Both sides now

Things I bitch about:
~ Everything has gone to hell since the fifties. See the ad that opens the video above (though I kinda like the music).
~ I'm addicted to Candy Crush.
~ My mother doesn't clean up after me anymore.  (And that's not the only way I miss her.)
~ My bladder is getting old along with the rest of me.
~ I have to wear custom orthotics and athletic shoes pretty much all the time or my left ankle hurts and I break tiny bones in my feet, which is excruciating.  Worse:  I just can't go barefoot, even around the house.
~ I am allergic to every season.  Spring grass and tree pollen.  Summer ragweed.  Autumn leafmold.  Winter cold (fibromyalgia).
~ There is a very limited choice of dingbats here on Blogger. It makes me -

~ Really bad karma led me to being actively bipolar.
~ And really bad karma makes it impossible to take any of the drugs.  We've tried.  Not that the drugs work.
~ The compression fracture I got from my bad fall this spring hurts most of the time, and gets worse when I drive or wear a bra.
~ This is our front yard today.

from the bedroom window

from the street

~ The new line to the sewer is costing us almost $8,000.  The house has smelled like drains for several days.  We didn't have water or the ability to flush the toilets for two days. 
~ I'm still not completely unpacked since the last move (ten years ago).
~ I keep falling down breaking bones, getting concussions, nobody knows why.  Neurologist appointment coming up, sigh.
 
What, you need more?  I've got more.  I have 83 problems, like everyone else.  But on the other hand, obstacles are also opportunities. . . .
~ The internet!  Candy Crush!
~ Zen in the West!
~ I had a loving mother who taught me hard work by example, and at least gave me an ideal of neatness.
~ I'm still here, aging bladder in place.
~ My insurance covered the orthotics. I haven't broken a foot bone since I got them.
~ Our house has a good HEPA filter on the furnace and central air.
~ Bipolars are creative.  Irish poet karma is not all bad.
~ The sewer problem has led to much neighborly conversation and compassion.
~ I am newly appreciative of flush toilets.
~ Finally, while I hate falling, I've always liked the Samurai motto - 

Fall seven times, stand up eight.

Old songs and Strong Men

Above, the man of your dreams?  More about that in a minute.

Below, a sweet song I may have heard when I was six and Vaughan Monroe's version hit the top 10. I loved the narrative - a story in song, a message in persisting through the desert.  Keep a-movin' Dan.   I'm not alone in liking it - a lot of people have recorded it.  I landed on this version first, remembering Johnny Ray, and like it. 


While in that area on YouTube, I saw this and listened to it and looked at it, remembering clearly the movie.  Watching it, many stills from the well-done black-and-white film, I remembered the rigid gender roles in the culture I was born into; the patriarchy - the fundamental culture of the fifties.



I was probably about twelve when "High Noon" came to the Lyn Theatre half a mile from our house.  I was never into "cowboy movies" and thought pretty much nothing happened in it, and it was boring; you could fit about ten of it into one episode of 24 Hours. But I stayed and watched it, of course.  It was a long time until I learned you could walk out on a movie, and then it took me a while to do it.  So there I sat, absorbing the world in which men were interesting and brave and important, and women were . . . pretty. The men did stuff and the women . . . waited. Sigh.

It's been a long, strange trip since then, and most of it hasn't gone as we feminists hoped it would.  Keep a-moving, Jan.  And Susan and Heather and Tiffany, all of us.

I had a second bad fall two weeks ago, and have seen three doctors since then and had an MRI of my brain. Ischemic events happening there, so now I'm scheduled for a neurologist.  I'm tired.  So I'm going to ask you readers to comment, or e-mail me if this strikes any chords with you.  Or reminds you of the stories you grew up with.

Domestic Goddess

Domestic Goddess

This morning the collage group I belong to didn't respond to my idea that we create The Porpoise of Art (watch this space), and I think we settled on the idea of balance.  Then, as usual, I went off-road. (You don't have to do the assignment is one of our principles.)  Looking at the array of magazines from which we can cut out images, I picked up a Women's Day dated September 1953. 

That month and year I turned eleven.  This is a moment when a child is anticipating going through puberty and growing up.  Women's magazines like this were my travel guide back then.  An ad for a sewing machine at the front of this issue evoked memories of being a girl dreaming of grown-up life, and the drawing in that ad became the center of my collage.  Everything in the collage  that's black and white was cut and rearranged from that ad.

