Noise Reduction
quiet reflections on life in a loud worldArchive for Womanhood
Thinking of Mom
I woke this morning with a very specific image on the brain: My mom, sitting at the counter in our old kitchen, drinking her coffee quietly while morning activity swirled and buzzed around her. This came to me as, in the background, the Hobbit was shouting from his bed, “MOM! I wake up!” The husband was away, so I couldn’t throw him an elbow and ask him to answer the call. But, with Mom on the brain, I ignored the little man for a bit. After all, I didn’t want to be awake, and I definitely wasn’t ready to switch on my mother persona. No, I was most definitely not ready to be cheerful, creative, patient, encouraging, in charge, not in charge, flexible or on top of things.
“Mah-mah!” the Hobbit shouted. “I can’t hear you!”
Oh hush, I thought, and rolling onto my side, I looked at Mom, realizing that I was seeing her in a new way. To the right, to the left, behind and in front of her were kids – my siblings and me – doing the things that kids do before heading off to school: eating cereal, spilling milk, clanking peanut butter-covered knives into the sink, arguing, complaining, querying Mom about lost items – yet there was Mom, sitting quietly. I’d never noticed her before. I suppose I’d only noticed the activity. But there she was. Right there. Ignoring us all, insofar as she could, for just a moment or two.
My mom had eight kids. Eight kids! Only they were never kids to her. We were “children”, because Mom grew up on a ranch, where kids were baby goats not human offspring. But still, the fact remains: there were eight of us and I tell ya, every day I’m a mother I respect her, feel for her, thank her and, I think, understand her a little bit more. I also, sometimes, feel a little bit lazy. Like this morning, when I was lying there ignoring the Hobbit. Who am I to complain? I asked myself. I have only one. What about all those women with two, three, and so on? What about Mom, for goodness sakes!
There was so much that Mom just got done. Our lives were organized. Our clothes were clean. Our hairs were brushed, our fridge was stocked and every night other than the occasional Sunday pizza night a hot meal was freshly cooked and dished out in a most civilized manner. Mom was – is – the sort of person who just got on with the business of life with a smile, and I must confess that sometimes I’ve found that example more than I can live up to. I mean, not only am I not always smiling, but also, the dishes are not always done and the food is not always cooked with care (if cooked at all – Takeout anyone?). Moreover, the Hobbit’s hair is sometimes a mess and, let’s face it, so is mine. Sigh.
The Hobbit was calling: “Maaaa-mahhhhh! Where are you?!”
“I’m coming!” I shouted back, “I’m coming!” And at last I pushed myself to sitting. Before I stood up though, I sat there on the edge a minute, watching Mom savor her last sip, happy that at least once in a while, she took a little time for herself.
Babies and Bonsais
Tuesdays are my babysitting days. At nine o’clock, Ana comes. “Ana bus!” the Hobbit calls her, because when she comes, he gets to take the bus with her out to the library for some story-telling, dancing, singing and bubble-blowing fun. Meanwhile, I have a few hours to myself in which I can engage as an adult with the world. The point is to feel free for a little while, to stimulate my mind and my imagination, to find a little inspiration. So, I go to cafes and people watch and eavesdrop on conversations; I read newspapers or magazines I don’t usually have time for then sit back and process what I’ve just read; I wander in open space – on the beach, in a park, at the zoo – or read a novel, or head downtown to wade through the sea of working people. I buy a hot dog and sit eating it in a sunny spot while watching bike messengers kill time between assignments, professional women walking fast in skirts and running shoes, homeless men and women organizing their possessions in shopping carts or asking passers-by for spare change. I do any of these things and usually, by the end of my babysitting hours, I not only feel more aware of being alive, I also feel ready, excited even, to face the blank page.
Last Tuesday I started my Ana hours with a drive to the beach. It was a spectacularly clear day – the sky was a pale blue, the Pacific was sparkling, the temperature was mild and autumnal – and I thought some sea air might clear my head. A few blocks from the beach though, spotting a large garden center that I’d forgot existed, I changed my plan, pulled over, parked, and went in. (Ah, the spontaneity of the Ana hours!) I’d been thinking about getting some house plants and thought a little interaction with nature, tame as it would be in a garden center, might be refreshing.
Refreshing it was, and enlightening. Especially when I got to the bonsai section. It was a small section, befitting its subject, and when I spotted it, my heart fluttered with excitement. Bonsais! I thought, and I walked over, thinking maybe there was something of destiny in my happening on the garden center that day: I have long loved the tiny beauty of bonsais, and have, on a few occasions, thought of investing in one.
