RIPE

2010-08-03T16:58:00.000-07:00

When I was ten I went to a friend's house to play. Her home was long and gorgeous and so unlike anything I'd ever seen. This was 1969 and everything in her house was somehow tasteful and exquisite and outrageously colorful at the same time, like one of Barbie's whoozy mod designer outfits. She walked me through the front door - there was nobody inside but us - back to her bedroom and I remember three things that floored me: she had her own walk-in closet; they had a pool (A private pool. In Oregon. In the backyard where lounge chairs waited like something out of 'The Graduate') and the house had a wall around it, which of course I thought was fantastic. She lived only twelve, fourteen blocks from me but it was more than another world. It was a world of whispers.

See, her parents were divorced.

Whispered over the dinner table like cancer or Lou Gehrig's disease or Republican or as in 'Annie Hall', Jewish. For some reason this all stands out as much as the fact she had at least 100 stuffed animals in her room. And dozens and dozens of Barbies, twice as many as me. She seemed a little sad, this girl. A little bit like the daughter on Mad Men, blonde and distant and odd. But it never occurred to me it was about being divorced. It seemed more because she had everything and seemed to want none of it. I remember she offered me any doll or toy I wanted. I suppose to be her friend. I know I declined, not because of ethics or morality (I was already shoplifting now and then by 8, so ethics weren't really my concern) but only because how would I explain it at home? Nah, keep your own fabulous offerings to yourself blonde girl.

Later I found out she offered toys to a few other girls, too. And then she moved. To California.

Now everybody is divorced. Or about to be divorced or pretty much resigned to the idea, if not the fact, of it. And what used to be called a broken home is now a blended one, something we throw in a jar and hit Liquefy, Crush, Purify, Pulse. Everyone used to say - the media, our teachers, our parents, I mean everyone - that divorce was so horrible, so radically disgusting to both God and Nature, that it would rip the beating heart out of a family, damaging everyone in myriad and complicated ways, and if you didn't stay together 'for the children' you might as well condemn them to an endless merciless hell where all the other 'children of divorce' sat next to their personal walk-in closets, weeping with shame.

My parents stayed married until my dad died, when I was 19. My mother never remarried, never even dated another man, something that equally thrilled and saddened me; a choice that was strictly hers to make, not ours. But we knew many 'children of divorce' and most of those children seemed as blissfully normal as anyone with from a non-ripped-apart family would ever be. We all had our neuroses. We all had our moments in the sun. We all wished we were adopted (if we weren't) and hated being adopted (if we were). We all wanted to be popular, perfect, adored, the center of attention, the only A students in sight, with hair that wouldn't frizz and breasts that would soon command attention and we all had outrageous dreams and hidden secrets we told no one, no one at all. In other words: we were all kids.

Time passed. In the 80's and 90's, it seemed like everyone came from a 'broken home'. I became a stepmom, or stepmonster, actually. My oldest stepdaughter got divorced, and their daughter suddenly had 'two homes' as my stepdaughter once had. My step-granddaughter turned out just terrifically. She's actually better than terrific, she's wise, humane, interested and interesting, and I'm pretty sure she's never even considered shoplifting. She loves her Papa and her mother equally, unashamedly. She loves her father's ex-girlfriend. She loves her new half-sister.

She is not, as far as the eye can see, broken.

And shame on anyone, anywhere, for making her or anyone else feel that way.

Shame on the religious or the censorial for making someone feel deficient. Less. Chipped like a piece of china.

All families are broken and missing and without all the perfect bits. All families are normal and deeply lacking normalcy, we're all a tapestry of blood and love and defiance and need, related by things we can't touch. Sometimes we're even related by DNA.

There's a terrific piece in the New York Times today called 'In Praise of A Broken Home', written and illustrated by Ellen Lupton. Read it. Please.

And then just when you feel broken, get out the tape. -- Janet

Chéri revisited.

2010-08-03T02:17:00.000-07:00

After leaving the post about Stephen Frear's film Chéri, I received an email from a dear friend, letting me know that the saga behind the movie was perhaps more interesting and enlightening than the film itself. What I hadn't realized, was that the film project was originally developed (or at least nurtured) by Jessica Lange for many years, clearly with the thought that she herself would play the part of Lea.

Ten years after she began her crusade, the film was developed with the younger Michele Pfeiffer in the lead role. The story of this shift and of the cruelty of Hollywood is an interesting read. In this London Telegraph article, all is revealed, at least from one person's point of view, including some valuable insights into the story as written by Colette and where the movie, as finally produced, diverges from her intent.

I add, here, photos of Colette herself, young and old, so that you might see that when the woman writes of youth/beauty vs. age/self-possession, she knows of which she writes. —Charlotte

Time passes. A story is told.

2010-08-01T05:55:00.001-07:00

You are all probably familiar with the photo above left—"The Afghan Girl" photographed by Steve McCurry. It ran on the cover of National Geographic in 1985. In January, McCurry was sent back to find her and photograph her again. The similarities and the differences are stark.

If you are like me, you met her in the earlier photo a long time ago. And you've seen her face almost every time you walked into a Borders or Barnes and Noble. But having become a part of the fabric of our lives, she's gone without more notice. Her eyes have burned into us, but beyond that, we didn't know anything about her other than what we assumed to be true, given the headlines about her country over the years.

Her name is Sharbat Gula. And an abbreviated version of her story is here.

A footnote: she was photographed by McCurry with Kodachrome film. Steve McCurry was given the last roll of Kodachrome by Kodak last year when they discontinued production. He went back to Asia to use it. Hear that story here.

Beauté.

2010-07-30T02:45:00.000-07:00

Along with its bread, France is characterized by a widespread love and recognition of its own illustrious literary figures. Colette is one of them. She was born in a beautiful town about 45 minutes' drive from here. Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. I've never read her books, but I've gazed long and hard at photos of her, trying to fathom the depths of her gaze, and it is now on my to-do list to tackle her works in whatever language works best.

Her life was full of romantic intrigues with both men and women, so it's hardly surprising that in her book and in Stephen Frears' adaptation, Chéri, a beautiful young man, for whom the story is named, takes his own life for the love of an older woman, the courtesan Léa. Clearly Colette knew how to see women with the eyes of a lover. And what she sees is good for the soul.

I'm not critiquing the film (suffice it to say that though the acting was at times stilted, the film is a feast for the eyes and the middle aged heart), I'm merely here to say that the story did me good. Sitting on the brink of 50, contemplating still what it means to age in this unkind culture and what it means to be truly "beautiful," it was exhilarating to see Michele Pfeiffer holding her gorgeous own next to an actor (Rupert Friend) 23 years her junior. I don't know what she has done to maintain herself, and I don't really care. Her age (and the age of her character)—as I believe it always is—is evident. And it is stunning. Her hands, her eyes, and those rather decisive lines that run from the nose to the sides of her mouth—they don't lie.

If lines speak of years, they also speak of experience. And in this story it is her experience that wins and ruins his heart. But it is also her own knowledge and painful recognition of the truth of Age versus Youth that renders the story warm and real and—there's that word again—beautiful. The struggle, particularly in a woman who's entire livelihood had been based on her physical charms, is a valiant one.

So, girlfriends. If you haven't seen it, rent it, watch it, and love yourself for all that you are. Going back in time wouldn't make you more beautiful. In fact, it might make you less so.

—Charlotte

Our Daily Bread

2010-07-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

While Janet takes on the enormous, I take on the quotidian.

As every summer, I am in the French countryside until the end of August give or take a week. It's beautiful. And I am thankful for every day that starts anew. And each of those new days starts with a walk to the bakery, where we by our next 24 hours' supply of bread. Three baguettes if we are all here. Just one or two if I am here with my children and my mother-in-law.

As I've mentioned before, my mother-in-law lived here, in this town, during World War II. She lived with her severe grandmother. And they knew hunger.

One of the memories she has which seems to be clear and not rewritten by Alzheimer's is of her grandmother saying, "You must respect the bread." What she meant by this was more specific than you might think. She meant:

The bread should be cut and not torn. Tearing it is disrespectful of its fiber and its integrity.

The bread should be covered with a cloth to protect it from flies.

The bread should be handled with care, even with love, if you will.

The bread should be eaten with thanks. Great thanks.

And most of all, the bread should never be wasted.

I'm still often guilty of tearing bread (I feel like I become one with it when I rip into its crust enclosed softness), but I think about her words every, single day. About the depth and breadth of the statement. It goes beyond kitchen and table, into field and factory. If one is to respect the bread, one respects what goes into it. And one respects the earth that gives rise to all those ingredients. And one respects the hand that made it.

The man that makes the bread in this small town, wakes up every day at 4:30 or 5:00. He feeds everyone of the 375 souls who live here. He does not take vacation. His name is Gérard, and he is missing some teeth. He greets me always with a smile and chatter that I have difficulty deciphering. He is covered with flour. His cat sleeps in the bakery on a stack of newspapers.

Tomorrow is another day. And another loaf of bread. I cannot wait to taste it. If there is a 'God Particle,' it will be baked inside it. —Charlotte

And Buddha says Make Me One With Everything

2010-07-27T20:08:00.000-07:00

How many physicists does it take to find God? Apparently 1000. How many of those physicists are wearing a clown nose and Groucho Marx hair? Eight.*

For those of you who haven't been watching, let me pull back the veil and reveal the search for the origin of the universe, genius-style. One thousand physicists have been working at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory trying to find the 'God Particle', also called the Higgs boson, which is said to be responsible for for creating the universe as we know it. For taking the Big Bang and letting it linger, thus giving life to our unbelievable planet, our wondrous animals, our skyblue seas, our seablue skies, our far from endless bounty, BP, good things happening to bad people, bad things happening to everyone else, BP getting away with murder, Rush Limbaugh, movies featuring a naked or semi-naked Ewan McGregor, and yoga. Not necessarily in that order.

Over the last decade physicists - yes, God bless them - have examined a thousand trillion collisions of protons and anti-protons looking for signs of that singular spark that created us. All of which begs some serious questions.

First, how does someone count to a thousand trillion? That has to be exhausting. Five hundred trillion is exhausting enough and I'm not counting I'm merely typing. Secondly, is God truly in the God Particle and what does that name actually mean? GP: It's the Theory of Everything, and finding it would explain how all the forces in the universe interact to produce the world we know now. It's a theoretical energy particle that would reveal why things have mass - and why we, our planet and everything around it - was created out of chaos. It's never been observed. Never located. It's a phenomena that remains hidden, a mystery. What's essential is invisible to the eye.**

Origin of the Universe. Dark Matter. The Reason We're Here. 'Scientists Inch Towards Finding God Particle' the headlines screamed today. Will we ever get there? Or will the universal rug be pulled out from under us, Harpo honking in the background, Loki laughing at our misery? God, you trickster you, waiting behind the curtain, always in the details.

*This number subject to debate.

**Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince. Read it. It's beautiful.

-Janet

In(ter)active

2010-07-25T04:21:00.001-07:00

I couldn't agree more with what Janet wrote. And, in fact, immediately after writing her last post, she suggested we not blog anymore. She said, "We both have lives to live." And she's right. Why are we doing this? We're not sure.

It does seem that the world of interactivity is more and more a life of inactivity. If we are at our computers conducting our social lives, we are by definition NOT doing other things. We are sedentary, mostly passive participants in other people's dialogs. Trying to be wittier. Trying to be "seen". Trying to drum up larger numbers of "friends." So much of it is so highschool. And we're done with that, aren't we?

The blog is a little different. It's a way of recording what we're thinking. A way of sharing something with ourselves and with others. And yet, the exigencies of "real" life always take precedence. It's hard to do this with regularity when what really interests you in life, when you get right down to it, isn't talking about life but participating in it.

I was doing a freelance project a few weeks ago for Telecom Italia. It was a new business pitch and their strategy was to encourage Italians to use the internet. Italy is, for the most part, wired with high speed connections. But usage in Italy is lower than in Slovenia, which, when we lasted checked, was a "less developed" country. Italy is 27th or 28th in the world, if I remember correctly, in internet usage. So my job was to encourage Italians to spend more time sitting at their computers. More time writing emails and blogs and comments on Facebook. My actual job was to tell them that they'd be "missing out" if they didn't stop doing all that other great stuff they were doing (like actually spending real time with real people) and start seeing what "life" is all about online. Wow. Weird. I'm simplifying a complex argument, because yes, it's possible that being online more could help some people in remote areas economically, but let's get real: how much has it improved our lives? I think it's a serious question. And probably one that has to be evaluated on a case by case, very personal basis: how can I use technology to improve my day-to-day existence? Is it improving it? Is it damaging it? How do I really want to use it?

What it has given me is the chance to keep friendships and familial bonds alive. Living overseas was a choice I made in the era of digital connectedness. If it had been fifty years before, either I would have chosen to forsake love to stay with friends and family. Or I would have chosen to give up friends and family for a chance at making my own family elsewhere. Fortunately, I was spared that dilemma.

And being here with Janet, in this weird digital space, has been a privilege and a joy. I understand why maybe we should stop. But there's a part of me that doesn't want to. I'm not trying to make friends or influence people here; I'm just trying to participate in our own little experiment. But maybe the experiment needs to yield to new experiments. Other forms of dialog.

So what are we to do? I don't know the answer. But we'll all find out soon, won't we?

But maybe there's a clue in this stupid little anecdote: after Janet wrote her last post and asked me if we should stop, I wrote her back and said, "Maybe, but there's something I want to write right away! I'm gonna do it tomorrow!" Well, tomorrow came and went, and did I post? No. I harvested lavendar. And it was, I have to admit, satisfying in a way blogging never could have been. My fingers smelled of lavendar. The house was filled with its herbal perfume. And this winter, back in Milan, I'll make sachets for our underwear drawers. Hand stitched and filled. And every time I see or smell them, I'll remember this summer. Blogging assures sweet memories too, but it will never smell so sweet. —Charlotte

Facebook v. the world

2010-07-17T17:29:00.000-07:00

Love this from today's New York Times because it's not simply timely and true, it's really fairly sad. Ben Brantley writes first about Garbo, her mystery and fascination. And then about our culture's supposed 'democracy of technology', which honestly has become more of a dictatorship, ironic even to me as I write - oh sorry, blog - this. Brantley starts below:

The world, you see, no longer has any tolerance for — let alone fascination with - people who aren’t willing to publicize themselves. Figures swathed in shadows are démodé in a culture in which the watchword is transparency.

Increasingly, the perception is that everyone is knowable, everyone is accessible and that everyone is potentially a star. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, personal Web sites with open-door chat rooms, the endlessly proliferating television reality shows are now commonplace forums for the famous who want to seem like ordinary people and for ordinary people who want to seem famous. Us magazine’s rubric “Stars, they’re just like us!” has now been inverted to “Us, we’re just like stars.”

The theory appears to be that if you never shut up, no one can forget you. And that to shut up is to withdraw from life. I was seated not long ago next to a magazine editor, discussing a former glamour girl who had disappeared to a farm in South America. “I think it’s cool she was able to go cold turkey on being a celebrity,” I said. The editor answered sadly: “Really? I see it as giving up.”

Fame has become an existential condition: If your image isn’t reflected back at you, then how do you know you’re alive? The problem is that, people being people, 24-hour visibility will ultimately breed if not contempt, then weary familiarity. That’s why the tabloids need a new generation of cover girls and boys every year or so, a breeding process facilitated by reality television. Jake, Vienna, Heidi, Spencer: blink and you’ll miss them, though you can bet they’ll keep using Twitter until they die.

A hunger abides in us to see mere mortals approaching perfection and I, for one, would just as soon not be asked to separate the dancer from the dance, or for that matter the beauty from the beauty....When we first fall in love with people, they always seem remote, unattainable. Holding on to love after you’ve crossed the divide between you and the object of your desire is a chapter in achieving maturity; it’s what marriage is supposed to be. But there’s a part of us that needs to keep falling in love with the girl in the mists in the distance or the boy riding away on a horse. You’ve been there, I’m sure, and you know what happens when these dream girls and boys open their mouths or scratch themselves. The mystery dissolves like fog at sunrise.

So to honor a nearly forgotten time when there was romance in the unspoken, and human mystery wasn’t something that could be solved by the end of a television episode, might we now have a moment of silence?

No? I didn’t think so.

-- JC

Irresistible Force, Immovable Objects

2010-06-27T16:28:00.000-07:00

What makes us fall in love?

Is it the way we see ourselves reflected in their eyes? Or the way we think they're really the grand prize?

It’s a serious question, and even now I'm still no better at telling which couple will last and who will fade away. How some love affairs can turn out so right, get better, grow onwards and upwards, and others just be disastrous.

Is it timing, desire, desperation, fate, optimism, wishful thinking, destiny, chemistry, a witches’ brew of all the above plus a bit of Oh What The Hell They’re Available thrown in? What makes me adore my husband but – as far as you know – not yours? What makes you look across a crowded room and go Ooooh and Yumm and Yowza but makes your best friend think Nahhhhh and Huhhh and You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me? I think it’s fascinating, this falling-in-love-thing, especially when it works. When the person you live with is also your best friend, best critic, greatest confidante. And the reason you’re with them isn’t because it’s too laborious to get a divorce but because they honestly present you with the best version of yourself.

Or they don’t. Like so many women Marilyn Monroe wanted to be loved not as a joke or a body or a hair color, but as a full human being. In Arthur Miller’s eyes she thought he saw the best of her, the total sum of her parts. But he saw only what he wanted to see: an angelic creature that looked up to him unashamedly, a child-bride of adoration. He wanted perfection. She wanted the warmth of a safe sanctuary. Several people told her that Miller was the coldest man they’d ever known. No woman, not even a living breathing electric light, can melt ice.

But sometimes it's not really love, is it? It's more...that the bad, the wrong, the lousy can look so damn appealing. We can change them, we know we can! Sure they're horrible to other women, but other women aren't me! We are the moths and they are the flame and we mistake that burning sensation for something more eloquent. Something eternal and gorgeous and true. But bad stays bad. And moths keep beating at the door, the firelight, wings broken, fragile and impossible to stop.

Albert Einstein (who knew he was also a genius of relationships?) said this: Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably both are disappointed.

Do we all do this, whoever we are? Is it inevitable, and is he right? - JC

2010-06-25T15:47:00.000-07:00

Ah, now this is something to be excited for. David Fincher's newest film comes out in October. The Social Network...about that social network.

First preview in July.

First poster - right here.

Look at the design - so smart, so brilliant, completely viral, elegantly alligned with both fb's look and the new iPad as well. So simple, really, but I would have never thought of it.

And the line - fantastic.

Does Facebook steal your soul? Or does it just rent it for awhile, along with your every status update, photo-op, message to the masses that one hoped was actually private? Fincher + Aaron Sorkin on our complete loss of privacy sounds like 'Seven' without the blood. Wait. There will be blood. It will just be the internal, lusting, egotastic kind. And yes, it has a Facebook page.

- Janet

In that vein...

2010-06-19T09:10:00.000-07:00

Janet, thanks so much for that. I am reminded that we live in a bigger world. That there are more voices than our own. And what a relief really.

Some time last year, NPR ran a story about how many foreign authors Americans are missing out on. The list was as follows. I've read some of these, other not. And obviously it's not a complete list by any means; just an idea of where to start scratching the tip of the iceberg. Mind blowing, really, that the world is not as flat as we tend to think. I can highly recommend The Yacoubian Building whose author is now vying, according to an Egyptian friend of mother for office in Egypt and who has the establishment quite "bothered." And nothing can beat that title: What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire." I share them with you now.

Russia

Victor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of Werewolf and Buddha's Little Finger.

Boris Akunin, The Winter Queen

Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party

Albania

Ismail Kadare, The Three-Arched Bridge and

Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (Read Excerpt)

Hungary

Imre Kertesz, Fateless, The Pathseeker (Read Excerpt).

