Monthly Archives: January 2008

Very, very cold

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Yesterday it was about 50 degrees F when I left home in the morning, about 35 degrees when I left work in the afternoon, about 12 degrees when I went to bed, and about -1 degree when I woke up this morning.

There’s nothing like a tangible weather front, one that can be seen on more than just a weather map, one that can be seen coming, one that can be felt by all the senses.

There was the day I was at the lake, watching lightning of a storm further south. I noticed the black clouds moving toward me and stayed to watch the front advance. I felt the temperature drop and swear I could sense a change in pressure. Fascinated, I watched the line of the downpour as it advanced past 57th Street beach (where everyone ran screaming) until suddenly I was behind it, soaked.

Last night when I got off the bus I didn’t feel especially cold, but flakes of snow were starting to appear in the lights. In front of The Park Shore, I noticed that my hands felt cold and achy, and the wind picked up in moment. The storm predicted had begun.

I might have had the wrong key out for the back gate because at first it wouldn’t open. I couldn’t see with my hair blowing in my face and my eyes watering, and my fingers were now between achy and numb. Under my coat, sweater, and heavy shirt, I started to shiver with cold and wind. If necessary, I could always go around to the front door, but it would take longer, and I wanted to get inside as quickly as possible.

Then, while struggling with the lock, I experienced a very brief panic — a sensation that I had to get out of the elements now, or else. At that moment, the gate opened. For the rest of the evening, wind gusts occasionally shook the building and snow obscured the night, but I was warm.

When Sir Edmund Hillary died, I read the obituaries, then I skimmed some articles about an English climber who, depending on the version of the story you believe, was left to die or was left for dead by other Everest climbers. The writers described the conditions on Everest, but how can anyone convey what has to be experienced to be understood?

Reading about what extreme cold, high winds, and lack of oxygen can do to the human body reminded me that there are those who thrive on danger because with it comes excitement, glory, or notoriety, or all three. I am not one of them; I will never climb Everest. While I may not be the adventurous type, however, I am an imaginative one, and underlying these moments of panic are flashes of imagination and empathy, some sense of what it is like to experience uncertainty about pain and suffering, about life and death. It’s not rational; I had no real fear of freezing to death by The Flamingo’s back gate. For a second or two, though, I was pure animal, unsure and afraid of the future.

And very, very cold.

1977 blizzard, a birthday, and awareness

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There are few dates I remember specifically unless I write them down, which I seldom do. January 28, 1977, is one of them. I was 15 years old, it was my mother’s 58th birthday, and my father didn’t come home.

I realized today that 31 years have passed since that night. I think I finally convinced my mother to blow out the candles and to cut the cake. It was an anxious, sad occasion, minus any joy, and then we didn’t know that she would celebrate only six more birthdays.

At 15, I think I really believed that parents lasted forever. A couple of my uncles by marriage had died by then, but I never thought of my cousins as being without fathers. I didn’t think of such things at all.

At 58, my mother knew that nothing lasts forever, or even very long. She’d lost her parents, she’d lost siblings in both childhood and adulthood, and she’d lost a husband and child. Life had programmed her to be anxious, and had not as yet programmed me at all. While her determined anxiety and fears troubled and even annoyed me, my uninformed optimism undoubtedly disturbed her. How could I be so sure that everything would be all right and that my dad would be safe in the storm?

I couldn’t, and probably I wasn’t. But I wanted to be, and therefore I was.

Two years later, a boy in my high school band was hit and killed by a drunk driver. We had been only nodding acquaintances, but he was intelligent, talented, and friendly. I was shocked. I went to the wake and met his parents, but it was months before I accepted that he would never play the trumpet with us again. It felt wrong. How could someone alive suddenly not be alive, not show up for practice? And when would this absence end?

My dad turned up the next morning, not entirely understanding the consternation and stress that his enforced absence had caused. All’s well that ends well, but there was nothing happy about my mother’s birthday in 1977. We were trapped by the weather and by fear.

My mother had me when she was 42 and died when she was 64. Of all our birthday celebrations, my dad’s, hers, Virgil’s, and mine, her 58th birthday is the only one I remember, the one during which an awareness of loss and what it could mean must have crept into my consciousness. At 46, I now know all too well the effects of loss and fear of loss and find myself fighting not to become my mother, sure of the worst. Children and adolescents can afford to be optimists; I can’t afford not to be one. I want to believe.

Dream: Dangerous feelings

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I was in a workplace that I didn’t recognize and was called into a room with co-workers I didn’t know for a preview of training we had signed up for.

We were told to assess our personalities by writing down words that describe ourselves. I found this to be very difficult, but eventually came up with four or five words; I think one of them was “feeling,” which I thought was cheating because of Myers-Briggs and INFP.