Hoping to find a variety of bonsais to behold, I was a bit confused if not disappointed to find the section contained tools I’d never seen before, and gloves, and seed packets and books. Where are the tiny trees? I wondered. I want to see some tiny trees! Figuring there might be some answer in one of the books, I picked up a guide to bonsai cultivation, and as I began to read, it dawned on me that the idea of walking into a garden center and buying a bonsai was pretty much at odds with the bonsai tradition. Bonsai cultivation is an art, I read. Bonsai cultivation is a centuries-old tradition based on Chinese ideas about the relationship between humans and nature. It is a meditation, a spiritual practice, part of a long, steady journey toward enlightenment. Honestly, it sounded wonderful and rewarding. But pretty quickly, I lost all interest in taking on the practice myself, because as I read about the planting, pruning, fertilizing and repotting of bonsais, I realized that I already have a bonsai of my own: the Hobbit. Every day, I’m cultivating a person. From delivering him into the world, through all those long, long nights in the early days when he’d wake two or three times, I’ve been cultivating him. And the ongoing cultivation – the feeding of him, dressing of him, bathing of him and putting him to bed; the playing with him, reading with him, and laughing with him; the establishment of an environment in which he can grow and become his best self, the introduction of other people into his life, the letting go and the being there with extra care during the harsh winters of his life – has rich rewards. The Hobbit blossoms. I blossom.
So, who knows. Maybe there’s a bonsai or two in my future. But for now, I’m more than satisfied with the challenge of being fully present in my life with the little guy. Especially when I have those Ana hours to balance things out.
Happy Birthday, Hobbit!
Two years ago, at this moment, I was getting out of a taxi, nauseated and in serious pain as my husband helped me into the hospital. The hobbit was well on his way into this world, and five hours later, he had arrived. We called him a little red devil from the start because he came out bright red and a little furry. But o, was he cute, with the funniest little facial expressions I’d ever seen. I remember the first night in the hospital, after everyone was gone and I was there alone, with him in his plastic hospital-issued bassinet beside me – I just cried and cried. I couldn’t believe the pregnancy was over and my little creature was on the outside now, in the world with the rest of us. Wow. And now he’s two. And he’s excellent. I’m so glad he was born. For me and for the world. Yay, hobbit. Happy birthday!
August Dispatch
While the hobbit naps, I type. It’s been many weeks since I posted anything to the site and even now I don’t have much to add. I try to write, I do, but most often I end up reading instead. I figure this has to be good in long run. After all, “Read everything” is age-old advice for aspiring writers. But dare I admit here that I don’t even feel like an aspiring writer any more? I feel like a mom, a woman, a human being. An observer of nature – this morning, for example, I watched as my mom’s cat pawed and pawed at the baby squirrel she’d caught. The poor little squirrel was dying slowly, burrowing its head into a pile of fallen leaves, while the cat just kept poking at it – and a consumer of food, the written word, red wine and the Olympics. I just visited the blog sites of several writer friends and even as I felt proud of them and longed for their company, I felt 100% like a nonwriter. Funny thing is though, I felt only moderately upset by this. Mostly I didn’t really care. I like my life at the moment. I’m doing the best I can to participate in the world. I laugh more with the hobbit than I’ve ever laughed in my life. Russia and Georgia are at war, but what can I do about it? I mean, just the other night I saw George Bush and Vladimir Putin sitting three seats away from each other at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, laughing it up together. Surely, if the problem was going to be solved quickly, they could have solved it. No?
But I digress. I just wanted to log in and say hello to anyone who still takes time to visit the site. (blog stats reveal that just yesterday two nice people stopped by) I wanted to say I think about writing all the time and even have a few ideas, I’m just not in a position to compose at the moment. I think my point of view is still a little blurry and my time too limited to filter anything but the essential. The light where I am is so different from the light in London, the horizon so far away, the happenings so new to me. I’d like to write about rural life but I’m not going to be living rurally much longer. In a few weeks I’ll be relocating to San Francisco and maybe then I’ll have more to say. In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to read, I can report that The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon is one darned good and powerful piece of literature.
Muddling Through
Once, about a decade ago, I babysat my nieces and nephews while my sister and brother-in-law went for a much-needed dinner date. Around eight o’clock, probably an hour after my sister left, the youngest, a girl, began to tell me that she missed her parents. Holding her on my lap at the top of the stairs (at the bottom of which was the front door), I tried to reassure her that her parents would be home soon. Then, with all the drama a three year-old could muster, she frowned and clarified, “But I weally, weally miss them. I mean, I weally, weally, weally miss my pawents.”
