Marriage

I wrote this piece on marriage before Mark was diagnosed with cancer. While it questions the institution, it pays homage to Mark’s tenacity and love, which is what it's all about.


I recently reread Shulamith Firestone’s book, The Dialectic of Sex, and while I reject the cyber solutions she posits, her description of marriage is right on the money:
“A second cultural prop to the outmoded institution is the privatization of the marriage experience: each partner enters marriage convinced that what happened to his parents, what happened to his friends can never happen to him. Though Wrecked Marriage has become a national hobby, a universal obsession—as witnessed by the booming business of guidebooks to marriage and divorce, the women’s magazine industry, an affluent class of marriage counselors and shrinks . . . still one encounters everywhere a defiant ‘We’re different’ brand of optimism in which the one good marriage in the community is habitually cited to prove that it is possible.”

I’m guilty as charged. While I’m not married, per se, I’ve lived with a partner for 33 years and have two children with that partner—Mark. I didn’t exactly rationalize our relationship with the thought that we could do it “better,” at least at the beginning. It was fraught with difficulty from day one, as I had no idea how to live with a man and he’d already spent nine years living with his first wife. Ours was more of a partnership by default (a common theme in my life). We were both living in Placitas at the time, a little village at the north end of the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque, when our mutual friends Anne and Charlie decided to move to Arkansas where Charlie could go to Physician’s Assistant school. Mark and I both claimed that they’d told each of us we could move into their cheap little house. He was living in a leaky dome up in Dome Valley and my landlady was moving back into her house and kicking me out. We were having an affair, but it was new and I certainly was not ready for a commitment beyond that. I suggested we move into Anne and Charlie’s house as roommates. Mark would have none of that, so we moved in as lovers and I did a lot of crying those first couple of months, as I learned what it meant to live intimately with a man.

We started out keeping our finances separate. There was never any doubt that I wouldn’t marry him. But we became a couple, partying with all the other couples and families in Placitas, some of whom had previously been members of communes but had eventually drifted into more traditional relationships. The months somehow turned into years. We were both so poor we eventually pooled our resources. And we started building a house together on the land I had bought outside the village before we were together. (I’d borrowed the down payment from my mother and made monthly payments; in those days, land was cheap.) Five years later, we had our first child. Seven years later we had our second one.

Before we had the first one there was talk of extending our family to include a female friend of ours who I had known since college. She was single, she and Mark got along well, she loved New Mexico, and we didn’t want to be a nuclear family. We talked about having two mothers, but I don’t think we talked about our being two wives—at least with her. I always thought it would be a good idea. But we had lots of good ideas in those days and few of them came to fruition. So I ended up in a nuclear family situation, rationalizing like all the rest, that we wouldn’t make the same mistakes our parents made, that our generation was more enlightened and better able to avoid the pitfalls of marriage, particularly with regard to a woman’s position in society. I don’t know why we made those assumptions, as on a daily basis we had to deal with all the cultural issues that had never been resolved, particularly the woman’s issue. I fought like hell to maintain a position of equality and independence, both circumstantially and psychologically. It made for a very combative relationship that ultimately elicited resentment and regret.

But for some reason we stayed together. Inertia? Money (we never made any)? The kids (our older son once told us he’d kill us if we ever broke up)? Fear of being alone (it is a travesty in this world that our two choices are living in nuclear families or living alone)? I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, and even discussed it once with a therapist who I went to see when the built-up resentment over the battles I’d had to fight to maintain equality was making me hateful. And I finally figured out what it comes down to is loyalty. I know that Mark, as a white male who grew up in a culture of dominance against which we all have to struggle, has made that his struggle as well, and I know that he has tried, to his best ability, to shed those shackles. I also know that despite his foibles and insecurities he has been incredibly loyal to me and continues to try to make me happy.

