What Would You Do?

I have just finished reading an excellent blog post about the disappearance of a little boy in Oregon who vanished from school after his stepmother took him to visit his tree frog exhibit at the science fair. The post addressed the fact that there was much speculation about the stepmother’s guilt, based not on any kind of history or evidence, but on the fact that she (and the boy’s father) seemed not to be reacting in a way that proclaimed their innocence to onlookers. As a mother, a stepmother, and a human being who witnesses grief frequently as part of her job, I found myself responding strongly to the idea that people outside a tragedy are able to judge with any accuracy the reactions of those at its center. I have lived long enough to see responses that were deemed “genuine” and were subsequently found to be false, calm and measured grieving that was no less deep for its smooth surface, and a national dismissal of the grieving process. It seems to me hypocritical and shallow to evaluate anyone’s true feelings, let alone their guilt in relation to a possible crime, based on some rickety construct of imagination, snippets of TV dramas, and various other kinds of fiction. Until we wear the shoes of the terrified, the bereaved, or the shocked, we ought not to imagine for one minute that we know what constitutes a “normal” response, or what we ourselves would do.

Five years ago in July , a local boy disappeared. His name was Ricky Holland, and he was seven years old. His foster parents were visibly agonized, participated tirelessly in the hunt for the boy, and were often seen weeping on television. A more gratifying, soul-stirring parental manifestation of pain could not be imagined. Night after night we watched, riveted, as the exhausted couple returned from combing yet another marsh or field, sometimes sobbing, always hollow-eyed. occasionally stumbling and clinging to one another for support. As it turned out, the touchingly broken parents had killed Ricky, bundled him into a plastic trash bag, buried him, and lied for months to police, the media and the hundreds of volunteers who gave up days to search for the child. Crazy like the proverbial foxes, the Hollands showed us all what we wanted and expected to see, and it worked. It was grief sufficient and patent enough that we all believed them; it was a visible manifestation of what we knew we would do under the circumstances. It looked right, and we bought it.

I have also been involved in the death of another seven-year-old boy who died accidentally while riding down a hill with my son Sam on another hot, July night. The day after the accident, after the flashing lights, the yellow tape, and the throngs of gawkers and police-issue blue, the boy’s father came to our house to visit Sam and tell him how grateful he was that he had run to get help right away, and to commend him on his bravery. Maybe it was because he was a doctor, or a father, or just a decent human being, but in his time of greatest loss he was calm and rational enough to consider what had happened to the “other boy.” There was no issue of guilt in that case, but had the media been observing the father’s behavior I am almost certain that there would have been noise about “excessive calm,” and by psychobabble about possible attachment deficits. What that man did was an astonishing gift of awareness and compassion for my own child, and I am eternally grateful to him, but his behavior was decidedly not what we know we would do. We would cry more in public, be unable to leave the house, and probably be unable to bear the sight of the boy who survived.

Finally, I think it’s important to acknowledge that in most cases we are a society that is pathologically uncomfortable with grief. It is some exponentially insane kind of ironic to use someone else’s apparent sadness as a gauge for guilt  in a world in which we are all about the buck-up, get over it and move on. (I blame the Puritans, although the actual explanation is probably more sociologically complex). Many other cultures seem to have a built-in mechanism for acknowledging grief, from wailing over a coffin to legally mandated leave time following a death. The terrible, empty black hole is still there, but there is recognition that some folks need to wail, some need longer than others to get back on track, and everyone in a community shares in a loss. There are pockets of compassion and honesty  here, programs for grieving children, parents and those who have lost a loved one to violence, but mostly the expectation is that you have a few good cries, graciously accept casseroles, and don’t inconvenience anyone else too much with the desperate, wild, unfamiliar and searing pain that threatens to tear you apart. If our only compass at such times is that strange, artificial set of Grief Rules that we learn in this society, what do we do if we don’t feel like crying in public, or if we still feel ravaged after we have worn out the good will of our friends? What if you’re a Kennedy and you want to cry at one of the many family funerals rather than maintaining the requisite stoicism? What if you have lost someone young in shocking and sudden circumstances and you really don’t emerge from your protective daze until weeks after you should have been “healing?”

I have seen people roll their eyes at someone “carrying on” at a funeral, and I have often heard someone told, in the kindest way possible, that it was “time to move on.” Maybe a hobby or a vacation might fill the gaping void – and (if I read the subtext correctly) make the bereaved stop bringing everyone down by moping and being negative. It seems that “normal” involves a prescribed period (maybe six weeks) of intense and observable grief followed by equally visible “getting better.” Anything less is suspicious, and anything more is…suspicious. There is no open-hearted allowance for individual temperament in this standard; we know what we should see and when we should see it, from the moist handkerchief at the funeral to the weak but resolute public reappearance after an appropriate interval. It’s  what we know we would do.

Until we have to do it.

Arguendo

I hate arguing, real or otherwise. I am a consensus-builder, a peace-maker and a finder of common ground. This is not because I was scarred by a combative family as a child, or subject at any point to abusive or explosive anger; it’s really just a matter of temperament. I undoubtedly err on the side of remaining silent when something should be said (you’ve decided against immunizing your baby?!) but in general, being conciliatory  has helped me to make friends, succeed in the workplace, resolve conflict, and keep strong family ties. It may be a character flaw of the highest order, but unless I am advocating for someone weaker, it is always more important to me to be liked than to be right.

If you tell me that you believe in the superiority of Velveeta over Camembert, I will twist myself into a pretzel finding something good to say about Velveeta (it does melt nicely) before I’ll fight with you. When the stakes are higher than the relative merits of cheeses, I will still try to find common ground. I happen to be married to someone of a different political flavor, and while I have certainly not been “converted,” I believe that I have gained valuable insight and tolerance by discussing everything from Iraq to public schools with a conservative. The minute I become doctrinaire, smug or angry, I lose the capacity to listen and understand. It isn’t “caving;”  it’s maintaining civility and refraining from dehumanizing someone because of his opinions. It is not, in my opinion, possible to win anyone’s heart or mind while judging and castigating him, and on the off-chance that I may influence his beliefs, I work incredibly hard at discussing, rather than arguing.

When it’s the real thing, arguing is tense, harrowing, and fraught with peril. Being a person without much of a temper, I have never understood the whole idea of saying nasty things “in anger;” I have, all my life, been convinced that every argument signaled the end of the relevant relationship, even if the other person was my own mother. (As of this morning, you’ll be pleased to know, my  mother and her fierce temper are both still with me). Much as I dislike it, however, I have to give the genuine argument its place in the psychological pantheon. In people of adequate sanity it often serves as a sign that there is an issue requiring resolution, particularly if the same conflict resurfaces repeatedly. It also gives people an opportunity to say things that need to be said, and to hear “the other side.” It can be cleansing, and serve as a wake-up call of white-hot intensity. I still hate it, it still feels cataclysmic, destructive and war-like to me every time, but a legitimate, passionate argument of substance has a purpose.

