There are no words

The members meet weekly in a church hall. They practice giving speeches and speaking extemporaneously because at some point they realized this was a skill they lacked or a streak of potential that had gone unfulfilled for too long.

I imagine they go because they are tired of the palpitations, the queasy current of nervous electricity that shoots up the back of their legs when having to take the podium, or there hangs over them like a cartoon storm cloud the deeper fear of actually not having anything worth saying, their thoughts unformed or shapeshifting. They are failing to convey their points or they wish to exorcise their embolalia. Yes, of course, I am projecting.

I am sitting in a small row of chairs with a folder in my hands, an agenda written out to the minute, with all the members given formal titles for the roles they will assume, like the Introducer of the Welcoming Speaker. It is like a play about a play about a meeting and the ritual of the symbolism of the meeting. It is what makes city council meetings on television fascinating in their excruciating verbal obfuscation, the saying of that which is meant to convey politeness and procedural correctness when what you are feeling is rage or fear.

They are so welcoming. It’s even my title in the ritual symbolism of their meeting etiquette, where I am Welcomed Guest Wertis. I want to take that leap into the mosh pit of their hospitality, but at the same time something is holding me back, the fear perhaps that I would be under obligation to practice speeches I didn’t want to give or find myself stating, in week after week of Table Topics that, “I have no words.”

Good ideas are not at my beck and call in that way. Maybe it would be good training for the words, to roust them out and make them march in straight lines, not meander aimlessly, but this could be achieved by journaling exercises rather than by devoting the time to come to meetings and having this precise verbal choreography with people.

In spite of the time limitations, the Key Speaker runs over. The warning card is flashed more and more emphatically by the Keeper of Time in the front row.

Some of the Toastmasters have been in this together for a decade. I find this both touching and disconcerting. I had thought it was more like a course you took, where you solved your public speaking issues and moved on, but it is more a club where they take comfort in the rituals, a sort of fan group for an ideal state of a very certain kind of polite eloquence. They draw closer together through succinct personal revelations but maintaining a correct distance. Feedback is given not by name but by role. I thought the Master of Table Topics did a commendable job keeping time.  There are leadership tracks you can join, a progression of speaking accomplishments to achieve, wider audiences to be addressed regionally, internationally. Is this my show? Are these my people?

What if, during the meeting, an emergency happened and we were forced to stay in the church hall until the all-clear sounded, how long would it take for the formality to erode? Would the topic be correctly adjourned in lieu of determining the severity of the situation? What if someone is an unreformed circuitous talker? Would the group turn on him or her? I imagine pairs being elected to venture into the church basement in search of nuclear era snacks. If the situation were worse than we had at first imagined, how long would it be until the longest-serving members of the club revealed their true feelings about each other? Perhaps one person would throw down her knitting and cry out, “I’m tired of being so darned nice all of the time!” and made a run for it into a thick cloud of waiting poison.

The folder sits on my desk at work all summer, an unanswered invitation, offering the promise to be a different person, one who speaks with a firm but measured conviction on a variety of topics, who can turn a phrase like an unexpected flash of silver in the otherwise muddy creek of human communication where the cliches and the long winded preambles sway like aquatic weeds, the point falling like a lost lure into the silt. Weeks pass and I know that I should say something, thank you for having me to the meeting, anything, but the words just won’t come.

A night of luminaries

“Oh,” says the man in the fedora when we are introduced, “You were on the radio yesterday.”

What a great way to enter a party, especially when you have come alone and you are not sure who else will be there.

He has just recorded a couple of spots for the same program and writes a column for the paper and a blog about restoring a 1954 Chevy truck. He doesn’t mention it, but he has a day job with an international engineering and geospatial software firm. Now, if we hadn’t started off talking about writing we might have chatted about our jobs and left it at that. When meeting people at parties I am not extending my urbane, tabby paw and declaring myself to be The Wertis.

The great thing about social media, my husband jokes, is that nobody knows you’re a dog.

Yeah, says the dog, before there was Twitter, no one would talk to me about anything of substance.

Social media blurs all the lines between your professional, family and private life. And while it is important in, say, marketing to connect your brand across platforms, I am not wanting, personally, to become this seamless online entity. I don’t want to log in to news media through my Facebook account or Tweet my Amazon purchases or be the same six people everywhere I turn up. I don’t want people to read this blog because I am the mother of the older or younger daughter. I want there to be a little opacity even if it is an illusion.

