In 1968, I was fourteen years old, a freshman in high school, and on the drill team of the Carlisle High School Marching Band. Being that our sports teams were the 'Carlisle Indians,' our drill team was known as the 'Indianettes.' This meant that, not only did we march in parades, but, almost every Friday night, we would get on a school bus and be transported to other schools and march on their fields at football halftime. It served as a guaranteed way to be out with my friends.
We had band practice every Saturday, marching for hours, all over the football field, and getting yelled at by our music teacher and band leader, Mr. Wyrick. Before each practice would begin, Mr. Wyrick would tell us that when and if he had to call us out by name and yell at us, we were not to take it personal. He assured us that he wasn't meaning anything by it, except directing us as to where we were supposed to be marching, or standing. He said that we were 'working together as one big machine,' and when he yelled, he was just trying to get the machine to run smoother. He gave us an analogy of 'keeping us oiled, and working out the kinks.'
While he stood on a bench on the edge of the field, he yelled and cussed us all out through a bull horn. He would yell so hard that blue veins would actually pop out of his forehead! At first, it scared me, but the older kids stood on the field and snickered while he referred to us as a bunch of 'losers and shit heads.' He would call out the kids that laughed and said, "You can laugh all you want to, but you're still a big machine made up of a bunch of little-bitty nothings from the middle of nowhere, and that's all you're ever going to be!"
We quickly learned how to judge for ourselves what we were supposed to be doing, to save the poor bastard from stroking out. When practice was over, he would have a big smile on his face and graciously thank us for our hard work, and point out the slightest improvements that any of us made.
After several weeks of marching in the cold wind and rain, we developed some not-so-elaborate formations. Some of us were bright enough to be bored with, and ashamed of them, especially when we marched on the football fields of other schools.
For instance: One of our routines involved marching out onto the field to the tune of the jingle from the 'Excedrin Headache' commercial. The first group marched in the form of a person's head. Two lines, marching in single file was his throat, and a group of us marched closer to the bleachers, forming an oval shape, which was supposed to be a person's stomach. At the end of the song, around the last six beats, and a drum roll, the drill team captain, Jeanie Shumaker, and her very best 'frenemy,' Vicki Carpenter, would appear on the field. Each would be carrying a large, white, circular piece of cardboard, with a big letter 'E' on each of them. They were supposed to be a couple of Excedrin aspirins.
They would run past the kids that were supposed to be a pair of lips, opening as they ran through. Then, they would run in the center of two marching straight lines of the kids that were the throat. When they finally reached the oval shape of us that were supposed to be the stomach, the cymbals clanged, and the trumpets and tubas would do a, 'TA-DA!'
After that, everything stopped to a silent stillness. The crowd in the bleachers would be sitting there, very perplexed. At the same time, all at once, the whole town took one big breath and said, "Huh?"
As we marched off the field to a pathetic rendition of, "Winchester Cathedral," the feeling of disappointment among us kids, was so thick, that we couldn't march away fast enough!
The few times that I ever looked out at the crowd of people in the stands, they were pointing and laughing at us. As I marched, I felt both anger and embarrassment. There was never any 'applause.'
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
TRADITIONAL NOT SO MUCH by Lorelei Black
I often tell my best friend Asia that had I been born a beautiful gay Turkish man like I was supposed to, I would’ve coaxed Damien’s wavering bisexuality out into full force and she would have been my One True Woman. Then again, my idea of a romantic compliment is telling Damien he would be great as a twink in a gay porn. Thankfully, Asia understands this statement as the highest honour I could give her and she laughs and tells me we could just get married while we were in Montreal. I think this is an excellent plan -- then I would go marry Damien and she would go marry her boyfriend and we could spark a Supreme Court case asking whether we are committing bigamy or not seeing that the United States does not federally recognize gay marriages.
This sounds pretty exhausting, though, and we’re slightly too mentally ill and physically disabled to deal with something like that.
We are the sort of best friends who talk in broken, incomplete sentences or at times even just noises and understand each other as communicating full, insightful thoughts. Yes, we’re one of those. We amuse ourselves by playing what we call The Starbucks Game, where we walk into the Starbucks section of a Barnes & Noble and talk about the most disturbing aspects of our lives to date until we can clear out everyone in the area. This usually happens accidentally, though. We have no concept of ‘appropriate’ topics because neither of us have said anything to each other that we’ve found too disturbing, graphic, or just gross.
While pretty much all eight of my friends are my best friends, there is something about me and Asia that is different, I think, that while my friends and I all love each other, she and I practically share a mind. She’s the only person I could spend every day on end with and not want to stab myself in the eye, and I’m not even engaged to her. I even take her to family functions like she’s related to me or something. Damien’s family’s going to start feeling suspicious about something soon, even if they’re not sure what it is. But she’s the only person who can keep me sane through the crazy.
This Thanksgiving, Asia was not here, so I went with Damien to his brother’s new big house that Damien and his sister are so jealous of and he apologizes to me that he can’t be his supposedly wildly more successful brother. He doesn’t get that I’m not jealous because I’d rather not have a house with woodrot and be married to a sexually repressed bad dresser who works at a mega church. In any case, the whole family was there on both sides, and it was intensely awkward for me. Most people still aren’t sure about what to say to me or what topics to bring up, partly because they don’t know me, partly because I’ve been known to fly off my handle at their father.
“So what the hell is on my plate?” I whisper to Damien.
“Um, well, that’s turkey with gravy… here’s some creamed onions… those are sweet potatoes… and stuffing.”
“What’s in stuffing?”
“I actually don’t know.”
Marilyn, his mom, is now clued into the fact that someone, somewhere, is asking a question. “What’s wrong?”
“This is the first American Thanksgiving Lorelei’s ever had, so she‘s never had stuffing. She wants to know what‘s in it.”
