Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
In the Deep End of Aging
I look at myself in the mirror.
My bathing suit is faded and starting to sag. That is fitting, metaphorically speaking. Everything is sagging. Layering, folding, crinkling. It is pitiful. What do you expect? I ask myself. You don’t get to be this old and have no consequences.
I will feel different when I get in the water. I’ll glide along with my shortened breaststroke, sheltering my left shoulder with its frayed rotator cuff like the broken wing of an old sparrow. The water makes swimmers ageless. That is what I have always thought.
Another older woman comes out of the locker room. Her suit is new and fits her perfectly. Her legs are smooth, nothing about her is falling to the ground. She swims a swimmer’s best freestyle, a perfect stroke and a skim through the water that looks sharklike. I wonder what I should have done differently to be more like her and less like myself, to not be so falling apart.
There are two very young women in tiny bikinis. Of course, their bodies are perfect and while I float in the deep end, occasionally putting my arms over my head and submerging myself, I try to remember if I was every perfect like that. If I was, I have forgotten.
Many years ago, my friend Karen convinced me to do leg exercises with her. The purpose was to prevent the formation of cellulite. I didn’t have any then. She often remarked about what good shape my legs were in, but she’s not said anything like that in a good while. I remember especially a time we spread out big towels on the Lake Michigan beach to do our exercises in the sun. Hundreds of leg lifts and dozens of downward dogs. It made me dizzy and hot.
I decide to buy a new suit. And maybe a new swim cap and goggles. Take the bull by the horns, as they say, reimagine myself. Floating I decide to give myself a pedicure, use the deep rust polish with tiny sparkles. I’m not trying hard enough, I say to myself. I am on the dangerous cusp of not caring and I have to pull myself back to vanity and effort.
Aging is so challenging.
The Scary People are Coming to Dinner
The part about extending invitations to dinner is luscious.”Oh, you really must come, see our new kitchen.” Head toss, wave. The best feeling ever is when the event itself is a long ways off, a beautiful feast on the horizon, everyone well-coiffed, pleasant, and stainless. Idyllic.
Then comes the steady drip of days counted off. “You know, it’s only a few weeks until the scary people are coming to dinner. We really need to plan our menu.”
This is tough when the scary people are amazing chefs with a pickle and separate dish for every occasion. My husband considers what to cook because, after all, it is his cooking skills that the scary people will appreciate and rightly so. He will not touch a recipe unless it involves at least three spices we don’t have and an indexed set of instructions. You know, first you de-vein the shrimp and then you roast the shrimp shells in olive oil until they become a bright orange and give off a delightful roasted shrimp aroma in your kitchen. I know these words because I read them to him tonight. These are instructions from the first chapter of how to make pumpkin shrimp soup. I left out the celery, bay leaves, onion, sage leaves, and a pinch of saffron from the wee bottle that our daughter brought home from Spain twenty years ago and which I just noticed tonight had the McCormick brand tattooed on the side. Oh well. We had been waiting so long to be exotic and now this.
Then there is the pureed pumpkin, just roasted, and the chicken stock from Sunday’s chicken, and cream and lemon juice and cayenne pepper. Now we are at the end of the second chapter of the soup trilogy. The soup’s finishing will occur tomorrow right before serving and involves dealing with the de-veined shrimp and a lot of complex moves made harder by having the scary people stand in our kitchen while it’s all going on.
This is only one of extraordinarily complex dishes my husband has planned for tomorrow night. I, on the other hand, will be the scullery maid, not even rising to the level of sous chef. I make the things that people stuff themselves with because they’re not sure about the soup with the roasted shrimp shells. Everyone has a function in the kitchen. I keep people alive. My husband astonishes them. We have a well defined-division of labor honed from thirty years of kitchen nightmares, dropped hams skidding across the floor and raw garlic garnishing hors d’oeuvres. “Weren’t we supposed to roast that garlic in the oven first?”