The cat’s mother: she has followers.

The world being flattened by social media is good for education, health, the arts, technology, maybe democracy, but all the facets of your life and all your social groups merged into one avatar is a bit horrible and tedious. You don’t need to know me as the charming professional that I might be. This blog is where I get to be grumpy or go off topic or be uncertain. If I felt that I were writing for people I see every day it might be a bit weird. I like to think of my readership as mostly far-flung. And not everyone at work wants to know about my obsession with keeping the scissors in the kitchen or what I think about when I drive.

On the second Saturday in December, 5,000 glowing paper bags line the roads of the historic districts of our small city.

But I didn’t know about this and so, when driving to my friend’s open house, my first thought was that, as I turned off an arterial road into the dark residential one, these were little stone plinths to help drivers avoid running onto lawns. Or to warn them off. The neighborhood association had gone a bit bonkers I thought, baring their teeth at me. These white markers extended all the way down the street, in an endless maw.

As my eyes adjusted, I realized that the brutal white teeth were paper not concrete. This transformation and their impermanence made them beautiful. I had the idea that they were there to guide the runners of whatever race had taken place during day, for the stragglers, to light their way to the finish line.

When the network of light expanded at the first cross-street, I saw that it was too complex to be part of the race. As a marathon route, this would have been like one of those puzzles where you have to trace a design without lifting your pencil or retracing any segment, which, town of engineers that we are, would go down a treat. They could call it The Mental Mile.

I tell the man in the hat about a post I have been trying to write about a friend, how I think that both of us consider each others’ lives to be a form of writer’s colony. Is that fair? It is so hard it is to write about people you know. Other people will read what you have written, if you’re lucky. You will have made your friend both larger and smaller than real life. You have reduced them to fit the form of your writing, but at the same time you have made them a larger character with whom more people might identify. You expose them to interpretation.

Dotted around the room, I see people I know. I run the course between them, without lifting my pen. The night, the bags of light, the people walking on the street are all part of an evening called Luminaries, which involves house tours and people being expected to decorate.

On my way home, I see a set of blue upholstered French Regency chairs arranged in a front parlor. The room behind them is alight and the light falls on the cushions so that they take on an air of mystery and importance, like a cat disappearing into the shadows.

Strange bedfellows

The other night my husband shared something very personal. It is something that has been present for the past two and half years and he has just now given it words. After a lifetime of considering himself to be a cat person, my husband has discovered that he is a dog person.

Midlife Animal Preference Conversion (MAPC) is not as uncommon as I had thought. The next day my friend reported that she, too, has MAPC. A staunch dog person, she was actually so pro-dog, she was anti-cat, and you know what they say about protesting too much. “I mean, I have even sent cat joke emails,” she confessed. Only in spite or, some might say, because, of her cat aversion, one has arrived at her house and twined its tail ’round her heart. “This cat is making me think that I might actually be a cat person. All of a sudden dogs seem so needy.”

I tell her about my husband. Everyone’s switching teams. I get the appeal of dogs, but I can’t imagine living without cats. I’m playing on both sides.

My husband and I both had cats growing up. We adopted as soon as we were out of school, and even in college there was D-U-G Dug (I named him), an orange tabby with a mean streak, who wandered around the Town Houses looking for food and more interesting or more violent people to hang out with; he was always itching for a fight. We were never sure about Dug, who owned him or what he was all about.

In London, we didn’t qualify for a pet through the RSPCA because we didn’t have direct access to the outdoors. Animals grow old and die in the Battersea Dogs Home, because, as the name suggests, they already have a home, thank you, and a more suitable one than yours, so sod off. We got our first London cat from a classified in The Loot. I took the tube out to a grim, grey street in East London and brought him home in an apple carton. We got him a kitten the following year. He has always been very devoted to her. We’re not sure if the feeling has ever been mutual.

Dogs, like cars, are impractical in a city. Oh, people said, when we were making plans to move to the US, are you going to get the girls a dog? What are we, we replied, the Obamas? They had just moved to the White House.

