Last week I went to Placitas to see my old house. Or rather I went to see what was left of my old house. Actually, all I saw was the place of my old house. My neighbors had told me years ago that the folks who bought the house built onto and around it, kind of like folks who build onto or around a trailer to turn it into a more solid construction; but my house, an adobe for god’s sake, was nowhere to be found.
Neither were the fruit trees, the cottonwoods, the native grass, the rock gardens, the vegetable and flower gardens Mark and I spent fifteen years cultivating, carefully meting out the precious water that is pumped from hundreds of feet below ground. I guess when they took off the second story, added on rooms (including one at the west end with a turret) and then put on a different second story, the vegetation got in the way. This one now resembles a lot of the houses built over the twenty years I’ve been away: solar adobe style, boxy, oversized, characterless.
Our handmade houses were something different. In the 1960s, when the back to the land movement stumbled into Placitas, a land grant community at the north end of the Sandia Mountains, some folks emulated the traditional building style of the long time Hispano residents of the village. Others saw homebuilding as venues for their creativity, constrained only by the capacity of their pocket books. Ours was somewhere in between: a two story adobe with a gambrel roof (double pitch) built around second-hand doors and windows that we brought home from wherever we could find them: Coronado Lumber in Albuquerque, the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and Buffalo, New York, where Mark had friends in the antique business. It took five years of building before we moved in, ten years to “finish” (adding the greenhouse, putting in a bathroom upstairs, but you never really finish a handmade house), and one year to sell.
Many of our compadres’ creations are still there: Cathy’s Dome out on the mesa; Rumaldo’s ranchito on lower Las Huertas Creek; the crumbling adobe in the village where Mark and I lived while we built our new house; the triple dome and solar dome (where we fell in love) in Dome Valley, and Daisy’s carefully crafted compact house on a windswept hill (thank you for being my companion on this nostalgic trip). But what Placitas mostly is are the thousands of new homes that beginning in the 80s the developers aggressively marketed to attract Albuquerque commuters, retirees, and second homeowners. From I-25 east you pass La Mesa, Tierra Madre, Placitas Homesteads, Ranchos de Placitas, Placitas West, Puesta del Sol, and the Overlook, among others, until a sign on the road tells you you’re now entering the Historic Village of Placitas.
Placitas is not unique, of course. Things change (just ask the land grant community). People build houses. Developers build many houses. In El Valle, where I now live, we suddenly have second homes. But Placitas is emblematic of a consumer culture that is the basis of this country’s power and wealth. We became the “primary engine of capital accumulation” (David Harvey), which vastly increased the infrastructure necessary to support this kind of massive suburbanization. The housing boom in the 90s exacerbated the overbuilding and created the upper middle class culture that now dominates Placitas. Now, in the 2000s, there must be a slew of foreclosures and some nail-biting developers who won’t survive the housing bust, but the damage has been done: loss of the commons, validation of yuppie culture, and the mining of the already limited water resources of a semi-arid environment.
So we left, and it took me 20 years to go back (I’ve now lived in El Valle as long as I lived in Placitas). My friends who stayed say they drive up the road alongside the “Homesteads” and “Ranchos” with their eyes pointed straight ahead, following the route home without looking. When they take their morning walk up the hill and see another road bladed through the desert, they look away. They’re attached to their homes and their history in the crazy, mixed up place Placitas was and is. I prefer the was.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
The Swim Team
This post is not really about swim teams, it’s about David Sedaris’s piece in the New Yorker called “Memory Laps”, which I read and immediately burst into tears. I already wrote about my lackluster career in competitive swimming in my Olympics blog post. This one is about fathers, in particular, his and mine. Unlike Sedaris’s father, who berated him after losing at swim meets, my father never went to my meets. His damage was done at home.
Now that I think about it, he probably never saw me race. Considering all our kids’ soccer meets and chess tournaments Mark and I attended over the years, that constitutes really egregious behavior. Not only didn’t he attend any “events” of mine, I don’t ever remember him stepping foot in any of my schools. My mother was the one who had to go up and bawl out my fifth grade teacher for not letting me retake a standardized test when it was discovered that I’d skipped a line in my answer sheet marking and therefore negated the entire test.
Speaking of test taking, my father claimed that he knew my sisters and my IQ test scores and bragged to his poker playing buddies down at the American Legion about what brainiacs his daughters were. First off, I don’t remember taking any IQ tests, and secondly, the only reason he was bragging was to validate his own intelligence through his offspring. He also went around the house quoting Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza, who to this day I’ve never read because of my aversion to anything he valued.
OK, we’re headed for a discussion of victimhood here. Why did he need to validate his intelligence through his children? Because he was born in poverty in southern Illinois, coal-mining country just like its southern neighbor Kentucky? Because he never got to go to college, like my mother did, which he used against her in any number of ways, like belittling her looks, her character, her interests. Which he then repeated with my sisters and me when we reached puberty. In “Memory Laps” Sedaris says of his father’s constant harassment: “I’d never know if my father did this to hurt me or to spur me on,” and he doesn’t give us enough information for us to figure it out, either. But Sedaris’s focus is on how it made him feel: “My dad was like the Marine Corps, only instead of tearing you to pieces and then putting you back together, he just did the first part and called it a day. Now it seems cruel, abusive even, but this all happened before the invention of self-esteem, which, frankly, I think is a little overrated.”