What I do not credit with a shred of value is arguing “for the sake of arguing.” I know that many folks delight in a good debate, or in provoking “healthy disagreement,” and that is their perfect right. I will be in the corner with my book. If I say “I love ‘Glee’” and  you say “I don’t get it – I tried to watch it but it’s the stupidest thing I ever saw,” where do we go from there? If I say “I’m thinking about trying that new Italian restaurant” and you say “I have no interest in that” you are probably being honest (or a thoroughgoing pain in the ass) but you are also foreclosing any further conversation, and chipping away at any sense of fellowship or mutual sympathy. Why is it not easier to say “hmm” or “tell me why?” rather than shutting the conversation down with the finality of a dead-end? I think, in these situations (both real) that the intention was that I would spar back a little, say why I liked “Glee,” or that I read a great review of the restaurant. I think I was supposed to have been provoked a little, and prodded into defending my position; in both cases I gave up. Life is too short.

I am equally put off by the whole “Devil’s Advocate” thing. I can make out a remote, legitimate purpose in terms of checking an idea for holes.  If one is proposing the roll out of a product intended to change the consumer landscape, it may well be prudent to challenge everything from design to marketing strategy before risking shareholder wrath and public humiliation. If, on the other hand, I declare my personal belief that chocolate chip cookies are the safest thing to bake for a crowd, I do not want to hear “why do you assume everyone likes chocolate chip cookies?” You can tell me to leave out the nuts because of allergies, or suggest that I make two kinds for the sake of variety, but responding negatively with no real solution, just for “fun,” is incredibly annoying.  I don’t want to be rigorously challenged, made to probe more deeply or to have my consciousness raised unless it’s really important. There is, again, that problem of response. Am I meant to say “you’re right; I’m wrong. I have made a terrible, indefensible choice based on false assumptions, and will repair at once to the kitchen to find a better idea?” How about “everyone likes chocolate chip cookies; I’ll show you my data.”

So there’s a line somewhere, and on one side are the controversies necessary to keep our relationships and our government transparent and functional. There are the questions that have to be asked, the assumptions that must be challenged, and the opinions and beliefs that are central to each individual’s sense of justice and morality. If we wish to live meaningful lives, the right to raise, and to refute critical issues must be sacred, and we must all have skins thick enough to withstand criticism and questioning. On the other side of the line are personal preferences, plans and ideas susceptible to many differing and valid viewpoints. There is rarely any need to take up arms over these non-issues, and active inquiry, interest and openness often leads to stronger relationships. My opinion is no more valuable than anyone else’s, and I value common ground more than asserting my individual preferences. I have argued with, and ultimately lost a friend over his insistence that the Holocaust never happened, but I would not spend five minutes sparring with anyone over her taste in sports teams, movies or books.

There is no real answer here (although, if you are inclined to play Devil’s Advocate you may point out that I have stirred the nests of several hornets in this post), only questions about temperament and its intersection with socialization. Am I all touchy-feely and prone to singing “Kumbaya” because I’m sensitive, or because I’m sensitive and raised, as a woman, to be conciliatory and pleasing? Would my self-confidence grow if I challenged everyone on everything, or would I simply be alone more often? Is honest bluntness a public service, or a form of passive-aggressive nastiness masquerading as virtue? Are the only really valuable posts on Open Salon those that focus on controversial issues and incite heated debate, or is there just as much merit in my perpetual navel-gazing? There is no real answer here.

The Places I Can’t Forget

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” -Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

There is a basic tenet in Buddhism that the only reality is what is happening now. The past exists only in our heads, muddled by our own unavoidable perspectives and biases, and the future may or may not come to pass. If a piano falls on you in three seconds, it’s best not to have spent that time separated from the sights, sounds and emotions of the moment.

I find this a helpful construct for many reasons; I tend to be a ruminator and a worrier, frequently leaving the moist, fragrant air of a summer second to regret the actions of a remote January morning, or to fret over what might happen as the air grows crisp and the leaves turn from green to red. I wonder, though, if it is wrong to remember places I loved, that are forever lost to me, and that live on only in my memory and the collective memories of those who actually experienced them. It’s a moot point, really, because I can’t seem to stop myself, and it doesn’t seem to do me any significant harm to remember. This happens, particularly, when I think about my grandmothers’ houses, places that still exist, but which are empty of the people, the atmosphere and any other context that gave them meaning for me.

I have not seen the ocean in more than a year, and I feel keenly the inability to summon, clearly, the sound of waves on the sand, the salt smell in the air, and the sound of gulls. I know, though, that if I jettisoned my obligations, filled my trusty Hyundai with gas and started driving, I could be on the beach in less than 24 hours. I could feel the sand shift under my weight, search for shells and bits of glass, roll up my pant legs and flirt with the lacy white edge of ocean that rushed up to meet me. It’s all still there.

The house in which my mother grew up in Ohio is still there, too, but not really. 5105 Chestnut Avenue in Ashtabula Ohio, built on a red brick road, near the train tracks and a quick walk from the “downtown” where we shopped at Carlisle’s and went, after a Thanksgiving dinner with our Jewish family, to see the parade that brought Santa in for the season. A house built at the turn of the last century, divided into two parts with a series of mysterious tenants inhabiting the smaller, upstairs apartment that originally housed my great-grandmother. Two stern Mormon gentleman with suits on, a kind old lady who invited me upstairs and gave me candy, and a pair of white china swans made to hold bridge snacks. Inside, a foyer with a massive, embroidered chair that we believed to be a throne of some sort, always the smell of something wonderful cooking, the front bedroom with part of an ancient Cleveland Indians sticker on the mirror from when it was my uncles’ bedroom, the back bedroom filled with books, my grandmother’s bedroom redolent of perfume, her dresser covered with the jewelry, perfume and powder befitting a woman who had once been a model, and always been a beauty.

Outside, in warm weather, the sharp smell of Spirea, and a family with kids across the side street. It never occurred to me, as I played with them, that there was almost no furniture in their house, that the windows were broken, or that they were dirty and wore the same clothes all the time. I didn’t understand why my grandmother, head of the local Red Cross chapter, always insisted that they be fed something from the largesse in her refrigerator and pantry; sandwiches, homemade fudge, packets of leftover leg of lamb, noodle pudding and carrots. I didn’t understand until years after her death that the neighborhood was falling apart around her, that the death of the steel industry had left poverty, the end of Carlisle’s and the whole downtown, the conversion of surrounding houses into rentals, and an increasing threat to her safety. To me, the house lives on with its linoleum kitchen floor, the single bathroom with a claw-foot tub, the bathroom cabinets full of fascinating items like Sardoettes and Vitabath. It still smells of Ma Griffe, roasted meat, and the cool metallic smell of the back hall where can goods filled a series of compartments with individually latched doors. It is still my grandmother’s house, the house in which my mother grew up, and the house in which I felt completely adored, safe and cosseted in the way only a band of Hungarian Jews (or Greeks, or Italians, or Mexicans) can cosset a beloved little girl.