Portugal

Antonio Lobo Antunes, What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?

Norway

Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

Egypt

Naguib Mahfouz, The Thief and the Dogs, (Read Excerpt)

Muhammad Yusuf Quayd, War in the Land of Egypt

Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building

Japan

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Mexico

Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz

Rest in Peace

2010-06-18T14:38:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest novelists in the world died today.

Jose Saramago was 87 and 'great novelist' doesn't do enough to define him. An outspoken activist who despised dictators, cruelty, and apathy in almost equal measure, he won the Nobel prize for literature in 1998. It wasn't until he was in his 50's that he begun to devote his life to fiction, and his novels are pure, gorgeous, emotional gold. 'Blindness', 'Baltasar and Blimunda', 'The Gospel According to Jesus Christ', 'The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis', 'All the Names', and my own favorite, 'The Cave', all speak not only to his deep imagination but his even deeper humanity, irony and wit. He could make you laugh and cry in the same sentence. He always, without exception, made you think. Not that long ago he delivered a much-lauded speech where he described globalization as the new totalitarianism and 'lamented contemporary democracy's failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.'

Increasing powers of multinational corporations? Yes, we see it everywhere.

There's one in particular who's taken their absolute power all the way to the bottom of the sea, and who broke the whole f'ing Gulf Coast 60 days ago. And for each one of those 60 long, lost, killing days they've been allowed to 'fix it'.

Jose Saramago must have detested this as much as I do. And I wonder if he wondered: if it were Bush in charge and this was happening, wouldn't there be more outrage? Much, much more outrage?

Rest in Peace, wonderful writer. -- Janet

Baby, Beautiful

2010-06-14T19:08:00.000-07:00

When we were in Sardinia we met the most wonderful guy. Actually, to be honest, we met a whole gaggle, or goggle, or whatever noun makes sense, of terrifically great & fun & gorgeously great people but Filippo, that's his name, he stands out. Yes there's Myla, his part-human part-Husky part-raccoon all-unforgettable dog (as if there weren't enough of those in the world). And there's the fact that he that dropped his life and his work to take us around the island and show us gorgeous things both great and small, including Mussolini's summer house and an Agritourismo that served an 11 course vegetarian dinner that felt like 102 courses in one body-numbing row. Delicious.

But what it really was is that we felt like we knew him. Had known him for years. Liked what he liked. Felt as he felt.

And that shorthand that comes into play? We all have it.

You meet someone in line at the coffee place & instantly like them.

You run into somebody at the Cuban place next to the bookstore and feel like you've known them for 15 years.

People when you least expect it who renew your faith in mankind again. And for an hour you forget that BP exists, that the war(s) go on, that not everything is peachy or keen.

So. Anyway.

Filippo, that's his name. He posted this photo on Facebook. This baby in his hand. This bundle of freaking gorgeous unbelievable who-needs-cartoons-give-me-one-I-want-to-cry fluff. If someone knows something more amazing, please, send it in. With this, I believe in miracles. Charlotte, over to you.

Ooh la la.

2010-05-27T02:06:00.000-07:00

Venus on the half court. Venus goddess of 40-Love. Venus the Olympian. Venus French-kiss Open. Ah, Venus Venus Venus. Never did tennis look so—Sting, could you strike up "Roxanne" about now?—red-light a.k.a. "Take all that white, proper, stiff upper lip, gracious tennis wear and wipe my pretty rear end with it." Yowza.

What do you suppose it's like to play against that? What do you think it measures on the richter scale of "psyching out your opponent"? And what will be next? Topless? Bottomless? The mind can only wonder. Which is, I'm sure, exactly what it's supposed to do.

Where have we been?

2010-05-25T00:17:00.000-07:00

Well, the conventional answer would be, "We've been to London to visit the Queen" or something like that. But we haven't. We've done something far more monumental. We've been to Florence to see each other.

I trained down from Milan with my two girls in tow. And Janet and Rick bussed up from Siena, taking a break in their vacation to do what we don't get to do enough: be together.

I won't go into details. Suffice it to say that four hours when you haven't seen someone in oh-nine-years-give-or-take is a phenomenally emotional ride. I kept staring at Janet thinking: Is that really you, in the flesh? Can this be?

And through the veil of years and distance I must say that Janet is more beautiful than ever. More full of heart. More gracious. More chocolatey. I could have eaten her up on the spot.

And then, before it began, it was over. And all those fragments of conversation desperate to weave over the gaping hole that an ocean and two continents have dealt us came to a final teary hug. A kiss on that softest of cheeks. Arms that want to grasp something that should never be let go of. A goodbye that musn't be a goodbye, at least not for long. (Promise?)

Yesterday, I had the good fortune of hearing Florence and the Machine's The Dog Days Are Over..."Happiness hit her like a bullet in the back"...and I thought: yes, that is exactly what it was like. A bullet. That giveth and taketh away.

Here's till the next time, Janet. Love, Me

Florence and the Machine "DOG DAYS ARE OVER" Music Video from LEGS MEDIA on Vimeo.

Art & Artificial Blondes are such Beautiful Things

2010-05-05T13:38:00.000-07:00

I paint because I am a woman.

(It's a logical necessity.)

If painting is female and insanity is a female malady, then all women painters are mad and all male painters are women.
I paint because I am an artificial blonde woman.
(Brunettes have no excuse.)
If all good painting is about color then bad painting is about having the wrong color. But bad things can be good excuses. As Sharon Stone said, “Being blonde is a great excuse. When you’re having a bad day you can say, I can’t help it, I’m just feeling very blonde today.”
I paint because I am a country girl.
(Clever, talented big-city girls don’t paint.)
I paint because I am a religious woman.
(I believe in eternity.)
Painting doesn’t freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last. Painting is a very slow art. It doesn’t travel with the speed of light. That’s why dead painters shine so bright.
It’s okay to be the second sex.
It’s okay to be second best.
- Marlene Dumas

And I write because I'm an insane woman living in the woods staring at the ocean who quite often feels like an artificial blonde & who wants so badly to believe in some kind of eternity. And a writer who now adores the painter Marlene Dumas. She makes me, for a moment at least, stop thinking about oil spills, hypocrisy, and snow falling in May. - Janet

You Write Like A Girl

2010-04-12T14:08:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I was reading about Then Came the Evening, the new first novel by Brian Hart. Most reviews compared him to Cormac McCarthy, an incredible author of spare, painfully gorgeous, textured prose. The kind of writer who forces me to stay up late, oh so late, reading and wishing I could write anything like that. But several of these 'reviews' just pissed me off. Because they were from women, all of whom commented in one way or another that Hart 'writes like a man'.

I'm sorry; he writes with his penis? With his testicles? While he's scratching his ass and farting? What the hell does this mean and why would anyone critique someone this way? It's a man's book, too tough, testosterone-fueled, too harsh, all muscle-bound, aggressive, violent, and really, really depressing. A woman would have never written this.

Really? Oh shut up.

Part of my anger at these bloggers and critics is that they're so unimaginative in their criticism. Part of it is any writer being referred to by gender or race - does Brian Hart write 'too white', too? Or too black, too Hispanic, too tall, too short, does he write as if he's part Irish or just a little too country? Part of it comes from what Oscar Wilde said over a hundred years ago: 'There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.' But then he wrote all gay-ish, so what did he know?

And the rest comes from the fact that I was labeled, early and often, as a 'woman writer'.

When what I was, I imagined prosaically, was a human being who writes.

Look, there are florid writers who are male. Depressing, dark writers who are female. It's 2010 and we still live with this idiotic distinction of how we use words?

Oh forget it.

I bought the book. It's fantastic, beautiful. Reading it along with Patti Smith, Lorrie Moore, Mary Jo Bangs, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Anne Sexton, Margaret Atwood, Anie Proulx, Alice Munro, Zadie Smith, and all those other aggressive, ball-scratching, testicle-lifting unsentimental authors. You know, the men.

-JC

Holding the Universe Together, Part II

2010-04-08T14:47:00.000-07:00

Thought for the day:

The violets in the mountain

have broken

the rocks.

- Tennessee Williams

And aren't most of us violets?

- JC

How to Breathe Underwater

2010-04-04T17:52:00.001-07:00

One of my friends is this wonderfully amazing person who seems to be able to handle any crisis well. Which is fortunate because she's going through another one in her family right now.

J. wouldn't agree that she moves through the world like grace under pressure. Like me, I think, she tends to project some strange calmness to the outside world even when her head feels like it's just been cut off. But her face, everything about her, projects this strong 'I can handle anything life throws at me' attitude and people believe it. She's so open and generous and unbelievably giving it seldom occurs to people she may be drowning. And a lifeline, a raft, may come in handy.

So I guess today would be a shout out to people to recognize when our friends are doing the dog paddle, or the breast stroke, and things are good. And then to come a little closer when you see that they're barely treading water. No one, even the most graceful among us, can forever breathe underwater. Somewhere in Bend, Oregon, I hope my good friend is safe inside an inner tube, and the water is calm.

- Janet

Losing it. Finding it.

2010-03-25T23:53:00.000-07:00

A beautiful article which needs to be shared. "Dominique Brown: Losing It," in today's NYT.

"Time hangs heavily on the unemployed soul. If I ate an egg at 8 a.m., by 9:30 I was starving. I became obsessed with eggs, gazing on their refined shape in wonder. Perfect packets of nutrients. I ate eggs all day long. When I had a job, I never thought about eggs."

Dominique Brown was the editor of that magazine we loved, House & Garden, which folded some years ago, dragging her also into the crease of its nonexistence. Her chronicle of that experience and the resulting blog SlowLoveLife.com are beautiful indeed.

I invite you to partake.

"How's the weather?" vs. Deep Thoughts

2010-03-24T01:08:00.000-07:00

Maybe you saw it, maybe you didn't. But in case you didn't, here it is again: Talk Deeply, Be Happy?

This is a recent Well blog in the New York Times about the considerable benefits of talking—really talking—about the world, problems, relationships, etc. instead of that time-worn favorite, the weather. Apparently, studies do show that people who spend more time involving themselves in substantive discussions are happier than those who spread themselves thinly over the lighter fare.

Somehow, I'm not surprised by this.

About four weeks ago I left the rather sour post on Facebook that I was thinking about "getting off." Within hours, I received a shower of responses from people I'd hardly heard from in months saying, "Awwww, but we'll miss you." And the truth of the matter is that, weirdly, I kind of felt the same way. But how could that be true?

I think there was that sense that I would miss them because—and I am speaking strictly for myself here—with every Facebook "friendship" I've invited or maintained, the motive was based on this rather romantic notion of recapturing the bond I once had with that person, or of exploring what that person represents to me from my own past. That is not superficial stuff. I think this is, in part, how we end up with friends who aren't really friends. For me the idea is not to show off an astronomical number of acquaintances, but to somehow gather up the last remaining shreds of my own personal story. Those people are like the photographs that I keep in boxes and rarely look at, but when I do look at them, I realize that I would have the hardest time throwing them away. They have a value because they represent something. Me.

The flip side is that there is rarely any meaningful discourse with these people (now, mere Snapshots of Themselves). There's just that idle chatter on the Wall which is the Opposite of what I feel and want. Can I be blunt here? I hate that stuff. I mean, I engage in it, but it wastes loads of time and I always feel empty and sad and dissatisfied.

I know the writer of the aforementioned blog, and the conductors of the study, weren't looking at Facebook as much as they were looking at spoken exchange, but I think their thesis and their findings explain why I find Facebook so dreadfully saddening. It's also why, when I want to "talk" to someone, I prefer the private-messaging feature or that dinosaur of technologies, email, which reminds me of the even more protozoan personal favorite, actual letter-writing.

But the best of all, is talking. Really talking. Which is why, I also wish, every time I am posting a blog, that we were all of us miraculously reunited over a glass of wine and an endless amount of free time to let ourselves and our recent stories unfold. What do we really think? How do we really feel? What hurts, lately? What feels good? Why? And when it was all over, we'd go home thinking how good it felt to be alive, to be really connected, and to have maybe the tiniest hint of why we are all here.

(On that note, thanks to Joselin Martin for her fabulous posts on Journey Not Destination about running, being an athlete, running with MS, and the sheer persistence most things worthwhile require. It's been a joy to read, deeply satisfying. Nothing small-talky about it.)

The Cove is Secret No More

2010-03-10T21:03:00.000-08:00

God knows I've quoted this before, but let's get it out there again:

Margaret Mead once famously said

'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people

can change the world.

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.'

See 'The Cove'.

Not just because it won an Academy Award for best documentary of the year.

But because it's intelligent, humane, important, unflinching, truthful, necessary.

And because a small group of people can change the world.

And if we're lucky, we can be some of them.

-Janet

The Oscars May Not Feel Like History

2010-03-08T10:40:00.001-08:00

But today they are.

And as much as the Academy Awards are often ridiculous and political and shame-facedly wrong ('Crash'? You've got to be joking)

a woman, yes, a woman, finally won not just Best Director, but Best Picture as well.

Some facts are in order here.

Yes, Kathryn Bigelow started out as an extremely talented artist.

Yes, she studied under Susan Sontag. As in: Susan Sontag.

Yes, she was in direct competition with her ex-husband, another kind of glorious first.

Yes, she's only the fourth woman ever nominated for Best Director in the history of the awards. Which is, yes, a weeping crying idiotic shame.

But she won.

And more importantly than that simple historic fact is this:

She and The Hurt Locker deserved it.

One small film - the lowest grossing film to win Best Picture in Oscar history - that almost went straight to DVD,

that almost wasn't distributed, that almost no one saw.

Until now.

With a woman finally holding the gold in her arms.

For the first time in years, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, I'm proud of the Academy Awards again.

- Janet

Of Earthquakes, Squashed Fingernails, and the Passage of Time

2010-03-02T01:53:00.001-08:00

I am practically numb with the news. The deceased. The buried, still to be dug out. The fight for food and water. The sense of hopelessness for Haiti. Horror for Chile. I feel for these people, deeply, and yet, even as sadness and disbelief hog the marquee of my emotions, that other side of my brain grapples with the more existential side of it. The small opening act that gets less attention in the news: What does it mean?

Maybe it doesn't mean anything. I sometimes think that assigning meaning is the task of idiots. (Case in point: Pat Robertson's assertion that the earthquake in Haiti was God's payback for that country's pact with the devil.) And maybe meaning isn't even the right word at all. Maybe what I'm looking for is a kind of sense. Or something to take away from all this. Something instructive. And what I get, while the link isn't at all linear, has something to do with time.

Human time, geologic time, light time. Time.

We tend to think in lifetimes—our own. Or, more often, in the spans of weeks and days. To Do lists. Short term plans. Before I go to bed tonight. When the kids are out of high school. Before I die. Etc. And in our minds, it's all peculiarly concrete and measurable. Familiar.

But the fact of the matter is that we exist also in completely other time frameworks.

It's likely no consolation to the humans of the planet who are suffering loss right now, that Earth is living its own time, just as we are. That it needs to stretch and shrug, grow and shrink, address that itch on its back. It's probably no consolation that fault lines are going to toss us aside every 60 or 500 or 300,000 years, and that the Earth is going to count those years according to its own needs, not our careful human calculations. It's no consolation, no, but it is true.

(We read this morning in the newspaper, that the Chile earthquake was powerful enough to shift the Earth's axis by 3" and that because of this shift, we will now enjoy an almost infinitessimally smaller amount of daylight each day. So much for human timetables. Just like that, the Universe has demonstrated that our measurements are no longer valid. Wrong, in other words. Meaningless. Next?)

And what this all does, strangely, is make me relax a little my own concept of time. I have lived much of my life in a hurry to pack in as much as possible. I have tried to control and "make happen" and reach goals. This has not always been a bad thing, and I don't intend to say "What does it matter in the big picture?" even though it seems like that is where my argument is going. What I mean to say is that there's a proper time and place for such clocks to tick loudly. And there's a time and place for them to fall silent, because they just don't measure up, nor do they serve us particularly well.

Let me explain. I've begun to think that we humans have two times, perhaps three. The times of our minds (this is the To Do list time), and the times of our bodies and our psyches. My Italian husband always said to me, "Life is long." I thought he was crazy. (Didn't he perceive, like everyone else, that life is simply too short, i.e. ticking along at a rapid clip?) But now, I am beginning to understand what he meant. Even as we rush around, some things simply take time. They take the time they take. And no amount of disciplined action-taking will change that.

Four months ago, I smashed my finger in the door of my daughters' room. Blood began to spread under the nail. It throbbed for days. Then it turned black. Then the black spot began to grow out from the cuticle. For much longer than I thought, my nail continued to grow out black. A couple weeks ago, the top layer of nail came out of the cuticle separated from the new nail growing underneath. The "black spot," which was of course, dried blood, slowly disappeared as the water with every bath, hand-washing or dish-cleaning, did its invisible, gentle job of washing it away. Now, I have this unsightly layer of fingernail which looks like a dirty piano key. Thick, yellowish. Unattached at the bottom, still attached at the top. There's nothing I can do about it, and nothing I want to do about it. It would hurt! So I leave it, and look at it. Day after day after day. We're not talking great loss here. We're talking a single fingernail. But it's teaching me a whopper of a lesson: It's going to take as long as it's going to take.

That's a finger. But then there's my heart. In 2006 my father died. This is the sort of earthquake we all suffer, and there could be no more apt geographical metaphor. The plates shifted. My grounding, which I so trusted, fell away. Nothing was solid. And here I am 4 years later, still putting things right, or trying to rebuild with lighter more flexible materials the structure of my heart. The pain is still there, but it has morphed. And it has changed me. Time is passing. It will continue to pass. It will take as long as it takes.

Marriage. (That subject again.) My marriage is a miracle to me. It has grown and evolved according to its own clock. It has a sense of time that eludes me. It seems to have a timeless faith in itself that keeps it going, even when we have run out of patience or nice things to say. Darkness, light. Another day / month / year.

We have to trust in these times. We have to surrender to them. We are in their grasp and their flow. They will confuse us, serve us well, outlive us.

And so, as I've written this, I've overcooked my lunch, unaware of the time. Geologic time is no good for steaming vegetables.

For Chile

2010-02-27T18:07:00.000-08:00

To all our friends in Chile, and to all those who have friends and family there as well, we send our hope and our sympathy and our prayers. Because, yes, prayers of any kind are needed now. - Janet

Violence and Women

2010-02-25T16:59:00.000-08:00

I'm not talking about the horrendous act of violence against women. I'm talking about the violent acts perpetrated by women that, too often, our gender (and the media) assume are infrequent. Because, unfortunately, it's not actually infrequent at all.

Awhile ago several women wrote both The New York Times and The Oregonian about how they 'simply couldn't believe' women could be suicide bombers, as the Christmas Day Pants Bomber (we need a better name don't we?) warned.

Yet they can be and they are. There have been female suicide bombers, acting as martyrs, since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. And of course before that, for at least dozens of years. We can read about them online, watch them on TV, read report after report. But perhaps we don't want to, because it screws with our idealistic view that 'If women ruled the world, there'd be no war.' Again, it's pretty to think so. But reality, well, it bites.

What is about us that wants to believe women, and girls, are incapable of horrible acts like this? Why do we want to idealize ourselves in this way? Yes women commit far less violent acts than men do: a fact. But we've always been capable of it, and quite often act on our impulses. We're human and therefore culpable of terrible things. I think accepting, and demanding, absolute equality means refusing to think we're better, greater, deeper than an entire gender. The male one.

There is a terrific article about Amy Bishop right now in the NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/arts/28bishop.html?hp. She's the neuroscientist who just killed three colleagues and injured three others in a rampage that everyone should have seen coming. To read about how she murdered her 18 year old brother in 1986, and yet served no time, is honestly chilling.

