Not One For The Girls?

Today I face more than the usual trepidation staring at this blank page, which is staring back like a white-painted board ready to come out of the screen and clock me on the forehead.

First, fun as writing my last blog was, it seemed to have left me needing more than the usual recovery time. Then, the week’s events galloped away at breakneck speed, leaving me tied up in a stirrup, clanging along behind, sorting through the miles and miles of ideas with my face bouncing in the dirt. Idea-generation went something like this: Ow, no; ow, no; ow, no, not that one either ...  (To recap the week’s events, first there was a Royal Wedding and a sudden market for real rotten tomatoes to fill a void in the virtual world, that may yet bring nanotechnology into the present. Then, an EF3 tornado a few miles from my home killed three people and gravely injured many, many others. Then, the death of Osama Bin Laden. Enough said on that one.)

So imagine just how meekly I approach you, dear reader, and request that we return to the subject of the Royal Wedding. (Holy Mary, Mother of Nanotechnology, please protect me from future rotten tomatoes.) In the interest of not pushing weak stomachs and delicate sensibilities too far, I will keep my hypothesis short.

My question to all those who had a strong visceral reaction to the Royal Wedding is this:  If you loathed it strangely much, as though Justin Bieber were headlining, could it have been because it was too female? Maybe too gay? The kind of event little girls dream of ensconced in their pink canopy beds, and to which people like Alexander McQueen devote lifetimes of artistry and passion?

I am aware of all the good arguments that could be used to disagree with this inference, involving symbolism, imperialism, and a lot of dollar figures that, I suspect, would balance out in favor of local economies and small businesses, if the analyses were completely done. But these arguments were more rarely used than the “compare this wedding to so much other more important news” complaint  --  a postulation that has always failed a test of logic, in my opinion. I suspect if people really thought about it, many would sit back on their heels at the idea misogyny and other kinds of “hating” were largely the origins, somewhere, for so much disgust.

The response to the wedding reminded me often of a social networking backlash some months ago, involving Breast Cancer Awareness. Fulfilling a secret, online pact, women posted where they kept their purses using a prescribed innuendo. Mine went like this:  “I like it hanging from hardware specially installed on the wall.” The mystery of the meme would be solved at some later date  --  the “awareness” part of the equation. It took some time for the anger that followed to find its voice, to evolve into something that could become a counter-meme. At first men were curious, asking “what are these women up to?” Then, many were pissed, the vitriol sounding quite misogynistic. Finally the reaction caught on when the message sounded more reasonable, suggesting people do something “for real” to benefit breast cancer victims instead. Logic failure again: the purpose was to raise awareness, and the effort was working off-the-charts better than any billboards and brochures campaign that money could ever buy. (Note there was no such wholesale backlash for “Turn Your Profile Picture Purple” in support of gay rights  --  the real reason would be too obvious  --  or dozens and dozens of other attempts to use the status update to promote understanding.) All I could hear in the breast cancer backlash was, “Women, get back in your proper places.”

The wedding was breathtaking, from an artistic point of view. Color, scale, symmetry, all spectacularly executed --  yes, the parts of my brain- and heart- neural pathways that respond to beauty lit up like fireworks in the sky. I make no apologies. And if anyone dares ask for my participation in a future breast cancer awareness campaign, I will do it. I may be the only one, after that last slap to countless women’s faces, but I will. I love a good wedding, and I love to refuse to get back in my place.

The Loser's Circle

Ben was banging his head lightly on the thick glass wall of the skybox overlooking the track. Cars were hurling themselves around the oval speedway, attended by more than a hundred thousand revelers. The muffled sound of engines thrummed against the glass, like a B-movie hive of bees revving up to get in.

“Knock it off, Ben,” Shirley hissed into his ear. He felt her fingers press hard into the crook of his arm. “Everybody knows you don’t want to be here. Suck it up.”

He stopped banging but the terrific reverberation continued, even without his forehead keeping time. He gazed downward to hide tears that were gathering, uncontrollable as ball bearings in a bowl. An unfathomable sea writhed in the stands, a parti-colored body of Budweiser t-shirts and rebel flags and mirrored glasses and beer coolers. Harsh sunlight cast the masses in an odd, blue relief on the other side of the window glazing. A constant blast of cold from the air conditioning held the shimmering heat at bay, like magic. Countless dots of baseball caps in the haze shifted together, aimed like magnetized toys at a mysterious "lead car" somewhere in the pack. Big corporate money had paid for the skybox engineering that filtered out so much of the noise, but, partly out of habit, Ben worried whether the vibration could affect the baby that Shirley carried.

He could not speak, for the painful lump that was forming in his throat and chest.

