Topic Bouquet

P O S S I B I L I T I E S

2010-06-17T20:17:00.018-04:00

I look both ways when I cross one-way streets. Today, when I caught myself doing it, I thought:

"Does this make me a walking illustration of the paranoid personality?"

But then, I thought again.

Hopefully, I told myself, it's a display of the actor's, fiction writer's, scientist's or mathematician's mind at work. Such minds wade through millions -- trillions -- of possibilities, as they make their personal sense of a character, theorem or other riddle. During that prep time, no possibility is out of the running.

When my children were little, if we were driving somewhere and someone swerved in front of us, I'd attempt to steer clear of road rage, and instead, put this question to the kids: Why would a driver do that?

I might start the ball rolling with something like: Somebody may have really scared him just now, and he thinks he's running for his life," or: "Maybe something very, very sad happened, and she isn't thinking straight." As for the kids, it's amazing what their unADULTerated minds could come up with.

Today, I realized that what I'd been thinking, right before I looked left and right, had gone something like this:

Couldn't there be an occasion when, driving, I might turn a corner, my thoughts ablaze, and then, horrified, realize that on a street I know so well, I had just turned the wrong way? I might then notice a woman strolling 2 inches from my bumper, a woman who had just looked only the other way.

Come to think of it, by a wide margin it's friends in the arts and sciences who report that they do not own a single TV set, in fact, never heard of a tenth of the shows that are into multiple years of being hits.

(I, on the other hand, have heard of them plenty -- studied up on them, in fact, then chosen a few. I use TV as the poor woman's theatre trip. Right from home, I can watch stage productions in their entirety on PBS, or, on the major networks, one venerable stage actor after another who has transished to a series on the small screen.)

But I think I understand those TV-free friends. They're entertained enough.

Maybe what many TV viewers are searching for during their off hours, in all those sitcoms, hospital dramas, police procedurals and reality series, is a version of the extravaganza that goes on in some minds, whether those minds are on or off duty.

CRASH! BAM!

2010-01-31T01:20:00.014-05:00

I was walkin' along

Mindin' my business

When out of an orange-colored sky

Crash! Bam! Alakazam . . . *

Those who know that song (and by now, is there anyone but me?) remember that it has to do with love at first sight. But it also pretty well describes what happens when the pieces of some play, novel, short story, whatever I've been writing suddenly rearrange themselves and whammo, the illusive key to a character, event or entire plot is slammed into my hand. If I'm writing an article or some other piece of nonfiction, then the way to approach it, or the order that the jumble of pieces should go in, suddenly becomes crystal clear.

I'm sure many of you in the same racket have experienced this. I wonder if you've also found that this almost always happens when you weren't even thinking about that piece of writing, or probably about any writing at all. It's exciting, feels magical.

What caused me to bring it up is that today, for the very first time, while I was walking home from a long, inspiring Shabbos lunch, not thinking about writing, it occurred to me that the sensation is not comfortable That had never crossed my mind before.
I'm not suggesting its comparable to childbirth, which people often describe as worth the experience because of the result. Unlike childbirth, we're talking a nanosecond of discomfort. Maybe it's more like getting struck by lightening, and then, the next split second, there you are in full possession of your superb discovery, and with none of the ill effects associated with your brief accident.

I suppose that's why I thought of the lyrics to that song today for the first time in a whole lot of years. Crash, Bam, indeed. But not for long.

_________________________________

* "Orange Colored Sky" by Milton DeLugg and Willie Stein, has been recorded since the 50's by some of the most popular entertainers of each succeeding generation. Nat King Cole, Danny Kaye and Doris Day each recorded it. Then, so did Burt Ward (TV's Batman) -- the latter version produced by Frank Zappa. It was also sung by Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman) with the help of several Muppets, on "The Muppet Show".

