I left Anacortes in the dark this morning to avoid traffic, and then I followed day two of the board meeting on Zoom. The drive was long and the meeting beautiful and intense. So as soon as it was over I took a long walk.
Early on my loop I passed a mother and her look-alike teenage son. She was lecturing comprehensively, but not angrily, in rapid-fire Japanese, punctuating her thoughts with wild gesticulations, while he listened with a grave expression.
Later I saw a mother and her adult daughter, also Asian, but I couldn’t hear what language they were speaking. The mother and I exchanged smiles and she cheerfully said, “Good morning!” The sun was setting behind her, the horizon just beginning to glow.
This was right near where about half a dozen Muslim women sat picnicking. They smiled and said something I presume was hello or such like.
Then, as I approached my car, I passed a tired, dusty man who looked like he’d just gotten off work. He was waiting for his dog to finish sniffing. As soon as I was within polite earshot, he raised his chin and complimented me on my “lovely blue floral-patterned purse.” This delighted me because a young man pushing loads of baggage in the Spokane airport after the last board meeting said almost exactly the same thing.
Until recently, I’d always been an early morning walker, but I’ve been enjoying these evening scenes, all of us unwinding from our days. So much care and kindness.
Yesterday after my swim I had a long chat with a woman in the locker room at the Y. Funnily enough, now that I’m working from home, most of my in-person socializing happens déshabillé, dressing or undressing. Which was not on my Apocalypse bingo card, for sure.
Anyway. The entire time I was assembling myself, she was applying lotion, generously, languorously. Honestly, I almost felt like I’d been doing it wrong my whole life. Should I avert my gaze? She sat on a stool, extending first one leg and then the other to prop an elegant and lovely foot on the locker door. There she was in her fire engine red panties and leopard print push-up bra, toes painted, slowly smoothing globs of lotion over every curve—all the while keeping up a friendly banter.
I learned that she’s been with her husband “forever,” and that they only got married after she realized, in her thirties, that she wanted to be a mother. “I hadn’t thought about it before then, but suddenly it was important.” She told him she didn’t expect him to “hang around.” She also wouldn’t “get pregnant on purpose” to trap him. And here she looked me dead in the eye. “I would never do that, like some women.”
But she made it clear to him what she wanted. (Brava!) Her parents came to help her move out of the apartment the weekend he was meant to fly off to California to stay with his brother.
“We had the van half packed when he walked in the door and said, ‘I can’t believe I almost got on that plane.'”
We were talking about weddings because my older son is about to get hitched—our boys are the same age. She’s at least ten years older than I am, as most parents of my sons’ peers are. It was lonely being the young mommy. I appreciated her candor and kindness and stories.
And let me tell you: She is hot.
Everyone we encounter has a story. And perhaps a secret. The next time you’re in the grocery store and see a slim woman, late sixties, with a shy smile and a gap between her front teeth—under the nondescript jeans and top, she might be sporting sexy underthings.
This summer I’ve been fecklessly plodding along with my French language study. My multi-pronged strategy includes learning a poem now and again, and last week I happened across a disturbing little ditty by Jules Supervielle, “Dans La Forêt Sans Heures.” Jules, bless him, is encouraging the birds to seek their nests in the vertical void where a tree has been cut down, for as long as the memory trembles. Or such like.
Well, that just cut a little close to the bone. (No pun intended. Jeez.) My back garden is still in recovery from the side sewer disaster three years ago. Those vertical spaces that are now empty sky do still evoke for me a sense of this isn’t right. But, then, I’m more aware of the light in late summer, when the garden is drying up and the sun is already low in the sky. Not a huge fan of this particular liminal time, summer-ish and not-quite-fall.