My other grandmother lived in North Providence Rhode Island, in a house that I loved maybe more than anyplace else I have ever been. It was on a corner, with an unused grape arbor in the back, and a stone wall overlooking the street on the side. Across the street lived the Feely family, large, Irish, loud, welcoming and (to me) magical. I played with Sean and Michael Feely every waking minute when I was in Rhode Island, and avoided playing with the drippy girl whose name escapes me, she of the Beautiful Chrissy doll, who used to stand outside my grandmother’s house calling plaintively for “Eee-ann” until my father asked her, gently, to knock it off.

Inside, there was Grammy Graham’s kitchen with the wall clock that played a German song, and a bread box with a box of Cheese Nips in it. I learned to make pie crust in that kitchen, rolling out my own scraps, sprinkling them with cinnamon and sugar, and patting them into my own tiny tins. We ate at a trestle table made by my grandfather (which is now my desk) sitting on long benches. It was very New England, from the row of peter tankards on the shelves of the hutch to the braided rugs on the floors made by Grammy over long winters. The bedspreads were white with little bobbly things on them, the bathroom smelled of a combination of Cashmere Bouquet soap and bandages, and the under part of the hutch had a pewter cream and sugar set in which I knew that there were always sugar cubes which I would remove using the tiny tongs, and dissolve on my tongue as I lay on the cool, hardwood floor. I slept, on summer visits, on a screened-in porch which was heaven to me. I was alone, close enough to hear my family moving about on the other side of the wall, cooled by the evening breezes, calmed by the swoosh of passing cars on the street below, feeling very grown up as I read into the night. Years later, long after my grandmother’s death, I persuaded a friend to drive me from Boston to Providence to see the house again. It had been changed; it was no longer the weathered blue-grey of my recollection, the arbor had been removed, and it was not Grammy’s house. I wept inconsolably, undoubtedly making my unsentimental friend wish he had made other plans.

I still dream about both houses, disoriented until I am sufficiently conscious to understand that I am remembering only phantoms. The smells of roasting turkey and baking pie, the texture of nubby bedspreads, and the glimpse of an upstairs neighbor are lost to me except in my own mind. They spill out, no matter how vigilant my attempts to “be here now.” There is a Spirea bush near my own house, and there is a moment every spring when I catch its strong, sharp scent and I am twelve again, bumping up the red bricks of Chestnut Street, stretching after hours in the car and looking up to see my grandmother in the doorway at the top of the stairs. Mostly I live, in the present, but I am secretly pleased that I am so unenlightened that I can still travel back to the places that I preserve, in some dark and dusty memory book,  like the loveliest of pressed flowers.

Apples and Sheep

The real issue is the phone. I am almost at the end of the contract that binds me to Verizon and to my pink Blackberry Curve. It hasn’t been a bad run; I’ve never had an issue with Verizon aside from their draconian tendency to declare a payment “late” five minutes after it’s due, and I mostly like the Blackberry. It has limits, though, the Blackberry – I would like a bigger screen, faster connections, and the ability to play music from my iTunes library. I have long dreamed of a single device that would replace the Blackberry/iPod Touch combo that I now carry everywhere I go for more than five minutes, and that dream could, of course, be answered by an iPhone. That slender, shiny object has long been the Holy Grail of technology about which I have barely allowed myself to dream; we are a Verizon family, I had A Contract, it was Terribly Expensive. In a world filled with war, poverty and oil spills, it seemed beyond petty to spend time thinking about a phone, even a phone that would play my music, offer me Doodle Jump when my oral surgeon left me in the chair, and allow me to use my index finger to scroll swiftly to the last comment on a post. I do think about it, though, growing faintly fevered as I contemplate the possibilities. No more juggling the Blackberry and the iTouch while driving. No more endless scrolling with the little ball to get to the bottom of a screen. The end of receiving calls asking me if I had intentionally made a phone call when I had, in fact, dialed accidentally through pocket or purse.

The good news is that my husband, himself more interested in the new Droid technology, has figured out that I can leave Verizon, buy an iPhone and start a new relationship with AT & T for a mere $100.00 plus a tiny bump in the monthly bloodletting. The bad news is that the possibility of owning an iPhone has rekindled a deep-seated conflict for which there is no therapeutic treatment. I believe, in my heart of hearts, that I am a Mac person. I am writing this on a Toshiba PC, and I have never actually owned a Mac, but I know in some inexorable way that I should have a sleek, white Apple product on my lap. My husband believes that the whole Apple marketing strategy is aimed at hooking rich, white sheep; he reminds me often of the “Simpson’s” episode in which Lisa gets an iPod and becomes, briefly, a worshiper at the shrine of a thinly veiled Stephen Jobs. Do I want to be one of those sheep, he asks me, using an arguably less good operating system, and one which offers me no real benefits or improvements? I do. I really, really do.

They are beautiful objects, those light, white Macs, and I feel certain that being relieved of my heavy, 17 inch black laptop would be the first step on the path to Technological Enlightenment. I also believe that pulling a Mac out of one’s laptop bag at a coffee shop is like a secret handshake; the other Apple People smile a faint, smug smile and admit you into the inner sanctum. I have bought the “I am a Mac” ads, hook, line and sinker. Macs are for people like me, creative types, liberals, music lovers. They probably come with the home page set to “Salon” or “HuffPo.” Never mind that their allegedly intuitive navigation would actually be more difficult for me after 13 years of using a PC, or that I am unlikely ever to make or edit movies. I am emphatically not the dowdy old guy with glasses; I am the hip, young guy from “Dodgeball” who may be dating Drew Barrymore.

I am a sheep.

My parents, my brother and many of my friends have Macs, and I take every possible opportunity to play with them. I love their lightness, their brightness, the cuteness of the icons. I am dazzled and stricken with envy at the ability to sync everything between Mac and iPhone so that one’s calendar, playlists and documents are available in miniature form. At a local bakery I recently saw a college student studying for finals, her high, round table sporting a MacBook, and iPhone and a pristine cup of coffee. She was maybe 20, lithe and blonde, her hair in one of those casual ponytails that made her look breathlessly sexy but would make me look like Kathy Bates tearing down walls in “Fried Green Tomatoes.” I knew, then, with a pang of desire unseemly in a follower of Buddha, that if I could just get that stuff my life would be different. My fingers would grow longer and attractively manicured on the keyboard, my legs would lengthen, and I would undoubtedly develop a faint odor of fresh laundry and spring flowers. My writing would become magnificent, my grocery lists would be miraculous, and every e-mail would resonate with a unique combination of incisive wit and admirable pragmatism. How could it be otherwise?