But the girls have always liked dogs. They have, I can see this in retrospect, been repressed dog people, living in a cat household. The older daughter went through a major dog phase. We learned how to ask “May I pet your dog?” in French as part of our small arsenal of  vocabulary, like straw and vacuum cleaner, which they never teach you in school, not anticipating that you will travel with children or rent a house.

“Are you sure the verb is caress?” my husband asked nervously as the older daughter strode over to strangers in cafes, parks and markets.

The younger daughter really wanted a dog when we moved to America. In the same way that  parents respond to requests for a guinea pig with, “But we have a fish,” so too, did “But we have cats” begin to sound a little hollow.

We got a dog.

We spotted the mother lolling by the side of a road as we were going to a friend’s house on the outskirts of this little town in the more agrarian part of Alabama. That looks like a nice dog, we all remarked, seeing dogs the way that women trying to get pregnant notice babies: everywhere.

“She just had puppies,” our friend said, “and I bet they’d let you have one. They’ve been giving them away.” And so we drove out of town an hour later, with a puppy, making an emergency stop at the dollar store for food. It was a bit like coming home from the hospital with the older daughter. I can’t believe they are letting us do this. We have no idea what we’re doing.

I found dog mentality a little frustrating at first, their need for hierarchy. We’d watched our share of The Dog Whisperer, which in retrospect should have tipped me off to my husband’s latent MAPC, and I knew that the root of all dog problems was the owners’ inability to establish dominance. Housebreaking was tedious, but the mental energy was in letting him know you were top dog. Cats just don’t care about all of that and throughout this business of puppy training they were like our elegant, childless friends, stretched out on the couch enjoying an elaborate cocktail while we carried dessicated meaty dog treats in our pockets.

You start thinking like a hackneyed sexist. Cats are aloof, capricious women, with psychic powers, slinking around in designer gowns. Dogs are boisterous, 9-year-old boys who will do anything to make the team and expect that you will be their firm coach who knows all the rules.

“Dogs are on your side,” my husband says. It is a revelation after he sees that the dog charging the cat when she reaches up the shred the sofa some more. The dog knows this is not allowed. She couldn’t care less. It feels good. She was bored. The dog is a great smelly beast and not graceful. Eats my food. And worse. I could go under the couch and get your tennis ball but then you would just run around some more.

“We’re never getting another cat,” he says.

We are leaving the farmers market when we see people in the parking lot of the Liquor Express with a box of tiny, brindled puppies, the mom on a leash. “Oh,” we all cry, “puppies!”

“Should we get one?” my husband asks.

“Yes!” we all shout. Even me.

“Ha!” he exclaims. “You would, wouldn’t you? You said yes.” I mean, it’s like the worst idea ever, obviously. Two elderly cats and a stable, happy dog. Let’s see, let’s push one or all of them over the brink of one thing or the other.

Later, when we are all bundled together on the bed—humans, cats, dog—it occurs to me that pets, cats and dogs, most animals, with their shorter life spans offer up a science fiction kind of tragedy, going from small, skittery kittens and soft, warm, wiggling puppies to old souls, with ginger tread and deep sighs, within the scope of a human childhood. More themselves than ever and moving past you and away to the end of their own days.

You probably think this post is about you

This is the dog’s first visit to Chicago, to any city. We wonder what he will make of the buildings, the elevator, so many people. This is a dog whose ears prick at the rumble of the UPS truck at the foot of our road, but if, in the city, a man across the street gets into a parked car and starts the engine, whose yard is it anyway? Do you bark?

Where are you supposed to pee? Why are all the flowers behind fences?

Normally, on arrival, we would throw our bags down and stay inside for the night, but the dog needs to be walked. We find ourselves out on the street, amid the elegantly tattooed, the sleeveless and coiffed, the ice cream eaters, the cafe table occupiers.

We are looking for a spot that looks like a place where a dog might be allowed to poop. This would not be in the arranged pebble garden in front of a doorman building, nor in the precise display of birds of paradise and begonias in a pristine lawn stuck with placards stating that the ground is treated with chemicals and dogs are not allowed.

Chicago has alleys and this is where we find a perfect patch of unlandscaping, the potential of which the dog grasps immediately.