Women. We're wonderful, we're amazing, we create gorgeous art and bear children and advocate for peace and hold families together. We can do anything. We can even be Medea when we want to be. - Janet

Signs of Spring

2010-02-18T16:15:00.001-08:00

Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to.

Someone said that to me on the phone this morning, and as it's a line from one of the best holiday films of all time, I immediately agreed. Agreed even though this man works in a business where faith seems patently counter-intuitive (the stock market) and that I've had an awful lot of dumb, blind faith lately for someone who works in advertising, faith that's jumped all over me like some sadistic heavyweight boxer with a grudge.

But after all, what does common sense actually get us?

It tells us not to talk to strangers. And then we miss things like true love. Or that soul mate Charlotte spoke of.

Or some honestly terrific conversation once we discover he/she/the stranger isn't as creepy as we originally thought.

It tells us not to judge a book by it's cover. And when the cover is inordinately well-designed, that's just idiotic.

It tells us to stand in the shorter line when history tells us the shorter line is always going to get slower the moment

we join it.

It makes us surly and boring and common, common sense does, and no fun at parties.

And it tells us we can't make a difference in this world. A difference of twenty dollars to a cause we believe in. A difference of taking a working vacation and volunteering while we travel. A difference of saying no sometimes when we mean no, and yes when we believe yes, taking a chance, being who we wish to be. A difference of rescuing just one animal who desperately needs a home. Not all of them. Just one. One child, one person, one animal, one difference.

It may feel like the least we can do; sometimes it's actually the most.

I don't believe in God, not at all, not even a little. Although every time a fox hole comes up, I say the words out loud.

In case I'm wrong and somebody is listening. In case even the stars pay attention now and then.

Faith doesn't require anyone listening at all. That's pretty much the beautiful thing about it.

- Janet

Live as if you were younger.

2010-02-07T00:13:00.000-08:00

This just in from Anna H. via email: a fascinating article by the BBC about psychologist Ellen Langer and her experiments to demonstrate, if not scientifically "prove", that living and thinking younger actually reap observable physical benefits.

In 1979 she conducted an experiment in which she asked a group of elderly men to re-live, well, actually to live, as if it were still in the 1950s. They spoke about all things 50s in the present tense, imagining that they still inhabited those halcyon days of their own youth. No one cooked for them, lifted heavy luggage for them, clutched their elbows as they went up and down stairs. They were asked to take care of themselves, live for themselves, all the while imagining that they were young.

The results were astonishing. One man, by the end of the trial, abandoned his walking cane. Blood pressures dropped. Participants were judged by witnesses to look and appear younger than before. Langer even adds that such youthful thought staves of dementia.

I believe it. Never having purposefully conducted this experiment on my own, I can say that I have proven it to be true over and over again without being aware: never do I feel older than when for some crackpot reason I am actually telling myself I am old. And never do I feel younger than when I am cruising around town on my bicycle from yoga to shopping to the post office to work.

I invite you to read the article, and check out the video, whippersnapper.

(Thanks Anna.)

—Charlotte

Soulmate. Schmoulmate.

2010-02-05T00:37:00.000-08:00

Well, here I am back on the marriage bandwagon. It's a fascinating topic and one that seemingly occupies a large portion of my gray matter. But it's not really marriage I want to talk about, it's this notion fed by the media and, unfortunately often by our own best friends, that our soulmate is out there—somewhere. If we just wait long enough, look hard enough, bend ourselves into the right positions—eventually we will find, attract, and hold in an everlasting and perfect embrace "the one." The one that was meant for us.

I hate to say it, but what a bunch of crap. It simply doesn't happen like that. And expecting that it will or even should probably impedes the possibility of something much less glamorous but much more viable and fulfilling actually ever happening.

As often occurs, I've run across the topic out of the blue in two very different media sources just this week. The first time was in an Italian psychological monthly. The second was in the book, Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat Pray Love), which I can easily, even happily, recommend. Both recount as a departure point the mythic allegory presented by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium. He tells us that "humans originally consisted of four arms, four legs, and a single head made of two faces, but Zeus feared their power and split them all in half, condemning them to spend their lives searching for the other half to complete them." (Wikipedia, "Soulmate.") Thus, here we are today, many of us, in perpetual search of the Mr. Right who just happens to be looking for us, Ms. Right. Hmmm. When you put it like that, it just doesn't seem like such an intelligent way to spend your time does it?

In Committed, Gilbert conducts fairly exhaustive, though admittedly purely personal and non-academic, research into the the marriage rites, rituals and raisons d'etre of many (often far flung) cultures. Places where being man are wife are more or less job descriptions. Places where marriages are conducted by arrangement. Places where divorce is all but unheard of. Places where the notion of your husband being Mr. Right is laughed right out of the grass hut...because it's just such an inconceivably inconceivable notion. (Do you think maybe if they'd read Plato's Symposium they wouldn't laugh so much?)

The funny part is this: no one disputes that your spouse or life partner can become your soul mate, in a sense. What's disputable is the notion that a couple can instantly click without the benefit of: maturation, sticking together, living and working side by side, tolerating each other's faults, being honest about their own, hurting each other, misunderstanding each other, irritating each other, etc. And I'm sorry, but the part where the other person "completes" you will forever and always remain a myth to be brutally debunked. Our task in life is to complete ourselves.

And so, it is with a heavy heart, that I say that there are women I love and respect and about whom I care deeply who continue, despite their intelligence and their talent and their otherwise brilliant insights, to look for the one headed, two-armed, two-legged creature that completes them and their soul. It is painful, really, to witness. If they could just visit the right country, go to the right cocktail party at the right time, go to the right book-signing of the right debonair writer, be in the right vegetable aisle at the right organic grocery store at the right hour of the right man's day...

Right.

I don't want to bruise their already bruisy hearts, but I want to tell them as lovingly as possible to stop. Not stop as in give up hoping for love. But stop as in stop looking for that kind of love. I want to tell them to shut their minds to the soul mate and open their hearts to the flesh-and-blood guy who's likely right in front of them. Right there. The one buying non-organic white bread. (Ick, bad choice of bread...but maybe he just needs someone to gently set him straight...or not...for the rest of his loving life.) See what I mean?

—Charlotte

With Love and Squalor

2010-02-01T22:27:00.000-08:00

Because perfect sentences are a kind of prayer, I offer these of Salinger's:

She was sixteen, and beautiful in an immediate yet perfectly slow way. She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence. Her hands were very pale brown, with slender, actionless fingers. When she sat down, she did the only sensible thing with her beautiful hands there was to be done: she placed them on her lap and left them there. In brief, she was probably the first appreciable thing of beauty I had seen that struck me as wholly legitimate.

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

I don't really feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.

And I have one.

-- Janet

Sad Day.

2010-01-29T05:30:00.000-08:00

Of course it had to happen. And maybe he's glad it did. But it still makes me sad. Very. Like another one of the necessary voices is gone. (How many can we afford to lose?) As the obit says (NYT, "J.D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91"), paraphrasing Janet Malcolm's article for the New York Review of Books, "That the Glasses (and, by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point...and it said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there."

It feels like another goddam perfect day for bananafish.

I Feel Bad About My Neck, Eyes, Cheeks,Knees, Etc.

2010-01-23T11:25:00.000-08:00

Ever have one of those days when you wake up and look in the mirror and think, oh, man, I'm beautiful? Me neither.

Sometimes the right lighting might trick me into thinking that yes, I really do have but one chin, but then that lighting fades or someone turns it off and reality slaps me back into shape. Wait, 'shape', that's the wrong word. Just slaps, that's all.

A few years ago I suddenly realized my face was a souffle, and it had fallen. Someone carefully took me out of the oven and then banged the door shut - cooks, you know the sad result. And as I pushed my souffle-face back into a resemblance of self I thought Well, what now? Injections? Plastic? Prayer? Needles and novacaine or whatever they use? All the above? Charlotte and I have talked about this through the years and we constantly come up with this: We're not against it, not at all. We applaud it, especially when its admitted. We just, well, I don't know. We still love Georgia O'Keefe and Virginia Woolf. I didn't want Bette Davis eyes but I had them by 28, maybe earlier. Was I supposed to fix them then? If so then youth really is wasted on the young.

We, Charlotte and I, maybe we're crazy. We still think our wrinkles do not define us. We know that age can't really be erased. Some days I feel 68. Somedays I feel 25. Somedays, I get so brave there is no number attached. And those, without a doubt, are the best days of all.

Let's give. The other kind of love.

2010-01-17T05:31:00.001-08:00

Leaping from romantic love to love of mankind...

Blogging, particularly about personal observations / feelings / thoughts, seems horribly self-indulgent these days. There just seems to be one thing out there that is urgent enough to actually say: Let's try to help the Haitians, and let's pray that the people that are actually attempting to distribute our help, can soon figure out how to do it given the chaos on the ground. Here are some ways to contribute:

American Red Cross

Beyond Borders

CARE

Catholic Relief Services

Clinton Foundation

Clinton Bush Haiti Fund

A more complete list is on the MSNBC site.

—Charlotte

Semper fidelis: The couples of Elliott Erwitt

2010-01-12T23:11:00.000-08:00

I could go on and on and on and on. But somehow I think I won't. Suffice it to say, that in my marriage, all of those wonderful abstracts (safety, intimacy, respect) ebb and flow...but with a predictable tendency to return, and boy and when they do! We're not always even nice to each other...but that's us. We're still maturing, what can I say?

But the main reason, I am at a loss for words, is that Janet's last post featured one of my favorite images of all time, by one of my favorite photographers. And when pictures tell stories, it's often time to be quiet and just look. Elliott Erwitt faithfully (and I say that because of the constant heart with which he confronts the world through the lens) photographed a lot of couples in a lot of situations, and somehow always seemed to look at them with a hopeful, benevolent eye. They are not necessarily faithful to each other, but he was always faithful to them. I attach three of them here in what I consider a sort of Timeline of Love for further study. No further comment. —Charlotte

Marriage and Infidels: Part III

2010-01-11T20:02:00.001-08:00

So a good marriage is what? I love how Charlotte said it was a metamorphosis, that her husband has changed before her eyes and she before his. And that she's glad she witnessed those changes; honored, even. And there's a chance she nourished that evolution. Allowed and enabled him to be the man he is now. Maybe they fertilized each other (is that too farm-y a word? Look, I live in Oregon) and without the other a quite different metamorphosis would have taken place. Something not quite as beautiful. And maybe the best way to stay married is to stay. If it's good, that is. If it's right. If it's real. But ah, there's that rub again.

None of us wants a marriage that's just X marks on a calendar, a prison term of required days. It's not a trap we absentmindedly stepped into. Most of us weren't actually forced into someone's devious clutches, were we? Even at the Little Chapel of Love in Vegas, we're usually somewhat awake. Whoever we were we stood up before God or Man or someone wearing something formal, we said some words we thought we meant, we made our girl friends wear dresses they didn't want to wear (taffeta, bows, knee length, emerald green) we paid for champagne or beer or cheap wine, we cried and ate cake and made people give us presents, lots of them, and again nobody forced us into this. In sickness and in health. To love and to cherish. I take you, whoever you are. Some of us made mistakes. Some of those mistakes turn out miraculously wonderful. Some don't.

Right now I'm sitting in a hotel in Santa Monica, working on a job away from home for three weeks, and I miss my husband already and I just got here. Reader, how sick is that. He is, absolutely and unequivocally, my best friend. We actually like each other. We actually love each other. There are still mysteries here, and we've been together for 19 years - what? 19? Who knew? And as I sit here almost watching 'Revolutionary Road' (a film you don't have to watch because you can literally hear it a hundred miles away) and its portrayal of a marriage I wouldn't want in ten thousand years, some thoughts on a good marriage come to mind. See if you agree:

Respect. Respecting each other's uniqueness, the way he's not you and you're not him, instead of vainly forcing the other into your mold of...'be this, be this dream in my head.'

Intimacy. The ability, and not just the wish, to reveal thoughts and ideas and truths you never thought you'd reveal to anyone. Having them caught, understood, acknowledged. Not laughed at. Not thrown back in your face during a fight. Not reduced or ridiculed.

Safety. Knowing that if you blow a gasket, or he blows his, no one will just walk out the door. Safety enough to hold you both when things go bad, money fades, jobs are lost, wrinkles grow, changes come.

Honesty. The ability to say 'Yes that does make your ass look fat' and 'I do kind of wish your ass wasn't so fat, but I love you anyway.' The ability to want to be better to the person you're spending your life with instead of worse. The way you don't take each other for granted all the time, because you know, eventually, time ends.

Wanting them in a way you still don't want another. Letting that want be heard, and met.

Gentleness. A great word.

Remembering the vow you took and knowing this was a choice you made, a choice all your own. He's not a pair of boots you can just return on a whim. She's not a chore you must endure. And if you made the wrong choice, then confess already. Work on it or change it, have the courage of your convictions, have some convictions at least. Not every marriage will work or last or go on for decades. Some, like cars and blind dates, run only for so long. So does that mean they're a failure? Or just ended on their due date?

And so back the to adultery/infidelity/infidel question: seriously, can you be unfaithful and still have a good marriage? If both sides know about it, no secrets, no lies, then I say yes. And good for you. But if it's a lie and something you do behind the other's back, then no. One of you has a marriage and the other has...convenience. One has a smorgasbord, an all-you-can-eat-buffet. And the other is on a lousy diet. Infidel, infidelity. Yes perhaps they are the same thing. - Janet

I second that emotion.

2010-01-10T00:27:00.000-08:00

Yep, yep, yep. Janet, you said it. Significant things are harder. And you said it exactly when I needed to hear it. Not that I was packing my bags and walking out the door, or even looking at younger men, I was just having one of those ho hum moments (which usually lasts about a week) in which I think: "So, this is it."

And that's part of the difficulty of monogamy too, really. Not a fight. Nothing big and shaky and earthquaky like a wild, woolly extramarital affair. But the "dark matter" of conjugal reality. That much-of-the-time stuff that binds you together and becomes, inevitably, kind of "so-what." A bit boring. Or, no, just a bit quotidian. The slogging through difficulty which doesn't ever seem to abate. Financial pressure. The other's way of dealing with the things that bug them, which in turn, bugs you. That stuff. The habits that never change. All the things that inspired my Mom to say that the best way to stay married was to live in houses next door to each other. But she got divorced.

I think it's more what Janet was saying. Sometimes the best way to stay married is to stay. Because the moment-that-lasts-a-week passes, the dark matter leads to a bright shiny star, and you see beside you the person you married, except somehow new and improved, because they stayed with you too. That's always the thing that amazes me. As hard as it sometimes is to stay with him, look everyone! he has stayed with me! And we love each other. A lot. More now than before.

And then there's this. As much as marriage may seem a stale affair, it's a growing, shifting beast more comfortable with geologic time then the minutes we count day to day. People do change and grow and experiment within its hold. You don't see it while it's happening, but sometimes you glimpse the results-in-progress, and it's very exciting. The man I married is not the man I'm married to now. But the one I'm with now is better than the one I chose, and he made that metamorphosis in front of my eyes. I feel honored to have witnessed it. I hope he's being gratified by similar changes in me.

NOTE: I have to add this. I don't think that in all cases staying married is the right thing to do. Nor do I think that all marriages are saved by "sticking with them." Nor do I mean to slam people whose marriages failed for serious reasons.

Infidelity v. Monogamy: A Love Story

2010-01-08T11:30:00.000-08:00

Is ‘infidel’ the root of infidelity? I look at that word sitting there in all its faithless glory and wonder. And when opportunity knocks (a glance across a crowded room, the friend in the next cubicle you’ve always kind of had a crush on, two mouths meeting at a party, both imbibed and uninhibited, the handsome man in Fiction Aisle B at the neighborhood bookstore let’s say) do you really have to open the door?

Some people can be unfaithful again and again with a kind of weird reckless abandon, and still think it doesn’t ‘affect’ their relationship, although these same people seldom rush home and shout ‘I just slept with someone and it wasn’t you!’ so I suppose I can see their point; what your other half doesn’t know doesn’t hurt them. Or something like that.) Some people are categorically unfaithful yet think their spouse would never, ever be the same way towards them, which seems like wishful thinking at the very least. An in-elegant lie. Or a profound failure of imagination.

And then there are others who wouldn’t be unfaithful with their bodies no matter what. Their minds, maybe. Their dreams, sure. But not unfaithful in the way our culture defines it, no matter how many years pile up. No matter how difficult and rocky a relationship can be. No matter how it’s the honest truth that no one person can salve all your wounds, answer all your needs, fill the hole in your soul, be impossibly perfect and unremittingly fantastic always and forever, come what may. But I’ll throw something out there and say that that’s what friends are for. That’s what all our great intimacies are for, the friends and non-lovers who are there for us of both genders and nod, listen, agree, disagree, shake us up, think we’re crazy or mad and share their madness with us. Because the reality is – and Charlotte and I talk about this all the time – every relationship is a changing thing. Sometimes easy, sometimes unbearable, sometimes marvelous, sometimes weepily lousily awful, sometimes a little miraculous. Show me one that isn’t and I’ll show you one that it isn’t a relationship at all.

Living under the same roof with anyone (dogs, cats, birds not included) - spouse or friend, lover or family, child or partner – is difficult enough to make the poets bitch about it for centuries. And every time I think I’ve got life licked – the job or the kids, the marriage or the expectations, the friendships or the extended family – I realize again that all of this is a moving river. Some days it’s so smooth and glassy you just drift. Other times so tumultuous you'll certainly drown. It dries up till you’re walking on rocks. It brings storms. It turns beautiful. But it’s constant only in that it’s ceaseless; it's never rational nor logical and there is no GPS system so stop looking for it. At 14 you really want to believe in perfect endings and glass slippers and Nancy Meyers movies, but if you still believe in them at 26 or 38 or 44 or 51, then woe is you. Or actually: Whoa.

So anyway, fidelity. An article in the NY Times showed that for men who cheat, opportunity is far and away the number one factor. If the opportunity is there, no matter what she looks like, no matter how easy or hard or for how long, they (the ones inclined to wander) will take it. For women who stray, it wasn’t opportunity at all but the chance to feel more attractive, more appreciated or desired. But it made me wonder. These women are, by and large, with men who only see them as opportunity. Would they feel dejected by the truth? Or would it not matter at all? Does infidelity stop the river for awhile? Does it teach you how to swim, or at least hold your breath? It can be so easy to be unfaithful. Anyone can do it. Opportunity knocks everywhere you go. And being faithful to one person month after month, year after year, can be difficult sometimes, I suppose. But significant things usually are harder, aren't they? They mean more because they matter. And isn’t that the point? I mean really, isn’t that the point? - Janet

Peri-menopause on a sesame seed bun.

2010-01-03T02:29:00.000-08:00

Hearts do not know they're wrong

2009-12-30T12:25:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I wish we'd had the fortitude of other heterosexual couples, and simply refused to get married until everyone could marry. Everyone. Such a simple word isn't it? Such a basic thought. And to think that in 2010 this simple, basic, human right will still be denied to millions is insane. Immoral. Criminal. A sin in itself.

So for all those who try and succeed in making love a crime, a thought by Tennessee Williams, not that they'd know his name, or read his words:

What is straight?

A line can be straight,

or a street,

but the human heart,

oh,

no,

it's curved

like a road

through

mountains.

Here's to curves of every kind.