I thought of her yesterday when the hobbit was whining and banging on the table (as he recently has taken to doing way too often for my taste) and I became aware of a weally, weally, weally big wave of my own missing swelling inside me – that of missing my Life Before Hobbit. As he banged and whined, I removed myself to the sink and began to wash dishes aggressively while his dinner warmed on the stove. I was wobbling between asking him politely to stop banging and ignoring him, between scolding him sternly and walking right over to the table to bang bang bang it until my fist could bang it no more. Various tips from various parenting books flitted around inside my head like flies and all at once I was feeling terribly annoyed and terribly guilty for feeling annoyed. I was feeling a lot of things actually, and all of them seemed to be boiling boiling in the great pot of my stomach. I thought of clicking my heels three times, but then I realized I didn’t in that moment believe there was “no place like home”. (After all, where is home anyway? And is it really so great?)
And then the hobbit grabbed the plate of cheerios in front of him and tossed it onto the floor.
*
Have you ever noticed how often people talk about the weather? I have. For some time now I’ve been noticing it, starting, probably, back when I was in college, and underslept, and of a mind to observe and analyze just about any human interaction in search of sincerity and meaning. A conversation would turn to the weather, and I’d think, dismissively: Don’t these people have anything better to talk about?
Now that I’m older and a wee bit wiser (she writes, hopefully), I see how short-sighted and naive I was back then. (And, yes, snooty in my dismissiveness, but please forgive me for not wanting to get into that just now.) Indeed, since those snooty days, I have weathered nearly two decades of adulthood and in that time have come to respect the weather greatly for its unfailing ability to rescue conversations from all sorts of extending silences. I’ve come to realize that whatever substance the weather lacks as a topic, it more than makes up for in goodwill. It is something all humans respond to. It bridges linguistic, cultural, political divides, and it can often lead a conversation to commonalities that might otherwise have gone undiscovered. It is evocative, the weather, and it is handy in taxis, in foreign countries, on ferries. It brings far away friends closer. It makes taciturn farmers gregarious. It is, simply, good, the weather, and I hope the next time you find yourself commenting on the cold and gray or that lovely evening last night, you revel in the connection you are making with another human being.
(Now, you are probably asking yourself what this has to do with anything. Well, the answer is not much. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about lately.)
(And, by the way, in case anyone is interested, the weather here today was bright, sunny and fully June-appropriate. The birds were happy, the insects were busy, and I was busy and happy.)
*
Speaking of connections, today I connected via email with an old friend who’s a reporter currently based in Iraq. According to his email, he’s spending his time getting to know soldiers, covering court martial hearings and contemplating the beginning of civilization on the banks of the Euphrates. He says it is hot where he is. Hot, and dusty, in case you were wondering. You can read one of his more recent dispatches here.
*
Speaking of dusty, the hobbit and I were stuck in traffic today. We were driving along that highway I mentioned in my last post. The one that cuts through the valley and is lined on either side by cultivated fields. Men were working in the fields, which were very, very dusty. Some were riding on the back of a big tractor like thing dropping something, presumably seeds of some sort, into the soil. Behind them, three others walked along with hoes possibly, something that was used to push the seeds in. Honestly, it was difficult for me to tell what, exactly, they were doing. (I was driving after all, and how many times do I have to admit that I really am a city kid, despite the rancher relatives? I mean, I wish I knew more about agriculture, I really do. But the fact is I know very little. Ho, hum.) Anyay, as I sat there praying that the poor, hot little hobbit could keep on happily babbling in the back there until we reached our destination, I was also watching the dust that was rising off the field where the men were working. Mixing with the heat, the dust formed a blurry band of light that stretched about ten feet into the air and looked to be the work of some special effects department somewhere. And the men – with their baseball caps and bandannas and rounding shoulders – as I watched them work, I wished I had the guts of my reporter friend. I so wanted to go into those fields, introduce myself and ask those men a few questions about their lives. I was thinking about them being immigrants, and wondering if my immigrant experiences resembled theirs in any way. I doubted it. After all, I was welcomed in England, I spoke the native language and I never made my living doing field work under the blazing sun. Still, I was hopeful we might find some common ground, and I figured that, if nothing else, we could talk about the weather. But then the traffic moved forward and I went with it.
*
Today, Thursday, was a good day. The husband woke me up early with a cheerful long-distance call and instead of going back to bed I got up, made myself a large cup of coffee and did some writing and some emailing. The hobbit woke up an hour and a half later in a good mood. We had a happy morning, free of whining and banging. And so it went. I talked to a friend who’s also momming and cherished her understanding. We laughed. The hobbit laughed. We got stuck in traffic on the way to pick up my niece and nephew and there was no whining or banging there either. For lunch we ate Mexican food with the niece and nephew and then the niece and nephew pushed the hobbit around in a shopping cart while I did errands. Later, the hobbit played in the car while I cleaned it. We had neither banging nor whining at dinner and after dinner we did the bath time dance, cracking ourselves right up. Before bed, the hobbit kissed a picture of his dad. We read a pop-up book and The Cat in the Hat. And then I fetched myself a large glass of wine, chatted with my sister while making my dinner then sat to watch the rest of the day play out over the lion’s paw in the distance. I listened to public radio via the internet. I read an email from a dear friend in London.