A sensible, independent person in my position would understand that Droid is the latest and greatest, and that it would be smarter to stick with Verizon, pick a phone that used Droid, wait for their new music library system, and revel in my PC by installing Microsoft 7.0 in all its considerable glory. The grass is sleeker, whiter and cooler on the other side of the fence, but not really any better for me. The iPhone gets me everything I need in one piece of equipment, but I lose a real keyboard, which I kind of love. A Mac would really have no clear benefits for me beyond the aesthetic, and costs considerably more for the privilege of making me A Mac. For the things I actually do, as opposed to my Walter Mitty dreams, my PC and my Blackberry work petty darned well, miraculously well in the great scheme of things. It’s not like I am writing posts with a quill and parchment, or calling to make dinner reservations on a rotary phone attached to the kitchen wall. It’s only, it’s really only that I long for an iPhone with all my heart, and if I can have one, I’m going to have one. If I win the lottery I will also have a Mac as soon as I get the first check from The State of Michigan.

I am a sheep. A fat, white, woolly sheep with an Apple in its mouth.

Matters Domestic

Leroy got a better job so we moved
Kevin lost a tooth, he’s started school
I’ve got a brand new eight month old baby girl
I sound like a housewife
Hey Chel, I think I’m a housewife

-”Anchorage,” Michelle Shocked

My parents both worked, and they had an enviable and sane balance of household duties. She cooked (well), he made our school lunches, did laundry and took us to the dentist, she gardened, he mowed and weeded, they decorated together, and a gnomelike little woman from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula deep-cleaned once a week. We kept our own rooms clean, walked the dog, emptied the dishwasher, set the table and generally did as we were instructed. Not only was my mother not June Cleaver; I was keenly aware that a mere decade before my birth women had been trapped at home whether they wanted to be there or not. My mother’s best friend Joyce, who I loved and admired, said often that she “nearly went crazy” during the years that she tried to stay home with her children before returning to teaching. I grew up vaguely scornful of women who did not work, squandering their hard-won freedom in exchange for days of “ring around the collar” and recipes involving canned, creamed soups. I did not believe that I would ever be married or have children, and my future seemed necessarily to be all about the well-cut suit, the Lean Cuisine and the pleasing of no one but my dynamic and fully actualized self.

The older I got, however, the more I noticed a virulent strain of domesticity creeping into my daily life. My dorm rooms were always “decorated,” and I loved the time I spent arranging furniture, hanging curtains, and creating appealing landscapes of books, colored pencils and found objects. I entertained, “borrowing” glasses and plates from the dining hall, riding a borrowed bike outside City limits to buy wine, and fashioning ersatz canapes from whatever I could find at the Ben Franklin on Main Street. When I had a law office, I decorated it with white furniture, a cozy floral waiting room couch, walls of (non law) books, hanging plants, and bright oil paintings. Classical music played constantly, I burned scented candles, and I made really good coffee that was served in mugs made by a potter friend.

When I got married, after courting my husband mostly in my bright, warm little office-home, I had already had my son. (Definitely not June Cleaver). My plan was to take the baby to work with me, and continue blazing trails of truth and justice. What actually happened was that I was far more interested in the baby than in anything else I was supposed to be doing; after three months Rob and I decided that we could afford for me to close the practice, parcel out my cases, and work very part-time from home. I was a housewife, and I absolutely loved it. I decorated, I crafted, I cooked, I baked, I was delighted by the baby, I reveled in piled of clean, warm laundry and I made “mommy friends” who were also home all day. There was never a single moment when I resented the arrangement, longed to be working again, or felt even remotely “crazy.” It was the best job in the world for me, and I felt incredibly fortunate that I had the option to stay home. Sam was in day care a few hours a week while I worked, and I saw that as an opportunity for him to love another set of people, and to be open to the world.

I know that most families need two working parents, and that there are legions of women who would love to stay home with their children, at least in the early years, and can’t afford to stop working. I also realize that the whole question of who stays home, if anyone, and whether it benefits children is a huge, touchy sore on the body of domestic policy from the personal to the national. We made a decision, for our family, that it was good for me to be at home and involved in Sam’s school life for as long as we could afford it, and that we were willing to make some trade-offs to make it possible to work only part-time, and from home. We didn’t take vacations, we drove cars until they fell apart, we didn’t eat out much, and we rarely had the most expensive or latest gadgets. We saved money because I had no work-related expenses, we paid for minimal daycare, I cooked creatively on a tight budget, and I really enjoyed garage sale hunting and turning discards into useful, household objects.

As time passed, we decided that it would be good if I earned more money; Sam was getting older and more independent, my stepdaughter was out of the house, and the economy was eroding the salary that had made it possible for Rob to support us all comfortably. I work part-time, but occasionally I have a full-time gig; two years ago I was press staff for a federal Congressional campaign and worked more than eight hours a day for several months. Just last week I completed a writing job that consumed most of my waking hours for two months. I felt good about the financial contributions I was able to make, and I thought it was important for Sam to see the example of a strong, working woman, but I was always aware that things at home were falling apart; the kitchen floor got dustier and dustier, laundry was sometimes scrounged from the “dirty” basket and pressed into service, and more than one takeout meal appeared on the table at 6:00. No one died; it’s how lots of families live all the time, of necessity. That didn’t make me like it any better.

At the moment, I am between jobs. The writing project is over, and I don’t start my next “real” job (as Hospitality Coordinator for a local church) until June 1st. I am engaged in a glorious frenzy of polishing wood floors, re-covering throw pillows, making homemade granola, bread and soup, washing dogs and ironing summer linens. I do not wear heels, pearls or a cinch-waisted dress, I do not fix Rob a cocktail and freshen my lipstick when he comes home, and I do not watch soap operas. My brain is fully intact, but my heart is at ease. The sacrifices made by the feminists before me are always on my psychic radar, but surely they were blazing a trail for me to be allowed, not only to be the president of a corporation, but to be the president of the PTA if that’s what I want. I cherish the choices available to me because of their work, and because I was lucky enough to be born white and upper middle class, to parents willing and able to buy me a fine education. I am beyond blessed to be able to balance meaningful work and periods where I am, happily, “just a housewife.”

I wish we lived in a world in which parents, not just mothers, could choose to stay home with their children, at least during their earliest years if they wanted to. It saddens me tremendously that many of the families in which children would most benefit from the daily presence of a parent are those least likely to be able to afford the loss of an income. I wish that the community I live in saw as much worth in making a home for their children as they see in the amassing of “stuff.” For every woman I know who is working because she is passionate about her career, I know another who is working with a heavy heart, supporting SUV payments and an a show home with cathedral ceilings.   Call me a throwback, but I believe with all my heart that the willing making of a home is a job as valuable as any other, and that it should never be viewed with cynicism or contempt. It is, at it’s best, a labor of  love.

Worse Than Wicked

Of the two very worst things I have ever done, one of them is the way I treated my stepdaughter. I had no excuse; I was well-mothered, as were my parents and my husband. There was a veritable catalogue of loving, generous maternal goodness for me to observe and study. My mother-in-law even gave me a good example of stepmothering; she married a man with four children abandoned by their own mother, and raised them with kindness, fairness and incredible energy. They all view her as their “mother” to this day, because she was.

