New National Holiday

I bet you missed it. I did. Friday, September 25th was Hug a Vegetarian Day! Darn it. A day designed by PETA to give some love and attention to all the hard-eating vegetarians out there. I totally forgot. Or maybe it was a subconscious, accidentally-on-purpose kind of thing because lately, I’ve been wanting to strangle some of the vegetarians in my life.

I’ve created vegetarian monsters. To be fair, only two out of my three children are veggie monsters. My middle child, Sam, is probably one bite of a Big Mac away from becoming an omnivore. (Do they even make Big Macs anymore? Yes, it’s been that long.) Sam is a foodie. He loves to cook, to eat, to taste. He loves to talk about food, restaurants. He wants to open one some day. I think once he tastes meat, he’ll be a goner. (Just please let it be free-range, organic, local chicken!) He’s 11.

It’s the other two I have to worry about: Lucy and Finn. Finn’s the oldest and Lucy’s the youngest. They’ve really taken this whole vegetarian thing to heart. Geez. Who knew? They’ve all eaten vegetarian since birth. But we've never made that big a deal out of it. When the boys were babies we lived near Cambridge, MA where everybody and their sister was either vegetarian, vegan or Unitarian. Our daughter was born in Washington, D.C. and we lived in Bethesda, MD which was, granted, a more conservative town but not without its crunchy element. Now, we live in a small town in Connecticut and our kids are the only vegetarians in their classes. They're also old enough to be going out to eat with and sleeping over friends' houses. Lately, it's kind of turning into a big deal.

It's not like we've never talked about why we're vegetarian. We've just always kept it very basic. Finn, who is twelve, asks for and absorbs a lot more detail than Lucy who is about to be nine.  And, Sam is the strong, silent type. He doesn’t ask a lot of questions. At least not about this kind of ethical, philosophical stuff. So, my husband, Henry, and I have always kept it fairly light and brief. i.e. We don’t believe in eating animals. Period. We don’t need animal protein to be healthy. Period. As Finn and Sam have gotten older, I’ve told them that animals aren’t kept in good conditions and that the feeding and care of those animals uses up more of the earth’s resources than could otherwise be used to directly feed hungry people. In other words, meat is an inefficient way of feeding people. I’ve NEVER gotten graphic with any of them about anything having to do with being a vegetarian. Period.

Yet, somehow Lucy and Finn have transformed into little proselytizers! You know, those annoying people who say gross things about what you’re about to eat or are actually eating? Such as, gee, I bet that somewhere there’s a lamb missing that leg? Or I wonder if that cow's kids miss her? The people who don’t get asked back to dinner parties? The people that give all vegetarians a bad name? The ones even other vegetarians find annoying? I found out from my sister that sweet, young Finn had cornered my poor, little nephew, Oliver, and told him all about slaughterhouses! It turns out that in a crusade to get his cousin to stop eating meat, Finn will use any weapon available to him, including acting out cows being led to the slaughter! At the lunch table, in the school cafeteria, my dear little Lucy will only sit next to the girls who don’t have meat in their lunches. Vegetarianism through peer pressure, anyone?

My husband, Henry, fell off (onto?) the meat wagon about 10 years into our marriage. He started eating meat again when we lived in Bethesda and he was taking clients out to lunch every day in a new job.  He also doesn't feel as strongly ethically about not eating meat as I do but supports it as a healthy choice for our kids. The dear man still eats vegetarian when he’s with the family. Coming home from work at night, he’ll sweep Lucy up in his arms and sometimes she’ll say petulantly, “Nooooo! I don’t want a kiss! Those lips touched meat!” Nice. Or when I place a bowl of soup in front of her, she’ll say, “Are you sure there’s no meat in this, Mama? Are you positively sure?” “Yes, my dear,” I’ll answer her the first five times and then it’s, Listen, kid, this whole no-meat thing was my idea in the first place. If I say there’s no meat, there’s no meat! Now, eat your soup!

They’re driving me nuts. I can only imagine how well this is going over at school. Well, actually I have some idea. Both Lucy and Finn have come home with stories of kids showing them masticated meat in their mouths, waggling hot dogs in their faces, making mooing sounds from between hamburger buns. I think I can imagine the self-righteous behavior on their part that may have precipitated this. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad they have highly developed senses of empathy for animals but I want them to use that same empathy on human beings.  Giving them permission to refuse meat wasn't a permission slip to harass people into vegetarian submission. Something has gotten lost in translation here.


