Ice

 

 

“How comfortable are you walking on ice?” the vestigial questionnaire asks.  1 – 10.  

I mark 0.

On the way home from the wellness center, I begin to think about a lot of people who are not comfortable on ice, or with ice, skating thinly on it or around it, for one reason or another.  This month and last, ice has been our chief weather, fast turned metaphor, fast turning allegory.

This year, I’ve decided to read memoirs…looking, as I put it yesterday to my uncle’s niece in Scotland, for clues to the way people persevere, for what gives us the resilience (dare I say hope?) of brain and body to weather what comes.  Beginning with a published list, then asking my reading friends for suggestions, then perusing the library shelves, I came up with some I hadn’t known, as well as some already read…even a long time before..and wanted to befriend again.

I’ve found a few important clues so far, two of which…maybe three…I’m bringing to our book group Wednesday night to begin a discussion about it (we were founded to have such discussions).

 

The first, found in re-reading one of the bravest books I know, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: a girlhood among ghosts, from the ‘70s, opens wide the field for me:

“I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes,” she writes in an early chapter, “White Tigers”.

Yes, I thought…it’s a good ground rule for considering this and a lot of life-searing searches, isn’t it?

Sure enough, it occurred as the resolution of a novel I picked up on a whim between reading lives. Carys Davies’ Clear, set in the Scottish clearances of the mid-1800’s on a far north island inhabited by only one man, is a story of three lives intimately wrapped in estranged languages. (In fairness, I won’t tell more, but urge you toward it in the spirit of mind-enlarging.)

In between those books, I paged through Dinners with Ruth, Nina Totenberg’s memoir on the power of friendships.  While Kingston’s and Totenberg’s books (not to mention Davies’) are planets apart in all the ways I can think of, Totenberg’s friendships, both highly public and meaningfully, privately supportive, reminded me mostly of the way in which most of our women’s lives work, whatever we are or do. 

It’s at the end that she discovers what is behind resilience.  Talking about the remarkable  people (women and men) with whom she has “had the fortune to have…as friends,” and are gone now, she wonders what they might think of the current world they have left behind, the one each has worked so hard to set right, to make better and more open to justice and sense:

“I am struck by the fact that no matter their origins or paths in life, all of them shared a common trait: optimism.  Today’s events, at home and abroad, would surely test that optimism, but while I think each of them would be realistic about the challenges we face, they would all be determined to persevere.  As Ruth [Bader Ginsburg] often said, “My story is hopeful.”

***********************************

I like my new vestigial therapist.  My first homework, she tells me, is to stand between, but not touch, the walls of a corner, feet together, while I close my eyes and keep my balance for 30 seconds at a time.  (Not as easy as you think when you have only one ear working.) Then, in the same corner, I am to open my eyes, look up, look down, look to one side, then the other. And come back to center. Repeat.

Talk about a good metaphor for what perseverance, resilience, and a widened view of life’s possibilities (and paradoxes) can give us.  Even if I can’t ever walk over ice, I am coming to know the way to keep myself from traversing whatever landscape I do come to, whatever dissonance or dark surrounds me.  Hoping to get it right.

 

           

 

 

 

On Time

 

"Luminaries such as [Husserl and Heidegger], who spent much of their prolific careers on trying to fathom the subjective experience of time, concluded that it is one of the most difficult of all phenomenological problems to understand..." (1)

 

It’s four days to the New Year, and, perhaps not surprisingly, I’m thinking about time.  Not so much years…I can’t seem to look backwards with any accuracy.  And not in age…there again, how I calculate my own age (years or intrinsic feeling?) is a conundrum, and how I calculate the age of others by looking at them is futile.

Time during the day is easy…clocks ring, timers buzz, the sun appears and then disappears, often in a purple-scarlet blaze out the back windows that has nothing to do with the clock.

The week, however, is the strangest of all counts:  I know how many days have passed not so much by the calendar, but when the laundry needs to be done.  Otherwise, a Tuesday is the same as Thursday or even Saturday.  What day is it? is a frequent question I wake up to.  (Is this the day I put the trash out?)

Time is, and ever has been, my nemesis.  Nobody’s time (except my sister’s at 4pm when it’s time for crossword puzzles) seems to suit mine, or I it.  I’m speaking of daytime, hourtime, mealtime, even yeartime. People ask if I am free next month at 2pm on Tuesday, and even if I put it on the calendar, it doesn’t seem real.  Next month is a blank, calendar notation or no.

In that regard, I’m always amazed at people who can plan trips a year…even six months…in advance.  Who knows what will happen before then to challenge time?