When I met my husband, I knew that he had a little girl. I met her, and found her to be cute, loving but not “my kind of kid.” She was the child not only of my husband, but of a mother who was unsophisticated, and, as it turned out, seriously mentally ill. I didn’t like the fact that my stepdaughter watched cartoons and movies all the time, that she was uninterested in books, and that she preferred fast and processed food. When I found out that I was pregnant, I began to think about the ways in which our child would be raised differently. There would be little or no television, there would be lots of books, there would be fresh, interesting things to eat, exposure to culture, and high academic expectations. In other words, our child would be raised to be me. I was an elitist, a snob, and the product of a family of academics – a boy broke up with me once, partly because all my family talked about was “the kings and queens of England.” The thing is that I liked growing up in my family, and it had produced two responsible, intelligent, cultured, well-educated children. It was what I knew, it seemed to have worked well, and it was natural (I think) that it was a pattern I sought to follow as a mother.

It was clear within months that we could not have weekend visits from my stepdaughter and live my Utne Reader Dream Life. She liked to watch TV, particularly “Rugrats,” which I found absolutely appalling. She liked McDonald’s, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and Chi Chi’s. She was not a reader, or the kind of kid who is instinctively given to learning new things. Her baby brother adored her, and as he grew, I gave up on the TV moratorium and made blue box macaroni for her when I made my own, homemade version for everyone else. I knew that her mother was not well, that life at her other house was sad and hard, and I kept trying to summon the compassion I would have felt for any other child under the same circumstances. Like a physical blockade, there was something that would not let me open my heart, relax, and accept the fact that no real harm was being done to Sam if he spent a few hours on the weekends watching Nickelodeon. I resented that little girl in a way that made my heart nothing better than a small, black rock.

Shortly after we moved into our house, when Sam was three, it became apparent that my husband’s ex was really, really not okay. There had been signs, but the combination of an oblivious GP and her periods of relative normality slowed the inevitable diagnosis. We knew we  could not leave a child in her care, she agreed, and we petitioned for sole physical and legal custody. It was the right thing to do,  and I talked a good game about helping her, keeping her safe, and providing a stable home, but I was devastated. The weekend suspension of my dreams was about to become our life; how could a decent human being tell a little girl who had watched her mother fall apart before her eyes that she was barred from any of the things that made her feel comfortable? How could I institute a TV ban, change her eating habits, make her stop talking baby talk when she was traumatized?

I say to myself now, as a kinder, better, less desperate woman: how could you even think of anything other than loving her and making her feel at home so that she could heal? How could you have taken such human tragedy and made it all about yourself, a privileged, beloved, not-all-that-young woman who traditionally loved and cared for every stray, human and animal that crossed her path? I can’t answer. I can only say that at the time, I saw nothing but my own loss, my own overwhelming sense of duty, failure, and anxiety. I could “do” for her, and I did braid her hair, feed her soup, be her Easter Bunny, but I never felt maternal.

As the years passed, a funny thing happened. It was no lightening bolt miracle of compassion on my part, but a gradual process of allowing my stepdaughter to become fully real and deserving of my help. She struggled with Mean Girls, and I was surprised to find that my impulse to defend her and set things right was swift, strong and true. She struggled with school and I pushed and nagged until we got the school district to test her and make a plan to help her work around the processing disorder that made it difficult for her to retain what she read. In high school, she was given an elaborate assignment involving the writing of numerous poems based on the works of Monet, an assignment that might have given pause to a Master’s candidate in creative writing. I tried to coach her, I tried to get the teacher to work with her in such a way that she had a chance of success, I watched her cry in frustration, and then I wrote it all myself without a shred of guilt. We got an “A+” and the teacher asked whether she could submit it to a magazine. We savored that triumph, my daughter and I.

It never became a bond like I have with my own mother; my stepdaughter and I shared few interests, and I often felt that we were not necessarily speaking the same language. In spite of the gaps, she became my child, and I became a person in her life who she could trust to give good advice, and practical help. Kind of a mother, although I was  a much better mother to my son. I always had difficulty accepting her without judging her choices, comparing her to others, or feeling guilty about what a bad job I had done. I got her through school, I taught her to write thank-you notes, put her napkin in her lap, and do her laundry, but the real love in her life, the deep, uncritical, ridiculously lenient kind of love came from her father and her (real) mother. I felt it only situationally, like waves that threatened to topple me with their force, but later melted into tame and level waters.

As she grew older I saw that she was naturally a kind person, a hard worker, and something of a pragmatist. She was good with babies, animals, grandparents, and the downtrodden. I admire that in her. She trained in her last two years of high school to be a Nurse’s Aid, and works at a local retirement center. Jjust over a year ago she presented us with a serious boyfriend. Earlier this week, they had their first child, a beautiful, shaggy-haired nugget of babyhood named Chloe with whom I fell instantly and irrevocably in love.

I might wish for different circumstances for her; she is only 20 and unmarried, but I have learned not to judge. Well, honestly, I have learned to correct myself after I judge. She loves her baby, and I see in her a kind of natural, calm maternal spirit that is unusual in the high-strung, internet-obsessed Older Mothers of my acquaintance. She doesn’t over think, she doesn’t ruminate, she just loves her daughter, instinctively and well. She has a chance to make the home she always wanted, now, a home without a divorce, without an unpredictable mother, and without a stepmother who cannot find a way to really, thoroughly love and comfort a frightened and damaged child. I want that home for her, because she is a sweetheart, and she deserves it.

I wish her a happy first Mother’s Day, and I hope that some day she’ll understand that, lacking her naturally accepting and sensible nature, it took me a while to become the mother she needed. Knowing her, I’ll get another chance.

Vocation

I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure. -Eric Liddell, “Chariots of Fire”

I have always wanted to write more than I wanted to do anything else (with the possible exception of reading). For a different kind of person, a saner, more confident kind of person, the happy coincidence of desire and objectively confirmed ability would have been a clear directive: Do This Thing. Being, as luck would have it, my neurotic, insecure self, I heard none of the praise, and all of the dire warnings about how writing was something “everybody thought they could do.” I believed those who cautioned that the chances of making a living as a writer ranked somewhere between those of being an NBA point guard or the victim of two lightening strikes. I wrote joyously from the time I was in elementary school, producing “novels” on my red Olivetti Valentine typewriter, but as I aged it began to seem incredibly presumptuous even to say aloud the words “I am a writer.” “I write.” I would not have had the nerve to say “I am a stunning beauty,” (partly because it isn’t true, but bear with me) and it seemed equally, ridiculously and pathetically arrogant to present myself as an artiste. It could be a hobby, a parlour trick, but a Vocation was a serious matter and involved cubicles and suits rather than garrets and thrift store clothing.