As I made this collage, I remembered having seven crinolines for under my circle skirts, and I felt the sweetness of the aspiration for femininity and for a well-ordered home.  The dream was only superficially about having a man love you and owning a house and having nice furniture and cooking and cleaning.  It was also about home and family, a beautiful refuge. 

I could write a book about the harm done to me by the patriarchy, especially as filtered through my parents, who never questioned it.  The idea was that the man was a good breadwinner and the woman took care of  their lifestyle.  There was no room in that dream for loving and marrying people of the same gender, or not marrying at all, or not having children, or the two-career marriage, not for most of us. There was not room for women being smart, though a few plain girls were doomed to be.  Despite this prison of expectations, there was something of value in the idea of a home and a dedicated homemaker.  And also in valuing softness and femininity. 

Anyone could tell you I am so far from being a domestic goddess.  Yet, I found as I made this collage, that that aspect of the dream still held appeal for me, and I was glad I recently bought a pink tee with ruffles around the neckline.

On Effortlessly Deleting

[image, a journal made by Brush Dance]
So now Surya Das has me thinking about all the selves I lost along the way. It has sometimes taken great effort, especially when it meant losing a dream. . . .

This despite the fact that the universe has done its best to give me what I desired. I realized that just now as I was adding a to-do item to the sticky note on my home page, and backed up to erase. Delete, I mean. Well, there's probably the problem right there. I still think in terms of "erase" when the world (or this privileged part of the world) has moved on from the manual typewriter and the white eraser made specifically to erase errors made on a typewriter.

I could not have dreamed of such a thing, a typewriter you could erase effortlessly, whose font you could change with a few strokes, from which you could send your thoughts around the world without anyone's permission. What I did dream of was not being a secretary anymore. I didn't really know what my problem was with that; in fact, I would have made a good executive secretary, in part because of my 1950's training to anticipate a man's needs. But working on the lower levels, I was often forced to sit and look busy. I never had a challenging task. Ever. And my work seemed meaningless to me. I had higher aspirations than playing a tiny part in building good tires.

Well, the universe did get me out of that and into college, and being an English major. I was sure teaching college would a big boost upward, out of the realm of girl work into the brave new world brought to us by the 1960's. Not that we knew it was happening even to us in middle-class middle America. We watched the British singing sensation, The Beatles, on the Ed Sullivan show, and didn't really get it. By the time they produced Sgt. Pepper though, I was first to buy it, and unveiled it at a party for my students. That was the high point of my teaching career, that first year, that party.

Actually, teaching college freshman and sophomores, which is what you're doomed to until you prove yourself with years of grueling labor, a kind of hazing, this kind of teaching is not an improvement over being a secretary in the general engineering department of Firestone Tire & Rubber Company. As a secretary, I got to go home at night without a stack of fifty themes to grade. I had clearly defined tasks which I could complete. I was bored by the work, but never exhausted.

Teaching freshman English, though, turned out not to be so much about meaningful work as I had imagined. . . I tried to learn how to teach writing, and the more I read about it, the more I could see that it couldn't be taught at a late age in a classroom of 25 students who don't want to be there. As for teaching American literature, what was our purpose in that class? To teach kids who the major figures were? But that kept changing. To get kids to love delicately crafted and profoundly sensitive written works? How do you do that? Many scholars think it has to be done at an early age, maybe by being read to by your parents. By the time we got kids in college, their hatred of what they had to read was formed. In 1995 I left academia not knowing where to go, just wanting out.

It has been a tremendously steep learning curve for me to figure out what I liked to do - create. Anything. Learn anything. Then I got all knotted up in trying to commodify what I did, for the deepest mid-century belief my parents shared was that money is everything. My father meant what he said, that Mother Theresa was a scam, that my cousin Wanda and her husband, who took in foster children, had some material motive. Money was the only conceivable motive. Worth was about money. No wonder I liked Buddhism when I found it, those stories about hermit monks who owned nothing but one robe, one bowl, and left their poems scrawled on boulders, or pinned to the wall of an inn. The very idea of not striving. Not striving?! Striving was everything, too. If I could write a book, I would look at the tragedies wrought by that Western belief.

Moving from "ought" to "like" is in a way the life story of anyone raised in the fifties, but I suppose it's a natural part of human development; children want to please their parents and teachers, learn the rules, be accepted in society. From then on, you're becoming your own person by following your own crooked path. I have a Brush Dance card on my desk with a saying by Lao Tsu. Maybe I have posted it before:

The way is simple,
but the crooked path is more popular.

The way is simple, the heart way, and the heart is a good guide, but I don't know anyone who hasn't had to take a crooked path to get there.