Not Yet

It may be my Catholic upbringing--suffer first on this earth, then get your reward in heaven--but I believe that only those who have endured a northern winter can truly enjoy spring. It's not that I hate Vermont winters. I would never chosen to move here if I did, and I confess to looking a few millimeters down my nose at those who flee to warmer places at the first sign of snow. 

Vermont winters are beautiful in so many ways--the muted shades of the landscape after the visual brouhaha of autumn, the frigid morning air that wakes up the very  marrow of your bones, the roads empty of tourists. When the days grow short I retreat indoors, along with the wild creatures. Book in hand, the cat blinking on my lap, the dog dreaming by the (gas) fireplace, I am as contented as a chipmunk in her hole.  But by mid-February all this hygge begins to pall. I have been stoic for months. I have not lapsed into bitterness or self-pity. I have sat before my light therapy box every morning, and poured extra vinegar into the washing machine to minimize static cling. Now I deserve--no, the universe owes me--spring.

I'm not asking for those clichés of the full-blown season, lilacs and daffodils. I'd be grateful just to be able to go outside with only a coat on, instead of coat, hat, scarf, gloves, mittens, heavy socks, and yaktracks strapped to my boots. I'd be thrilled to rediscover the humble pleasure of walking while looking at the trees and the sky, instead of looking at the ground, on the watch for black ice. And, after months of hearing only the cawing of crows (which I nevertheless appreciate as a sign of life in the otherwise dead landscape), it would cheer my soul to hear a little brown bird singing at the top of a tall, bare tree.

What makes a northern spring so magical is not out there in the physical world, but rather inside us, in our human nature. As the troubadours, the Victorians, and the Church knew, we humans mostly hanker after what we can't have: the princess in the tower, the ankle beneath the petticoat, truffles during Lent. The grass-is-greener principle is ingrained in our neurons, alas: after prolonged exposure to a pleasurable stimulus the delight begins to fade, and we look around for something different.

Therefore, thank heaven for the four seasons, Nature's built-in mechanism to keep us happy and on our toes. Grateful as I am for every glimpse of green--and there aren't many around here at the moment--I know full well how tired I will be of the omnipresent greenery (not for nothing is this state named after les verts monts), the heat, and the humidity, and how I will crave the golds and reds and chill of autumn. And when the leaves are gone, and "stick season" is upon us, I will wait for the first snow, feel disappointed when it melts, and long for the time when the landscape is entirely covered in white. 

And then when the days start to get longer, I will look outside in the morning, frowning and tapping my foot, muttering about the blasted weather and wondering when I can put away the humidifier that hums in our living room from October through March and has to be refilled, it seems, every five minutes (not yet). Wondering when I can throw my parka in the washing machine and hang it in the closet until next fall (not yet).Wondering when I can take the three geraniums that I have watered and misted and kept under a light out to the porch (not yet!).  

This is so not-Zen, I know. Maybe it explains why Buddhism is popular in places without seasons, like India and California. Here, practically next door to the pole, Nature herself gives us permission to desire, at certain times of the year, what is still in the future. As soon as spring arrives for good, I'll gladly go back to being fully in the present. But not yet.

Little Phobias

 The pandemic is abating, the world is slowly opening up, and for almost everyone this is great news. But for hermits, introverts, highly sensitive persons, and molluscoid types like me, the news is mixed. Yes, it's good to be able to buy a loaf of bread at the store without putting my life at risk. And it's good to know that I could, if I wanted to, have a professional cut the hair that, in the words of the musical, has grown "down to here, down to there, down to where it stops by itself."

But for those who identify at least in part with oysters, clams, and mussels, the quarantine brought definite advantages. As everything became forbidden, a delicious freedom invaded our lives. It was lovely to wake up day after day, month after month, without commitments to clutter our mental horizon. It was a relief to be spared the responsibility of making decisions about social obligations. Pascal said, "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone." Now we had permission to do just that.

But not everything was rosy in my pandemic retreat. After a while, the shell inside which I huddled began to feel constricting. I was brought up to believe that intelligent people are never bored ("Think!" my father would advise whenever I complained that there was nothing to do). Nevertheless, there was a limit to the amount of entertainment available within the walls of my cranium. What Jung called "the circumambulation of the self" was starting to make me queasy. 

Even more distressing, I noticed that, during the rare in-person conversations in which I engaged, I was losing the ability to respond quickly to what was coming out of other people's mouths. Words escaped me at hitherto unseen rates. I would get tangled in the thickets of a relative clause and be unable to find my way out again. 