I don’t bother any more trying to figure out why…it just is the way it is and I am. 

But I can’t help adding one scientist’s words:  “Our sense of time is often linked to our ability to recall past experiences, and disruptions in memory can affect our temporal perception.”  Hmmm.

 

It turns out that I am not the only one with a different sense of time.  A few days ago, I’d pulled Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat off a high bookshelf, thinking to explore further an issue with balance, this time in a narrative rather than the tiresome clinical way (I am nothing if not narrative in persuasion).  Therein, I found that the weirdness of time inhabits others, too.

 Mine, it doesn’t seem, is not what the med men would call pathologic, but there it is:  somewhere in the brain is a mechanism that regulates time by a pulse that doesn’t have anything to do with the clock. Or calendar (so often mishandled over the centuries, anyway, we might as well ignore it). Mine, like others, has a mind of its own.

If I had to guess, I’d say that I am much more tuned to the call of seasons for time, not only the four we also manage to misidentify (spring begins March 21? Not in the south or north, either), but also the subplots of each.  What seems springlike when the snowdrops pop up is only chapter one. When swimming temperature in the ocean arrives, and when it leaves, when the azaleas choose to bloom…all subplots. 

What day do sweaters go back into the storage box?  What day does wool become the friend against chill?  Or linen the breathability in sweltering summer…which usually ends here in October, by the way.  Those are the regulators of my time…the weather having its say as well as the mean temperature.

Even a single day regulates itself by sun or cloud, wind or rain, chill or mist or aridity.  The hours within begin or end later or sooner depending.  Mood, inspired by weather, can dictate my perception of time...even space.

 

But back to laundry-time, which changes with the seasons as well.  Less chronologically challenged housekeepers might be “Monday is wash day” types, but I’m not, and neither is my pile of soiled clothing, towels, sheets, etc., which seems to be as eccentric as I am with time.

Now that it’s winter, there are fewer of certain things to wash…shirts, slacks…and more of others…socks (I can’t seem to keep them in the drawer for long) and undershirts.  When spring ascends into summer, those items made in cotton and linen (thus ironing begins) also ascend in height in the laundry basket; though admittedly lighter and smaller, they take up a third more washing time than in winter.  The day doesn’t matter…some weeks it’s Friday and next Thursday, some weeks it’s Wednesday, Saturday and next Friday again.

None of this dismays me.  It’s part of the homeliness of life that something like when I do the wash tells me about the days passing.  There are so many other and better things to take up time than time itself.

Like art.  How long does it take you to make one of your cards, asked a friend recently as holiday-card season began.  I don’t know, I told him…sometimes five minutes; sometimes two days.  It depends.  I've had pieces of larger art take more than five years, but unless I happen to know the date of origin, I'm not counting.

  

Ah.  Perhaps I have found the ticking mechanism I travel with: it depends.  A nice subjective way of passing time.

Meanwhile, I wish to all a new year of good, whenever it begins for you.

 

(1)            Frontier Psychiatry. 2021 May 7;12:668633. Distortions: A Systematic Review of Cases Characteristic of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, Blom, Nanuashvili, Waters

 

A Dream

A Dream

When I began this blog…I can’t remember the year…I wanted to recreate some of the shared writing of the Journal Workshops I gathered since the early ‘80s.   It had been nearly 35 years, wherever I lived, enjoying and goodness knows learning from the stories and histories of the women who came to write with me.  But life changed after my husband died and I stopped giving them, going on.

Still, missing those shared stories and reflections, I thought to go back to words with others, hoping to have them share with me again, this time here.  If you read these posts, you will rarely see the comments and stories that come back to me, for often they are sent by email; only a few comment on the blog page.  A single word, sometimes, will spark a memory or feeling or emotion or opinion and return in someone else’s message.

It's a single word or short phrase, in fact, on which those earlier gatherings worked, opening our word-hoards (as the much-vaunted Beowulf writer called it) in voice or on paper.  I was reminded of that this morning when I woke out of a dream, though I remembered only about half of it.  A Dream was one of our most prolific cues. (The others which brought about pages and pages were The House on the Corner, My Grandmother’s Hands, and The Red Dress…just in case you want to try them out.)

I don’t know what this dream means, only that it was populated by (indeed initiated by) my cousin and included some others totally unrelated to her.  I would love to hear your thoughts about it; hence I share it here.

The first thing I remember:  walking into the room of a house that only vaguely looked like my cousin Gloria’s last house nearby, and picking up the telephone (the old desk kind) to hear her voice on the answering machine.  A whole message as if she had just left it.  I was startled to hear her voice so strongly and turned to someone just behind me to say so.  “How can this be? She’s gone.” 