- Janet

Person of the Year

2009-12-28T15:55:00.000-08:00

It's not the best film of the year. It's not the most brilliantly made or the most expertly crafted. It's didn't grab the headlines and for some reason - maybe fear, maybe bigotry, maybe thinking entertainment would not rightfully ensue - people stayed away. But the character of the year, the girl of the year, is Precious, as embodied by Gabourey Sidibe. She doesn't just rise, she conquers. She repels stereotypes. She refuses to fall into categories such as frail or wounded, naive or simple. She fights back with both dignity and generous intelligence. She is compassionate although compassion has never held her hand. She refuses to let her pain stand in for character, or let viciousness and cruelty inform her. She is never petty. She stands up. She stands out. She's beautiful.

And when she looks in the mirror and sees the image she wishes were reflected there - a perfectly happy, perfectly beautiful white girl with long flowing blonde hair - I really wanted to cry. But I didn't. I just kind of held my breath at the truth of it. How many of us saw, and still long to see, beautiful flawless blondes staring back at us? I wonder - what do beautiful flawless blondes see when they gaze into the mirror? Do they see the perfection? Do they ever realize it's there? Who we should all be lucky enough to see is Gabourey Sidibe as Precious. My personal nominee as human being of the year. - Janet

The Revolution will not be televised.

2009-12-20T22:56:00.000-08:00

Janet's last post about Tiger Woods and the unbalanced news approach to the lives of athletes was wide and deep and full of stuff to respond to. In fact, I carried comments around in my head for weeks, never somehow finding the time to commit them to digital paper.

One of the things I wanted to share was a brilliant article by Malcolm Gladwell (October 19) from the New Yorker, "Offensive Play: How Different Are Dog Fighting and Football" which dives deep into the offensive, violent habits of Michael Vick but also into the possibly (if we take a long hard look) equally questionable nature of our nation's favorite sport, of which Vick himself is a participant. I urge you to read it. It seems that violence is all around us, and dogs are not the only victims, nor are the fans of dogfighting the only ones passionate about injury and permanent damage.

But, there's more. On the subject of Tiger Woods. It is true that our obsession with his private life is completely misplaced and, well, stupid. It is also true that our love of seeing our idols fall so far is ridiculous. But the fact is this: He was never the perfect man we made him out to be (or he made himself out to be, or his image-handlers made him out to be, or his sponsors made him out to be, or Accenture made him out to be) in the first place. He was, largely, a construct. A shimmering, mirage-like image built on top of true athletic skill.

The media helped create the myth. Now the media is helping to pull the myth to pieces. And nowhere in there (or at least not to a great enough extent) are we looking at the true story. Tiger isn't the issue. The media is the issue.

A free, intelligent, educated, analytical media is the heartbeat of a thriving democracy. Ours has turned into a numbing drug that is as numbed by its own stupidity as the people who are sadly subject to its output. A media that supports myths and image-making isn't doing any of us any good.

On this subject, nothing better than Frank Rich's last rant on the NYT: "Tiger Woods, Person of the Year." Reading it, I had one sad thought. Right when our country truly needs something revolutionary to happen, right when the power needs to be wrested from the hands of those who would abuse it only to rake in useless wealth at the expense of millions of others, right then...there will be no revolution and it will not be televised. Because the very media that could help bring it about (bloodlessly, one would hope, if such a thing is possible), is too involved in the lie-making to let the rest of us know what we need to wake-up and face.

This has been written in a rush, without the benefit of proof-reading. Please excuse.—Charlotte

The Private Lives of Tiger Woods and Michael Vick

2009-12-04T13:22:00.000-08:00

Tiger Woods is not responsible for our morality, our hopes, our dreams, our better natures or our better angels. Tiger Woods is only responsible for his own.

What have we become when, ad nauseam, our airwaves scream about every move, rumor, innuendo, joke, cocktail waitress who may or may not have blah blah -- we're a nation of Rupert Murdochs. What does it say about the women who are selling their 'stories' of maybe/supposedly/ who knows/who cares/hooking up with him? He's not a criminal. There was no felony, no one died; why must we continually go through bread and circuses for national amusement? We want to make him a joke, a scandal, destroy his privacy because then we bring him down to size. There is, however, one athlete who does deserve to have his private life made public. And that is Michael Vick.

Vick is an athlete who's also a federal felon. When he went to prison fans cried out across the country: it would destroy his playing ability; he'd lose millions in endorsements and bonuses; his life would be forever ruined; were his crimes really all that bad? All lies. A court order said he can keep his $16.25 million in bonuses, even though the Falcons proved he used his contract to finance dogfighting. He now plays for the Philadelphia Eagles, with an option of 5.2 million more. Nike endorses him once again. Because of a plea agreement, he spent only 18 months in prison instead of the five years a non-celebrity would have meted. This for a crime that wasn't merely illegal, but unspeakably immoral, killing and torturing countless dogs and cats (pets, even his own, were used as bait).

Several weeks ago we pulled into a rest stop in Oregon. I noticed a dog wandering around unleashed and went to see if he had a tag. His name was Mickey something. Then I noticed his back was covered in scars. Thick, intersecting, two or three dozen railway tracks, a subway map of pain. Ears filled with holes. Scars lined his face, around his eyes, the back of his head, neck. He was well fed, clean, obviously a pit bull mix. Just then a male voice said 'Hi, can I help you?' His owner was scruffy, tattooed, a biker. Mickey ran over and jumped up and kissed him on the lips. The man said 'Three months ago he wouldn't have done this. He hid from everyone, shaking. Slept under the bed. Cried. He was a Michael Vick dog and I drove to Best Friends in Utah to get him. They called him 'Mickey Six' because he was six days away from being put down.' He then proceeded to tell me why. 'He'd been shot twice - there were still a bullet in his head here, and a bullet in his side, here. He had been ripped apart so many times they had to graft new skin here, here, and here. He'd been beaten so severely his legs and back were broken in several places. And in order to get him to fight, they'd stick electrodes in his ears and shock him. You know, get him frenzied. They did that to all the dogs. He still has seizures.' So. Let's see. Michael Vick has 'paid his debt to society' and we don't talk about him anymore. Tiger Woods admits he's imperfect and we crucify him. Why is sex in this country always more appalling than death? - Janet

La Donna Mascherata

2009-11-26T02:18:00.000-08:00

This image has been posted all around Milan for the past weeks to promote M.I.N.T., an international show dedicated to both modern art and antiquities. Thus the metaphor of the older woman with the mask of the younger woman's face.

Never mind the fact that its purpose was clearly spelled out; it might as well have read: "Charlotte Moore. This is (for) you." Because every time I saw it—and I saw it everywhere—I felt like I was looking at a public unveiling of my own current psychological make-up. It perfectly illustrates the way I see myself, except that at times, the face and the mask are in reverse relationship.

It's like this: some days, I'm young inside (so young, so ten-years-old, so willing to dance naked, high kick, act silly just because it'll feel good) yet the face that I see in mirrors betrays me. Other days, my face has the miraculously youthful glow of a time traveler in reverse, but my heart and mind feel the weight of years. Things are hard in this "sandwich" time of life; truths come a-knocking that we were—once upon a time—mirthfully oblivious to. I don't think I'm old; I'm not. But I am getting older, and it's a bizarrely complicated dance. Things aren't in sync. The face says one thing. The mind behind it says something else. And then they get all tricky and trade places. Things aren't linear and orderly; they are liquid and inconsistent, and as Janet once wrote in her greatest (in my opinion) unproduced script of all time, messy. Life is messy.

I don't even know how to get dressed in the morning sometimes, because I don't know what me I'm going to be that day. What will I project? Anything? What will I try to convince the world? Will I be able to pull it off? What will be comfortable? What do I really feel like having against my ever more ornery skin? Who, exactly, am I these days?

When Janet and I were preparing to write RIPE, we conducted some informal research among our friends and I remember very clearly one of the respondents saying that she felt that people judged her based on her appearance and that it was horrifically unfair, because inside—inside—she was someone else. I know what she meant. At a certain stage in my life, I too was probably guilty of looking at older women and either making assumptions about them or sort of erasing them from my field of vision. I didn't dislike them or find them bothersome, I just wasn't interested. Now I study them all every chance I get, trying to find where the mask starts and stops, and who the woman really is. And I've noticed that these very same women look at me, and there is in their eyes a kindness I never would have expected. A complicity. They know about the mask-thing too. And they know about the layers, and about the difficulty of really being seen for who you are.

The M.I.N.T. show ended yesterday. But the streets are still full of masked women. It's just that now we are not in photographs. We are just our selves populating this city that sometimes sees us, but most often does not.

The Other Other

2009-11-23T16:43:00.000-08:00

There are about nine books waiting for me in the living room. And two or three more shoved back behind the couch in the TV room, either because I think I'm hurting their feelings by ignoring them or looking at them reminds me what an idiot I am for doing that ignoring. It's hard to say. Our friend Jody owns one of the best bookstores (CLoud & Leaf, Manzanita, Oregon) in the country; seriously, the most perfect little enclave filled with the most beautiful books you never knew existed or had forgotten about when your brain stopped storing the good stuff and got filled with the banal, the sticky, the flagrantly ordinary, the blah. For the last few months I've barely been able to read more than ten or twelve pages at a time in a book I'm dying to read. So there's been poetry. Short (short) stories. The New Yorker, thank god. Ruth Reichl's last will and testament—kidding, sort of. But my books...they wait and wait. What's wrong with me? What's with the concentration lag? One of my favorite writers in the world is Colum McCann. And he just won the National Book Award for Fiction 2009 for his new novel (residing behind my couch) Let the Great World Spin. Readers, get it. He's a beautiful, gifted, extraordinary writer and the first Irish-born winner of the NBA. Here's his quote about the stories we read:

'Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is "to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right." This is the function of books—we learn how to live even if we weren't there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.'

We become the other, as Charlotte said once about traveling. The one we never dreamed we could be. Beautiful. - Janet

The Year After Year of Magical Thinking

2009-11-11T15:07:00.000-08:00

Maybe we are the stories we tell.

The ones passed down and left behind, the sayings we repeat without realizing we heard them on a daily basis (Be careful! My land! Hogs and kisses. Hello baby girl). We’re those small maybe enormous truths our parents and grandparents left to us in every story or joke or recipe. Like the little truth that when I make cheesecake it's always my grandmother's cheesecake, the only cheesecake in our family, holiday after holiday my entire life. There may be better cheesecakes out there (I sincerely doubt it, I've won bake-offs with this baby) but who cares: this is ingrained, it's family, it's personal, that's it. We're all of us wrapped up in our emotional DNA, born into our families or adopted, doesn't matter.

We’re the box with our mother’s wedding dress still in it, the one we opened up breathlessly when we first discovered it in the closet. We’re the photo where the bride and groom feed each other wedding cake. The lessons of the plums or the garden. The embroidery on the Christmas table runner set out just so every December, the menorah given from father to only daughter, the mementos that represent something almost lost to us but not quite, not yet. Every Thanksgiving a small part of my parents arrive at the table along with everyone else, even though physically they can’t be here. I hear my father’s voice whenever we pour wine, feel my mother whenever I make sweet potatoes, listen to conversations in my head that haven’t existed in a while, repeat, replay, pause. I’m the stories they gave me, their morality and their lessons, their gift for gab, their music, their laughter or swearing, their silences, too.

But we’re all another set of stories as well, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

We’re the magical thinking we tell ourselves. We’re the parts that aren’t rational at all, the superstitions, the fallacies we like to pretend are real.

We say there’s a reason for everything. That things will get better, they just have to. That if you believe it, hope for it, pray for it, it – whatever it is - will come true. We tell our single friends that love is just around the corner, and if they give up looking then Voila, there it will be. That good will triumph over bad, why wouldn't it, of course it will. We pour salt and stay away from ladders, we speak to stars and blow out candles, we hope and believe and believe and hope again because, honestly, some spark may touch coincidence and ignite. The raw truth that our friends have been around 13,146 corners in the last few years doesn’t matter; it just hasn’t been the right corner. Or the right time. Or they haven’t believed quite deeply enough. Count to three. Don't step on a crack. Hold your breath. Believe.

And it’s all, isn’t it, magic? Of course it is.

An invisible face in the sky or some enormous and all-presiding benevolent being looking down at us, protecting us; incantation, recitation, a magic word, a lottery number, blue sky, glass slippers, the world making sense, life giving never taking. Some people think they can't exist without magic. Some wouldn't have it any other way, take huge comfort, but I don't. I do it when I do it almost automatically, the way human beings have done it for thousands of years. And I know better. Yet there it goes, foxhole or not, and I wish I didn't. Or I wish it changed things. Or I wished...whatever. There it goes, that wishing thing again.

We want fiction in our real lives; we want reality TV instead of reality life. But why? Why is real life, our own, the ones lived by us and passed down to us, not good enough? They have enough magic in them already, don't they? At least isn't it pretty to think so? -- Janet

Va Va Va Voom

2009-11-10T13:24:00.000-08:00

Joan and Peggy.

I love them both. You can take Betty Draper and leave her in Reno till 1982 for all I care. But Joan and Peggy, they're the heart of Mad Men. They're the depth that Betty, as hard and cold as unbreakable ice, wishes she could somehow conjure up.

When I look in the mirror or read my bio it's Peggy I see, no doubt about it. But what a sigh that leaves. It's Joanie who has my heart.

She's glorious.

She gets everything, everyone, without saying a word.

She's utterly brilliant and utterly overlooked because she's so brazenly and unapologetically Va-Va-Va-Voom, like Marilyn co-joined with Liz Taylor, and so what if it's 1963, nothing's changed. We still equate beauty with stupidity. We still grade on a vicious curve, your IQ dropping with every B, C, DD cup.

So it was a little sublime Sunday night, Mad Men finale, when Joan and Peggy got a bit of what they deserve.

Has the word 'No' as uttered by Peggy ever been so long in coming?

Has a refusal to acquiesce ever felt so morally assured?

And when Joan finally came striding into the room head high and heels on - has any entrance been so welcome? We all she was coming. We knew Sterling Cooper etc. etc. couldn't function without her. The difference is now she knew as well. She holds the power not in her hips but in her hands, her head.

What I love about these characters isn't that they're women, isn't that they work in a fictional ad agency, but that they're women as compelling, complex, and utterly individual as any man on TV. Two entities who haven't much in common besides gender, and besides this: they've both been taken for granted their entire lives, their entire careers. Not simply by the men who employ them and romance them, but by the women around them. Their families. Society. And most egregiously, by themselves. I laughed out loud when Joanie smashed that vase against her husband's head as if she were christening a ship. The SSS Good Doctor.

Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. It's a start. But why not Olson + Holloway instead?

Home Sweet...Home

2009-11-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

We just got home. And when it isn't raining it looks like both these photos: the ones who missed us. The place we always miss.

So, as some people ask all the time, why go away at all?

We go away to get lost. To be anonymous on streets on beaches and in other people's lives. We go away, some of us who travel, to get out from under our own skin, our own expectations, the day to day and the week by week. We want to experience something we don't know is coming, and to be allowed to see it unashamed through open eyes. Taste something, smell it and walk through it and get and hear it, because it doesn't exist otherwise. No book, no photo, no friend's description or memory can really do it for you. I want to know what's out there. I want to know that things aren't how I thought or are terrible or gorgeous as long as they're true. And being there, I'm sorry, but it's the only way. Otherwise it's an illusionary world and a virtual one and who's not completely fed up with that?

Although, that's not always it. Is it?

We met some Canadians and Americans who traveled thousands of miles to end up comfortable and secluded and pampered: barely leaving their hotels, never saying 'hello' or 'please' in Spanish, eating at one winery and drinking at another and then returning to the spa they called home. I'm not putting them down; wait, yes I am. I'm putting them in a corner many of us just don't want to belong to. Why does anyone get on a plane to fly to a different country only to tell that country to get out of the way and leave them alone?

Why leave at all if you never venture out the door?

Chile and Argentina for three weeks. Not exactly what I had anticipated or dreamed of and for that, I'm grateful. It was beautiful, difficult, emotional, striking, enriching, intriguing, never dull, never complacent, varied and rich and breathtaking and sad and lovely in almost equal measure. We met some wonderful people. We saw some incredible, truly spectacular sites. We fed some sad and heartbreakingly lonely street dogs. We were almost annihilated by a car going 90 or so passing us on the left and almost killed a guy riding a bike the wrong way down a Santa Cruz street at night. We loved most of it. We hated some of it. As our friend Jesse said it wasn't a vacation it was just 'more life.' And then we come home because unfortunately we're only travelers, only visitors, in the simple sense of that word. We go for a little and come back again. Hopefully we don't leave too much ugliness or trash when we do; hopefully we learn something; hopefully somebody understood us, even just a little. We love to leave and we love to return. Elvis Costello said Home is anywhere you hang your head. We try to hang ours here, mostly. And raise it everywhere else as often as humanly possible.

Another one about time

2009-11-02T23:57:00.001-08:00

Philip Roth Jokes About Aging from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.

This morning.

2009-10-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

I met a charming 85-year old woman this morning whose biking path intersected my own trajectory home. She stopped pedaling, called to me, gestured just under her left rib, and said, "Excuse me, ma'am, but your heart—it's not over here, is it?"

I assured her that it was not.

She said, "That's good, because I have a terrible pain here, and I'm not ready to go yet." She did not seem in any pain; I suggested it was a cramp.

She went on, "I need three or four more years."

I said, "At least!"

She corrected me quickly: "No! No! Not at least! Just three or four. I have some things I need to get done. Three would be perfect; four might be too many. I have a dental bridge that's driving me nuts. No, no, four is too many. I considered making a deal with the devil, but he was unavailable. Too busy making people tell lies. Am I right? or does everyone tell lies nowadays? Lies, lies, lies. I put 1500 euros in the bank last year, and when I wanted to take it out this year, they made me pay them 5 euros to have it. That's a sort of lie, is it not? Can you believe it? Paying to have your own money!"

I told her she inspired me. It sounded a little lame, but I really meant it.

"Inspired? What does that mean?" I thought maybe I'd used the wrong word in Italian.

"No, no. It's the right word. I know what you mean...you mean, that I've given you the strength to go on, sort of. But don't let it be so. Listen, it's very simple. Just keep working. Works keep you alive, am I right? If you don't work, you sit on a bench and die. No, no. Work, work. Well, I must be off...just three more years, that's all I need..." and with that, this beautiful woman jumped on her bike and rode off.

Here's to the Other.

2009-10-25T00:25:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about Janet a lot lately. She's in South America. As I write, I'm not sure where. Maybe Argentina. Maybe Uruguay. I'm wondering what the weather's like and what she's seeing and how she's probably doing her gracious best to make herself understood in Spanish. Janet's like that. She's most definitely not the kind of American tourist to shout more loudly and slowly in English in the certainty that eventually that foreigner (in whose country she's standing) will understand.

Every year, maybe once, maybe twice, Rick and Janet go some place far away. They venture away from the comfort and sameness of home to seek out something different. Because they want to. Because ironically, it feels good. I think Janet would feel less comfortable, in fact, if they didn't do it. Because she knows, we all know, that despite what we think and tend to feel: it is different out there. Really different. And if you take any one of us and plop us down — voilà! — in a different cultural and geopolitical context, it is we who are different. In the bat of an eye, the crossing of a border, the uncomfortable minute stationed in front of the airport immigration officer, we become that frightening thing—the other.

I've lived in Italy for 11 years now (a number I can hardly believe, and which is certain to grow), and even as I become more integrated into the life here, I feel increasingly "other." I'm not sure why this is. I think it has to do with the surprising and undeniable depth of our cultural roots and also with the fact that human "time" is different than we think it is. We tend to talk about time flying, and yet in human, psychological terms, time can move quite slowly indeed. My eleven years in a foreign country are nothing. They're just the beginning of going deeper into this particular experiment. And, as time passes, I have that much more time to realize how different I really am.