Into this teetering high wire act of self-examination came my first really serious boyfriend, who fancied himself a writer.  He did, in fact, write massive novels that I edited for him as I repressed the knowledge that they were truly terrible. (The guy was really, really hot). They had plots, I’ll give him that, but the dialogue was stilted, cliches grew like mushrooms after a soaking rain…you get the picture. Even my pathological desire to be the girlfriend of this moron didn’t prevent me from arguing over and over with him about whether writers were born writers, or whether, in fact, anyone (him, for example) could just buckle down, apply himself and produce a novel. His key word in those arguments was always “marketable.” He believed (and may still believe) that if you write some formulaic novel that people will read in order to distract themselves from actual thinking, it is “writing” and “marketable” and “good enough.” I believe that there is a place for romance novels, “Sweet Valley High” and certain kinds of mysteries, and that while they are technically “written” they are not “art” of any kind. This was a total cultural and personal impasse; I do believe that “anybody can write a book,” but I also believe that I do not want to read something written for a check and not because of a need to communicate something, and to be heard.

It stuck with me, though, the notion that all that really mattered was the ability to create mindless literary Valium. Taking all of the available data, skewing it in such a way that any little ray of hope was blotted out by the immense elephants of pragmatism, I turned down every opportunity to do what I was born to do. After high school I chose to be a musician, because it was harder for me than writing, and therefore Real Work. After I recovered from that spectacular train wreck and spent happy years as an English Major, I chose not to pursue writing again; I went to law school because it sounded sufficiently rigorous, and, again, like Real Work. My parents, far from being proponents of all things “sensible” and lucrative, always believed I was a writer, and did their best to encourage me to take a shot at a writing life, without appearing actually to be offering advice. I heard and dismissed them in the same way I ignored their insistence that I was pretty.

After riddling my feet with bullets for twenty years, I was unable to write anything other than legal memoranda and the odd preschool newsletter. I had killed and buried whatever that thing was that had made me delight in the words and phrases that tasted like fresh-picked berries and stained my soul with their sweet juice. I was resigned to ill-suited jobs that made other people nod in approval. More accurately, I imagined that they were nodding in approval. For the most part, they were thinking about their own lives, unaware that some odd remark made twenty years earlier about the wisdom of a degree in “something practical, like packaging logistics” had been magnified into The Secret of Life by my misguided mind. I wore suits, I followed precedent, and I turned away from that persistent restlessness that came after reading a really great novel or story. “I could do that,” I would think, and then I would remember that everyone had a novel in her desk drawer, everyone at a cocktail party “had a book in him,” anybody could write, and nobody much was terribly good at it.

Through a series of tiny steps involving great trepidation and shame, I started blogging. I blogged about food, because I was interested in it, and it seemed to be a safe way to write without seeming to present myself as A Writer. I started to write about things other than food, and people liked them. I grew tired of writing about beating air into soufflés, photographing dinner before allowing anyone to take a bite, and competing with the power players in the foodie blogging universe. I was hired to write, first for other lawyers, then by a political campaign, then as a ghostwriter. I was being paid to write. I was, perhaps, a writer.

Forty years have passed since I received the Olivetti Valentine for Christmas, and commenced to write my first epic, “Lacey Comstock, Pioneer Girl.” I still feel that the writing I do in exchange for money is legitimate, and that what I write for pleasure is less so. I have not quit my day job(s), I do not believe that I am the next Donna Tartt, or even that my works will be collected and published, along with a regretful Forward after I die. I still look around in book stores and see that “marketability” rules, and that publishers cannot afford to indulge the writer who spins a beautiful phrase unless the phrases add up to something worthy of critical, if not popular approbation. My eyes are clear, my dreams are in check, and I can honestly say that I have expunged from my mind the image of my name in the New York Times Book Review.

It is, however, my true vocation to write. It takes nerve for me to type those words, to let them stay there, drawing attention to themselves at the beginning of the paragraph, obvious even to the most casual skimmer. I have to let it stay, though, because it really is the Secret of Life for this life, which (barring karmic recycling) is the only one I get. I dishonor my parents, who have believed in me all these years, any sort of Cosmic Organizer, and myself if I hide my desk light under the bushel of stark terror. The next time someone asks me what I “do,” I will look them in the eye and tell them I am a writer. Then I will devalue the proclamation with nervous laughter and seventy two qualifiers, but…it’s a start.

Tattoo

For most of my life, tattoos have been in the category of “things other people do.” My parents find them vulgar. Growing up, my main exposure was in the context of shows like “Mannix” in which the Bad Person often sported a lightening bolt or dragon on his malevolent forearm. In mysteries, too, the “distinctive tattoo of a Phoenix” was often the means by which the Bad Person was rooted out, despite having covered the tell-tale ink with clerical garb, or robes of mysterious Eastern cloth. Aside from various and sundry Bad Persons, tattoos were the province of Holocaust survivors, and men who had been in the military as impressionable youths. They were, those images, numbers and anchors, signals of something dark, regrettable, or offensive.

Many years later, I began to notice the presence of lighthearted, “cute” tattoos, particularly on women. My son’s second and third grade teachers both had a tattoo in the vicinity of their respective ankles, and they were both fine teachers, good mothers, and unaffiliated (to my knowledge) with anything particularly sinister or indiscreet. I started looking at tattoos, admiring fine art, asking strangers what the words or symbols meant, and did it hurt to have it done there? I discovered that many people I knew had a tattoo I had never noticed, and that some were signs of misspent and alcohol-enhanced youth, but most had great personal significance. A honeymoon tattoo, a tribute to someone dearly loved and lost, a symbol of deep religious significance.

A shift took place during my Tattoo Studies, and I began to see nothing unusual about people who had covered large parts of their bodies with ink. My husband’s nephew enthralled me at a family picnic describing his plans to have his late father’s face tattooed onto one of his legs. This plan would, at one time,  have provoked no response on my part other than a secret conversation with my husband about possible ways to talk the kid out of doing such a thing. I was fascinated. I wanted to know how they would get the picture on his skin, how big it would be, was it a common thing to do, would it hurt, so close to the prominent shin bones of a slender young man. I read “Tricycle” and noticed that many of the Buddhist monks with shaved heads and saffron robes were extensively tattooed.

I wanted one. I thought about placement, size and design. I first considered my wrist where it could easily be hidden by a watch or a sleeve when spending time with my mother. I favored the ubiquitous ankle, but thought that maybe it should then be done only in black to avoid clashing with the colorful skirts and sandals I wear in the summer. I wondered whether anyone else in the world worried about such things. I saw a beautiful, tiny heart on the back of a young woman’s neck, but decided that for my purposes, my tattoo needed to be visible to me. My purposes had evolved, over time, from the “cute-” a whisk, a pencil, two hearts for Rob and Sam – to the more serious. I wanted either a tiny dharma wheel or “om mani padme hum” to remind me to stop and be in the moment, compassionate, and fully alive.

I ran a trial balloon past my mother, thinking that perhaps she had become accustomed to prevalence of tattoos in polite society. “What if I got a tattoo?” I began, tentatively, “I mean, I’m not saying I’m going to do it…just ‘what if?’”

“You can never be buried in a Jewish cemetary,” she began, “and it looks cheap. Who do you know that would mutilate herself like that?” There were literally a hundred people, but I interpreted the question as rhetorical, and moved on to safer topical ground.