Last summer I was thrilled with the garden recovery and my new-to-me greenhouse. I was also adjusting to the news from my darling hematologist that I would need anticoagulants for the rest of my days. And it turns out that requiring a tiny pill twice a day in order to stay alive gives one a whole new sense of the world. I did not expect to have a more ominous, visceral sympathy for civilians in war zones, for instance. Not that I didn’t have sympathy before, but it’s different now when I hear news about, say, Ukraine. Before the Mortal Peril, I had never taken any medication, so the many ripples of meaning with this reality shift startled me.
Generally, I’m not thrilled to be dependent on Big Pharma, but my doctor was perfect as we talked through all of it. Dr. Chen is about half my height and speaks with such a strong accent I frequently have to replay his words in my mind to glean meaning.
At one point I asked—why now? Why, after fifty glorious years of being absolutely medically boring, did this genetic blood clotting disorder suddenly manifest?
His face lit up and he leaned in to touch my knee. “I can tell you!”
“Oh…?”
“It’s because…” and here he spread his arms wide, “…we are getting older!”
Great!
It happens that this doctor’s office is in the vertical space that was once the stained glass dome of the church where I spent ten formative years of my life—a structure that was subsumed by the hospital complex about fifteen years ago.
Construction of that glorious brick building was completed in 1916, and it was designed to accommodate 1,150. But like the churches of so many mainline Protestant congregations, this one, too, had seen a dramatic drop in attendance in the 1960s and ‘70s. By the time I had arrived in the late 1980s, attendance on any given Sunday wavered between fifty and eighty souls. On a red letter day there might be a hundred. Which means that the services seldom drew a crowd large enough to fill the space to even 1% capacity. Our stalwart crew of elderly in that cavernous building seemed quite a meager gathering indeed.
Those Sunday mornings—that was when I learned that absence often seems a palpable thing, and I was occasionally startled and awed to realize that the missing, the dead, were as present as the living.
“You’re sitting in Homer’s spot,” an agitated gentleman once told me.
I slid over in the empty pew to give the dead Homer some breathing room. As it were.
Earlier this spring I listened to Nick Offerman reading his memoir, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play. These days, to even out many decades of reading almost exclusively books by white men, I tend to favor works by women and persons of color. So if I’m going to read a book by a fella, it’s gotta be good. It was.
My favorite part was when Offerman described his group text with his two best buds, George Saunders and Jeff Tweedy. He said something along these lines — and you have to hear this in Ron Swanson’s voice for maximum awesome:
“I know these men love me, because we often say things to each other like… I love you.”
I thought about this again yesterday when my son Eli texted me from a wedding in Wisconsin. His close friend Grace is marrying her Spaniard. Eli had visited them in Spain on his wandering return home after finishing his Peace Corps stint. They watched a 2016 presidential debate together, but Grace’s then-boyfriend went to bed early because there was too much yelling at the screen, and even with the captions on, he wasn’t able to suss out any meaning from the words of the man who was about to be (sort of) elected. As is often the case with weddings, it’s been a mini college reunion for Eli’s cohort. The other day he sent a photo with Ben and Gabe, his little trio. Such radiant faces.
(Offerman talks about this, too, about the dramatic and comedic or such like perfection of three.)
Eli and his chums graduated eight years ago, and I was delighted when he reported that they picked up right where they left off, as if all those years hadn’t happened. Lovely.
I met those boys when I flew out for Eli’s senior voice recital. They had another friend visiting that weekend, also a Nick. His mother was gravely ill with cancer, so he was on leave of absence that quarter. But he returned for a visit, possibly for the recital, although that might have been a happy accident.
This crew lived in a grand old Victorian mansion which had many splendid secret spaces, so there was plenty of room for me and Nick. I watched as these young men, my son and others, wrapped Nick up in care. They were constantly hugging and telling him they loved him. I distinctly recall Ben at the stove making dinner. A few times he casually touched Nick’s shoulder or gave him a squeeze.
(Note: They were also gross and teased and told revolting jokes. Also, side note, someone in the house made jello shots that weekend, which I’d never seen or tried before. My younger son still teases in a sing-song falsetto, “Are those jello shots?!”)