Creating

2010-01-26T00:21:00.011-05:00

How long ago was it? It can scare you when you try to estimate how many years have gone by. Maybe 20. No. Maybe more. Toni Morrison was teaching a course at Bard College, traveling the two-and-a-half hours once or twice a week from NYC. I drove the 45 minutes from my town located on the other side of the Hudson, because Ms. Morrison was going to end the semester by reading from her work and talking a bit, and the public was invited.

Aha. It must have been more than 20 years ago, because they actually thought it reasonable to hold the event in a smallish classroom. Students and visitors filled that room so tightly that I found myself inches from her left cheek, watching her profile as she spoke.

I discovered as she read from her novels that I could recite whole passages with her, under my breath. I'd read each book only once, but I knew whole sections by heart. The phrasing was so lovely, how else could the wording go?

In between readings, she spoke. I have no memory of what she talked about that night, except for one thing. She said that the line between fiction and nonfiction was a false boundary. Both could be creative, which placed them in the same camp. Of course! Once you hear it, you know it's true.

It's a wonderful concept, because it gives permission in both directions. It allows writers to tackle anything, labeling and limiting themselves less. And to those who want to stick with just one of the two genres, say nonfiction, it gives permission to write poetically and uniquely nevertheless, instead of thinking they're not allowed to go there.

I don't remember my ride home, but I'd like to think I sang a Toni Morrison book all the way, and maybe I did.

SAVING DAYLIGHT

2010-01-06T18:39:00.011-05:00

Every year, I stop earlier than I want to. Yes, I surrender and join those who have turned their clocks back. I give in only because my absence from the bandwagon is driving family and friends nuts. Somehow, they don't appreciate living in my parallel universe. Even then, though, only the kitchen's time has to go. My bedroom and my wrist are my business.

Well, actually, my watch has now succumbed. Too many people were growing frantic if their eyes fell on my watch when I was out in the world. So a mere few weeks after the kitchen clock backflipped, so did my watch. But as I write this, we've passed the two-month mark, and I'm still saving daylight -- if only in my bedroom.

I already had that clock 20 minutes ahead. So now we're talking a hefty chunk of time between my bedroom hour and everybody else's. As a result, I'm not fooled much. With the exception of the occasional split second before my brain swerves into gear, I am always aware that my bedroom hour is a good distance from Everyone-Else-Around-Here Standard Time.

Most years, it gets old, and I join the throng. One year, I never reached that point. In that case, come April, when everyone else had to put their clocks ahead an hour, mine just stayed put.

At least for the time being, my private clock bestows upon me a unique outlook. Make that two outlooks -- because when I check the time in the bedroom, I have one of two reactions.

Some days I think: Wow. It could be after 10:00, but actually, it's not even 9:00. I am wealthy with time!

On other days, however, my thoughts go something like this:

Hmm. It may not be true, but my clock says a quarter after ten. And that reminds me that 10 o'clock and beyond await me not that far ahead.

To wit, is time half full, or is it heading toward empty?

DEFINING ART

2009-07-23T16:00:00.007-04:00

At my Jewish day school, our principal was British and preferred being called "headmaster". Occasionally, he'd visit our 8th grade classroom during the half of the day reserved for secular studies. He would knock and politely ask the teacher if he might interrupt for a moment. Then, with that dignified but musical accent, he’d read us a bit of literature – poetry, perhaps, or part of a play. Or he’d lead us on a journey into the unknown by presenting us with an algebraic problem or two.

The 15 of us in the class had moved as a group through the grades, gaining or losing one or two along the way. So I probably could have predicted who’d surreptitiously groan at this interruption (usually a boy).

I, on the other hand, adored every moment of every visit. Later, when I enjoyed all of high school algebra and geometry, chances are there was a connection. Even today, a long time later, I keep on my book shelf a plane geometry review book I once came across at a yard sale. Some day, I hope to find the time to relearn all those theorems. They can take me from a problem’s skimpy offering of givens to the seemingly impossible proof, if I just discover the necessary connecting steps and take them.

