I will be away for the next couple of weeks, but will return in the New Year.
In the meantime,
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
Wednesday, December 4, 2019
The Cassandra Lineage
Whenever my uncle led the
aged, utterly mellow cart horse out of the barn to be harnessed, my mother’s
mother would come out of the kitchen and stand watching, her hands on her hips.
“This horse,” she would say,
shaking her head, “is going to kill somebody one of these days.”
Like my grandmother, my
mother worried constantly about potential catastrophes. “When your father and I
married, and then you were born,” she confided to me years later, “I was
happier than I’d ever thought possible. But even in the middle of so much
happiness, I always felt that God was somewhere up in the clouds, with a big
stick in his hand, waiting to hit me on the head.”
More years have passed, and
now that I am my grandmother’s age I too spend way too much time looking out
for murderous cart horses and wincing in anticipation of the next blow to rain
down from heaven.
My grandmother’s and my
mother’s persistent intimations of disaster were rooted in their experience of
the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939. My grandmother was in
her late thirties then, and my mother in her teens. Since they lived on a farm,
they did not starve. But my grandfather, the village vet, sometimes had to hide
from the bands of anarchists wreaking havoc in the countryside, and the family
would frequently leave their beds in the middle of the night and crouch in a
ditch to escape from bombardments.
“We all wore a little stick
tied to a string around our neck, so that when the bombs came we could bite
down on it and the shock waves would not burst our eardrums,” my mother
remembered. The terror of the anarchist raids; the nights spent cowering in the
ditch to escape the bombings; and, at the end of the war, the fear of the retreating
soldiers left a mark on her psyche that lasted the rest of her life.
It’s not hard to see how those
three years of living in constant fear would lead to my mother and her mother’s
hyper-vigilance; their feeling that, if they let down their guard for a single
moment, disaster would strike; and their bone-deep conviction that life was, at
bottom, a tragic affair, and that passing moments of happiness were simply
accidental flashes in the enveloping darkness, and not to be relied on.
My first decade passed
against a chorus of cautions and warnings.
“This child isn’t eating
enough.”
“Look! She has a fever
again!”
“She’s pale. She should spend
more time outdoors.”
“Don’t let her out of the
house in the middle of the day. She’ll get sunstroke!”
“Quick! Shut that window.
She’s standing in a draft.”
“Take that book away from
her. She’ll get indigestion if she reads after lunch.”
While my mother was alive, I
put a lot of energy into countering her apprehensions. When I was a teenager
and she had her second child, I watched her live in fear that my vigorous
little sister would waste away, and I tried to convince her of the basic
sturdiness of babies. When my own children were born and she warned me against
germs and other potential threats, I showed off my casual trust in their
aptitude for survival. When she tried to talk me out of moving to a rural part
of Vermont where hospitals are few and far between, I ignored her and did just
that.
But now that both my
grandmother and my mother are gone, my ability to put on that tough-woman act
has deserted me, and I often shudder at the prospect of imminent doom. I envision
endless tragic scenarios, ranging from a flat tire on a deserted dirt road to civil
strife, fires, floods, and the extinction of honeybees. It is as if the
rose-colored glasses that we all need to wear in order to function in the world
have been suddenly ripped off my face, and life appears in all its meaningless
gloom.
Just as, when passing in
front of a mirror I sometimes think I’m catching a glimpse of my mother, I find
myself reenacting the Cassandra role that she and her mother played so
faithfully. But why? I didn’t live through the war. I didn’t have to cower in ditches
in the middle of the night, or hide from anarchists, like my mother and her
family. I didn’t starve, like my father and his family.
How, then, did I become
infected with the Cassandra virus?
For years I assumed that my
predisposition to see the dark side of things was something I had inherited
from my mother and her mother, like my brown eyes and curly hair. But studies
of the descendants of survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic events
such as the American Civil War point to a different explanation.
Though still controversial,
these studies suggest that the trauma undergone by individuals of one
generation can change the way their genes are passed on and expressed in their
offspring, even if the parents do not discuss their own traumatic experiences
and the children lead normal lives. The most common manifestations of this
trans-generational trauma are anxiety, depression, and lack of resilience.
I don’t remember my parents and
grandparents discussing the war in front of me. There were passing references
to my father having to stay hidden for three years to avoid execution, but he
never talked about what it felt like as a twenty-two-year-old not to be able to
go outside, or play the violin, or have enough to eat. Likewise, other than the
story of the little sticks on a string, my mother did not say much about that
time.
But whether unconsciously,
through her own anxiety about my welfare, or through epigenetic transmission,
she passed on to me Cassandra’s gift of foreseeing disaster, and I often
tremble in anticipation of whatever blow the universe is about to deliver next.
There are many depictions of Cassandra
in ancient Greek vases, and she is always shown with brown eyes and dark, curly
hair.
Labels:
anxiety
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Cassandra
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depression
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epigenetics
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Greek mythology
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mothers and daughters
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Spanish Civil War
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trans-generational trauma
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
Not Writing
In 1932, when she was at the
peak of her fame, the French writer Colette opened a cosmetology shop in Paris.
She blended lotions and potions and applied them to her clients' faces with, as it
turned out, awful results. Her friends and the reading public thought that
the shop was a terrible idea, and everyone was glad when it closed. But I know
what Colette was after when she went into cosmetics: she was avoiding writing.
Over the years I too have
tried many strategies to avoid writing: milking goats, training dogs,
embroidering pillows. But now that the goats are gone and Bisou is well-behaved
and the cottage is dotted with pillows, I have found a new method: whittling
birds.
In October I attended a whittling
workshop, whittled bird #1, and gave it away. What you see here is bird #2, and
I’m about to start on #3.
As simple as this bird looks—it’s
small enough to fit in the palm of your hand--it took me approximately ten
hours to make. How many pages of text could I have produced in ten hours?
In fact, whittling is a lot
like writing--or rather, like the second stage of writing.
When I whittle, I start with
a block of wood from the craft store. But when I sit down to write I have to
make my own “block”: the first draft, where I type whatever comes to mind as
fast as I can, not stopping to reread or revise, until a have a block of text to
work on.
What I like about
whittling—and used to love about stone carving, before my shoulder and arm rebelled—is
the subtractive process, getting rid of what gets in the way of the real shape.
For me, the best part of writing is making the second, third, and umpteenth
drafts, in which, wielding the Delete key like a whittling knife, I eliminate unnecessary
stuff until the piece reveals its true form, which is often different from what
I thought it was going to be.
