An expatriate in my own land
In the last year that I went to work, on almost every Monday, I wore the same item of clothing — a pair of red, Royal Stewart tartan trousers that I bought in London. I was not there for vacation, but to attend a memorial service for my husband.
Continue reading “The Magic of Monday Pants”
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.
First of all, know that these sounds are normal: birds very close to the house, the way our cat belts out torch songs of boredom in the middle of the night.
The car horns and sanitation workers you have in New York will be replaced by a throbbing chorus of cicadas. You may call a friend and hold the phone in the air. Just try to imagine, you will say, what I am going through.
When you tell your parents of your plan to take up residence in Alabama for three weeks, as our dogsitter, they fear for your safety in this place where anyone and everyone could be carrying a gun. Manhattan, the devil you know, has its dangers to be sure, but out there, in wild America, you can’t be sure of anything, only that you are an outsider.
Your mother reminds you that you are Jewish, that you might have car trouble, and that this is a place with storms and snakes. Or maybe they don’t know about the snakes. My daughter mentioned the other day that she sees them pop out of holes in the ground on her way to school. I don’t think I will tell you about the snakes.
My husband, who understands what people from New York City can be like, because he is married to one, emphasizes that people in the South are friendly. It is customary to nod or wave as you drive down our street or even speak to people in the supermarket. You ask me about this later and I confirm that it is true. You don’t need an exit strategy.
Even as I tell you that we live on a suburban street, I know that you are picturing a swamp, the only means of escape a rusted out truck with manual ignition. As you pull repeatedly on the clutch the cicadas drown out all other sounds.
As I write the instructions for how to look after the dog and where to find things, you ask questions I hadn’t anticipated. I am trying to tell you how to navigate my life while you are busy inventing your own.
In one email you ask if I own a mandolin and where to go to an open mic night to sing. I know where to find a cigar box banjo, but I am not even sure these are real questions. Since when are you a musician?
You clarify that the mandolin is for slicing cucumbers from the farmers market and that you have a fantasy where you will unleash your inner cabaret persona. You imagine a nearly empty nightclub—I am picturing a raucous table of missile defense engineers drinking Monkeynaut, a local brew, cheering you on. This is not a place where we celebrate loneliness.
You ask what to bring. How can I tell you? A bathing suit. A sweater for the supermarket. But maybe also a cape and a tricornered hat.
What time does the dog go to bed? You ask. Does he like to chase balls? The questions keep coming: ziplining, manicures, health food. I am researching a new life rather than instructing in my own. You are free from the burden of being me. All I ask in return is that you let me know how it goes.
This piece was written last spring in answer to a writing prompt of Operating Instructions. My friend did come here and became good enough friends with some of our friends that she returned. She could have been the only person in all of NYC to visit for New Year’s. She found the experience broadening in some ways and the experience of having to drive everywhere oppressive, which I think very few Americans get. People think cars are freedom, but if you have grown up being able to walk out the door and get anywhere on foot or public transportation a car is a big, needy beast with its own agenda. You have to negotiate with it to get anywhere. You have to pay attention to it and to “the road” first thing in the morning. She has drafted her own version of the experience, which I will share here as a companion piece.
“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.
Late in his brief career as a New York City public school teacher, at the end of the school year, there was a change to the schedule that meant my husband had to collect his sixth grade class from the music room, which was in another building, across the street.
He arrived to find them, not standing on risers, but slumped in their seats, some were reading or drawing, not misbehaving but enduring. The class was like a waiting room of the powerless and resigned. Up at the front of the room, their teacher sat in an equally desultory manner at a piano, playing a popular song from 1890s.
The song he sang, “Sidewalks of New York,” describes the growing up and apart of urban youth of the Victorian era, of days gone by and life in the city as it was then. It could have led to an interesting discussion of how children’s lives in the city had changed, or how music was made popular before radio, or how music can engender nostalgia. My husband was then reading Luc Sante’s Low Life, an engaging piece of research on that era, and knew the song from that book. On weekends we strolled the sidewalks of New York looking for glimpses of its former self along the Bowery and among the tenements by the Manhattan Bridge, to spot the windows of illegal sweatshops leaking steam or the ghosts of old signs that indicated dives, flophouses and bunco parlors.
In the same manner of squinting into the past, one might have sought to find vestiges of an alert and engaged teacher somewhere in this music classroom. The fug of boredom, the obsolescence of the song might inspire a Brutalist reposnse. Tear it all down. There is nothing worth saving here. What had inspired him to start singing this song to his students? Whatever it was, he had long ago given up.