I needed outside stimulation. I longed to feel the wayward breezes of other people's ideas. My mental gears groaned for the oil of human contact. Inside my clamshell, my legs were cramping; my chest was tightening; I was stifling. I had all the symptoms of claustrophobia.

Of course, my shell was not a prison cell. Within reason, I was allowed a certain amount of freedom. Well-masked and distanced, I could walk the icy roads with a friend. I could make brief excursions to the grocery store. I could even get in the car and head for the wide open spaces. But as the pandemic wore on, I became reluctant to do any of these things. Rather than fetch that loaf of bread, I would make do with the ancient tortilla discovered at the bottom of the freezer. It was too much effort to make myself heard and understood from behind my double masks, so I took fewer walks with friends. And I avoided car trips except when compelled by an urgent need that Amazon could not fulfill.

Along with claustrophobia, I also had agoraphobia.

So now, as gates fly open and the peoples rejoice, all I feel is conflict. Caught between the desire to burst out of my clamshell, and fear of the outside world, I am an apprehensive, undecided, spineless mollusc.

I know what you're supposed to do about phobias: you desensitize yourself gradually. If you're scared of spiders, you start by looking at pictures of them. Then you observe a live one at a distance. Gradually you get closer and closer, until you turn into one of those people who trap spiders under a glass and deposit them outdoors, murmuring endearments. Following that model, and now that the weather is easing, I should lengthen my walks, take longer drives, maybe actually go somewhere I want to go (but where?).

It will take time and effort to get rid of my fears, but it will be worth it, I tell myself--that is, unless the dreaded variants take off and I have to scuttle back into my clamshell. My emotional life is starting to resemble the game of whack-a-mole: claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and now, the mother of all phobias: the fear of uncertainty. But I'll probably just have to learn to live with that one.

Chicken Nostalgia

I dashed into the hardware store the other day, looking for niger seeds for my finches, and, this being Vermont and almost spring, I walked by a display of sugaring supplies. Next to them was a forty-pound bag of chicken feed, and the sight of that bag pierced me like a sword. 

It’s been six years now since I took my little flock to be killed, in preparation for our move to the retirement community where we now live. My hens were big, affable, butter-colored Buff Orpingtons, the golden retrievers of the chicken world. They were, as hens go, unflappable, and they made it through Vermont winters in their unheated chicken coop. They were not egg-laying machines, like those sad, nervous Leghorns favored by factory farmers. My hens’ egg production waxed and waned with the seasons, as God intended it to. 

On the other hand, they were composting machines, and my garden depended on them for its fertility. All year round, hunting for seeds, they scratched and shredded the layers of old hay that lined their coop, and deposited nitrogen-rich droppings into the mixture, which I periodically hauled to the garden to work its miracles. 

As thrifty as Depression-era housewives, my hens consumed every wormy apple and rotten tomato I threw into their yard. They even ate their own eggshells (after we’d eaten the eggs), thus recycling the calcium. I admired them for their usefulness, but I loved them for the eagerness with which they rushed out of the coop in the morning, for their cozy go-to-roost purrings in the evening, and because they knew and trusted me, and would let me sit with them in the sun while they pecked at the grass, and sometimes at my shoelaces. 

I have a long history with chickens, from the ones that my grandmother used let me feed when I was barely old enough to walk, to the live capons that she sent by train to Barcelona for our Christmas dinner, and the little lame chick that she sent to keep me company as I lay in bed recovering from measles. 

Now, as my autumn declines into winter, I would like nothing better than a couple of hens (you can’t have only one, because they get lonely) to comfort me. But as Vermontish and progressive as the community where I live is, chickens are not allowed. And so, whenever I run across a bag of feed in the hardware store, or drive past the “Chicks Are Here!” sign in front of the Tractor Supply every spring, I practice the art of letting go. I’ve read that this is important preparation for the ultimate divestiture, and makes it easier. 

I practice letting go of the idea of keeping hens, and of raising my own food, and of being who I was all those years ago. And in my mind I also practice letting go of Bisou, who is fine right now but who will be my last dog, and whom I’ll inevitably have to let go in another three or four years. 

On the other hand, carpe diem! we are told. Live in the moment! But how to do this while simultaneously practicing letting go is the emotional equivalent of rubbing one’s stomach while patting one’s head. The two things keep leaching into each other. No sooner do I enter fully into the joy of taking Bisou for a walk than I’m overwhelmed by the thought that someday we’ll be taking the last one. And I can only recapture the enjoyment of the walk if I firmly put out of my mind the inevitability of loss. 