In the middle of the night a man and a woman are hosting a radio guest, local boy made good, comedian Jimmy Pardo. They start talking about back hair and it emerges that between the two men, they partake in brow grooming and back waxing and that one of them trims his underarm air. This is an odd conversation to wake up to. It is all very The Capital in The Hunger Games. And then, more disturbing, one of the men reports a conversation his wife has had with their waxer—he goes to his wife’s salon—who had told her she was lucky to get an appointment, this is our busy season with prom, with all of the girls coming in for, no, not leg or underarm or brow waxing, nope: Brazilians.

People here pull their dogs back a little when they see another dog, or is it just our motley hound? “He’s not good with other dogs,” they say, or “She can be aggressive.”

We take the dog to the lake and let him off leash. Other dogs are here, only one is muzzled. They run in and out of the water. The beach, framed by skyscrapers, and the skyscrapers topped with swimming pools, has always seemed something of a miracle, add to that the jubilation of the dogs.

Two people are wrapped up and sleeping by the lifeguard stand. The limbless panhandlers and the homeless shock us anew. This is still going on, this problem still unsolved, against the backdrop of the shoppers’ paradise, where everyone, the beggars and the shop people, are telling you, Have a good one!

If it is not enough that underage girls are getting Brazilian waxes to please themselves and/or their prom dates, the final portent of civilization’s downfall is spotted by my husband in Brooks Brothers, where the men’s department now sells Spanx. Spanx for men. In Brooks Brothers. In Chicago.

To rephrase my father’s joke of yore, which was, If it’s 5:30 PM in New York, what time is it in Chicago? (Answer, 1950), if civilization is T minus six tufts of unwanted male body hair and one pound of belly fat in Chicago, how much farther behind the dystopian curve are we in Alabama? Do we measure cultural velocity by incident, density or force of impact? For all I know, men are waxing in Alabama, have been for years, and I’m just not tuned to the right radio station to hear about it.

What is it about the city that you have these intense, young, put-together women walking swiftly with their aspirations set out like tiny prep bowls of rose-colored salt and olive zest? Does it create them or are they drawn to it? And, finding others like them, it feels necessary and unquestionably right.

For me, the city is a natural habitat. I revert to form so much that the overly chatty biker dude who rings me up at H & M tells me I ought to smile more. But why is he pretending to have an Australian accent? And is it wrong to think that the hairy shoulders with the leather vest and the untrimmed underarm hair are a bit… unprofessional?

Our last night in Chicago, the dog and I make our way out into the evening. Outside the Puma fashion store, we meet an older woman and her smaller dog, who stands on his back legs and waves his paws until his owner lets the leash out slowly and allows him to approach. Our dog, however, is not engaged. He looks back and forth, not making eye contact, unsure of what to do next. The lady compliments his markings. I thank her. Then she laughs abruptly.  I look down to find that he has started to wee, too close to me, spraying the tops of my sandaled feet. Without another word, she retracts her dog and moves on.

But who can blame him, the dog, coming to such a place as this? He has made a good job of it. Feet and sandals can be washed. Unfazed, undefeated, liberated, we walk through the cafe tables, past the pancake restaurant, and into the alley.

Photo by The Younger Daughter, who took the dog out for several walks and found these signs hilarious.

Mouse

My year of playing Tetris in Penn Station was not totally wasted. Me, the joystick, the shapes, the Russian dancers. It was my act of transition, from graduate school to graduate school apartment and hours at a gameless computer (solitaire not counting), and before the internet. Every now and then I got my initials on the high scores screen.

I apply these same skills now to packing up the car for road trips. Tiny under-the-counter European refrigerators tested my ability to see how blocks of butter, sausages, liters of milk could be placed on their sides, each grocery bag unloaded was a completed row of multicolored cubes.

Tonight’s challenge was an enormous pile of firewood in the garage.

I’ve got my gardening gloves on and I’m in a groove. My husband and the dog have gone to pick up my daughter and take her to an appointment. The other daughter has downloaded an app to study Spanish vocabulary. When they get back, I will have shifted the wood. I am like… a pioneer woman.

I am down to the bottom third of the woodpile when I see it.

Some white matting. A swift movement. I have rumbled the mouse.

It is gray.

I prod at the nest with a mop handle. I don’t have a big animal phobia but I don’t like the idea that something is going to jump out at me. I open the garage door so that it can escape to freedom. That would be easiest.

I throw away the nest. Will the mouse come looking for it?