So here I am, more than 30 years later, rereading Shulamith Firestone (I’ve searched for information about what ever happened to her after the publication of The Dialectic of Sex and have come up with nothing). My older son has been in a series of monogamous relationships since he was in high school, and is now marrying a lovely and independent woman. My younger son is still in college and to my knowledge has never had a serious relationship with anyone. Both of them at least had a less traditional upbringing than Mark and I did, were less pressured in high school to pair off and become part of a couple, and have been exposed to an array of peers and friends who function quite well outside mainstream society. But they also have the weight of the marketplace on their backs and have less opportunity to slip through the cracks that Mark and I managed to navigate because the cracks aren’t there anymore. I don’t know if either will ever have children, and although Mark and I would be doting grandparents, that may not be such a bad thing. But I fervently hope that they both find some way to live with other men and women who will care about them, be intimate with them, and create a family for them, not necessarily based on marriage between a man and a woman with two kids.

Solution: To recognize and encourage—socially, legally, economically—everyone’s personal choices about how they want to live with other people.

Drug Company Advertising

Even though we have satellite TV, which we got for our younger son and so Mark could follow the NBA, I don’t watch it much, and when I do I am continually astounded by the commercials. Instead of seeing the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet and getting your wash sparkling clean with Tide and Cheer, we can now ingest drugs for erectile dysfunction, arthritis, constipation, osteoporosis, high cholesterol, fibromyalgia, dry eyes, and depression. The commercials all end with a list of potential side effects for each drug —dizziness, weight gain, blindness and heart attack—along with the caveat, “Ask your doctor if this drug is right for you,” but what do we need doctors for? The drug companies have identified the diseases, designed the drugs, and have apparently bought off the doctors who now prescribe the medicine. The patient just needs to tell the doctor, “I saw Viagra advertised on TV and I want some,” and voila, he’s got an erection.

I’m old enough to remember when doctors not only diagnosed and prescribed the drugs, they actually came to your house to do so. When I was in grade school, our doctor in Colorado Springs came to the house when we were too sick to go to his office. Which usually meant we had the chicken pox, measles, mumps, or the flu. Now, of course, they have vaccines for all of these diseases, but in those days all the kids got them and were down for at least a week or two. I remember when I had one of them, and the doctor wanted to give me a shot, I ran out of the bedroom and into the closet in the kitchen that went under the stairs. This was a very deep closet, full of all kinds of things besides clothes, and required a major extraction by my parents, with a lot of kicking and screaming on my part. But the good-natured doctor waited until I quit screaming and still gave me the shot.

Even with the new vaccines there are plenty of diseases out there that need a drug — mainly all our new “lifestyle” diseases — ergo all the drug advertising on TV to all the couch potatoes watching it. Everyone over 60 seems to be on medicine to reduce their high blood pressure and cholesterol. Type II diabetes is epidemic, but weight loss medication will allow you to drop the pounds without ever passing up that piece of strawberry cheesecake or walking farther than the car to the house. Environmentally caused auto immune diseases like fibromyalgia are bringing once active people to their knees with chronic pain and loss of energy. Lyrica, however, will help you do all those things you used to love to do, like watering your plants and going on vacation to Bermuda. Baby boomers are dropping like flies with hip, knee, and even shoulder replacements, after years of pounding their joints by running on pavement or climbing across all those scree fields on their mountain ascents. But Boniva once a month will keep those bones strong and sturdy, and Ativa once a year will keep that “on the go woman” going.

After being bombarded nightly by these unfulfilled promises no wonder everyone is depressed and can’t sleep. But there are plenty of drugs for that, too. No more of those hard core barbiturates, you can take Ambien and Lunesta, which will lull you into a gentle sleep and make you fresh and alert the next day, assuming you don’t have any of the potential side effects like walking in your sleep and falling down the stairs or falling asleep while you’re driving, which a former Santa Fe county commissioner did, claiming Ambien made him crash into that parked car on the side of the street. If you’re depressed you can take Zoloft or Prozac and get rid of all that anxiety and worry about whether you’re going to have to spend the last of your paycheck on a tank of gas or enough groceries to get you through the week. You may even have to cancel your high-speed Internet connection, or god forbid, your satellite TV service that allowed you to find out all about Prozac in the first place.
So we’re all going to live to be 90 as long as we take our daily regimen of 20 or so different medications every morning and night that are probably working against each other to counteract each one’s desired effect, leaving us all demented. But hey, we’re not dead, and apparently that’s all that matters.