Maybe the boys I went to college with supported and loved on each other, back in the day. But I never witnessed that level of overt care or heard the words I love you spoken aloud by my cis male housemates and friends. Or queer friends, either. I remember some shoulder punches and shoves, but not hugs. Or, an occasional side hug? Which is probably why all that kindness for Nick made an enormous impression on me. Anyway. As I’ve gotten older, I have far less tolerance for the sarcasm and weird physicality that passed for affection among men when I was younger.
Until I read Offerman’s book—which, bluntly, somewhat renewed my faith in middle-aged cis white men—I thought perhaps it was a generational shift, that younger men were able to embrace and live into care and affection without fear. And maybe it is, but my data sample is small. Still. I wonder. Offerman and Tweedy are my age, and Saunders ten years older.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether these trios, Offerman’s and my son’s, are affection flukes. What matters is the love. More of that, please.
Yesterday I couldn’t take the heat anymore, the feeling of being trapped in my house. I thought for a hot second about hiking Mount Si, but with fuel prices astronomical and my car being a diesel, a long drive seemed unwise. Besides, my shocks are shot. Not a metaphor. So I went to our glorious city park early in the day while it was still cool.
I have a standard route, four miles, beginning in the woods and walking the spine of the park, then down to the beach and back up.
Oh, gosh. The sunlight through the trees! Cool breezes, too.
As I approached the water, I heard a scream, almost-but-not-quite an eagle.
A few moments later I heard a sing-song voice: “Where’s Alma? Alma! Where are you?”
*scream*
“There she is!”
I smiled at Alma’s presumptive mother just as daddy elicited another screech. She did not smile back, but widened her eyes in the universal “get me outta here” look. I raised my eyebrows in sympathy.
There were actual eagles on the cliffs making a fuss, and after I clambered down to the beach I looked for them.
Three women were walking with a toddler.
“Have you seen the eagles?” I asked.
“Eagles?”
I was mildly astonished that they had not even heard the racket.
“Those are eagles making that sound.” I finally spotted a baldy and pointed.
The women dutifully looked up but seemed confused. They were not interested. By then it was in the 80s, and perhaps they were too hot to care.
(Once my beloved-the-younger as a surly teen told me, “Not everyone shares your interests, Mother.” Apparently not.)
It was only about nine, but already there was lots of activity. Paddlers and boaters and seals and the flusterpated eagles.
This past week I’ve been taking inventory, as we sometimes need to do, usually at a most inopportune moment. Like during a heatwave. I’ve been pondering my writing life (shit), my house (needs paint—$$$), my job (terrific, but part-time), and my future (opaque). It’s hard to sort your priorities when there’s a lot going on. Walking helps. Getting out of the house does, too.
And so does clearing a whole lotta crap from your home.
On Saturday I could have been writing, but it was too hot to think. So I set up the fan in the junk room and assessed what was sparking joy. Precious little. Took eleventy million pounds of whatnots to Goodwill. Also moved a dozen or so linear feet of stacked books into my office, thinking I’d attempt a bookish Tetris with the already full shelves.
Before bed that night I finished reading a book about addiction and intimacy, and the whole way through I was like… I don’t get it. And by morning, the addiction dealio was clean out of my head. Didn’t give it a single thought on my walk.
Then I got home from my walk, looked at the piles, and laughed.
Oh.
(I mean, seriously, my book problem is not causing me to harm myself or others, so likely not an actual addiction. But the stacks and stacks and stacks of books on the floor gave me pause.)
My house has several Frankenstein-ed additions, and all the newer bits have the same issue—openings on every wall, a door or window. This is surprisingly problematic. I decided to move one of my bookshelves in front of an unused door, creating a wall of books, no hole in the wall.
The lighting isn’t fabulous, but it was ten thousand degrees, so lighting was not my top priority.