My favorite dinner guests are those who show up exhausted and hungry, possibly weeping from a sudden divorce or stolen car. In their misery, they are grateful for a boiled hot dog on a week-old bun. Anything on a plate reminds them of mom, a napkin and clean silverware extraordinary touches never forgotten. Surprise guests are even better. The less time I have to prepare, the fewer excuses are necessary. If it is hot, I’ve met the standard. I like that. I’m fond of the earth mother image but only in small doses; people need to leave as soon as they’ve wiped the crumbs from their chins.
My husband will have none of such minimalism. When he goes to sleep tonight, he will be dreaming of the roux he is planning for his etouffee. He’s in the zone where he’s forgotten about the scary people and he’s into his art.
It’s awesome. The scary people won’t know what hit them.
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Originally published n 2014. I’m trying to remember the last time we had people over for dinner who weren’t related to us. Time to get back to those magic times.
Durant Diary: Entry #10
Durant is a four-time Iditarod dog. He ran the race just last March – a thousand miles across Alaska’s mountains, plains, and Bering Sea ice. That’s him in the middle. That look on his face is elation. We see it sometimes at the dog park when we first get through the gate and he takes off loping. A big grin, especially if there’s snow like there was today, and it is very cold.
Lately, he’s not wanted to come in from the yard even if it’s dark and the temperature’s dropped. He approaches the back porch, looks up at me, and then turns tail to trot back into the trees or into one of the two doghouses in our dog yard. There’s straw out there – in the doghouses and strewn about – so it probably reminds him of the Iditarod trail.
This morning, I asked him if he was homesick.
At night, Durant sleeps on the floor next to my side of the bed. The window is open no matter the weather and sometimes he sniffs the cold air before settling down. I love him for this and for many other reasons. I also understand about giving up being one thing to become another without really knowing what the new thing is. I’ve done that for decades. I’m doing it now.
We have our joy and melancholy in common, me and Durant.
Another Gone Friend
A writing friend died in his sleep a few days ago.
Out of the blue, his son posted about his father’s death on Facebook, not mentioning the cause, and right away I was adrift in a sea of disbelief. Of course, his son wasn’t obligated in any way to tell the rest of us why his father had died. That wasn’t the point of his post. The point was to celebrate his great dad.
But we – his writing friends – well, we needed to know why. Why would this happen to a guy who wrote a beautiful book about taking his father’s ashes to Mount Everest? A guy that traveled and drove race cars and posted pictures taken from his duck blind and all the while enjoyed life in big and little ways we all envied.
His name was Ed.
I didn’t know Ed well. I don’t know very many people well. It’s probably a character flaw, a weird predisposition to solitariness. And now I’m wondering if there’s still time in my life to change my personality. Maybe I could be more like Ed – interested in other people, chatty, upbeat, supportive and friendly. Well, I am some of those things but not in any kind of even fashion, just sporadically, and even then, being even a bit like Ed tires me out so that I flee to my car as soon as I can.
At our last Writers Showcase in the fall, Ed read a piece. I don’t remember it well except that it was fun and entertaining. I remember reading my piece which was, not unexpectedly, a darker, melancholy story, and I remember Ed sitting in a folding chair, several rows back, halfway leaning against the wall. When I was done reading, I saw him, his arms folded across his chest, nodding, like, yeah, that was pretty good. And if I ran into him tomorrow, by some magic of time, he’d bring up my piece, talk about it, remember it.
Ed died of a heart attack while sleeping a few days ago. Gone, just like that. Why we don’t know.
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Ed’s book: My Father’s Keep: A Journey of Forgiveness through the Himalaya
Less is More, My Friend
I’m trying to say less online and have it mean more.
You can’t run your mouth all the time and expect anyone to listen. And you can’t be shouting and swearing and the ubiquitous ‘calling people out’ and not grind your followers’ patience to a nub.
