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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

  

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.

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.