But both whittling and
writing require an act of faith, that beneath the extra wood and the extra words
what I want to find lies waiting.
When I’ve spent too long squeezing
words out of my brain and flinging them up into the cloud, something in me clamors
for the feel of wood in my hand, the ache of
tired muscles, and the final reward of an object endowed with length and height
and width, a thing that I can hold and touch. And I know exactly how Colette
felt, slathering make-up on the cheeks of her chic clients, playing around with
lipstick, rouge, and eye-shadow, not writing.
Labels:
Colette
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comfort birds
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subtractive sculpture
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whittling
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wood carving
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writers
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writing
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writing distractions
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Me and the String Quartet
In 1954 the government of
Ecuador imported a string quartet from Barcelona. I spent the last years of my
childhood in Quito, in a house that my father, my mother, and I shared with the
three other players.
In those pre-pollution days, we
all woke up each morning to the sight of five active volcanoes around the city:
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Cayambe, Rucu Pichincha, and, the most apt to shower cars
and sidewalks with ashes, Guagua Pichincha. After exclaiming about the beauty
of the view and speculating on which volcano would erupt next, the quartet would
rehearse.
This began with a lengthy
session of meticulous tuning which the cellist, who had studied with Casals,
insisted on. My father would play his A string, and the second violinist would
try to match it exactly. This took a while. “Maybe it’s a touch flat,” the
cellist would say. Then, “Perhaps you need to bring it down, just a hair.” The process was repeated with
the viola and the cello, and finally the real playing would begin—Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and what my father called a “piece of
candy” for the audience: the Tchaikovsky quartet, Op. 1, with its saccharine
second movement.
In the afternoon the
musicians practiced individually, and my father gave violin lessons to the
children of Quito’s Jewish community. On the weekends, we went adventuring—and
in those days, the moment you left the capital you were sure to have
adventures.
Only my father and the
cellist knew how to drive. The cellist had a tiny blue Fiat, and my father drove a 1944 Dodge with a wonky second gear (my mother had to hold up the gear shift with a forked stick whenever we descended from the high Andes to a lower altitude).
We would pile into the two cars and set off for the páramos, vast
barren plateaus so high above sea level that, even having grown accustomed to
Quito’s nine-thousand-foot altitude, we would gasp for breath at the smallest
exertion.
Time and time again we would pull off the stone-paved road, a legacy of the Incas, and everyone
would get out and gaze with wonder at yet another set of volcanoes (Imbabura! Tungurahua!
Sangay!). Everyone but me, that is. The more my parents exhorted me to
appreciate the beauty all around, the less I saw to admire. If at least there
had been some interesting animals, but other than the occasional high-flying
condor or a herd of llamas haughtily ignoring us, all I could see was an
endless expanse of beige barrenness.
The trips to the jungles of
the Pacific or the Amazon were more entertaining—someone was always foisting a
parrot or a monkey on us, and there were almost-naked Indians with painted
bodies. We spent one Christmas as the only whites in a village populated by the
descendants of shipwrecked African slaves. They were tall and majestic, very
dark skinned, and dressed in immaculate white. All night long, on Christmas
Eve, they drummed and chanted in ways that sounded just like the sound-track of
King Solomon’s Mines.
Hotels were beyond rustic. On
one trip to Puyo, in the Amazon jungle, the viola player, a courtly, balding,
bespectacled Catalan, addressed the hotel owner. "Madam," he said, "would you be so kind as to direct me to the bathroom?" She led him to an open window and gestured with silent dignity to the verdant
vista stretching uninterrupted all the way to Brazil. In the morning it was
raining and, since there was no running water, my father and his three
colleagues shaved under the downspout in front of the building.
Did I mind living with five
adults? As an only child, in Spain I had made my aunts, my uncles and my grandfather
into playmates. Now I did the same with the members of the quartet.
I didn’t much care for the
cellist, whom I found vain and affected, with his upturned nose, his little
mustache, and his obsession with tuning. But the viola player, despite his
thick glasses and his jowly face, made an excellent playmate. Our bedrooms were
adjoining, and at night we would communicate by knocking on the wall between
our beds. My favorite, however, was the second violin, because he was the
best-looking of all--tall and aristocratic, with an elegant Roman nose. Also,
he had an ocelot kitten, named Pepita, that I coveted.
Not only did I find these men
entertaining, I did my best to entertain them. I made jokes and invented games,
one of which consisted of appending Italian endings like -ella
and -etto to Spanish words, which I
found hilarious as well as clever. I showed off, sang loudly out of tune, giggled.
They in turn teased me and called me Unita, which translates roughly as
“Onesy,” referring to my only-child status. If they ever found me annoying,
they didn’t show it.
I burst into puberty like one
of the volcanoes that periodically erupted around us. There was no graceful flowering
into demure young womanhood. Overnight I grew breasts, pimples, and hair on my
legs. But my mind lagged behind my burgeoning anatomy, and I persisted in my
childish ways. Or perhaps those ways weren’t so childish, and my fondness for
the violist and the second violinist was more of an adolescent crush than the
reaching out of a lonely child.
After a couple of years, the
second violinist packed his bags and returned to Spain. The violist married his
Catalan fiancée, a woman in her mid-thirties, by proxy. (This had to be done
because her parents would not allow her to cross the Atlantic alone as an
unmarried woman.) My parents sat drinking brandy with the groom on his
brideless wedding night, and months later, when his wife finally arrived, I lost my remaining playmate. But by then I didn’t care: I had met a boy my age at a bar
mitzvah, and fallen in love.
Me being kidnapped in the Amazon by the viola player (holding knife and using my braid as a mustache) and the second violinist
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Golfing Bees
I heard it on NPR, so it must
be true: scientists trained bees to play a golf-like game in which the bee
pushed a ball into a little hole in order to get a sugar-water reward. The
trained bees then demonstrated before novice bees, who not only learned from
them but quickly figured out ways to put the ball in the hole more efficiently
than the trained bees.
Half a century ago Jane
Goodall showed that chimpanzees used twigs to get tasty termites out of their
mounds. Instances of tool use further “down” the evolutionary scale, among
monkeys, birds, and even octopuses, soon followed.
One by one, the flags that once
marked us as unique are going up in flames as animal behaviorists show that,
when given appropriate tools such as computers, certain primates can use
language, albeit in a rudimentary way. And if you paint a dot on the face of a
monkey, an elephant, a dolphin, a magpie, or even an ant, and then stand them in
front of a mirror, they will touch the paint spot, thus demonstrating a kind of
self-awareness.