“Shirls!” a male voice whooped from near the bar. Ben's wife swung her enormous belly in the direction of the voice. “Mark, baby!” she called, throwing her arms wide, palms up, trotting her Betty Boop heels across the room. She tucked her head in her "signature" way  --  saying with her body language I’m coming to get you. Her spiky platinum hair was a halo under the spotlights of the luxury skybox; Ben did not have to turn to see it in his mind’s eye. He remembered the first time he watched her lean into the bathroom mirror and use her thumb and forefinger to pull half-inch long curls down onto her forehead. “My signature look,” she grinned at him with a sideways glance. Every move she made wrecked him back then.

If he altered his depth perception, he could see his own, faint reflection in the skybox wall just now, instead of the crowds below, the curly copper hair, his John Lennon glasses. Kind, sleepy blue eyes that his mother had always told him would win him any girl he might want. The state park anthropologist and the hospital foundation fund raiser—how had Ben missed that he was to be a main character in a story Shirley made up in her own head? What a perfect rom-com, she would have giggled to her girlfriends. Watch this, she would have said, setting her Appletini down and moving in to pluck him from his quiet life.

Nothing in his studious history had warned him to steel himself against someone like her. Nothing told him to arm himself that night with something more sturdy than a field jacket and a Powerpoint presentation for the Chamber of Commerce crowd. He had been the evening’s specially scheduled 25 minutes of cultural entertainment, unusual to them all as a zoo animal. How dangerous could it have been? He thought he would pack up his things and head home, unmolested.

It had been plenty dangerous. Two months into their marriage, Ben's quiet, unprying mother had startled him with an uncharacteristic commentary. "That woman wants everything under the sun," she muttered to the sandwiches she was making, in the belief that Ben could not hear. Now, he wondered how an elderly woman who’d devoted her life to raising two sons could have known so much, so quickly, about her new daughter-in-law.

Except that his mother was only partly right, he thought. Shirley didn't want everything, she only wanted one singular something that, now, was very, very simple to understand. All eyes on her. If a man squinted and held her in a certain light, she could seem to have succeeded, to have captured the luminescence she worked so damned incredibly hard to attain. All that guileless want in and of itself made a man ache, at first  --  made him want to encourage her like she was a tap-dancing little girl. Yes yes, keep trying, you'll get it right! It made Ben a little sick to think about it, like he'd awakened from amnesia to find he'd been a pedophile or purveyor of porn in a previous life.

Under any other circumstance, he would not have been here at the track, even outside of the fact he was with a woman he no longer loved. This place bloodied his humanist heart. In the stands below, he saw nothing but lack of education and the blind patriotism and conservatism that it allowed. All around him, he saw nothing but the men making millions by controlling worldviews with the spectacle outside. Surprisingly, they had little interest in the actual race. They were completely focused on the bar, the catering handled by tuxedoed waiters, and the decorative women they'd invited. Like Shirley.

The speedway Christmas party almost nine months before had been hellish enough. "Shirley, you're too sick to go," Ben argued. "You've haven't stopped having morning sickness, and it's way past dinner. Let's rest. This can't be good for the ba--"

He broke off while she shimmied into a length of royal blue sequins.

"Stay home if you want," she said, checking her figure in the mirror, and that was it. That was the beginning, middle, and end of her concern for her husband's wishes, or her child. She was going, and under those circumstances, like these ones, so was Ben. He played her game that night, of hiding their news at any cost, including at the cost of his dignity. Once, in the jumble of a sudden panic of getting caught, he'd made it look like he was pissing while she threw up in the Country Club topiary pots outside. She could make him do something that completely out of character. Her glittery gown and the noise, of course, drew attention to her retching despite Ben's widely planted limbs. Only the valets saw, and they thought she was drunk. Which was OK, because “they” did not matter.

"But why?" Ben asked. "Why not just tell everybody?"

She never would say. In that signature way of hers.

No one could have been more shocked by her pregnancy than he had been  --  he had thought Shirley didn't want children. Yet she seemed completely fine with the idea. He guessed she had work reasons for not telling and kept quiet. And something magical seemed to happen between them, in that time of the shared secret. They fell into a more contented patch in their marriage  --  she was too tired to run all day and all night for her work, and she seemed to want to stay close to him for a change. After years of shunning any mention of Ben's work, of scowling if he brought up a find in the park, she listened attentively. She needed him, she mewled at his affections. He rose to the occasion under her approving gaze. She was even interested in Ben’s own family for a change, in the speech he was working on for his brother's wedding, for example. She curled into the armchair in their office; she looked over his shoulder from time to time, and rubbed his back. Her morning sickness had gone by the time Ben recited it in his rented tux; she beamed at him in a way he had never seen.

