Thursday, September 16, 2021

To My Readers:

Here is my blog's new home:

https://mygreenvermont.com/

I look forward to seeing you there, and thanks for reading!

Lali

Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Eating Bugs

Quito, 1954. My mother comes excitedly home from the market with a package of shrimp, the first she’s found since we arrived from Barcelona, where shrimp was only one of several marine species in our Sunday paella. She places the package in the sink and asks the indigenous maid, Maria—black braids, embroidered blouse, felt skirt—to wash them in preparation for cooking. Maria opens the package, takes one look at the contents, and runs out of the kitchen, her braids streaming behind her, screaming that those bugs in the sink are just like the bugs with many legs that you find curled up under a stone, and she would rather die than touch one, much less eat it. 

It’s my first lesson in gastronomic relativity, in which I realize that what we like to eat or can’t bear to even think of eating is determined more by where we come from than by the merits of the thing on our plate. Ecuador is replete with challenges to gastronomic provincialism. There is the Andean village where at dusk small flying beetles take to the air, and are chased by swarms of little boys who catch and eat them. “They are sweet,” they tell us, munching. And there is the Saturday afternoon ritual when native families sit in front of their houses ridding each other’s scalp of lice, which they eat--a practice that supposedly helps to protect them against typhoid. And in the Amazon basin, we are told, people hunt monkeys with blow guns and boil them whole…. 

In Spain, before we went to South America, everything that I ate was anatomically correct: small fish were served entire on my plate, and I don’t remember being grossed out by their fishy eyes looking up at me, or by the knee caps and hip joints of rabbits and chickens, or by the chicken’s comb, which my  grandmother used to save for me. 

But the years have changed me. Long before I became vegetarian I stopped eating chicken thighs, because I couldn’t bear the sight of all the muscles and tendons; then I stopped eating chicken breasts (those ribs!); and then I stopped eating chicken altogether. Now, wishing I had the energy and resourcefulness to be vegan, I make-do with vegetables and dairy products, with an occasional can of salmon or sardines to boost my protein intake. 

I recently read “Grub,” an article in the September 6 issue of The New Yorker about entomophagy, or the practice of eating insects. Given the expanding human population and the diminishing resources of the planet, insects offer an ecologically sustainable source of high-quality protein, so it becomes almost a moral duty for us all to support the companies that are working to make entomophagous cuisine available to the world at large—and that includes actually eating their products. 

This is something that I will happily do as long as I cannot tell what I am eating. That means no legs, no antennae, no compound eyes, no diaphanous wings, no chewy bits of exoskeleton. Give me bugs ground into anonymous, homogeneous powder, and I will ingest not only cute, small things like ants and ladybugs but Luna moths, tarantulas, locusts, and Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Shared by most Americans, this preference for bugs in powder form presents a problem for the “tiny livestock” industry, because insect protein, as you know if you’ve ever squashed a bug, is gooey instead of solid. But they’re working on it. 

Note that I haven’t said anything about flavor. But mix some insect powder with an egg substitute, dredge in bread crumbs, fry lightly in olive oil, and what’s not to like? I just celebrated Labor Day with a sad little vegetarian patty made of mostly beans and corn. After that, critter croquettes don’t sound half bad to me. 

Thursday, September 2, 2021

Wobbly

I’m in a wobbly state these days. This, I am told, is normal after hip replacement surgery, but lately I’ve been feeling even more wobbly emotionally than I do physically. My inner weather shifts from placid to stormy countless times during the day. It doesn’t take much to lower my barometric pressure: an unanswered email, one item too many on my to-do list and, above all, the danse macabre of the news cycle, swirling in my consciousness from dawn to dusk. 

I wasn’t always like this. Although I had my ups and downs, I never approached my present weathervane-like state. One variable of course is age. I had always imagined that someday, when I finally grew up, I would attain a sage-like equanimity. So far this fantasy has not come true for me, on the contrary. 

But the principal variable, I believe, is not my age, but the age in which we live. Floods and fires. Afghans clinging to the fuselage of taxiing cargo planes. Haitians being dug out (or not being dug out) of ruins. Americans dying who would have lived if they had been vaccinated. Overflowing ICUs, exhausted doctors and nurses, and a virus that keeps reinventing itself. The uncertainty of what life will look like in a month, or three. Who can stay calm in the middle of this?

Often I tell myself that no generation before us has dealt with threats of this magnitude. And then I try to imagine myself as a Jew in 1940s Germany, or as my father, in hiding from 1936 to 1939, the duration of the Spanish Civil War. Surely the daily fear for their lives, their hunger and deprivation, were worse than what I and the people around me have to put up with. 

But here is the difference: although for us lucky ones the dangers are not immediate, they are planetary. We are the first generation to live day in and day out with the awareness of massive extinctions and colossal disasters across the globe, and the threat of more to come. (Have you noticed how few butterflies are around this summer? I saw a single Monarch at my hyssop yesterday and almost went down on my knees before it.) 

So in my apocalyptic moments, my mood teeters and falls. But then, because I am human and cannot sustain any one emotional state for very long, the phone rings, or I meet a friend, or I find a good book, and I lurch upright again. However, these are merely distractions, and the next newscast, article, or photo plunges me into the depths once more. 

Is this the new normal? And if so, how are we going to get through it? Is there even something beyond the through? I suspect that, for weary Londoners in the middle of the Blitz, it also must have seemed as if their trials would last forever. But then the Americans finally joined the war and made everything better. 

Where, I wonder, are the “Americans” who will come with weapons, K-rations, and chocolates, and get us out of this mess? 

Monday, August 30, 2021

To My Readers:

This is to let you know that, after today, if you have subscribed to this blog you may not get an email with my new posts. I am also aware that it is now impossible to leave comments on the blog. I apologize for these technical problems, which I am trying to resolve.

I post every week on Wednesday or Thursday, so until things return to normal you can always find me by clicking on MyGreenVermont.

I am sorry for the inconvenience, and am grateful to you, my readers, who keep  me writing.

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Showing Off

 My new left hip is only four hours old when the nurse comes into my room. "Wanna take your hip for a spin?" she asks, wheeling the walker up to the bed. I stand up and, feeling like the recipient of a New Testament miracle, take hold of my walker and walk. "You're doing great! Feel free to walk up and down the halls if you're up to it," she says, and returns to her station. 

Fiddling with the ties at my back, I adjust the XXL hospital gown to my actual dimensions, and go exploring. At the end of the hall, I stare out the huge window at the rain. Next door there is an empty room with chairs and sofas intended for visitors. As I leave, my walker bumps against the doorjamb. What am I doing with this annoying contraption?  I'm not even putting any weight on it. In fact, I can probably get around without it. 

I leave the walker in my room and take another stroll. This is much better! It leaves my hands free to keep the XXL gown from flapping open while I fantasize that my recovery is over and I am back to normal, even before the sun sets on my surgery day. Not the least of my joys is the look of amazement on the nurse's face when she comes to fetch me. "Wow, you're really killing it!" she says, adjusting the blood pressure cuff. 

I blush with pleasure, and imagine her back at her station saying to her fellow nurses, "That woman in 2116 is amazing. I've never seen anything like her in my life! Nobody has ever recovered from surgery this fast."