And now bees, despite their
tiny brains, have shown that they can readily learn, and improve on, behaviors
that in the wild are totally outside their repertoire.What are we supposed to do
with all this information? Fret and feel guilty, obviously.
I can’t spray soapy water on
the ants on my kitchen counter without feeling like some vengeful deity massacring
innocent beings. And what about my nemesis, those mouse-sized, appalling wolf
spiders that come into my warm house in the fall, hoping in their little spider
hearts that this year I’ll let them hang out in a corner of the mud room? Am I
a monster for going after them with a broom?
How can I justify anything
but the strictest veganism when I know that eating eggs (even ones from
free-range hens) and dairy is predicated on the sacrifice of male chickens and
calves? Yet even vegans must think twice before sitting down to dinner, now
that it has been revealed that trees communicate with each other, warning of
dangers such as invasive insects. Mother trees, bless their hearts, do their
best to protect and nourish their little saplings. If trees are sentient, what
about other plants? How does a lettuce feel as it is yanked out of its native
soil?
I don’t know where this will
end, and perhaps some human-made disaster will close this chapter in the
development of our consciousness. But one outcome is that, albeit slowly, our treatment
of animals is improving.
Many years ago, before the
advent of PETA, I worked for a few months in a respected laboratory where, with
the goal of curing cancer, thousands of mice, hamsters, and rats were subjected
to great suffering. Today those conditions would be unthinkable, and a place like
that would be closed down.
Every spring, in Vermont,
when the moon is in a certain phase and the salamanders march to their breeding
grounds, hundreds of people spend the night at designated spots on country roads,
acting as crossing guards for the amphibians.
Not so long ago, in both rich
and poor neighborhoods , dogs and cats used to run loose, breeding, fighting, and
getting run over. Leash laws and spay/neuter programs have rendered the
lifestyle of our pets far less “natural” than in the old days, but as a result they live longer, healthier lives. It used to be that you never heard of a
cat living into her late teens, but I now personally know of several.
Not a moment too soon, we
humans are beginning to abandon our cherished spot at the top of the
evolutionary scale. As science demonstrates that sentience and cognition are
more widely distributed than we ever imagined, the great chain of being is morphing
into a circle, a dance that Brother Wolf and Brother Rabbit (and even Sister
Spider) can join in, along with us.
Labels:
animal behavior
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bee behavior
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Jane Goodall
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PETA
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self-awareness
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tool use
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tree communication
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veganism
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vegetarianism
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Litany
As a musician, my father was
seldom home in the evenings, but on his nights off he often led us in saying
the Rosary. My mother, her two sisters, and I would sit in the dining room while
he walked up and down, beads in hand. The Rosary consists of five Our Fathers
and fifty Hail Marys. How long does it take to say all those prayers? If you’re
a kid, half your life.
“Why do I have to say those
same words over and over?” I ask my mother.
“You’re supposed to meditate
on the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary,” she says.
“But it’s boring!”
“Shhh. Your father’s about to
begin.”
I stare at the bread crumbs from dinner that litter the yellow tiles under the table. The
maid is waiting in her room for us to finish saying the Rosary so she can sweep
and go to bed. I glance at my mother’s stockings, which she has rolled like
donuts around her ankles to keep them from getting runs, and decide that when I’m
allowed to wear stockings I will never roll them like that. I envy my father, who
is allowed to walk while he prays, instead of having to sit still.
After the last Hail Mary is
said, however, there is a reward: the Litany of the Virgin Mary, a list of
fifty epithets of the Mother of God, which my father recites in Latin. After
each name, we respond in chorus, ora pro
nobis (pray for us).
Here is a sample:
Speculum iustitiae (Mirror of justice)
Sedes sapientiae (Seat of wisdom)
Causa nostrae laetitiae (Cause of our joy)
Rosa mystica
(Mystical rose)
Turris eburnea
(Tower of ivory)
Stella matutina
(Morning star)
I don’t know why this list of
names thrills me. Years later I realize that they have something in common with Homeric epithets such
as “white-armed Hera,” and “bright-eyed Athena.” At age nine, though, I have not
yet heard of Homer, and I don’t know Latin. I can make out a few words, but
even if I understood all of them I would find them puzzling: what is a tower of
ivory, or a mirror of justice, and what do they have to do with the Virgin Mary?
But I love the rhythm of the
Litany, my father with his raspy smoker’s voice pacing in synch with the names,
and us responding ora pro nobis, ora pro
nobis. On and on go the names, Mother
of our Creator, Virgin most powerful….And this extraordinary collection of praises is dedicated
to a woman—one who as a teenager was visited by an angel, which was just the
first of a series of amazing things that happened to her.
And now that She is in
Heaven, sitting between God the Father and her Son, Jesus, with the Holy Ghost
in the form of a dove hovering above her head, She looks down upon me kindly (Virgin most merciful) and with special
understanding, because she was once a girl like me.
The presence of this
quasi-divine Lady in the heaven of my childhood gives me something that the images
of God the Father, with his white beard, and God the Son, with his brown beard,
could never give me: a sense of identification with the divine feminine that
puts me in the ancient lineage of females—Babylonian girls praying to Ishtar,
Egyptian mothers praising Isis, Greek wives sacrificing to Hera—who, from time
immemorial, have sought help and consolation from the Mother of us all.
Labels:
Catholicism
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childhood memories
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Divine Feminine
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feminism
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Goddess
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Litany of Our Lady
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meditation
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prayer
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rosary
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Virgin Mary
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Pasture
Sometimes I imagine, and not
in a morbid way, that I’m lying on my deathbed, remembering my life. Like
everybody else, I’ve had moments of high joy: wedding day, childbirth, work-related
stuff. But there are also more subtly-flavored memories. Pregnancy, once the
initial excitement abated, was one. I would lie on the sofa in the afternoon,
not reading the book on my lap, not crossing items on my to-do list, not
writing letters to my mother, but content to simply gestate.
Nursing my babies was another.
Those enforced breaks from the brouhaha of early motherhood allowed me to put
aside laundry and work. Rocking slowly, listening to the little slurps and
gulps, I might have been a mother cat, blinking in the sun and purring as she
nursed her litter.
But that was long ago. The
last time I felt this kind of contentment was in the field in front of my house,
in southern Vermont. It is a cliché spring morning. The grass is bright green,
and the dandelions are glinting in the sun. Up high on the house roof, against
the clear sky, the bluebird sings his wistful little song. And, for the first
time in months, I am letting Lizzie and Emma, my goats, out of their yard.