And now I’m down to just one precarious pile of books instead of five. This room is still tiny, but somehow covering that door, closing the hole—it works.
Unlike my car’s shocks, the closing is a metaphor, albeit cliché and clunky and woo-woo. Fact is, though, my summer has been full of holes, too many distractions, potential pathways. So marching into August, with a cool morning, I am setting some boundaries and giving myself protected space for focusing on what is good and true and beautiful.
And I’m thinking about whoever wrote this note, propped up on the root mass of a fallen tree.
You’d think I’d have learned to keep the back door closed after the hummingbird tragedy a few weeks ago. I had set up my work computer on the patio on a rare lovely day to Zoom in for our weekly staff meeting. Thank goodness I was muted, because my Beautiful Killer sauntered right past with a hummingbird in her mouth—straight into the house. I screamed, then leaped up to save the bird, exquisitely small. Sadly, it perished later that day.
And then the other night my predatory housemate trotted in with something that at first we thought was a rat. (OMG.) But it was a baby bunny, miraculously unharmed. Ross chased the cat out of the house; bun-bun ran under the couch. I was able to scoop it up and return it to the garden, where I hope it will survive, lesson learned.
My heart pounded in my chest a good while after. Hare-raising.
Haha! Kidding. Or not. Because just a few minutes earlier, I’d found a wasp nest in the greenhouse. Not excited about wildlife right at this mo.
Earlier this week I was gassing on about the importance of names, and here I am telling you about the nameless killer in my house. She was born in a fish hatchery to a feral mother. One by one her litter mates disappeared into the woods. This creature was the smallest, and the first to venture out exploring, and at at eight weeks she climbed a small mountain to set up a-howling outside my son’s house. Three days, straight up, about a quarter mile. Eli found her under his car and had to pry her wee claws off the tire. “That was work right there.” Fully grown, she’s still only about six pounds.
So for a while she was called Runty, but that is not a proper name. My friend Alison, who is definitely an animal person, began calling her Beautiful Killer, and it’s stuck.
And while that is also not a proper name, it’s apt. The killing spree is new, revved up at just the time I’ve been pondering the best parenting book I’ve ever read, Noah’s Children: Restoring the Ecology of Childhood, by the late botanist, Sara Stein. This book is now shamefully out of print.
In the ’90s, before the Internets, I had read Stein’s other books. I kept thinking—she has a book about children in her. Back in the olden days we used to have to go to the library to find reading material. And I remember the day I discovered that she had, in fact written this book I knew needed to be written.
One of her ideas that has stuck with me all these years is this—that we should not have to bundle children into some form of motorized transportation in order for them to experience Nature. Nature is, in fact, all around us. She made me rethink the built environment and what I wanted my own children to experience the moment they walked out the door.
But the door is the thing. I want nature to stay out there. No tiny corpses in my house, please. At the same time, I am working on an essay about my years working at the church where Ted Bundy was raised. So I am hyper-aware that humans are predators, although the degree to which our brutality is manifested varies. Uncomfortable.
The Beautiful Killer is snuggled near me as I write. I’m not a big cat person, and she’s not fully tame, so the fact that she seems to be somewhat bonded with me is perplexing and charming. Bless her evil heart. Whenever I am sitting, she prefers to be nearby, supervising. I’m okay with this because it means she’s not hunting.
Also, she’s sleek and gives me cred during Zoom meetings. When we’re inside.
When I was a girl we used to visit my grandmother in Lorain, Ohio, every summer. It was miserably humid and buggy, and, coming from Colorado, a shock. But it was pleasant to sit in the screened porch on the ancient squeaky glider chair, the seat cushions sticky on the backs of my thighs. I was frequently exiled there after dinner to eat my ice cream, which I liked to mush up. This was a jolly punishment for not “politely” eating my food “as it was served.” The nights were lively with insect chorus.