I dismantle its hickory apartment building. Will it go sniffing in search of the exact log it lived on? I’m leaving that log right there.

Longtime readers may remember that my younger daughter once rejected the offer of a particular novel, explaining patiently that she does not like books about animals who defend their territory.

How far will a mouse go? Is my garage his territory? I feel like one of the insensitive human characters in The Borrowers. Oh, where has my thimble gone? I could have sworn I left it on top of the sewing basket… Now whatever is it doing here by the mouse hole?

I regard the remaining logs. The mouse scurries behind them, behind the extra refrigerator that came with the house. Each log I reach for could be the one the mouse is under.

But, you know, this woman’s got a job to do. So I carry on. My husband is very impressed when they return. The pile is one log deep. Who knew I could stack wood like this? My older daughter regards the remaining logs for some time. Under no circumstances is the mouse to be brought into the house, we remind her.

She cuts up fabrics and has this collection of them. One was in the mouse’s nest.

We go back in for jackets. We are going out to dinner.

“I saw them both,” my daughter says when we return. “There are two mice.”

***

I am back in the garage a second night. This night I am shifting things out of the storeroom and figuring out what we keep and what goes in the skip.

A purple ziptop bag we brought home from Mardi Gras from years ago has been sitting on top of the filing cabinet in the garage for at least a year.  I have been assuming it was the extra beads. I open it.

I find some doll clothes. A baby doll. The doll’s shoes. A plastic bag with a juice box, a ziploc bag with some potato chips, a plastic fork, a napkin and a tiny plastic container with cut-up hotdog and ketchup.

It is a running away bag. The giveaway was the napkin. Also the doll.

I am glad that whoever packed it, almost certainly the younger daughter, forgot it, forgot about it and stayed on to defend her territory.

Garages are easier to pack than to unpack.

Gotcha

"Miss Bessie's First Refrigerator," but not, one assumes, her last

I am watering some new shrubs on the rocky slope behind our house where the system doesn’t reach, having an early morning moment of virtuous housetasking. Doing the watering is a mindless act, daydreaming, restorative, not  the perpetual upsell of American life.

But it sucks you in. It creeps up on you and announces itself when you least expect it. When our very nice stainless refrigerator was ailing last month and my husband was talking about the kind of unit he’d get to replace it, I started thinking, oh, yeah, that would be nice. Not, we should just get whatever fits.

New features… I’m thinking. Maybe glass doors… like a deli. In my fantasy we live on full bowls of trifle, lemons, Pellegrino and a rainbow of Vitamin Water. We don’t have bits of things, simultaneous ketchups, things that are formless and white, like a chicken carcass.

We were watching a new TV show and I noticed how nice the kitchen of the young urban couple was, all dark teal walls and stainless appliances. A lovely bowl here and there. Maybe glass is the new stainless.

But, I think, happily, the nice thing about a garden and watering your shrubs in the wooded glade is being out in nature. It’s a good way to start the day. I see a squirrel on a nearby tree and think, I could get him (with my hose). But still, where the hell did that come from?

Our fridge is repaired, but the temperature in the vegetable drawer seems a bit too cold. One day, we’ll have to get a new one. Glass-fronted. The better to display the game.

Let me count the ways

“He says, ‘Hey guys, welcome to Abercrombie.’ What do I even say to that??”

It is an open-ended conversation starter, a welcoming gesture in case you were intimidated by the shuttered gloom of the place, of entering an adolescent cave. It is a more casual version of “Is there something I can help you find?” (Bath & Body Works—um, yes, have you got any Halloween-themed hand sanitizers? That’s what I’m handing out this year!) Or the creepy stranger/friend tactics of Gap a few years ago: “Great scarf!”

“What do you say to that? Jeez,” my husband says, “you really are a curmudgeon.”

I am and I am not. So rather than continue my rant about the mall and the strategic greeting tactics of its young employees or the fact that stores have created 13 seasons to separate us from our money and bring more stuff into our houses, I am going to write my list of things I like about living here, aside from my work and friends.

1) Fresh okra. An Egyptian/Middle Eastern specialty in London, it is readily available here. We love okra more than corn.