Where is the line between victim and perpetrator? Why do some people transfer their disappointment in themselves to those around them through berating and never going to swim meets? Why are others able to rise above their disadvantage and in so doing bring everyone they love with them? Or, like David Sedaris, create an alternative universe where tragedy is comedy and the theater of the absurd.
I don’t know the answers to these questions. The nature/nurture dichotomy—which should be a synthesis, I think—is too complicated for me to jump into here. I only know that as a parent I have tried my absolute best to support, nurture, and educate my children despite my own feelings of inadequacy, my disappointments, my failings. My father was unable to do this, something I don’t really dwell on very often or have a need to forgive. I only think about it when I read about David Sedaris’s father, and then I feel an overwhelming sadness for the victims and the perpetrators, whoever they may be.
Now that I think about it, he probably never saw me race. Considering all our kids’ soccer meets and chess tournaments Mark and I attended over the years, that constitutes really egregious behavior. Not only didn’t he attend any “events” of mine, I don’t ever remember him stepping foot in any of my schools. My mother was the one who had to go up and bawl out my fifth grade teacher for not letting me retake a standardized test when it was discovered that I’d skipped a line in my answer sheet marking and therefore negated the entire test.
Speaking of test taking, my father claimed that he knew my sisters and my IQ test scores and bragged to his poker playing buddies down at the American Legion about what brainiacs his daughters were. First off, I don’t remember taking any IQ tests, and secondly, the only reason he was bragging was to validate his own intelligence through his offspring. He also went around the house quoting Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza, who to this day I’ve never read because of my aversion to anything he valued.
OK, we’re headed for a discussion of victimhood here. Why did he need to validate his intelligence through his children? Because he was born in poverty in southern Illinois, coal-mining country just like its southern neighbor Kentucky? Because he never got to go to college, like my mother did, which he used against her in any number of ways, like belittling her looks, her character, her interests. Which he then repeated with my sisters and me when we reached puberty. In “Memory Laps” Sedaris says of his father’s constant harassment: “I’d never know if my father did this to hurt me or to spur me on,” and he doesn’t give us enough information for us to figure it out, either. But Sedaris’s focus is on how it made him feel: “My dad was like the Marine Corps, only instead of tearing you to pieces and then putting you back together, he just did the first part and called it a day. Now it seems cruel, abusive even, but this all happened before the invention of self-esteem, which, frankly, I think is a little overrated.”
Where is the line between victim and perpetrator? Why do some people transfer their disappointment in themselves to those around them through berating and never going to swim meets? Why are others able to rise above their disadvantage and in so doing bring everyone they love with them? Or, like David Sedaris, create an alternative universe where tragedy is comedy and the theater of the absurd.
I don’t know the answers to these questions. The nature/nurture dichotomy—which should be a synthesis, I think—is too complicated for me to jump into here. I only know that as a parent I have tried my absolute best to support, nurture, and educate my children despite my own feelings of inadequacy, my disappointments, my failings. My father was unable to do this, something I don’t really dwell on very often or have a need to forgive. I only think about it when I read about David Sedaris’s father, and then I feel an overwhelming sadness for the victims and the perpetrators, whoever they may be.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
On Not Being Able to Get a Job
Mark and I used to read the jobs section of High Country News to see if there were any that had an element of environmental justice in the description. We would then narrow the list based on location: Helena, Montana sounded pretty good, despite the cold weather, or any place in northern California, but the Dakotas, Idaho (neo-Nazi country), and Arizona (too hot and too racist) were off-limits, which in itself limited the selection of possible jobs to almost none. But it didn’t matter, as it was all fantasy, an exercise in futility: Mark and I, and especially I, were essentially unemployable.
Lack of credentials certainly contributed to our dilemma. While Mark had at least earned a BA in English, it was a useless degree, of course, in the traditional job market. But he managed to parlay it into a job at the Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque, maybe because the infamous owner, Gus Blaisdell, was impressed by his erudition and liked having people around with whom he could have a conversation, but probably because Mark was competent and willing to work for shit wages. His other job was working on other people’s houses in Placitas, where we were living at the time, to acquire the skills needed to build our own house, which we worked on for ten years during the 1980s.
I never even got a BA (when my younger son Max first realized that I didn’t have a college degree he said “Mom, what in the world were you thinking?”). My first real job was with the Forest Service as a fire lookout, no experience necessary. On my first day on the job on top of La Mosca Peak, after a few hours’ instructions on how to use the fire finder to locate a smoke and the radio to call it in, I reported the Grants dump. Working for the Forest Service was also my last real job (and not because I was a lousy fire lookout). But I managed to parlay my experience as a hiking patrol in the Sandia Mountain Wilderness into self-employment: I started a publishing company and wrote a guidebook to the Sandias, which was quite a success, and then went on to write guides to cross-country skiing in northern New Mexico, hikes in other wilderness areas, and hikes around Santa Fe and Taos. I also parlayed our “back to the land” life in Placitas—building a house, bartering for services rendered, participating in acequia culture—into a freelance writing career.