At college, I majored in English and spent a lot of my extracurricular time with the university's theatre groups. Math courses were not among my requirements. Besides, without really thinking about it, I had begun to divide the world in certain ways. Scientists and mathematicians were other people. I was in the arts.

But what makes something an art?

I don’t know if Mr. Plotnick, our headmaster, pondered such matters when, before a visit, he'd contemplate what to bring to our classroom that day. Literature? Math? Did it matter? Did he realize on a conscious level what he was teaching us? A Shakespeare play and a well-solved math challenge are more the same than different. They are both poetry.

Abandonment

2009-07-09T19:03:00.004-04:00

She phrased it differently than I’d ever heard it phrased at meetings like this before. Just slightly. Did anyone else notice how it made all the difference?

“I wish,” she said, with a longing that I could feel from across the room, “I wish they’d been inside me.”

She was talking about her twins, adopted at birth. It had been an open adoption, with a birth mother passing them along carefully, having decided that it was best for them. They were five years old now. At this adoption support group meeting, there was a clear sense that we could say absolutely anything – and we often did. And yet, this group member didn’t think of saying that she wished she could have born children, any children. These particular children were hers so definitely, that she felt the need to have had them inside – them and no one but them. It wasn’t the experience itself that she wanted for herself. It was the closeness she felt for her son and daughter that made her wish, for their sake, for that missing piece.

I realized that I would express my yearning in a different way. After all, our stories were not the same. My two adopted children, two years apart in age, had each spent time in institutional settings before my agency had discovered them. I wanted the abandonment in my children’s past to simply cease being true, before they grew old enough to think about it.

A few months after that meeting, my son developed a curiosity about his birth mother. Sitting on my lap at home, he pieced together this question in the careful words of a three-year-old::

“What . . . her . . . name was?”

I offered her first name. That seemed to satisfy him for a year. It wasn’t until he was four that he brought it up again, in a very different manner. It was bedtime. We had just finished reading a book together and perfecting our duet of “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” I had turned out the light and was lying on his bed with him, waiting for him to drift off to sleep. But he wasn’t ready for sleep that night. In his voice in the dark, I sensed the same yearning I had heard from that mother a while back, at the meeting.

“I wish that I came from your tummy,” he said.

I wanted to rescue him from the deep mourning I could hear. So on went the light and right there, right then, we arranged it. At my suggestion, he tried pushing his head under my T-shirt. It startled me how very much bigger than a newborn he was already. It wasn’t easy for him to get even his head under my shirt.

Then, I went into labor.

“Ooh, the baby’s coming,” I called. “I can feel it! He’s ready to come out. He’s coming now!”

As might be expected with a birth, he had some trouble exiting my T-shirt, so there was indeed a sense of triumph when he made it. He had but a moment to glory in it, with arms stretched high and a victorious shout of, “Ta da!” before I grabbed him in my arms.
“My baby!” I said. “My baby.”

Now, seventeen years later, the woman who did give birth to him and three others has phoned them all, even before the youngest had reached the age of 18, the earliest age when the law says okay if both parties want it. (It just took one of them to give her the numbers of the other three.)

When she has called, she has opened with these words: “This is your mommy.” And then she has called them by the names she says she would have given them. They want to see her, to get to know her. They want to fill in empty spaces. They’ve been spending a lot of time with her.

I worry for all of us. Is she trying to convince them to recognize her now as their only mother? What if her reason for making contact doesn’t have anything to do with their good? She left them once already. I can’t let that happen to them again.

As for me, I comprehend, as never before, how it feels to be abandoned.

Childhood Memories: The Bath

2009-06-29T19:37:00.018-04:00

My childhood bathroom hasn’t gone anywhere. Strangers use it now, and for all I know they may be the umpteenth strangers who’ve claimed that it’s theirs. But uh uh. It will always be mine.