Sustainability

Sustainability is a word often bandied about by environmentalists, economists, and politicians trying to establish a platform. I don’t remember ever using the word myself when I decided to live in rural New Mexico for the rest of my life. Whatever we were after was more along proletarian lines, or the opposite of whatever we defined as bourgeois. There were plenty of other words to describe these goals: hippie, back to the land, alternative generation, or counter culture, but they all somehow missed the fundamental motive of wanting to discard any notion of being part of consumer culture while advocating for the overthrow of the government. How we could achieve the second goal in Placitas or El Valle, New Mexico, I don’t know, but we certainly could be nonconsummers when we couldn’t afford more than a weekly trip to town or anywhere you could spend money. Did that mean we were living a sustainable life? Not really, but it was probably as close as we could come to being self-sufficient without being labeled Luddites and maintaining some semblance of normalcy for our kids.

We weren’t prepared to live like our Hispano neighbors had only fifty years ago, when they grew all the food they consumed except for coffee and sugar. They grew all their vegetables and fruit and canned it for the winter. They raised sheep, pigs, cows, and goats and dried the meat for the winter. They grew and milled their own wheat for bread. They made most of their own clothes and musical instruments and actually spent time at each other’s houses talking, singing, dancing, and being neighborly. That’s the most important thing we learned in our El Valle lives: becoming buen vecinos.

I was surprised to learn recently that writer Jack London moved to a 1,400 acre ranch in northern California in 1905 where he could “leave the land the better for my having been.” He wrote in his journal, “My work on this land, and my message to America, go hand in hand.” He said he spent two hours a day writing, which is how he supported himself, and ten hours a day farming.

I thought if I worked on the land then I could have a message for America, that there was a better (whoops, not a poststructuralist word), more equitable way to live, if not sustainably, then at least consciously and lightly. Like building your own house, cutting firewood to heat your house, growing some of your own food, fixing, or at least maintaining, your cars, learning how to take care of yourself. If we could do everything the pioneers did, we could at least get a taste of a day in the life where everything was tended to: your body out in the garden, your mind at the computer, and hopefully your soul, the melding of the two. I try to never sit at the computer for more than a two-hour stretch (except when I had a deadline to finish the index for Malcolm Ebright’s book, Witches of Abiquiu, after which I gave up doing indexes) or I won’t have a body left to sustain a mind.

Perhaps the agenda calls for watering the vegetable garden or garlic field, which is really not that difficult as almost everything is on a drip irrigation system—I turn a few valves on and off and the plants are wet in a matter of hours. Of course, because everything is so sufficiently watered, things grow in abundance, and more and more of my time is devoted to dealing with the harvest. Some days I’m on my hands and knees thinning the carrots that have to be thinned in stages, rather than one fell swoop. Other days I’m stooped over searching for string beans hiding on dense vines only a foot high. At least the sugar snap peas grow six feet tall, although that means I’m constantly adding new string to the trellis to catch the incessant growth. Every day I search for the disgusting green tomato worms that if left unsquished would soon look like the caterpillars in Dune.

Irrigating the pasture is not so easy. One of my neighbors calls the corner of the field to which he can never get the water “Arizona.” We have a Sahara, a Gobi, and a Death Valley. No matter how many feeder ditches we dig off the main acequia, no matter how fast we get the water, or how much water we get, there are bare, brown spots that will never receive the sparkling waters of the Rio de Las Trampas. Too bad for them.
On the days when I do have to go to town, I always anticipate with great relief the final turn onto the dirt road that leads two miles to this village of twenty families. I find myself playing a game, pretending that this is the first time I have come here, that I have never before seen the lush, green valley or mountain peaks that are the setting for the village homes. I try to remember what I felt years ago when we first stumbled upon this place on one of our periodic, wistful trips to northern New Mexico when we still lived in Placitas, where we no longer wanted to live. I distinctly remember saying to myself, “You’ll never be able to live here,” as we made our way along the road of tin-roofed, handmade adobe houses painted lovely greens and pinks, sitting in fields of timothy grass, grazed by cows and horses, with at least one mandatory junked car on display. I thought at the time that it was probably the most beautiful landscape in New Mexico, if not the world, and I still do: the 13,000-foot peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains provide the backdrop, the piñon-juniper hills rolling to sandstone cliffs the vista. Now, as I drive down the road, I never fail to marvel that I am able to live here, surrounded by all the things that are meaningful and comforting to me. I lead a privileged, if not sustainable, life.