When he was finished, she got up and took the microphone from him. "Ladies and gentlemen!" she purred, throwing one arm wide, palm up. "Ben and I have an announcement to make!"

In a split second, a sickening thud sounded in his heart, as though she had dropped the mic. His face reddened with searing embarrassment  --  not for what Shirley was doing, but for the sudden realization that just about everyone watching had always seen what he had not. It was surely painfully apparent, if you were not in love with her. Every single move she ever made was a pose. Every one. Even in the privacy of their own home she drifted through a practiced choreography in every waking moment  --  laying a hand here just so, coming to a stop there to cock a foot behind her, turning dramatically to lean against a counter and stretch her arms wide behind her. He knew that instant that his sister-in-law didn't call her "The Little Teapot" because she was so small, but for the way that she posed for every family photograph: one hand on hip, the other hand held palm up, as though she was about to lead the church choir in song. The rest of the family smiled normally around her while she positioned herself to the sound of a movie score only she could hear.

It was a kind of psychosis. If he cared more, he might try to look it up. He didn’t though, not after grasping finally that the entirety of their marriage was an act. One that had needed an unwitting, studious male anthropologist type, with curly copper hair and John Lennon glasses. How lucky Shirley had been, even before him, that life had placed her in a perfect position for her particular talents, a role in the high-society hospital foundation that called for a glorified Mistress of Ceremonies.

"A glorified Mistress of Ceremonies!" she wailed  --  Ben remembered those had actually been her words, on the drunken occasion of her 35th birthday. How strange they had sounded coming from her; she had never to his knowledge suffered one moment of insecurity. He stood in the middle of the room and scratched his head at the maelstrom whirling around him. “I hate this place!” she screamed. “I hate this stupid, little, piss-ant place! Nobody recognizes talent! And oh, shit, me 35 years old!”

Now, with her 37^th birthday coming up, she seemed very happy with “this place,” very happy indeed. She was hell-bent to be here today  --  one week overdue and climbing into the stratosphere to get to the top of the grandstands. Working the room for the job like not even childbirth itself would slow down her career. She had turned everything regarding the baby over to him  --  the search for an obstetrician, scheduling appointments, checking out the pregnancy and delivery books at the library and then reading them. Studying up on what, exactly, new parents were supposed to do with the helpless being they would bring into the world. Even the baby's name. When she showed no interest whatsoever, he demanded  --  needed  --  some kind of commitment. Some indication she understood that this was real. "How about Melissa?" he said. "I know it sounds crazy from a guy, but I've always loved it, since high school."

"Sure," she said.

Baby girl? he wondered now, pressing his forehead to the glass in the hopes the sound vibration would ease his headache. What made him so sure it was a baby girl? Because that was what Shirley wanted. Statistical probabilities and his scientific background be damned, the likelihood was 100 percent. The size of her "want" in this case would be so great, he thought, her body would accept nothing but an X chromosome.

His next question was purely force of habit, as though his mind was a nurse checking a perfectly healthy man’s pulse. Had Shirley slept with every man in the room? Two years into their marriage the crazed worry disappeared from his being like he'd been touched by the fingertip of God. He had figured out, with absolute certainty, the answer was no. She had slept with no man in the room. Each man here  --  from the mid-level, ladder-climbing Mark to the rich track owners  --  thought he was the only one she had not yet taken to her bed, and each one was wrong. Because for Shirley, when the moment came for the silky underthings to come off, for the lacy wrap to be cast aside, for the dirty talk to stop and for pure, raw desire to rush in  --  her fantasies fell apart. Sex turned into an almost painful, restless, frustrating string of demands: Do this! No that! Can't you just, just ... damn it!

Just what, Shirley? Ben almost said aloud, to the glass inches from his lips. Say it, Shirley, and I'll do it. Can't I just help you keep your fantasy going? I don't even know what it is, but I know that you are the only one in it.

He drew in a deep, ragged breath. Gathering tears escaped and dripped down his nose.

She was not the only one, not exactly. There were two people in her fantasy now, and he was not one of them. The baby was his, he was sure, yet not his, not for long. He would endure this NASCAR hell to have whatever small role in his daughter's life that he could, to bring her safely into the world. Then, because he would have no other choice, he would turn his child over to this woman who would no longer need the frustrations of a man, to have 24-hour company if she wanted it, and an orbit around herself. Once the baby-care was finished and Melissa was toddling on her own, Shirley would wreak any havoc to get him out of the way. He would step aside so that his daughter would not be drowned in the maelstrom.

"Dude!" the suddenly sober Mark called. "Shirley's having the baby!"

The tears stopped and Ben ran to her side. He saw phones coming out to snap pictures, was ready to punch someone to stop them, but the men who owned the speedway knew how to use a blanket to hide bloody scenes, a body or a birth. In the tent that was created, Ben found himself alone with his wife, in a strange timelapse, unsure if minutes or hours were passing.

