the skin of someone much, much older than me. I was renewed when I came home, and sat on the couch with JH for some wine and quality time.

Today I have to go to a health screening, which really annoys me. At first I thought it was just the inconvenience of it that was bothering me, but it’s more than that. Every time we change our life insurance in any way, they want blood. It feels so invasive. Today’s screening is through JH’s employer, and the idea is that the health insurer will give us a better rate if we are healthy. They too will want blood, and will gather all sorts of other nosy, personal information about me.

On the one hand, as far as I know I am healthy, and so I’d like to be rewarded for that, but I don’t like the fact that so many different entities have done this same “screening” on me, starting with my own doctor, every damn year. I’ve had my blood drawn so many times in the past few years, and who really knows what they do with it, what sorts of tests they run, and in what ways they use and share this data? I hate to feel so powerless. I don’t even have anything to worry about, but for all the people who aren’t healthy, this system must seem like cruel manipulation. If you don’t line up like cattle and submit to their testing, you pay. You pay substantially.

Moo.

#87: Skeeved

The spring issue of Travel + Leisure features an article that I think is supposed to be health helpful, but in fact makes me never want to set foot in another hotel room again.

You know how you know something, but you don’t allow yourself to know it in a conscious way? The cleanliness of hotel rooms is one of these blindspots for me. We are talking petri dish squalor.

You see those reassuring carts in hotel hallways, holding neat rows of little shampoo and conditioner bottles, and candy-sized soaps individually wrapped in paper, and the tiny sewing kits. And then inside the cart are the crisp, folded sheets, and stacks of towels and bathmats. A door is ajar nearby, and you always peer in to see if the room is bigger, or better in some way than yours. And you see the maids stepping around the bed to tuck in clean sheets, wiping and vacuuming. Or they’re in the bathroom with that fetid mop that merely smears the bacteria all over the floor.

And what do they use to wipe the sink and tub? I’ve always suspected it’s the same rag used to wipe the toilets — if they even wipe the toilets. Who knows? Maybe all they do is fold the edge of the toilet paper into that neat little triangle and call it good. Do they swap in a clean rag after each room? I sincerely doubt they do, and according to this article, sinks typically harbor more bacteria than toilet seats.

And the floor? Every bit as foul as you would imagine — if you were to let yourself imagine it, that is. Twenty- thousand dust mites can inhabit one square foot of carpet, and athlete’s foot fungus can live on floors for up to three months. Think of the parade of bare feet that have traversed the carpet in any given hotel room. Think of the accidents, the spills and body fluids — undetectable to the naked eye, but festering there all the same.

Shall we move onto the bed? Sure, you’re savvy enough to strip the vile coverlet off, as well as the accent pillows that do not get washed, ever. But you also have to worry about bedbugs, once eradicated in this country and now an epidemic in hotels in all price ranges. Here’s a question: What brought them back? These are little bloodsucking pests about the size of an apple seed. They infest mattresses, and the cracks and crevices of the bedframe. They bite into your flesh while you sleep. That is, if you are able to ward off thoughts of all the nastiness around you long enough to get to sleep.

All these revolting viruses, germs and critters like bedbugs, lice and crabs are not being eliminated by the hotel cleaning staff who — let’s be honest — couldn’t give a rat’s. They’re just part of the bargain. And now that I know about them in a way I’ve never ventured to know before, I shudder to think of my children as babies, cozy and cradled in what we called a “nest,” made of the bedspread arranged on the floors of many a hotel room. Nest indeed. I’m horrified to picture their sweet and pure little bodies bathing in hotel bathtubs where the last guest very likely peed — or worse.

This information reaches me just in time for our February vacation at a ski condo, which must rate among the lowest in the cleanliness category. Then in a couple of weeks, I will meet up with my high school friends in Chicago, where, yes, we will be staying in a hotel. I’ll bring my Lysol wipes, if I can get them on the plane, and try not to be utterly neurotic. But it seems unlikely that I’ll actually ever sleep in a hotel room again.

#69: Queue Oprah

I don’t “watch” Oprah. But I record it, and I have this ritual on Sunday mornings. I stay in bed and scan through my annals of Oprah shows, deleting the ones that hold zero interest for me: featuring country music singers; or detailing brutal acts of violence against women or children; or ass-kissing stars with new movies to peddle. Which still leaves a lot of Oprah. This week I caught up on two shows back-to-back, both from early December. (It’s so freeing and efficient to zoom through a show and eliminate all the commercials. I can't watch any other way.)