They are twin Nubians, one
black, one fawn, with droopy silver ears and Roman profiles. The moment I open
the gate they dash out to the field, their long ears flapping, and set to gobbling
great handfuls of grass.
The field is not fenced in,
so I need to stay with them. In the past I’ve tried bringing a book to read,
but the moment I open it Lizzie and Emma rush to look over my shoulder,
reaching their long necks to nibble the pages: “What’s this you’re reading?”
Another time I brought paper and pencil, intending to draw them. But again, as
soon as they spotted me doing something with my hands, they cast aside all
thoughts of grass and ran over to see, and taste, my drawings.
Since multitasking is out of
the question, I watch my goats eat. They tear off amazing quantities of grass and
shove them down their throats with a few mighty chomps. Later, when their
stomachs are filled to bursting, they will lie down and regurgitate the
contents, give them a proper chew, and re-swallow them. It’s what ruminants do.
I sit on the grass and do nothing.
Cleaning out the hen house; getting the garden beds ready for the chard and kale
and broccoli seedlings that are waiting on the kitchen windowsills; thinning
the baby apples that are starting to swell now that the blooms are gone will
all have to wait until the goats have eaten.
For now, I watch and I
listen. A lulling rhythm soon establishes itself as the goats move across the
pasture: step, yank, chomp; step, yank, chomp. The bluebird has stopped
singing. Maybe his mate has arrived and they’re at the back of the house,
stuffing old grass and twigs into their nest box.
The sun—surprise!—actually
feels warm now, and I discreetly take off my down vest and sit on it, to keep
from attracting the attention of Lizzie and Emma, who will want to investigate.
I breathe the clean Vermont air, chew on a grass stem. Is this what they mean by “pastoral peace”?
It’s a very ancient human thing I’m doing, sitting in a field, watching goats
pasture. I think about the shepherds watching their flocks on Christmas eve two
millennia ago, and about the even older psalmist who identified with sheep
being led to rest in green pastures.
I think about those other
peace-inducing states—being pregnant, nursing babies. Like watching goats graze,
they are only seemingly passive. Lying on the sofa, rocking in the chair, sitting
on the grass, I am doing nothing, but accomplishing a great deal: growing a
fetus, feeding an infant, keeping goats safe while they pluck dandelions.
These are things that nobody
ever taught me. For once, I didn’t have to take notes, or memorize lists, or practice
techniques. They arose in me naturally, without recourse to the frontal lobes
of my brain.
I hope that death is another
thing that comes naturally, without conscious effort--something that, along
with our animal brothers and sisters, we humans instinctively already know how
to do. And I take comfort in the thought that in some future spring the
molecules of my body will turn to grass for somebody’s goats or cows or sheep,
and I will be part of that pastoral peace forever.
Labels:
23rd Psalm
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bluebirds
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breastfeeding
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Christmas
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country living
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death and dying
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goats
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memories
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Nubian goats
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pasture
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peace
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pregnancy
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spring
,
Vermont
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Mantillas
In Spain, when I was growing up in the 1950s,
women wore mantillas to church. These
were gorgeous embroidered affairs, white for unmarried girls and black for
married women. Anchored by a hat pin, the mantilla
was shaped like a rounded triangle, with the tip grazing the forehead and the two sides
hanging down over the collar bones. Before the age of reason, which was held by
the church to be seven, instead of mantillas
little girls wore small round doilies on top of their head.
Some blame Saint Paul (“any
woman who prays…with her head unveiled disgraces her head”), while others blame
the early fathers of the church for making women wear veils in church. It is easy in retrospect to rage against
Saint Paul and his cronies, who regarded head coverings as a mark of
submission. At the time, however, we thought
of the mantilla simply as a gender-related
sign of respect: men had to uncover their heads, and we had to cover ours.
Besides, with its scalloped edges framing the face, and the embroidered flowers
and leaves both concealing and revealing the hair beneath, the mantilla made almost any woman look
mysterious and alluring.
Nevertheless, we took the head-covering
issue seriously. If a woman on her way back from the bakery wanted to stop for
a quick visit to the Blessed Sacrament but had left her mantilla at home, she could throw a scarf or even a sweater over
her head. Otherwise, she had to skip the visit altogether (God, we were told, understood
these things, and would look kindly upon her intention).
Another ostensible reason for
the mantilla was to prevent the men
of the congregation from being distracted by the lust-inducing sight of female
hair. I found this odd, but then you never knew about men. It was their fault after
all that, in addition to the mantilla,
women had to wear stockings in church, and sleeves long enough to cover their
elbows. Still, even granted their penchant for getting aroused by seemingly
harmless objects, I figured that if I had been a man I would have found the
elaborate, semi-transparent mantilla way
more intriguing than a pair of braids or a head of permed curls.
When I arrived at my Catholic
high school in Alabama, I saw that girls, though well past the age of
reason, wore not mantillas but “chapel
veils,” exactly like the little doily that I had cast aside in favor of the
more grownup style after my First Communion. And it wasn’t just high school
girls who wore these, but also the adult women who filled the pews with their
husbands and kids on Sundays. Some ladies wore padded Alice bands with little stiff,
dotted veils pulled down coyly over their noses. Others, having dashed into
church on the spur of the moment, simply covered their head with a Kleenex, and
secured it with a bobby pin.
I interpreted this nonchalant
attitude towards head coverings as a sign of American progressivism, which I
was all for. But I continued to wear my no-nonsense Spanish mantilla because I thought it more
flattering than the doilies. And if it momentarily distracted from his prayers some hapless boy my age, well, so much the better.
As the fifties gave way to
the sixties, those tiny chapel veils, perched atop the teased and sprayed,
helmet-like hairdos of the time, looked more absurd than ever. By the end of
the decade, what with the surging feminist movement and the liberalization of
the church after Vatican II, chapel veils and emergency Kleenexes went the way
of stockings and garter belts. But the disappearance of head coverings signaled
a deeper exodus. Like many of my generation, I put away my missal and my mantilla, and left the church forever.
Or so I thought.
Labels:
1950s
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Catholic Church
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Catholic school
,
feminism
,
lapsed Catholics
,
mantilla
,
Saint Paul
,
Vatican II
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Swimming Lessons
My mother believed that
for a girl to make her way in society she should, in addition to speaking a foreign
language or two, know how to swim and play tennis. In the Catalan village where
she had grown up in the 1920s and 30s nobody did any of those things, much less
taught them. She had visions of country clubs and elegant house parties in my
future, and she wanted to spare me the embarrassment of sitting dry and bored
by the side of the pool, or being unable to return a kick serve on the tennis
court.