Now everyone has heard: a first-generation American sits at their table, someone whose parents are from a different country.
“Is it really?!” Damien’s sister-in-law squeals. “I’m glad it could be our Thanksgiving! Do you like it?”
“Yes, it’s great, thanks.”
“What do you usually have, then? Do you not have turkey?!” Everyone is looking at me with wide-eyed anticipation.
“Well, um, we do have turkey, but Romanians don’t understand gravy, so we have mujdei. I guess Americans would call it aioli. We have mashed potatoes and we have icre. It’s a dip made with bread, onions, olive oil, and fish roe.”
Every time I tell people what I eat on Thanksgiving, I consider giving them some bizarre story about an ancient tradition where a virgin must walk through a field of chickens and see if it rains before the feast can begin. Thankfully, by the time I get around to describing icre, it has exactly the effect I’d have been going for. Everyone is disturbed, for some reason, and they say it must be interesting to be having a ‘regular’ Thanksgiving now, and they stop talking to me.
“Why does everyone like stuffing? I don’t get it,” I say as I work on the bland comfort food.
“I don’t know, darling, but you’re not making me eat fish roe.”
At least the kids are cute.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
ALONE by Christina Franke
Alone, I look out the window, I look and keep looking, no matter what is in front of me. I have a book, I always have a book, but on the bus I don’t pick it up, or when I do, I put it down right away, and keep looking.
I have three days ahead of me, on this bus, 75 hours from San Francisco to New York City. When I’m moving all that has worried me, all that has made me unhappy, goes away. All that matters is the movement, the movement is enough to occupy me, looking, looking out the window. I don’t care if I’m looking at grey and ugly strip malls, sad, broken-down houses, or desolate farms, I take in everything, every detail. I imagine the lives of the people in these places, I watch the mothers walking with their children, the old men talking on street corners, everything is of equal interest.
And I watch the people on the bus, who get on, ride 100 miles and then get off again. In the Midwest, I see overweight women in thin cotton dresses, burdened with bags and young children, eating sandwiches, feeding their children soda pop as we drive along. I watch the sky, dark, looming, remembering that we’re in tornado country, afraid. We drive into the darkness for hours, days it seems. People get on and off, on and off. I stay in my seat, looking out the window. I eat in rest stops, grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee, pieces of apple pie, I brush my teeth in dirty bathrooms, trying not to touch anything. People on the bus are silent or murmur softly to each other. A child cries, then stops at a sharp word. I talk to no one, sitting in my window seat, looking out the window, never meeting anyone’s eyes, concentrating on the buildings and farms and trucks out the window.
Chicago. I have three hours before the bus leaves that will take me to New York City. I take a shower in the bus terminal, amazed that the Greyhound Bus company has thought of such a wonderful thing, a shower after two days sitting on a bus. When I get on the bus, clean with wet hair and a face that feels shiny from the soap, the driver tells us that this bus will go non-stop to New York. We leave at night and we’ll arrive at NYC’s Port Authority some time the next morning. We’ll only stop at rest stops, not to drop people off or pick people up. We’re all – the whole busload – we are all going to NYC.
Most of the passengers are black, many of them young. They’re thin, full of energy, talk, noise. I watch them, fascinated. They laugh with each other, they talk and talk, and as the night goes on, they all fall asleep, one by one. I sleep too.
In the morning, in the grey light, crossing Pennsylvania, crossing New Jersey, the talk starts again, the laughter, the joking, the stories. This is not the Midwest, these are not Midwesterners, these are city people, people going to NYC! I feel excited, I feel their excitement, and I know that they are the people I want to be with.
Way out on the flats of New Jersey, I see the Empire State Building first, then the other buildings of the Manhattan skyline. I weep with pleasure.
I have three days ahead of me, on this bus, 75 hours from San Francisco to New York City. When I’m moving all that has worried me, all that has made me unhappy, goes away. All that matters is the movement, the movement is enough to occupy me, looking, looking out the window. I don’t care if I’m looking at grey and ugly strip malls, sad, broken-down houses, or desolate farms, I take in everything, every detail. I imagine the lives of the people in these places, I watch the mothers walking with their children, the old men talking on street corners, everything is of equal interest.
And I watch the people on the bus, who get on, ride 100 miles and then get off again. In the Midwest, I see overweight women in thin cotton dresses, burdened with bags and young children, eating sandwiches, feeding their children soda pop as we drive along. I watch the sky, dark, looming, remembering that we’re in tornado country, afraid. We drive into the darkness for hours, days it seems. People get on and off, on and off. I stay in my seat, looking out the window. I eat in rest stops, grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee, pieces of apple pie, I brush my teeth in dirty bathrooms, trying not to touch anything. People on the bus are silent or murmur softly to each other. A child cries, then stops at a sharp word. I talk to no one, sitting in my window seat, looking out the window, never meeting anyone’s eyes, concentrating on the buildings and farms and trucks out the window.
Chicago. I have three hours before the bus leaves that will take me to New York City. I take a shower in the bus terminal, amazed that the Greyhound Bus company has thought of such a wonderful thing, a shower after two days sitting on a bus. When I get on the bus, clean with wet hair and a face that feels shiny from the soap, the driver tells us that this bus will go non-stop to New York. We leave at night and we’ll arrive at NYC’s Port Authority some time the next morning. We’ll only stop at rest stops, not to drop people off or pick people up. We’re all – the whole busload – we are all going to NYC.
Most of the passengers are black, many of them young. They’re thin, full of energy, talk, noise. I watch them, fascinated. They laugh with each other, they talk and talk, and as the night goes on, they all fall asleep, one by one. I sleep too.
In the morning, in the grey light, crossing Pennsylvania, crossing New Jersey, the talk starts again, the laughter, the joking, the stories. This is not the Midwest, these are not Midwesterners, these are city people, people going to NYC! I feel excited, I feel their excitement, and I know that they are the people I want to be with.