So you might say, not so bad, we both managed to find self-employment rather than wage labor jobs, but several things have to be factored into that evaluation. The first being that we made lousy money, had no health insurance, and no retirement. While we didn’t have a mortgage, we did have to pay for the birth of two babies born by caesarian section rather than at midwifery centers, as planned (we managed a trade with one of the obstetricians), for Mark’s hospital stay when he fell off the house while putting up the roof beams, and for a well that went dry before we’d even moved into our new house.
The other factor that contributed to our dependency on marginal self-employment was what I have to call our incorrigibility. It started in Placitas, when the developers came in with their subdivisions and their covenants (no chickens, no junked cars), and the Forest Service decided to pave roads and develop new ski areas, and we became, well, incorrigible. We demonstrated, connived, monkey-wrenched, wrote editorials and mockeries, and sued all of them. This continued, after giving up on Placitas and moving to El Valle, where threats to the community included not only the Forest Service and developers but lo and behold, environmentalists. This time we parlayed our activist experience, coupled with Mark’s degree in English and my book writing skills, into “that radical rag” La Jicarita News.
La Jicarita was the beginning of the end of any chance of regular employment. Over the course of 16 years we managed to piss off everyone: certainly the Forest Service; all kinds of other government officials from the county to federal levels; mainstream environmentalists who don’t know anything about community-based environmentalism; land grant activists who think only heirs should have a say in the management of land-based communities; many of our Anglo neighbors who worked at Sipapu Ski Area and supported its expansion; some of our Hispano neighbors who regard their water rights as private property and probably think we’re Communists; foundations that funded groups at cross purposes; and any number of other people, organizations, and bureaucracies that would never in a million years want either one of us to work for them.
So there you have it. In a couple of weeks I’ll be old enough to draw social security and I can jettison forever the fantasy of finding a job. I’m still self-employed as co-editor of La Jicarita with David Correia as it transitions to its new life in the American Studies Department at UNM, but as I threatened to do in my Productivity blog post, I’m going to start reading novels during the day to celebrate my new status: it’s not quite retirement, and it doesn’t mean better behavior, but it’s definitely a change, and at this point in my life, change is good.
Lack of credentials certainly contributed to our dilemma. While Mark had at least earned a BA in English, it was a useless degree, of course, in the traditional job market. But he managed to parlay it into a job at the Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque, maybe because the infamous owner, Gus Blaisdell, was impressed by his erudition and liked having people around with whom he could have a conversation, but probably because Mark was competent and willing to work for shit wages. His other job was working on other people’s houses in Placitas, where we were living at the time, to acquire the skills needed to build our own house, which we worked on for ten years during the 1980s.
I never even got a BA (when my younger son Max first realized that I didn’t have a college degree he said “Mom, what in the world were you thinking?”). My first real job was with the Forest Service as a fire lookout, no experience necessary. On my first day on the job on top of La Mosca Peak, after a few hours’ instructions on how to use the fire finder to locate a smoke and the radio to call it in, I reported the Grants dump. Working for the Forest Service was also my last real job (and not because I was a lousy fire lookout). But I managed to parlay my experience as a hiking patrol in the Sandia Mountain Wilderness into self-employment: I started a publishing company and wrote a guidebook to the Sandias, which was quite a success, and then went on to write guides to cross-country skiing in northern New Mexico, hikes in other wilderness areas, and hikes around Santa Fe and Taos. I also parlayed our “back to the land” life in Placitas—building a house, bartering for services rendered, participating in acequia culture—into a freelance writing career.
So you might say, not so bad, we both managed to find self-employment rather than wage labor jobs, but several things have to be factored into that evaluation. The first being that we made lousy money, had no health insurance, and no retirement. While we didn’t have a mortgage, we did have to pay for the birth of two babies born by caesarian section rather than at midwifery centers, as planned (we managed a trade with one of the obstetricians), for Mark’s hospital stay when he fell off the house while putting up the roof beams, and for a well that went dry before we’d even moved into our new house.
The other factor that contributed to our dependency on marginal self-employment was what I have to call our incorrigibility. It started in Placitas, when the developers came in with their subdivisions and their covenants (no chickens, no junked cars), and the Forest Service decided to pave roads and develop new ski areas, and we became, well, incorrigible. We demonstrated, connived, monkey-wrenched, wrote editorials and mockeries, and sued all of them. This continued, after giving up on Placitas and moving to El Valle, where threats to the community included not only the Forest Service and developers but lo and behold, environmentalists. This time we parlayed our activist experience, coupled with Mark’s degree in English and my book writing skills, into “that radical rag” La Jicarita News.
La Jicarita was the beginning of the end of any chance of regular employment. Over the course of 16 years we managed to piss off everyone: certainly the Forest Service; all kinds of other government officials from the county to federal levels; mainstream environmentalists who don’t know anything about community-based environmentalism; land grant activists who think only heirs should have a say in the management of land-based communities; many of our Anglo neighbors who worked at Sipapu Ski Area and supported its expansion; some of our Hispano neighbors who regard their water rights as private property and probably think we’re Communists; foundations that funded groups at cross purposes; and any number of other people, organizations, and bureaucracies that would never in a million years want either one of us to work for them.