Now it is the dead of night, and two orthopedics residents appear at the foot of my bed. "Do you think you could try raising you leg a little?" one of them asks. I respond with a high kick worthy of the Rockettes. "How cool is that!" he whispers to his friend. They leave and I sink back into slumber, wreathed in smiles.  I'd forgotten how good it feels to impress people.

The night nurse comes by with some pills. "I hear you've been walking around without your walker," she says, handing me a glass of water. "That's just not safe. I must ask that you use your walker at all times while you're in the hospital." 

Alongside the show-off, there lives within me a deeply obedient and compliant child. It is now her turn to shine, so I use the walker for the remainder of my stay, even though that makes my excursions less exciting (fewer chances of impressing staff) and clouded by the fear of my gown falling open in the back.

But when the physical therapist comes in the morning to clear me to go home, I am back in show-off mode, demonstrating the flexions and abductions I've been practicing for months in preparation for surgery.

I am not without self-awareness, so throughout my time in the hospital I am conscious of this childlike compulsion to impress everyone I come across, from surgeons to orderlies. But why I might be doing this, I have no idea. Could it be that I believe that my performances will get me more attention, and better care? But that seems counterintuitive, as doctors and nurses would surely be more inclined to minister to me if I appeared feeble and needy. 

Or it might be that at my stage in life there is little opportunity for performance and the ensuing applause. Gone are the days when studying hard would get me an A, so now I aim for good grades from medical personnel. It may make me look ridiculous, but I can't help myself.

Or maybe it's simply in my genes. As my 94-year-old mother was dying of encephalitis, I sat by her bed reading her a Catalan poem about the afterlife that she and my father had always loved. But before I could finish she shook her head, waved the book aside, and said "Look! Look what I can do!" and underneath the bedsheet she raised her left leg, and then her right, a good two feet above the mattress.

Monday, August 9, 2021

Little White Paw

I go into the bedroom to prepare for a zoom session. My dog Bisou is with me because she’s always with me, unless I’ve accidentally locked her in a closet into which she has followed me. I close the bedroom door, open the laptop, and wait for the host to start the session. Out in the hallway, the cat Telemann gives a melancholy meow, and sticks his little white paw under the door. If there is one thing I cannot resist, it is Telemann’s little white paw. I would interrupt a zoom meeting with the Pope himself if Telemann stuck his paw under the door. 

The session hasn’t started yet, so I get up and open the door. You’d think that he would rush right in, but no. Instead, he backs up against the little bench across the hall and performs his marking ritual. This consists of raising one hind foot after the other while making trembling motions with his upright tail. You have probably seen male tigers do this against a jungle tree in nature documentaries. Unlike the tigers, Telemann is neutered, so he does not spray urine, for which I’m grateful. When I described this ritual to the vet, he said it was a sign of affection. “You are loved,” he whispered. 

I beckon with voice and gesture for Telemann to come into the room, but he’s not done with the marking ceremony. I know that if I simply close the door, the meowing and pawing will start all over again, so “Heeeere kitty” I implore, in my most dulcet tones. He looks at me as if he’s never seen me before. 

Surely by now the zoom session has started? I go to check the computer, and while I’m turned away Telemann ambles nobly into the room. I leap to the door and close it before he can change his mind. Both pets are now in the room—Bisou is already snoring—and I can center myself as I wait for the session to begin. 

But where is the cat? He’s sitting by the closed door, staring at it as if to bore a hole through which to escape. Is he thirsty? Is he bored? Does he need to use the litter box? How urgent is his need? If I let him out, he’ll insist on coming back in. On the other hand, if I ignore him there may be a heavy price to pay. 

The host has appears and the session begins. The minute Telemann hears voices, he jumps onto my lap and presses his damn little white paw on the keyboard, which causes the zoom screen to vanish. When I get it back, he maneuvers himself with his derrière to the screen, tail raised to the sky. It’s a good thing I’m not zooming with the Pope. 

Despite his many quirks, I find Telemann entrancing, because he is so mysterious. Dogs have their own mysteries, of course, but compared to a cat, a dog is an open book. Living with a dog is like watching a foreign movie with subtitles—you miss some stuff, but you get the general idea. Living with a cat is like watching that same movie minus subtitles, and having to figure out what is going on by guesswork and paying close attention to the actors’ facial expressions. 

Few things are as puzzling as trying to read a cat’s face. Perhaps this is because the cat’s facial expression often bears no relation in human terms to what he is doing. When Telemann in a playful mode “assaults” Bisou or leaps after a string I’m wiggling for him, his face remains as solemn and composed as when he does his nails at the scratching post. Dogs have play faces. Cats do not. 

There is one situation in which a cat’s face does what a human’s would do in the same circumstance, and that is the purr face--the cozy-comfy face, with the eyelids at half-mast. It’s the kind of face that, when a human makes it, we think of as cat-like. But for the most part, a cat expresses himself with his body—tail up or lashing, back flat or arched, and so on. We humans are a face-oriented species, however, and we scrutinize eyes, cheeks, and lips before we remember to look at the body, so cats appear sphinx-like to us, hieratic and unfathomable. 

I like to live with both a dog and a cat for the same reason that some married men keep mistresses: the dog (the wife) offers reliable comfort and companionship, while the cat, like a capricious mistress, is in charge of mystery and drama.



Wednesday, August 4, 2021

The Age of Uncertainty

Masks, social distancing, distance learning, quarantines--we thought we were done with all that. We flung down our face coverings, hugged our friends, breathed sighs of relief. Now mask mandates, booster shots, and those obnoxious limitations loom once more on the horizon. Will the uncertainty ever end? 

The answer is, no. Covid may fade; the dreaded Delta variant may disappear; and we may return to some version of normalcy, if we can remember what that was like. But one thing is certain: something else is going to happen. In 1918, after the “war to end all wars,” people thought that they could get back to business as usual. But the war was followed by the influenza pandemic, then by the Great Depression, and by the Spanish Civil War, which was the dress rehearsal for the Second World War…. 

No matter how often we are proven wrong, we humans persist in our longing for certainty and stability, for things to stop happening so we can rest. I can’t imagine that this desire has any evolutionary value. Wouldn’t it have been better if as a species we had evolved to take change in our stride--to expect it, accept it, even enjoy it? Instead, we are forever waiting for the crisis of the moment to end, for the project to be completed, for exams to be over--and then, what? Then, and not before then, we will relax, take a deep breath, and be happy. 

Here is how it is for me right now: for a year, I have been waiting for a hip replacement, which is scheduled for next week. As I hobble around preparing for surgery--making one last trip to the market, taking Bisou for her check-up, doing the laundry--my mind, my heart, and my very bones are suffused with the conviction that after that magic date all will be normal, all will be well, and I will finally rest and be at peace. 

I feel this despite the fact that the many years I have lived and the many Buddhist books I have read should have taught me that, even if the surgery goes well (which it will!), when I return from the hospital some problem/dilemma/unexpected shift in the axis of my world will greet me at the door. It’s reasonable for me to anticipate hurting less after the surgery, but foolish to expect to take a deep breath and sink into blessed permanence.

That deep breath signaling the end of change would, if I were to take it, be my last one. Up until that moment, as long as I am alive, everything is bound to continue shifting in maddeningly uncertain ways. So if I want to relax and be happy, I need to figure out a way to do it right now, with chaos swirling all around. 