Hero Worship

Ironically, my Westminster Dog Show piece, which ends with the phrase, “Yeah, Tiger Woods” (the dog), was posted just before the golfer Tiger Woods’ escapes were aired in public. The following piece, also written before the airing of Woods’ troubles, seems particularly appropriate to the situation.

They stripped Michael Phelps of his Wheaties gig for smoking pot. Gee whiz. He’s twenty-three or twenty-four, doing what most other twenty-year olds do at some point in their lives and he gets taken off the back of a cereal box. But the question is, why is he, or Alex Rodriguez or Mark McGuire or O.J. Simpson, on the back of a cereal box in the first place? I assume being on the cereal box means that kids are supposed to look at the picture and want to be just like you, meaning they want to be born with the physical attributes and the psychological ambition and drive that allow these guys to make it to the top in their respective sports, where they are paid millions of dollars to single mindedly pursue success in a very narrow field of interest. What is heroic about that? Is making millions of dollars heroic or simply what our society equates with success? If it’s heroic, why don’t they put the pictures of corporate CEOs on the back of cereal boxes. Or do you have to earn millions of dollars and play a sport to be a hero. Is it the single mindedness (or simple mindedness, as the case may be)? Then why aren’t members of the U.S. House of Representatives on the back of cereal boxes. One certainly has to be single minded to disrupt your life every two years to raise the money for re-election.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not shedding any tears for Michael Phelps. He knew what was expected of him when he signed up to make millions by selling Wheaties or Nike sneakers. It’s us I feel sorry for. Apparently our lives are so bereft that twenty- something swimmers (swimmers, for Christ sake!) are the people we find most interesting and want to spend time with by reading People Magazine and joining fan clubs. I could understand wanting to spend a day with, or wanting to know better, Emily Dickinson or Che Guevara or Raymond Williams, but what on earth are you going to talk about with Michael other than the finer points of the breast stroke or how to get the most out of your turn?

While this kind of hero worship reveals the bankruptcy of our intellect, raising a good Samaritan to the status of hero reveals our emotional bankruptcy. Shouldn’t we expect any and everyone to stop to help someone on the road who is broken down or been in an accident? Why then do you see the letter to the editor telling everyone about the “hero” who stopped to help his wife change her tire, calling it “beyond the call of duty. No, it is the call of duty to help your fellow man or woman. Poor “Sully” Sullivan, the pilot who set the plane down in the Hudson River last year. What a reluctant hero he was. Or rather, was his wife, who, when interviewed by every TV and radio station in the country said, “I really don’t think Sully is a hero.” With the skills and judgment he had honed over a long career, and with the luck of the day, he saved a bunch of peoples lives as well as his own skin. Do we elevate him to hero status because we’re wrapped in our cocoons of self-concern and self-doubt and worry we would fail the test?

Westminster Dog Show

“Best in Show,” which is one of the funniest movie spoofs ever made, really doesn’t do justice to the absurdity and pathos of the Westminster Dog Show. The contrast between beautiful dogs (we’ll talk about the distastefully groomed and ugly ones later) and their handlers is almost too much to take. Do you ever notice the women handlers’ shoes? They sparkle. Remember those flats we wore to high school in the sixties, with our matching lime green and pink sweater and skirt outfits? Well, most of them wear flats like that but they actually sparkle. Usually they’re black, but in this year’s show one handler was actually wearing silver ones. Is there a dress code for women handlers that for some reason says that to run around the floor of Madison Square Garden with a dog on a leash you have to wear the ugliest shoes ever made?

Are they also required to wear these weird suits that have little flairs at the waist over tight skirts that show off their bottoms? And a lot of the bottoms are of ample proportions in the Westminster Dog Show, as well as bosoms, which when their owners run around the floor with their dogs do a lot of jiggling. To be fair, there are plenty of heavy-bottomed men handlers at the show as well, but their bulk is more discreetly hidden in your typical street suit (although one guy this year wore a tuxedo!). I didn’t see one handler who looked like that cute little Parker Posey from “Best in Show.”