“What was going on in there?” my husband asked one of the students on their way back to class.
“We’ve been singing that song all year,” was the reply. It was by then May or June. They had survived the worst of it.
And maybe the children had been singing it at one point, but they weren’t anymore. The teacher was on his own. His was the only voice lifted in song, if you could say it was lifted. The children were silent. They were neither participants nor an audience, but fellow prisoners assiduously ignoring him while serving time together in the institution he had created in his classroom. When the student said “we” have been singing he was acknowledging that bond.
However good or bad your teacher or school is there will always be moments of institutional tedium. School is about being with other people. It will involve waiting, listening, not running in the halls, and being on a timetable you didn’t create, being part of a group. Some of us are better suited to that than others. But moments are one thing, a year is another.
I was lucky to have had good music teachers. They became the song, each note, each phrase, and the class flowed. You sang, you mastered songs, new songs were introduced, you filed onto the risers, you performed. Over the years, we sang a lot of show tunes, a lot of Beatles, some traditional, one by e. e. cummings, which if you get a couple of us together, I bet we could sing for you, remembering the way that Mr. Davis enunciated, “A wistful LiTT-Le clowN/whoM SomeBoD-Y burie-D/upsideDowN/in an ash….baR-ELL…” stamping the time in pointy shoes. He was fierce and intense. Each breath mattered.
In the spring, faculty and staff where I have worked are invited to join the choir to sing at commencement. I should do that, I would always think, and finally last spring I did. At school and as parents, we are always encouraging children to step outside of their comfort zones, take risks, try new things. If you don’t ever do it yourself, the words will start to ring hollow.
I had forgotten how hard it is to learn a piece of music. Our piece was “Things that Never Die,” with lyrics by Charles Dickens that do not rhyme and an alto part that is hard and high. The director provides the song in a series of MP3 files that isolate each part. I listen in the car and sing along when I am alone. We have only four rehearsals. What if I forget the lyrics or miss the cue to join or to fade? Fear adds drama to the proceedings.
I have not stretched my voice in a long time, but at the same time I record some readings (from this blog) for the radio. I am a person who shies away from the sound of her own voice, but I am learning to slow down and breathe, to focus on the timing. One page of text becomes a lot of ground to cover.
Singing takes more concentration than I had imagined. This was how the time flew by in chorus. Some days you pick up in the middle of the song or at the end. You seldom work through it start to finish. Not the same way every time, for a year. When you read for the radio, you slow down at the last line to let it sink in. It might be the only thing that people really hear.
Think of a man who sings the same song every day, who used to love to sing. His voice, his fingers on the keys, the ideas that flow, the memories of a time the song describes. How had he settled on this song, of all the songs, not “American Pie,” rich with history and code, which an older boy had explained to us in our Middle School chorus, or a song of his own youth, whenever that had been.
What is the sound of a voice falling on deaf ears? A nostalgia for nothing, not even a desire to escape, just waiting like 30 children trapped in a room or a man trapped in a job.
Writing can be like all of these things: solitary, pointless or giving voice. But as I slow down here at the end what should I leave with you with? A warning against stagnation, the cautionary tale of a burned out hack, a boast that I conquered a fear, or just a note of thanks? Thank you for listening.
Image: Cover from sheet music of “The Sidewalks of New York”, by Charles B. Lawlor and James W. Blake. New York: Richmond-Robbins, Inc., 1914
Going to your college reunion is like visiting a country you have dreamed about many times. It will all feel very familiar, but people and topography will have changed in subtle ways. And the climate is different. You have never been there in summer. This was when they cleared you out and the town had some relief from your noisy indifference.
The plane is completely full and there are to be no seat changes. “Please let me know,” says the flight attendant, “if there’s anything I can do to make this flight any more enjoyable than it already will be.”
On our way there, we drop off the girls with their cousins and spend the night with my husband’s aunt and uncle in their new place, a house in a retirement community. It is located in a wooded setting around a large stone building that was the home of a railroad tycoon. The grounds are referred to as a campus, the banks of houses form a quad. There are activities on message boards, a gym, a pool, a greenhouse, a painting of a golf course in the manner of Fairfield Porter, photographs of residents posing comically with croquet mallets, antique-filled parlors, an art show with large format digital photography that challenges your view of subject matter and someone’s turtle collection in a glass case. There is a wall of mailboxes, each with a community paper inside. A wine tasting is in session. Dogs are allowed but not children. We are ready to move in except for that last fact. We could only call them our staff for so long.