Way out on the flats of New Jersey, I see the Empire State Building first, then the other buildings of the Manhattan skyline. I weep with pleasure.
Friday, December 3, 2010
STARTING OVER by Arthur Kahn
My observation is that when most people reach their early 60's their lives have more or less leveled out. Sure, this is a vast over simplification, but let's face it, When you're in your early 60's you've been working for over 40 years, give or take. Many people look forward to retirement as their own private Nirvana. For most, it's a pretty mundane Nirvana. For example, people who sew look forward to sewing for more than 2 or 3 hours a night. Golfers? I'm not a golfer (whew) but the people I know who golf seem to be unable to not golf. I'm not a fan of the sport (although I'm probably one of the few people who enjoy watching golf on TV – go figure) but those I know who golf derive true joy from it.
What I've described could be called “anticipatory retirement”. You're staring at the not too distant future. A future in which you reap the supposed rewards of having earned the chance to step off the whirling dervish that most people think is the whirl of life.
Me? Not on your life. My first (there were many) “mid life crisis” started in my mid-40's and ended right after my 50th birthday with a heart attack and open heart surgery with a pacemaker chaser.
At the time, I was working for a lawyer in Albany, N. Y. His self professed management style was “terrorist”, this all before we knew what terrorism really was. Mind you, I was not the greatest employee. A few days before my infarct ( the technical term for my heart attack was myocardial infarction – which feels really good on the tongue when you say it) I had been berated upon the discovery of hundreds of pornographic pictures on my hard drive at work. Thank God he didn't know, or suspect, that I would stay late at the office and have cyber sex or phone sex. Now, I'll grant you that, as a lawyer, I should have known that there is no right of privacy at the work place. Unfortunately, my life worked on the principle that lust trumped everything.
After initially surviving the heart attack (there were a few hairy moments, such as a precipitous drop in my heart rate after I was brought to Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, NY) it was decided that I needed to be chauffered to Albany Medical Center for a cardiac catheterization to determine if I needed heart surgery. The result was that I was scheduled for a coronary artery bypass graft (CABGx2 – pronouced cabbage), a double bypass. Better than three or four, no?
So, I'm lying in the hospital. I'm not too far from my office. I got along well with the staff, other than the terrorist, so I called and asked if they would mind bringing me a decaf iced coffee from this terrific coffee place near the office, The Daily Grind. One of them showed up a short time later, iced coffee in hand. With a letter “from Dennis”, the terrorist. With that she made an abrupt departure. As soon as I read the letter I understood the hasty retreat. Instead of a note of encouragement and perhaps a check, I was fired. Canned. Terminated. And, of course, no more health insurance.
Sometimes it pays to have other, more serious issues to deal with when faced with a crisis in one part of your life. Since I was about to undergo open heart surgery I mercifully couldn't dwell on what was, in the moment, an ordinary crisis, compared to what was coming. Open heart surgery is pretty serious stuff. What they do is put you on a refrigerated table to lower your body temperature to about 88 degrees. Then they put you into a coma (I had made a pact with the anesthesiaologist that he wouldn't catheterize my junk until I was out) and then they take a surgical steel sawzall and saw your sternum apart. They then take a rib retractor, separate your ribs and expose your heart. Next they hook up your major blood vessels to a pump. Then they kill you.
What I've described could be called “anticipatory retirement”. You're staring at the not too distant future. A future in which you reap the supposed rewards of having earned the chance to step off the whirling dervish that most people think is the whirl of life.
Me? Not on your life. My first (there were many) “mid life crisis” started in my mid-40's and ended right after my 50th birthday with a heart attack and open heart surgery with a pacemaker chaser.
At the time, I was working for a lawyer in Albany, N. Y. His self professed management style was “terrorist”, this all before we knew what terrorism really was. Mind you, I was not the greatest employee. A few days before my infarct ( the technical term for my heart attack was myocardial infarction – which feels really good on the tongue when you say it) I had been berated upon the discovery of hundreds of pornographic pictures on my hard drive at work. Thank God he didn't know, or suspect, that I would stay late at the office and have cyber sex or phone sex. Now, I'll grant you that, as a lawyer, I should have known that there is no right of privacy at the work place. Unfortunately, my life worked on the principle that lust trumped everything.
After initially surviving the heart attack (there were a few hairy moments, such as a precipitous drop in my heart rate after I was brought to Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, NY) it was decided that I needed to be chauffered to Albany Medical Center for a cardiac catheterization to determine if I needed heart surgery. The result was that I was scheduled for a coronary artery bypass graft (CABGx2 – pronouced cabbage), a double bypass. Better than three or four, no?
So, I'm lying in the hospital. I'm not too far from my office. I got along well with the staff, other than the terrorist, so I called and asked if they would mind bringing me a decaf iced coffee from this terrific coffee place near the office, The Daily Grind. One of them showed up a short time later, iced coffee in hand. With a letter “from Dennis”, the terrorist. With that she made an abrupt departure. As soon as I read the letter I understood the hasty retreat. Instead of a note of encouragement and perhaps a check, I was fired. Canned. Terminated. And, of course, no more health insurance.
Sometimes it pays to have other, more serious issues to deal with when faced with a crisis in one part of your life. Since I was about to undergo open heart surgery I mercifully couldn't dwell on what was, in the moment, an ordinary crisis, compared to what was coming. Open heart surgery is pretty serious stuff. What they do is put you on a refrigerated table to lower your body temperature to about 88 degrees. Then they put you into a coma (I had made a pact with the anesthesiaologist that he wouldn't catheterize my junk until I was out) and then they take a surgical steel sawzall and saw your sternum apart. They then take a rib retractor, separate your ribs and expose your heart. Next they hook up your major blood vessels to a pump. Then they kill you.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
I DON'T KNOW YET by Leëta Damon
I recently attended the Grace Hopper Celebration, a conference for women from around the world, who work in technology and computing. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was new to this organization and sitting in the midst of a career and personal crisis when I signed up to go. I’d been to several other conferences in the past, but only as an employee of the host organization, never purely as an attendee. It was to be one week in Atlanta in the fall, in a luxurious hotel. I decided I was going to go, leave my life and work behind -- just soak up possibilities, and unwind by indulging my senses. Intellectual stimulation, good food and wine, and bubble baths awaited. . .