So there you have it. In a couple of weeks I’ll be old enough to draw social security and I can jettison forever the fantasy of finding a job. I’m still self-employed as co-editor of La Jicarita with David Correia as it transitions to its new life in the American Studies Department at UNM, but as I threatened to do in my Productivity blog post, I’m going to start reading novels during the day to celebrate my new status: it’s not quite retirement, and it doesn’t mean better behavior, but it’s definitely a change, and at this point in my life, change is good.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
On Not Watching Basketball
It looked like nobody was going to be watching basketball this year until the players and management struck a 50-50 deal (meaning the players and owners will share the billions), and we had a five game bonanza on Christmas Day.
I didn’t do any basketball watching last year, either, except for a week: the NBA finals. I’m not a fan of either team (Dallas and Miami), but I’m especially not a fan of Miami. The hype generated by its acquisition of LeBron James as a member of the Three Musketeers (Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh being the other two), was enough to make even the most diehard fan jaded. Yes, even Mark, who loved basketball, had already admitted that the spectacle had defeated the substance. But I watched in his memory.
I gave up being a fan, meaning wanting a particular team to win, after the Pistons’ and Lakers’ great years in the late 1980s: I’ll never forget the on-court kiss of Magic Johnson and Isaiah Thomas. We loved Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic, James Worthy, Kurt Rambis, Maurice Lucas, and Michael Cooper (he came from New Mexico), Isaiah, the crazy Dennis Rodman, John Salley, and Bill Laimbeer. Mark stayed a fan through the Laker transition to Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. The kids and I gave up after Bryant was accused of rape.
You could make a case for not being a fan of any sports team if you wanted to make criminal activity the criteria: the transition from the ghetto to the “show” (as they call it in that great baseball flick Bull Durham) has littered the playing field with adulterers, wife beaters, rapists, animal abusers, and even a few murderers. To be fair, a lot of them are guilty only of wearing silk suits and driving Mercedes Benz’s and Jaguars. I always marveled at Mark’s ability to disassociate sports, particularly basketball, from the criteria used to judge just about everything else in life: class structure, economic inequality, corporate greed, media misinformation, etc. While he knew the world of sports was complicit in all these machinations, he didn’t care, because he just got too much enjoyment out of watching the ballet of basketball, the gut wrenching physicality of football, and the beauty of the home run. Watching games he became just another fan, yelling in excitement over a great play, groaning with disappointment at a missed opportunity.
Mark and I bonded watching Monday night baseball years ago. These were the last of the Oakland A’s days, also the last time I got excited about a baseball team: Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue. Then when the baby came along, one of us would cook dinner while the other one swung Jakob in his Tarahumara swing that a friend had given us. We hung it from a viga and tied a rope to its side so we could sit on the couch and swing it to and fro without it getting in the way of the TV. I sometimes still watch the playoffs and the world series, but once you lose track of who the players are you kind of lose track of the game.
The only football I watch is Friday Night Lights. A friend just told me that the only actor who actually played football is Landry, the Johnny come lately to the team and the ensemble oddball. Mark was a diehard Buffalo fan (his hometown), which was a kind of torture, even when they were winning (remember, Jim Kelly took them to the Superbowl, what, four times, and lost every time). I never really understood this about his sports nature, either. He knew perfectly well that the Buffalo Bills had nothing to do with Buffalo other than arbitrarily playing there, but he hung with them, and suffered with them, to the bitter end.
But back to basketball. I do appreciate the athleticism, the ballet jumps, and whirlwind speed the players display in every game, but without Mark to remind me, I just don’t watch and only tangentially know which team in each division is winning and how it looks for the finals. I’ll watch the finals again, just as I did last year, and hope that it’s not Miami or Dallas (or the Lakers). I can’t really say which teams should be there instead, but hopefully I’ll enjoy the spectacle: Marvin Gaye singing the Star Spangled Banner could redeem the show, but alas, that is not to be.
I didn’t do any basketball watching last year, either, except for a week: the NBA finals. I’m not a fan of either team (Dallas and Miami), but I’m especially not a fan of Miami. The hype generated by its acquisition of LeBron James as a member of the Three Musketeers (Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh being the other two), was enough to make even the most diehard fan jaded. Yes, even Mark, who loved basketball, had already admitted that the spectacle had defeated the substance. But I watched in his memory.
I gave up being a fan, meaning wanting a particular team to win, after the Pistons’ and Lakers’ great years in the late 1980s: I’ll never forget the on-court kiss of Magic Johnson and Isaiah Thomas. We loved Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic, James Worthy, Kurt Rambis, Maurice Lucas, and Michael Cooper (he came from New Mexico), Isaiah, the crazy Dennis Rodman, John Salley, and Bill Laimbeer. Mark stayed a fan through the Laker transition to Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. The kids and I gave up after Bryant was accused of rape.