Down one wing or up a flight are people who need care and medical attention. You do not see them in the parlor, in coats, dressed for dinner. It is like the college health center, tucked away, there when you need it.
We drive up to Poughkeepsie the next day and on arrival bump into a friend. How quickly you fall back into step with that flow of activity. We are meeting a professor for coffee. When we are talking about literature, his subject, I feel like my head is an abandoned house and each book, author, insight mentioned opens a door to a musty room. Motes of intellectual dust are kicked up as the room is aired out. I could explore this house on my own, I know, but who has the time?
These are the explosions of insight and clarity and ideas that illuminated my life then and, like an aging heir who cannot afford the upkeep on one’s own, I have closed one wing and then another and settled myself in a parlor with all that I need within arm’s reach.
At our next reunion we will have passed 50. Already, we are survivors of one thing or another. The bright future we walked out into 25 years ago was, we knew even then, something of an illusion. People’s lives meander and get complicated. We have our own issues, our children’s, our parents’ lives to reckon with.
Walking back to the dorm after our class dinner we are in front of the library. A group of women a few reunions ahead of us remark on its beauty and echo what we have been saying amongst our friends all day. Look what we had here that we didn’t nearly fully appreciate.
“If only we had known!” exclaims the older woman.
“You all knew,” her friend replies. “I was the only one who didn’t.”
There is a sense of safety in a group of friends your own age. We have been out there and had our experiences but now we are back together. This is what we had. We will always have had this. The college serves us tea in the Rose Parlor, beer on the lawn in front of our dorm, steak in a tent.
Like it said in the song we sang when there, Gaudeamus igitur, this is youth’s delightful frolic before the earth will have us. Let sadness perish.
Main photo by Nick Platt ’87, used with permission. See more of his work here.
I’ll be reading “Running Wild,” about my trip to the Amish community in Ethridge, Tennessee, on September 13.
I read “Think About it” on Writer’s Corner on our local public radio station, WLRH, Friday, July 20.
You can listen here.
Two more readings are yet to air. Writer’s Corner is on during “Morning Blend,” at 9:30 AM, and at, 6:45 PM, during “All Things Considered.”
I read “Garage Party,” a shortened version of the post “A garage so nice you could serve drinks in it” on May 29, 2012.
Readings are archived here and here.
If you like it, please let NPR know.
Night is falling. We are sitting in our friends’ back yard watching their next door neighbor light a bonfire for our children to tend. His are at the beach with his wife. Since the storms last year, the bonfire has been a popular activity.
Our friends’ German house guests call to report a flat tire, but the evening is fluid, dinner safe to wait. It is a perfect night to sit outside. Fireflies, but not mosquitoes. The children gather sticks and organize themselves.
The neighbor hands me his phone with a picture of his younger son in the dark, in front of a rectangular fire.
“Forget Chuck E. Cheese,” he says. “For X’s 10th birthday, we had all his friends over and burned down the climbing frame.”
Continue reading “The Biscuit Tin”
If I were to get a tattoo, it wouldn’t be butterfly on the back of my calf. It would be the kind you get in prison, the letters between your knuckles, the ones that say L O V E on one hand, H A T E on the other, across the lower joints of each digit. The kind they do with paper clips and melted ballpoint ink. Mine would say M I L K.
I sometimes resort to this. An initial on the heel of my palm.
Milk, I remind myself yesterday at work. I write it on the edge of a card with two other things, which I do. I get home. No milk.
My computer has spent the month in and out of the shop. Actually, for a computer, it’s probably like being at camp or an artist colony. It has been hanging out at the Apple store waiting for parts and moving up the repair queue. Tonight, I am collecting it and think to myself as I drive: Milk.
Today, someone in my Twitter feed posted a link to a video that some guy made of his 5-year-old daughter’s reaction to familiar logos. They said it would make you smile so much your face would hurt. I found it really depressing. The one creative idea she had was that the McDonald’s logo looks like it’s made out of fries. Otherwise she was just winning the speed round of global branding and visual literacy. She recognized them all immediately, either by name or product type (except for Motorola). Even if she didn’t know the name, she knew it was for soda, coffee, games.
When our children were small, I read that McDonald’s and Coke signs were recognizable to babies, even ours, and it was kind of, whoa, baby intelligence, freaky, but now it’s so clear that these things are being imprinted on us and children are just absorbing it all.