2) The Apple Man at the farmer’s market. He says things like: “A lady bought a whole bushel of these for apple sauce and said, but I hate to waste the peel. Well, I told her, you just boil these up and [I forget the rest] you can make apple jelly. When you grow up on an apple farm, you don’t let any of it go to waste.” And for $4 you can eat winesaps all week.

3) When I heard a song I liked on the radio, the next day I wrote the station and they forwarded my question to the host, who wrote me back that evening. This was the song:

4) When the wheel fell of our garbage bin I called the city. The next day a truck stopped in front our house, a man jumped out, popped on a new wheel and rode off. I waved wildly at him yelling thanks. Stunning municipal efficiency.

5) Abundant BBQ. When we lived abroad and only vacationed in Alabama (seriously) we would bring barbecue back to London. I hardly eat it now, but I know it’s only minutes away and that gives me a sense of security and wellbeing.

6) And if I need a digestive biscuit, they sell McVitties at Publix.

7) Our public library is really good.

8 )  If I went out at night I could go hear bands play at a converted mill for about $10. I could bring the dog and there would be free parking.

9) Our airport is easy to use, parking is $8 a day.

10) Two public radio stations.

11) Creek walks

12) A local cheesemaker whose wares can be purchased at Kroger and Costco.

13) Going to the pool after work, from air conditioning to three minutes of hot car to warm concrete, bug noise and the day winding down.

14) a very good used clothing store. I had a similar run of luck with finding good stuff at the St. John’s & St. Elizabeth’s hospice shop in London and thought I might have just been connecting with one person’s wardrobe, so my luck might be that this has happened again which is both sad/morbid or they were just tired of it/fortuitous.

15) Dog Park

16) Driving by fields of cows on the way to Target.

There, that was more than 10 things.

The next time the youth at the door welcomes me to Abercrombie, I’ll just be like, hey, back. We are, after all, happy to be here. But let me shop in peace, okay. And, no, you can’t have my phone number.

The salt of the earth

The Amish community sits on either side of an awful highway. It is a road that says don’t leave that for this.

Along the strip are Chevrolet dealerships and China Buffets and payday loan, pawn your title places. Vinyl signs with ugly fonts glare in the heat of the day. Tinsel glitters from the car lots. We roll through this flat land, no trees, no relief. Here and there are old signs that have some character, like an enormous yellow muffler, but mostly it is Shoe Caravan, this-n-that crap for your home and Captain D’s Seafood.

It is a moat of modern life, the kind of thing the elders might contrive to keep folks on the farm.

We are looking for the general store, the portal, where you can find the map that says which houses sell what. It is 100°F, a heavy heat that drains your energy and a brightness that blurs your vision.

At the country store, a man washes his horse in the buggy port.

Down the road, behind the store and around the corner, we go back in time. The only roadway signs are now small white ones with black capital letters that identify the products for sale. Green peanuts, onions, okra, pies, harnesses. The first house we stop at sells furniture and produce. The houses are set in clusters of buildings, workshops and barns. Two farms may abut each other so that there is an almost urban proximity to the two houses and then acres of green. A friend later explained that the second house was for the parents when they retired, leaving the farm to the child most likely to succeed.

There has been drought. The ground is dusty and the dirt swirls around us as we pull into the yard. Turkeys squawk in the shade. Outside the house is a little hut with baskets of tomatoes and peppers, a sign for okra and a display case of bead necklaces, some patterned, some random, the crafts of the less skilled, children, or in the case of another house we go to, of a blind man, meant solely for visitors.

A woman comes out of the house. She wears a dark, long-sleeved dress, white bonnet and round, tinted glasses with metal frames that look like soldering, the earpiece curling out under one earlobe. Her accent is not heavy but the cadence of her speech and her accent are unfamiliar. A girl follows her out, and is then sent to find a child to pick more okra.

In the furniture workshop are two small children with their father. What you don’t see with the long dresses are the feet: bare, dirty, broad and muscular. The father is short, with curly blond hair cut in a Dutch boy bob and bangs—like the boy on the paint can—and a springy, uncut beard. The boy and the baby play with the pile of shavings. The father makes tables and chairs and a high chair that turns into a rocking horse when placed lengthwise on the floor one way and turns over to become a desk and chair.