The first Oprah featured people who had accumulated a lot of money in some way, (building a business, winning the lottery, inheritance) and through a combination of materialism, extravagance, the greed of people around them, and total fiscal myopia, had blown through every penny (in some cases millions) with absolutely nothing to show for it in the end. The treasures! The trips! The drugs!

Then they trotted out a filmmaker and a homeless man, who had been given — no strings attached — $10,000, as a kind of sociological study (with cameras rolling, of course) to find out what would happen. Would he turn his life around? No — sadly, predictably, he would not. He would spend a third of the money on a truck, give lavishly to people he mistook for his friends, get married, and drink the rest of it down, finding himself at the end of the “experiment” once again in a sleeping bag under a bridge. Alone.

I think there is science to explain this: liquid’s natural behavior is to flow out to sea.

Queue the next Oprah. I don’t know when it was aired in relation to the first one about rags to riches to rags, but this guest was the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr. Muhammad Yunus. He invented the concept of microcredit, changing the lives of millions of people in his country of Bangladesh — and in due course, globally. He wanted to see what he could do about his country’s abject poverty and wandered around a small area, trying to determine what it was that people needed. He spoke to 42 different people and found that, between them, they needed the equivalent of 27 dollars to be free of debt. So he took the money out of his wallet and gave it away, thrilled by how grateful the recipients were, and how easy it was to solve their problems. This experience ultimately led to the establishment of the Grameen Bank, which loans “micro” sums of money to individuals, mostly women, without requiring collateral. The size of the average loan is $130, and with this tiny amount, hundreds of thousands of people have managed to completely transform their lives. They start small, self- sustaining businesses. They provide food, shelter and education for their families. The repayment rate is extremely high. And the next generation’s future will be very different from what it would have been without this strategy for fighting poverty. The beauty of the idea is how simple it is.

Here where I live, money is a slippery and ambiguous thing. It’s commonplace to grow into adulthood without ever really understanding its true value. Personally, I know I don’t. Is $200 a reasonable amount of money to spend on a pair of jeans? Or a handbag? How about lunch? How much should we spend on our homes, on furnishing them? Is an eighty thousand dollar car a rational purchase, whether it’s financed or paid in cash? The lack of cash is certainly no barrier to needing/buying/having; credit is automatic and acceptable. Buy now, pay later.

So what is a dollar really worth?

I have no definitive faith that guides my belief about life and death, but there is something about incarnation that has always made sense to me. I am here now in this particular body, in this moment in time, in this physical situation. And when I die, everything recalibrates somehow. When I think this way and wonder what other lives I might have lived, and what lives I might yet live out, the thing that is most obvious is that I have hit the jackpot in this incarnation. I can’t afford the vacation I dream about, can’t buy the car I’d like to drive, can’t expect the jewelry that would validate me, but still I am about as fortunate as any human being on the planet.

And I wonder sometimes what a life is really worth. Say what you will about Oprah, but little by little, she chips away at this, so I keep tuning in.

#54: Home again, home again jiggety jog

So how about this layout? Will this do…at least for now? I think I can live with this configuration if you can.

G-Joe rides Metro-North.
57 questions in 57 minutes.

N likes to write and draw
while she commutes.

We are back from four days in Connecticut and New York. I have written here about how elated I always am to return home to Maine when I’ve been away, and this trip was no different. The pace of life here suits me so perfectly. New York was chaotic and exciting and fun to steep in, if only up to the ankle, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was all going on elsewhere. Whenever I am in Manhattan I have the distinct feeling that I’m standing outside the gates — with no chance of admittance.

Connecticut had its gates up in a different way. Over the 14 or so years that I have been visiting the elite town where JH grew up, it has continued to transform from a place where most people lived modestly and a few lived ostentatiously, to a place where nearly everyone lives larger-than-life. The houses are absurdly out of scale. Every cute little bungalow or cape cod style home, completely respectable 20 years ago for the average family, has been razed and replaced by grander and grander McMansions, the most extreme examples of which look like they belong out on the Moors somewhere, or perhaps down la rue from Versailles. Instead, these hideous monster homes are staring down their equally hideous monster neighbors. Two words: hedge fund. When we first started noticing this trend, it raised eyebrows, but was mostly amusing. But now I see how misguided and careless we are as a culture, when those with money have to display their wealth like some giant penile object — validating their existence, denying their insecurities. The gluttony is so offensive when compared with how the rest of the world lives. It is revolting to contemplate the resources that are exhausted to build, heat and maintain these homes that provide shelter for a only a small number of people — and are often empty much of the year. So when I arrive back in my beautiful, natural, and comparatively unpretentious neighborhood (although I too live in the land of plenty), I am grateful and relieved, and determined to live more humbly, and to try to tread more lightly on our planet. More and more I am thinking about the impact of every small choice I make. I think what we need in this part of the world is an infusion of eastern thinking. Modesty, humility, less. I can do with less.