Well, there’s planning and hoping -- and then, there’s execution. In the space of time between making a reservation and getting on a plane, my lap top dies and a few other big bills come in. So downgrading my hotel to one a few blocks away seemed the sensible thing to do. The week before I was due to leave I was still deeply ingrained in a project at work that I was hoping to be done with before I left, and clearly wouldn’t be. In that last week, I wasn’t sleeping well, or fulfilling anything off my carefully constructed prep lists. A sleepless night of packing, weather woes leading to 3 reroutes, and 15 hours after arriving at the airport, I was finally in Atlanta.
Had I stayed in the same hotel my conference was in, given the sheer onslaught of information and human energy, I probably would have retreated to my room and ordered room service. I would have missed the 4 block walk each day through oddly deserted side streets, at least twice a day, that was somehow uphill both ways. I would have missed the 2 horse drawn carriages that rested at a taxi stand on my hotel’s street, just past the unassuming but loudly grooving supper club with no windows onto the street, only a facade that looked like someone’s front yard and door. Across from it, the snazzy “tallest hotel in the western hemisphere”, that had it’s first 2 floors on this side covered in scaffolding. Around the other side of the block, the drive-up entrance was a level lower (being downhill you know), and bustling with cars and bellmen.
I would have missed the panhandler that pointed me the way to my hotel that first night before hitting me up for change. I paid him a buck, after all he’d offered me a valuable service. On the way to the hotel, I passed this odd parking meter looking thing in the middle of the sidewalk outside the police station -- a collection point for the local “No Panhandling” campaign. (Oops.) I would have missed the police officers nonchalantly patrolling on segway, horse and bicycle. I would have missed that simple dance of meeting eyes or not, as we walked down the street -- the ‘how’ of which is often telling about one’s origins. I would have missed the foreign nationals walking around, scowling at the maps trying to get oriented and find their next destination.
As I’d been properly brought up in a paranoid city, I was careful to do such scowling before leaving my room each day. Having done so though, I walked about the streets with a certain comfort that eventually had those same foreigners asking me for directions. Hearing the accents and languages from all over the globe (like Japan, South Africa, Nigeria, Pakistan), I was thrown back to my teen and young adult years in Manhattan, doing the same thing. That music is one of the few things I miss about living in a metropolis. Atlanta is called the NY of the south, and I can see why, it feels much like that social home of my youth, but a little cleaner, a little saner, a little friendlier -- most of the time. I was happy to see a good number of couples of mixed-race comfortably walking about, but could not fail to notice that white men on the street almost invariably did not meet my eyes.
My formal conference sessions finally over, I head back to my room to prepare for the last event of this gathering, a Sponsor’s Night party to be held in the local aquarium. There was the promise of much dancing, something I do far too little of late, as well as good food and wine. I’d done relatively little of the indulging I’d planned on, since I was working between sessions or was too worn out to go out after the evening sessions of the conference. The aquarium was on my list of things to do in my carefully planned out first day and a half, designed to transition me from my always-working state to something a little more civilized. Unfortunately, Mother Nature and the entity I work for had different ideas of what I should be doing with that time; I was glad for this opportunity to see the fishes and such.
Back in my room I spruce up a bit, artfully slap on some warpaint as armor against the social onslaught I was walking into (2000+ women blowing off steam from an information-packed week is no joke), and put back on the only pair of shoes I had with me -- though somehow I’d ended up with something like 4 purses when I unpacked. (Such are the decisions made by a sleep-deprived brain.) The walking map said it was only about 4 blocks away, and the desk clerk confirmed that earlier. There it was on the edge of the Olympic park, piece of cake. The route I choose to avoid walking along the park as a woman alone, takes me down the steepest hill yet, and then uphill (of course) to the aquarium’s front door.
Walking into that dark throbbing womb, filled with sweaty, eating-drinking, dancing-laughing-talking women (a few men sprinkled here an there for good measure), was the sensory assault I expected. Jeans and evening gowns and glitter and glow sticks abound. Luckily the music wasn’t too loud, probably a by-product of the 40+ year spread of ages in the room. I bought a couple drink tickets, and got a glass of wine, saving the soft drink ticket for later. The ball room we were in had 2 huge glass sections on perpendicular walls, one looking into the tank of a pair of beluga whales and a pair of harbor seals, the other into an enclave of small sharks.
I spent some time up close with the whales, only a few inches of glass between us -- and, you know, thousands of gallons of water. At first I was wondering how the almost shamanically deep bass line was going to affect them, given the water’s and glass’s amplification properties. The whales seem genuinely unfazed -- enjoying themselves perhaps. They kept swimming very close to the glass wall, seemingly offering up their bellies for a good scratch as they slipped past. They seem amused as I refer to them as “little one” in our mental conversations. Turning away, I slip out of this main ballroom, have my 2 drinks and a bite, nodding at a couple people I’d met earlier in the week. Then having met my tolerance for humans and noise, retire.
In the morning, having been thwarted in my request for a late check-out, I have a choice: to make the mad dash out into the city and see a few tourist things on my neglected list, or to wander in a mellow fashion, just soaking up atmosphere and sunshine in this lovely southern city, I choose the latter. It’s a gorgeous early fall day, The weather has wormed up from the unseasonably cool temperatures of the last few days. Here in a business district on Saturday morning, traffic’s pretty light. I don’t even see the 2 horse drawn carriages yet. I head up the hill for the 2 pieces of unfinished business I left in the mall. A few serious indulgences later, I return with my still smoking credit cards (so much for downgrading).