I often find Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun and teacher, hard to take. But that’s not her fault. She’s a tough woman, and she writes unvarnished truths that, in my heart of hearts, I know are accurate. Such as: “We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that.” 

Who wants to hear this kind of thing? And yet, we all know that she’s right. 

She also says, “Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don’t struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality.” This reminds me of the Aesop fable that I read as a child, in which a sturdy oak tree, standing mighty against the wind, mocks the lowly reeds that bend and sway with each gust. But then a big storm comes and knocks down the oak, while the bending, swaying reeds survive unscathed. 

The weather of our lives is as changeable as the weather of the planet. It’s human nature to identify with the oak tree, wanting certainty and permanence no matter what. I am working on becoming more reed-like, swaying and bending in harmony with whatever comes, and maybe even learning to take pleasure in the dance. 

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Elegy for a Bird Feeder

 The finches (purple, house, and gold), along with their dun-colored wives and children, are gone. So are the titmice, nuthatches, chickadees, mourning doves, and woodpeckers (downy, hairy, and red-bellied). Also the rose-breasted grosbeak couple, the cardinal family, several tribes of unidentifiable (by me) sparrows, and all the chipmunks. Even the squirrels have fled. 

A bear was seen recently in our retirement community, and I had to take down the sunflower seed feeder, the suet cage (which needed to be refilled every day), and the squirrel baffle. If I had been living on my own, I would have taken my chances with the bear, but living where we do, I felt that I needed to be prudent. 

Taking down the feeders was one of the low points in a not-so-easy summer. The bear’s appearance coincided with the fledging of dozens of finches in the trees nearby. Four or five baby birds at a time would perch on the feeder, scrambling and fluttering on top of each other for their beleaguered parent to stuff seeds down their gullets. For hours after I took down the feeders the birds kept coming, and I could hear the insistent zik-zik of the young begging for food. I spent the afternoon in the bedroom, to get away from the sight and sound of so much disappointment. 

Then, suddenly, they gave up. Our yard is now bird-, squirrel-, and chipmunk-free. The cat Telemann, who used to spend his days leaping from windowsill to windowsill, lashing his tail and flinging himself at the glass in the eternal hope of catching one of the critters, now sleeps his life away. Sometimes—not often--a bird comes to the birdbath, drinks for a couple of seconds, and takes off. 

And sometimes a bee from the hives across the street perches on the rim and sips a drop or two. This is cause for much excitement—look, a bee!—kind of how you would feel if a unicorn emerged from the woods and approached your house. I had never thought or cared about the drinking habits of bees, but I do now. 

Still, talk about downsizing! After I gave up my goats and chickens, I assuaged my urge to nurture by feeding birds and squirrels. Now I’m reduced to offering water to bees. But bees, I remind myself, are better than nothing. 

The universe is doing its best to teach me lessons in non-attachment, but I am not a good student. I can’t wait for the first frost, when the trees turn colors and the bear goes to sleep in his cave, and I can put out the feeders again.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Pep Rally

 Birmingham, Alabama. A Friday afternoon in September. It is the end of my first week in my new American school, and I am at my locker, about to go home. The hallways are deserted, but it’s probably because everybody has already left for the weekend. A girl comes by. “You can’t go home now!” she says. “There’s a pep rally in the gym! Hurry up, you’ll be late!”

It’s been a week full of weirdness. The weirdness of something called “homeroom.” The weirdness of the Pledge of Allegiance (from which I, a citizen of Spain, am excused). The weirdness of diagramming sentences. And the unspeakable weirdness of boys in the class. 

And now this pep rally. What is “pep”? What is “rally”? 

I find my way to the gym, push open the door, and am blown back by a wall of sound so loud it nearly knocks me over. Never in my thirteen years, and certainly not in my previous schools (run by nuns, for future ladies) have I heard such a din. The entire school is here, even the priests, nuns, and lay teachers, all of them yelling at the top of their lungs. There are repeated “rah’s” and “go’s” and “yay’s,” but are these expressions of anger, alarm, or what? Why are they raising their fists in the air? Is this a political demonstration? 

The noise is so loud that I give up trying to understand and stand there dumbly, sure that everybody is wondering what is wrong with me. In the center of the commotion stands a line of girls dressed in flared knee-length green skirts and thick white sweaters with big green letters on them. Grinning maniacally and yelling “rah,” and “go” and “yay,” they shake what look like mop heads made of green and white strips of paper. Periodically they give an extra loud yell and jump in unison, pumping their arms, arching their backs, and making their skirts float up. 

Behind the girls is an even more bizarre sight: a group of what I assume are boys with helmets covering their heads and part of their faces, grotesquely swollen shoulders, and capri pants. They are dressed in white, with big green numbers on their shirts.

 Then Father H., the principal, steps to the microphone and the yelling subsides. He makes the sign of the cross and the girls drop their mops to the floor as their skirts settle around their calves. “Hail Mary, full of grace…” Father H. intones. I recognize the prayer, so I say to myself “Dios te salve, María…” But what are we praying for? 

When it’s over I walk home in the amazing Alabama heat, glad to be away from the noise and the alien excitement, but feeling strange and alone. I’m worried that I never figured out what the pep rally was about, and that I will perhaps be asked about it on a test. For the moment, though, my brain unclenches, and I bask in the temporary relief of not hearing, not speaking, not trying to understand English. 

At home, I kiss my mother, go into my room, and turn on the radio—very softly because my father is in the living room practicing. Buddy Holly is singing that it’s raining in his heart. I can understand that. It means that he is sad because the girl he loves has gone away. (Will an American boy ever be sad because of me?) 

Then comes the mournful refrain: “Oh misery, misery, what’s gonna become of me?” And my brain, ceaselessly working to make sense of the strange world in which I find myself, concludes that Buddy must be saying “Oh, Missouri, Missouri”-- which is a state somewhere in the middle of this big, confusing country where that cruel girl has gone and left him all alone, like me.

Wednesday, July 7, 2021

My Parents' Wild and Sexy New Year's Eve

 My violinist father always worked on holidays. Even on Christmas Day, while the rest of us were still eating the capons that my maternal grandmother had sent to Barcelona from her farm, my father would pull out his pocket watch, drain his glass of champagne, and say, “time for me to go.” He would go around the table and kiss his mother, his father, his two sisters, my mother, and me and, after admonishing my mother not to wait up for him, pick up his violin and vanish into the night. 

The year I was eight, a concert was cancelled and he was free on New Year’s Eve. Since he worked outside the house most nights of the week, my mother thought it would be exciting, instead of going out, to celebrate by staying home. She explained to me that because this celebration, which she called by its French name, réveillon, would happen at midnight, I would not be included, but I could participate in the preparations. 

In the early December dusk we set out to buy the food. First, we went to the fruit seller to buy grapes, because in Spain on New Year’s Eve you need to eat one grape with each stroke of midnight, for luck. Then we went to the xarcuteria, to buy foie gras, xorisso, ham sliced so thin you could almost see through it, and five different kinds of olives. Next we stopped at the wine store for a bottle of Catalan bubbly. On the way to the bakery we passed the church. A gypsy woman with a baby, her hand outstretched, huddled on the steps. My mother gave her some coins, and as we walked away with our net bag bursting with good things to eat she said to always remember how lucky we were to have food, and a house to live in. 