I wrote.
Sweeping Insights
Some of you are familiar with the hobbit’s love of sweeping. However, some of you might not be, so I will tell you outright: my son, AKA the hobbit, loves sweeping. He’s loved it most of his little life and as far as I can tell, sweeping’s only rival for his heart is “talking” on the “phone” (where talking = babbling enthusiastically and uttering the occasional “umm” and “bye”; and phone = anything that can be held up to the ear (e.g., mobile phones, cordless phones, fisher price phones, refrigerator magnets, ipods, pieces of chocolate, clothes, stuffed animals…) I don’t know where he picked up his phone habit, since, as friends and family will attest, I am not much of a user, and the husband, well, he does most of his telephone communication at the office. However, I am pretty sure he got the sweeping habit from me since, as it happens, the hobbit and the husband have a crumb-dropping habit in common. But I don’t love it. Not like he does.
Take the other day for example. It was a gorgeous spring day, with a blue sky, warm sunshine, chirping birds, delicate blossoms – the works. So, I was not surprised when, arriving to pick up the hobbit at nursery, I found all the children playing outside in the yard. I could hear the happy laughter, squeals and squawks even before I turned the last corner into the lane, and it was all so cheerful I started to feel quite happy myself. As I approached, I sought my hobbit among the twenty or so little people running around the yard, talking to each other, talking to themselves, laughing, skipping, and so on. Was he running with that group? No. Skipping with those? No. Swinging on the gate? No. Hiding under the picnic table? No. Bobbing up and down on the little seesaw they have there? No. Clinging to the trousers of a teacher? No. Wandering around lost and wondering when his beloved mommy was going to arrive?
No.
Sweeping?
Sweeping! Of course! Just as I started to take a second look over the scene, there was a break in the crowd and at last I saw him: my little hobbit, contentedly but with great focus, sitting in the middle of all the chaos, sweeping the ground with a dust broom. Crazy baby!
I thought of this story this morning as I read about the latest crisis news coming out of the U.S. – about the grounding of hundreds of airplanes after 8 failed FAA inspections. Or, hang on, maybe it was that other crisis news coming out of the U.S. – about the collapse of the lending industry? Or, no, it must have been the news about that other crisis – about Iraq? No? Or that absurd letter I got from the IRS the other day, describing Bush’s Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which, as far as I can tell, is predicated on the notion that the best thing that Americans, many of whom are actually in debt, actually at risk of losing their houses, and/or actually at risk of losing their jobs, can do for their country is…spend more money.
No?
Well, anyway, something made me think back to the sight of my hobbit sitting there so contentedly, but what I couldn’t and still can’t decide is whether his sweeping was an instructive demonstration of how to keep one’s head in difficult times or a frighteningly accurate enactment of George W. Bush’s unique leadership style.
Anyone?
Pearl Cornioley, I Wish I’d Known You
I like obituaries, and have for a very long time, probably for the same reason I like social history: I like learning about other people’s lives. I came across the following the other night as I read through the newspaper with a glass of wine in hand, the husband’s delicious chicken stew warm in my tum and the hobbit fast asleep downstairs. The headline alone was enviable, but to read on was to be transported back through the last century, and to be inspired. Funny enough, I came across it right after reading the latest about the Geraldine Ferraro Barack-Obama-is-where-he-is- because-he-is-black absurdity, and I liked imagining what Ms. Cornioley would have said to Ms. Ferraro. Something blunt and French, I thought. Something much more cogent than the feeble “Oh shut up already” I felt like saying when I read the story. I mean, come on. Is anyone else as sick and tired of this gender-race chatter as I am?! Both women and black people (which includes black women, I might add) get shafted in this world – even people who think this is the divinely inspired way of things know that this is true. So why is someone as accomplished and intelligent as Geraldine Ferraro spending time saying stupid things that pit them against each other? Why is she fueling a fire that threatens to destroy the tender green grasses of a re-energized, optimistic, confident Democratic Party? I came across a blog the other day that was raging with anti-Obama feeling, sourced primarily in the fact that he was a man. I just can’t understand that. I mean, sure, as a woman, I notice that Hillary Clinton is treated differently as a result of her sex. For example, in the YouTube/CNN Democratic debates that I watched a couple of weeks back (very interesting if you ask me, I recommend a view), when the candidates were asked to say one negative and one positive thing about the candidate to their left, John Edwards said he wasn’t sure about the color of Hillary’s coat. Ha ha, what a chuckle. Not. It was a relatively benign but obnoxious comment in my opinion, and it revealed that, regardless of what Edwards thinks of Clinton’s policies and politics, at some level, he also sees (and probably always will see) her as a woman, meaning, in this instance, an object whose clothes should have made her attractive but (in his opinion) didn’t. Did any of the other candidates have his outfit commented on? No. Did this annoy me? Yes. But did it influence my opinion of candidate Clinton in any way? No. If anything, it made me think less of Edwards, but it was just one of hundreds of details I absorbed from the debate and not even close to the most important one. As far as I’m concerned (yes, my rant is coming to an end here), Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both good candidates. They have different strengths and weaknesses, and they are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, not White Woman and Black Man. To succeed as President of the United States, they will have to be able, with intelligence, articulateness, diplomacy, wit, experience, charisma, power and wisdom, to transcend their respective woman-ness and black-ness, so as to influence and lead with all of their capabilities. I think they both are able to do this, so what I’m evaluating is how and in what directions will they influence and lead.