It’s small, right at the top of the stairs, my parents’ room to the left, mine to the right. I’m in the tub at this moment, all warm in the steam from the hot water. I’m wrinkling more by the minute, and the magazine story I’m racing to finish dampens further every time I put it down for a sec on the tub’s rim, or turn a page with a dripping hand. Somewhere up ahead, after college, I’m going to meet Angelo, and in the letters he’s going to send me from prison, he will attempt to expand my education about criminal justice in the USA. In one of those letters, he’s going to suggest that people transform their bathrooms into solitary confinement cells to find out what that feels like. Among other tips, he’s going to suggest:

~ Take any ornamental cover off the ceiling light and leave a bare bulb.
~ Keep the heat down so it becomes clear what a gift it is to be allowed to wear your underwear, because it can keep you that welcome bit warmer.

I’m 10 and in the tub, but at the same time, I’m an adult remembering back, and so I know that Angelo, whom I will not meet for 16 years, is 13 as I relax in the warmth. At 13, he has already endured years of punishments from his father, although he has seldom understood what he did wrong. The punishments have included sitting in bath tubs like the one I’m in. But Angelo’s have been filled with ice cubes. The punishments have also included ropes. Any connection with ropes between me and my parents is this: On days when none of my friends are around, my father is generally willing to hold one end of a rope, my mother the other, so I can jump.

If Angelo is 13, that means he’s about to be kicked out of his family’s apartment by his dad. His mother will not intervene. He is going to have to live on the streets and, as he will some day tell me, fight the neighborhood dogs for food from garbage cans. By 17, he will be under arrest for a serious crime. There will be front page coverage for days in the Spanish language newspapers. By the age of 18, he will be in prison.

I know this even years before I meet him. I am 10 and in the tub, and although I'm determined to finish this dripping story, I know that it will end as they all do, with mystery solved, family feud or friendship mended, Angelo’s fury at the world faded, and his programs in the prison to teach inmates machine repair or art well underway when, against all logic, we meet.

The Economy, or: Upside THAT!

2009-04-12T15:45:00.004-04:00

Found it!

You know that silver that’s supposed to line every cloud, economic or otherwise? I’ve seen it! More precisely, I see it all over the place.

Not that it can halt my bouts of panic, self pity or despair. It can, however, create a nice counterpoint.

So, viewers, let’s play “UPSIDE THAT!"

Today’s silver lining challenge: (What else?) The Economic Downspin.

Challenge accepted.

Silver lining Number One:

THE ENVIRONMENT IS PROFITING – ELECTRIC COMPANIES ARE NOT
Or
WHAT REASONING COULDN’T ACHIEVE, THE DOWNSPIN CAN.

To illustrate: In its latest newsletter to residents, my local school district lists ways it has found to cut costs.That’s understandable, since a large hike in our upcoming school taxes would earn a D-minus from us voters.

One money-saving gesture on the district’s list – smarter use of energy. Waste will be more effectively curbed. Lights in rooms not in use? Coffee makers on all day? Computers still on when the workday has ended? One-sided print-outs? You get the idea. All are to become bad habits of the past. Sensors and timers are going to help.

Well, that kind of waste has been on the list of every environmental org. for perhaps 15 years. It actually made it to the school district’s list before this year, but without much fanfare. Now, for reasons not environmental, the necessity is clearer and the commitment far greater.

Multiply that by thousands of school districts and businesses, then throw in countless households, all trying to lower their energy bills. Economy and thermostats go down, planet’s chances of survival -- up!

Lining Number Two:

OLD VALUES ARE NEW AGAIN

I’ve just submitted my final draft of an article (for Living & Being Magazine) about people who have started or continue to run small businesses during these hard economic times. I focused on three examples in the Mid-Hudson Valley. Not one owner was down or worried. A restaurateur, a seller and renter of event supplies and services, two wine and liquor retailers, all felt their enterprises were meeting customers’ changing needs.

The occasional visit to a restaurant is a relatively inexpensive “up”, said one. Another observed: “people are still getting married, having babies…” so they continue to celebrate major life events – just differently. And finally: The owners of the liquor store felt that people needed them even more now. Why?