The result is that I feel "at home" often with other people who are "different" too. I have something very important in common with our part-time Philippine house-keeper/nanny that I do not have in common with my own Italian husband. In this context, we are both foreigners. Her name is Pamela, and we love her, and she has most definitely lived through hardships that have never brushed up against my comparatively serene existence. But we both know what it's like to be the other in this intensely Milanese context. She knows distance. She knows separation. She knows having difficulty being understood. She knows bureaucratic battle. She knows being outside instead of inside.

But you don't have to be on a trip or living in a foreign country to feel or be other.

I was born in the American South to parents who, because of a specific mixture of education, nature and nurture, were disdainful of it. We lived there, but there was always a feeling that there was something not quite right about it. The result? I felt "other" in my hometown, my high school, most everywhere. But it wasn't a bad feeling. It was a feeling of strength and security. I liked it.

And the truth is this. Even if you never go anywhere, there are times in your life when you are outside the inner circle. You are the "other." In relationships, the other person is, by definition, the other. A man is other to a woman. A lesbian lover is other to the woman she calls partner. An employee is other than his boss. Sometimes just acknowledging this otherness helps ease tension. You can't change it, maybe you shouldn't, so what you can do is observe it and reflect on it, and understand that you are just as "other" as anyone else. Always fitting in, always being like everyone else—well, that would be downright debilitating, I would think. The fear of crossing a line, not being accepted, not seeing yourself reflected everywhere would be stifling. Stepping outside the accepted definition of yourself is a bracing experience, and in our lives, despite our geographical locations, we have to do it to survive and thrive.

I'm not always perfectly comfortable, and my life is by no means free of frustration. But I feel comfortable being the different one. And to tell you the truth, I feel lucky to wear this mantle.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

Incredibly good advice

2009-10-23T07:44:00.000-07:00

Child home with Swine Flu. DVD helping to take mind off symptoms. Time to pull out all the good old movies. Passing through her room, I caught this:

Mrs. Incredible: (Lots of whining about her marriage, etc.) What do I do? What do I do?(Sobbing into her kleenex.)

EDNA: WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Mrs. Incredible: Hmmm?

EDNA: YOU ARE ELASTIGIRL! MY GOD! PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER! (Hitting Mrs. Incredible over the head with rolled up papers.) WHAT WILL YOU DO? IS THIS A QUESTION? YOU WILL SHOW HIM THAT YOU REMEMBER THAT HE IS MR. INCREDIBLE AND YOU WILL REMIND HIM WHO YOU ARE. YOU KNOW WHERE HE IS. GO. CONFRONT THE PROBLEM. FIGHT! WIN! AND CALL ME WHEN YOU GET BACK DARLING. I ENJOY YOUR VISITS.

I think Edna Mode is my hero. I wish she'd ended up in our Pedestal Chapter in the book. So deserving. Wanna see it?

Brook Land Is Mine

2009-10-14T13:36:00.001-07:00

So right now we're running around throwing clothes into suitcases, getting on conference calls, watching the world wide web be not so worldly or wide out here on the stormy Oregon coast, trying to get out of here and get to South America for a few weeks of Spring. And yet what keeps hitting the back of my mind like an insistent lover is...Brooklyn. In the last few months friends and strangers and coffee baristas have brought up that bucolic borough again and again. In fact someone who reads this blog - that's right reader, we may be up to a grand total of 25, and not all friends and relatives! - wrote from out of the blue, the prettiest email, the sweetest words, all from that distant land called Brooklyn. And it threw me back to last year, when we were back with Fincher shooting the Stand Up To Cancer work, and Rick and I ran over to Brooklyn for a breakfast that turned into lunch and then some because we just couldn't bare to leave. Someone we used to know at Wieden said that Brooklyn's like Portland, but that just proves he's been gone too fucking long. It's nothing like at all. It can't be copied or counterfeited. It can't be recreated out here in our new Western lands because there's something so inherent and in-grown and deep rooted there. We just don't have that. We have other marvelous and inescapable things but not that.

And while we were there we went to The Five Leaves (go there, now!) and sat at the counter and had the best freaking cup of coffee, okay, four (hello Carlos!) with beans that actually were roasted in Eugene, Oregon, a few hours from what we natives fondly do call Stumptown. Carlos was lovely and kind and irrepressible. The homemade ricotta with honey was delirious and moreish. Everyone told us to go down to Spoonbill & Sugartown for books and we did and of course Rick had to bodily drag me from the place, banshee-like, but not before the owners had exhausted themselves looking for the newest Paris Review and not before they had won my bookish heart forever. I want to go to there again. I want to go to there now. But first, we'll go to Buenos Aires and meet up with my great vagabond-poet nephew and spend three glorious weeks on the south side of the globe. As usual, Charlotte will write superior blogs with beautiful illustrations and extraordinary thoughts and I'll be drunk somewhere, trying to make a point I deeply, albeit slurringly, believe in. Let's end with W. Whitman of course:

What is it, then, between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not - distance avails not, and place avails not.

- Janet

So much is possible, isn't it?

2009-10-11T07:28:00.001-07:00

I saw this picture in the New York Times. Maybe you did too. If you didn't: The baby I've circled is Michelle Obama in the arms of her mother. If I'd been looking at a paper edition of the Times, I'd have clipped it out. But I did the digital equivalent by dragging it to my computer desktop, because I want to keep it forever, tuck it in my wallet, and pull it out when I pull out pictures of my children. It is such a complete image of all that is possible in this strange, unpredictable, often seemingly cruel world. And a hopeful thing to put next to the pocket-sized images of one's own offspring. Not that they'll be famous or powerful. It's not that which I wish for them. But that maybe they'll grow into a world where things they don't imagine can be true, really can be.

Choice 201

2009-10-08T23:57:00.000-07:00

After my last post, everyone who commented was kind enough and quick to say that I didn't need to qualify what I was saying, that I didn't need to explain that I was talking about choice v. that stuff that destiny serves up. Everyone was generous and knew what I meant, and to all of them I say "thank you."

But as often happens with blogging, I hadn't really been thorough in either my original post or my comment. And, as some days have passed, I've realized why it bothered me so much not to have been more specific the first time around.

The distinction between what luck or destiny serve up and what we choose is critical and central to the discussion, precisely because choice, by definition, is the opposite of that which is out of our hands. You choose to take or deny a job. You don't choose cancer. And those of us who have lots of choice in life have been given a very fortunate hand, indeed. And for all that choice, all that flexibility, all that opportunity to say "yes" to this or "no" to that, we ought to be damn (double-damn) grateful. Not whiny. Not full of regret. Not negative about our lives and why they aren't like so-and-so's "greener" life on the other side of the fence. We ought to be celebrating every aspect of those choices, cognizant of the fact that we were lucky to be able to make them in the first place.

In other words, every choice we make is a celebration of the freedom to choose. And the ripple-effects of those choices are a reminder. -Charlotte

Pro-Choice.

2009-10-07T07:50:00.001-07:00

Fill in the blanks:

I chose __________________.

I have chosen to _______________________.

I choose to _______________________.

---

I was walking down the road the other day feeling kind of grumpy about having to pick up more groceries, cook more dinner, whatever it was. You know the feeling. Like you wish you were living in a parallel universe without the constant T0-Do list. And all of a sudden it hit my like a bolt of lightening: I chose this life. I chose the man, the place, the children, the work (and often lack thereof). I chose the precise mix of mess and beauty, urban insanity and country calm. Luck played a huge part in much of what I have, yes, but most of what I am inclined to grumble about is precisely what I wanted. And what I want.

And right then and there I felt joyous. Yes, joyous, as if bliss had been beamed down by the sun. Realizing that I had chosen what I was experiencing, right then, allowed me to stop resenting it and to be thankful for it. Thankful for the arm-ache that accompanies carrying your groceries home. Thankful for the chance to cook another meal for my family. Thankful for the flexible mix of unemployment and employment that I enjoy. Thankful for the bills to pay, the messes to observe before whisking away, the warm bodies to kiss before going to sleep. Thankful for the chaos and the conflict and the craziness.

Seems to me we (women, mostly) have a tendency to waste a lot of time whining about stuff that—if we were honest—is the direct or secondary result of a choice we've made. And we criticize the choices that others of us make, while we're secretly resenting our own. In a way, it's just a really mentally unhealthy sort of immaturity. We seem to forget the role that our choices play in our day-to-day realities.

And then I thought about our rather limited usage of the phrase "pro-choice." And how we all ought to live our lives in a truly pro-choice fashion. Accepting our own choices. Investing in the rightness of them, or consciously (and conscientiously) choosing otherwise if they were in error. And respecting without endless and acid discussion the right of other women to choose something for themselves that is different from what we've chosen.

Whatever. Maybe this is too simplistic. But accepting my own choices changed the color of my mood from something tending toward gray to something tending toward a lovely bright shade of greeny yellow. And I realized that I'd do well to repeat the same exercise a little more often.

I choose to remember what I have chosen.

Hear that? It's my kitchen, weeping

2009-10-05T10:55:00.000-07:00

The end of Gourmet Magazine. The end of Gourmet Magazine? To save Bon Appetit? Because people refuse to eat anymore, they simply assemble? Oh god. My knives just wrapped their little blades around each other and prayed. Gourmet is the New Yorker of food. It's a bible. It's food porn and literature both. And it has Ruth Reichl! It's so gorgeously written, stunningly photographed, it's brilliant and beautiful so of course they're going to let it go. A long time ago, 15, 16 years, I told Chris Shipman I didn't read it because it looked so snotty. And he replied 'It's not snotty, it's perfection.' Rest in peace, perfection. Oh great: now my pans are all making a break for the door. The sponges have thrown themselves off the sink. Somewhere, Julia Child is very, very sad.

- Janet

Eat, Friendship, Pray

2009-09-26T14:49:00.000-07:00

Here’s Charlotte, Donna, Luca and I in Milan a few years ago. Four girls to a camera. We’re not drunk, we’re happy. Intoxicated maybe just by finally being together in Charlotte’s house for the very first time. And we haven’t been together again since. Miles separate us - time separates us, too, work and life, all the necessary evils – and it just makes me ache a little bit. All the phone calls and email and twittering (not really, not ever) can’t quite close the gap of not having the ones you need in front of you. And today I finally realized something obvious: friendships are marriages.

The good ones, anyway.

The compromise. The forgiveness. The expectations and the letting go of them. The necessary sharing of each other with the outside world. The wishing you could crawl inside someone’s head, see out, Malkovichian-like, from their eyes. Ending each other's sentences. Getting the joke. Not telling the room you've heard the joke ten thousand times before. The temporary insanity that comes when you feel you’re not understood, appreciated, beloved. Respecting boundaries (friends have boundaries? Get out.) Believing each other when one of us says No, honestly, it doesn’t make your ass look any bigger than usual. Having some sort of mutual respect that doesn't deflate as time goes by. Amy Bloom said 'Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.' And that's true of friendship, too.

Because once you know most of the ins and outs of someone, once you know their buttons and insecurities, their needs and their demons, you have to be very careful not to abuse them. Once you know you’re in – you’re important, you’re unique – you have to try to balance your own self with theirs. Some of my greatest friends have been there for 45, 35, 25, 10 years. Others for merely a year and yet we’re just as close. In turn we’ve all been so wonderful with each other. And so bitchy. Needy. Gentle. Voracious. Caustic. We’ve dropped everything to take a plane for a birthday or funeral. We’ve given money. We’ve taken it. We’ve lost each other. We’ve given in and given up and walked out of rooms and slammed doors and come back, apologized. We’ve been very very good. And just utterly terrible.

And now I think I put up walls not to keep someone out, but to see who cares enough to knock them down.

Like marriage some of these will end in divorce. Some will just run their course. Some will last forever, the nursing home, the reading of the will, the porch and the rocking chair. Some prove quite constantly that love is, thank god, truly blind. Is it rare to love so many people you don’t see every day, every month, even every five years? Is it normal? A few weeks ago a good friend told me I have the widest group of friends she’s ever seen, the most diverse. I don’t know if that’s true. But I do know how fortunate, crazy-lucky really, it is to have so many strong loud kind generous life-supplying unafraid-to-be-bitchy unafraid to wrap their arms around me and hold on tight friends, male and female both. How fortunate to know at the end of the phone are a few people who will pick up, be there, not fade away, not judge, shut up, listen. My best friend? My husband, by leaps and bounds, far and away. Charlotte and I have that in common, too. But all these other marriages are sweet as well. Polygamy, you're so hard to resist.

-- Janet

Louise Bourgeois.

2009-09-20T21:43:00.000-07:00

"It is very difficult to be a woman and to be likeable. This desire to be likeable, it is really a pain in the neck. How are you going to be likeable and be yourself?"

These words come from the mouth of the artist herself in Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine. It was impossible not to stop and wonder at the truth of them.

—Charlotte

Remember the plums: A tale of Alzheimer's

2009-09-11T23:31:00.001-07:00

I've just gotten back from summer in France. It was beautiful as always, and poignant in many ways. But the thing, I'm afraid I'll remember the most is the story about my mother-in-law (N.) and the plums.

Last year, we purchased a tiny strip of property next to our little house that contains a single plum tree. The French call these particular plums—small, yellow and tinged with violet—"Mirabelles." Who knows how long that tree has actually been there, but N. insists that it grew during the war, and that she used to benefit from the rare plums that would fall on the house-side of the wall.

As soon as they ripened this summer she was obsessed with them. I think because she has such strong memories of being in Accolay during that dreadful war, of eating whatever presented itself (it seems they gathered and ate dandelions in great quantities) and possibly often going without, she felt the need to not waste one single piece of fruit from that tree!

At any rate, she couldn't remember, ever, that we owned the property. So rather than picking the good fruit from the tree, she would only gather it from the ground. Good, very good, half rotten. Whatever the condition she would eat it. And she ate them all day, preached their benefits, carried bowls full of them into the kitchen—sometimes several times a day, forgetting that she'd already brought some. There was frequently a little cloud of fruit flies in the kitchen, which drove me nuts, or the slightly vinegary smell of semi-macerated fruit.

And every day it would start again. More plums. More insistence that we should all eat them. And always the heartbreaking invective: We can't let them go to waste! We have to eat them! (I ate about 10 one day that I picked from the tree—they are small and easy to pop into your mouth—and they gave me a very bloaty feeling, and a good bit of gas. So the girls and I ate the few we wanted, but refrained after that.) But N. continued to eat and eat, and fart and fart. She farted for days, sometimes having to run to the bathroom. After about ten days, she decided to make jam, insisting as always, that the fruit couldn't be wasted. I told her that no one in our family really eats much jam, and that they'd truly be wasted if she did that. I explained that it was better to leave them on the ground, let nature take its course, where nothing is wasted, just composted. But she would have none of that. If they weren't eaten—by us—they were wasted.

I hoped she'd forget her obsession, but she didn't, and one day, just to put it to rest, because by this time there were various bowls of Mirabelles lying in the kitchen with their little buzzing clouds, I said, "N., why don't you make the jam today. I need to get you some sugar, but I'll go this morning, and when I get back you can make the jam." So, I got the children up, dressed, made the beds etc., slowly working up steam for the trip to the grocery store, and before I knew it, there was the smell of cooking fruit in the house. She'd gone ahead and made the jam using confectioner's sugar instead of normal (it was horribly sweet), and forgetting to include an enormous vat of plums she'd left outside. When I pointed this last bit out to her, she shrugged her shoulders, and made another enormous batch without sugar and mixed it with the first. All this, she put into jars she found in the garage, which were in no way sterile and which did not have proper lids for conserving. Those jars still sit in the kitchen in Accolay, because no sooner had she made it, then she forgot and started collecting them from the ground again.

That afternoon, too late, because we needed it anyway, I got sugar. When she saw me unloading it from the bag, she said, "Oh, we should make jam." I told her she already had. She stared at me blankly.

Two days before leaving she was still madly collecting plums, and this continued on up to our departure. She insisted on taking them back to Milan, so she stored them in a discarded 6-bottle wine carton. Overflowing, the carton had to be put inside a large plastic bag, before being the last thing loaded into the car. Even as we packed the car, she was putting plums into her purse for the trip and insisting that my Roberto, my husband, lock the gate so that none of our neighbors take any. (This, I found very odd from someone who didn't want to waste. I would have put a sign on the garden wall that said, on the contrary, "Please come in and help yourself to plums.")

Roberto and the girls piled in with N. and her plums, balanced on top of an enormous load. And I followed in the smaller car.

When we got back to Milan, and began unpacking, Roberto took the girls and N. up to open our respective apartments, and the doorman and I stayed down to take the bags out. We cracked open the back of the car, the plums came cascading out of the car out onto the dirty, dirty floor of the garage. It was comical. The car was so overstuffed, and things had shifted in the journey, so that when it was all over, both shoes and plums were dropping out of the car. We did our best to put it back into order, and within a half hour or so, I was carting the plums up to N.'s apartment. I proudly plopped them down on her kitchen table, and said, "Here! Here are your plums!" And she just looked at them and said, "What are those?" I explained, adding that since they'd all fallen in the garage, she'd need to rinse them really well before eating them. She nodded, but I know that her instinct to eat them "as is" is too strong; she won't remember.

Two hours later, she was back at our house with plums in hand and mouth. "I've brought you some plums," she said. "I just gathered them in fresh in Accolay. And since you all weren't there, I thought you might like some."

And there it was. Recent history entirely re-written. She somehow, now, remembered gathering the plums, but had erased our very constant and patient presence from the entire summer. It's probably the way she would have wanted it. Herself. Her childhood. The miraculously abundant fruit on the other side of the wall. The threat of the German soldiers occupying the grandest houses of the little town. The steady hand of her grandmother. And a world, though tragic, that made sense to a child and that she remembered from one minute to the next. And we, well—not even born yet.

Or maybe it was just the lure of that perfect, simple goodness—the impossible to resist:

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

—William Carlos Williams

No forgiveness necessary. What is is. What was was. We're all in this together. —Charlotte

Awesome, Dude

2009-08-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

Henry likes guitars.

Electric guitars, acoustic guitars, famous guitars, whatever has the word 'guitar' in it. Henry likes fat ripe loud raucous rock music. 70's bands. 60's bands. He knows songs from before he was born, stuff I don't even know and didn't know then. Henry likes NYC, Manhattan anyway. He likes the way it looks and feels and smells, the commotion and ubiquity and endless thereness of both cement and humanity. He the likes the crowds on the street and how alive it is day or night, how it etches itself into your skin and your brain and becomes part of you, how you're never alone there, even when you are. Henry likes sea creatures, rocks, sticks, saltwater, water, period, when it's not too cold and it's not too hot, wild things, Henry Potter books, Henry Potter films, anything apparently by Michael Bay (this, I'm waiting for him to be 15 and get over the guy) cultishly great Korean films, vampires (who doesn't), Arrested Development, The Flight of the Conchords (again, yes, what great taste he has), saying Dude and saying it repeatedly, poetry, a good campfire, fishing, sushi, great jokes, cilantro, the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the color 'black'. Henry makes mean guacamole, dude. Henry wrote a poem for the Oregon Student Poetry Contest that received Honorable Mention (and deserved more, dude) that goes like this:

I can't forget the fish

the one that got away

the pig of a fish

the fish that took my flies

both of my flies

I can't forget the feeling

the feeling of hooking a great fish

the feeling of the line snapping

snapping under the fish's strength

tearing the tippet

the heavy 4x tippet

I can't forget the satisfaction

the satisfaction of the jerk

the fish pulling my fly rod

the curt but amazing jerk

the satisfying feeling

of hooking a monster fish

Smart, sensitive, funny, strong, loving, so good at so many things, becoming himself moment by moment, a boy, a man, almost there. I used to think having a girl would be the end-all be-all. Then I met Henry.

- Janet

To be Alive

2009-07-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

Merce Cunningham, the greatest living choreographer in the world, just died, age 90.