Anyway, back to Pearl Cornioley, whose obit started this post and will end it. What a life! I do wish I’d known her, and I’m very glad she got to live to the ripe old age of 93. Hope you read right through to the end.
“Pearl Cornioley, 93, a British agent who led Resistance Fighters,” by Douglas Martin (as reported in the International Herald Tribune).
Pearl Cornioley, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied France to work as a courier between the British and the French resistance and rose to command 3,000 underground fighters, died on Feb. 24 in the Loire Valley of France. She was 93.
Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed to The Associated Press by Caroline Cottard, the secretary of the retirement home where Cornioley lived.
Cornioley, who was 29 when she was sent to France in 1943, commanded troops who killed 1,000 German soldiers and wounded many more — while suffering only a tiny number of casualties themselves. She presided over the surrender of 18,000 German troops.
Her unit interrupted a railway line that connected the south of France to Normandy more than 800 times in June 1944, the month of D-Day. It also regularly attacked German convoys.
Sometimes carrying a case of cosmetics to pose as a traveling saleswoman, she had many brushes with danger. She hid in a cornfield as German troops fired random shots into the field. She was almost killed by a resistance leader who doubted her identity. The Germans offered a million-franc reward for her capture.
Pearl Witherington, as she was known at the time of her wartime exploits, was British by birth and French by upbringing. Her code name was Wrestler, her nom de guerre was Pauline, and in wireless transmissions to Britain, she was “Marie.”
Cornioley was an operative of the Special Operations Executive, which the British formed to support and coordinate resistance in the occupied countries of Europe. Agents from many walks of life, from business to journalism to academia, joined what was essentially a by-invitation-only club. Women were welcome because they might be viewed as less suspicious, and many proved to be excellent agents.
‘The girls who served as secret agents in Churchill’s Special Operations Executive were young, beautiful and brave,” Marcus Binney wrote in his book “The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Agents of the Special Operations Executive” (2002).
“At a time when women in the armed forces were restricted to a strictly noncombatant role in warfare, the women of SOE trained and served alongside the men,” he continued. “They fought not in the front line but well behind it.”
Cornioley stood out. In his book “Set Europe Ablaze” (1966), E. H. Cookridge called her “one of the main pillars of the network” of the SOE and the resistance fighters they supported. She was the only woman to become a network leader.
Cecile Pearl Witherington was born in Paris on June 24, 1914. A great-grandfather was a chemist who introduced the recipe for Worcestershire sauce to Lea & Perrins, and a grandfather was an architect in London, according to Binney. Her father traveled the world for a Swedish company that supplied paper for banknotes.
Her father’s heavy drinking and spendthrift habits shattered the family, obituaries in British newspapers said. As the eldest of four daughters, Cornioley started working at 17 as a secretary and made extra money by teaching English at night.
When the Germans invaded France in 1940, she was working for the air attaché at the British Embassy. The family left Paris in December and followed a circuitous route to London. There, Cornioley got a job at the Air Ministry.
But she burned with anger over France’s defeat and began searching for a way to fight back. Luckily, her French was superb.
“And anyway I didn’t like the Germans,” she was quoted as saying in an obituary in The Independent. “Never did. I’m a baby of the 1914-18 war.”
Through an acquaintance, she found her way to the SOE, which she joined on June 8, 1943. In training, she was recognized as the best shot, male or female, the service had seen. The commander wrote, “Very capable, completely brave.”
On the night of Sept. 22-23, she parachuted into France, near Châteauroux. Her two suitcases landed in a lake, where they were lost. Within hours, she was reunited with her French fiancé, Henri Cornioley, who had escaped from a German prison camp and joined the resistance. The two then worked closely.
This mix of love and war has caused many to see Pearl Cornioley as the inspiration for Sebastian Faulks’s popular 1998 novel, “Charlotte Gray.” In 2001, the book was made into a movie of the same name, directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring Cate Blanchett.