I kept looking for J. C. from work because I thought she would know about and could explain this exercise, which made no sense to me — picking a few descriptors subjectively isn’t a personality assessment, and I was under the impression that it wouldn’t go much beyond that.

When we had come in, we had been assigned to seats, and now it was announced that there would be assigned seating for lunch for perpetuity. J. C. may have arrived by then, but even her calming influence couldn’t keep me from becoming hysterical. I couldn’t believe what was happening and that I was to be forced to spend every lunch hour with the same person or people every day. It seemed unbearably cruel, and I was torn between anger and despair.

A group of us was taken somewhere to tour the grounds. I noticed that what appeared to be a spotlight in the ground was tracking our movements and opening up as if preparing to fire. I pointed this out to the group, and a young man told me to take most of the group to higher ground. Something happened, although it wasn’t quite an explosion, and when I looked back and down, it appeared that the earth had fallen in, but the fate of the young man and those who had stayed to help him was unclear under the settling dust.

Then we were inside, and I was on upper floor looking down into a laboratory. A girl stood on the other side of a window, laughing and apparently waiting for the group to move on. I noticed something in the lab turning toward her, and before I could do or say anything, it had attacked. She was gone, leaving behind a white harness. Someone explained that she had gotten too close to the window and that a security system in the lab had detected the harness, which was a tracking device. Everyone found that they were wearing one.

This story seemed too pat for me — why endanger people without warning? — and I saw the enforced lunch seating in an even more sinister light. No one else seemed perturbed by these incidents, but I could feel danger everywhere like a tangible presence. Perhaps that is what I had meant by “feeling.”

Book review: The Literary Lover: Great Contemporary Stories of Passion and Romance

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The Literary Lover: Great Contemporary Stories of Passion and Romance. Edited and with an introduction by Larry Dark. New York: Penguin Books USA, 1994. 368 pages. ISBN 0140171649.

From the young to the old, the sanctioned to the illicit, the mundane to the erotic, and the bored to the ecstatic, editor Larry Dark traverses the sometimes perilous territory of love, lust, and marriage in this collection of twentieth-century stories.

Dark deliberately progresses from the young to the middle-aged to the elderly. He begins with “Faces of Madness” by Rachel Ingalls, a tragic story of teenage love and adult lives destroyed by parents who are more concerned for their money and reputations than for their own children. Left to themselves and in their simplicity, William and Jean discover more about love than the adults around them have ever understood. When they are betrayed by those who claim to love them, they separately retreat into madness, wounded irrevocably.

While not as disturbing as “Faces of Madness,” Steven Millhauser’s “The Sledding Party” is haunting in its own way. Most of us will recognize Catherine’s adolescent perturbation and discontent as she struggles with her friend’s half-understood declaration of love. Millhauser captures the mixed, confused emotions of the girl on the cusp of womanhood — fear, longing, alienation, desire to belong, and the pull between the things of childhood and those of adulthood. During the course of one crisp winter’s night, a subtle transformation takes place that leaves Catherine’s future to the reader’s imagination.

At the other end of the spectrum is the calculating woman whose “Instruments of Seduction” (Norman Rush) include not only objects but a keen sense of how to manipulate her men earned through decades of practice. In “The Habit of Loving,” Doris Lessing shows how even an older man with a lifetime of experience can mistake basic sympathies for love in his quest for something wonderful and greater than himself. “Letter to the Lady of the House” by Richard Bausch outlines what can seem to be the natural course of a long marriage. “People start out with such high hopes,” the letter writer’s aunt tells him after revealing that “whatever she had once loved in [her husband] she had stopped loving, and for many, many years before he died, she’d felt only suffocation . . . only irritation and anxiety when he spoke.” The letter writer begins his epistle after “another one of those long, silent evenings after an argument . . . We had been bickering all day . . .” but asserts that, “. . . whatever our complications, we <i>have</i> managed to be in love over time.” He concludes, “And if I could, I would do it all again, Marie. All of it, even the sorrow. My sweet, my dear adversary. For everything that I remember.”

Some stories, such as “Morning” by Joyce Carol Oates, seem strangely uninteresting given the topic. Caught between her safe, predictable husband and her married lover, Lydia makes the obvious choice, which somehow works out — at least for the near term, with a hint of what is to come.

As a contemporary tale from 1988, “Graduation” by Andre Dubus is dated. Even with its deep South setting, the story’s focus on virginity, the effects of its loss on a 17-year-old girl, and the lie she tells her future husband seem overstated. “Safe Houses” by Nadine Gordimer is dated by its historical context, but is nonetheless a compelling story of a political enemy whose “safe house” is that of a woman too rich, insulated, and bored to realize or guess at his identity or his nature. Theirs is the relationship of people who do not want to change their lives, but who seek opportunity and the passion of the moment. “Yet of course he had feeling for her — hadn’t he just made love to her, and she to him, as she did so generously — he should not let himself dismiss the relative sufferings of people like her as entirely trivial because it was on behalf of nothing larger than themselves.”