On Saturday morning, we heard that JH’s 103 year old grandmother had fallen and was in the hospital. She is an incredible woman, tiny but mighty, feisty, fiercely independent, a force. We don’t know what is going to happen, but I will never forget how, at 90, she was the star of our wedding. She wore a short-sleeved, A-line dress in navy blue, with tiny seed pearls, that she said made her feel like a schoolgirl. She danced the night away and no one could take their eyes off her. At one point one of my friends sighed, and said that she hoped she would have that energy when she was 90. The friend she said this to responded, “What makes you think you’ll have that energy at 90 when you don’t even have it now?” Well not many do.

Meanwhile this weekend, we were hoping to celebrate JH’s mother’s 70th birthday. It was unclear whether we could do that with her mother in the hospital, but my mother in law decided, bravely I thought, to have our dinner as planned. And I think that it was the right decision. Life is for living, and there is no one who embodies this more than JH’s grandmother. She would certainly want her daughter to have her birthday party, and so she did.

#52: Mayflower to Mars

Watched Desperate Crossings: the Untold Story of the Mayflower last night. Grim. Desolate. Bleak.

What would the pilgrims say today if they could see this country they founded? What if they could witness the corruption, the materialism, the environmental contempt? Would they have reconsidered their mission? I wonder about that. These people turned away from everything they knew in order to worship God the way they wanted. I have no model for that kind of conviction, and can’t imagine an ideology so important that I would willingly make any such sacrifice. When they arrived, they had absolutely nothing, and no way back to their old way of life. It would be like moving to Mars today, but substituting faith in science for faith in God.

But if they were plunked down in the middle of contemporary America, those pilgrims would have to be impressed, too. We’ve worked a few things out in the last 400 years. What we’ve built, how we get around and communicate with each other, the science and medicine we rely on, our arts — it would all be incomprehensible and mysterious, and probably terribly threatening. Even though as human beings we share the same basic instincts: to survive and be happy (Were the pilgrims really after happiness? Certainly not the way we define it.) I wonder if we would even be recognizable as the same species.

And so to continue along this trajectory, in 400 years from now, what will civilization look like? Will there even be civilization? The pilgrims survived against enormous odds, and their staying power is part of our legacy as Americans. Still we seem unable/unwilling to change our current course toward self-destruction. And that’s really bleak.

Scrapping?

I’ve been doing a little bit of blog spying. Well, not spying exactly, just checking out some blogs, bouncing aimlessly from site to site, to see what other bloggers are writing about, and I can’t figure out what the connection is between blogging and “scrapping” (scrapbooking for those, like me, not in the know). You have no idea how many sites are devoted to scrapbooking! I guess if you work for hours and hours designing a single page that’s going to be filed away into a scrapbook, you need a bit of validation. And a blog where you can show all your scrapbook pages might just offer that. (I’m going into a bit of a rant here, so consider yourself warned.)

Sure, we’ve all got hundreds and hundreds of pictures we take every year (mine lay idly in iphoto), and who’s to say what anyone should be doing with them? But this whole scrapbooking mania is simply over the top. You can just feel the zealotry. You take a picture or two of your children (isn’t it always children and pets?) and design a super-cute layout with adorable papers, borders and whatnot, and turn your life into a work of art. It's that easy. But it’s so phony I want to throw up! I want to know why the picture, on its own, isn't good enough to evoke feelings of love and pride and contentment. Every event has to be tarted up in order to qualify it as a memory, because reality is just not damn good enough. So instead of looking at a picture and thinking, “Oh we had such a nice day on that hike in Vermont,” the past gets a makeover, by themes and kits and decoration. You can just imagine how these families are art-directed through birthdays, holidays and vacations, posed and positioned, with the scrapbook moment always in mind. And ultimately, it’s the scrapbook page that’s the measurement of a wonderful life. But is there really a life there?

Ladies! (Sorry for the sexual stereotype, but let’s face it, it’s mostly women who are caught up in this). Put down your little wavy scissors and your acid free paper. Step away from the archival glue, and go about your life. Be present, and to hell with creating the pretty picture of perfection. Every event doesn’t have to be tricked out and gift-wrapped in order to be significant.