But enough about the handlers. The huskies and terriers and St. Bernards and spaniels are all beautiful, of course: pampered, indulged, and treated like children rather than dogs, but still beautiful. Even the standard poodle, before grooming, is kind of cute. But what they do to the poor poodle — this year’s Westminster finalist was black, the one in Best of Show is white — is beyond the pale. First they shave all the hair off its skinny little legs except for these puffballs at the ankles. Then they attack the poor dog’s rump with the clippers until the only hair left on its body is around the ruff. Then they shave the dog’s face, where any semblance of its embarrassment could be hidden, and tease it’s topknot into a beehive. Finally, they produce a puffball at the end of its tail, and voila, you have the ugliest, most humiliatingly desecrated creature one could ever create. I don’t have the heart to do the research to find out who started this hideous practice, but they’re all complicit, as these poor poodles seem to win more Best in Shows than just about any other breed. This year, a cute old Sussex spaniel named Tiger Woods won Best in Show. I’m not quite sure how this happened, as the woman who is the judge for the final award not only wore sparkly shoes but a sparkly dress and arrived in a limousine after being sequestered in a hotel without a TV so she couldn’t see any of the previous Best in Breed winners before she picked the Best in Show. She stood imperiously on the floor in her sparkly high heels and diamonds while little old Tiger Woods ran his little old legs like spinwheels down the length of the floor, ears flapping, to the roar of the crowd. Yeah, Tiger Woods!

Consumer Culture

Somehow the idea of intellectuals deconstructing Enlightenment values that failed to enlighten and liberate while mindlessly participating in privileged consumer culture seems absurd. And the idea becomes more than absurd when it declares that the values that determine how I try to live my life are mere constructs based on style, not substance, that there is no rationality and truth, progress is a myth, and pluralism and heterogeneity are alternatives to mainstream, normative life. Of course, all of us who came of age during the sixties revolution of consciousness were creating and living these rejections and assumptions. But the hope was not that, in the inimical words of Terry Eagleton, “A radical assault on fixed hierarchies of value [would] merge[d] effortlessly with the revolutionary leveling of all values known as the marketplace.” In the rush to smash hierarchy, it seems the postmodernists forgot that it is necessary to smash capitalism as well.

The juxtaposition of two halves of page A12 in a recent New York Times couldn’t have been a more revealing testament to just how decadent, how obscene, really, our consumer culture has become. On the left side of the page was a Bloomingdale’s advertisement with an anorexic model decked out in a “dyed sheared mink double breasted coat.” On the right side of the page was an article detailing the incursions of Sudanese Arab gunmen into Chad, where they were killing and wounding hundreds of civilians.

How do these mink coated people live with themselves? I know that money buys you protection from things you don’t want to know or think about, but they do pick up the New York Times occasionally and see page A12, don’t they? Even if wealth is equated with success, isn’t there some line over which the excesses begin to bother them, just a little? Like “dyed sheared mink double breasted coats?”

Apparently not. Maybe this blog can’t really be separated from the one on Capitalism — cultural materialism is inextricably linked to an economic analysis — but there is still some part of me that believes there must be a human, gut level connection that transcends these analyses. I know, I know, this has been wrestled with by the likes of Rousseau,Voltaire, Locke and Weil and everyone one else worth his or her salt, but there’s just something about conspicuous consumption that baffles me. One clichéd answer is that once shopping and accumulating goods becomes the focus of your life, you can never have enough because then you wouldn’t have anything to do. But why does one think that shopping and accumulating goods is fun? I hate shopping: clothes shopping, household goods shopping, even food shopping. I rarely end up with any piece of clothing I truly like, buying toilet paper is boring, and I race through the grocery store as fast as possible so I can get home as fast as possible.