“Innocence” by Harold Brodkey, 34 tedious pages of the student-narrator’s detailed analysis of his attempts to bring his girlfriend to climax, does not improve with a second reading (I had read it before in another anthology). By contrast, the gem of this collection is William Kotzwinkle’s beautiful, moving, sizzling “Jewel of the Moon.” The older bridegroom of the arranged marriage begins as his wife’s slave and, through months of delaying and building up to the consummation, completely masters her and her desires to their mutual ecstasy. “Jewel of the Moon” is both loving and highly erotic, a combination that is rare in this anthology.

The Literary Lover has its moments, but there are surprisingly few insights into relationships. Even John Updike’s “Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer,” while more original and interesting than the Oates story with a similar theme, falls short, as does “Houses” by David Leavitt, in which a man is torn between life with his wife and the emotional home and future he has imagined for himself and his male lover. By the time I came to the end of The Literary Lover, I was afraid that perhaps all that can be said about love in its many forms has been and that there is nothing left. I hope I am wrong.

27 January 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Witches and diver scallops

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Yesterday I knew it was going to be a glorious weekend when the first thing I did Saturday morning, after a night of restless, troubled, broken sleep, was to break an irreplaceable tea dish.

Last night, while I was cutting open packages of goat cheese for a cheese-and-crackers orgy, I also cut a good-sized divot in my left ring fingertip–using children’s safety scissors. Who knew they would be so effective? On the plus side, I’d just bought antibiotic bandages. Perhaps I knew . . .

In between incidents, J. was kind enough to come over and drive me to Whole Foods. He was excited about getting the “softball-sized” diver scallops he’d reluctantly passed on last week.

I said, jokingly, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Whole Foods didn’t have any left?” He laughed.

Guess what? They were sold out of diver scallops.

I joked about it in the car. J., who’d also been disappointed that a café he had wanted to go to had been closed due to earlier winter hours, said, “Maybe you’re a witch.”

Not likely, because if I were I could find far more productive use for power than to deprive J. of a few diver scallops.

Dream: Labyrinthine locker room and reunion

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This time I was at a college reunion.

I think this began in an underground locker room, where I was looking for a swimming pool and a bathroom. It was deserted, probably closed, and some of the passageways were very tight. Part of me wanted help, but part of me did not want to be caught.

The place was eerie in an apocalyptic way, quiet with small noises, dark, cavernous but close. I was alone as one can be, even though at one point I think a former gym teacher offered to point me in the right direction.

I found myself in a large, dark wood room, probably a banquet hall. It seemed to be a reunion of my college class from the University of Chicago, yet I recognized nearly everyone around me as a member of my Frontier Central High School graduating class. There was one girl in particular, Paula, who I have not thought of in 29 years. I looked around and saw more and more people I’d known from high school, even though I have proven bad at remembering and recognizing them in real life. They were neither friendly nor hostile toward me, including Paula. I said to her, “How strange. I went to a university that I thought no one else would go to. I didn’t see any of you during the entire four years, yet here you all are.”

I asked one boy, name unknown now, what he had majored in at the University of Chicago, and he said, “Aerospace.” The answer threw me off, so I asked, “The engineering side?” He gave me a distant look and a vague answer. Aerospace didn’t sound right. I became confused by all of these improbabilities and think I may have wormed my way through narrow passageways back to the underground locker room. It was less disconcerting.

Puppet Bike and people watching

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I sent a friend links to Puppet Bike videos on YouTube, and he commented that the audience reaction is entertaining in itself. I noticed this, too. Because it was warmer last night, I had the opportunity to watch Puppet Bike and its audience interact for more than an hour.

First, it strikes me how many people pass by as though they don’t see the bike or puppets or hear the music. Some of them may see it all the time, but it seems odd to me that it doesn’t bring them even a momentary smile. Others just look sour, and I wonder how it feels to be behind that mask most of the time. Often, I look and feel unhappy, even depressed of late, but sour seems like an even worse expression to turn toward life.

Many people who appear not to have seen Puppet Bike before do stop and get into the spirit. Four girls between 8 and 12 years old, accompanied by adult women, stopped for a while and soon were dancing and laughing together to an old song they couldn’t have known or recognized. Several men whipped out digital cameras and mobile phones, and one man took photos with a professional-level camera. A few men walked by, looked for a moment or two, and left tips in the box office, as though they are familiar with the puppets (perhaps they saw them one day with the children during a trip to the city). One woman with a European accent shyly asked me if I had a $1 bill for four quarters. I did, and the $1 bill ended up with the puppets (later, so did the four quarters, after I ran out of singles). There were also groups of teenage boys and young men who weren’t embarrassed to be seen watching and laughing with the puppets for a few moments.