But whoa there, Nelly! Now that I’m thinking about it, I wonder if blogging, how I do it anyway — writing about what goes on in my life — is really any different. In a way, I’m doing the same thing here. I’m dredging up events, recent and distant, and putting a sort of frame around them. I make connections and draw conclusions and present it all tidily for you. And yeah, I too am looking for validation! So do you think there is any essential difference between writing and scrapping? Obviously, a lot of blogger-scrappers have found some parallels.

Women can save the world

I think it is going to take women to save what ails this world. If we look at the places on earth where the worst injustices against humanity are occurring — Africa, the Middle East, North Korea, China — these are all patriarchal societies. When women are oppressed, the society in which they live withers and future generations suffer. Women, the world’s mothers, have a basic instinct for establishing peaceful, productive societies. Their priorities are the children, and so they attend to health care, security, education and the opportunity to fulfill one’s potential, all the things that make for an enlightened society.

If women had the power in these male-dominated places where there is a culture of tyranny, massacre, rape and repression, I believe that there would be peace. And I believe that only women can achieve this, and so until they have the power, nothing will change.

This ancient proverb I love basically lays out your step-by-step guide for peace — and it all starts with engendering "light in the soul." Isn't that what mothers (well, all good parents) do?

If there is light in the soul
There will be beauty in the person.
If there is beauty in the person
There will be harmony in the house.
If there is harmony in the house
There will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation
There will be peace in the world.

What can we really ensure?

Have you heard about the school in Massachusetts that has banned the game of tag from the playground because it was deemed too dangerous and violent? The school officials state there is no way to ensure the safety of the children in their care if they are running and possibly pushing each other. That word comes up a lot when it comes to children and safety: ensure. And its evil cousin, insure, is always lurking there in the shadows, too.

Where does this idea come from that safety can be ensured? Parents, school administrators, insurance companies — and all their teams of lawyers — are in the business of insisting that we do that, or someone will pay. But the real price is being paid by our children, who are being raised these days like milk-fed veal.

I’m going to journey into my own childhood for a moment, noticing along the way all the invisible dangers I faced on a daily basis. From the age of 5, as a kindergartner, I walked to school and back, a mile each way, without any parental supervision. The kids were dismissed and we flowed like a river down the streets to our various homes. I don’t remember a single incident. It was a nice time, actually, after school, to wander home and notice the leaves on the trees, or the icicles melting, or the smell of the earth in springtime. It was a time when I would daydream, or walk with friends, or just kids I knew. Sometimes a game would start up, without any adult planning, and we would find ourselves in a group of kids we might not choose to play with: the nerds, the prissies, the bullies, the little brothers. And we found that we could get along with those kids too.

My parents never once called another parent to ask if Mary/Lisa/Diane would like to come over and play. Mary/Lisa/Diane was probably already over, or I was over at her house. There was no drop off and no pick up. We had choices and freedom, and we could explore together, get into fights and stomp home mad, or resolve them. We learned how to get along —  with the kids who were our friends and with the kids who weren’t. And everyone was home by dinner.

I didn’t look to my mother or father to entertain me. If I whined that I was bored I was told to go outside. And so I’d go. That sense of freedom nourished my imagination. I would get on my bike and ride around the neighborhood, inventing stories about what I saw. And there was something so electrifying about that. I could be anyone, anywhere, in any time.

We roamed the neighborhood and played kick the can, skateboarded down the street, rode bikes, jumped rope, played tennis against the school walls, climbed trees and played hide and seek. We even played tag. And when I think about it, there was so much physical activity we must have eaten heartily and slept like babies.

Today, it’s scheduled activities, play-dates, car seats and helmets — and all of these things are good things by themselves. It’s the excessive measures we take to ensure that our children are 100% safe at all times that is choking the life out of them, because there is no such thing as 100% safe. If we are alive then we are at risk of injury or death, no avoiding it. We can try to minimize that risk, but the tendency in this culture is to take this concept, like all concepts, to the extreme. In recent decades, I’ve noticed that the very word “extreme” has morphed from a negative into something decidedly positive.

How will today’s risk-averse mindset impact the next generation? My children! If I could give our kids anything, it would be more freedom so they could develop curiosity, originality, confidence and self-sufficiency. They would learn instincts, social skills and how to make decisions and live by them. I would let them play and actually compete, and winning would teach them drive, and losing would teach them empathy. Still, they wouldn't be 100% safe, but they’d be happier, and better equipped for what awaits them outside the safety gates of childhood.

Let’s have some faith and let the kids play tag!