One evening after it began to cool we went for a walk, and my stepmother showed me her elementary school and various childhood landmarks. We passed the former home of a mean old neighbor who didn’t like the children to walk on his grass.
“He would yell at us. So when we walked by on the sidewalk, we’d occasionally, casually, step one foot on his precious lawn.” She demonstrated.
Both these women had been raised in Lorain, and as they reminisced, I noticed that trees loomed large in their memory and imagination—this one excellent for climbing or that one lost to disease.
I’d had a special tree in my own early childhood, when I’d lived in Connecticut, a maple. But I didn’t know the names of any other trees. Evergreens were generically “pines” for me, and I felt ashamed and jealous as each tree on our walk that evening was named and particular.
“I wish we learned tree names in school,” I said.
“We didn’t learn these names in school,” my stepmother said, astonished. “Everyone just knew!”
Everyone just knew.
As a gardener, I have since learned many names of plants and trees, of course, and I love that those names often tell a story. I recently reread Penelope Lively’s Life in the Garden, which reminded me that Anna Pavord’s The Naming of Names has been on my TBR pile for years. I’ve hauled my beautiful hardcover copy off the shelf.
But forty years after that evening stroll in Lorain, even the quickest perusal of any Facebook gardening group will confirm that very few people just know. I don’t think it’s difficult to suss out how this general illiteracy came about. But it does seem to me to be a symptom of something ugly and unwieldy, a peculiar and tone deaf relationship with the outdoors, with the scraps of land in our care.
Two years ago on July 4, as I was coming home from a socially distanced barbecue, my first outing in months, every intersection in my neighborhood was bright with explosives. The blocks, the squares, became bizarre cubes of light, the grid eerily visible, three dimensional. I worried about fire, about our urban wildlife.
On this Independence Day I’m anticipating more of the same commotion. And I’m remembering a late June backpacking trip on Mt. Tahoma, pictured here. And I’m thinking about constitutional and environmental crisis. I’m also appreciating my stepmother as a child, leading the charge with tiny rebellious steps on that old codger’s lawn—and I love that she and my grandmother had tools to see and appreciate the variety and particularity of living things.
My chicken tractor is currently in the front garden. Hens may look mild-mannered, but their scorched earth policy is extreme and effective—they have done a fabulous job taming a campanula infestation. At least one of my older neighbors disapproves, but aside from the obvious weeding benefit, birds in the front also attract visits from the neighbor children. The toddler who lives two doors down, Huckleberry, generally comes over every evening before bedtime. And during pandemical times, I’ve enjoyed chatting with the children and their parents. So. In the front they remain.
You can just see the tractor over by the apple trees.
This morning when I went out to feed the hens, only one came tumbling down the ramp in her characteristic state of discombobulation. I tossed in their breakfast and turned to admire my pumpkin patch in the area formerly infested—which I weeded yesterday and which, despite the cool wet spring, is coming along nicely. And then I noticed movement, dark, out of the corner of my eye. It was the other hen, silently sauntering up the front walk from the street. Evidently she’d escaped last night and had a walkabout. (Which probably accounts for my doorbell ringing after I was in bed. I did not get up.)
The cat, half the size of that bird, was supervising my morning rounds per usual. She disapproved of this scenario. So did I—although I was also astonished that this sweet ridiculous wanderer survived the coyotes and raccoons. How the hell am I going to get her back into the coop? I opened the hatch, anticipating a big stink, but she casually walked right in. I found a rock to stop up the escape route and went in for coffee.
I prefer less excitement in the two minutes after I wake, but, hey, crisis averted.
Several weeks ago I bought a persimmon tree. The restoration of the dust bowl situation of 2019 is coming along nicely, but there are a few little spots that could use verticality. Also, I love persimmons. So yesterday I went on bindweed patrol and cleared a small wasteland area and finally dug the hole for that gorgeous tree. Bonus: I found a fork, a potato, and a shard of what I think is called jadeite. These projects I think will take an hour typically eat up the entire day. Or, in the case of this persimmon planting, the entire season eleven of Coffee Break French.