Cornioley insisted that romance was not her motivation for going to war. In an interview with The Telegraph in 2002, she said: “There was a job to be done. I didn’t put my life at risk just so I could be with Henri.”
But in October 1944, after being separated and almost killed, the couple made it to London, where they married. They moved to Paris, where Henri Cornioley worked as a pharmacist and Pearl Cornioley as a secretary for the World Bank.
He died in 1999. Pearl Cornioley is survived by their daughter, Claire.
In 1995, Cornioley published her memoirs, which she wrote with Hervé Larroque. One tale concerned a “really cute” rabbit she took everywhere with her. The rabbit was oblivious to machine-gun fire.
Cornioley received many honors, but the one that stuck in her mind was the one she turned down. That was Member of the British Empire, or MBE She had been offered the civil version, not the military one.
She sent an icy note saying she had had done nothing remotely “civil.”
Happy Mother’s Day
Here’s a benefit of being an expatriate I hadn’t expected: I get to celebrate my motherhood twice. English Mother’s Day (actually called Mothering Sunday) was yesterday (Sunday) and I had a great day. It all started at Mass on Saturday evening, when I was unexpectedly applauded and given a daffodil along with all the other mothers there. Then, Sunday, I slept in while the husband had first breakfast with the hobbit, and I actually felt refreshed when I joined them for second breakfast. Next, I volunteered for market duty so the husband could putter around the house with the little fella, and had the pleasure of bumping into some friends on my way (and they say London is a big city…). I walked with them a few blocks, delighting in the fact that it was just little old unencumbered me, them and their cute baby, and then I shopped slowly at the farmer’s market under a blue, blue sky. Finally, I stopped to sit on a bench and eat one of my favorite things – a sausage sandwich – before heading home. So far so good; and it only got better.
As the hobbit was finishing his lunch, we gave him his first haircut, which was a total success, if a little confusing for him, especially when we spritzed his hair with water. (This was actually a little amusing for us, I must admit. His confusion and the the scrunched-up face he made when we spritzed, I mean. Call me cruel, but it was just too cute.) Quickly, he got into it though, helping to comb his hair along the way. He really wanted to help with the cutting, too, but we had to draw the line somewhere, and just this side of sharp scissors seemed a pretty darned wise place to draw it, no? After that, we went out to buy him his first pair of real shoes! What a delight for this mom. Up to now, the guy has had these soft shoes that were great when he was crawling and just starting to walk, but now that he’s getting on toward running! Let me put it this way – the minute he had the first shoe on, he started stomping his foot like a wild man. He was laughing and honestly, I’ve never seen anyone so happy about shoes in my life. It reminded me of the good old days when my own mom would buy me sports shoes and I would go around showing everyone how much faster I could run with the new ones. Happy guy. Happy me.
On our way home, I stopped into a funky little massage place I’ve been eyeing for a while and found that yes, they could fit me in for a 30 min head, neck and shoulder rub. Whoopee! The husband and hobbit headed to the playground and I got to sit in a comfy chair and have some of my knots worked out. It was a totally unfussy pleasure, and completely without the bells, whistles, “relaxing” spa music, essential oils, and fluffy bathrobes that often make the experience of massage a little too precious for my taste. Ahhhhhhhhh.
We got in some family laughs before the hobbit zonked, and then we had a real hog up of a dinner (as my dad might describe it): enormous hamburgers and caesar salad by me, fried potatoes and ice cream sundaes by my husband. Wow-wee. Over dinner we caught up with each other before he heads off on another few days of work travel, and over sundaes we caught up with our friends on Lost, who just keep on being lost, albeit, fortunately for us, in an edge-of-the-seat sort of way.
A little reading before bed (Dreams of My Father, by Barack Obama; which I enthusiastically recommend), and boom, I’d say that was the best mother’s day I’ve ever had. And there’s another one just around the corner. Lucky me.
Let’s hear it for the mothers!
A Few Words on Transportation
For reasons I won’t go into, I was feeling a little low last week. Blue, restless, fed up with pretty much everything other than the hobbit’s wild hair and his habit of scooting backwards into my lap whenever he feels in need of a cuddle or some milk. So it was that when I dropped him off at nursery one afternoon, I had no appetite for the hum drum. In other words, I realized that though I could go home and sit in front of the computer, I felt no inspiration whatsoever and it seemed unlikely that the time would be well spent. Instead, what I really wanted to do was get out of my neighborhood and the few neighborhoods I regularly visit these days. Too, I wanted to be among people. And, I was mid-way through a beautiful novel and was dying to dive back in. At the same time, I didn’t want to do shopping of any kind. I didn’t want to drink coffee, tea or anything else I would have to purchase in order to rent a table in a cafe. And I didn’t want to sit outdoors – it is February after all.
