I grew up in a family in which manners extended well beyond “please” and “thank you,” and the placement of one’s napkin on one’s lap. I answered the phone “Graham residence, Ann speaking” and said “excuse me” before I interrupted adult conversation. I was also expected to recognize adult conversation, and to refrain from interjecting my own opinions or anecdotes unless they were requested. I was never encouraged to believe that I had the same rights as adults in the household, and consistently taught to consider “the other person” in matters which ranged from sitting through dull stories told by old people to expressing great joy upon receiving a(nother) knitted hat for Christmas.
My brother and I were not allowed to chew gum, yell or play loud music in the house, or to thump up and down the stairs. We wrote thank-you notes, ate what we were served as guests and held doors for people. My mother disapproved of containers (milk, catsup, salsa, soda bottles) on the table, and required that condiments be decanted, and that we knew which forks and spoons were used for what purpose. We could sit through a concert or lecture without getting up or rattling wrappers, and we could eat at a nice restaurant without disturbing other diners. If we had to, we could sit still while the adults drank (endless) cups of coffee after dinner and discussed people we didn’t know. We were not allowed to use the words “fart” or “butt” or to comment in any way about the passing of gas.
We were well-loved, thoroughly supported and doted upon; we were simply expected to behave well in most circumstances. The basic premise of our upbringing was that the opinions and activities of children are interesting mainly to those children and their immediate families, and that adults outside of that circle should not be discomfited in any way by their presence. Charmed and entertained, absolutely, but not disturbed or annoyed. Under the guise of “manners” we were being taught to be civil, compassionate members of society – to listen patiently, think of others and be grateful, gracious and helpful.
In my present family, the rules of my childhood are largely dismissed as archaic, artificial and repressive. My husband was raised on a rural farm with five other children, and while his parents both have lovely manners, they were lucky to keep napkins on laps and elbows off the table without concerning themselves with the vulgarity of gum chewing or inquiries about who had “cut the cheese.” I believe we have taught my son to behave well in public and to consider the feelings of others, but his manners at home are sometimes appalling. He has the questionable gift of being able to adhere to all of my parents’ rules at their house, and then to slip back into ill-mannered sloth at home.
While some of the rules have fallen away at my house for reasons of expedience (my life is too short to decant catsup) others are rejected on the basis that the rules were just plain weird to begin with. Gum was made to be chewed! Who wants bored kids sitting around fidgeting while adults try to talk? In addition, there is the ever-popular refrain “no one does that!” Apparently I am living in a door-slamming, gum-chewing universe where children are encouraged to recite the complete play-by-play of favorite Disney movies in the middle of adult conversations and announce every ingested bean and every resulting emission with great relish.
I have also been advised by both professional and lay analysts that the rules of my upbringing were a way of squelching my natural impulses and denying my true self, and that children must be free to express themselves, and simply “be.” If that means throwing a football in the house, or interrupting grandma’s monologue about her walking tour in Denmark, so be it.
In the context of my house, I am suffering from battle fatigue. I am told so often that my inclinations are snobbish and outdated, that I tend to save myself for egregious behavior. My son chews gum, plays loud music, and thumps on the stairs with impunity. For now, I am trying to be satisfied with the fact that his manners in the Great World are decent (aside from a baffling inability to move a napkin from table to lap), and he is an essentially a kind human being. That should mean that the important lessons are being learned, and that we can work on refinements.
Secretly, though, I delight in accounts of well-mannered children carrying the torch of etiquette. I devour stories in the New York Times about children who are sent to special schools to learn how to behave at the dinner table, how to meet and speak with adults, and how to behave at the theater. I nearly wept tears of joy when I called an old friend and her daughter answered with the familiar “Smith residence, Alice speaking.” Call me repressive, old-fashioned, or simply “weird,” but I believe that manners are an embodiment of civilized society. I would hate to think that there is no longer any place for them in the world in which I live.
The problem is that moderation takes huge discipline, and that when I am tired, or hungry, or celebratory, or breathing, I tend to want something, and it is very rarely “just enough.” Back in the days when I was not eating a low-carb diet, I would be drawn into the kitchen by the inexorable pull of the remains of the triple layer carrot cake, or the virgin carton of “Moose Tracks” in the freezer. I wasn’t after a “bite,” or a “taste;” I wanted enough to create the culinary equivalent of Blotto. I could eat four slices of pizza, seven cookies, or half a bowl of leftover Halloween candy without thinking, after which I would be placid and satisfied (until the next time). I don’t do that anymore, not because I have become more disciplined, but because I don’t want to die before the next season of “The Rachel Zoe Project” begins.