I spent too much time thinking about the tattoo. I didn’t have the cash, and it was such a serious commitment. It is “mutilation,” strictly speaking; it’s the insertion of needles into your flesh, chemicals under your flesh, and it involves the risk of infection, scarring and pain. I have watched too many TLC documentaries not to know that there are many instances of post-tat remorse, and that the cost of removing one’s prison tattoos or the name and picture of an ex is high in both dollars and nerve endings. What if I hated it? What if, following my already flaky spiritual path, I decided that I wanted to practice Judaism and to be buried in a Jewish cemetary? What if it stretched or shrunk into some unrecognizable form as the result of weight gain or loss? What if it really, truly did mean that I was in some way cheap, tacky, and/or nothing more than a Dedicated Follower of Fashion willing to make an irrevocable mistake in order to enjoy three weeks of feeling like one of the cool kids?

I haven’t decided. The cash will be available today; I’ll put it in the bank and think some more. I don’t really need a permanent, inked reminder to be mindful; it actually seems to violate the most basic tenets of Buddhism to require such external motivation. I still fear judgment, categorization and dismissal. I do not fear the pain. I need to sort out the difference between an expression of freedom and some subconscious desire to seem like someone who is free. I should be thinking about a hundred other things, like work, laundry, genocide, planting tomatoes and marriage equality. Instead, I find myself imagining a tiny, black dharma wheel hovering somewhere above my right ankle. A discreet prayer across the top of my left wrist. A message to myself and to the world, about something I have not yet understood, something inchoate, urgent, and suspect. Something I need to hear, whether or not it is ever broadcast on my flesh.

The Best of Us

There are many responses to a death, all of which are understandable attempts to understand and “handle” something alien and painful. We resort to cliches and saccharine, and people who were completely objectionable in life are lionized and worshiped. He or she was “the best,” best friend, best father, best partner imaginable regardless of actual, historical fact. What else would you say – “he was a son of a bitch and he talked on his cell phone in restaurants?” We also tend to make each death part of our own story, to draw into the fold of our personal mythology a person who, in life, might have been peripheral. High school friends unseen for thirty years, grocery store clerks with whom we exchanged a total of thirty words…they seem larger and more important merely by virtue of being dead. In our shock, we magnify every exchange, allowing ourselves to expand the relationship until we were closer people, better people, perhaps people who meant something to one another. It may be regret, projection, or merely some vestigial hard wiring that makes folks more popular in death than they were in life.

Sometimes, though, we lose a genuinely amazing person. I’ve lost one, and I’ve struggled for days with how to write about her without sounding like the stickiest, and ickiest of the post hoc fans. Bear with me.

I’ll start with the ending, so you won’t feel manipulated into some artificial kind of shock. It’s too cheap for my purposes, that reflexive indrawn breath that comes from falling in love with a character who is killed off too early. Carrie Joy Hurst died last Friday afternoon when she lost control of the motorcycle she was riding, and collided with a stationary object. She left her husband Brent, and three children. She was thirty-five. So now you know that part.

I met Carrie a few years ago because she played in a local band called The Fruitflies. We knew the keyboard player from one place, and the lead guitarist from someplace else, and it seemed inevitable that we would go to check them out at some point. It was a huge adventure for me; my husband has conversations with people about the rock concerts of days gone by, but I have no such history. When he asks someone which time they saw Jethro Tull at Cobo Hall, I have nothing to offer. I saw Peter, Paul and Mary once, without Mary (she was sick) and Don Mclean in the 70s. Other than that, it was all classical, all the time. I was nervous about going to some biker bar called Double Deuce, uncertain about appropriate biker bar attire, worried that my inexperience and complete lack of cool would make our friends embarrassed to have me in the audience. I was also thrilled at the fact that when it was over, no matter what horrible things I said or did, I would be able to say that I had been in a biker bar.

The bar was dark, the tables were vaguely sticky, and there were lots of long-haired guys in bandanas, with and without leather chaps, and the women who drank, rode and lived with them. I needn’t have worried about my clothes. There were lots of tattoos, serious shooters of pool, and waitresses who seemed to know every guy in the place. At the front, under a wall-mounted shrine to mixed cycle parts, was the band. Michael was at the keyboard with his long, auburn ponytail and trademark Australian rancher hat. There were “groupies” in Fruitflies t-shirts who seemed to be helping, not helping, milling around and/or drinking. It all seemed to be fine.

There was a “girl” in the band, and I could see her, tall and blonde, wearing overalls over a striped jersey and looking like she was possibly 19 or 20. I remembered Michael rhapsodizing about this person. He’d been skeptical about a woman singing some of the songs, but “Carrie was amazing.” He had also told me that she was surpassingly warm, and kind, and had been a great help to him during a painful divorce. From my vantage point near the pool tables, nursing some magical kind of beer that came in a self-cooling can, it was hard to believe that the  girl I saw across the room was the Joni Mitchell/Oprah combination we’d been promised. Her hair was in braids, for God’s sake; she resembled nothing so much as L’il Abner’s backwards cousin Ida Mae.

They started playing, and it was good – I watched the girl, Carrie, who wasn’t featured in the first few numbers. She played some kind of finger cymbals and sang harmony, and I was just watching her move. She had no self-consciousness, as if she entered the stream of the song and bade farewell to the bricks and mortar around her. She was graceful, and sexy, and completely uncontrived. When she sang, Dido’s “White Flag,” The Cranberries’ “Linger,” a scorching version of “Me and Bobby McGee,” I developed a full-blown girl crush. Ida Mae could sing, man.

On a break, Michael came to out table to drink with us, and Carrie stopped by to meet us. Her braids were falling apart from sweat and motion, and she had a tiny diamond in one of her nostrils. She put a gentle hand on Michael’s shoulder as she talked, and she smiled constantly. There was nothing phony about it; she was a really, genuinely, happy woman. I knew from Michael that she didn’t love her job, that she really loved her kids, that she’d been a stay-at-home mom for several years, and what I saw was that this ordinary woman with an ordinary life was giving off sparks of joy that were nearly palpable. She was damned happy to be there, with us, singing for twenty-five bucks and free drinks. It would have been wrong not to be happy with her, so I relaxed, had another beer, and felt the warm glow of alcohol and admiration soothe my soul.

Over the years, we saw Carrie often. She and Brent-the-lead-singer fell in love, divorced their respective spouses and married each other. It should have been a scandal and an occasion for gossip and disapproval, but mostly it wasn’t. They loved each other’s children, they respected their exes and treated them fairly, and when they were together, it was like having an audience with a four-handed, two-hearted deity of love. Every time I saw Carrie, I wanted to be her, to crawl out my own, uptight skin and spend a day relaxed, happy, and able to surf life’s killer waves without crashing. She was so easy, so beautiful in her imperfections, that I found myself wondering how to get like that – it wasn’t the superficial things like the tats or the piercings, she had what us high-falutin types call “joie de vivre.” She was at home in her body. She was a friend of the universe. One serndipitous evening we walked to our neighborhood park to hear another friend’s band, only to find Brent, Carrie and their assorted children. We joined them, and  I watched their children throw a Frisbee together, the bigger kids careful to aim low enough to give the little ones a fair chance. I watched Carrie draw a quilt around her shoulders, lean back into Brent, and sink into the cool evening, the music and the grace of being right with the world.