The réveillon would take place not at the regular dining room table, but at the smaller, more intimate brazier table. This was a round table with a wooden framework that supported the brazier a few inches above the floor. My mother would decant hot coals into the brazier and cover the table with a floor-length tablecloth made of green felt. On cold afternoons she would pull up a chair, lift the cloth over her lap, rest her feet on the edge of the brazier, and sew or read in comfort in our otherwise unheated apartment. For the réveillon, she covered the felt cloth with a smaller, white Belgian-lace cloth. 

The most important aspect of the réveillon wasn’t food, but romance. She and my father had to match the elegance of the tablecloth, the starched napkins, the candles (which we normally reserved for brownouts, a frequent occurrence in the years after the Spanish Civil War), and the cut-glass goblets. 

I desperately wanted to see this part of the preparations, so well before midnight my mother put on her black, floor-length evening dress. It was fitted at the waist, and fell straight to the floor with a pleat at the back. The décolletage was modest, and the narrow sleeves reached to her elbow (my family was as conservative in dress as it was liberal in displays of affection). She wore pearls around her neck and her white fur stole around her shoulders. The latter was not for show. In winter, whenever she wasn’t sitting at the brazier my mother was always cold. 

She had my father dress up too. The only hitch was that my father’s dress clothes—his tailcoat and white piqué vest and bow tie—were also his work clothes, but he nevertheless looked romantic in them. For a moment they stood smiling side by side in front of the brazier table so I could admire them, and then they sent me to bed. 

How is it that I remember, as clearly as if I had been there, my mother and father drinking champagne and feeding each other grapes with each stroke of midnight, and then dancing to my father’s favorite slow foxtrot (“Night and day, you are the one…”), her head on his shoulder, his mustache tickling her neck? It must have been the glow on their faces as they let me see them in their glory, which even to my childish eyes held all the rest—the wine, the candles, the grapes, and the dance.



Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Of Eggs and Hens

When I said goodbye to my little flock and had to resort to getting my eggs cold from the supermarket cooler instead of warm from the nest, I made sure to choose cartons that said that the hens who laid those eggs were “free-range” or, at the very least, “cage-free.” 

Temple Grandin, that patron saint of farm animals, writes that battery hens are the most mistreated of all livestock. The suffering of cattle in feedlots is nothing compared to the misery of hens imprisoned in tight individual cages, deprived of natural light and food, forced to lay without regard for seasonal rhythms, and slaughtered after a couple of years. 

There was a time in my life when I made mayonnaise from scratch, in the blender, with garlic and olive oil, and eggs from my own lovelies. But when I was reduced to buying it at the store, I forgot to think about the hens whose eggs were used in its manufacture. Then one day, reading labels, I found mayonnaise made with eggs from cage-free hens, from the biggest producer on the planet, Hellmann’s. 

Not that cage-free hens lead an idyllic life. They don’t run around on grass, peck at bugs, or preen their feathers in the sun. They spend their lives in huge rooms filled with hundreds of their peers, making the most horrific din. Still, it’s far better than those cages. 

I bought the jar of Hellmann’s and took it home. It tasted like ordinary mayo, but I felt better as I spread it on my bread. Then, on my next trip to the store, I saw a new product on the shelf, a mayonnaise dressing from the same manufacturer that, the label said, was made with olive oil. 

I am a devotee of olive oil. As a child, one of my favorite foods was “pa amb oli i xocolata,” the all-time Catalan after-school snack: a thick slice of crusty bread sprinkled with dark, aromatic olive oil, accompanied with a chunk of almost-bitter chocolate. (If you’ve never tried it, it beats Hershey’s by a mile.) 

When the AMA discovered the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, olive oil ranked first on its list of panaceas. A powerful antioxidant, the oil is supposed to be good for the heart, the brain, the gut, and the immune system. It fights infection, lessens the risk of strokes and certain cancers, combats pain and inflammation, helps prevent diabetes and, because it keeps blood sugar levels stable, may help you lose weight. Not surprisingly, it’s even good for your mood. 

I was in the kitchen putting away the olive oil mayo when I realized that I hadn’t checked whether its eggs also came from cage-free hens. What if I had bought mayonnaise that was good for me but bad for the hens? 

The days are long gone when one could go to the store and choose stuff based on whether it looked good and how much it cost. I had barely mastered the secrets of tuna casserole when I learned that most of the foods available in the supermarket were bursting with possibly lethal substances. The first culprit, identified in the 1970s, was salt (would give you heart attacks), followed in the 1980s by fat (ditto, plus you would look awful), followed by sugar (pure poison, and ubiquitous), followed by hormones (would give you breasts if you were a man, cancer if you were a woman), pesticides, and the growing awareness of what our food system was doing to the welfare of animals. 

Trips to the supermarket became exercises in defensive warfare against industrial farming, food conglomerates, and big business, all of whom were bent on doing me maximum harm for their maximum profit. And now here I was in the kitchen, holding my jar of Hellmann’s, about to face a moral choice between the welfare of millions of hens and my own. 

But like Abraham about to sacrifice his son at God’s command, I was spared the dreadful choice. A close look at the label informed me that all Hellmann’s mayonnaises are made exclusively with, as they put it, “cage-free eggs.” 

After a year when good news has been scarcer than, well, hen’s teeth, I clutched the Hellmann’s jar to my breast. Could it really be that one of America’s major food producers had both my welfare and that of the female chicken at heart? Alternatively, could it be that consumer pressure had inspired Hellmann’s move to use olive oil, and eggs from cage-free birds? 

Whatever the reason—and I suspect it’s #2—it gives me hope. Maybe the next target for us consumers could be the bull calves that are born each year to keep their mothers lactating.  Heaven knows I sympathize with the plight of dairy farmers, but the sight every spring of farms with dozens of calves in rows of individual “calf igloos” may well drive me to veganism. In a nation that sends robots to Mars, surely there is a way we can have our cheese and eat it, with a clear conscience.




Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Reading...Reading...

Reading is my vice. If I’m not writing or drawing or making smoothies for lunch or walking Bisou, I’m reclining on cushions, reading. I’m not proud of this. Even though I mostly read what the culture considers “good” books, and reading is supposed to engage the mind more actively than watching TV, I know I should read less. 

I read to get away from the vicissitudes of daily life, from worries about the future, and above all I read to get a break from what Jung called the endless “circumambulation of the self.” And I read for company--the company of the author, whose voice reaches me across space and time and opens doors to worlds that I would otherwise never know. Sometimes, when bits of those worlds turn out to be almost exact replicas of bits of my own world, I feel a shock of recognition, and the author and I become fast friends. 

I especially like it if my author friend has published many books, so that I can spend months in her company. I fell in love with Iris Murdoch’s mind, and with the way she invents enormously intelligent characters who are at the same time enormously foolish. Luckily for me, she wrote 26 novels. I felt bereft when I reached the final one (Jackson’s Dilemma, written as she began her decline into dementia), so I read them all again. A year or so later, missing her company, I went back for a third reading. 