Food being off the table, so to speak, there are other things that pull me towards the tipping point. During a recent bout of sciatica, I was given giant, economy-sized bottles of Vicodin, Flexeril and Valium. I was in a tremendous amount of pain, and there was no “high” involved, merely a cessation of the feeling that I would amputate my left leg if I could get up off the couch and find my chef’s knife. I do recall, though, that a “sciatica cocktail” left me feeling mellow and made me forget everything unpleasant that might previously have been lurking in my addled mind. I was also a more benevolent creature, unruffled by things that would ordinarily cause me to snap at loved ones or begin to stew about ways to express my unhappiness at the loudness of the television or the shoes in the middle of the living room floor.
Wainright goes on, in “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,” to say that, in addition to cigarettes, chocolate milk and jelly beans “there’s those other things /Which for several reasons we won’t mention.” I have craved other things, far darker than anything I’m willing to discuss in a blog post that my mother will read. There was a time in my life when it seemed very romantic, artistic and edgy to switch off the controls and let myself pursue whatever I craved. Maturity, marriage and motherhood have all contributed to the end of that kind of thing, but it still worries me that there was a time when I would drive to a man’s house in the dead of night to leave a note on his windshield, begging him to come back. Fortunately, as long as my husband is alive and well, it seems unlikely that I will revert to stalking unkind and inappropriate men because of my deep belief that we are soul mates, and that the “having” of him would make me whole.![albetta_summer08babyangelpinkback_large[1] albetta_summer08babyangelpinkback_large[1]](http://imagineannie.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/albetta_summer08babyangelpinkback_large1.jpg?w=400&h=400)
The desirable outcome varies, but I grew up a child musician with peers who were being pushed hard to be professional musicians from the time they were three or four years old. In my community, future prodigies were started early in “![soccer-ball-over-sky[1] soccer-ball-over-sky[1]](http://imagineannie.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/soccer-ball-over-sky1.jpg?w=346&h=346)
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I am now receiving “Town & Country” in the mail because, on a tip from a clever friend, I went to
Although I am not happy that many at the tippy top of the socioeconomic pyramid have lost jobs or taken a bath on investment returns, it is interesting to me to watch the process by which the realities of my daily life have become “chic.” We have a more than adequate roof over our heads, and are sufficiently fed and clothed, but we do not eat out regularly, take vacations, buy hardcover books, buy expensive theater or concert tickets, or spend lavishly on holiday gifts. If I need a pair of black flats, I go to Target. My diamonds were inherited, and I buy my hair color in a box at the grocery store, blow out my own hair, and do my own nails. We are completely entertained through a combination of Netflix, free local concerts and tickets to theater performed at local high schools and theaters. I love beautiful things, and admit to having cravings for everything from a Kate Spade bag to a Cooper Mini, but those desires are filed in a brain compartment far away from the realities of my actual life. They are in the toile-covered, expensively scented “if I had a million dollars” compartment, right under paying off all of our debt and giving a huge donation to the local food bank.![penny[1] penny[1]](http://imagineannie.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/penny1.jpg?w=500&h=482)
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There is, of course, the kind of gay male friend made famous on “Sex and the City” who will go shoe shopping and give good advice (as opposed to my husband, who tries to help, but mostly just likes the idea of really, really high stilettos and corset lacing detail), but I have always had girlfriends with whom I did that kind of thing. There was something else about those boys and men that I needed, and it’s not an easy “thing” to pin down, because they are all very different from each other. Some march in Pride parades and have rainbow stickers on their cars, and others live lives indistinguishable in any way from my own, including being married, having children and working. They are as diverse as any other group of people I know; one of them was even a Republican for a while. It’s not patent “gaiety” that I love, it’s something else about those men.![L1_Children_playing_game[1] L1_Children_playing_game[1]](http://imagineannie.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/l1_children_playing_game1.jpg?w=420&h=311)

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The clear, objective truth, however, is that while Beautiful but Dumb did, in fact, write several entire novels, I have never gotten past page 162. I have been writing novels since I was in the third grade, at which time I produced a hand-written, hand-illustrated work entitled “Lacy Comstock;” a vague bastardization of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books with a little
In college, I chose to be an English Major rather than a Creative Writing major mainly because I was totally mystified by what went on in the Creative Writing Department. I understood how to read, discuss and write about literature; I did not understand the highly expressive, raw, in-your-face, and often abstract kind of writing that I read in the school’s literary magazine. My personal taste ran to the extremely subtle and restrained variety of fiction and poetry (Wharton, Austin, James, Yeats, cummings), and although I had a long flirtation with Sylvia Plath, and wrote a great deal of my own wretched poetry about the general crap sandwich of teenage life, it was really Plath’s formality that made me love her writing. The process of laying out life-altering, heart-rending events and emotions so elegantly that the emotion is heightened by the very sense of repression inspired me. The wild, emotive, chaotic poems that were held up as golden exemplars in the Creative Writing program were total anathema to me, and (being a competitive type) I knew that what I would and could write was going to be judged as derivative and uninspired. I wrote papers about light and dark imagery in Shakespeare, and kept writing short fiction and poetry “on the side.”