Fortunately, I was feeling decisive, and a solution came to me rather quickly: I decided to board the tube and stay on it a while. I decided to go west. I decided go to Kensington.
The ride was great. All around me were flesh-and-blood humans. Adults, children. People reading free newspapers, resting, doing puzzles, playing with their phones. The trained rocked steadily and didn’t make me sick. The novel (Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, in case you were wondering) swept me away like a magic carpet to the turn-of-the-century American South.
When I finally reached the South Kensington station, I realized I had only about twenty minutes to spend before I would have to begin my journey back to pick up the hobbit. This was a bit of a disappointment, but, since I was out of my neighborhood, not consuming, and quite happily swimming along in the stream of London life, I set the disappointment aside and made my way to the Museum of Natural History. I limited myself to the lobby, and this turned out to work perfectly, as it allowed me to spend some quality time with the few but impressive artifacts on display there. I loved it. I was transported many times over. Sitting on a bench beside a giant turtle skeleton, I imagined archaeologists down on their knees in the dirt, digging out those bones with care, maybe fascination, possibly reverence. Tourists taking pictures made me feel I was on holiday. A group of pre-teens in school uniforms being mustered by their teachers reminded me of the sense of freedom I used to get from field trips.
Moving on, I rested my head against a cool stone wall while taking in the next huge creature, a predecessor to the seals we know today. One thought led to another and soon I was imagining the sea off South America, warm and sparkling in the sun and a breeze.
Before leaving, I spotted the stump of a tree. It was a redwood, I think, though my memory for factual details is horrid (sensory details? not so bad, but facts? yikes). In any case it was huge, and from California, which I remember because I, too, am from California, so this particular detail hit home, so to speak. Anyway, it was just a stump, but in the mood I was in, it struck me as a magnificent stump, and all I wanted to do was put my arms around that stump and sit with it a while. It had been an old tree when it died, and its rings were many and beautiful. So varied, so absorbing. Some finely drawn, some squiggly. I thought about trying to count them but instead I just stared at them, and again I was transported, to the redwood groves of my childhood summers, with fog hovering here, a little bit of water dripping there, a carpet of needles underfoot.
I was reminded of this little journey of mine two nights ago, as I sliced two leeks for the pasta sauce I was making. As whole leeks, these two were homely, it must be said, but once they were thinly sliced, they were as beautiful in their own way as that redwood tree I’d seen. Their beauty was a gift, too, because when I started slicing them, I’d been preoccupied. It had been a long day. My writing was not going according to plan, the hobbit was in a teething funk, and the husband was away. The coverage of the U.S. presidential campaigns was becoming ever more petty and dispiriting, Turkey was invading northern Iraq, I’d read two opinion pieces on the U.S.’s use of waterboarding, and I was struggling to figure out what to make of Castro’s resignation in Cuba, the torching of the U.S. embassy in Belgrade and the defeat of Musharraf’s party in Pakistan. All that, and then there were those leeks. So simple but so gorgeous, in vivid shades of green running from emerald to almost white, with fine and delicate rings within rings. I paused. I breathed. I put some music on and moved on to the kale feeling a little more at ease.
Musings of a Mid-Month Mind
For a few days every month, my mind enters a state of disorder that makes communication, not to mention living, difficult. No doubt, they were days like these on which, once upon a time, countless male doctors diagnosed countless female patients with Hysteria. For my part, I do not feel particularly hysterical. I just feel scatterbrained, dulled by self-doubt, weary, whiny and generally on shaky ground.
Now, before someone goes and posts a comment along the lines of “Too much information!” or “Whiny is right!” I will quickly note that I do have a reason for mentioning all this, and that is to explain any lapses you may encounter in the following paragraphs. It is because, well, these days are happening now. This week. And, as I noted above, in these days I have trouble concentrating. I forget what I am doing right in the middle of doing it. Thoughts interrupt thoughts and –
What I mean to say is that these are the days when I prefer to use unbreakable plastic cups instead ceramic or glass. The days when I often find myself saying, “It’s a good thing I have a neck, else I might misplace my head.” These are the days when I am more capable than usual of feeling empathy toward moody teenagers and less capable than usual of putting together a post for my blog that takes just one idea and runs with it. In other words: the old rule of essay writing – Tell them what you are going to say, then say it, then tell them what you said – is excruciatingly difficult to follow in these days; so, in a moment of middle-aged wisdom, I have given up the struggle and decided to go with a more meandering post. In other words: consider yourself warned. Please.
First thing first: the blog. I was surprised and encouraged by the number of comments I got both on the blog and via email. Thank you, thank you. For not just taking time out to read, but to comment as well! I never expected it.