It’s at moments like these that a couple of pasturing hens would come in handy, to turn my mind to dirt baths, grass, earthworms, compost, and the cycle of life.

My grandmother and I, feeding chickens

 

Love and Work

“If I died tomorrow,” my mother used to say, “your father would mourn for the rest of his life. But if they took away his violin, he’d be dead within a week.” She didn’t say this bitterly, or with animosity towards the violin with which my father earned his living, or the piano on which he composed whenever he had a free minute. She knew that as a woman she had no rivals. “With my music and you, I will be the happiest man on the planet,” he wrote while he was courting her. But my mother was right when she said that he wouldn’t be able to live without music. 

In the family mythology, my father was considered 1. a saint, and 2. a happy man. The saint part I heard mostly from his mother, who would sigh and look towards heaven whenever she said his name. But both sides of the family were united in their admiration for how hard he worked and never complained nor lost his temper. Here again, my mother had a more nuanced view of the man she loved: “Yes, your father is very good. But he’s not a saint. Mostly he just doesn’t care enough to get involved in things that don’t have to do with music.” 

This led directly to part 2 of the family myth, that my father was extremely happy. How many times did I hear my mother say to him, with a rueful smile, as she struggled with some domestic issue, “As long as you have your violin, nothing bothers you…” One of the things that did not bother my father, but did bother my mother, was his relative lack of ambition or, put another way, his contentment with the way things were. 

“Tonight we’re doing Parsifal, with Solti, who is a genius. I can’t wait!” he would say as he was getting into his tailcoat. Never mind that he would have to make his way home on foot because the streetcars would have stopped running by the time the performance ended. Never mind that the next day there were classes to teach at the conservatory, plus symphony rehearsal, plus private students, plus another opera at night. All that mattered was that he would be playing four hours of Wagner under a superb conductor. 

My mother worried about how long he could keep up this pace. If only, she thought, he were more aggressive, would put himself forward, would use his connections, he wouldn’t have to work so hard and would get more recognition. But recognition, which he fully enjoyed whenever it came his way, was far down the list of my father’s concerns. What he really cared about was playing and composing as best he could, all day, every day. 

When we were living in Quito, Isaac Stern came to give a recital. At the end, as my father exulted over Stern’s gorgeous tone and his fabulous technique, my mother asked him if he didn’t find Stern’s virtuosity discouraging. “Discouraging!” my father said, “why would I think that? On the contrary, it makes me want to play all the more.” 

All those years of watching my father find solace in the daily practice of his art imbued me with a sense of the connection between work—good work, that is--and happiness. My father, even my childish eyes could see, had both love and work. My mother had love, but lacked real work. I knew without a doubt that, despite his monstrous workload, my father was the happier of the two. 

I wanted to be happy like my father, but I was not a man. I was consigned by fate to my mother’s domain, where love and its attendant concerns— rearing children, looking nice, thinking and talking about feelings—held sway. Later, as an adolescent, I remember coming home from school, wanting nothing more than to go into my room, close the door, and write in my diary, and seeing how desperate my mother was for me to sit down and confide in her. “So that’s what happens when you depend too much on people to make you happy,” I said to myself. 

I have known few people with as deep a passion for their art as my father had. The gods did not bestow an equivalent gift on me. But when I sit down to write I call up the image of my father at the piano, and I try to enter into my work as humbly and wholeheartedly as he did, and on good days I get a taste of the joy that sustained him.

My father and I. Fall, 1960

 

Uniforms

To my first school, run by an order of German nuns in Barcelona, I wore a black- and-white houndstooth jumper and a long-sleeved white cotton blouse. In the classroom we wore a white coverall to catch the spatters from our dip pens as we practiced handwriting. And to protect our modesty while we did calisthenics in the garden, we wore bloomers under our skirts. 

My school in Quito, run by the Sisters of Mercy, required two uniforms, one for regular days—blue-and-white check with short sleeves and gathered skirt--and one for special occasions (el uniforme de fiestas). Since my parents’ original plan was to stay in Ecuador for only one year, my mother explained to the principal that it didn’t make sense to have two uniforms made. Would just the regular one suffice? The principal said it would. 

The problem was that the principal neglected to issue a school-wide edict declaring me exempt from the uniforme de fiestas. That fall, school had not been long in session before a special occasion arose in all its awesome grandeur: the feast of Our Lady of Mercy, patroness of the order. The day dawned light and clear over the Andes, as most days did in those pre-pollution times. The volcanoes ringing the city twinkled and sparkled under their eternal snows. In the school courtyard, my fellow students were assembled, and what had been a sea of light blue was now a sea of navy: el uniforme de fiestas. 