I finally have my items packed and logistics worked out to get home, but my flight doesn’t leave for several hours. So I stack various carefully packed bags onto my newly purchased luggage cart and rolling suitcase, look around one last time, stack up my trash and recyclables and struggle out the door and down to the lobby. Leaving my bags with the valet, and waiting until I see him put them into the locked room, I step out into the delightfully warm and sunny day.
I head across the street, through the parking lot across the street, towards Ted’s Montana Grill, and turning the corner toward the restaurant, and spot Mr. Turner himself, mustache and all, deep in conversation, carrying a briefcase that is a little at odds with his chambray shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. I smile a bit and continue on. I walk in and for the second time this week, am shown to a paneled booth. Dark wood and leather banquettes reign here, giving a homey cave-like air even on such a bright day.
I choose one of the “only available on Saturday” meals, and pull out my book: Eat Pray Love. Reading it on this trip, I’ve been chuckling a lot, recognizing more and crying a little. I must find more by this author. I feel like I’ve known her for years. Lunch comes and I enjoy this gently barbecue-sauced, long simmered bison short rib, fork tender and toothsome. It’s paired with the most genteel garlic mashed potatoes I’ve ever had -- I swear they simply waved the bulb of garlic over the pot and muttered some vague incantations. Perhaps this town needs a few more Italians I decide as I continue to read about the author’s adventures in Roma and Napoli, and munch away.
Atlanta - what was that line I heard the other day? “All your dreams could come true or you can get killed at a stop light, you just don’t know... You just don’t know.”
Well, there’s planning and hoping -- and then, there’s execution. In the space of time between making a reservation and getting on a plane, my lap top dies and a few other big bills come in. So downgrading my hotel to one a few blocks away seemed the sensible thing to do. The week before I was due to leave I was still deeply ingrained in a project at work that I was hoping to be done with before I left, and clearly wouldn’t be. In that last week, I wasn’t sleeping well, or fulfilling anything off my carefully constructed prep lists. A sleepless night of packing, weather woes leading to 3 reroutes, and 15 hours after arriving at the airport, I was finally in Atlanta.
Had I stayed in the same hotel my conference was in, given the sheer onslaught of information and human energy, I probably would have retreated to my room and ordered room service. I would have missed the 4 block walk each day through oddly deserted side streets, at least twice a day, that was somehow uphill both ways. I would have missed the 2 horse drawn carriages that rested at a taxi stand on my hotel’s street, just past the unassuming but loudly grooving supper club with no windows onto the street, only a facade that looked like someone’s front yard and door. Across from it, the snazzy “tallest hotel in the western hemisphere”, that had it’s first 2 floors on this side covered in scaffolding. Around the other side of the block, the drive-up entrance was a level lower (being downhill you know), and bustling with cars and bellmen.
I would have missed the panhandler that pointed me the way to my hotel that first night before hitting me up for change. I paid him a buck, after all he’d offered me a valuable service. On the way to the hotel, I passed this odd parking meter looking thing in the middle of the sidewalk outside the police station -- a collection point for the local “No Panhandling” campaign. (Oops.) I would have missed the police officers nonchalantly patrolling on segway, horse and bicycle. I would have missed that simple dance of meeting eyes or not, as we walked down the street -- the ‘how’ of which is often telling about one’s origins. I would have missed the foreign nationals walking around, scowling at the maps trying to get oriented and find their next destination.
As I’d been properly brought up in a paranoid city, I was careful to do such scowling before leaving my room each day. Having done so though, I walked about the streets with a certain comfort that eventually had those same foreigners asking me for directions. Hearing the accents and languages from all over the globe (like Japan, South Africa, Nigeria, Pakistan), I was thrown back to my teen and young adult years in Manhattan, doing the same thing. That music is one of the few things I miss about living in a metropolis. Atlanta is called the NY of the south, and I can see why, it feels much like that social home of my youth, but a little cleaner, a little saner, a little friendlier -- most of the time. I was happy to see a good number of couples of mixed-race comfortably walking about, but could not fail to notice that white men on the street almost invariably did not meet my eyes.
My formal conference sessions finally over, I head back to my room to prepare for the last event of this gathering, a Sponsor’s Night party to be held in the local aquarium. There was the promise of much dancing, something I do far too little of late, as well as good food and wine. I’d done relatively little of the indulging I’d planned on, since I was working between sessions or was too worn out to go out after the evening sessions of the conference. The aquarium was on my list of things to do in my carefully planned out first day and a half, designed to transition me from my always-working state to something a little more civilized. Unfortunately, Mother Nature and the entity I work for had different ideas of what I should be doing with that time; I was glad for this opportunity to see the fishes and such.
Back in my room I spruce up a bit, artfully slap on some warpaint as armor against the social onslaught I was walking into (2000+ women blowing off steam from an information-packed week is no joke), and put back on the only pair of shoes I had with me -- though somehow I’d ended up with something like 4 purses when I unpacked. (Such are the decisions made by a sleep-deprived brain.) The walking map said it was only about 4 blocks away, and the desk clerk confirmed that earlier. There it was on the edge of the Olympic park, piece of cake. The route I choose to avoid walking along the park as a woman alone, takes me down the steepest hill yet, and then uphill (of course) to the aquarium’s front door.
Walking into that dark throbbing womb, filled with sweaty, eating-drinking, dancing-laughing-talking women (a few men sprinkled here an there for good measure), was the sensory assault I expected. Jeans and evening gowns and glitter and glow sticks abound. Luckily the music wasn’t too loud, probably a by-product of the 40+ year spread of ages in the room. I bought a couple drink tickets, and got a glass of wine, saving the soft drink ticket for later. The ball room we were in had 2 huge glass sections on perpendicular walls, one looking into the tank of a pair of beluga whales and a pair of harbor seals, the other into an enclave of small sharks.