You could make a case for not being a fan of any sports team if you wanted to make criminal activity the criteria: the transition from the ghetto to the “show” (as they call it in that great baseball flick Bull Durham) has littered the playing field with adulterers, wife beaters, rapists, animal abusers, and even a few murderers. To be fair, a lot of them are guilty only of wearing silk suits and driving Mercedes Benz’s and Jaguars. I always marveled at Mark’s ability to disassociate sports, particularly basketball, from the criteria used to judge just about everything else in life: class structure, economic inequality, corporate greed, media misinformation, etc. While he knew the world of sports was complicit in all these machinations, he didn’t care, because he just got too much enjoyment out of watching the ballet of basketball, the gut wrenching physicality of football, and the beauty of the home run. Watching games he became just another fan, yelling in excitement over a great play, groaning with disappointment at a missed opportunity.
Mark and I bonded watching Monday night baseball years ago. These were the last of the Oakland A’s days, also the last time I got excited about a baseball team: Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue. Then when the baby came along, one of us would cook dinner while the other one swung Jakob in his Tarahumara swing that a friend had given us. We hung it from a viga and tied a rope to its side so we could sit on the couch and swing it to and fro without it getting in the way of the TV. I sometimes still watch the playoffs and the world series, but once you lose track of who the players are you kind of lose track of the game.
The only football I watch is Friday Night Lights. A friend just told me that the only actor who actually played football is Landry, the Johnny come lately to the team and the ensemble oddball. Mark was a diehard Buffalo fan (his hometown), which was a kind of torture, even when they were winning (remember, Jim Kelly took them to the Superbowl, what, four times, and lost every time). I never really understood this about his sports nature, either. He knew perfectly well that the Buffalo Bills had nothing to do with Buffalo other than arbitrarily playing there, but he hung with them, and suffered with them, to the bitter end.
But back to basketball. I do appreciate the athleticism, the ballet jumps, and whirlwind speed the players display in every game, but without Mark to remind me, I just don’t watch and only tangentially know which team in each division is winning and how it looks for the finals. I’ll watch the finals again, just as I did last year, and hope that it’s not Miami or Dallas (or the Lakers). I can’t really say which teams should be there instead, but hopefully I’ll enjoy the spectacle: Marvin Gaye singing the Star Spangled Banner could redeem the show, but alas, that is not to be.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Letter to Elizabeth, Number Two
I haven’t had time to blog much lately, but when I read your piece “On Breaking Two Taboos, Sharing, Playing Games, and Not” (elizabethtannen.com/blog), about a month ago I started composing this letter to you in my head. Now it’s in writing.
When I was in my carefree twenties (that’s a laugh, carefree maybe but, as I talked about in Letter Number One, full of existential angst), I remember having a conversation with someone about the “worst part of being alone” and all he could come up with was he didn’t like eating by himself. I went into a long discourse about how being alone denied one intimacy, being able to share your most heartfelt feelings with someone who actually cares to listen and respond to those feelings.
I ended up being intimate with Mark for 34 years, and yes, there was a lot of sharing and caring and listening, along with all the silence (comfortable and uncomfortable) that accompany a long relationship. Now, however, I am at the other end of the book shelf, alone again, without the intimacy I complained about not having in my twenties, but aware now of how complicated intimacy can be. I lost the only person in the world who paid constant attention to me, even if it was often critical attention. There will never again be anyone who knew me as Mark did, and in many ways I won’t know me as well either because I don’t have him around to fill in the gaps: “Who is that person?” or “Did we see that movie?” or “Which kid was it who called big trucks ‘hot zooms’?” Neither is he there for me to share the information only he and I were privy to, which makes it hard to validate a feeling or remembrance.
You don’t particularly appreciate this when you’re living it. Mark and I, as well as many other couples I know, were constantly jockeying for time alone, to have the house to ourselves so we didn’t have to answer to anybody or do anything we didn’t want to do, like cook dinner when you wanted to read your book. We’re not really wishing for singlehood, as we see our single friends wondering how it happened that they live alone, without the intimacy we’re complaining about. We want to have it all, actually: someone around with whom we feel completely comfortable and intimate when we want them around, and when we don’t want them around we want them to go away for awhile but know that they’ll be back.
When we lived in extended families or tribal groups or all those crazy communes in the sixties we had more than one person paying particular attention to us, which created its own problems, of course: lack of privacy, peer pressure, group think. It’s complicated, no matter how you look at it: living alone, living in a nuclear family, living in a group. We fumble along, complaining and compensating, rationalizing and resigning ourselves to circumstances that are both amenable to change and outside our control. I imagine you’ll experience it all over the next 30 years, like I have. All I can say is, buena suerte.
.
When I was in my carefree twenties (that’s a laugh, carefree maybe but, as I talked about in Letter Number One, full of existential angst), I remember having a conversation with someone about the “worst part of being alone” and all he could come up with was he didn’t like eating by himself. I went into a long discourse about how being alone denied one intimacy, being able to share your most heartfelt feelings with someone who actually cares to listen and respond to those feelings.
I ended up being intimate with Mark for 34 years, and yes, there was a lot of sharing and caring and listening, along with all the silence (comfortable and uncomfortable) that accompany a long relationship. Now, however, I am at the other end of the book shelf, alone again, without the intimacy I complained about not having in my twenties, but aware now of how complicated intimacy can be. I lost the only person in the world who paid constant attention to me, even if it was often critical attention. There will never again be anyone who knew me as Mark did, and in many ways I won’t know me as well either because I don’t have him around to fill in the gaps: “Who is that person?” or “Did we see that movie?” or “Which kid was it who called big trucks ‘hot zooms’?” Neither is he there for me to share the information only he and I were privy to, which makes it hard to validate a feeling or remembrance.