I curate what I post online (Facebook and Threads are the platforms I use) and I’m very careful about commenting on others’ posts. Advocacy, facts, humor, personal vignettes that might be found helpful or thought-provoking – that’s my inventory.
My new parsimoniousness comes out of wanting to be wise. So, if you follow the shibboleth that ‘you are who you pretend to be,’ I figure if I act like a sage, I might eventually become one.
Therefore, in the spirit of ‘less is more,’ I will stop right here.
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Photo by Nadir sYzYgY on Unsplash
The T-Rex, the Woodchuck and the Wildebeest
[This is a piece from 2013 which I read to my writing group today. It was good for a few laughs which we all needed. ‘It’s not literature,’ as a snooty friend of mine would say, but I don’t care. I like stories where the animals talk.]
Once upon a time, there was a stringy brown woodchuck who desperately wanted to be big and powerful. His powerful urge to be powerful convinced him to buy a T-Rex costume on Amazon.com which he wore coursing through the woodchuck tunnels at night hoping to impress his neighbors. But, alas, they just scoffed.
The best the woodchuck could do was to find a real T-Rex to hang out with. That way, he knew he could feel power by association, the next best thing to having real power himself.
And so it was that the woodchuck hooked up with Big T-Rex, the thundering, spiky, mean as a not fed since last week junkyard dog Big T-Rex. Big T-Rex sized up the woodchuck and right away decided to call him Junior, Junior Woodchuck.
Big T-Rex and his little sidekick, Junior Woodchuck or JW, were forever together, inseparable it seemed. Big T-Rex would be seen strutting through the jungle and little JW would skitter behind him, ducking behind trees, running up alongside, and getting swatted back in place by Big T-Rex. “Stay where you belong, you meaningless little speck,” Big T-Rex would roar.
But when it helped Big T-Rex to have JW by his side, like when they were about to walk through the Happy Animal Commune, Big T-Rex would put his arm around the little rodent’s shoulders. “My BFF, my bud, my pal,” he’d croon as they strolled through the Commune, careful to keep time with the thrum of Kumbaya. “Let’s walk together, my friend, Kumbaya, never apart, my friend, Kumbaya, always happy, my friend, Kumbaya,” and so it went until they hit the outskirts of the Happy Animal Commune and then Big T-Rex would slap JW upside the head. “Don’t crowd me, squirt. Get back where you belong.”
Every day, Big T-Rex would head to the local meadow to eat all the grass and trees. Since his doctor advised against meat consumption, Big T-Rex had been trying to green his diet but it was hard work and he lacked enthusiasm. Why eat salad while a herd of wildebeest stood by, watching him eat their grass and trees, as motionless as statues and as uncomplaining. “Stupid wildebeest,” Big T-Rex grunted to JW while he mowed a lane of grass. “They’re just standing there dumb as sticks watching me eat all their food. “
“Maybe they’re afraid of you, Big T-Rex. After all, you are pretty massive and you have those really major teeth and all those spikes,” said little JW, cowering behind a raspberry bush that had mysteriously sprung up in the jungle.
“WHAT? Didn’t we just walk through Happy Animal Commune? Everyone knows I’m a swell, too swell guy.”
“If that’s so true, Big T-Rex,” said little Susie Wildebeest who had just moments before decided to stand up for her frozen in place brethren, “if that’s so true, maybe you could stop eating all of our grass. You can eat other animals, you know, and we’re kind of stuck with the fruits and nuts regime.”
“I’ll eat whatever I feel like eating, including you, you ugly, dim-witted horse-go-wrong.” Big T-Rex returned to his grazing, mowing another lane in the nearly denuded meadow. “Get out of my way.”
In one motion, the herd of wildebeests turned their collective heads and looked at Susie. Hmmmmm, they thought. Who does she think she is? She’s acting all uppity with the Big T-Rex. She’s going to get us all in trouble. They swayed and mooed. OhhhhhhhhNoooooooOhhhhhhhhNooooooOhhhhhhNoooooo.