I was 13 when I became a vegetarian.  (My mom was supportive of my wanting to be a vegetarian but also wise enough to make me wait until I was able to cook for myself.) I went through my own stage as a self-righteous vegetarian. Although, I remember it only through those kind and foggy mists of time. Surely, I wasn’t this bad? Hmmmm. I should ask my mom. Uh-oh. What would she say? Actually, I know exactly what she’d say. She’d laugh and give me a hug. Oh, what you put me through, she’d smile.

Hey! Maybe that’s what Hug a Vegetarian Day is all about. Give us a hug and we'll relax. Give us a hug and we’ll spare you the details...unless you really want to know and then we'll tell you..after dinner. For now, just give us a hug and pass the salt.

Starstruck in the Starbucks' Drive-thru

I almost ran down an elderly woman at the Starbucks' drive-thru the other morning. I didn’t mean to. She was wearing a bright orange t-shirt so it wasn’t like she was hard to see. It was kind of the shirt’s fault, actually. The shirt said something about Guantanamo in big black letters across her sunken chest. Not being a fan of poorly run military prisons, that jerked my attention off the road. I was trying to read the shirt and sip my grande nonfat vanilla rooibos latte and drive the car at the same time. You see the problem. Maybe it was payback for patronizing a huge corporate giant instead of my usual neighborhood barista. I don’t know. Luckily, neither of us was moving too fast.

 I have to say, I was immediately suspicious of her. In my small part of the world, you just don’t find that many old ladies sporting t-shirts that say Guantanamo in big black letters and end on a positive note. (And I say old ladies in the most admiring way.) Squinting recklessly into the sunlight, past the glare of her glowing shirt, I saw what it actually said was: CLOSE GUANTANAMO NOW! Relaxing, I braked and called out my window, “Hey, I like your shirt!” Not knowing how close I’d come to killing her, she ambled trustingly up to my van. And it turned out that this lovely person not only wanted Guantanamo closed but she also wanted a little something called World Peace. My kind of lady! So badly, in fact, was she yearning for peace that she was walking 1,000 miles throughout New England with a handful of other folks on a Peace Walk. 1,000 miles in about 50 days.

I was star-struck. I guess we were holding the other travellers in the Starbucks drive-thru hostage for a bit.. me grasping this delightful woman’s hands through my window... her telling me all about the Peace Walk. That is, until an extremely helpful, small man wearing a Just Do It t-shirt made it his business to let me know I needed to get the hell out of the way. So I just zipped my Eurovan into a spot and hopped out with a big happy bubble in my stomach.

 You know how when you’re on a subway car and the insane person onboard starts talking very, very loudly and everyone is suddenly horribly uncomfortable and looking at the floor and pretending he doesn’t exist except he definitely does exist and you‘re all trapped together in a poorly ventilated space? But then, all of a sudden, he says something absolutely spot-on true and you want to cackle out loud at the craziness of life but you’re afraid because then he’ll probably sit down right next to you and maybe even follow you home? So you don’t know what to do but then you happen to look up into the kind eyes of the stranger across the car from you and you both smile a tiny smile because you both just get it and it’s such a relief to know someone else onboard gets the weirdness and wonder of it all? Well, that’s how I felt in the Starbucks' parking lot. These people were my tribe!

 It turned out the woman in the orange shirt was the driver for the New England Pilgrimage for Peace (www.peacewalk-newengland.com.). There were four more walkers there in the car: one from Nicaragua who was looking at a map, a young woman who was trying to take a nap in the backseat and two seniors who were standing in the parking lot in their stocking feet cutting pieces of moleskin to fit in their shoes. They all looked kind of worn out except for the lady I‘d almost run over who was the oldest of them all. She was positively perky. They’d spent the previous night sleeping at a church. Already up and walking for hours, they were on their way to a town about 10 miles away. I asked if they needed anything. Nope. Could I get them anything? No thanks. Were they taking donations? They demurred. Finally, kind of grudgingly, they said I could buy a t-shirt if I really wanted to. So I did.

I gave them a $25 donation in exchange for the t-shirt, which was designed by friends in Nicaragua, and told them how I believed in peace too. I shared some of the small things I do to work for peace and justice and thanked them for their undertaking. They listened closely and what they really wanted to know more about was me. Me? Yes! They were very curious. What was I doing? What did I think? How did I keep from getting discouraged? Were there other people who thought like me in my little town? Where did I find like-minded people? Then…Come join us if you’d like! Walk a few miles with us. Bring the kids. Anytime! Gratified, I took their picture because I wanted to record this moment of serendipity. Then one of them gave me the greatest hug. Not the kind where you barely pat someone on the back. Or the kind where the person leans in stiffly with their upper body. Just the really good warm kind. And then they were off! Leaving Starbucks in their dust.