You don’t particularly appreciate this when you’re living it. Mark and I, as well as many other couples I know, were constantly jockeying for time alone, to have the house to ourselves so we didn’t have to answer to anybody or do anything we didn’t want to do, like cook dinner when you wanted to read your book. We’re not really wishing for singlehood, as we see our single friends wondering how it happened that they live alone, without the intimacy we’re complaining about. We want to have it all, actually: someone around with whom we feel completely comfortable and intimate when we want them around, and when we don’t want them around we want them to go away for awhile but know that they’ll be back.
When we lived in extended families or tribal groups or all those crazy communes in the sixties we had more than one person paying particular attention to us, which created its own problems, of course: lack of privacy, peer pressure, group think. It’s complicated, no matter how you look at it: living alone, living in a nuclear family, living in a group. We fumble along, complaining and compensating, rationalizing and resigning ourselves to circumstances that are both amenable to change and outside our control. I imagine you’ll experience it all over the next 30 years, like I have. All I can say is, buena suerte.
.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Stuff
For the past three weeks I’ve been dealing with my mother-in-law’s lifetime possessions, the story of her deliberate accumulation of things that become, to the successors, “stuff.” It was all acquired during the course of forty years in the same house in Buffalo, then ten in Santa Fe. I’ve tried to be respectful of what to her were treasures, not stuff, sending the china (I knew her for 34 years and I don’t remember ever eating off it), crystal, antique chairs and dresser off to the consignment store, gifts of art or pottery or jewelry back to those who gave them, especially cherished things to friends, books to the library, and much, much more to St. Vincent de Paul.
My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Poland whose family came to New York when she was six, grew up desperately poor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She told us stories of getting thrown out of her family’s apartment for unpaid rent, carrying their belongings down the street in a wheelbarrow. One of her siblings was killed in World War II; an older half brother became a successful businessman; her younger brother a professor at New York University; and she, after twenty years of secretarial work, went to college and earned a master’s degree in social work. She and my father-in-law, also a social worker who headed a United Fund agency in Buffalo, became solidly middle class and enjoyed a fully pensioned retirement—fueled by a booming stock market—of world travel and portfolio security.
They were also of the generation that bought Dalton china settings for twelve on a trip to England, Waterford crystal at the factory in Ireland, Tibetan thangkas in India, gold jewelry from around the world, pueblo pottery and turquoise jewelry in New Mexico, and art from a sophisticated group of Buffalo painters with whom they socialized.
But what really got me, going through the stuff, was the thought of my own children someday going through mine. What do I have that makes me so anxious? A set of red dishes my mother-in-law bought me for my fiftieth birthday? My clothes, mostly acquired at thrift stores? The art gives me pause, but they can give Terri’s paintings back to her, if she outlives me (or keep them, of course), and they took some of Mark’s work after he died. The John Wengers will probably find their way to those who knew him.
What seems to be upsetting me are the floor to ceiling shelves with books, that, just like the china, nobody wants. James Woods, in a recent New Yorker article, wrote about inventorying his father-in-law’s library in upstate New York and finding out that “nobody really wants hundreds or thousands of old books.” I may not have 400 books on the Byzantine Empire, but I have, due to Mark’s love of him, every book ever written by or about Jack Kerouac; every beat poet ever published; every 18th and 19th century English novel ever written (I know that’s an exaggeration: let’s arrogantly say every “important” English novel ever written); political philosophy from the Greeks through the Enlightenment to Karl Marx and the poststructuralists; and 20th century paperback novels that everyone else has, too. Mark already sold the first editions and collectors’ items to folks like Nicholas Potter (secondhand bookstore owner in Santa Fe) of whom there are fewer and fewer in business. My kids will want only a select few, just as I wanted only a select few of my mother-in-law’s. Even if the iPad and the Kindle don’t destroy the book business altogether, nobody is going to want my “old books.”
When I don’t have anything of interest borrowed from a friend or checked out from the library, I go to my shelves and find stuff, like this incredible passage from George Elliot’s Mill on the Floss, which I’ve owned for 20 years but never before read:
“I will not believe unproved evil of you: my lips shall not utter it; my ears shall be closed against it. I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt to come short of my most earnest efforts. Your lot has been harder than mine, your temptation greater. Let us help each other to stand and walk without more falling—to have done this would have demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust—would have demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking that felt no self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no large words into the belief that life can have any moral end, any high religion, which excludes the striving after perfect truth, justice, and love towards the individual men and women who come across our own path.”
How can you not stop and marvel at a passage like that. It speaks directly to my post-Marxist humanist pragmatic self (see eponymous blog post), which is tied directly to all these books on my shelf that no one but me wants. While I’m not quite ready to let them go, not ready to consign them to “stuff,” I think it’s time to start culling: slowly, carefully, selectively (based on some criteria I’ve yet to determine). That, instead of an estate, will be my gift to my children: one small shelf of books when it’s my time to go.