Maybe that’s my problem. I don’t particularly like leaving home. Home is my life’s work, essentially. It’s where I surround myself with everything, or almost everything (I can’t make my kids stay home forever) I value. Inside my passive solar adobe house I have access to an incredible music collection (Mark is an incomparable audiophile and our record collection is comprehensive); books I’ve read once, am waiting to read, and will probably read several more times before I die; a lifetime collection of art and photos on the walls, ranging from John Wenger’s spaceship landings, Mark’s contemporary santos (Emily Dickinson, Rene Magritte), and Alan Labb’s fat-bellied men to collages of each of our children from infancy to public school; our two dogs Django and Sammy, and Mavis the cat (who also belong outside, but seem to want to stay inside as they age alongside us); and various lifelines out—telephone, satellite internet, and satellite TV. Outside I have ten acres of pasture, orchard, vegetable garden, flower gardens, casita, river frontage, and small village life, which is both colorful, comforting, and fraught with annoyances, just like any other place one decides to call home.

Why do I need to go out other than to see some of my friends occasionally, go to a movie theater to see a first-run movie instead of waiting for it to appear on DVD (although I can barely stand the commercials and booming sound in the theater), hear some live music (there’s always YouTube), or god forbid, actually have to attend a meeting to cover it for La Jicarita News, the alternative journal we publish monthly. When we first started producing the paper we were caught up in the immediacy of the battles among the Forest Service, environmentalists, and community people over access to forest resources. Those battles, at least for the communities, were largely lost, and the Forest Service barely has a budget left to mark enough trees for community firewood. The environmentalists went on to other issues like wolves and salamanders, which fortunately don’t live in northern New Mexico (it was the spotted owl that started all the ruckus in the 90s when the enviros insisted it lived in our woods). While other battles still rage, over the commodification of water and the nuclear mission at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we see that our fourteen-year newspaper run may be nearing its end. We don’t even want to attend the few meetings we’ve determined must be attended to maintain our viability.

So because I don’t go anywhere, I certainly don’t need to shop for clothes. If I happen to find a good deal on a shirt or pair of shoes at the thrift store, which I do like to cruise through for additions to my cow collection or a file cabinet for 30 years of collected papers, I make it a policy to give away a shirt or pair of shoes I already own. One of my favorite entertainments is to periodically go through my closets and cabinets and throw or give things away. With tremendous delight I watch files of battles I’ve had with the Forest Service since 1985 burn up in the wood stove. I sigh with satisfaction when I’ve depleted a closet enough to be able to push hangers from end to end to see what I actually still own.

I chose time over money. If through some fortuitous circumstance I ended up in a life with both, maybe I’d like to shop, too. But if the “me” in that life was still the “me” in this life, I would hope I knew where draw the line in the sand. And a “dyed sheared mink double breasted coat” wouldn’t even be in my cultural vocabulary.

Chatter

I’m sitting on the Chinatown bus in Philadelphia waiting to go to Washington D.C. and the man in the seat behind me is on his cell phone talking to his wife/girlfriend/ partner who just dropped him off and is herself driving home in their car. I know all this— which I don’t want to know— because I can hear every word he says through the crack in the seats. As soon as the bus leaves Chinatown and heads south along the river, he’s on the phone again, this time to someone he’s meeting in D.C. They proceed to have a 30-minute conversation about how the third person they’re meeting in D.C. screwed up by not getting in touch with them sooner so they could coordinate everyone’s arrival better: “I’m counting on the bus to not take more than two and a half hours or I’m going to be late for the meeting. So and so should have made her reservations weeks ago so we could have arranged to come in on our flights close to the same time. I know, I know, it’s too late to do anything about it now but . . . “ and on and on and on.

About half way to Baltimore (the guy is still on the phone) the bus pulls into a rest stop and we sit there for awhile until some of the passengers start wondering aloud if this is a scheduled stop or what’s going on. An Asian gentleman then approaches the rear of the bus where we’re sitting and explains that he’s having to translate for the two people who were on the bus from New York but slept through the stop in Philadelphia where they were supposed to get off. When they woke up and realized where they were they approached the bus driver and asked him to take them back to Philadelphia. The translator says, “We’re trying to decide whether to turn around and take them back to Philadelphia or continue on to Baltimore where they can catch a later bus back.”