“Hey Shirls!" Mark barked out over the blanket, breaking the spell. "What do you say we name him after whoever wins the race today?” A riff of male laughter slopped over the blanket behind his joke. Toasts were made.


By the time the rescue squad traveled up so many flights with all of their gear, the baby was crying in Shirley’s arms. An announcement had been made over the loud speakers, and the roar of more than one hundred thousand people vibrated through the skybox glass. The two men at each corner dropped the blanket-curtain so that it covered mother and child. Ben’s “perfect” little family was snapped by an Associated Press sports photographer.

“Danica!” Shirley announced then, pulling the well-practiced 100-watt smile from her pose-repertoire. The story that went 'round the world. Their baby’s name would be Danica.
 

Hearts and Flowers

We Crabs of the Zodiac, so secretive, shy, and unwilling to open the protective shells of our homes or our souls to anyone:  it’s a miracle of god that a writer exists among the lot of us. For people who tend to just bleed passions all over everything, seem to need to, we sure can tie ourselves into knots about it. Even for this little blog, total page-hits in the low thousands, a loved one always has to talk me off a ledge every single time I post. It’s so bad, I find it difficult to unclench my fist now and reveal the simplest little thoughts that I have in my palm for today. Favorite landscaping tips I’ve learned over the years, something I know a little about  --  what could be so revealing about that?

Ask Freud, I guess. And can you spare a Valium and a hug, friend?

Well, watch me be brave.

You see here photographs taken this morning of my favorite landscaping tree and special occasion gift, the Forest Pansy Redbud. I love it for its natural shape, the manageable size that it will grow, its willingness to thrive in sun or shade, its profuse spring flowers, its hardiness, its native status in my part of the world. But most of all, I love it for the red hearts this particular cultivar delivers like a box of chocolates every year beginning about right now. A whole tree of hearts  --  how perfect is that? For this last reason, be forewarned. I may be that weirdo who shows up with a small tree as a gift for a baby or wedding shower, any occasion worthy of celebration for the length of the lifetime of a tree. “Think of this day every time you see the red hearts in spring,” my card will say.

Not shown in the photograph is the blue spruce planted in the mid-ground of the landscape (it’s too small to see in the photo, for now), and the lime yellow-green Heuchera that will be planted all around the base of the redbud. This combination of colors  --  blue, violet red, limy yellow  --  creates a gorgeous pallette against a green backdrop; I always make sure to layer these colors in my sight-line. The spruce and Heuchera are "evergreen," in that their colors remain through the winter. Heuchera is that rare, shade-loving plant, incidentally (why it goes so well under the redbud), and it's always a good rule of thumb to place light greens and yellows in the darkest parts of the garden. They seem to glow there, and pull the eye to rest on the coolest, most peaceful places in your yard.

Because I am working with acres here, and not a normal size yard, I used Colorado Blue Spruce in this case. But in the past, in smaller spaces, I've used a blue spruce I love even more, the Foxtail spruce. It only grows 12 to 15 feet tall, much more to scale for regular yards, and its unusual shape is my favorite of all the evergreen trees. This is the tree that Disney puts in a scene with baby forest animals. Or if you're a certain kind of guy, afraid of losing your essence to an image like that in the yard, think of it as the tree you want covered in songbirds drawn by the feeder you built yourself. The Foxtail does get a little scraggly around the bottom over time, so I plant Oakleaf hydrangea all the way around the base, to hide the worn part. This pairing  --  for color, texture, year-round beauty and year-round flowers (dried, in the winter)  --  is one of the best I have ever seen, in all of landscapedom. (Check for compatibility in your zone, of course, and study your garden encyclopedia for spacing.)

Painting with living color has been a lifelong comfort. I've been known to go back and visit past homes, to marvel from the street at the size of a tree I put in the ground 20 years ago, or to frown over a current owner who doesn't seem to know, for example, hydrangea can be trimmed to any size you want it to be. It's been hard for me not to return with hand-held trimmers in those cases. "Don't mind me! I'm just going to get some of these old canes out of here and I'll be out of your way!"

* * *

But back to the present, and the future. Since this blog is such a crazy mix of topics, every one a favorite for some people, and a definite "least favorite" for others, I want to offer a few insights about what I expect will come next. Several friends and I recently tacked together the craziest set of circumstances for a short story you ever heard, and I'm trying to gather the courage to write it. I also plan to post at least one more update on quitting smoking; those blogs have had some of the most hits of any of mine, and I feel a duty to any smokers who might be white-knuckling it with me, in spirit. (A quickie:  it's Day 13, and I'm still not lighting up.)