Then there is Anthony Trollope, who wrote 47 novels on his daily train commute to his job with the British postal service. I don’t think I’ve read them all yet, but I’m almost there. Trollope’s characters, unlike those of his contemporary, Dickens, are never wholly saints or sinners, but complicated mixtures of both. I don’t know whether Trollope was a good man, but I don’t see how anyone so fully in sympathy with humans in all their imperfections could be anything but kind. 

I am not a fiction writer, yet certain novelists teach me to write. At the moment, I’m reading my way through Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series (25 novels), in the order in which they were written. I care very little about who murdered whom, or how the endearing Wexford solved the crime. But I am agog at Rendell’s rendering of physical detail. She tells us how every character, no matter how minor, looks, speaks, and is dressed; how houses are furnished, from wallpaper to floor coverings; how gardens bloom or wither in various seasons. And she’s wonderful on weather, especially rain, as one would guess, given her nationality. How did she manage, as she built her complicated edifice of scenes and clues, to have the mental space and imagination to write all those descriptions? 

And then there are the writers who make me laugh, to whom I devoutly give thanks every time I open one of their books. I read them mostly for therapy, since I’m not sure that it’s possible to learn to write humor (it’s either in your DNA, or it isn’t). At difficult points in my life you can calculate my distress levels by the number of P.G. Wodehouse novels and short-story collections on my bedside table. 

Aided and abetted in my vice by my Kindle, which can waft almost any book in the world to me in the middle of the night in the middle of a blizzard, I read my life away. My electronic library contains 496 volumes, safely stored where they never need dusting. 

At night, lying in bed Kindle in hand, I tell myself that I should turn off the light and go to sleep. True, reading is good for writers, but it can also replace writing, and that is a danger for me. And I think about Cervantes’ warning, in Don Quixote, against other dangers of excessive reading. Enamored of novels of chivalry, Don Quixote sold his land to buy books, and spent day and night reading volume after volume. Eventually, Cervantes tells us, “as a result of too much reading and not enough sleep, his brain dried up, and he went mad.” 

I’m not there yet, but some days my brain does feel a little “dry,” and I worry that I might end up like my compatriot Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.







Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Miss Daisy at the Wheel

 I was seven before I could tie my shoes, twelve before I learned to tell time, and almost twenty when I got my driver’s license. I can’t account for the first two delays, but the third one was partly due to my own MeToo story. When I turned eighteen my father, tired of chauffeuring me around, decided that it was time I learned to drive. Although he had the patience required to be my violin teacher, he knew his limits, and he signed me up for lessons at a driving school in Birmingham, Alabama. 

It was late spring, and already sweltering. The air was heavy with the scent of magnolias, and the mockingbirds were in full cry. The instructor was a skinny, youngish guy wearing a crew-cut, t-shirt, and shorts, and when he saw me, his eyes lit up. “Why sure,” he drawled, “I’ll be happy to teach a pretty girl like you to drive.” (FYI, I was no Miss Alabama contestant. Just a healthy, well-nourished young woman.) He opened the driver’s door for me, “Just set right down, honey, and make yourself comfortable,” he grinned. 

I sat behind the wheel, but was not comfortable. I was in a state of terror lest I cause the car to buck when I let out the clutch, as had happened during my father’s first and only attempt to teach me. Add to that the close proximity of my leering instructor and the sultriness of the afternoon, and all I knew was that I wanted run out of there, beg my father’s forgiveness, and possibly become a nun. 

“How did your lesson go?” my father asked when he came to pick me up. 

“It was terrible. I hated it! I’ll never learn,” I moaned. It didn’t even occur to me to tell him the real reason for my discomfiture. To us girls in the 1960s, sexual harassment was another of those annoyances that came with being female, like menstruation. 

Gritting my teeth, the following week I went back for an encore: the heat, the instructor’s compliments (“That’s a real nice outfit you’re wearing!”), the bucking car. Then, miraculously, a reprieve: my parents decided to send me to Barcelona for the summer, albeit on the condition that I continue my driving lessons there. 

This time the instructor was older and bigger than the Birmingham guy, and even more thrilled to have me in the tiny Fiat with him. It wasn’t as hot, though, and my clutching and shifting had improved a bit. But when the stares and the compliments progressed to pats on the arm, I cancelled the rest of my lessons, left the city, and spent the rest of the summer riding my bike on the dusty roads near my grandparents’ farm. 

In Birmingham that fall, my father took me back to the driving school. My first instructor was gone, however, and the new teacher was a (to me) elderly gentleman who cared more about my driving than my looks and who, at the end of the first lesson, said reassuringly, “Don’t worry. You’ll make a fine little ol’ driver someday.” A couple of weeks later, having demonstrated my ability to parallel park on a hill, I got my license. 

Unfortunately my father, having watched me maneuver a shopping cart in the A&P, concluded that I was still a danger behind the wheel, and sent me back for more lessons. The elderly instructor had the good grace not to laugh when he saw me coming. 

But his prophecy was accurate. More than half a century later, not only am I a fine little ol’ driver; I am a fine little ol’ lady driver. For I drive like a little old lady, the way I imagine Miss Daisy (of Driving Miss Daisy) would have driven if she had been behind the wheel. 

Gone are the days of shifting and double-clutching and parallel parking. Like the rest of the world, I now drive an automatic with a camera that shows me where I am when I back up, which is handy because I am no longer tall enough to see over the backseat. The car helpfully flashes lights at me if I’m about to make an imprudent lane change—not that I change lanes unless absolutely necessary. Left to myself, I pick a lane and remain faithful to it until I arrive at my destination. And the back-up camera gets little use, since I avoid parking anywhere I’ll have to back out of, even if it means having to skate over an icy parking lot to get to the store. As for parallel parking, one of Vermont’s many charms is that, with only 600k inhabitants in the state, there is hardly ever the need for it. 

Safety first is my motto, and I feel safest if I’m going under 40mph, which means avoiding four-lane highways, of which there are blessedly few in this state. In fact, except during mud season, I’m happiest on a dirt road that, but for the occasional milk truck, is free of scary semis and people in a hurry, and winds calmly from woods to fields, offering views of pasturing cows, sheep, and the occasional alpaca. 

My only fear on those dirt roads is of cyclists, of which there are way too many around here. I feel foolish following one up a hill at 5mph, scared to pass because I can’t see what’s coming at me in the opposite direction. And when I do pass one, I’m tormented by visions of his or her keeling over, like the Monty Python guy on the tricycle, right into my path. 

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,/O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!, Robert Burns cooed to the field mouse whose nest he had upturned with his plow. Except for the sleek part, two centuries later the poem is a spot-on picture of me as I drive down the alarming roads of life.



Thursday, June 10, 2021

Wings

The guardian angels have flown off, who used to sit on our right shoulder or walk invisibly a step ahead, keeping us from falling into ditches and temptation. They have disappeared into the ether, tired of being ignored. Maybe they’ve become extinct, due to habitat loss in the hearts of humans. Or perhaps they have simply retreated, like a threatened bird species, to places where they feel safe, such as the bottom of the ocean, or another planet altogether. 

In this fractious age I long for the company of my personal angel, assigned to me by God at birth, even though I haven’t felt his presence since I was in pigtails. I remember one summer, out in the fields with friends from my grandparents’ village. An apartment-dwelling city kid, I stand hesitating at the edge of a creek as the others jump across. One of the girls advises, “say a prayer to your guardian angel and you won’t fall in.” How can I ever recover that trust? 