Good grief, Susie thought. Why is my herd such a bunch of deer in the headlights? Knobs.
“Big T-Rex, I think it would be really nice if you would leave a little more grass for us. Can’t we all just get along?” By now, Susie Wildebeest knew that she was kind of on her own. The herd had stopped its swaying and mooing and had turned completely around. All Susie could see was a sea of asses. The tails were even still.
She appealed to Wise Old Lion who had been sunning himself on a rock, checking his manicure, and eyeing the ladies in the next pride over. “Could you please ask Big T-Rex to leave us a little more grass,” she asked the Wise Old Lion.
“Oh my, my, my, little girl, I just hate to intervene in community squabbles. I’d much rather y’all settle this amongst yourselves.” For reasons unbeknownst to anyone, Wise Old Lion had a very pronounced Southern accent. Some said he’d just recently moved from Atlanta but others thought it a bizarre affectation.
I’m screwed, Susie thought. I might as well go for it. Maybe once the herd sees my profile in courage, they’ll get their asses in gear and stand up to Big T-Rex.
“Listen Big T-Rex. I’ve really had it. You have got to stop eating all our grass.” Susie stuck her 34 AA chest out and summed the little teaspoon of courage that she’d been keeping in a jar on the top shelf of the upstairs attic of her head. “Right now! And I mean it! And if you don’t, if you don’t, well, if you don’t you can just, you can just, you can just BITE ME.”
And he did.
“Big T-Rex bit me! Wise Old Lion! T-Rex bit me,” cried little Susie.
“You need to develop a thicker skin, my dear,” drawled the Wise Old Lion, rolling over on his back so as to prevent tan lines on his ample belly and the other parts of him that were normally shaded.
“WHAT? What do you mean I have to develop a thicker skin? Big T-Rex just took a bite out of me!” Susie yelled, holding the two edges of the wound together with her front hooves, not an easy move for any four-legged animal much less a wildebeest which is somewhat off kilter to begin with.
“Well, you did tell him to bite you after all, didn’t you?” Wise Old Lion shrugged. Now the Southern drawl was really getting on her nerves.
“Oh my God, it was a figure of speech. You know, figurative, not literal, It’s a saying. It’s what people say on the street when they have just had it with somebody.” Susie looked for support from the asses that used be her herd-mates. Same asses, same tails.
Junior Woodchuck now was panting heavily and prancing around Big T-Rex. “He bit her! He bit her! Did you see that? He bit her! It was so DELICIOUS! His euphoria was approaching the very unseemly.
Big T-Rex cuffed him to the side. “Get out of my way, you rapturous little fleabag.” “Go eat some butterfly dung.”
And so it was that little Susie Wildebeest decided to leave her herd and catch a plane to New York to make an anti-bullying PSA. It was in New York at a meeting of the National Anti-Bullying Alliance (NABA) that she heard that Big T-Rex had moved on to the next meadow to eat all the grass while that herd stood motionless and the Wise Old Lion lolled in the sun and practiced his drawl, and the woodchuck waited impatiently for his next moment of ecstasy.
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Photo by MARIOLA GROBELSKA on Unsplash
Caked Out
Nobody would believe I made a cake, a layer cake no less, for which I had to buy new round cake pans since it’s been decades since I baked a layer cake or really any cake for that matter, but I felt compelled because my very adult son managed to guilt trip me about his birthday without even trying, I am that susceptible to feeling that I have fallen short that a person barely has to blink twice for me to be questioning my decisions, why, for example, I chose to go to a political meeting rather than make a birthday dinner for, as I said before, my very adult son who has multitudinous other options for celebration, but I consider this the curse I accepted by the unreasoned-out decision to become a mother.
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Photo by kaouther djouada on Unsplash
Broken and Lost Things
I wait for loss.