I spent some time up close with the whales, only a few inches of glass between us -- and, you know, thousands of gallons of water. At first I was wondering how the almost shamanically deep bass line was going to affect them, given the water’s and glass’s amplification properties. The whales seem genuinely unfazed -- enjoying themselves perhaps. They kept swimming very close to the glass wall, seemingly offering up their bellies for a good scratch as they slipped past. They seem amused as I refer to them as “little one” in our mental conversations. Turning away, I slip out of this main ballroom, have my 2 drinks and a bite, nodding at a couple people I’d met earlier in the week. Then having met my tolerance for humans and noise, retire.
In the morning, having been thwarted in my request for a late check-out, I have a choice: to make the mad dash out into the city and see a few tourist things on my neglected list, or to wander in a mellow fashion, just soaking up atmosphere and sunshine in this lovely southern city, I choose the latter. It’s a gorgeous early fall day, The weather has wormed up from the unseasonably cool temperatures of the last few days. Here in a business district on Saturday morning, traffic’s pretty light. I don’t even see the 2 horse drawn carriages yet. I head up the hill for the 2 pieces of unfinished business I left in the mall. A few serious indulgences later, I return with my still smoking credit cards (so much for downgrading).
I finally have my items packed and logistics worked out to get home, but my flight doesn’t leave for several hours. So I stack various carefully packed bags onto my newly purchased luggage cart and rolling suitcase, look around one last time, stack up my trash and recyclables and struggle out the door and down to the lobby. Leaving my bags with the valet, and waiting until I see him put them into the locked room, I step out into the delightfully warm and sunny day.
I head across the street, through the parking lot across the street, towards Ted’s Montana Grill, and turning the corner toward the restaurant, and spot Mr. Turner himself, mustache and all, deep in conversation, carrying a briefcase that is a little at odds with his chambray shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. I smile a bit and continue on. I walk in and for the second time this week, am shown to a paneled booth. Dark wood and leather banquettes reign here, giving a homey cave-like air even on such a bright day.
I choose one of the “only available on Saturday” meals, and pull out my book: Eat Pray Love. Reading it on this trip, I’ve been chuckling a lot, recognizing more and crying a little. I must find more by this author. I feel like I’ve known her for years. Lunch comes and I enjoy this gently barbecue-sauced, long simmered bison short rib, fork tender and toothsome. It’s paired with the most genteel garlic mashed potatoes I’ve ever had -- I swear they simply waved the bulb of garlic over the pot and muttered some vague incantations. Perhaps this town needs a few more Italians I decide as I continue to read about the author’s adventures in Roma and Napoli, and munch away.
Atlanta - what was that line I heard the other day? “All your dreams could come true or you can get killed at a stop light, you just don’t know... You just don’t know.”
Sunday, October 17, 2010
WITH JOAN OF ARC by Diana McCourt
1962
I am alone without another adult living with me for the first time in my life in a tiny apartment on the corner of Riverside Drive and 93rd St. Because she was worried about me, my mother did what she does well – decorate. There is a beautiful red rug in the narrow small room that serves as bedroom, living room and dining room. There is clean white linoleum on the floor of the miniature kitchen. Nina, my 1 year old daughter, has Margaret Owen wallpaper in her little room. The furniture is bits and pieces of mistakes from decorating jobs of my mother’s; a table that was the wrong size, a bed that didn’t fit.
The piano is mine, the only major piece I salvaged from the seven year marriage I recently escaped from.
Nina and I spent many hours sitting on the red carpet. I smoke a lot and Nina likes the cellophane from the cigarette pack that crinkles when she holds it next to her ear. I throw a ball to her and she ignores it, preferring the sound of the paper.
“Ball, Nina, ball,” I explain, taking her free hand to touch it. Nina loves the red rug, in fact will not leave it. She will crawl to the edge of it where it meets the kitchen’s white floor but will not cross that line. If I carry her to it she screams.
Dr. Manuel Furer of the Masters Children’s Center finally talked to me last week. Nina and I went four times to his clinic at the urging of one of my friends. They tried playing with Nina while her father and I watched through a big glass window. The blocks and toys that any other child could have responded to meant nothing to her. Nina was looking at the play of light on the white wall from the outside window.
There was supposed to be some kind of report or help or something but my calls to the Dr. never get answered until finally I told the secretary to get him to the phone right now – that this was cruel and unprofessional treatment. He did come and muttered, “It's hopeless, she’s autistic, it's hopeless,” and he scuttled away leaving the secretary to finish the call.
I wept for a while and then called my mother.
“The doctor says Nina is autistic”
“ARTISTIC!” my mother said delighted, “well there is nothing wrong with that!”
I felt bad for my mom who was having other shocks herself including a recent heart attack. When I explained that it was AUTISM, a serious mental problem, she responded with a trembling voice, “Don’t do that to me."
“Sorry Mom,” and I ended the conversation.
So now Nina and I are trying to make a new life in what was becoming a vacuum. I have tried taking Nina to the nearby playground but it terrifies her and she screams her high pitched scream until I must leave. There is my friend Harry who visits and plays the upright piano for Nina who responds in her shivering delight and trancelike rocking. But Harry wants to be with me all the time and I am not interested – he is needy and I have little heart to spare.
Nina and I visit the nearest safest place outside our little room – the park at the end of the block. It is the Joan of Arc Park holding the first female equestrian statue in New York. Her missionary zeal – her energetic warrior spirit is a mockery of my in-service and imprisoned life. Nina and I snuggle on a bench at the base of the statue, absorbing spirit.