When he was 80 he danced a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov. When he could no longer move his arthritic feet he would make up dances in his head. And so eloquently he said this about dance: 'You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscript to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.' I think of Charlotte when I think of him.

For Janet from Charlotte

2009-07-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

Something I ran across today:

Fur, Feather, Flesh

2009-07-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

I love animals. That seems like such an obvious thing to say. But the more I observe human behavior towards animals I know it’s not. Many people think animals are just fine. You can look at them. Occasionally touch them. You can feed them. Admire them from a distance. Own them. Dress them up in sequins and faux fur which is both redundant and insane. Give them up or throw them out when you've outgrown them or they've outgrown your children or the couch or the TV room. Because you know, they're okay, they're fine. Then there are others who honestly see almost no separation when they compare the way they feel about an animal and a human being. But when push comes to shove a majority of humanity still believes animals – domesticated or not - are ‘other’ and therefore less than us. And I think this has to do with our need to keep them at a distance so we can use them. As beasts of burden. As fabric. As a food source. As experiment. As killing sport. As the thing that can’t speak our language so can easily be made slave.

Most humans would roll their eyes at Albert Schweitzer's creed about animal life and slaughter: Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

And then I observe the rancor that comes when some people find out my charity extends almost solely to animal rights groups, refuges, sanctuaries. When I explain that as donations go, humans charities far, far exceed the number of donations that animal groups do, they don't listen. For them it's abnormal, and a little pathetic to put it frankly, to put other animals anywhere close to the throne we occupy. We are their gods. They are lucky for the lives we have allowed them to live.

And it’s all so incredibly odd to me. As humans, we are but animals. As humans, we no doubt evolved much later than most of the animals we treat so deplorably. But because we won the evolutionary jackpot and were blessed with the capability to both torture and revel in it, we get to hold dominion over them. Sometimes it’s the most humane, kindest type of dominion. But most often it’s so far from any definition of kindness.

When I read anyone claiming that humans who love animals to a greater degree do so because animals are ‘easier’ than human beings to interact with, I shake my head. And when in the mood, laugh. They purport we’re obviously wounded or shy or insecure around people, and animals allow us to hide with them, or behind them, or ask less of us. But nothing could be farther from the truth. My companion animals expect extraordinary things from me, just as my friends and husband do. I let them all down quite a bit. Human nature, I suppose – Hah! But I do not love them as equally as I love human beings because they ask less of me. I love them equally because quite often they give more. It is as simple and true as that. - Janet

Oh heck.

2009-07-05T03:55:00.001-07:00

Clearly, the ex-Governor Palin does not read our blog. There I was rambling on about the merits of not quitting, and she does her damnedest to prove me wrong. Maybe that's why Janet and I don't have many readers: WE'RE NOT INSANE ENOUGH. Oh well. I'm sticking with sanity. If Ms. Palin tries to head to the white house, I think it'll be a worthwhile camp to sit in. (Did anyone notice the loons making a guest appearance during her announcement? Birds of a feather...)

I (would like to but can't) QUIT.

2009-07-02T05:32:00.000-07:00

Sorry. So sorry. I've been "absent" lately. Not physically (who's ever physically absent in the world of the internet? Wow, that's kind of a depressing thought. Now you never have an excuse for not being there. Heavy.) Anyway, no. I've been mentally absent. Or preoccupied. Or whatever you want to call it.

So let's call it what it was. Crisis-ing. Yes, sad to say: I was in a panic, a tizzy, a "state" about the state of my career. I.e. that thing I do when I'm not raising my two beautiful children. Over time, it's begun looking like a hobby instead of a career and that's part of the problem. I want to excel and be brilliant and be "all over it" but I also want balance and time to watch the flowers grow (I include my daughters in that category) and time to smell the coffee, not to mention brew it. But the crisis wasn't about balance, it was about whether I'd "lost 'it'" or not.

I suppose this happens to all creative people every now and then. (Let me clarify something before going on: I think most everyone is creative, although there was that accountant I had so many years ago that maybe wasn't, but I use the word to refer to people who rely on their creativity to make a living and/or a reputation.) Anyway, I hit some sort of wall a month or so back. An internal wall. Something. I just felt like I was going nowhere. Had no more good ideas. Dried up. The economy wasn't helping of course, but that "high" I was on a while back in which I actually claimed that the slow economy was "okay" because it gave me time to get my life in order, well, let's just say that was over. And it wasn't just the lack of jobs, it was the lack of some spark in me...as if my reserve of gunpowder had been depleted. It was a really frightening feeling. Like my soul had changed or something.

Simultaneously, my mom, who is 77, was taking a class at NYU about modern Russia, in which she had to write two papers on the subject of her choosing. Mom is a professor by trade, still teaches at Pace University, but these assignments threw her. She too hit some sort of wall simultaneously. Teaching writing was one thing, but researching and writing on an unknown topic was something else. She began to doubt, to waffle, to wonder...she began to feel "old."

So here we were an ocean and three decades apart feeling over and done with, spent, and extremely unsure. My mom took the first leap. She decided to stick with her course, write her paper no matter how long it took, no matter how out of shape her brain felt for this specific task. She dug in and just did it. She wrote and rewrote and rewrote until she got it right. And she did get it right. And her professor's comments reflected that. Her conclusion at 77? "I'm going to do this every year. When I finish this course I'm starting another one." Ah, so that's how it's done?

For my part, I started to design something on my own. The going was slow...but it helped to shift the doubt ever so slightly out of the wallow it had created in the pit of my stomach. But the real kicker was a job that finally came alone. And it was a good one, a perfect chance to prove myself wrong. So I followed my mother's example. Dug in. Did it. Re-did it. Kept at it. You might say you don't have a choice when someone's paying you...but you sort of do. You can do it well. Or you can do it not well. Give your all. Or not. This time I did, or at least I tried, and it massaged out the knot of doubt...I'm not calling myself a genius by any means, but at least I don't feel paralyzed anymore. I feel like someone who knows her profession. Who's good at it. Who's not in the least ready to stop. (What was I thinking?) I feel like someone who just got through a bad patch. What's that line from the Speedo ad a gazillion years ago? "What doesn't kill you just makes you stronger"? Yep. Close enough.

---

So. As they say, "Quitting is not an option." It just isn't. True for my mom at 77. True for me at 40-something. And true for my daughter who is struggling through her first two weeks away at summer camp. She wanted to go. I paid (and paid and paid). Now she's there. First night: "I wanna come home!" (Sob. Sob. Wail. Wail.) "Come get me, puh-leeeeeeeze."

As much as it felt kind of rotten to say it, it also felt kind of right: "I'm sorry honey, I can't. You'll have to stick it out." And she will. And she is. And I'll bring her home this weekend. She'll be happy, in her comfort zone again...but little does she know that this is just the beginning. Of humps and hills and mountains to climb, icky stuff to get through with a stiff upper lip, experiences that ask you not to give up. Being unable to quit...and, in the end, being glad you didn't.

Let Us Now Praise Not So Famous Men

2009-06-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

So I post this photo here for some simple reasons. It's Father's Day. And the first day of Summer two thousand and nine. And this picture - isn't it great? - captures both these thoughts pretty well. My dad died when I was nineteen years old and he was just 49; I was born on his 30th birthday. He was a riot, a charmer, a ball buster, a little bit Dean Martin a little bit Robert Mitchum. He taught me how to fish, tell elk prints from deer, make donuts and marinara sauce, the importance of hard work, beautiful music, raucous laughter, card games, true love, attention to detail, compassion, tolerance, wisdom, fearlessness.

Having a life. Not watching other people's lives pass by and calling it good, but honestly breathing and accomplishing something every single damn day. Even as he was sick and dying of cancer he was building a deck on our house. Passion, that's a good enough word. Passion for breathing in and breathing out. Here's to every father who lives with that kind of intensity, that kind of grabbing at life and appreciating its singular intensities. Here's to Charlotte's Dad and the time she had with him. I wish there had been more. And here's to the first day of Summer and the second day of Summer in Italy. Right now it looks like blue skies ahead.

Food, Inc. Because we are what we eat. So what are we?

2009-06-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago 96,000 lbs of US beef was recalled. Again. Ninety-six thousand pounds of meat and honestly no one here even bats an eye. Two years ago 15,000 Americans got sick and several died from eating salmonella contaminated Vegetable Pot Pies. Just a few weeks ago, thousands of gallons of mineral water tainted with E coli was recalled in Ireland. Across America we’ve had salmonella outbreaks in spinach, tomatoes, peanut butter and pistachios and too much e coli to count. It’s insane and shameful and still people – friends and strangers alike – find it more interesting to worry about 'swine' flu then they do the food and the lard and the truth right in front of them. On their plates.

Each time this happens, for a week or a few days, people won’t eat peanuts. Or they’ll throw out their spinach. They won't touch raw tomatoes but they'll eat fast food, processed food, gobs of it without caring what's in it or what it's doing to them. Because they don’t care about the big question: why does this keep happening, again and again, and why aren’t we doing anything about what’s causing it in the first place?

And now, because ConAgra can’t pinpoint which of the 25 ingredients in their pot pies carries salmonella, 100 million pot pies have just been labeled both ‘unsafe’ and ‘consumer is responsible for safety kill step of food’. That means you. Your grandmother. Your kids. We’re responsible and if we die, we really should have read the fine print. Because you can’t rinse E coli or salmonella off food. You can’t soak it or pray for it to be gone. And if it happened to tomatoes one month and peanuts the month after that and frozen food today, what makes you – any of us – think it won’t happen again and again ad nauseum (literally)? And unless it makes you sick – or makes your child die – do you even pay attention? Do you even care? We aren’t just what we eat. We’re how it was grown. How it was processed. How it was watered and picked and stored and distributed. Whatever we eat, be it animals or vegetables, we're also what we eat eats. If pesticides are used, we eat those. If hormones are used (hello meat, milk, eggs, ice cream, cheese) we’re that, too. What’s in our food, your food? Formaldahyde. Estrogen. Feces. Half of all US Sewage ends up on crops. Half of all US sewage waste – feces, PCBS’ dioxins, DDT, asbestos, parasitic worms, ratioactive material from hospitals – that’s right baby, radioactive waste - sleeping pills, birth control pills, etc etc etc all the stuff we throw down a toilet without caring – 50% of it ends up on crops. Not organic crops. Not sustainable crops. Big fat you just got it at Costco and Safeway and Fred Meyer crops. Because of loopholes in regulations, and the fact that Cargill, ConAgra, and Monsanto are as vocal and voracious as Big Oil, Big Tobacco, and Big Guns have ever been. In my view, worse. Because they are slowly, and in some cases, not so slowly killing us. Killing our children. If your children matter to you, shouldn't you give a damn? Shouldn't their health be as important as you keep saying it is?

Eating is a choice. It's a choice just like every other choice we make and it’s not nearly as difficult as most of them. You are what you eat. Where you eat. You are also where you refuse to eat. So what, exactly, are you? Go see the new film Food, Inc. Go to http://www.foodincmovie.com.

Grateful.

2009-06-02T16:50:00.000-07:00

That’s the word of the day.

Sometimes it’s the one thing we don’t have much time for, that chance to feel grateful. Or it’s a passing emotion we barely acknowledge. But as trite or common or naïve as it may sound, there are so many things that deserve our gratitude. Our children being healthy instead of ill. Having a job we love that occasionally loves us back. Having a job at all in times like these. Great friends who keep us sane, or give us sanctuary, or who make us laugh like sinners, or forgive our sins on a daily basis. Friends like my stockbroker who’s getting his company to donate all – all – of their charitable donations this year to fight breast cancer. Answered prayers. Or ones that may yet be answered. Second chances and second chapters, because our lives are full of them, regardless of what Fitzgerald wrote. Today I kept internally complaining about the stupidest things – if it’s not the vacuuming or the sweeping or the laundry or the dog hair it’s the garden or the weeding or the watering or the cat food. It’s the writing job I don’t want to do but that screams to be done. The invoicing the clients the conference calls the essentials and the demanding and the needy and they never go away. But if they did, then what? Then there’d be complaining about that, too. I walk out and see the garden growing like literal and delicious (truly edible) weeds and think, we did that, we cultivated that, it’s worth everything and more. But it doesn't take a garden. It takes observation. It takes knowing things could be much worse. Much harder. Much less. We must find – I must find, anyway – the space to be consciously grateful. And some sort of constant way to be thankful more often than not.

The Phone Scares Me

2009-05-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

Charlotte is scared of rational things. As irrational as they may feel, they're all based in some pretty normal fears. She's scared of airplanes, earthquakes, natural disasters, war. She's scared of death and of dying. But I sit over here on the other edge of the world, on the lip of the biggest ocean with enormous trees waving in the wind and and I'm scared of some insane, crazy shit.

I'm scared of moths. There, I said it. That's the fuzzy comfort of having a blog nobody reads but us. Here I can unload my freakish fears without worry someone from fourth grade will come running up to me spewing aloud my deepest secrets. Even if they do read and yell, who cares, we're old now. So anyway Moths, go figure...something to do with a short story by Arthur C. Clarke or H.P. Lovecraft when I was seven or eight. Soon afterwards I read 'Portnoy's Complaint' and was intrigued by liver, yes, yet never afraid of it. Hmmm, what else?

I'm scared of car accidents which is ridiculous when you live in a country so dependent on automobiles. Scared that someone I love who's five or ten minutes late is actually dead in a car and I'll find out at any moment. The knock on the door. The phone that rings late at night - there it is again, that ringing.

I'm scared that I'll jinx things by thinking about them or not thinking about them or saying them out loud or not giving them the reverence they deserve. As in 'Wow, we just made it to the airport in time! And brr, look at all that freezing rain coming down in absolute sheets. Thank God there's no chance whatsoever that our plane will go down! Look, there's someone from ZZ Top going into first class - and he's bringing his guitar. This will be the safest, fastest flight ever!" But in this above-mentioned fear I do take comfort being joined by roughly 25,000,000 others who throw salt over their shoulders, never walk under ladders, and talk to their own, individual, listening, nodding God. Perhaps I underestimate their number.

What else? I'm scared of turning on the TV and seeing the hunting channel or the fishing channel or anything to do with a trapped, wounded, scared, attacked, dying animal of any kind. I'm scared somebody will steal one of our dogs (twice now instead of 'dogs' I typed 'gods'; hence my point) so that when they're in the car and I leave, I hit the 'lock' button four, five, six times in a row as if my hand has a mute kind of Tourette Syndrome.

And I'm scared of the telephone. Not in some Tippy Hedren-it's-going-to-attack me phobia but what you have to do once you pick it up. You have to speak into the damn thing, and I hate it. Hate that it should be a comfort and connection and I fear I'm bothering the other side. Are they listening or have you interrupted them during sex? Are they thinking about the sex they just had, mulling it over as you speak? Do they want to talk to you or were they hoping you were the repairman? Do they want to listen or talk or both or neither and is this a good time or is the repairman coming over for sex? So many questions, so many ring tones, I hate it.

And yet the telephone is still a lifeline. Almost everyone I love lives far away. Charlotte in Italy and everyone else scattered from NY to Boston to LA to San Francisco to Seattle and Bend to Hawaii to Portland. Even if they live close by, a phone comes in handy. For years I'd tell my closest friends that I almost called them, I really thought about calling them, isn't that fantastic, the way other people think of sending a letter or card or trying out for American Idol. Derek and Kevin repeat it to this day: gee, I thought about calling you...isn't that enough? Yet for me this is truly sancrosanct: if I love you, you make it all the way to actual thought. But to press those numbers, well, it takes something out of my soul. Does anybody else do this? Mean to write, call, connect, approach, hold, make meaningful, keep thinking they'll always be enough time? And when did it change? Remember grade school, junior high, high school, rushing home to talk to the friends you just saw all day long in class? Remember pressing the phone against your head for hours until your ear was practically on fire? Practically sweating? And how can ears even sweat? Remember your parents screaming for you to get off the goddamn phone to eat dinner? Do homework? Texting, twittering, it's all the same thing just with a slightly different device, although no sixteen year old will ever understand outrageous ear heat. But it's connection, that thing Charlotte talks about, that way we reach out to someone else we trust, regardless the miles. The sound of someone you love on the other end of the phone is a gorgeous thing. The thought that anyone loves you enough to call when they could be doing something else, that's wonderful. Why would I be afraid of something so beautiful? Spontaneous? Alive? Maybe the saddest sound is a phone that never rings at all. That and a moth, trapped and scared beating against the light. Which is another reason to keep turning the lights off.

Another cycle to contend with.

2009-05-24T00:49:00.000-07:00

O.K. So in addition to the fear cycle, the menstrual cycle, the climactic cycle and the motorcycle, there's the happiness/success cycle. Or so I'll call it.

Recent research at the University of Virginia has revealed that "moderately happy people, while less successful in relationships, tend to achieve more, because being a little disgruntled can serve as an incentive to improve."

On another front, Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, "argues that humans have evolved to live like bees in a hive—in tight, cooperative groups. Haidt has found that many people, when asked to remember the happiest time in their life, will refer to an intense, hivelike group experience such as military experience, a band or just a time when they had a close group of friends. 'During the Enlightenment we busted out of the hive and created modern, independent ways of living,' Haidt says. 'Now we fly around asking, 'Why am I not satisfied'?"

These two tidbits, thanks to my Spring 2009 issue of the University of Virginia Magazine, make great and disturbing sense to me. They explain why, when I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I lived through a heady period of creativity (i.e. success, in my mind) at Wieden + Kennedy which left me both exhilarated and constantly frustrated (read: miserable, despite my success) but which I have continued to search for elsewhere in life. I remember it as being a deeply happy and rewarding.

In retrospect, I think what was rewarding was what I achieved, and, yes, the amazingly tight relationships which were formed and which continue to grow and deepen even today. My friendship with Janet, for example. (Thank you Dan Wieden for "giving" me Janet.) But what I have now—a deep, abiding and loving relationship, two beautiful children and a curiously fulfilling life in Italy—provides me with a greater happiness. I couldn't have had this profound happiness without giving up that earlier phase—that literally buzzing hive of group activity.

Flip side: I'm often not as creative, I fear, in this happy hive as I used to be in the disturbing one. When I confront the shift in personal creativity, I get grumpy, grumpiness spreads, and before you know it, something creative pops out of it again. I feel happy. The smiles come back, I enjoy life, creativity ebbs.

Around and around and around. Happy - creative/successful - happy - creative/successful. And so we go. How lovely it would be to be happy and to feel creative, be creative at the same time. —Charlotte

Repeat after me.

2009-05-18T02:03:00.000-07:00

My grandmothers, Rosa Sanders Thomas (left) and Gladys Hartz Moore (right).

Long time. No hear. Sorry about that.

When last we spoke, I was tamping down various fears in order to go visit my mother in New York. Suffice it to say that once again the trip was well worth any pre-travel jitters. It was full and rich and meaningful on just about every level.

I found my mother well, but contending with some degree of memory loss, which became in a way the centerpiece of my visit and of my thought-process even now long after the bags have been unpacked. I won't go into the details of why or how, but I will say this. Having a mind bent toward the metaphorical, I even see memory loss as a sort of metaphor, but also as a tool of nature to force human beings into a pattern of behavior that might serve our survival, or at least, the quality of our lives.

The metaphor is that memory loss is a sort of editing tool that forces our minds in older age to focus on the things that matter. (The name of that woman you just met at the newsstand five minutes ago but have already forgotten? Probably doesn't matter. It's taking up disk space. Let it go.)