But I don’t only want my own angel back. I want guardian angels for members of Congress of both parties, for everybody in the White House, and for the nine Supreme Court justices. I want guardian angels for doctors and nurses and nurses’ aides, and mothers and fathers, teachers, border-crossing refugees, police officers, farmers, and pet owners. I want guardian angels for animals wild and domestic, and for forests and houseplants and vegetable gardens. 

How can we get them back? The ancient Greeks left jars of milk and honey at the local spring to make sure its naiad would keep the water flowing through the summer. But how do you lure an angel? Some kind of nectar comes to mind, like the sugar water one puts out to attract hummingbirds. But angels being pure spirits, food won’t do the trick. What about angel decoys? If putting out a duck statue causes ducks to come plunging out of the sky, we could maybe attract angels by becoming angelic ourselves. But that is too much like pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, which are feeling pretty frayed these days. Maybe the desire for an angel’s return might be enough, since that is all that is in our power to offer, just as the simple desire for union with God is said to be the most efficacious kind of prayer. 

In the meantime, I’m making an effort to pay attention to the possible hidden presence of angels in my midst. For example, I’m wondering about the wood thrush that sings its heart out all evening long in the maple tree behind our cottage. I have never heard a thrush sing so close, or so loudly and persistently, night after night. It gives me goosebumps, the way he harmonizes with himself (he does this by controlling the two branches of his syrinx, or voice-box, independently). When he pauses between songs, other thrushes answer him in the woods beyond.  

The song of the thrush sounds unlike any other music on earth, and more like what I imagine to be the music of the spheres, coming from somewhere out in the universe, piercing and liquid and sweet. Or maybe it’s the voice of an angel—angels in the Bible were notorious for adopting disguises—warbling endlessly at me, saying something like: Pay attention! Don’t think so much. We’re all around you. We never left. 

If a state of total alertness combined with total delight is what being in the presence of a heavenly being feels like, then it may well be that the singer in the maple tree and his fellows in the woods beyond are in fact the angels that we thought were gone. 



Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Bedtime Rituals

Sometimes, when I can’t go to sleep at night, I repeat the prayer that my mother taught me when I could barely talk, “Guardian Angel, sweet companion, don’t forsake me….” As I begin to drop off, the toddler that I once was rises up within me, and I feel again in my tongue and palate the effort to form those words, as my mother slowly enunciates each phrase. 

Since my mother thought I might catch cold from the chilly floor tiles, I did not use to say this prayer on my knees, but flat on my back in bed, with the covers up to my chin and tightly tucked all around. A year or two later, my mother added a P.S. to the Guardian Angel prayer: “Dear Lord, please watch over everyone. Make sure Daddy has plenty of work, and make me a really good girl.” When she explained that I could hasten the arrival of a little brother or sister by praying hard for it, I added a P.P.S. and kept at it until I was sixteen, when that prayer was finally answered. 

But prayers were only part of the bedtime rituals. The sickly child of a hyper-vigilant mother, I slept in my parents’ bedroom until I was in second grade. Their bedroom was at one end of a long hallway, and the living room where my mother awaited my father’s arrival from his nightly rehearsals or performances was miles away at the other end. At bedtime, I hated to let her go. I dreaded the fading sound of her heels on the tiles as she walked away from me, and I was afraid of waking up alone in the dark with one of my eternal ailments. 

As she quietly made her way towards the door, I would ask for reassurance, “Where is my cold?” 

“On the North Pole,” she would answer. 

“Where is my earache?” 

“Oh, very, very far. In India, I think,” she would say, her hand on the doorknob. 

Then, just before she, like the sun, vanished until morning, I would ask, “And my fever, where is it?” 

“It’s not even on this earth. It’s on the moon!” and she would close the door, leaving me with only my Guardian Angel for company until she and my father tiptoed in hours later. 

I wonder, in retrospect, did my parents find my presence next to their bed an impediment to making love? They were too happy as a couple to have abstained all those years until I moved to my own bedroom, but on the other hand I never heard any sounds that struck me as unusual. They probably counted on my being a sound sleeper, like all children. I do remember hearing them whisper in the dark, and making whispering sounds myself (bsss…bsss…bsss) to alert them to my wakefulness. 

I assume that it was my mother and not my father who insisted on my sleeping in their bedroom until I was of school-age. Yes, I had lots of childhood illnesses, but except for the measles, none was life-threatening. What made her so anxious that she had to keep me with her even during the night? Shortly before she died she said to me, “those happy years when you were little and Daddy and I were young, I always felt that God was up in heaven, holding a big stick and getting ready to bring it down on our heads.” 

Those happy years were less than a decade after the Spanish Civil War, a period during which, living near the front lines and having to hide in ditches to escape bombardments, she had feared for her life every day. So it is no wonder that for her the sudden happiness of married love, relative security, and a child of her own felt like fragile gifts that could only survive because of her constant watchfulness. 

I don’t know whether our prayers, and my sleeping body at hand’s reach in the dark reassured her. I hope they did. But all these years later the Guardian Angel prayer, when I recite it like a mantra, continues to comfort the anxious child that lives within me.



Thursday, May 27, 2021

Pause

In our family it was almost considered a sign of intelligence: the lightning-quick flare of temper, the instant reaction to a perceived slight or irritation, followed by a gush of eloquence recapitulating the offender’s past misdeeds and setting out principles of moral philosophy for her future improvement. The quick-temper gene came from my mother’s father, a usually mild-mannered man who would unpredictably erupt at minor annoyances and who passed the gift on to my mother, at whose knees I learned the art of venting wrath promptly and with panache.



I am talking here about strictly verbal expressions of anger, as at our house even the slamming of doors was forbidden. Still, anger is anger, however it is expressed, and though manifesting it feels as good as scratching a mosquito bite, to its recipient it feels like an attack by a horsefly.
 

My meditation practice is outstanding in its sloppiness. I go through periods when I meditate occasionally, and periods when I meditate every day. But sloppy or rigorous, in some thirty years of sitting, the twenty minutes on my cushion have hardly changed at all. Unlike me, the monkeys in my mind have neither aged nor slowed down, but continue to leap and race through the forest of my neurons until the bell dings and the session is over. 

This so discouraged me that at one point I was ready to give up. Didn’t Einstein (or somebody) say that doing the same thing over and over in hopes of obtaining different results is the definition of insanity? But then I learned that one should not expect to enjoy the fruits of meditation while meditating. Rather, they are most likely to make themselves felt during the times when we are simply going about our daily life. If we notice that we are less quick to anger, if we pause before we jump to slap away an irritant, that is a sign that meditation is working. 

Here is what Viktor Frankl, whose wisdom was forged in the terror and suffering of Auschwitz, says about that pause: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom” (Man’s Search for Meaning). 

That space is what I am looking for, the blessed nanosecond in which on good days the effect of my sloppy meditations comes into play, and I choose to forego belting out an angry aria in favor of a more moderate response, or simply silence. True, that tiny pause doesn’t feel nearly as good as letting fly a tirade, but at the same time I can say that, although I often regret the tirade, I have never regretted the pause. 