In the meantime, I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love at the strong suggestion of a close friend, who seemed to think the book would be particularly valuable to me at this point in my life. (She was right.) And also, that the author and I have a lot in common, in our ways of being and making our ways through the world.

Oh shit. Damn that friend  --  she is right again. Curses, because I recognize a very particular kind of "quirky" that the author and I share, and she and I are most alike when she is being most annoying. Whine fests, over-thinking, manic scrabbling for meaning, hyperbolic rants, hyperventilation, self-deprecation, and general openness to any and every emotion in this galaxy and the next. She's a veritable antenna to a Universe of feeling. I do not want to negatively impact anyone's desire to read the book, which is not high art but fabulous in its overwrought, funky way. It says so much about the female condition that it ought to be required reading for women's studies classes. I just wish I was cooler in one or two respects than the writer is. Lest this sounds like just more self-deprecation on my part, know that my husband laughed awfully hard when I read him a line or two of Gilbert's that "might" apply to me, too. He roared.

From the book:
"I said to God, 'Look, I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?"

And how's this for hyperbole:  
"... I got to thinking about how much time I spend in my life crashing around like a great gasping fish, either squirming away from some uncomfortable distress or flopping hungrily toward ever more pleasure."


Ow.

Out of curiosity after I’d written the opening sentence for this blog, I googled Elizabeth Gilbert’s birthday. Yep, she’s a Cancer, born July 19, 1969. So let me just say, there are many ways in which she and I are not alike. I can't fully get into her quest to "find God," for one thing, because I don't believe in any god based on a Judeo-Christian tradition. No all-powerful deity with intelligence; the closest I might accept is an inner life force, a collective consciousness. (Although Gilbert is seeking god in an Indian ashram, her Judeo-Christian influence is extremely apparent.) I believe miracles could be explained with science, if we had the tools. Even the fascinating human observation that people born at similar times bear certain very similar traits could be explained, if we had the ability to cope with an impossible number of variables. The "stars" offer a nice, completely impractical theory. So sorry, Ancients:  cause and correlation are not the same thing.


All of which is to say, when Gilbert is racing into a clump of eucalyptus trees in India to express her joy to the god she has finally found, she seems pretty silly to me. "I threw my arms around one of those trees, which was still warm from the day's heat, and I kissed it with such passion. I mean, I kissed that tree with all my heart ..." 

Well, all right, it is quite possible, that I could kiss a tree. But that's all.

My Token Conservative Friends

Yesterday, again, two friends came to blows on my Facebook page, spitting venom at eyeballs with all the deadly intent you might expect from opposite ends of the political spectrum. I usually log on and discover this kind of brouhaha past its beginning, when verbal fisticuffs have already drawn some first blood, but not so late that I couldn't put a stop to it. With few exceptions, I leave the floor open.

I am mostly OK with this. This must completely baffle some of my friends, since I  --  and the great majority of them  --  are dyed-in-the-wool liberals. (Honestly, I am lucky that George W. Shithead and I will never come within arms-reach of each other, because I would not be responsible for the white-hot blind rage that would put me in a secret prison for a long, long time.) The arguments can sometimes get quite ugly, depending on the viewers' sensitivity: nothing most people would allow in their own homes, and just the kind of devolvement that causes me to leap for the off-button on the TV. I've blocked and deleted conservative "nutcases" in other online arguments, so why don't I now?

The short answer is that I'm still listening.

This is not because of my deep belief of the old truism “give an idiot enough rope and he'll hang himself”  --  though the saying has applied in a past situation or two. Try to bring biblical fire and brimstone into the discussion, for example, and any intellect I may have powers down like the Tin Man in the rain. That's when friend-deletions happen.

By the process of elimination, I no longer have those kinds of unthinking, party-line, Fox News mouthpieces among my friends  --  at least, not that I know of. The remaining conservatives seem to be intelligent and articulate. I don't think they are homophobes or racists, for starters. Their reasoning for being conservatives must be outside the realm of anything I have yet heard; I don't understand it, not at all, but I want to. I may later decide they're whack jobs, but I don't know yet. Two in particular: One told me early in our Facebook re-acquaintance that he was "the original compassionate conservative" (wow, there's a concept I haven't seen or heard in years). The other makes it known repeatedly he doesn't like the extreme crazies desperately in need of Thorazine, or something  --  the Tea Party et. al.