The survival tool is this. I noticed with both my grandmothers (one who probably suffered from Alzheimers and the other who was mentally clear into her 100's) a tendency to repeat themselves. But what they repeated weren't grocery lists, phone numbers, or plans for the day. What they repeated were stories. Family myths. Personal tales of passage and growth. In the case of my forgetful grandmother, these stories were burnished and shaped by the passage of time and the loss of memories less important. In the case of my mentally acute grandmother, the stories, I realized later, were pertinent to my own growth. She knew exactly what she was saying, and she was going to say it as many times as possible before it was too late. In both cases, the stories in question were repeated to me over and over and over again. I always listened, aware in some way that they might serve me later, aware too that my grandmothers were telling me who I was and where I came from.

At times it was boring. I sometimes wanted to say, "I know, I know. You told me this already." But I tried not to. I hope I didn't. Because what I realize now, is that my own mind needed that repetition to make the gist of the stories stick. Here I am, decades after their deaths, and I can't repeat the details of what I thought would be permanently tattooed on my gray matter, but I can remember the over-arching themes. I can remember the point. I can recall some of the texture and color. The emotion. I am beginning, as an adult, to relate to more and more of the "why" behind the telling.

So. It dawns on me as memory problems plague so many of our parents, that perhaps nature has a plan. The American Indians kept their culture alive by listening to the stories of the Elders. Stories were told over and over and over again. Talk-story it was called. Lectures hidden in tales. Lessons interwoven in drama. History, not boring, but entertaining. Again and again. Repeated and repeated until it wasn't so much learned as absorbed.

Now as my mother-in-law tells me daily of her life in France during WWII and my mother tells me one more time about her favorite teacher in high school, I realize that there is probably a deeper reason—a reason bigger than simple loss of memory or the need to talk—for the retelling of these particular tales. My survival will be served well by listening. My going forward will be informed by what they have to say.

It's Nature's will that we forget, it seems. It may also be her will that we repeat what we remember. Because if we're not going to choose that the oral repetition of these stories be part of our way of life, if we're not going to formalize the passing down of these words, Nature's going to choose it for us. Because I'm sure, very sure, it is her will that we listen, learn, absorb, then tell again when it is our turn. —Charlotte

Fear. The Big One.

2009-04-28T21:50:00.000-07:00

I've been afraid most of my life for some reason or other.

When I was young, I was afraid that my parents would abandon me—that they would fail to pick me up at school one day, and that would be that. I was afraid that the school bus I rode up and down the mountain where I grew up in Tennessee would slide off the road on one of the more treacherous turns. I was afraid of dogs, particularly Max the German Shepherd who lived in our neighborhood and who did eventually kill Charlie the Poodle, the only dog I was not afraid of.

In later years, before I could drive, I was still concerned about my mom not showing up to pick me up, but at this point the fear was not that she wanted to abandon me (she had put up with my shit for years, so it was clear she intended to stick it out with me), but that something horrible would happen to her.

And then, the fears vanished for a long period, because ugly stuff I'd never spent any time fearing began to happen in my life for real, the most dramatic of which was my parents getting divorced and selling the house I'd grown up in. I had to adjust to all sorts of things that were "strange." Moving from a house into an apartment. From a neighborhood to a complex my mother could afford at the time. Trying to connect with and buoy up a father who seemed to be suffering unfathomable pain. Being the kid at school who currently had "a problem." I remember hearing a teacher refer to me as a child from a "broken home." I told her off, as politely as a Southern girl could, and felt much better.

This is small potatoes compared to the tragedy that many people deal with, but they were personal issues, nonetheless, that knocked my fears right out of the arena. Dealing with real life left no space for fear. And as the tectonic plates that had underpinned my childhood began shifting, so did I. I became more adventurous. I tried new things. I climbed mountains in the Rockies with my biology classmates. I befriended people I'd shied away from. I got a job. Bought my first plane ticket, took my first flight alone. I also started drinking, being "wild," testing the boundaries that had so safely and wordlessly delineated my upbringing. Fear was falling out of my lexicon—for better and for worse.

Fast forward through a decade and a half of college, more schooling, frenzied careering right up to what would come to be known later by the people who coin such terms as a "starter marriage." My husband was a terribly handsome, warm, talented young man. We moved to Portland, settled into our careers (I more happily in those days than he), and bought a dear little house complete with, yes, a picket fence. We worked on the house, began work on a luxurious garden. And what do you think happened? I started to be afraid again. Really afraid. Really, truly deeply darkly afraid.

Of what? Well, in hindsight, I'd say many things, mostly internal. Fear of being trapped. Fear of accepting the reality of my choice. Fear of no longer being mobile, free. Fear of not being able to become myself within the confines of a relationship. (I was immature, what can I say?) But, mostly, these fears manifested themselves as one big, giant fear of earthquakes. Or the fear of being targeted by the Uni-bomber who was active in those days. Or the fear of being bombed as I slept in my bed by angry Iraqis. The first Gulf War was going on. I hated it. It was all over the news. 24/7. Seemed like sooner or later I'd have to pay for all that bombing. Wouldn't I? And what better time than when you're not dealing with your marriage like a grown-up?

Portland is situated on a fault, and after the two big earthquakes in California hit, I hammered my husband mercilessly about leaving Oregon. He looked at me like I was crazy. Our life was good. Why would we unsettle ourselves? "Because," I would stammer, feeling the panic zip back and forth between my knees, my hands and my heart. I knew I didn't have a good reason, so I didn't dare offer it. I ran away from this fear (and the actual fears it masked) in a zillion useless, reckless and self-destructive ways while simultaneously having a glorious career. Not surprisingly, after four years of marriage, my husband called it quits. More tectonic plates crashing and sliding. More upheaval.

But what did I do? Did I move away from Oregon, the place where my Personal Big One was waiting to happen? No. I stayed there, and ta-da, the fear vanished again. As another Charlotte-earthquake and its aftershocks required me to react/act/learn with some degree of maturity, the metaphorical earthquake and all the fear it inspired receded into the background.

I'm still afraid of earthquakes, flying and dread diseases, because (hello) what I'm really afraid of is dying. Especially when things are going so beautifully. My life is full. My marriage is good. My children are amazing. I don't want anything to mess with that; I've worked hard to have it. But my fear is not rational. Of course, one day I will die, but letting the fear of it erode the joy of every passing day is simply not an option. So I've been learning to deal with it. To live my life anyway. To keep things in perspective.

Somewhere during the Bush administration, I, like many Americans, had a front-row seat for the demonstration of "How Fear Weakens You, Makes You Vulnerable to Manipulation, and Siphons Off Valuable Energy You Could Otherwise Be Using to Live a Fuller and Better Life in a Healthier World." This was destiny throwing up a billboard that said, "Fight the good fight, Charlotte. You're on the right track. Don't give in to the fear."

Tomorrow, I leave my children and my loving rock/anchor/pillar of a husband, to board a plane and fly to New York (where I have not been since 9/11), while the media rages on about a Killer Flu and birds in airplane engines. I'm a little nervous, but nothing approaching panicky. And I know that my reason for going—to be with my mother for a few short days—is well worth setting aside the ungrounded fears I have about all of it.

Life is calling. And I'm determined not to be too afraid to answer.—Charlotte

p.s. Can't wait to hear from Janet, who will join us again soon from the Ground Zero of Swine Flu, where I'm sure she's had a lovely time.

Flying solo.

2009-04-25T03:10:00.000-07:00

Charlotte with photo of Janet and Charlotte

snapped 10 years ago, more or less.

Janet and I live two continents and an ocean apart, more or less. I never see her, not even using iChat or Skype. We write emails, occasionally post a letter, and send each other photos in which we are rarely present. We use stand-ins, dogs and children, to show who we "are" these days.

But we couldn't be closer. She is a sister to me. A mentor. A rock. A shoulder. A soft and warm place. A psychologist. A fairy god mother. A measuring stick. A dose of truth and honesty. A mirror. The person who finishes, and often starts, my sentences. So many things.

So when she goes on vacation, even though we are already more than 6000 miles apart, I miss her. Knowing that she's not at home with her dogs and her greenhouse and her wabi sabi cups and her mercurial ocean, makes me feel a little less stable than usual. Even blogging without her feels a little wobbly, even though we alternate all the time.

Weird.

Anyway, all's fair in love, war and friendship. When she gets back from Mexico. I'll go to New York. And she'll be "alone" for a week. During which you will all probably note a dramatic improvement in the quality of the posts.

This is just to say, I miss her terribly. So, here's to Janet, my dear friend. May she travel safely, and come home rested. —Charlotte

More Susan Boyle. 10 years ago.

2009-04-24T03:10:00.000-07:00

Something about her singing "Killing Me Softly" is just too touching for words. Take a listen. First up, "Cry Me A River" and then the Roberto Flack classic. (If you want to zip ahead to it, slide up to 4:19.) There are no comments equal to the pathos of her voice. —Charlotte

Sun, Surf, Sand, Margarita. Repeat.

2009-04-20T16:27:00.000-07:00

A few year's ago Rick’s stepfather Bob was sitting on our deck, content, first time on the Oregon coast. Relaxing in the filtered sunshine coming through the Sitka Spruce, the tide making the rocks sing on the shore below, a hawk flying between the trees on the edge of the cape, one of those days that makes you certain everyone not living in Oregon is crazy-stupid or merely crazy-insane. We mentioned we were leaving for vacation in a week. He looked from forest to ocean, looked at us. ‘A vacation from this? Why?’ A poet in our midst. And his point was taken. But once again nature calls. In this case the small and highly intoxicating fishing village/surfing town/expat haven of Sayulita, Mexico. First Bend for three days, then a week with great friends. This means Charlotte will have the blogging to herself. Unless Mellie or one of our other one ripe friends wants to join in.

Yeast: the new Prozac.

2009-04-19T04:44:00.000-07:00

I like to cook. I don't like the obligatory shopping / feeding / plate cleaning ritual that seems to take over my life, but when hours are long and the fam is relaxed and one job has been neatly filed away until the next one comes along, I do like to cook. In fact, I love it. But I've never been a bread person, at least not until this year.

A couple weeks ago, for what reason I can't remember, I was feeling low. Blue. Down. And it dawned on me, in one of those rare epiphanies that occurs when you actually identify what it is you really desire, that I wanted to bake a loaf of bread. I called a trusted baker friend, got the low down on the perfect loaf of bread, and got started. By the end of the day, the last crumbs of that yeasty wonder were being wolfed down by my kids with generous portions of butter, and we were all basking in an unusual happiness that almost only comes with making things yourself. But in the case of the bread, it was more than that. It wasn't just that we made it, it was that the thing seemed to have a warm life of its own. The texture, so belly-like. The rising. The punching-down. The yeasty smell which increases over time. The miraculous elasticity of flour, water and little else. The physical exertion required to make it yield its best—an exchange of energy that, yes, is "life". I dunno.

Today, we made pizza. Making the dough was a simplified version of the bread process with the addition of olive oil and a different ratio of ingredients. But the same magic took over again. The yeasty rising, the alive-ness of it. The ability of the dough to forgive and forget and succeed brilliantly despite the pummeling best efforts of strong hands and small weaker ones.

It's my new drug of choice. Not that I had one before. But let's just say that it works as an antidepressant as well as the centerpiece of a warm day spent around home and hearth. Not to mention the fact that it's the perfect antidote to so much else in life that isn't quite right and downright wrong. —Charlotte

And then there's Saint Susan.

2009-04-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

Some Major and Minor Saints, Part One

2009-04-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

Some saints are highly secular. But for some of us they form our strongest religion. In no particular order whatsoever: Merce Cunningham. Diane Arbus. Kerouac & Cassady. Dickinson. Hemingway. Capote. Plath. Martha Graham. Anne Sexton. Jackie Robinson. Sandy Koufax. Julia Child. Muhammad Ali. Louis and Ella. Tenzing Norgay, because sherpas do all the heavy lifting. Jane Goodall. Harvey Milk. Tennessee Williams. James Baldwin. Langston Hughes. Robert Lowell. Billy Wilder and Kurosawa, Hitchcock and Truffaut, Polanski, Kubrick, Capra, Almodovar, Cuaron & Inarritu & del Toro. Imogen Cunningham. Lucien Freud. Francis Bacon, Botero, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Robert Crumb, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Tina Modotti, Claes Oldenburg, Meret Oppenheim, Diego Rivera, Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, Wayne Thiebaud, John Currin, Helen Levitt, Richard Avedon. Hunter S. Thompson, dammit. Philip Roth. Joyce Carol Oates. Donald Barthelme. Raymond Carver. Roald Dahl. Salinger Salinger Saliger. Philip K. Dick. Junot Diaz. Nikolai Gogol. Amy Hempel. Patricia Highsmith. Shirley Jackson & Alice Munro. Grace Paley & Dorothy Parker. Annie Proulx. George Saunders. Ricky Gervais and Eddie Izzard forever amen. Christiane Amanpour. Hendrik Hertzberg and every single New Yorker writer. Rachel Maddow. Maira Kalman. Philip Petite. The French, period. While we're at it, the Italians. Anyone not going to a 'tea party' circa April 2009. The voters of Iowa and Vermont circa April 2009. Gore Vidal. Ingrid Newkirk. Michael Pollan. Fareed Zakaria. Toni Morrison. Tom Stoppard, still. Gloria Steinem, always.

Viva the Mod Squad!

2009-04-07T00:56:00.000-07:00

It's a stunning image, isn't it? I was cruising through the New York Times slideshow on Michelle Obama's style while in Europe for the G20 summit, and this one stopped me in my tracks not because of what she's wearing but because of, well, let me count the ways.

First, there's the hysterical size difference between the Lilliputian royals and the land-striding first couple. Second, there's the difference in complexion and all which that says about the strides we've made in the Unites States. (If the Queen and her consort were black and hip, I bet there'd be less discussion about doing away with the royal family. "What's your name? Who's ya daddy? Is he rich like me?") Then there's the décor, and the perceptible difference in smile-ability.

It was after I walked away from my morning peruse of the news to water the plants on my balcony that it struck me. It's so simple.

The Obamas are modern. Queen & Gang, God bless'm, are not. By choice or by accident, they just aren't. Then it hit me that Bush wasn't modern either, and that was one of his major flaws. And McCain, as much as I sort of respect him, didn't strike me in many ways as modern, either. While conversations and debates raged on during the election about conservative v. liberal, capitalist v. socialist, right v. left, Republican v. Democrat, something was missing. We weren't talking about modernity, and we should have been.

Modernity is a great word. Because it's not about leaving the past behind. It's this: "The quality of being current, or of the present," and what could the world possibly need more than leaders who are "of the present"?

Bush and Co. made me want to flee from "now," because they were essentially driving us back into the Dark Ages anyway. The Obama's, on the other hand, have so quickly restored my sense of happiness about being alive in this day. I rest my case and leave you with one more image. I'll go back to digging in my own modest—but modern—dirt now. —Charlotte

A Wabi-Sabi Life or Nothing

2009-04-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

The Japanese word wabi means harmony, peace, balance, what's simple and unmaterialistic by choice. Humble and in tune with nature. Sabi means 'the bloom of time'. I love that: the bloom of time. Not the waste of it, but the bloom. What's most intriguing to me, lover of The Plath and The Sexton, is that both wabi and sabi in their most original, ancient forms meant desolation and loneliness. And now mean so much more, especially when taken together.

The architect Tadao Ando says this: 'Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. Wabi-sabi is flea markets, not warehouse stores; aged wood, not Pergo; rice paper, not glass. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet. That our bodies as well as the material world around us are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came. Through wabi-sabi we learn to embrace liver spots, rust, frayed edged, and the march of time they represent.'

Here's to frayed edges, loving use, and a raucous and persistent celebration of cracks and crevices and the stuff that creams and gels and even surgery will never fix. We are the wabi-sabi women. Get used to it.

My Daughter Lila

2009-03-30T14:43:00.000-07:00

Lila kind of has my eyes. She seems to really have the shape of my face, parts of my body, a certain swagger that connotes confidence mostly when we're not feeling confident at all. Right now Lila and I have sort of the exact same hair color, but that won't last. She was born in October and thank god, I don't remember much of the labor pains or the screaming or the rush to the hospital or even if we rushed at all. Memory takes that away, thank the benevolent gods. Who said that if we remembered every second of childbirth, humankind would have died out millenia ago? Precisely.

But of course she's not literally my daughter, not in the 'pulled from the womb' kind of way.

Honestly, who made up these archaic rules?

Many of my nearest and dearest have children. Many other of my other nearest and dearest do not (we have instead the furred, domesticated, can't-judge-you-in-therapy kind. And we love them pretty much the same.) When I was ages 11-32 the last thing I wanted - literally, the very last on the list - was any sort of baby growing into any sort of child becoming, eventually, an adult. This may have had something to do with blatant and loud feminism (I like to think so) or my leftist worry about overpopulation (definitely an early bloomer here) or the strange moment when Ronda P. turned to me when we were 13 and told me she was not only pregnant but she was keeping the kid and naming it after me. Honestly, I didn't know we were that close. And I did what any sensible 13 year old would do - tried to talk her out of it, stayed as far away from her as possible, and felt badly when she left Raleigh Hills to 'see if she liked Catholic School.' Right. Precisely.

Later, marrying Rick, that desire changed and I decided yes, a child (or two) would be wonderful. Didn't happen. Didn't kill me. But it was sad to realize I would never have a child (or two) of my own. Sad that we didn't adopt. Sad that I didn't have all that the words 'my child' implies, not the least is which telling other people to shut up, you're going to raise your children any damn way you want.

Sometimes, I ache for those words.

So, Lila. Her mother was the first person to ever look me in the eye and say 'This child is yours, too.' Her mother was the first person to ever put my hand on her ripe and round belly and proclaim 'This child is yours, just as much as she is mine.' With Lila she did that. With Henry. With Ginger. They are our godchildren, but we have other godchildren. There is something about Lila and Henry and Ginger that transcends that rather benign label, something that reaches right into my gut like it does whenever I see any of my nieces and nephews, something that's flesh and blood and bone and marrow. It's DNA. It's inescapable. It doesn't scare me at all.

We bathed them and kissed them and cleaned up after them and read to them. We were there when they started to walk and we're there, now, when they're falling in love and hating wrestling or loving drama or reading about Jack The Ripper or wishing on some crazy falling star. I didn't get the birth pains or the right to declare them to the IRS or the amazing ability to know that forever, always, they will always be mine, regardless of how I raise them or what city they move to. We're not really related after all. They can turn away or turn on a dime. We could have one big fat blow out of a fight with their parents and poof - it will all be gone. Probably not. But it could. It's transient, I guess. Fallible.

But I look at Lila - at Henry - at Ginger - and I feel so insanely, profoundly, shut-up-and-dance blessed.

Look at her.

Who wouldn't?

2009-03-25T03:35:00.001-07:00

And another thing: I'm not going to be saying "I'm sorry" with the same frequency as before.

One of the beautiful (and irritating) things about life in Italy, is what happens to women when they hit, oh, seventy. They have the most unbelievable sense of authority. If the bakery is crowded, makes no difference. They push to the front. If they have to cross the street, they stop traffic. If there's advice to be handed out, they do it without waiting for permission. In other words, they're not big on being overly concerned about what other people think. They are looking out for Numero Uno.

That said, if they trip you with their canes, sending your pomodorini flying, they're quick to say "I'm sorry." These women aren't impolite, they've just arrived at a certain point in life. And that's the point of being very, very sure of who they are, what they're about, and what they think. I'm taking notes.

The world is full of people who are rude, pushy, and immorally egotistical. We're suffering the effects of that now, globally. But there are people like me, who have tried for too long to make up for it in not-quite-the-right way. Quick to apologize, quick to assume that I'm the one who's likely in the wrong, I've been saying "I'm sorry" when it probably wasn't necessary—even when, and here's the clinker—I didn't feel sorry. What was I doing?