The pause does not feel especially difficult or unpleasant. It feels like a little nudge, something inside gently reminding me to please just wait a second before I react. But it does feel strange. It doesn’t feel quite like the real me, the me that is quick to put things into words, especially if they are angry things. 

Sometimes the urge to scratch the itch is too strong. It drowns out the soft inner voice, and I lash out in the old way. But that’s o.k., because the universe is sure to send me lots more chances to practice the pause, to dive beneath the current and sink to where there is stillness and, for this one moment, peace. 

Wednesday, May 19, 2021

On Bliss

Ever since he said it, I have been annoyed by Joseph Campbell’s advice to “follow your bliss.” Perhaps it’s envy of those whose good fairies whispered at their cradle, “Little one, pay no attention to what people tell you. Do what you love and all will be well.” I did not have a fairy bending over my cradle. Instead, I had a guardian angel, who said, “Be a good girl and do as you’re told.” Sometimes I wish that I had had that fairy, or even Joseph Campbell, at my cradle. What would my life have been like? Where would I be now? 

The fairies have won out over the guardian angels, and today’s children are encouraged to follow their bliss as routinely as they’re told to eat their veggies. This is not without its problems. For those who were brought up as I was, there was comfort in believing that if we were good and did as we were told all would be well. Within those boundaries, we enjoyed a certain freedom, especially the freedom of not having to make big decisions. A child obliged to follow her bliss has a heavy responsibility on her skinny shoulders. 

History is crammed with tales of geniuses who followed their bliss, usually at great cost—a cost often paid by those who loved them. I’m thinking of the otherwise tender-hearted Rilke, who abandoned his wife and infant daughter to dedicate himself entirely to poetry. I’m thinking of Tolstoy, who after his conversion made his wife’s life a purgatory so that he could follow the new dictates of his conscience. I’m even thinking of the good Saint Francis, who did not hesitate to renounce his father in the public square in order to pursue Lady Poverty. And what about the merely talented, the poets and painters in their garrets, the buskers on their street corners—how heavy a price are they paying for their bliss? 

Given its uncertain results, it’s surprising that Campbell’s short quote had such an effect on our culture. It precipitated an avalanche of authors, gurus, and graduation speakers who urged the multitudes to look deep inside themselves and find their path to rapture. But perhaps Campbell’s idea came at the right moment, when for the first time in the history of first-world nations the children of street sweepers could become astronauts. And it was also a welcome reaction against the unthinking compliance that religion and society had for centuries regarded as the highest form of virtue, especially for women. 

But this bliss advice should be administered with care, or it can produce anxiety in the young (what if I can’t figure out what my bliss is?) and regret in the old (I never found my bliss, and now it’s too late!). Wouldn’t we be better off not aiming quite so high? The belief that happiness is inversely proportional to expectations has a long history, from Buddhists, to Stoics, to some modern psychologists. This is not to say that we should encourage complacency in the young, or even in the old. As Aristotle and my mother advised, moderation in all things. 

Maybe the problem lies in the word “bliss,” with its sensuous sibilants, which connote a heaven-on-earth, floating-on-air, uninterrupted felicity such as even Saint Teresa of Avila experienced only momentarily in her mystical transports. Instead of following our bliss as if it were a balloon floating just beyond our reach, a more reasonable practice might be learning to find it right here, today, in whatever is afforded us by the brains, talent, and luck that we’ve been granted, and be content.



  

Friday, May 14, 2021

Rethinking Showers

Good grooming, advises Amy Vanderbilt in the 1967 edition of her book of etiquette, which I received as a wedding present, means “a daily, and often twice daily, shower or bath, [and] fresh underwear and stockings daily or twice daily….” Even in my most perfectionistic moments I was not insane enough to follow her advice to the letter, but since my arrival in the land of endless hot water nine years earlier, I had taken to heart the American custom of daily showering and frequent shampooing. “You’ve washed your hair again?” my mother would exclaim as I struggled to fit the dryer hood over my twenty-seven rollers. She was also amazed that, along with my schoolmates, I felt obliged to wear a different outfit every day, which meant tossing everything I had worn the day before into the washing machine. 

Back then, America’s bathroom shelves mostly featured a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo. But in the ensuing decades bath products proliferated to include soaps for different kinds of skin, shampoos for different kinds of hair, conditioners (both rinse-out and leave-in), and body scrubs, butters, and gels. Showers grew longer as we applied the right product to the right body part and then made sure that whatever we had slathered on was sluiced down the drain. 

Now, trillions of gallons of water and mountains of plastic bottles later, things may be changing. According to the  New York Times, during the pandemic many Americans stopped showering every day, and were amazed when their body did not exude pestilential smells, their skin did not erupt in gruesome infections, and their scalp did not drip grease onto their shoulders. 

On the contrary, many people who had been bedeviled with dry, flaky, itchy skin noticed that the condition improved when they stopped scrubbing every square inch of their bodies every single day. And, when given a break from too-frequent shampoos and blow drying, formerly lank, straw-like hair showed its gratitude by growing glossier and more manageable.

With an eight-minute shower using up to 17 gallons of water, not to mention the electricity to heat that water, plus the products being washed down the drain, the trend towards less-frequent showering is good news for the environment. But why stop there? As long as we’re moderating our cleaning compulsions, we should think about laundry. 

If we had to wash clothes by hand we would think twice before tossing a shirt we’ve only worn once into the dirty clothes basket. But since washing machines are here to do the work, that carefree flick of the wrist at the end of the day requires less time and energy than looking at the shirt, deciding if it can be worn again, and hanging it carefully on a hanger. 

The Swedish designer Gudrun Sjoden believes that we should reevaluate our laundry habits: “Generally we all wash far too often! Wear your clothes until they are dirty, before which you can air your clothes and remove individual stains.” I know how to air a grievance, but I’m not sure how you air a shirt (by hanging it out the window?) but lately I have taken to hanging outfits I’ve worn once or twice in the bathroom overnight to get rid of whatever noxious odors may be clinging to them. As for removing individual stains by hand and then wearing the item again, I haven’t reached that level of ecological virtue yet. 

This is a world away from Amy Vanderbilt, who advised us to “wear a simple, starched [my italics] house dress, a clean one daily, if you must do housework…” Once the house was sparkling, the dress went into the hamper, since changing for dinner was one of the hallmarks of gracious living: “Fresh clothes and make-up, even if you are to be alone with the children for a simple meal, are psychologically sound and bring a needed change in the day’s pace.” 

Her writing bursts with the exuberance of an era when belief in progress and the endless availability of resources was at its peak. It is also a celebration of indoor plumbing, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other mod cons that made possible this manic changing of dresses and stockings, showering and grooming, even in the absence of domestic staff.

No wonder so many housewives in mid-century America became addicted to Valium. Today our stress comes from a different source: the knowledge of the havoc that our way of life has wreaked on the planet, and our obligation to do something about it right now, by whatever means are available to each of us, even if it requires giving up habits that would make Amy turn in her grave.



Wednesday, May 5, 2021

My Mother, on Beauty

 When my mother turned seventy, she said, “The trick at my age is not to try to look forty. The trick is to be the best-looking seventy-year-old in the room.” When she turned eighty, she told me that she had scheduled a “make-over” for herself. I remember hiding a smile. My mother looked awfully good for her age, but a make-over at eighty? What was she hoping for? 