One summer, while we
were living in Quito, she heard that a former Olympic swimmer, señor Otero, was
offering a girls-only swimming course, and she signed me up. This was just
before I developed breasts, while I could still squeeze my twelve-year-old body
into my childish swimsuit, a cotton affair with tiny pink roses on a white
background..
In the dressing room, as
I struggled to cram my thick braids into a white rubber swimming cap, I looked
around at my fellow learners. These were no girls! They must have been in their
late teens or early twenties, but to me they seemed practically as old as my
mother, with fat white thighs and bathing suits that had built-in containers
for their breasts.
At an altitude of over
nine-thousand feet, Quito’s temperature year-round hovers in the 60s. The pool where we would learn to swim--“like
fishes, guaranteed!” according to señor Otero--was outdoors, under a sky that
in those days was untroubled by pollution, and with a view of the green slopes
of Pichincha, the lively volcano that presides over the city. The pool was
unheated.
Before we were allowed
to get our feet wet, señor Otero—balding, ripped, and wearing a tiny bathing suit—dragged out a number of
narrow wooden benches and arranged them around the pool. We were each assigned
a bench, and told to lie on our stomachs as senor Otero threaded his way among
our recumbent forms, explaining the scissors kick and the crawl stroke.
That exercise over, señor Otero led us to the deep end of the pool. “Señoritas, al agua!” he yelled, motioning for us to jump in. The
idea was that we would eventually surface, turn on our backs, and practice
floating. There was much shrieking as bodies hit the chilly water, but one by
one my classmates emerged from the depths and began to float. But I, stunned by
the jets of water forced up my nose by the dive, my muscles turned to stone by
the cold, just couldn’t do it. Every time I turned on my back, my feet and then
my legs, my pelvis, and the rest of me would gradually and inexorably sink.
When señor Otero blew
his end-of-class whistle I pulled my soaking-wet braids out of my swimming cap
and got shivering back into my clothes. At home, I lay in my darkened room all
afternoon while pool water drained out of my sinuses.
Twice a week, for the
rest of the summer, I went to swimming class. I suffered through the back
stroke, the crawl, the side stroke, the breast stroke and the butterfly. I also suffered from a kind
of embarrassment that I had never experienced before: that of being in a group
of half-undressed women presided over by an all-but-naked man. I was probably
the most naïve twelve-year-old in the western hemisphere, but there was
something deeply discomfiting about señor Otero prancing among us, telling us
what to do with our bodies, and sometimes helping us do it.
Whether it was because
of embarrassment, the mercilessly cold water, performance anxiety, or painful
sinuses, while my classmates mastered one stroke after another, I could barely
float. And summer was almost over.
Señor Otero’s course would
culminate in a demonstration before a crowd of parents, relatives, and
boyfriends, and would consist of each student swimming the length of the pool
in the stroke of her choice. For me, señor Otero made an exception: I would
only be required to float across the width of the pool.
One by one my plump,
pale classmates dove in and, using the crawl, back stroke, breast stroke, side
stroke and even the butterfly, emerged triumphant at the far end. When my turn
came, I took a deep breath and flung myself into the frigid water. I stretched
my arms out by my ears and tried to stay horizontal. I didn’t have far
to go, but when the cement wall was almost at my fingertips, I felt something
bump my hip. It was the head of señor Otero, who, not wanting to have a student
drown in front of her parents, had dived in to save me.
A couple of weeks later,
my parents went with some friends to El Tingo, a thermal springs resort south
of Quito, and they took me along. It was a weekday and the place was
practically empty. While the grownups were eating lunch I got into my bathing
suit and, ignoring the swimming cap, entered the pool. The sun shone down on
me, and in the warm water every muscle in my body softened.
Nobody was watching. I
lay on my back and floated a while, squinting against the glare. I felt like I
was dissolving in the glorious warmth that enveloped me, and dreamily, without
thinking about it, I began to do the back stroke. When my arms hit the cement wall,
I realized that I had made it across the entire length of the pool. I turned
over and tried the crawl—nothing could be easier! The breast stroke and side
stroke were a snap, and I even managed the fearsome butterfly.
My mother was delighted
with my sudden metamorphosis into a swimmer. But when it came to tennis, luck
deserted us. To this day, whenever I see a ball hurtling in my direction, I
turn and run the other way.
Labels:
adolescence
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Quito
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Quito weather
,
swimming
,
swimming instruction
,
swimsuits
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
The Mediocre Meditator's Prayer
Dear Goddess/God/Ground of
Being/Universe,
Here I am again, on my
cushion, chair, or mat,
with my breath, and bones, and
heart.
Oh, and my monkey mind, too.
Already the macaques are leaping
through the forest of my neurons, and I haven’t even found my breath yet.
Sigh. Right hip hurts a bit.
What am I doing here, on this
cushion, chair, or mat?
What am I looking for?
Wrong! I’m not supposed to look
for anything.
But a bit of peace wouldn’t come
amiss right now,
Goddess/God/ Ground of Being/Universe.
Now the monkeys are throwing
fruit.
Gently let them go. Breathe. Is
it time to get up yet?
None of this makes sense.
Focus on the heart instead.
How long have I been doing
this? I don’t mean just today, but in my life.
Years and years, but not consistently,
not faithfully enough, obviously.
Or I’d be better at it.
Don’t judge. Breathe. Accept.
I can’t stop the screeching monkeys
or send blood to my left
foot, which has fallen asleep.
The only thing I can do is to
keep showing up on my cushion, chair, or mat.
So I do, mostly,
Goddess/God/Ground of
Being/Universe.
Labels:
meditation
,
monkey mind
,
Zen Buddhism
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Enlightenment at the Vet's
Spent half of Sunday last
week at the emergency vet clinic with Bisou. As animals came in they were triaged, and since Bisou was not in dire straits (her problem had to do with anal glands), we had to wait. And wait. And
while we waited I fretted.
As often happens with humans
as well as dogs, now that we were at the clinic Bisou seemed less bothered than
she had been at home. She’d had this anal gland issue before, and I knew what to expect. So what was I
doing here, waiting for what seemed like an eternity? Couldn’t I make her comfortable with warm
water compresses and take her to our regular vet in the morning?