“They’re entertaining at home more often . . . There’s more cooking going on, family, friends, fellowship.”

Now that sounds like quite the sparkling lining to me.
___________________________________

A postscript of a personal sort:
Having lost my job to across-the-board layoffs at my organization, I’m searching madly for another position, while doing the occasional freelance assignment as the supply of those shrinks as well.Like clockwork, things around my house have chosen this difficult period to break down or wear out. Of course, there’s no money to pay for the big ticket items that simply must be replaced. Dark, dark cloud.

Persuasive friends plus encouraging publicity from governmental agencies convinced me I’d be eligible for help I never thought I’d need. So household crises paired with an economic downturn have allowed me to feel, very personally, the caring attitude that must have led to the legislation that in turn led to the help I’m receiving now. Additionally, in my rural county at least, I’ve been impressed by the way in which recipients – all kinds of us -- are treated respectfully by county workers. Like colleagues, is how I’d describe it.

Silver lining Number 3:

I was given the opportunity to find all that out.

Imported Words

2009-03-12T21:11:00.000-04:00

If right about now, you could use a taste of 11/4/08, I have a paragraph for ya. I came across it shortly after I'd posted my own thoughts about that phenomenon: Election Night, '08. I opened the Winter edition of the Barnard alumnae magazine. (It had been waiting patiently for a week or three on my living room coffee table.) Right up front was a stunning description by the college's new president, of what she'd encountered in the Barnard-Columbia neighborhood that night.

I'm honored to place it, with permission, right below, directly above my post on the topic. Think of it as an eyewitness report worth saving for your grandkids, as filed by Dr. Debora Spar.

" . . . My kids and I . . . sat glued to the television from the moment the pundits began opining. When the results were called, less than a second after California's polls closed, we heard a spontaneous roar break out along Broadway. Without thinking, my son and I dashed out the door and headed for the street. Outside the gates of Barnard, a huge crowd had already formed. People were screaming and crying, hugging strangers, and dancing along the pavement. Without a leader, without a destination or plan, an impromptu parade started marching -- running, skipping, cartwheeling . . . Police officers entered the crowd and gave high fives to all who passed; night cleaning crews at Tom's Restaurant and the Deluxe literally put down their brooms and started to dance along. When security crews hastily closed off patches of the street, taxi drivers got out of their cars and gleefully joined right in. I've never seen anything like it in my life."
- Debora Spar
Barnard Magazine
Winter 2009

Still -- Thoughts about the Election

2009-03-04T00:29:00.003-05:00

I've been thinking about those earthshaking events of the past that have brought people out into the streets of their neighborhoods and into the hallways of their apartment buildings, to find comfort among total strangers. All such experiences that I can personally recall have been negative (assassinations, blackouts . . .) That communal reaction was always the silver lining in a very, very dark cloud. I had therefore come to assume that tragedy is a necessary ingredient in the phenomenon of strangers lowering their guard.

Then came Election night, '08. What happened after the polls closed and the results were announced had all the earmarks of what followed those crises of the past -- except for one thing: the absence of any sense of tragedy. I feel privileged to have gotten to see this more positive search for community.

People did go out looking for others. According to a story in New York magazine, one group of teens broke spontaneously and uncharacteristically into a chorus of the National Anthem. Somewhere else, a megaphone materialized and was passed around, so that people who were strangers to each other could speak emotionally of their pride and happiness. This sort of thing was happening not just around the country, but around the world.

Months later, I'm still mulling that November alteration to the usual scenario. I wasn't around for the end of WWII, but the other day it occurred to me that, judging from the famous Times Square photos, that was also a case of happiness that drew people together in the streets. My next thought was, wait, that wasn't an occasion of total happiness, because it marked the end of a a tragic time, a difficult time, a period of terrible conflict.

Which in turn led me to the question: Is that the most suitable description of the deal on Election Night, too?