I am alone without another adult living with me for the first time in my life in a tiny apartment on the corner of Riverside Drive and 93rd St. Because she was worried about me, my mother did what she does well – decorate. There is a beautiful red rug in the narrow small room that serves as bedroom, living room and dining room. There is clean white linoleum on the floor of the miniature kitchen. Nina, my 1 year old daughter, has Margaret Owen wallpaper in her little room. The furniture is bits and pieces of mistakes from decorating jobs of my mother’s; a table that was the wrong size, a bed that didn’t fit.
The piano is mine, the only major piece I salvaged from the seven year marriage I recently escaped from.
Nina and I spent many hours sitting on the red carpet. I smoke a lot and Nina likes the cellophane from the cigarette pack that crinkles when she holds it next to her ear. I throw a ball to her and she ignores it, preferring the sound of the paper.
“Ball, Nina, ball,” I explain, taking her free hand to touch it. Nina loves the red rug, in fact will not leave it. She will crawl to the edge of it where it meets the kitchen’s white floor but will not cross that line. If I carry her to it she screams.
Dr. Manuel Furer of the Masters Children’s Center finally talked to me last week. Nina and I went four times to his clinic at the urging of one of my friends. They tried playing with Nina while her father and I watched through a big glass window. The blocks and toys that any other child could have responded to meant nothing to her. Nina was looking at the play of light on the white wall from the outside window.
There was supposed to be some kind of report or help or something but my calls to the Dr. never get answered until finally I told the secretary to get him to the phone right now – that this was cruel and unprofessional treatment. He did come and muttered, “It's hopeless, she’s autistic, it's hopeless,” and he scuttled away leaving the secretary to finish the call.
I wept for a while and then called my mother.
“The doctor says Nina is autistic”
“ARTISTIC!” my mother said delighted, “well there is nothing wrong with that!”
I felt bad for my mom who was having other shocks herself including a recent heart attack. When I explained that it was AUTISM, a serious mental problem, she responded with a trembling voice, “Don’t do that to me."
“Sorry Mom,” and I ended the conversation.
So now Nina and I are trying to make a new life in what was becoming a vacuum. I have tried taking Nina to the nearby playground but it terrifies her and she screams her high pitched scream until I must leave. There is my friend Harry who visits and plays the upright piano for Nina who responds in her shivering delight and trancelike rocking. But Harry wants to be with me all the time and I am not interested – he is needy and I have little heart to spare.
Nina and I visit the nearest safest place outside our little room – the park at the end of the block. It is the Joan of Arc Park holding the first female equestrian statue in New York. Her missionary zeal – her energetic warrior spirit is a mockery of my in-service and imprisoned life. Nina and I snuggle on a bench at the base of the statue, absorbing spirit.
Monday, August 30, 2010
FLYING DREAMS by Liam Watt
Google “Wing Suits – Norway”. That'll take you to a series of You Tube videos of full grown men wearing something closely akin to a flying squirrel costume, jumping off some of the highest cliffs in the world, spreading their arms and legs, catching the wind and flying at over 100 mph along these cliffs, staying aloft with an incredibly long glide ratio, for five to ten minutes at a time. Then, when frightfully close to the ground, open a parachute and waft gracefully to a gentle landing.
I've always had flying dreams. From as early as four or five I've had the incomparable experience in my dreams of feeling some unfamiliar sensation of power in my mid section that allowed me to lift off the ground at will and soar casually around the trees and rooftops of whatever scene I'd find myself in.
When I was six, we got a new refrigerator that came in a cardboard box. When my father flattened that box and put it over by the garbage cans I knew immediately I had the makings for my first set of wings. While my parents were busy with their weekend chores, I snuck out a kitchen knife, then raided my mother's sewing box for some long elastic bands. In an astonishingly short amount of time, I was climbing out the attic window on to the rather gently sloping roof of our attached garage, pulling out behind me my newly constructed set of strap on wings. I put on my simple apparatus, strapped to my back and arms, walked over to the edge of the roof, and almost without hesitation, fully expecting that unique feeling in my mid-section that I'd experienced so many times in my dreams to carry me aloft, I jumped off the roof and crashed in a heap on the back lawn below.
Fortunately my parents hadn't seen me and I surmised that this might take more practice than I'd realized and accepted that I'd have to start closer to the ground. There was a stump of a large oak tree my father had recently cut down. Again and again I'd climb up on the stump just a couple of feet off the ground with my cardboard wings strapped on, try to feel that feeling of power in my solar plexus area, and jump out, frantically flapping my arms believing my wings would carry me farther than if I'd jumped without them. My father saw my experiments and actually helped me measure the distances jumping with and without the wings. He gently let me observe for myself, quite disappointedly, no significant difference.
But the flying dreams continued and each dream produced the most exalted feeling I'd ever experienced and I wasn't going to be deterred from having that feeling while I was awake. The property behind our house had a small empty field and a wooded hillside with some hickory trees that lent themselves to climbing. My next attempt was to grab my mother's umbrella from the front hall closet and my fathers umbrella from the garage, go back into the woods, climb into the hickory tree with the perfect overhanging branch, umbrellas hanging from my belt. I stood on that branch and got my balance, opened the umbrellas and leaped into the air, again in full confidence that exhilarating feeling of power would arise and carry me off like Mary Poppins – who by the way hadn't appeared yet into modern American culture.
No need to report the results of this experiment. But, although Mary Poppins hadn't arrived in the movies, Disney's first cartoon version of Peter Pan had, and it was all the rage for kids that summer. At seven years old, I went to see this tantalizing flying adventure with Jimmy Ardito, an older kid of about ten who lived a short bike ride down the road from our house. Jimmy's mom, Alice, took us to the movie and on the way home Jimmy told me he knew the secret of how to make Tinker bell's pixie dust. Chopped up toothpicks. Yup, he was sure, guaranteed, pixie dust was nothing but chopped up toothpicks.