Law school sounded the complete death knell of creativity. Without going into tedious details, I will explain that I went into law school in the fall of 1987 a creative type, and came out unable to write anything that was not fact-based until I started writing this blog in 2003. In a world in which no sentence may be written that is unsupported by fact, and in which the greatest weight is given to arguments which logically follow arguments already made and accepted, there is no room for the creative flourish or the personal expression. Law school was a mistake for so many reasons that I could probably write for thirty days straight about that, and that alone; suffice it to say that the worst thing, the very worst thing about that particularly bad choice was that it made writing into a form of verbal algebra instead of a creative act.
So this morning I was reminded that today begins not only National Blog Post Month (NaBloPoMo) but National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Ridiculous names aside, these two challenges mean that I will be blogging daily, and also writing about 5 pages of a novel every day. The “finish line” of NaNoWriMo is reached on completion of a 175 page novel. It will not be Wharton; it may be pure, unmitigated garbage, but it will be a way for me to be better informed and less cynical about my direction as a writer. Maybe I “have a novel in me.” Maybe I don’t. We’ll know at the end of the month, and I’ll know whether I can really communicate on the page and create art, or whether I would be better off attending classes on Writing Romance Novels for Beginners.![Madelines[1] Madelines[1]](http://imagineannie.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/madelines1.jpg?w=213&h=197)
I am sitting here looking out the window at fallen leaves. A pumpkin scented candle is burning, and I am reaching back as if a $250.00 fee for an hour of Freudian analysis depended on my success. If I really strain, I can remember precisely two costumes. When I was in kindergarten, my best friend Leslie’s mother made us pink satin tutus with real tulle skirts. I loved Leslie’s house because she was the only child of well-to-do, older parents, who were able to provide Leslie (and often, me) with all of the good things in life. Leslie had a bedroom with carpet, a pink canopy bed, and her mother did not work, but stayed home to make us crustless fluffernutters for lunch. Tragically, my own mother worked, had a one-year-old baby, didn’t sew, and refused either to buy “Fluff” or to cut the crusts off of sandwiches. Leslie’s family moved to New Orleans after that year and I never saw her again, but my tutu lived long enough for me to make my brother wear it when he was four or five. I put a washcloth on his head as a stand-in for longer hair, and called him “Mary.” (His session is right after mine).![man_from_uncle[1] man_from_uncle[1]](http://imagineannie.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/man_from_uncle1.jpg?w=300&h=298)
I don’t remember any other costumes, but I remember two other things, both of which concern candy. I remember that my trick-or-treating years coincided with the first (real) episodes of razor blades and poison in candy, and that every piece of our hauls had to be inspected by a parent, with all homemade, loosely wrapped, or otherwise suspicious treats thrown away along with those that had a visible razor entry line or reeked of bitter almond. My parents were generally very low on the overprotection scale, but it would not have looked good in the press had one of us consumed strychnine in a Mars Bar and they had issued a statement that they were, of course, saddened, but that they generally tried to “let us try to make our own decisions.”![snickers[1] snickers[1]](http://imagineannie.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/snickers1.jpg?w=400&h=344)
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