I'm going to stop. I'm going to start blocking the traffic if necessary. (Excuse me, but the crosswalk should be a safe place to cross the street, no?) I'm going to defend my opinions. I'm going to respect my own course of action, and not second guess it because it's inconvenient to someone else—my children, my husband, the other mother in the park, the account guy at work, etc.

I'm going to say "I'm sorry" when it's warranted, and I will mean it. But when it really isn't appropriate, I will politely decline. Someone else can be sorry.

2009-03-23T09:26:00.000-07:00

Last week when I went to see my therapist, we were discussing fine-tuning, next steps, where I'd like to see improvements in my life, etc. And I made a rather lame joke about what I'd do when I grew up. A joke, I'm embarrassed to say, I've made too often lately. Lazy.

He let not more than a millisecond pass before looking me squarely in the eyes and pronouncing the following: "You are grown up, Charlotte."

There it was. Out in the open. Shockingly true and strangely liberating. I am grown up. Mature. A woman. Whatever I've done so far has been a matter of choice and consequent decision-making. Whatever I will do or not do from here on out, will also be a matter of choice and consequent decision-making. Nothing, at this point, is because I am too young to figure it out yet, too "green," too inexperienced.

It's time to stop making excuses. It's also time to accept what I'm not going to do—ever—in order to make room for the many things I am going to accomplish, still.

I think in our youth-obsessed culture, which has largely to do with outward appearances, we confuse the "beauty" of youth with the excuse of immaturity. But you can't really have one without the other. And right now, I'm not interested in either.

Maturation has been anything but boring. So I'm no longer going to deny the fruits of my own labor—those which have hung heavily, ripely on the tree, and those which will grow in seasons to come.

And I'm sure as shit not going to my grave waiting for myself to figure this out. It would be such a shame to grow old and die, having bypassed the part where you know who you are. The wrong words tend to wear grooves in our minds, until we believe them. I'm changing the words today.

—Charlotte

Spring-Cleaning Outside In

2009-03-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but this "economic crisis / change of season / time to prepare the taxes / lull in my career" is doing me good. In fact, I'm enjoying it. (I have to immediately interrupt myself with a quick caveat or two, though: First, hunger hasn't set in yet, and hopefully it won't. Second, I have nothing but brotherly concern for the people who are suffering real hurt. I wish I could make things better for them.)

But, for me, it can't be denied. This Spring feels fresher than any I can remember in personal history. The stakes feel higher, but the chances feel greater. We've gotta clean up. And the best place to start is in your own sphere. And as I've got nothing better to do, that's pretty much what makes up my daily To Do list.

It all started with the crisis. No work. OK, so use the time otherwise. That's the point of freelancing, right? (I mean, if you're going to angst your way through workless periods it's not a career path you should choose.)

Then, the season changed. The cloud lifted, the sun decided to shine and shine and shine—all as if to say, "Whatever happens, bigger forces at work, and guess what? Sometimes they're benevolent." But it was also an inevitable reminder of the overriding existence of Cycles. That helped a lot. Things will "come back." They always do.

Then, tax-time rolled around. Not my favorite time of the year, but somehow very, very cathartic. There's no way to do it without digging out the boxes, confronting the detritus collected over another 365 days. Organizing. Categorizing. Editing. Totaling-up. Fessing up. It feels good. And it leads, like a pebble tossed in the water, to ripples and every larger ripples of Putting Things in Order.

Once the receipts were harvested, the copies made, the signatures illegibly placed on the appropriate lines, we moved to closets. Storage rooms. The garage. Things are neatening. Lifting. The mass of stuff we've accumulated as a family (three generations) in the past years, was all sorted through this week. And most was given to charity. Sifting through it was sobering. "We. Bought. All. This. (?)" Yes, we did. It was not nice to face up to, but it's the first step in realizing that, no, it doesn't all need to be replaced. And, no, you don't have to have "new" stuff. And, wow, somehow it all has more value—real value—when there's much, much less of it.

And what happens to me when I start yanking out the hidden stuff, organizing the socks, giving to charity—cleaning? Things in my head start moving around too, reordering themselves. With every "thing" that is dealt with, there's a bit of gray matter that gets dealt with too. The Inbox of my e-mail demands a good cleaning out, but so do the drawers of my soul. Fears, interpersonal "messes," bad habits—they all require the same measured "dealing with." And as a result, I start feeling lighter inside, as if so much more were possible. And as the literal clutter is removed, so is the clutter in my head. There's a clearing. And inside this clearing, I feel both safe and sound and strangely content. I also feel something inside me soar, that was too weighted down before.

So even though there's no work coming in, there're still bills to pay, and the world hangs in the balance, here in my growing clean spot, I feel that I just might be able to dream my way out of this one. So much more seems possible, because so much more light can get in.

—Charlotte

Coraggio

2009-03-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

NOTE: This is just another take on what Janet said. But it bears repeating.

Here in Italy, it's said countless times a day: "Coraggio!"

Courage! Buck up! You can do it! But it also a carries a sort of "Get on with it" connotation at times. Like, here's the courage you need, now shit or get off the pot, if you'll pardon my French.

It's used on every occasion that requires the minimum stiff upper lip. When you decide to spend the summer in Milan instead of joining the mass exodus out of hell. When you have to eat all your vegetables. When you realize you have to undergo open heart surgery performed in the mythic Philippine style. When you merely have to face another day head-on. It's used for challenges great and small, enormous and insignificant. Once in a lifetime, and run of the mill.

And, you know what? It actually helps to hear it, to receive an injection.

Why do I say this? you ask. Because I've concluded...no, wait, my Mom told me...that Life requires boatloads of it. That at every turn, I would be well served if I carried an extra, even illegally sized, stash of courage in my backpack/suitcase/bra. You doubt me? Let's talk.

Marriage. (What could be scarier?) Childbirth (ditto). Failing. Succeeding. Losing your job. Not finding a new one. Bush et al. Knowing that somewhere out there, there really is a Camorra. Flying (why does that plane stay airborn anyway?). Climate change (or any other headline you'd like to focus on).

And that's just the obvious stuff. What about our internal workings? Our deep fears? Our persistent flaws? The demons—oh let's just be honest and call them "our choices in life"—that continue to haunt us? The long term effects we are having on our children? The hurt we dole out without realizing it, until it's too late? The losses? The chances that never come back? The people we love that never come back? The people we lose? There is nothing to keep us going at times other than courage. Nothing.

•••

Let's get back to climate change for a minute. If you're a woman, you have your own internal variety to contend with, the one that will strike sooner or later, requiring you to spend all of the winter months in cruise wear.

Which leads me to my theory that a middle aged woman came up with this rallying cry. (Coraggio!) Can we talk about shocking? Can we talk about unpredictable? Can we talk about paranoia? Can we talk about not knowing what's around the corner, not even tomorrow morning? That's what happens...and it happens for a long time...and it starts without warning...and it goes on and on...even though the prevailing signs and symbols say that you are "fine." I know, I know. Many of my friends sailed through this change in their life without a ripple, a hiccup or a lost hair. I, on the other hand, have days where I feel like I'm not a day older than 25, followed by days where I feel like someone who couldn't possibly be me. Things are "off." Things are out of whack. I'm out of whack. And then it goes. And then it comes back. And then...

In every phase of my life, I've been behind in my ability to "get it." Just when I realize where I am, I've scooted on to the next point. Right when I'm getting used to myself, my body has decided to take me on another blindfolded tour of yet-another amusement park (with even scarier and more thrilling rides). Just when I think I know something, really know it, I realize I don't.

But this time, I think I do know something. I know it in my cells, in my weird-feeling head. I know it with my heart. I know that my Mom was right. It--Life--does take courage. And Janet was right. You have to get through it.

You just have to. And you can. Coraggio.

—Charlotte

2009-03-02T15:13:00.000-08:00

Going Through It

There’s something in the air lately. Some of it's the optimism, and relief, that comes from finally having a President worth believing in. A President who not only understands the depth and frailty of our economy, our safety, our future, our planet, but a leader who believes in our ability to make it through times such as these and come out stronger on the other side.

But the other emotion traveling through our atmosphere is realism. The realistic expectations of the grownups we're being forced to become instead of the children we've been for almost a decade now. We're finally being told to be adults, instead of greedy, spoiled, careless brats. Or to be fearless, instead of being full of fear. Not fearless enough to spend money we don't even make, but fearless in the way we attack our real lives. Fearless in the way we look at reality and deal with it, make the most of it, adore it. We’re supposed to learn what matters, what counts, what lasts. We’re supposed to take stock of our lives when we go through something like this, when our friends are losing jobs and money isn’t just tight it’s squeaking.

Right now, some of our friends are taking leaps they weren't before. Quitting and starting over. Leaving for a new city. Being brave instead of refusing to move. Several friends are getting divorced. Others have considered it, dropped it, picked it up again and set it down in some dark corner hoping it will stop making noise. In every case, money or lack thereof has absolutely nothing to do with it. Most have been married a long time, some more than 20 years, others ten or eleven or twelve. In almost every case the wife or the husband – or both – have been thinking about it, tossing the idea of it around, for years. And then shoving it under the rug. Until the rug is so high they have to walk around it when entering the house.

For some of us, the rug covers a multitude of things we refuse to look at. Whatever we’re ashamed of, afraid of, loathe to admit. The way we eat too much, care about ourselves too little. The phone calls we never make, the list of to do's that gets longer and longer, the life we let slip away, the lies we mumble to ourselves and others, the way we act like we'll live forever and a day. And we walk around The Rug until we’ve created a groove in the floor, then a gutter. And we look up from the gutter at the shadow that mountain makes and we feel buried beneath it. And our necks ache so, constantly turning away from the shadow it casts.

One of the best things I learned during therapy was this: Whatever it is, you have to go through it. Not around it, through it. Grief, fear, loss, addiction, anger, hatred, self-loathing, we’re so afraid to go through the darkness of the woods. Like a child we keep pretending if we don't acknowledge it, it will cease to exist. Close our eyes, whisper the words, poof! it will disappear, like some lovely fairy tale.

But it doesn't.

And it won't.

And it's ourselves we bury in that darkness, not just those Things We Shall Not Name.

And so to my friend who keeps shoving things under the rug:

Stop.

Get out the vacuum.

You can get through this.

God it will be messy and painful and there will be times you can’t stand another second and you'll cry and you'll wish you'd never started and you will feel awfully alone and utterly overwhelmed. But then you'll see something through the trees: a light.

And you will be brave.

Because sometimes brave is the only thing to be.

- Janet

On Cottesloe Beach

2009-02-16T15:00:00.000-08:00

About nine years ago my husband said the worst thing he’s ever said to me. We were laying on the beach in Zihuatanejo with some friends, drinking and playing cards, utterly relaxed and a little high and discussing, as so many couples do, our current crushes and the ones we’d be allowed to – oh what’s it called – you know, the exceptions to the fidelity rule.

Obviously all the names were of the celebrated and illustrious sort, for I’ve yet to meet any couple secure enough (or idiotic enough) to openly discuss each other’s attractions to the real and the next-door and the familial and the best friends in our midst. Anyway, when it came to me I listed my usual suspects, for I tend to fall rather faithfully the first time around. My husband has heard the same four or five names repeatedly over the years; I know his, he knows mine. There’s an odd comfort in that.

And then I paused and said ‘But I think my top one right now is Heath Ledger.’ And this husband of mine reared up on one elbow – we were all laying on our towels in the sand – and barked, honestly barked, practically spitting the words out – ‘Heath Ledger! But you’re old enough to be his mother.’

Old enough to be his mother? Shouted as if this idea wasn’t some brilliant original sin but an atrocious crime someone should really pay penance for. Lock her up! She likes younger men! Oh you hideous horrible crone – look at you, you’re 40 years old for god’s sake. What surprised me was his attitude. After all he’s twelve years older than I, so in truth he could have sired me, legally, in some of the sadder of our Fifty States. Why was he so repulsed by a nineteen-year age difference?

But then it occurred to me. It wasn’t the difference in age. It was the direction.

If I’d cooed Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe, Sean Connery, everyone would have nodded, Ahh, yes, wise age-appropriate choice. But obviously my erotic compass was off, pointing wildly due South instead of decently North.
So. Have I mentioned how unabashedly pissed I became?

How righteous in my indignation?

How, after two split seconds of stunned (and hurt) silence, I reared up as well and shouted the first two things I could think of. One, why was it singularly appropriate for every crush of his to be as young as his own daughters? And two, why was it so commendable of me to appreciate men 10, 20, 25 years senior but appalling if their ages decreased instead of progressed? And then I asked when the hell did he become Sophocles?
Now I suppose I should be thanking the fates in some Oedipal/Electral way that this truly was the worst thing he’s ever said to me. I suppose I’m lucky that way. And I suppose it should also please me how prescient my tastes were, and how over the years I’ve been able to torment him for his own appalling choices (Denise Richards, yes, Denise Richards) while pointing out the brilliancy of mine.

But it also makes me realize that by 37 or 38 I had turned a chronological corner, at least in society’s eyes, and that I was too old for some things. Some people. Some dreams. Some desires. Perhaps the words hag, biddy, gorgon, harpy, harridan, shrew are too harsh, but the dictionary still offers them up when you type in ‘old woman.’ Perhaps it’s utterly ridiculous to consider human years like the rings of a tree. But I’ll admit this, shh, tell no one: when my nephew told me last year that his 22 year old friend found me ‘really hot’ I wasn’t merely delighted. I was vindicated.
Which brings me, at last, to this photo. On New Year’s Eve we sat on Cottesloe Beach, just outside Perth in West Australia, overlooking the Indian Ocean. It’s gorgeous, iridescent, unspeakably blue. Wild parrots gather in the Norfolk pines at dusk, calling to each, finding their mate. Each night hundreds of locals sit on the shore and watch the sun sink into sea, and for once that verb ‘sink’ does no justice to the act. Here on the other edge of the world the sun doesn’t just vanish, it melts. It’s liquefied, a living lava lamp of orange and magenta and scarlet, taking a full ten minutes to finally disappear.

It was one of Heath Ledger’s favorite places in the world.

He had such excellent taste.

Speaking of which...

2009-02-08T07:34:00.001-08:00

Image: www.travel-to-naxos.com

Death. Doors....Tourist spots?

Odd how these go together (last two posts and the comment in between). Metaphorically. Poetically. Emotionally. Clearly, death, despite being the ultimate closure, is yet another passage for those it takes and for those it leaves behind. We call what comes after it "The Great Beyond," not knowing, really, what that means. And those of us who lose someone go forward, despite our loss, into unchartered territory. Sometimes territory that is unpredictably beautiful.

So nothing could be more powerful, graphically, then the shape of a door or a window framing nothing but time and space, making manifest an invitation from here to there. But the outlining of space does something else—at least for me. It gives me a tremendous sense of optimism, a sense that infinite possibility is just there, within reach. A complete Liz Lemon: "I want to go to there." And despite the fact that a delineation is by definition a border, the opening without context makes me feel border-less. It makes me feel utterly free.

Janet's comment to Teresa mentioned the Portara at Naxos. It seemed only fitting to include it here. Time to move forward. As individuals. As a collective. The door is right there. And it's open. Maybe the time is not opportune to go to Greece, but we can walk freely through those beautiful doors in our minds and in our hearts.

—Charlotte

Something that Lasts

2009-02-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

Our friend Mark died a year ago today.
All week the words Write something write something Write anything on the blog to prove you're here kept passing through my head, but waking up this morning there was only one idea that made sense. 365 days ago Mark left. And because he's never coming back, this will be for him.
Mark loved good cigars and great Scotch and the way those two make a night a lot more gorgeous. He was a poet who loved other poets most of all. He was passionate about the written word and how incendiary it can be, how loving, how perfect. He hated phonies and pretentiousness and idle gossip, although gossip is never idle and the phonies should know that most of all. He loved his wife and his dog and his cat and he loved the ocean, too, and these mountains most people take for granted.

He loved the simple act of reading a book. He loved the heft of them, the craft of the spine and the ink, the smell of pages and how no internet will ever replace all that, how reading something online has no soul but what we force into it. He loved law-breaking liberals and profane revolutionaries and those who go howl in the night and he threw this dark pointed look at anyone he met who understood none of it. There was something feral about him when pushed by an idiot or fool. He knew some idiots and some fools.

He loved New York City and Paris and Woody Allen films and Che Guevara and Fidel Castro's pitching; how he would have loved to have seen Soderbergh's 'Che'. He didn't judge others which is a quality in such short supply I can think of almost no other besides him. We shared some of the same Gods - Cormac McCarthy and Kerouac and Ginsberg and Cassady, Lowell and Plath and Berryman and Carver and Rexroth, and always at the top of the list the great, misunderstood, underappreciated Hemingway. Mark simply did not live long enough, if quantity of years are anything to go by, and I think they are. It's such utter bullshit that those who die young somehow cram all the good years in: we say this so we can live with the loss, sweep it away, hope it won't happen to us. Some people get all the luck; others try to make and save and store up what they can. Whenever I read something beautiful or bruising or benevolent or terrifyingly true, I will try to think of him. Mark, this is for you.

My Autopsy

There is a way
if we want
into everything

I'll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the
small and glowing loaves of bread
I'll eat the waiter, the waitress
floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks
like water at night

The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese
poems

You eat the forks,
all the knives, asleep and waiting
on the white tables

What do you love?

I love the way our teeth stay long after we're gone, hanging on
despite worms or fire

I love our stomachs
turning over
the earth

There is a way
if we want
to stay, to leave

- Both

Matthew Dickman

Dream.

2009-02-04T04:40:00.001-08:00

Our heartfelt thanks to Teresa Elliott

who contributes the following.

If ever a winter was long, it's this one.

If ever there were a time to dream, it's now.

Consider this the portal.

Well, here's my pink door. It came to me in a dream. It was actually the finishing touch on my courtyard, which came to me in a daydream (never confuse the two), and was made possible when I sold my husband's truck. It's a nice courtyard, peaceful. There's a fountain—that's de rigeur, ain't it?—and sometimes I catch Homer, a dog, drinking from it, standing like a man with his feet on the rim; other times I see grackles bathing in the upper basin; sometimes I see both of these things at once. Those are very sweet days.

Also in the courtyard are melon-colored hibiscus and pink bougainvilla, there's a gardenia bush that sends off blooms faster than I can place them behind my ears. There are several kinds of bamboo ringing the perimeter, the most dramatic kind being Timer, which grows so mightily I expect it to come for me in my sleep. And I bet there are worse ways to go. In fact, I know there are.

Also in the courtyard, behind the pink door, is a big ship, made by a potter, my husband's friend, intended to house my darling's ashes, except I can't get them out of the more official brass container. I took the brass container with me to Key West not long after I received it. We stayed in a grand old plantation home surrounding...a courtyard...wait a minute, is that where this whole thing started? For sure we did a lot of daydreaming that trip, so maybe...

The dream in which my pink door starred was the first time I'd woken up laughing in just the longest time and I guess that's why I needed to bring it to life. It quite broke the spirit of my handyman—he hasn't returned a call since—but I'm told it amuses passersby. My across-the-street neighbor says they take pictures of it. I wonder what they think. I hope they think it's "witty." I hope they don't think I'm trying to keep the bad stuff out, 'cause you can't. I'm trying to keep the good stuff in. And it's working out okay. Not perfect, but okay.

Teresa Elliott is a writer living in Austin, Texas.

If ever there was ripeness.

2009-01-30T23:32:00.000-08:00

If you don't know who Maira Kalman is, it is never too late to find out. She will make up for all that lost time. Please watch this video. It is worth it just to get to her last line.

For more such inspiration, please visit http://www.ted.com

—Charlotte

We couldn't agree more.

2009-01-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the plug, Mr. President.