While my mother sat at the kitchen table sipping cup after cup of Nescafe with Alice, and Jimmy had gone off to more thrilling adventures than misguiding a gullible seven year old, I helped myself to a handful of toothpicks from the kitchen drawer and arduously cut them into the smallest possible pieces with my boyscout knife. When my mother asked what I was doing and I told her, her response was about the same as if I'd told her I was going out to the back yard to play with King Kong. She never expected that I actually went back to that wooded hillside, climbed up to that perfect hickory branch about fifteen feet off the ground, sprinkled my freshly made pixie dust all over me, imagined that feeling from my dreams in my midsection, and plummeted straight down into the huckleberry bushes below.
Really dejected now, having used all my pixie dust at once, I went back into the house for more toothpicks. Of course I didn't share the details of where I'd tried my experiment when Ma asked, I simply said my pixie dust didn't work the first time and I was going to make some more. Jimmy's mom, Alice, straightforwardly asked “did you say abracadabra?” In retrospect, I understand where Jimmy got his sense of amusement, but my mom realized that I might be courting danger and insisted that I jump only from that stump that still remained from the big oak tree my father had taken down the year before.
Remembering the results of my earlier attempts from that location, I decided to save myself the trouble of the tedious chopping of the hard toothpicks, and my serious doubts about the mere words abracadabra, since I never had to say that in my dreams. Instead I took my favorite bamboo airplane with the wind up, rubber band driven propeller, and went out to the back field for some satisfactory, solitary playtime, knowing with full confidence that someday I'd learn the secret of that tantalizing power in my solar plexus that allowed me to fly so freely in my dreams.
I've always had flying dreams. From as early as four or five I've had the incomparable experience in my dreams of feeling some unfamiliar sensation of power in my mid section that allowed me to lift off the ground at will and soar casually around the trees and rooftops of whatever scene I'd find myself in.
When I was six, we got a new refrigerator that came in a cardboard box. When my father flattened that box and put it over by the garbage cans I knew immediately I had the makings for my first set of wings. While my parents were busy with their weekend chores, I snuck out a kitchen knife, then raided my mother's sewing box for some long elastic bands. In an astonishingly short amount of time, I was climbing out the attic window on to the rather gently sloping roof of our attached garage, pulling out behind me my newly constructed set of strap on wings. I put on my simple apparatus, strapped to my back and arms, walked over to the edge of the roof, and almost without hesitation, fully expecting that unique feeling in my mid-section that I'd experienced so many times in my dreams to carry me aloft, I jumped off the roof and crashed in a heap on the back lawn below.
Fortunately my parents hadn't seen me and I surmised that this might take more practice than I'd realized and accepted that I'd have to start closer to the ground. There was a stump of a large oak tree my father had recently cut down. Again and again I'd climb up on the stump just a couple of feet off the ground with my cardboard wings strapped on, try to feel that feeling of power in my solar plexus area, and jump out, frantically flapping my arms believing my wings would carry me farther than if I'd jumped without them. My father saw my experiments and actually helped me measure the distances jumping with and without the wings. He gently let me observe for myself, quite disappointedly, no significant difference.
But the flying dreams continued and each dream produced the most exalted feeling I'd ever experienced and I wasn't going to be deterred from having that feeling while I was awake. The property behind our house had a small empty field and a wooded hillside with some hickory trees that lent themselves to climbing. My next attempt was to grab my mother's umbrella from the front hall closet and my fathers umbrella from the garage, go back into the woods, climb into the hickory tree with the perfect overhanging branch, umbrellas hanging from my belt. I stood on that branch and got my balance, opened the umbrellas and leaped into the air, again in full confidence that exhilarating feeling of power would arise and carry me off like Mary Poppins – who by the way hadn't appeared yet into modern American culture.
No need to report the results of this experiment. But, although Mary Poppins hadn't arrived in the movies, Disney's first cartoon version of Peter Pan had, and it was all the rage for kids that summer. At seven years old, I went to see this tantalizing flying adventure with Jimmy Ardito, an older kid of about ten who lived a short bike ride down the road from our house. Jimmy's mom, Alice, took us to the movie and on the way home Jimmy told me he knew the secret of how to make Tinker bell's pixie dust. Chopped up toothpicks. Yup, he was sure, guaranteed, pixie dust was nothing but chopped up toothpicks.
While my mother sat at the kitchen table sipping cup after cup of Nescafe with Alice, and Jimmy had gone off to more thrilling adventures than misguiding a gullible seven year old, I helped myself to a handful of toothpicks from the kitchen drawer and arduously cut them into the smallest possible pieces with my boyscout knife. When my mother asked what I was doing and I told her, her response was about the same as if I'd told her I was going out to the back yard to play with King Kong. She never expected that I actually went back to that wooded hillside, climbed up to that perfect hickory branch about fifteen feet off the ground, sprinkled my freshly made pixie dust all over me, imagined that feeling from my dreams in my midsection, and plummeted straight down into the huckleberry bushes below.
Really dejected now, having used all my pixie dust at once, I went back into the house for more toothpicks. Of course I didn't share the details of where I'd tried my experiment when Ma asked, I simply said my pixie dust didn't work the first time and I was going to make some more. Jimmy's mom, Alice, straightforwardly asked “did you say abracadabra?” In retrospect, I understand where Jimmy got his sense of amusement, but my mom realized that I might be courting danger and insisted that I jump only from that stump that still remained from the big oak tree my father had taken down the year before.
Remembering the results of my earlier attempts from that location, I decided to save myself the trouble of the tedious chopping of the hard toothpicks, and my serious doubts about the mere words abracadabra, since I never had to say that in my dreams. Instead I took my favorite bamboo airplane with the wind up, rubber band driven propeller, and went out to the back field for some satisfactory, solitary playtime, knowing with full confidence that someday I'd learn the secret of that tantalizing power in my solar plexus that allowed me to fly so freely in my dreams.
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