Even before I’d moved back here, Gloria and I had had lunches and stay-overs and visits…a retired designer, she was one who came to look at this house when I was considering buying it (she frowned).  Over the years, her early health issues had begun to limit her life, but not our connection, until it brought it to a close a few years ago.  What has bothered me ever since then was that, though I knew her children, I’d had to hear about her death third-hand, and, it being the pandemic era, been told they would hold a memorial later, when possible.  I didn’t hear about that, either.  So perhaps you could say that her voice on that dream phone, so present-tense, was once more making a necessary connection, even after this long.

In any case, the next remembrance of the dream was Gloria herself, coming in from somewhere and sitting down with me to chat about family and life and sewing and cooking (she was superb at both).  She appeared in her beginning-to-be-infirm state of being, so the suddenly busy activity around her kept us separate from that.

Which included, strangely, a large table in a bare connecting room (never would she have had a room of that emptiness) where some men…one in particular whom I actually know (she didn’t) had turned into a chef in a chef’s jacket and small hat and was making a special sandwich.  I asked what the piece he was adding to it was, and, as he answered in French, I thought I heard him name a thin piece of rare roast.  No, he chided me, and then I saw it was a glistening slice of Emmenthaler or good Swiss.

When he and the others began to eat the sandwiches, I went over to ask for some for Gloria, too, for I knew she would enjoy it.  He had half a half of his left, and seemed reluctant to give it up.

But no matter…for then I realized, turning, that Gloria had left the house, and I began, with some women we had been chatting with, to look for her.  Not in front, not in back…there was a pool area…perhaps she was sitting there?  Yes.

Did I reach her? I have forgotten that part.  Once again, however, she seemed to disappear.  Still bemused, I woke then, this dream (so unusually) staying with me, even in bits and pieces.

I do miss Gloria, her company and her family connections to our long past.  She was in age exactly midway between my mother and me.  Her father was my grandmother’s nephew.  Her sister Adele was one I admired for her working life in the City.  Her letters and phone calls with relatives still in the prettiest part of  Italy…it was she who told me about them; in the years when she and her husband were able, they traveled every year, almost, to visit them. 

Her wall of our older relatives, installed house after house in the same way, was the backdrop for our visits in her family room.  Always her superb sewing (she, not I, had inherited the needlework talents of our foremothers and gone beyond many of them)…she taught me the trick of altering slacks (a need we shared, for different reasons), and her way of replicating, on her machine or with needles of all kinds, any high-priced garment she saw herself in, a marvel. 

Her recipes, old on thin paper, new cut neatly from magazines, or reinvented, all shared, her stack of instant appetizer-dinners from Trader Joe’s, and the tiny intricate cookies she baked for holidays…nothing like that giant dream sandwich…

All stay with me. As do the life lessons she passed on, on widowhood.

It being Christmas day, it seems the more poignant, this dream. Does it to you?

  

Snow

 It's barely December, but this morning, after a week of cold-ishness, the thermometer reads 27 degrees..."feels like 19," reports the weather report.

I'm up too early, so I stay in bed for an hour or so reading more of The Last Chinese Chef...fascinating for its history and illumination of the best food of China and its chefs, but mostly for me redolent of the way food…the right food, the right ingredients, the right preparation, for the right people…keeps us together.  One doesn’t eat alone, the Chinese tradition goes…one gathers to share bowls together.

 Then, when it lightens, I close the book and look outside to see what began last night as a few flakes of snow after too long a day of promises.

Sure enough, the mailboxes, cars, benches, bushes have a thin layer of white on them. Ah...not much (not as much as Alexander wishes, or I either, truth to tell…if it’s going to snow, it should SNOW), but enough.  I pull on my warmest clothes...a pair of corduroy slacks, wool socks and the sweater my mother knitted me way back when I was another shape, and too cold in New Hampshire.

This is her birth month...a few days after Christmas she would have been 108. 

   

Like most of her family in those generations, she was an expert needleworker.  Many of us are lucky to have the fruits of her work.  (In her nineties, it annoyed her that she couldn't do the stitches her hands took for granted..."When I think, I used to knit dresses in the movie theatre in the dark!" she complained.)

The boys each had her blankets…as infants they were given throws modeled in soft colors that even when they were adults they’d use.  For me, there were shawls and scarves…

 

…and, for the coldest mornings, this sweater.  Even now on my screen porch, facing southwest, I can stand in it, warm.

Thanks, Mom.