My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Poland whose family came to New York when she was six, grew up desperately poor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She told us stories of getting thrown out of her family’s apartment for unpaid rent, carrying their belongings down the street in a wheelbarrow. One of her siblings was killed in World War II; an older half brother became a successful businessman; her younger brother a professor at New York University; and she, after twenty years of secretarial work, went to college and earned a master’s degree in social work. She and my father-in-law, also a social worker who headed a United Fund agency in Buffalo, became solidly middle class and enjoyed a fully pensioned retirement—fueled by a booming stock market—of world travel and portfolio security.
They were also of the generation that bought Dalton china settings for twelve on a trip to England, Waterford crystal at the factory in Ireland, Tibetan thangkas in India, gold jewelry from around the world, pueblo pottery and turquoise jewelry in New Mexico, and art from a sophisticated group of Buffalo painters with whom they socialized.
But what really got me, going through the stuff, was the thought of my own children someday going through mine. What do I have that makes me so anxious? A set of red dishes my mother-in-law bought me for my fiftieth birthday? My clothes, mostly acquired at thrift stores? The art gives me pause, but they can give Terri’s paintings back to her, if she outlives me (or keep them, of course), and they took some of Mark’s work after he died. The John Wengers will probably find their way to those who knew him.
What seems to be upsetting me are the floor to ceiling shelves with books, that, just like the china, nobody wants. James Woods, in a recent New Yorker article, wrote about inventorying his father-in-law’s library in upstate New York and finding out that “nobody really wants hundreds or thousands of old books.” I may not have 400 books on the Byzantine Empire, but I have, due to Mark’s love of him, every book ever written by or about Jack Kerouac; every beat poet ever published; every 18th and 19th century English novel ever written (I know that’s an exaggeration: let’s arrogantly say every “important” English novel ever written); political philosophy from the Greeks through the Enlightenment to Karl Marx and the poststructuralists; and 20th century paperback novels that everyone else has, too. Mark already sold the first editions and collectors’ items to folks like Nicholas Potter (secondhand bookstore owner in Santa Fe) of whom there are fewer and fewer in business. My kids will want only a select few, just as I wanted only a select few of my mother-in-law’s. Even if the iPad and the Kindle don’t destroy the book business altogether, nobody is going to want my “old books.”
When I don’t have anything of interest borrowed from a friend or checked out from the library, I go to my shelves and find stuff, like this incredible passage from George Elliot’s Mill on the Floss, which I’ve owned for 20 years but never before read:
“I will not believe unproved evil of you: my lips shall not utter it; my ears shall be closed against it. I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt to come short of my most earnest efforts. Your lot has been harder than mine, your temptation greater. Let us help each other to stand and walk without more falling—to have done this would have demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust—would have demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking that felt no self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no large words into the belief that life can have any moral end, any high religion, which excludes the striving after perfect truth, justice, and love towards the individual men and women who come across our own path.”
How can you not stop and marvel at a passage like that. It speaks directly to my post-Marxist humanist pragmatic self (see eponymous blog post), which is tied directly to all these books on my shelf that no one but me wants. While I’m not quite ready to let them go, not ready to consign them to “stuff,” I think it’s time to start culling: slowly, carefully, selectively (based on some criteria I’ve yet to determine). That, instead of an estate, will be my gift to my children: one small shelf of books when it’s my time to go.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year: The End
This will be my last installment under the heading Diary of a Bad Year (two bad years, actually). It is signified by the death of Mark’s mother, from whom he was estranged when he died last year, on November 27. During this last year of her life we never discussed this estrangement, nor did we discuss anything that would force us into a place I did not want to go.
That being said, as she began to decline I did whatever I could to help, eventually moving her out of her house into a fairly nice residential facility, an “independent living” apartment. But once she made the physical move she essentially gave up: her increased dependency and loss of “control”, something she had hoarded all her life to compensate for a bad beginning, shut her down psychologically, emotionally, and physically. Her decline was dramatic: within three weeks of the move she required 24-hour care, and a week later she died.
Dealing first with Mark’s death, and now hers, has forced me to face my own mortality, which I’ve written about previously in other Diary of a Bad Year blog posts. But it has also forced me to think about not just the fact that I will die but how I will die. Not surprisingly, this is a topic that doesn’t generate much discussion in our youth obsessed society, but as we continue to live longer, buoyed by miracle drugs and interventions that may extend our life span but render us mentality and physically bereft, we better start doing some serious talking.
The so-called Death Panels that were a part of Obama’s health care reform package were quickly scuttled after that nomenclature stuck. In some more enlightened European countries there can at least be a discussion between the patient, family, and physician about “end of life” wishes, which is much more substantive than the health care directives we sign in this country saying we don’t want to be resuscitated if we’re already dying of cancer or heart disease. They don’t say anything about what our choices might be if we’re dying of old age and are so infirm that staying alive is cruel and unusual punishment. And the medical interventions that have gotten us to that state are also forms of cruel and unusual punishment. Two years ago I watched my beloved amigo y buen vecino slowly die of complications from diabetes, a stroke, and finally colon cancer. The last six months of his ordeal were in the hospital, where he was kept alive by extraordinary means, until finally he came home and said, “Ya basta, I’m tired and I’m not going back.”