In the spirit of ethnographic confessions, I admit I'm watching as though they landed their spaceships in my living room and offered greetings from Planet Claire. I am fascinated as any anthropologist would be given the opportunity to understand another life form. In truth, I have not heard one word from them yet that helps me understand. I am looking at them with one slitted eye, thinking "You must be just plain greedy? Greediness  --  that's it, right?" But until I get some indication they want to eat human babies, I'm still listening. I have to. I need the hope. To the very last minute, I need to believe we can do better, we can show our children better, maybe leave them something more than ashes. Call me that current dirty word "peacemaker;" call me an appeaser in the face of war; call me a bleeding heart, to a fault; call me a hopeless champion of hope. But those two maybe-non-crazy conservative friends of mine peep up from time to time, saying just enough to suggest a surprise  --  perhaps something outside the Tea Party line.

They might be waiting for their chance, like me. Friends may have noticed me dropping a bizarre, repeat comment into comment threads involving both factions over time, what on its face might seem the strangest failed segue: "The difference between Left and Right is in how we do a cost-benefit analysis." People probably wonder what the hell? I am waiting for someone to ask me, "Just what do you mean by that?" Because I think, when the Tea Party et. al. has snuffed itself out along with most of the entire planet's environment, "the cost-benefit analysis" will be how the remaining, hopefully reasonable two sides rebuild some kind of working relationship with whatever is still left. You see there the limits of my hope:  I am listening for what can be cobbled together, after the fall.

But that's just an illustration of how I wish the debate would get to something constructive, a blog for another time. If everything is as broken as it seems to be, then maybe it's up to the rest of us half-way reasonable diplomats to get on with it, and prepare for what happens after the Empire is laid to waste. Until the day when our two sides get down to such intensive therapy  --  maybe when the unicorns slide down rainbows, bearing flowers for all  --  there will be times when the conversation devolves. I really don't know what else to do about it, if I am to keep listening.

Me, Myself, and ...

Many years ago, a few days into a new job, I was getting to know a handful of coworkers when the subject of Only Children came up. We were a small public relations office on the frontlines for a desperately beleaguered larger institution, so on the occasion of my arrival we were taking more than the usual time to bond, like soldiers. Sitting together, drinking coffee, talking for hours while waiting for the battles ahead. We hadn't gotten to family histories in the long, deep conversation yet. But I looked around, decided these people were A-OK, and deemed it safe to pronounce, "All the Only Children I have ever known were completely socially inept."

This did not sit well with one of us who, come to find out, was an only child. Man oh man, he was touchy touchy.

Time is a teacher. By the time I left that institution several years later, I had learned that the Only Child situation was far worse than I had ever thought. Some people with no siblings could be virtually crippled by their inabilities to get along with others, to cope in team projects, or to have the spotlight swing off of them even briefly. I was astounded by the lengths to which some Only Children could go for attention.

* * *

The purpose of this story is to illustrate "why I hate writing in the first-person," at the very same moment I am announcing that henceforth, I will be embracing the first person in this blog! Well, maybe not “embracing”  --  more like fully engaging in the exposure therapy. Up to now I’ve loathed it and I think it shows. If blogs are going to be so conducive to this particular point of view, though, I need to quit delivering it with the ambivalence of a housewife bringing a Jello salad mold to the table. (She might be smiling, but inwardly she's wondering what she was thinking when she stirred pecans, cottage cheese, celery and pistachio pudding into the same bowl, and then expected them to hold together in a fish shape. Awfully easy to screw up, for a recipe that looks like congealed vomit and nobody likes in the first place.)

How easy is it, to screw up the first person? Let me count the ways.

1) You can really step in shit, as I did in that PR office so long ago. This is something a little more forgivable (or at the very least, forgettable) when speaking off the cuff. It's a little known fact that in Journalism 101, however, the first rule taught to fledgling writers is, "Do not step in shit for no good reason."

2) It's the trickiest of all Points of View to write, often coming off as self-centered at best, or desperately needy of a constant spotlight. With the exception of bad seeds, I like for people to like me. I don’t want them to wish to slap me, if they have to endure one more moment inside my brain.

3) Don't we have enough of narcissism in our culture already? Really  --  Facebook status updates are surely all anyone needs of me.

4) Worst of all, first-person is frighteningly revealing. Much safer to report a story in the third-person, rather than deliver your Jello mold stark naked, the word "I" sprinkled liberally throughout the dish in case anyone missed who is responsible for the mess. Plus -- for good measure -- some stories from your own personal life stirred in, the better to piss off people you actually know.

* * *

I am aware of the irony of the story that opened this blog, and that some percentage of readers will be Only Children. I trust they've cursed me mightily all the way to now, but that is precisely my point. Time is a teacher -- and some students need a lot of it. Maybe they ought not to be writing first-person until they are good and old, sticking with simple, factual reporting instead. I needed about ten more years to see the flaw in my logic about Only Children, beginning with the fact that undoubtedly, I had many perfectly normal acquaintances whose sibling status was not known to me. I needed personal experience:  when I remarried, I discovered an only child in my new husband’s family was one of the most well-balanced, likable, Zen-like fellows a person could know. Really -- I'm not just saying that so that when someday he is, indeed, rich and famous, he includes me in his will. Though that would be OK, too.