Meanwhile, cats arrived
yowling in their carriers. Energetic young dogs (not much apparently wrong with
them) leaped and twisted at the end of their leads. Bisou looked around and was
entertained. I pulled out my Kindle and went back to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, one of the best novels ever.
You may have seen the BBC adaptation—it’s about the rise of Thomas Cromwell in
the court of Henry VIII. Wolf Hall
and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies,
are also among the most depressing books I’ve ever read, having to do with
man’s (and woman’s) cupidity, cruelty, and stupidity.
As compelling as Mantel’s
writing was, I couldn’t get into it. I kept wondering whether sitting hour
after hour with a dog who wasn’t anywhere near death’s door was the right thing
for me to be doing. Was I being silly, alarmist, absurd? Would the emergency
vet laugh at me?
There were other things I should
be doing. I had agreed to join a group to write letters to people in Arizona
that afternoon, urging them to register to vote. What if, as a result of my
failure to show up, half a dozen Arizonans didn’t vote, and my party lost the
election? You know what they say about a butterfly flapping its wings in the
Amazon… (on second thought, there probably aren’t any butterflies left in the
Amazon).
Worst of all, I felt sure
that any intelligent adult in my situation should be able to discern
the right thing to do: whether to wait as long as it took for the vet to see
Bisou, or pick up the leash and head out the door. So while in Mantel’s novel one side burned
heretics at the stake and the other beheaded, hanged and disemboweled those who
refused to go along with Henry’s wishes, I flogged myself with the notion that,
whatever the right thing might be, I was failing to do it.
Two hours passed. Bisou was getting antsy, and I could neither read nor relax. And then out of the blue I had an insight: I had always lived with the assumption
that for each situation there was an ideal response, and that it was up to me to
figure out what it was.
But what if, I thought, gently
moving Bisou’s muzzle out from under her tail, sometimes there isn’t a clear course
of action? Perhaps, faced with my stay-or-go dilemma, even the Dalai Lama,
Mother Theresa, and Stephen Hawking might have found themselves uncertain
about the right decision.
If, like me, you are saddled
with perfectionist tendencies, the thought that sometimes there isn’t a right
answer will make you uncomfortable. On the other hand, how soothing to the
dithering brain the acceptance of uncertainty, with its concomitant absolution
from guilt!
Finally Bisou was called, her
wound salved, antibiotics and anti-inflammatories dispensed. Back home after
our four-hour ordeal, I gave Bisou her meds, applied a warm water compress to
her nether regions, and put an e-collar around her neck. I didn’t make it to
the letter-writing meeting. If my favored candidate loses in Arizona, I'll be sorry, but I won't flog myself about it.
Labels:
anxiety
,
Bring Up the Bodies
,
dog anal glands
,
emergency veterinarians
,
Henry VIII
,
Hilary Mantel
,
Kindle
,
Thomas Cromwell
,
Wolf Hall
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
First Day of School
I
started school when I was six, and until I entered that first-grade classroom I cannot remember having been in the presence of another child my age.
The
school was run by an order of German nuns who had fled Hitler and come to impart
punctuality, discipline, good posture, and the German language to the daughters
of the Barcelona élites. It was an expensive school, and my parents would not
have been able to afford it if I hadn’t been their only child. But the nuns’
German accents carried a whiff of exoticism that my mother, whose fondness for
strange people and places would later lead the family to Ecuador, found
irresistible.
That
first morning, not just my mother but my father too marked the solemnity of
the occasion by walking me to school. As my classmates and I were being
marched into the building, I turned for a last look at them. Why weren’t they
coming with me? When Schwester Maria showed me my desk, I realized that,
for the first time in my life, I was in a room without a relative in sight--no
parents, aunts, grandparents, or great-uncles and -aunts—just strangers.
I
already knew how to read, so that part was no trouble. Nor, unless she
addressed me in German, was Schwester Maria a problem, since I was well
accustomed to dealing with grownups, whom I usually found to be reasonable and
who could be trusted to keep their word. What terrified me were the other
girls.
I
could make neither heads nor tails of these turbulent midgets, who exhibited none
of the courtly manners I was used to from adults. On the very first day, in German
class, we were called on to read a list of words: die Mutter, das Mädchen,
etc. When it was my turn, all went well until I got to der Vater. Not
realizing that in German “v” is pronounced “f,” I gave it the Spanish
pronunciation, which, unfortunately, also sounded like the Spanish word for
“toilet” (el vater, from “water closet”).
To
say “toilet” instead of “father”! What could be more hilarious to a class of
six-year-olds, on the first day of school? Instead of calmly correcting me, as
my mother or my aunts would have done, my classmates burst into gales of
laughter that only stopped when the Schwester rapped on her desk.
But
that was nothing compared to the sufferings I experienced during playtime, when
my classmates exploded out of the classroom and into the gravel yard, screaming
at the top of their voices. Why were they yelling? Why were they running
around? What was I supposed to do? I was used to being led and instructed at every step by
adults, but here nobody was explaining anything. I had no idea of how to
approach the other girls, start a conversation, or join a group.
We
all went home for lunch, and when it was time to return to school, I told my
mother that I was done. I didn’t like school, and wouldn’t be going back. She
answered that of course I had to go, I was a big girl now, etc. I resisted. She
tried to take my hand. I grabbed the arms of the rush bottomed chair I was
sitting on and held on with all my might. But she pried my fingers loose and I
had no choice but, sick at heart and weeping with humiliation, to go down the marble
stairs of the apartment house and out on the street, to what felt like my place
of execution.
One
day I heard a girl ask another “me estás amiga?” (are you my friend? the
use of the verb “estar” implying the temporary nature of these
friendships). So the next day I gathered my courage and approached one of the
more popular girls, the beta if not the alpha of the class.
Me estás amiga? I asked, tremulously. And she answered “no,” flicked
her braids, and turned away.
That
was it for me on the playground. All during class I dreaded the approach of
play period, and all during play period I longed for the bell to ring so I
could take refuge at my desk. I did finally find one girl to share the misery
of those play periods. She was even shyer than I--the omega of the grade. We
didn’t particularly like each other, feeling an obscure contempt for our mutual
weaknesses, but we tolerated each other because we had no choice.
Just
when I thought things couldn’t get much worse, I developed amblyopia, or “lazy
eye.” My mother rushed me to the ophthalmologist, who said that the only way to
keep me from losing sight in the lazy eye was to cover the good eye with a
patch for one year.