While he had the wherewithal and presence of mind to refuse more hospitalization, that doesn’t really speak to the problem of those who are old and infirm and are ready to die before their bodies actually give out. There was a story in the newspaper the other day about a couple, in their nineties, who decided to stop eating and drinking because, like my neighbor, they’d simply had enough. They were kicked out of their retirement facility for taking this action. Let’s penalize those who actually make a decision to exercise choice, as opposed to default, which drains their—and everyone who loves them—physical, emotional, and yes, financial well being (the focus of Medicare on medical intervention rather than long term care is another story).
What about those who suffer from incipient Alzheimer’s, who are able to see what the future holds and don’t want to go there? What choices do these folks have who want to be the person they are instead of a person who will be unrecognizable to family and friends? Some would argue that as Alzheimer’s progresses you are unaware of the loss of identity, that it is those around you who do the losing, so that makes it OK. I don’t want my children to lose me. I’m their mother, the person with whom they share their most intimate thoughts, worries, and aspirations (caveat: I know there are tons of things they don’t tell me because it’s none of my business), but I am also a person they see in a larger context defined by my work, the way I choose to live, and how I treat them. When Mark’s mother was dying, what she talked about was not the present, her loss of control, what she suffered, or even those of us who were with her. She talked about her life when she was young, her parents, her brother who died in World War II, her youngest brother who she essentially raised, and her life with her husband, who died five years before her.
The image of the native Inuit putting the old person who can no longer contribute to society out on the ice floe remains very vivid to my generation. That is obviously not an option for today’s society (as well as the fact that there may not be many ice floes to put them on). So what are we supposed to do? I don’t have the answer, but if we can’t even have a conversation about it without a Death Panel label we are, as individuals, and as a society, complicit in what often amounts to torture.
That being said, as she began to decline I did whatever I could to help, eventually moving her out of her house into a fairly nice residential facility, an “independent living” apartment. But once she made the physical move she essentially gave up: her increased dependency and loss of “control”, something she had hoarded all her life to compensate for a bad beginning, shut her down psychologically, emotionally, and physically. Her decline was dramatic: within three weeks of the move she required 24-hour care, and a week later she died.
Dealing first with Mark’s death, and now hers, has forced me to face my own mortality, which I’ve written about previously in other Diary of a Bad Year blog posts. But it has also forced me to think about not just the fact that I will die but how I will die. Not surprisingly, this is a topic that doesn’t generate much discussion in our youth obsessed society, but as we continue to live longer, buoyed by miracle drugs and interventions that may extend our life span but render us mentality and physically bereft, we better start doing some serious talking.
The so-called Death Panels that were a part of Obama’s health care reform package were quickly scuttled after that nomenclature stuck. In some more enlightened European countries there can at least be a discussion between the patient, family, and physician about “end of life” wishes, which is much more substantive than the health care directives we sign in this country saying we don’t want to be resuscitated if we’re already dying of cancer or heart disease. They don’t say anything about what our choices might be if we’re dying of old age and are so infirm that staying alive is cruel and unusual punishment. And the medical interventions that have gotten us to that state are also forms of cruel and unusual punishment. Two years ago I watched my beloved amigo y buen vecino slowly die of complications from diabetes, a stroke, and finally colon cancer. The last six months of his ordeal were in the hospital, where he was kept alive by extraordinary means, until finally he came home and said, “Ya basta, I’m tired and I’m not going back.”
While he had the wherewithal and presence of mind to refuse more hospitalization, that doesn’t really speak to the problem of those who are old and infirm and are ready to die before their bodies actually give out. There was a story in the newspaper the other day about a couple, in their nineties, who decided to stop eating and drinking because, like my neighbor, they’d simply had enough. They were kicked out of their retirement facility for taking this action. Let’s penalize those who actually make a decision to exercise choice, as opposed to default, which drains their—and everyone who loves them—physical, emotional, and yes, financial well being (the focus of Medicare on medical intervention rather than long term care is another story).
What about those who suffer from incipient Alzheimer’s, who are able to see what the future holds and don’t want to go there? What choices do these folks have who want to be the person they are instead of a person who will be unrecognizable to family and friends? Some would argue that as Alzheimer’s progresses you are unaware of the loss of identity, that it is those around you who do the losing, so that makes it OK. I don’t want my children to lose me. I’m their mother, the person with whom they share their most intimate thoughts, worries, and aspirations (caveat: I know there are tons of things they don’t tell me because it’s none of my business), but I am also a person they see in a larger context defined by my work, the way I choose to live, and how I treat them. When Mark’s mother was dying, what she talked about was not the present, her loss of control, what she suffered, or even those of us who were with her. She talked about her life when she was young, her parents, her brother who died in World War II, her youngest brother who she essentially raised, and her life with her husband, who died five years before her.
The image of the native Inuit putting the old person who can no longer contribute to society out on the ice floe remains very vivid to my generation. That is obviously not an option for today’s society (as well as the fact that there may not be many ice floes to put them on). So what are we supposed to do? I don’t have the answer, but if we can’t even have a conversation about it without a Death Panel label we are, as individuals, and as a society, complicit in what often amounts to torture.
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