Then there are those who are clearly Puppet Bike fans. One, an attractive, affluent, beautifully dressed middle-aged woman, stood squarely in front of the puppets, giggling, clapping her hands, and keeping up a running commentary on how much she appreciates them. (J. overheard her on my mobile phone and said she must be his kind of person.) Another middle-aged woman came along and said to the owl that he’s missing an eye. (He acknowledged this by covering his face and nodding.) “Awww, are you okay anyway?” she asked. The owl nodded and began dancing to prove it. This may have been the same woman who asked if the two kitties could come out to dance. The tiger gave her a long, hard look until she said, “Oh, I guess you’re a kitty, too.” This seemed to placate the offended feline.

A police officer on a bicycle appeared toward the end of the performance. He wore a tight-lipped grin as though he didn’t exactly approve, and for a few moments I thought he might say something or cause a problem. Then he broke into a wider, more sincere smile, waved a few times to the puppets until they noticed him and waved back, then rode off. I realized the grin was a cover for genuine emotion; how often do we get to see police officers allow themselves to enjoy themselves? Even police officers need a little Puppet Bike in their lives.

Not quite toothless yet

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I have a high threshold for pain, I’m told by those who should know — health care providers whose job involves causing pain, e.g., sliding long, cold, pointy metal implements up a nostril.

So when a tooth started to object to hot and cold liquids and foods shortly after my dental examination and cleaning last week, I was inclined to ignore it. After all, tooth pain often comes and goes for no discernible reason. Only once did the pain not subside, forcing me to break down, see the dentist, and find out that I needed a root canal (said the endodontist’s assistant after the procedure, “Weren’t you in agony? There was blood and infection everywhere under there.”).

This time, however, I waited only a few days instead of a few months, even though the pain was intermittent and not that bad. Why? Because my overactive imagination started to feel millions if not billions of bacteria pouring into the vulnerable spot, setting up housekeeping, and eroding the structure away until the nerve was exposed. When I ate or drank anything, I could feel the resident bacteria inviting in more friends, saying, “Welcome! Bienvenue! There’s plenty to go around!”

To quell the greedy, destructive masses, and my imagination, I made an appointment with the dentist.

The dental assistant poked, prodded, and even pounded around my upper left molars, where I thought the problem was, then took x-rays. The moment I bit down in preparation, I realized the unhappy spot was not in the back, but in the middle. The dentist, who sees all from her office via computer, directed the second set of x-rays at #14 and #15; a shadow turned up. After she took her turn poking around, she came to the conclusion that it would be prudent to replace both old silver fillings. Prudent — and painful. And costly.

An hour later, she was almost done, telling me that now I have more filling than natural tooth in that area. She wanted to test my bite with the new fillings, but apparently I was too quick to snap. “Not yet; that’s my finger,” she admonished, although when I apologized she said that there was no harm done; she’s gotten “pretty quick” herself.

A few minutes later, her hand got tangled up in my hair. “Hmmm, you bit my finger; I pulled your hair,” she said. “So now we’re even,” I noted. She laughed nervously.

Of course, the last laugh was hers (in her office) when the office manager presented me with my portion of the bill.

Ouch. Perhaps I’m more sensitive to pain than I thought.

Note: Don’t get the wrong idea. I have a great dentist, worth every painful dollar.

Dream: Surreal move

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The house I was in, made of brick and as large as The Flamingo, was about to be moved to a spot a mile or two away, although I was under the impression it would be very different.

I never left the room I was in, but as time passed I puzzled and wondered how such a large house could fit onto a truck and be moved in one piece. Every now and then I would sense that it was about to topple over or crumble from the stress of the movement, or be knocked down by a bridge or in an accident.

The journey seemed to take hours, which bothered me quite a bit because of the distance. I fretted about the stability of the structure, the time it was taking, and an appointment I was committed to keeping and was close to missing. I felt that I wanted to miss it.

I remained oddly passive, awaiting the building’s fate and my own, which never seemed to come but which hung out there like a poisoned carrot on a stick.

One more thing to worry about

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This is from a recent BBC news article online.

A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is racing towards a collision with the Milky Way, astronomers have announced.

At this point I was thinking, “All my troubles . . . all our troubles may be solved!” No more anxiety about the Iraq war, the economy, climate change, personal upsets . . . and no more Britney Spears headlines. Blessed relief on all counts.

Then I read the next paragraph:

Smith’s Cloud, as it is known, may set off spectacular fireworks when it smacks into our galaxy in 20-40 million years.

That doesn’t really help me today, and even if I were on a low-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, which I am not, 20-40 million years may be pushing it for my life expectancy.

It contains enough hydrogen to make a million stars like the Sun, say experts, and its leading edge is already hitting gas from our galaxy.

Already! This could be closer than we think and bigger than all of us. And we were worried about the hydrogen bomb.