In the last year or so since my city began changing rules and codes and whatnot to pave the way for more housing, I have occasionally felt defensive about having so much space, a small house and large garden all to myself. With the new zoning, three living units could be built on a parcel the size of mine. I haven’t seen green space as a high priority in any of these new development plans. On the days I work this little rectangle of land, I think about this. Do I want everyone to have a home? Yes. Do I want to give up this space? No. But for the first time yesterday, I considered who might come after me on this plot. Would they value this garden, this oasis of plant and bird diversity in a sea of lawn? Or would this be merely an investment?
Through an accident of algorithm and chance, I’m connected more to the UK gardening scene than the US. I didn’t understand the point of Instagram until I happened across several British garden accounts. And my pal Lawrence turned me on to the BBC’s Gardeners’ Question Time, which is a Friday afternoon treat every week. Notably, there is a mention of climate change in every episode. I sure hope gardeners in North America are also tuned in, but if they are, I haven’t heard.
While I worked yesterday, at the back of my mind, I was turning over the question of carbon sinks, wondering about the value of this space, which is not an investment but a home. I was thinking, too, about an article my friend Alison sent, about the deracination of literature. (Deracination! What a fabulous word.) I’d just finished Ali Smith’s brilliant Winter on Saturday, and it features a scene in which we learn that the blog, Art in Nature, is run by a guy, Arthur, who does not actually enter nature but explores from his computer using Google Maps. The articles and the book and my gardening toil—a confluence I could not have scripted.
So. That was my weekend, exhausting and satisfying. Yours?
I still feel that the 60s and 70s were a terrible time to be a child—although at least then we waited until (the boys) were teens to send them off to participate in wholesale slaughter. Now we let that happen in schools.
As an undergrad in the late 80s I once had a class with Marcus Borg, of the Jesus Seminar fame. One week we read a chapter from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, which I only vaguely remember. Although I do remember the scent of the yellowed pages and the green cover of my used hardback. And I also remember precisely the day he told us, giggling, “Back in the 70s when I taught this book, I used to ask my students to come to class high. Can’t do that anymore.” He had twinkly eyes.
He’d brought an orange to class that day, a bright lovely ball of color in the drab library classroom. He rolled it in his hands, and I think he passed it around the table. He peeled it, urging us to experience the scent… and such like. I can’t fully remember past that bit, as I was in a fugue state of mortification.
That orange-in-the-library scene came back to me last week after I read Tessa Hadley’s brilliant novel, Free Love, which takes place in 1967—that fractured time ushering in the 70s, when you could ask your students to smoke some weed before class. Vietnam. Race riots. Protests. The Beatles.
I was alive during the summer of love, but only barely. I don’t remember the 1960s. Except maybe one scene when I was a toddler. I have an older half-brother, born in 1952, who lived with us for a while when I was very small. I woke one night and saw my brother at the kitchen table with our father, who was weeping and talking about Canada. Oh—and I remember the television propped up on the avocado green counter in the kitchen, our father springing into action to shut it off. I didn’t understand the words “wholesale slaughter,” not yet, but I had a visceral terror of my father’s distress. I don’t remember Vietnam, and it wasn’t history yet when we were in school, but it cast a shadow.
An older friend shared that the lyrics to this 1970 release sum up his sense of that era.
My younger brother has much more specific memories of our 1970s childhood. Occasionally we exchange texts, usually trying to suss out what the hell happened. “Do you remember…?” I can’t recall what triggered the last spate, perhaps I asked a question because of the Hadley novel, but out tumbled a distressing series of texts.
It started with Muffy. I don’t remember Muffy, but my brother sure does. One day, evidently, she drove up in her blue Saab and our father hopped in and said, “Hi, Muffy!” and off they went.
(Our mother’s name is not Muffy.)