Even to my ten-year-old eyes the outfit looked weirdly old-fashioned: a scoop-necked wool dress with a white cotton “dickey,” it was belted at the waist and had wide sleeves gathered in folds at the wrist. The skirt, deeply pleated, fell to mid-calf. An absurd beret, also navy blue, crowned the effect. This being the 1950s, my classmates wore starched crinolines under the pleated skirt, which made it swing like a bell with every step, and patent leather Mary Janes. 

I entered the courtyard in my everyday uniform and the scuffed lace-up ankle boots designed to correct my supposedly flat feet. “Why aren’t you wearing your uniforme de fiestas?” whispered one of the girls in my class. 

“It’s because…My mother said…,” I mumbled. 

“La Mercedes won’t care what your mother said. She will be furious,” the girl warned me. 

La Mercedes, the vice-principal, was notorious for her temper. She soon spotted me as we lined up to enter the chapel, and wanted to know why I was disgracing the school on this, the most sacred of fiestas. I again stammered about my mother and the principal, and she frowned, shrugged, and sent me to the back of the line. 

That first year, I endured several more feast days in the wrong uniform, believing that in the summer I would go back to Barcelona where my non-controversial uniform and the German nuns were waiting for me. But several months after our arrival in Quito, the Ecuadorean government had mysteriously run out of money to pay my father’s string quartet their contracted salaries, and between endless promises that the money would come soon, and endless negotiations to get at least part of what was owed to us, we stayed in Quito almost four years. 

I was ten, then eleven, twelve, thirteen. Every fall the drama of the uniform was reenacted. Every time I showed up in ordinary blue when the school was in festival navy, nuns, lay teachers and students were outraged. “But why are you wearing the wrong uniform?” they would ask, as if it were my first offence. And every time I was at a loss for words. I understood that my mother, who on one occasion had had to borrow my allowance to buy groceries when the Government neglected to pay my father’s salary, could not afford to hire a seamstress to make me one of those awful navy outfits. But I also knew that, in that school, few things mattered as much as showing up in the right clothes for the right occasion. When nuns frowned and shook their heads and sent me to the back of the line, when my classmates asked why, why, why, I felt that I, and I alone, was responsible. 

Things got much better when I entered a Catholic high school in Birmingham, Alabama. Here, in the land of the free, there were no uniforms, and once I got my mother to understand that it was unacceptable to wear the same outfit to school  two days in a row (“But why? If it’s not really dirty…”), the clothing dramas temporarily abated. 

But in tenth grade, the school decided to institute uniforms. Perhaps some prophetic soul had seen miniskirts on the horizon and decided to take preemptive action. Whatever the reason, our mothers were instructed to go to Pizitz, Birmingham’s premier department store, to buy the uniform, which consisted of a plaid, pleated skirt and a short-sleeved white cotton blouse. My mother was fine with the skirt, but she saw no reason to buy the regulation white blouse, because she had a perfectly good white blouse hanging in her closet that she was sure would fit me. Never mind that her blouse was nylon rather than cotton, and had pearl rather than plain flat buttons. 

I warned her that it would never do. I argued and pleaded, but she was unmoved. I don’t believe that lack of money was my mother’s reason for her refusal to buy the uniform blouse--the Birmingham Symphony was a lot better about paying its musicians than the Ecuadorean government had been. Maybe she thought that two white blouses in a single household would be sheer American extravagance. Whatever the reason, she sent me to school in the nylon blouse. 

It did not take long for what I had foreseen to come about. I was summoned to the office. There I was interrogated by the principal’s secretary—mercifully not by the Monsignor himself, who perhaps thought it improper to concern himself with female attire—about my incorrect blouse. And suddenly, as I stood looking at my feet while she glared down at me, my brain was flooded with the clear understanding that this was not my problem. 

It was my mother’s problem, and it was the school’s problem, but it had nothing to do with me. It was not my job to reconcile two opposing sets of adult requirements. I was not morally responsible for their contradictory ideas of what was right. Let them fight it out among themselves, I said to myself, feeling a mixture of relief tinged with righteous fury. 

And so I looked the secretary in the eye and said, in a voice that trembled only slightly, “My mother has decided that this is the blouse she wants me to wear. Perhaps she cannot afford to buy another one. You could always call and ask her….” The secretary nodded and sent me back to class, and I never heard another word about uniforms again.

Fourth grade, in Barcelona, in the garden of the German school. I'm in the last row, next to Mater Leonarda