We were friends, and we were groupies, following them from the biker dive, to an outdoor Fourth of July concert, to the bowels of a college basement bar with beer in plastic cups. We were always just a little puffed up to be with the band; a seismic shift for my controlled, sardonic self. Then, of course, Carrie rode into that stationary object and that part of our life was over. At the funeral, Brent sang John Lennon’s “Real Love,” accompanying himself on the guitar. Carrie’s son and Brent’s daughter spoke, and if you didn’t know that one of them was a stepchild, you would never have guessed. A photo montage showed Carrie smiling, holding her children, marrying Brent in waders and a white veil, and singing. After the service I found Michael and hugged his bony frame, the brim of his hat bumping my hair. “She was the best of us,” he said. Ordinarily, nine times out of ten, I would have chalked that up to Post Hoc Deification Syndrome. As it happens, though, he was right.

Torch & Twang

Let’s be real, here. People who grow up like I did are not often country music fans. Aside from my mother’s odd taste for the sounds of the Grand Old Opry (acquired during her years at Wellesley, no doubt) I knew no country music unless it was from one of those “Willie Nelson’s Greatest Hits” ads that ran constantly on our local CBS station. Well, sometimes I caught a little bit of “Hee Haw” if no one changed the channel in time. Suffice it to say that “another somebody done somebody wrong song” was never my music of choice.

I like irony, subtly, and a literary lyric. Like my tea, I tend to like my music un-sweet, unless the sweetness is only one of many layers and has no cloying quality. There was a kind of song that made me queasy from the time I was very small:  ”Baby, I’m a want you,” and “Cherish” come to mind. Well, and that other kind; the kind where a dog dies and is carried out to sea, or someone (or something) named “Wildfire” is apparently lost. There was a kind of broad, needy, whiny quality about those songs, and that Ick Factor seemed to exist in every country song I heard. “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain?” Seriously?! Every song seemed to be a celebration of Good Ole Boys, brainless women who perpetually fell in love with (and were jilted by) Cads, and a blessedly unfamiliar world of tractors, church, and girls made to wear hideous homemade garments and/or sell themselves to feed their families. It was hyperbolic, sentimental and ridiculous.

Joni Mitchell sang “I wish I had a river/That I could skate away on,” and I knew exactly what she meant. I did not require her to explain that she was unhappy, why she was unhappy, or that she was unhappy because she had broken up with a guy named Jeff. I got it. I spent hours parsing Beatles’ lyrics for meaning (stymied mainly by my inadequate supply of psychedelic drugs) and posting lyrics I loved on my bedroom walls. “Skating away on the thin ice of a new day;” “I have become comfortably numb;” “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain.”  The words were poetry, and they spoke to me, as good poetry does, in beautiful abstract tongues that offered me the answers to my adolescent problems if I was willing to do a little thinking. I had no truck with musical pablum.

In college, at the peak of my black-wearing, Marlboro-smoking archness,I took a break from my regular classical show and filled two-hours of radio with a mockery of country. I assumed a Southern drawl, used the name “Candy Memphis,” and played anything country that I could find in the record closet. I spun “Stand by Your Man,” and got my friend Wallis (who is really from Memphis) to call in live and request something called “This Bed’s Not Big Enough for the Three of Us”  in his more authentic accent. It was one of the finest mornings of my young life.

In the mid 90s, I met Cassie. She was the secretary in the law office below mine (I couldn’t afford a secretary), and we went to lunch together most days. She was a revelation to me, with her tough life story, her big wedding plans, and her propensity to dip her fries in her Frosty. She was un-ironic, an open book, untouched by cynicism or snark. Her fiance watched Nascar races and football games, and she watched with him. She had a cat named “Squeaker” and kept pictures of him on her desk. She read bride magazines, and went to blockbuster romantic comedies. When we took her car to lunch in the summer (my 10-year-old Honda had no air conditioning) we listened to country music.

By the end of August, I had fallen in love with country music. It wasn’t the old-style country of Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty; it was the first wave of “new country.” I listened to Garth, Clint, Shania, Trisha, Lorrie, and Alan. I loved the sad stories, and teared up the first time the car was filled with the melancholy strains of  ”Don’t Take the Girl.” I smiled at “Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.” I belted out “Friends in Low Places” and invited my (imaginary) drinking buddies to “Prop me up beside the jukebox” when I died.  With kd lang and Mary Chapin Carpenter as gateway drugs, I Went Country.

There was something I needed in that music, something about sweetness, and wholesomeness without edge or cynicism. There were songs about the joys of summer days, falling in love, staying in love, and raising a family that were some kind of balm for my single, 30-year-old heart. I remember sitting in my own car at the end of a work day, hearing Pam Tillis sing “Sweetheart’s Dance,” and bursting into tears. I didn’t really want to be what I was any more, I didn’t care about being cool and detached, I wanted a sweetheart. I wanted a sweetheart and a house with a porch, and a pie on the windowsill and a jar full of fireflies. I wanted Aunt Bee next door, and The Saturday Evening Post on the coffee table, and a boy who played baseball. I wasn’t necessarily going to wear gingham and call everybody “honey,” but I was sure as hell not seeing myself in a black suit with 3-inch heels and The Virgin Suicides as bedtime reading.

Within three years, I was married to my sweetheart, and the mother of a potentially baseball-playing boy (We tried, but I think that part of my fantasy life is over). I now have a house with a porch, and although there is rarely a pie on the windowsill…there could be. I have swung back to some kind of center, musically and personally; there’s a little Keith Urban and a lot of old Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson on my iPod, but it coexists with “Vampire Weekend,” “Spoon” and a little Jay-Z. I still admire the incredible voices of most country singers, voices that put Britney and Gaga to shame. I also admire the singer-songwriters who craft poems and set them to music in ways that are sometimes as sublime as anything I loved in my youth. I have choices, about what I listen to, and whether I’m feeling more Edie Sedgwick or Aunt Bee on any given day, and that’s part of what makes life worth living.

I guess something just had to give, back in the days when I Went Country. I don’t know that it happens to everyone, and it certainly doesn’t happen in a 120 degree car with Pam Tillis on the radio. I’m sure that during that 3 minute song I felt myself change. I understood something, I  took a leap of faith from the safe ground of self-protective cynicism to the unknown territory of admitting that I wanted something as common as a family and a home. I identified with that raw, patent need for love and safety that I had dismissed and mocked for more than thirty years. I would never, in my current incarnation, pick country music as my favorite genre, or even my second favorite. It might make third behind classical and alternative; then again, it might get bumped by classic rock. In a Tom Petty-George Strait smack down, well, never mind. All I know is that when I needed a catalyst it was there for me in all of its resplendent sweetness and spiritual generosity. For that I will always be grateful.