And then the phone pinged and pinged, one text after another.
I told Bonnie B that her mom’s friend and my dad were a couple of hoes… lol.
Bonnie’s mom’s friend Mrs. Windrow had an affair with Buddy who was Mrs. Mouche’s boyfriend. I would come home from work and tell mom I saw Bonnie and she would mention Mrs. Mouche, Mrs. Windrow and Buddy.
Bonnie said I didn’t like Mrs. Windrow and she thought I saw something.
I finally remembered needing to use the bathroom at the beach and Buddy and Mrs. Windrow were in the doorway.
It’s sick because she was as blatant as Pa was with Colleen Wood.
Mrs. Windrow’s kids were probably out on the beach.
Ball of confusion. Good God. I had to read this series several times before I finally (kinda) figured out what he was saying. Then, pondering what might possibly say in response, he followed up with this:
I saw and heard too much when we were kids.
I saw different things, but also too much.
We grew up in affluence, not technically on the Gold Coast, but close enough. My own children’s amused sense of their grandparents is that they were swingers, young and beautiful, drinking, fucking, getting high…. Accurate.
Meanwhile, the children were unsupervised. While there are good reasons to mourn the loss of unstructured time for children—I’d link a recent article but can’t find it—generally having an adult around to make dinner or do the laundry is pretty swell for the small people.
So. I picked up Free Love because I’d heard the author on my favorite podcast. After the first chapter or so, I paused for several days. I knew that our protagonist, Phyllis, a suburban homemaker, was about to make terrible choices throw off convention. And I knew that the children were going to pay for their mother’s need to explore her sexual identity. (And they do.)
I finally girded my loins and finished. Hadley’s characters are frankly more nuanced and less selfish than many of the adults in my tiny hometown were. I didn’t like Phyllis or, honestly, many others, but I could sympathize. A bit. Because this question of how we might live an authentic life when expectations are stultifying and the world is on fire—relatable.
At the same time I remain convinced that there is something to be said for convention. Or, at least, for paying attention to each other’s needs, especially the children’s.
There is one scene in the book that soothed, let in some light. It’s almost an aside, and probably only a paragraph or two. (I listened to the book, so I’m guessing.) This bit is a description of one of Phyl’s sisters, and it is vivid and recognizable and compassionate. Her sister’s husband helps with the housework so his wife can paint, and they have a non-verbal child with a mental disability, around whom the rest of the immediate family rallies. The love for that child binds them. An older family member comments that it would have been better for everyone if they’d gotten rid of the child. So this sister has found a way to make unconventional choices and live an authentic life within a marriage.
This brief sketch is the freest love in the story. I’d like a novel about that family, please.
Some books mess with us in a bad way. In college, Free Love would have wrecked me. I couldn’t even handle the orange Marcus Borg brought to class, or the idea that getting high could be in any way liberating. I appreciate that Hadley avoids waxing nostalgic, but doesn’t go entirely dark. She gives us a glimpses of care.
The cliché is that a fine book will transport us, take us out of our experiences. But a fine book can also help us integrate our experiences, which is what Free Love has done for me. A bit. I still feel that the 60s and 70s were a terrible time to be a child—although at least then we waited until (the boys) were teens to send them off to participate in wholesale slaughter. Now we let that happen in schools. On my bad days, I despair that we’ve made so little progress in my lifetime.
On the whole, I’m not sorry I read Free Love, but I’m heading back to my favorite reading era, between the wars and just after—I’m just finishing the novels of Josephine Tey. And it’s almost time for my annual reading of Gaudy Night, which is (in my humble estimation) an exploration of women and power and marriage disguised as a murder mystery.
And if it ever warms up around here, I’ll call this my summer reading.
One of the last movies I saw in a theater before The Plague was Little Women. Mostly I remember that everything about it was easy on the eyes and ears. I also remember an incident at the ticket counter. I’d paid and then hustled over to the concessions stand, leaving my friend Barbara to fend off the advances of a chatty old codger. I felt ashamed even as I was ditching her to get popcorn.