Up jumps the cell phone guy who starts in, “There is no way this bus is going to go back to Philadelphia. I’m already late as it is. These people need to take responsibility for themselves.” That’s right, a chorus of voices ring out. We’ve paid good money (the Chinatown bus costs $15, as opposed to Amtrak’s $60 to $80) to get us on time to D.C. and we can’t go back because two passengers missed their stop! The woman in the seat in front of me wakes up and asks what’s going on. I explain the situation and she says, “I heard them come through the bus when we stopped and yell out ‘Philadelphia, Philadelphia,’ at least a couple of times.” I answered her, “I wish I could sleep that soundly.”

Several days later I’m sitting in the Philadelphia airport waiting for a flight that’s two hours late, knowing I’m probably going to miss my connection home. Sitting next to me is a young woman waiting for the same flight who decides to pass the time talking to her sister, who is also sitting in an airport waiting for a flight. They are both going home for Thanksgiving. No one wants to give up their seat in the waiting room because the room is packed and you’ll end up on the floor if you do. So I listen to her tell her sister every excruciating detail of her trip to the airport, what’s going on in the airport, what she’s got in her suitcase (five pairs of shoes for her four day stay), how her sister can possibly survive four days with only a backpack for a suitcase, etc., etc.

I actually need to talk on a phone because I have to call Mark and tell him to cancel my surgery for the next day (how crazy was I to schedule hand surgery on the day before Thanksgiving and then actually try to get home on time?) and give me the phone number of our friends in Chicago who I’m probably going to have to stay with when I miss my connecting flight home. I pile all my possessions on my chair while I go find a pay phone, for which my calling card company charges me ten times what they charge from a regular phone, and hope all my stuff is still on my chair when I return.

I do end up staying the night in Chicago with our friends, who can’t believe I don’t have a cell phone so I can call them when I get off the train at the stop near their house, The next morning I’m back again at O’Hare Airport waiting to catch my plane to Albuquerque. A young man in his late twenties or early thirties is pacing the floor with his cell phone, speaking loudly in what I think is an Australian accent, talking to his wife/girlfriend/partner about the fact that he is about to get on the plane and that the plan for New Year’s Eve at the hot springs outside of Denver is just “awesome” and that it’s going to be so powerful, the best celebration yet. Then he tells her goodbye, and as we’re walking down the ramp onto the plane (he’s right behind me) he’s on the phone with someone else explaining that the celebration at the hot springs is going to be truly “awesome” because 30 of his closest friends have already said they’re coming and can you believe how fabulous it’s going to be, better than last year, truly outstanding.

Of course, there he is when we get on the plane, sitting right in front of me and he tells two more people about the hot springs gig before they make everyone turn off their cell phones. But do I finally get a reprieve from the constant chatter than has taken over every public place and ruined it with private bullshit? Not on your life. It turns out that the guy sitting next to him is a student at a seminary and that the hot springs gig that the Australian (turns out he’s from New Zealand) has been raving about is some spiritual gathering that he and his “closest 30 friends” have been going to for the last few years. So naturally, their conversation turns to religion and they are off to the races. For the next hour they engage in a spirited dialogue regarding the church doctrine espoused by the seminary student and the freewheeling Christianity celebrated by the New Zealander. There’s a lot of scripture quoting, scripture interpretation, discussion of the merits of various popes, discussion of dogma regarding who’s going to heaven and hell, ad nauseum. While the New Zealander challenges the seminary student on a lot of his fundamentalist rap defending the church, it’s within the context of the sanctity of Christianity, and I’m hoping (I don’t pray) there’s not a Muslim or a Jew across the isle.

Finally, after a free bloody Mary from the airline attendant, who I’ve consulted about airplane etiquette, I’ve had enough. When the seminary student starts in about homosexuality being an abomination I stand up and say, “That’s it. I’ve listened to this crap for almost an hour but I’m not going to sit here and listen to offensive talk about homosexuality. You’ve offended any number of people on this plane, particularly me, and it’s got to stop.”

And it did. They listened to their iPods for the rest of the flight, and the guy sitting next to me bought me another bloody Mary.

Solution: Never leave home.