Oh well. Skin to the wind.




* Written with insincerest apologies to everyone who loves Jello molds.

Hide Your Children, and Bats

Yesterday, I did some of the best writing in the whole wide world. The best ever ever ever. Me and David Sedaris, we were communing. The three intertwined stories ala "This American Life" turned out so funny and enlightening that poor David was beginning to worry about his place in the literary world. I was thinking to myself, "I don't really have a wardrobe suitable for accepting awards." You'll just have to trust me on this, because a) that super-stretch would be really nice for me, and b) no one will ever see the blog that resulted. After devoting seven hours to thinking the whole thing through on a drive home from the beach Monday, and then about three hours writing it last night, I quickly went to get permission to publish from my daughter, who was the subject of one of the hopelessly intertwined stories. It was just a formality  --  the part from her young childhood was so adorable (not embarrassing at all), I just knew she wouldn't say "no." She did.

For today's blog purposes, this means "update" instead of our originally planned programming.

I am on my fifth day of quitting smoking, and not one millisecond closer to seeing any light at the end of this tunnel, unless the light is a headlamp in the psyche ward. This is not my usual hyperbole here. I am convinced people like me who haven't quit smoking yet experience withdrawals differently from everyone else. Whether this is really true does not matter one iota to me right now. If my boss were a trace less kind than she is, or if I didn't have the good luck of working in my own office where if I bite my lip hard enough no one will hear me, I would not have made it through this day without a cigarette.

Imagine being covered head-to-toe in the worst possible poison ivy or jock itch (I'm guessing on the latter of these), with no hope that it will go away for weeks, no position you can get into to relieve the insane itching and pain, no pharmaceutical that works to help. That's how bad the rage that welled up inside of me was. Imagine there is something you can buy over the counter that makes the agony go away in an instant, but everybody says it causes lung cancer or some other similar fate that is supposed to be worse than the one you are in, at some point in the unknown future. You could be creamed by a truck before it happens.

First I wanted to break things indiscriminately, hit and kick solid matter until my bones broke  --  that would certainly get my mind off the current unbearable pain. I was thinking, when I could think, what an idiot I had been, not to foresee this and lay in a heavy-duty baseball bat for the occasion. Again  --  not hyperbole; every word of this is precise and true. I stomped around like a mad woman, looking for what could reasonably be broken, when my eyes lit upon several pieces of leaded crystal in my office that, quite literally, have the company name etched on them. I didn't begin throwing them as hard as I could onto the grass outside  --  but it was a very, very close call. Instead, I dropped onto the floor and cried into my arms, folded on the seat of my chair, for one entire hour. And not a nice, cathartic cry, but a crazed snotty gushing of curse words, loathing, and despair. Think Jim Morrison's "brain squirming like a toad." When it was over, it wasn't really over  --  I was just too exhausted for anything but pushing my storm cloud around from one place to another. The look on my face was something like a woman's when she is practicing Lamaze, as she is trying to keep her mind on her focal point at the height of childbirth.

Meanwhile, last night and tonight, my daughter  --  innocent, unknowing babe  --  keeps coming to me, to read aloud various essays she has written for school.

Phoenix From The Fire. I Hope.

I had a reverie this morning, in which I changed my living will to state that I am to be kept on the Cadillac of life support, forever. My legal directive came to pass, so beautifully according-to-plan that health insurance executives flew their jets right into our little town and threw themselves, weeping, at my family members’ feet. Please! Please! We’ll do anything! Just agree to cut her off! They offered their souls in exchange for a signed DNR. To which my family said, “ew.”

Because this blog is public, let me be clear: It was just a reverie. I do not want under any circumstances to be kept in a permanent vegetative state. It scares me to no end, to think that certain members of my Catholic fundamentalist family would take that paragraph all the way to the Supreme Court.

But oh how I relish the vision of those execs writhing in agony.

All of this was because last night, I was told that my health insurance would not devote one nickel of its astonishing profit to help me pay for the $250 nicotine inhaler my doctor prescribed for me. Our regular pharmacy doesn’t even keep one in stock. “I’d have to order it for you,” the pharmacist told me. “It’s been years since anyone has bought one.”

Well no shit. Let me look into a loan first. A credit card, maybe. Let’s bring one more for-profit industry into this gathering of vultures. If you’re a reader whose mind rushes to a cost-benefit analysis, smoking vs. smoking cessation, kindly think for one second about blaming the victim first. Tobacco addiction is expensive, but the cost is borne in dribs and drabs, one pack or one carton at time. If your average Joe The Plumber is going to trade the cost of one for the other, he has to quit smoking first.