Naturally I immediately told the popcorn people what a terrible friend I was, and we all looked over, concerned. Barbara is in her 70s and gorgeous.
“She was a Wall Street lawyer in the 1960s. I figured she could hold her own. But, still. I shouldn’t have abandoned her.”
The popcorn people’s eyebrows went up.
“I just thought he was with you two,” one of the popcorn people said, still concerned.
“Oh, no.”
When she finally got rid of the guy, Barbara pulled a desperate face as she made a beeline for us, and we were all quite sympathetic.
“He was kinda cute. Until he started talking. And talking. And talking.”
Side Note for the fellas: When you see a beautiful woman in the movie theater, maybe a dissertation about your hearing aids is not the best way to get her attention.
Funnily enough, I remember this Little Women-adjacent scene as much as the film itself. Although, I’ve been thinking about Lou Alcott lately:
“I am more than half-persuaded that I am, by some freak of nature, a man’s soul put into a woman’s body.”
Will this information change how we read Little Women? I don’t know. As a middle-aged mother, on my most recent reading of Little Women, I was struck by Marmee, problematic indeed.
(Side note: I recommend Geraldine Brooks’ novel March for a harrowing and visceral depiction of the enormity of Marmee’s rage.)
These memories of before-times outings and the memory of reading my stepmother’s copy of Little Women form threads of meaning that I am learning to weave into my understanding of life-during-pandemic, this utterly changed landscape that we pretend is getting back to normal. And the delight, remembering Barbara’s close encounter with a would-be admirer stands in contrast to Marmee’s rage, giving each a poignancy.
And what does that have to do with Barkis, you wonder? A tumbling of associations, for one.
And. Well. It’s time to live a little again, out in the world, so Barbara and I masked up and went to see the new Downton Abbey movie last week. Again, easy on the eyes and ears, and we bought our tickets in advance, so there were no cheerfully oblivious codgers to deal with in the ticket line.
Julian Fellowes is no Greta Gerwig, but the costumes and scenery are the whole point of the Downton franchise. But! There was one bit I especially appreciated. At a significant moment a darling character—no spoilers here—leans in to his beloved and says, Barkis is willin’.
And if you know, you know.
Back in the olden days, I read aloud the first chapter of David Copperfieldto my boys. It’s a whirlwind opening, a mean old aunt arriving at the birth of what she believes will be a girl, and she is, let’s say, profoundly disappointed. As an adult, it seemed screamingly funny to me. But when I looked up, both boys’ faces were blank with disbelief.
“Why would you read this to us?”
“No. We hate her.”
“She’s terrible!”
(Which is generally how I feel about that brilliant asshole Charles himself.)
“We’re not listening to this book.”
“Come on brudder. Let’s go.”
Eventually, though, they did listen to a recording of an abridged version which plays up the relationship between Peggoty and Barkis.
It was during this time that one day the boys’ father called from work. Some of you will remember that telephones used to be attached to the wall. Number one son picked up, and even across the kitchen I could hear a gruff, “Put your mother on the phone.”
My son tipped his head and gazed at me with a wry, confused smile. After a pause, he held out the receiver and quietly said, “Sounds like Barkis changed his mind.”
To my horror, neither of the boys remember this telephone scene. Or Peggoty. Or Barkis.
But I do.
Generally, lately, my reading is focused on books by women and non-white persons. Okay, yes, I did just finish my second reading of War and Peace, and no regrets there, baby.
In fact, I don’t regret my time with any of the so-called classics—which, in my humble opinion, are not “Great Books” because they exist in some ethereal netherworld of Greatness, but because of the resonances of meaning in our own lives, connecting us to our former selves, to previous generations, to each other. Both generating and holding these moments of rage and delight. The Barkis is willin’ moments.