He communicates more with smiles and gestures. He brackets his sentences so that we are guessing at the middles, like feeling our way along the wall of a dark corridor. He likes this, but would be happy to give up this. He gestures at a shelf of commercial stains. He could be 25 or 35. He has at least four children and he got the house.

When an older sister picks up her crying small sister, I see the baby’s long white bloomers. Their authenticity is more of  a surprise than had she been wearing Dora the Explorer pull-ups. The clotheslines are hung with rows of big-to-small white bloomers or dark blue long-sleeved shirts.

At the next house a girl pumps water in the front yard, making a flash of silver against the energetic, silhouette of her figure as she throws herself into her work. There is no electricity, they do not drive cars. The children are educated from first to eighth grade. They learn German first, then English.

“Imagine if they had turned their hand to wine-making,” I said.

The other shoppers/visitors: a black woman looking for collards. In her backseat, four small children press their faces against the window to see the Amish children. A white woman with some kind of slatted basket that needs repairs talks to the farmer at a table of produce, potholders and Indian corn necklaces. If you lived locally this would be your farmers market and your  alternative to Lowes for outdoor furniture.

We go from house to house and buy more produce.

An Amish man walks along the road carrying a gun.

Those of us who grew up reading and/or watching The Little House on the Prairie will remember wondering what Laura would have made of the modern world. And through my futuristically chauvinistic benevolence, I felt a twinge of conscience. Maybe they would have benefited from Thinsulate and radio, but then they wouldn’t have captured our imagination or enjoyed what they had otherwise, the maple syrup snow, Pa’s fiddle.

The next day I heard a radio diary of a trip to Mali where the mud used to build houses and the mosque is harvested at the end of the drought season. People were torn between a desire for modernization and regret for the loss of their traditions. The builder says the mud houses are much cooler in the heat and the people who live in them are healthier than those in concrete houses yet most aspire to a concrete house.

At one rather busier, more diversified shop they were selling car air fresheners to smell of things from nature, like kudzu or cut grass, but they didn’t; they smelled of air freshener. If you want to smell kudzu, drive a buggy. The freshly shelled beans are put in ziploc bags and there a few rustic little pots stamped China on the underside. Even so, I did not get the feeling that after we all departed, they were putting on their T-shirts and flip-flops and watching TV.

The Amish have been settled here since 1944 and the religion dates back to the 17th century. Where do they draw the line at technology? What must it be like to see us over the years, parking our cars in the driveway, our changing, immodest fashions? I found an ABC TV series about Amish teens and rumspringa, the year of “running wild” and deciding whether to become Amish or to leave their families and join the modern world. One of the boys had rigged his buggy with an iPod and speakers. The music he chose was 1980s heavy metal, as if he couldn’t bear to bring himself totally up to date. At the end of the year he decided to stay, content to ride to sound of his own horse.

The younger daughter likes the way the children have jobs and the older children look after the younger ones. The older daughter would be in her last year of school. They would enjoy the time spent out of doors. If we were to join the Amish, we would have no skills and a lot of catching up to do, as if our whole lives had been rumspringa.

Two days later summer is obliterated by a cold, dark, steady rain for Labor Day. I take the girls and a friend to the movies at our outdoor, town-styled mall that has no place to buy an apple or a pint of milk, no newsagent or chemist, only adornment, entertainment and dining. We arrive early and amuse ourselves as the only customers in Sephora, smelling funnel cake shampoo and Justin Bieber perfume. The message of the movie is one the Amish would appreciate, that you should spend the time you have now with your family over other pursuits. It is hard to imagine them now, in their simple houses with the rain pelting down and the fall coming, though I like to think I could give this all up if I had to.

Like you, only better

The other weekend my husband suggested a trip to the main branch library. You’d have thought the kids misheard it as Haribo factory. The library also has a friends of the library shop and we returned home laden with books and comic books to keep and books to return.

Amidst all of this recreational reading some of us have summer reading for work. We are pacing myself to get it read the better to reapply ourselves to Zola (in English, people, in English) on holiday.

I have finished reading Switch, about motivating people to embrace change. I heard one of the book’s authors speak this winter. He was an excellent speaker with funny and apt visuals but this vibrance (it’s a Photoshop word) is diluted over 300 pages. The key concept is that people are elephants with riders (id and ego) and to truly change behavior you have to speak to both.