In the interest of full disclosure, later today a different pharmacy sold me the inhaler at a huge discount. I don't know why  --  I suspect it's because we pay an optional, additional monthly premium for upgraded health insurance  --  but I'm not asking any questions for fear it was a mistake. On behalf of so many others, I still bear lots of ill will against a host of profiteering demons in this mess. Remember the original pharmacist's words? Most nicotine replacement therapies are sold over the counter in this country, where insurance is not even a remote possibility. And when was the last time you heard of an in- or out-patient nicotine drug rehab facility?

Nobody my age who is still smoking wants to. Nobody wants to strangle to death slowly, nobody wants in on the health care nightmare, nobody wants a piece of their face cut off or a voice box sliced up or to have a crippling stroke. Plenty of my very close genetic relations have died torturous deaths because of cigarettes, smoking to the last, ashamed and so sorry for what they “had done” by making their families endure their horrible ends. Extraordinarily intelligent, beautiful, artistic people. Every one of my genetic siblings has smoked heavily, beginning in their teen years. Note that I am adopted, did not “imprint” on smoking behavior, and am the only smoker in the entire extended, adoptive family that raised me. I didn’t know my “genetic” family, or of our extremely similar, powerful cravings—for dairy products and tobacco, for example—until I was 16 years old. (And already a pack-a-day smoker…) My bio-mother said repeatedly that our drive to drink milk was the pure Norwegian in us. It was always a bit of a joke to me until I read the book Why Some Like It Hot by Gary Nabhan, and readjusted my big-britches attitude and understanding of genetic propensity.

Whatever the biological reality, nicotine addiction is hurting you, whether or not anyone in your family lights up.

Almost six years after Peter Jennings’ death, his mea culpa for having smoked makes me sad and angry. “I was weak,” he said when he announced his lung cancer diagnosis, so visibly full of shame for smoking after a lifetime of doing so much else. I wish instead he was furious, and got numbers like these into the discussion:

—In 2008, Medicare paid $55 billion just for doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of patients' lives. (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/05/60minutes/main6747002.shtml)

—The same year, Philip Morris International boasted a profit of $16.3 billion on sales outside the United States.  (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/business/06tobacco.html)

—In 2009, the top five earning health insurance companies averaged profits of $12.2 billion. (http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/09/zirkelbach-profits/)

Obviously, I spent about 10 minutes of internet “research” here. It appears that it would take quite a bit more for some reason, to get a figure for US profit on tobacco sales. Somebody else find the primary sources, and argue all the statistics and numbers that could be pulled into this debate. I already know, from long personal experience, that it’s not in the tobacco, health insurance, or health care industries’ general financial interests to help people quit. I can't even dream of health insurance industry executives begging my family for mercy in the end — Medicare is picking up the tab in the cost-of-dying matrix, what doesn’t bankrupt us as individuals, anyway. We will pay and pay, coming and going.

Here’s how serious I am about this. If I die a smoking-related death tomorrow, or next year, or anytime at which I look remotely like the photograph used for this blog, use the same photograph for my obituary, and don't crop out the cigarette. Tell the world I fought to quit my whole life, and tell the world I did not want to go this way. But also tell the world I do not apologize. Until we all quit blaming the victims, until we fully accept this for a devastating, heartbreaking disease with genetic origins, and fight like hell for research and against such insane profitability, we’re going to lose loved ones this way. Until everybody stops clucking at people like me and starts demanding holistic answers, we the “little people,” smoking and non-smoking taxpayers, are going to foot the bill—in advance with our Medicare contributions, and after death with the sales of our estates. Bend over, friends.

Yet, I am not Joe the Plumber; I can afford the $250. I am one of the lucky ones who could make the decision to ante up the bucks, whatever my insurance decided. I slept on it and then called around until I found a pharmacy that had a nicotine inhaler in stock, just in time for my quit date of April 9, 2011. I asked how much it would be at this particular establishment.

“Will your insurance help pay for it?” the pharmacist asked first.

“No,” I answered. “Assholes.”

One second of shocked silence and she burst into bitter laughter. I guess not too many people just say it. A few hours later she rang up the sale for me, at just $25. Maybe she forgot a zero. Maybe something else more hopeful, from an insurance perspective, happened.

Undoubtedly, at some point, someone else less lucky than I am right now will be standing in line at the same pharmacy, terrified that it's far too late for quitting. And that someone else will not be so lucky. The pharmacist will hand over the drugs that help a human being endure chemo, or will collect someone's last dollar for the month. I'd be willing to bet you a $250 nicotine inhaler that the word "assholes" pops into her mind.