I put my hand to my neck a dozen times a day to feel the chain that holds my mother’s wedding ring. The ring is gold and very thin. If it was thinner, it would be a strand of my father’s hair. He gave it to her eighty years ago, almost to the day.
The ring on the chain around my neck, I seek it. I believe it. I feel the ring, how slight it is, and I am glad to have this thing that belonged to my mother but I am always afraid that one day I will reach up to my neck to feel the chain and it won’t be there. I prepare for grief as I start reaching, the sick dread trickling through me, and then I feel the relief of finding my mother’s ring with my fingers.
Except yesterday. There was no relief yesterday. The chain holding my mother’s ring was gone from my neck. Vanished. Disappeared in the dark in the country’s third largest city on sidewalks traveled by hundreds of people.
On the counter in the kitchen are the three broken pieces of the green glass sea shell plate my son bought for me in Puerto Rico when he went there on a school trip when he was 12. He could have brought me a t-shirt or a keychain or nothing, but he chose the green plate. I don’t know why. I never asked.
I decided to throw the three pieces in the trash and try to find a new special plate. But the stacked pieces sit on the counter, a cairn marking a thousand dinners. There isn’t a plate that has been more present in our lives all these many years. But it cannot be mended and used again. Even I see that and I try to repair everything, everyone. Then my son’s girlfriend said we should glue the pieces together and then paint the mended parts with gold paint because that’s what the Japanese do. It’s about people, she said, about where we are broken and mended. And so we went to buy glue but we couldn’t find any gold paint.
On Facebook today, I read a post by someone who has lost two beloved children. He described how being in a place filled with young people became overpowering to the point that he was searching for an exit, someplace to flee to be sick in private, and then his companion jolted him from this desperate state and reminded him that he chooses life. Every day, I imagine, he chooses life over the alternative, which must be standing in front of him with a wide, welcoming embrace day and night. He chooses life.
Now that I have lost my mother’s wedding ring, I no longer dread losing it. That is something but I don’t know what. I would have preferred to keep it, to perhaps have been warned by a close call that it might be lost so I would put it away and not wear it every day as if I was special. As if nothing would ever happen. But that’s not how it goes, for rings or anything. This is just practice. I see that now. Everything is practice for what might come next.
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Originally published in 2017
All the Heavy Rain
I didn’t go to the third funeral this week because it was raining.
At first, the rain was light but now it’s pouring and I’m glad for that because the rain is affirming my decision not to go. If I had gone, it would have been the second funeral today. Two funerals in one day and I am not a pastor. I am just a person. A living person.
I am rubbed raw by the funerals and by the shooting of Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Last night, I went with my friend, Karen, to a demonstration in front of the ICE office in downtown Milwaukee. As we walked toward the crowd, we were each handed signs, beautiful signs with messages printed on fabric stapled to sturdy four-foot-long wooden poles. I held my sign like I might a flag if I were in the front line of a high school marching band. It was heavy but felt like a lifeline. I don’t know why.
Up in front where all the speakers gathered, there was a sign that said ICE Killed Nicole Good and that was the first time I saw her name. I said to Karen, “Her name was Good.” And I felt the tears welling up, much like this very moment. We stood with our signs and listened to short speeches and then yelled the chants as loud as we could. It felt good to chant, to yell because we couldn’t scream. It wasn’t the time for screaming.
We marched in a wide, wide circle up and down the street. We did this for ourselves but also for the media so they could see all the people, the signs, and the stepping. The sign became heavy and because it was dark, walking became trickier, the pavement uneven. Because we are old women, we got tired the second go round and so we stepped out and surrendered our signs. It was alright. We came. We stood. We marched. That was last night.
The rain came just in time tonight. Saved me from the third funeral. Actually, you might call it the fourth funeral if you count last night.
Sphere of Influence
Morning porch coffee
Skirt or pants boots black or red
Meeting across town
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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