This
did save my eyesight, but it was disastrous for my social life. One of my more
boisterous classmates—bright blue eyes, blond curls, freckles—looked at my patch
and screamed, “it’s contagious!” And the whole class squealed and scattered. Fortunately
her father, who was a doctor, heard about this and made his daughter apologize,
and I shed my leper status.
I
spent my school years oscillating between mind-numbing boredom and heart-clenching
anxiety. The boredom occurred in the classes that involved reading—History,
Spanish, and Religion. Every year, on the first day of school, when the new
books were distributed, no matter how hard I tried to control myself I would
race through and read them to the end, which left me with nothing to discover
for the rest of the year.
The
anxiety-producing subjects were German (I never did understand the difference
between dative and accusative); arithmetic (my father had no talent for
numbers, so my family excused me on the grounds of heredity); handwriting (both
my father and his father had exquisite handwriting, so there I was a bit of a
disgrace); and handwork (crochet, knitting, and, later, embroidery).
But
physical education was the worst. Until I entered first grade I had never
thrown a ball or raced another child. My inexperience, combined with poor depth
perception caused by my lazy eye, made phys ed. a trial all the way through
college.
In
grade school, calisthenics, for which we wore knee-length bloomers under our
uniform, and which were led by a nun in full habit, was a relief, since I was
tolerably good at following precise directions. Also, perhaps thanks to the
flexibility I inherited from my double-jointed paternal grandfather, I excelled
at forward and backward somersaults. (Since the nun in her long habit was our
only phys ed. instructor, I can’t imagine how she demonstrated these.)
As
it happened, the subjects that scared me most were taught by nuns (we had lay
women, native Spaniards, for the others). However, despite the bitter stories that
people often tell about their Catholic education, in my twelve years of
Catholic school in three different countries I did not see a single instance of
a child being hit or treated in an improper way. There was strict discipline, certainly,
but by the same token, even in my co-ed high school we never had to worry about
being threatened or harassed by our peers.
Nevertheless,
it is true that I was afraid of the German nuns. But I think that that had to
do with language. Their Spanish was far from perfect, and when they ran out of
patience they ran out of Spanish too. Being scolded or simply instructed to do
something quickly (schnell!) by a frowning nun in a foreign language terrified me, so my strategy was to pass unnoticed. At the end of the year I never
got awards for academic performance. Depressingly, my prizes were for “buena
conducta y aplicación”—in other words, I was well-behaved and did my
homework.
The
boredom/anxiety ratio shifted over the years. After I felt comfortable
understanding and speaking English I grew less anxious and more bored, with the
exception of math and phys ed. classes, which continued to mortify me all the
way through college.
I
am happy to report that my fears of other people disappeared long ago. But sometimes
at night, when I think about that first day of school, I can feel once again in
my palm the hardness of the arm of the rush-bottomed chair I clung to, and the
despair at being fished out of the calm waters of my infancy and flung into the
roiling torrent of the world.
Third grade. I'm in the middle row, next to Mater Hilaria. The girl who mocked my eye patch is at the other end of the same row, next to the lay teacher. |
Labels:
amblyopia
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Catholic education
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foreign language learning
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German school
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nuns
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socialization
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Dilemma
Had three appointments with
service providers this week, and they went something like this:
The hairdresser parted my wet
hair into sections, picked up the scissors and said, “And what are your plans
for this afternoon?”
“Got any plans for the afternoon?” the
chiropractor wanted to know, preparing to twist my head off my neck.
“Got anything fun planned for
later on today?” said the dental hygienist, adjusting the chair.
And the dentist: “Open wide?
Awesome! Ummm...do you have any nice plans for the rest of the day?”
When I mumbled something
noncommittal they all, with the exception of the hygienist, asked if I had any exciting
travel plans or have been anywhere exciting recently.
I find these questions embarrassing. Don’t these people know that I know how boring they must find
their clients’ responses? Do they really think that I am so naïve as to assume they
will be fascinated when I tell them that I expect to take a nap the minute I
get home, then maybe read a book? Do they think that I have no theory of mind?
But if there is one thing I
have in spades, it’s theory of mind. I have so much of it, in fact, that I am
often silenced by a too-vivid image of how trivial what I’m about to say will seem
to my listener.
Is there anything more soul-killing than someone
nattering on about their schedule? The only being on the planet on whom I inflict
the details of my afternoon plans is my spouse of fifty-two years. Ditto for
travel plans and stories. Who, aside perhaps from one’s own mother, wants to
hear about the bistro in Bogota or the flight to Madagascar?
So when people assume that I do
not possess the ability to put myself in their place (something that the normal
child learns to do by about age four) I feel patronized and embarrassed.
I wonder why these otherwise capable professionals persist in these inquiries. I’ve been going to the same
hairdresser for five years, and for five years he’s asked about my plans for
the afternoon, never noticing that every time I deftly shift the conversation to
his Labradoodle, who is in fragile
health.
This tiresome practice is probably
the fault of some business guru, who came up with the idea that asking clients
questions about their schedules and travels would improve their satisfaction
and lead to financial success. But that only works if the clients have a strong
narcissistic streak, or lack theory of mind.
My hairdresser, my
chiropractor, my dentist and hygienist are
professionals. I am their client. I don’t need to feel that we are buddies. Why
can’t we rest peacefully in our respective roles and dispense with these attempts at formulaic chitchat?
Of course the trouble with
theory of mind is that it is just that: a theory. Which means that when I
imagine that my dentist would be bored if I told him about a trip I took in
1984, I may be wrong. He might in fact be deeply interested in my story, and feel
gratified that I am willing to share it with him. Perhaps he gets lonely,
endlessly digging around in people’s mouths while they cringe in anticipated
pain, and is starved for conversation.
Labels:
chiropractors
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dental hygienists
,
dentists
,
hair dressers
,
horns of a dilemma
,
theory of mind
Wednesday, September 4, 2019
My Inner Snail
Donat pressa!
my mother urged at the door of our apartment, as I searched everywhere for my
chapel veil. We were on our way to Mass, and if we didn’t get there before the
Ofertory we wouldn’t fulfill our Sunday obligation.
Corre, corre!
the maid Luisa would say as we trudged up the hill to my school. She was as
obsessed with punctuality as the German nuns who taught me.
Schnell, schnell! Schwester Maria hissed as I dawdled
outside the classroom.
“She’s so slow!” the nuns
would lament to my mother. And they were right. In the morning, it took me
forever to unbutton my coat, put on my smock (we wore white smocks over our
woolen uniforms to protect them from ink stains), find my desk, and get my homework
out of my satchel. At lunchtime, I had to reverse the
process, and I was always the last one out of the building.