“The Apple store logo with a bite taken out,” says the 5-year-old.
I have always thought that this is a really brilliant logo, capturing the moment where the bite has been taken; it’s all about knowledge and maybe you’re still even in paradise. People love going to the Apple store. It’s pretty and you can play with things. Women especially love to touch things in stores. Here you go, lady. An apple.
Because I have been taking my laptop in for treatment it’s been feeling a bit more like going to the vet. There is the awkward moment where you are waiting for the bad news. Or when you are waiting for them to bring your device out from the back room, where it has been transmitting fear, aggression or anxiety to the other devices.
And out where the Apple store is: no place to buy milk.
But I remember anyway. I put the milk away. I am listening to the radio in the kitchen. Scientists have made an amazing breakthrough. They have isolated the area in our brains where we process language and amidst the electrical chaos of our minds (I liked that) they can pick out and decode the words that are being thought. The reporter concludes happily that this will be a great means of facilitating communication with patients who have no other means of communicating.
Dude.
Who says that such amazing breakthrough technology is going to be limited to this use?
What would they do if the patient is thinking, Get out of my head. I hate you. I love you.
Thought control to Major Tom. I’ll type it out for you because maybe you don’t have the new mindreader app yet, but start thinking like a sci-fi villain for a minute. What would you do with this new technology? How could you make some money out of it?
I already find OnStar and GPS location services freaky enough.
I wouldn’t need a tattoo to remind me to buy milk. I would think it and you, my car, would drive me there when you detected we were in the vicinity of a milk-buying place, far away from the Apple store, on whatever road was closest.
By the time my thoughts get me into trouble with whatever authorities have bought the rights to the Verbalizer, if I didn’t already have something printed something on the other hand, my cellmate might have ideas for what it could say, but no need to speak them.
My first visit to Alabama was in college with my boyfriend to visit his great-aunt in the town where his mother had grown up. We drove from Chicago in his mother’s alligator green Buick convertible. Or, technically, he drove, because I did not have my license. Remember the movie Diner and the football test? That was kind of like me getting my driver’s license at age 25, just before the wedding.
Which is totally within the bounds of normal if you’re from NYC, unless you spend summers somewhere with cars. In fact, I ran into my K/1 best friend at the DMV when we were getting our photos taken. She was only doing it so she could use her dad’s house in the Hamptons.
Seinfeld is New York City told from the point of view of a person who lives in the city but did not grow up there. Cars play too big a role in the lives of the characters. They have not resigned themselves to the folly of urban car ownership, indignant to be hindered by crosstown traffic and lack of parking. Hookers are using my car. Paranoid suburban fantasy. Growing up, a car was a show-offy extra, like skiing; driving was a vacation skill, something I dabbled in, but frankly it was never going to come in handy.
The older I get the more I realize that life is like a 12-part novel cycle, with recurrent themes and characters who disappear only to turn up years later when you least expect them. Running into A. at the DMV, for instance. A college road trip that ends up laying down tracks for future life experiences.
The boyfriend, now husband (I passed my road test), would drive and drive, and the drive through Indiana is flat and boring, and we would stop at Cracker Barrel and guess what he would do? He would play an arcade driving game. I remember these paper placemats advertising bee pollen with testimonials from Nancy Reagan, who was then the First Lady. I would read about the miracle benefits of bee pollen and he would drive a pretend car and then we were back on the road. It was the summer of the Ollie North hearings and of Tammy Faye Bakker. The world was a mad place. Mad and hilarious if only you didn’t have to believe any of it.
What would we do in Alabama for a week in June? It would be hot. It is a town of 3,000. You could go swimming at Mrs. X’s house. She has a nice pool. And then would come a description of the house, the work Mrs. X had done, the garage so nice you could serve drinks in it. We loved that line.
We have been using it ever since, with all its nuances.
We said it sometimes when we were househunting.
In the time we have lived here, I have been to two parties in garages. One was on Halloween, a party with folding chairs, beer and crockpots of chili. The other was a half-saree, a coming-of-age party for my younger daughter’s friend to which all of the girls and female teachers of the grade had been invited. A mural had been painted on the wall of the garage and there was a buffet table. There were white fairy lights in the greenery and the effect was transformational rather than the rather dire image of the original party we had imagined, or the lives that might be lived there, even ours.
I read a version of this post on WLRH (my first piece for the Sundial Writer’s Corner.) You can listen here.
The Other Side 