She was more intensely aware of people’s looks than anyone I’ve ever known. “Look at her with that long neck,” she would say, tilting her chin to point out some unsuspecting woman waiting for the bus. “She should at least wrap a scarf around it. And her poor husband with his little short arms—his hands barely hang below his belt!” And she would shake her head sadly, because there’s nothing that one can do about short arms. 

She focused on my appearance with particular vehemence, but even though I complained bitterly, I benefitted from her fixation. She had my teeth straightened, my eyes uncrossed, my flat feet corrected, my acne tamed. The year I turned twelve, she got me my first girdle, and sent me to have my braids cut off and my legs waxed. She worked tirelessly on my posture and facial expression (“Don’t sit there with your mouth open. It’s not an intelligent look.”) But though she wanted me to look as well as I possibly could at twelve, fourteen, or sixteen, she was adamant that I not look a minute older than her idea of what a twelve-, fourteen-, or sixteen-year-old should look like. Hence, no stockings or straight skirts before fourteen, no lipstick before sixteen. These were the fronts on which, since I cared more about lipstick than braces, we fought our fiercest battles. 

In the 1970s, when I was a grown woman with a husband, two children, goats, chickens, and a profession, she wrote me a letter expressing her concern that I might be in danger of looking “like one of those farm wives I saw when I last visited you. That would be a terrible thing! What would people think?” I might be cleaning out the chicken house, but that was no reason not to look soignée. 

She was unsparing of her own shortcomings in the looks department, but treated them with the insouciance of one who knows she is the only star in her husband’s firmament. “Your father must have loved me a lot,” she confided after she became a widow. “He was a leg man, but he married me even though my legs are less than perfect, as you know.” 

And I did know, because she would comment ruefully about her legs, which were slightly bowed; her hips, which were too wide; and “up here,” meaning her chest, which was too flat. But about her appearance from the neck up, I heard no complaints, and rightly so. She had a wide brow, thin, arched eyebrows above large eyes, a well-shaped nose, and a jaw-line that retained its definition her entire life.                                                                                                                                         

She kept her beauty rituals to a minimum: a slathering of Nivea at night, and in the daytime a little powder and lipstick, and maybe a discreet slash of eyeliner at the outer corner of her eyes. When she was going to the opera, she would curl her eyelashes, and follow this with an application of Rimmel, the ur-mascara that came as a solid black cake in a small flat box. You spat on the cake, rubbed the resulting paste with a little brush, and applied it to your lashes. Then you took a pin and carefully separated whatever clumps of mascara the brush had left behind. (Spitting on the Rimmel cake, along with that graceful backwards twist of the torso to check the straightness of stocking seams, seemed to me as a child to embody the essence of femininity.) 

Other than scraping it off her forehead—because she had somehow conceived the notion that a wide forehead was a sign of intelligence—she didn’t do much about her light-brown, curly hair, which she kept short. But this changed in the 1960s, when hair was expected to rise straight up from the scalp before curving smoothly downwards into a balloon shape. After watching me put my hair in jumbo rollers every night, she observed that in the morning it did form that coveted balloon. But she was too fond of her comfort to sleep on rollers, and she may also have wanted to spare my father the sight of her lumpy head next to him on the pillow. Instead, she recruited me as her hairdresser. After she washed her hair I would put it up in rollers, and fit the hood of the portable hairdryer over them. When the hair was bone-dry, I would take out the rollers and, very gently, because her scalp was sensitive and she would yelp if I tugged, tease, spray, and mold her hair into shape. 

In her eighties she was still, thanks to good hair and good bones, the best-looking eighty-year-old in the room, so when she announced her plans to get a make-over, I wondered what was going on. Shouldn’t she be satisfied that she didn’t look any worse? What could any process, short of extensive plastic surgery, do to improve an eighty-year-old face? I was in my fifties at the time, and as unable to put myself in her place as if I had been a teenager. 

I kept my doubts about the make-over to myself, and the next time we spoke on the phone I asked how it had gone. “It was a waste of time,” my mother said. “The woman kept repeating ‘We must bring out your features!’ as she put blush on my cheeks and darkened my eyebrows. I washed it all off when I got home. My features are all still there, thank God, and they don’t need bringing out.” 

The features that enchanted me as a child stayed reassuringly the same as she turned eighty-five and then ninety, delineating to the end what had always been for me the face of love.



Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Curls vs. Waves

I went on YouTube for advice on my pandemic hair, which was last cut on February 5, 2020, and found dozens of sites that help women to deal with curly hair. And not just deal with it, but enhance it, embrace it, and glory in it. 

I learned a lot. There are no fewer than nine levels of curliness, ranging from loose waves to tight curls. Although I came into this world with Level 3A, “soft curls,” almost a century of blow-drying had reduced me to Level 2A, or “loose waves.” But since I’ve been letting my hair dry naturally during the pandemic, it has breathed a sigh of relief and, all by itself, risen to Level 2B. According to the websites, with just the right kind of care (and products), I could aspire to Level 2C, or “almost curls.” The process sounded kind of like taking care of a plant, so I decided to give it a try. 

But then I realized, from the hundreds of comments on the instructional videos (who knew there were so many women out there worrying about waves vs. curls?) that for a woman with wavy hair to strive for curls can be regarded as a kind of cultural appropriation, and makes her vulnerable to something called “wavy-hair shaming.” 

If you don’t believe me, here is one of the exchanges, with the incendiary bits snuffed out: “Just because tighter curls are now starting to become popular doesn’t mean you wavy types can pop in and try to call your hair curly….” To which a wavy-haired person responds, “You’re the prime example of wavy-hair shaming by a lot of curly-haired people… People with curly hair are self-entitled [horrible individuals] who think their hair is really unique and special...” 

Why am I tormenting myself and you with these trivial tales? It’s because the curly/wavy hair wars spring from the same aspects of human nature that are responsible for the other kind of wars, the ones where people actually die. 

Even if we someday attain racial equality and gender parity, even after we grow to accept transsexual people and people with handicaps, and old people, and people of other nationalities, religions, and socioeconomic levels, we will be sure to latch onto something else to make us feel apart from and superior to the rest of the herd. 

Here is one example, drawn from the supposedly innocent realm of childhood. My first-grade class, most of us barely old enough to tie our shoelaces, is marching single file out of the classroom into the schoolyard, and as we pass the kindergarteners going in the opposite direction, a scornful chant erupts from our ranks: lit-tle ba-bies, lit-tle ba-bies… 

The urge to distinguish, to separate, to draw a line between “us” and “not us” is deeply embedded in our DNA. We are born with a depressing zero-sum mindset: I can only be beautiful/good at math/chosen by God if you are less beautiful, less good at math, and unchosen by God. This may have survival value for some species—if I push my fellow hatchlings out of the nest there will be more worms for me—but it’s threatening to do us humans in. 

The day may come when, out of boredom, the wave/curl warriors will put down their weapons. But then, what? Perhaps pendulous earlobes will emerge as the next badge of beauty, and those with low-hanging lobes will feel proud, and those without will feel miserable, and tug on theirs to make them longer (which will make them subject to earlobe-shaming), until the short-lobes decide to exult in their status and proclaim their superiority, and it’s the long-lobes’ turn to feel bad. 

Me at Level 3A


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