Neither the nuns nor my
mother scolded me for my slowness, but I spent my childhood being pressed to
get on with it, stop dawdling, pay attention! It felt as if I were mounted on a
snail, while everyone else galloped past me on horseback.
It took me ages to learn to
tie my shoes. I was ten before I learned to ride a bicycle, twelve before I
learned to tell time. I was the last in my class to finish a row of knitting,
and in playground chase games I never caught anybody, but was easy prey for my
faster classmates.
I lived in a world where people
were in a perpetual rush. My father would come home for lunch, fling off his
coat, and sit at the table. He would put his watch by his plate and announce,
“I have five minutes to eat!” and five minutes later he’d be out the door,
violin in hand, on the way to rehearsal. Although my father was the main rusher
in the household, my mother, my aunts, and the maid also seemed to live in a
whirlwind of activity.
For my part, I dwelt inside a
kind of semi-transparent egg, where sights and sounds reached me dimly, and
mostly without claiming my attention. While the world spun around me, I peered dreamily
at random objects—the s-shaped arm rest in the Tyrolean-style dining room
bench, the crusty bread crumbs under the table after a meal, the blue and
yellow floor tiles, the raised velvety flowers on the ugly sofa upholstery. I wondered
about invisible stuff too, and astounded my mother when, at four years old, I asked
her to explain what things were like, before they existed.
But mostly I thought about
things that I hoped would happen: that a sudden illness of my maternal grandmother’s
would mean that I had to leave school and go with my mother to help out at the
farm. And, later on, that my father’s negotiations with the Ecuadorian
government would work out so that, again, I could leave school and go with my
parents to Ecuador.
In Ecuador my woolgathering
habit persisted. Because of the discrepancy between the Spanish and the
Ecuadorian systems, at twelve I was put in a class with fifteen-year-old girls,
whose obsession with hairstyles, boys, and their “monthly visitor” made me think
that they were all insane. I retreated deep inside my egg, and in four years
made only one friend, a girl who, as the eldest of twelve children, was accustomed
to taking care of slower siblings.
My inwardness was more obvious
than I knew. One morning I realized with a start that I was still standing in the silent
school courtyard when the rest of my class had filed into the classroom. But I wasn’t alone. Regarding me with her sparkling green eyes, Madre
María, the dreaded vice-principal, shook her wimple and said, “I see you’re out
of it as usual, Benejam!”
It was only in my teens that
I learned to hurry. I hurried to learn English, to clean the house, to play the
violin in my father’s orchestra, to finish my term papers, to sterilize my
sister’s formula, to put my hair up in rollers at night, to get to Mass in the
morning.
With Time’s winged chariot
forever at my back, I became a champion hurrier, but at the cost of leaving
things half done, of putting the final period on a paper that I knew could be
much better, of having to make do with good enough. Newly married, I watched in
wonder as my husband dried himself after a shower, from head to toe, including
between his toes. I was used to jumping still half-wet into my clothes, never
mind drying between my toes.
The older I got, the faster I
rushed—mothering, working, cooking, thinking. I did everything at top speed, schnell, schnell! But that was only on
the outside. Inside, I was still the same slow me, pondering endless trivia, riding
my snail, and wondering if things would ever slow down.
Now that the mothering, the
working, and the cooking are mostly over, I still feel that there isn’t enough
time in the day for all the things that must be done: clipping the dog’s nails,
folding towels, answering emails, inquiring about sick friends, meditating, exercising….My
fondest hope is that, sometime in my remaining years, the slow, backward child
that still dawdles inside my brain will stop trying to keep up, and be at peace
with her snail.
Labels:
Barcelona
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child development
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Ecuador
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German school
,
introverts
,
slow living
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Telemann and the Spider Plant
He glares down at me like a
gargoyle from the top of the six-foot bookcase, lashes his tail, blinks. “What!”
he says, and goes back to administering the death by a thousand cuts to my
spider plant.
I have, since Telemann came
to us from the mean streets of Philadelphia two years ago, disposed of most of
my houseplants. The ASPCA’s list of plants that are toxic to cats lists 417
species (including, for some reason, catnip), so I am now down to a couple of
citrus trees, a jade plant, and my once-flourishing spider plant, which is not
poisonous because, if it were, Telemann would have died long ago.
When Telemann first arrived,
the spider plant was busy making babies on a shelf in the sunroom. Swaying in
the slightest breeze, those babies proved irresistible to a kitten who had,
poor thing, until now been deprived of toys, stimulation, healthy food,
veterinary care, love, and a warm home. As soon as he saw those plantlets, he
knocked down a couple and ate them.
I moved the plant to the
dining table, but by the next morning several more babies had perished. I
thought that the sideboard would provide refuge, but it didn’t take long for
Telemann to enact the botanical equivalent of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents.
I transferred the grieving mother
plant to the highest spot in the cottage—the top of the tall bookcase in our
bedroom. There wasn’t a lot of light there, but spider plants are tough, and
after a while it started to look more cheerful. But that was before Telemann
figured that it was only an easy five-foot leap (I made my husband measure it)
from the nightstand to the plant. We covered the top of the bookcase with loops
of packing tape, sticky side up, but that didn’t deter Telemann, who is
probably the only cat on earth who doesn’t mind sticky tape on his paws.
Why are cats so amoral? Why
do they do bad things and not care? Dogs try hard to be good, and if they
sometimes fail, they suffer pangs of conscience. When Bisou used to do bad
things, she always felt guilty. (Now that she’s ten, she hasn’t done anything
bad in a long time.)
You’d think that after all
I’ve done for him Telemann would let us have one measly spider plant to purify
the air while we sleep. But reciprocity is not in his repertoire. If, as the
cliché has it, dogs give humans unconditional love, cats expect unconditional
love from us.
Still, despite his disastrous
effects on my houseplants, I always manage to forgive Telemann, partly because in
a weird way I admire his après moi le
déluge attitude, his focus on his own desires, and his confounded nerve,
which remind me of various autocrats, past and present. Luckily Telemann, with
his velvety gray fur, little white paws, and slender body, is much easier on
the eye. Plus he does have his sweet moments, when he becomes a purring,
kneading machine, and exacts all the unconditional love I have to give.
Labels:
ASPCA
,
cat behavior
,
cats
,
dog behavior
,
dogs
,
houseplants
,
poisonous houseplants
,
spider plants
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