Second thing: speaking of sex (in a biological sense), I was interested to find that the majority of people who commented or emailed me about the blog were women. I haven’t done a count, but I would feel safe saying that if I didn’t send the announcement to an equal number of men and women, women did not outnumber the men by much. So, what was it? I asked my husband about it (my husband being the resident man), but he just scratched his head and looked puzzled. (Is now a good time to mention that my husband did not comment on the blog until I asked him if he’d seen it, a few days after I sent the email about it?) Then he said, “Maybe it says something about the different ways women and men communicate/respond/express themselves?”
“You think?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Me neither,” said I. Then, “What about the content? Do you think it says something about what I wrote appealing more to women than to men?”
“That wouldn’t be my guess,” he said.
“Hmm,” I said.
“Ab-bwah!” said the hobbit.
Anyone else?
Speaking of majorities and minorities: how about that presidential campaign going on in my native country, the US of A? Darned exciting, I say. I mean, surely I was not the only one who had no interest in sitting through a raced characterized by a sense of inevitability. No? And the polls, the polls! Finally they have been exposed as the silly wastes of time they are! And that’s not all I am excited about. There is also the fact that this is the first presidential campaign in the history of my voting life in which I am genuinely excited about the candidates. And the fact that, so far, there has been more talk about policy and candidates’ visions for the country then about fellow candidates. There is also the fact that the surprises in Iowa and New Hampshire have restored my faith in the power of the vote, not to mention the American voter. As far as I am concerned, the results of the last week stand as persuasive evidence that my fellow citizens are thinking people. I try hard not to be an American-bashing American, but I will be the first to admit: the last presidential election made this effort an especially strenuous one. This week though, it’s as easy as finding the hobbit hilarious.
Less easy this week is feeling hopeful about humanity generally. The news coming out of Kenya is especially unsettling, but Kenya is hardly the only place experiencing devastating political violence. I didn’t mention this in my New Year’s post, but that novel I put in a box two weeks ago was set in a fictional military dictatorship and involved assassinations of opposition leaders, voting fraud and the murders of mostly poor people who served as scapegoats for the party in power. It was based on events that happened in the 1930s, in the Dominican Republic, but it could easily have been based on events occurring right now in, well, you name it – Kenya, Congo, Sudan, Chechnya… (as well as, albeit less morbidly, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, China, Russia, Iran, Turkey… ) Seriously, one of the reasons the book got away from me was that every time I glanced at a newspaper there was another, only slightly-modified version of my story staring back at me, causing me to rethink, recast, rewrite. I tell you, there are days when the constancy of the human tendency to abuse power is enough to make me want to shut out the world entirely. To go shopping, become a hedonist, live only for today and book one of those pampering days in a spa that smells of citrus and lavender. Add to all that facts about extreme poverty in the US, discrimination in France so powerful it inspires young people to burn cars, Neo-Nazism and violent nationalism on the rise worldwide, the conditions in detention centers throughout Europe and the US for illegal immigrants, most of whom have already been through hell to get where they are, teenagers being murdered on the streets of London — and things do seem pretty grim.
(Up goes the mood. Down goes the mood. See what I mean about “these days”?)
(Actually, while I’m being parenthetical, and on a downer, and writing about voter fraud, I might as well take this opportunity to note that earlier this week I received an email highlighting a convincing New York Times magazine article about the potential problems the US faces as many states move to electronic voting. In response, I signed a MoveOn.com petition requesting congress to pass an emergency paper ballots bill. Maybe you want to check it out?)
But, all is not bad. Indeed, there is plenty of good news, too. There is that refreshingly substantial US presidential campaign I was writing about. And, the war crimes trial of Liberia’s Charles Taylor started this week in the Hague, so justice just might well be served there. An invention called Plumpy’nut is making it possible to treat malnourished kids more effectively than ever before. A friend of mine who spent the entirety of her twenties as a political prisoner in Turkey is finally feeling safe and secure enough in London to write a memoir that is funny, wise, compassionate and beautiful. The hobbit is learning to walk and the amazing Skype is making it possible for faraway friends and family to watch him do it. “These days” are passing. Dilbert continues to be odd. Snoopy continues to be funny. My husband’s carbon footprint this month was about as big as the hobbit’s new shoe (a vast improvement). Google maps showed me the tiny village in Siberia where a new friend grew up. Hearing aids are more powerful than they have ever been before and just the other day, while reading an article about Somalia (Somalia being one of the most dire places on the planet), I came across a story about a group of young Somali refugees living in Kenya who have formed a music group called Waayaha Cusub (New Era). Ah, the power of art to uplift. Check out their website. It’s great stuff.
And that’s it for this week. Thanks for muddling through.