Change and habit seem to be at the crux of American society. We like what we like: ice in our drinks, cheese-flavored food, television. We have the fourth meal at Taco Bell, 320z cups, man caves, and unlimited movies streamed to the TV for $8 a month. Seriously, don’t get up. But we also are under this pressure that we need to become a better person (Nutrisystem, home gyms, pedometers, botox, magazines). It’s all about having a plan. It’s about the wanting.

In a brilliant stroke of integrated-neuroses marketing, Ziploc now touts their small bags as being the perfect size for 100-calorie snacks, which is a category of chocolate-flavored cereal bars and fake puddings and tiramisu yogurt that hits that weird soft spot between restraint and indulgence.

Summer and travel are two abstracts which make you believe in transformation. Travel makes you want to behave differently and, if my book is to be believed, it is easier to break or start habits when you are away from your regular life where much behavior is automatic. My summer holiday is all about cheese, sitting around and drinks. And books. I want to read more. And, really, I’m good with that.

Even though, if I thought I would remotely enjoy reading Zola for more than two pages in French, I would.

Reading material, whether or not to pack sneakers, or nice clothes for evening meals are all important decisions. Contemplating the books to take when you are going to a non-English-speaking country is all the harder. If you run out, you will end up reading a waterlogged copy of The Thornbirds, which you were lucky to find for 40 euros. This didn’t actually happen. It was Isabel Allende in lira, but you get the idea.

I did not think about my capacity for change when we went to New Orleans to visit our cousins. We throw our things in the car. We walk, eat and hang out. I take printouts of articles I need to read. It is a short trip. I don’t think I am there to improve myself.

But I forget my toothbrush. Luckily, they live walking distance to Whole Foods. I nip out, envying their having a walking distance shop of any description, to admire the merchandise and buy the most right-on toothbrush ever. It is curvy and green, in both senses of the word, made from recycled yogurt pots. When I’m finished with it, if I can remember that the original packaging is in my weekend bag, I can reseal the used toothbrush in its sleeve (no Costco bra packaging here, see previous post) (Thank you, Costco, for being so nice about the return) and drop it in a mailbox; it is addressed and postage paid. Except there’s some part of me that balks at the idea of sending someone my used toothbrush. That’s the intractable elephant in me. Even though the rider will tell me to do it for the environment.

On the way home from New Orleans, we see a sign for the Greene County Greyhound Park. It sounds so stately home, so National Trust. One could imagine the greyhounds in long robes, sprawled out on a terrace with stucco urns of rambling roses, other dogs strolling around the grounds. This is actually the dog track which made the news over some bingo/slot machine controversy. The new name does not suggest, as it should, country men in their overalls and sun-creased faces, the jittery, carnival screech of the metal rabbit, the cement floors and the fog of cigarette smoke, for this is how my husband and I would spent a truly odd evening together back in the day, in the Kennel Club, drinking whiskey and rye.

I have figured out the holiday reading, but not the holiday clothes. I have been having these same conversations with myself since I was young. The rider knows I should take a simple, neutral dress (that I don’t own), flats and sneakers, one cardi, and a bathing suit. The elephant wants to pack a trunk, ha ha, feels sorry for the skirt I haven’t worn all summer, the patterned top I forgot I had, thinks maybe also take the grey batwing sweater, the white trousers, the lighter weight capris that I don’t like the material of, but that are practical and so get worn grudgingly from time to time, my souvenir T-shirt from the Pepper Jelly Festival.

The magazines are filled with articles on how to pack, what to take. The magazines know this is the kind of crazy stuff their readers are thinking about: how to pack for their better selves. Like, what I need to do is go shop for that dress, but the rider said no shopping for clothes, shoes or accessories this month.

The urge to overpack comes from this unrealistic sense of dressing for the person you might become while away. A person who, for example, wears high-heeled shoes. A person who is chic like a French woman. And then you are also trying to know yourself very well. You will never wear that shirt without a longer layer underneath, you hate shorts, these shoes hurt my feet. And you get so sick of yourself that you really need to get away from this person and lose them in a book.

Fleecy goodness

“The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying the slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more.” — Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

I know that quoting someone’s book does not constitute a blog post, but I read this, finally finishing the book this weekend, and I appreciate slippers and I appreciate slippers as a metaphor.

I am wearing my slippers now.