  

 Wow, I thought, after they left. Who were those people? Did I just imagine that? Maybe you live in Berkeley, California or Cambridge, Massachusetts where people of all stripes gather for all kinds of reasons every day of the week. I don’t. I live in a small New England town. The biggest gatherings are for church fairs and town picnics. This felt a little bit like a miracle to me. I’d asked them if the local paper had known they were in town. No, they’d replied seeming unconcerned. The minister who’d hosted them said that maybe she’d write an article and then possibly submit it to a paper. She’d taken a picture, they thought. Oh dear, I’d worried. Didn’t they want publicity? Didn’t they know how these things worked? How were people supposed to find out about them? Not everybody’s as nosy as me. I mean they didn’t even seem to have signs, for god’s sake!

  

And then I read their mission statement:

The 2009 Pilgrimage for Peace is an opportunity for a group of interfaith walkers to cover an average of 20  miles per day as they wend their way through all six New England states, meeting with multi-faith communities, peace groups, schools, retirement communities, and others along the way.

Participants will walk approximately 1,000 miles over 50 days. The literal steps are intended to be little steps   for all toward transforming themselves and recognizing that peace starts with them.

The goal is to have conversations at the gatherings to determine how people feel they can best achieve peace   in a world that is distressed, discouraged, and struggling—either for themselves or for those around them or in other parts of the world that bear more than their share of challenges.

These folks were pilgrims. Pilgrims for peace. They weren’t so much concerned with who knew about them as with who they met along the way. A pilgrimage is a journey of great moral significance. It’s not about making headlines necessarily. Making connections and allowing themselves and others to be affected by the experience was more important to them….like what just happened in the parking lot of Starbucks. Of course, there is so much nuts and bolts work to be done for peace and justice. Wars to be stopped. Prejudices to be overcome. Economies to be fixed. Governments to be overhauled. Bellies to be filled. Entire societies to be changed. It’s overwhelming. Sometimes you just have to take a few steps. And then a few more. And see who you meet along the way. And listen to they have to say. Then rest and decide what to do next.

So I’m grateful we crossed paths that day. It restored my faith just a little bit. I hope I gave them some encouragement. I sure tried. And it truly felt meant to be. Sound a little crazy? Well, sometimes you've got to be that crazy person on the subway car. Sometimes you just gotta slam on the brakes and hop right out of your van. Talk to strangers. Read their shirts. Grasp their hands. And try not to run them over.

Forced to Watch Guiding Light as a Baby!

Yes, I was forced to watch soap operas. Sort of. When I was a little babe just days from being pushed out of my mother’s womb, the strains of The Guiding Light’s opening theme fell on my pre-natal ears and left their mark. A similar destiny belonged also to my mother, although hers happened near a radio. My kids met the same dramatic fate. But the way things are going, my grandkids probably won’t.

Actually, soap operas almost never made it to the small screen at all. When they debuted on the radio in the early part of the 20th century, they lasted just 15 minutes and were chiefly a way to sell housewives soap, detergent and other household cleansers. Washboard weepers, their other moniker, were the beginning of our daily dose of women’s domestic fiction. But network executives were unsure about the transition to television because…wait for it…they weren’t sure if women would actually sit down, take a load off their feet during the day, take a break from their housework and watch a show. Yep, you heard it right. Poor saps. Obviously, they’d never done a day’s housework in their lives or spent the day chasing children around a house. Needless to say, ever since, women around the country have been telling children to, “Shush! It’s time for my stories!”


The Guiding Light was the first to make the transition to that glowing box in the corner of your living room on January 30,1952 on CBS Television. Based on a family of lower middle class German immigrants, it was created by a Irna Philips, a woman who is widely regarded as the mother of the daytime drama. She is credited with the circular, casual pace with which these stories are told. Philips knew women would want to run and stir something on the stove or check on a sleeping baby and not have missed so much story that they’d be completely lost by the time they got back to their sofa. Smart lady, right? Also a shrewd businesswoman, she would tailor her stories to better fit the products of her sponsors, writing in a wedding to suit a dressmaker, for example. The daughter of German immigrants herself, the framework of Guiding Light was partially based on Irna Philips’own life.


My mom’s mom had listened to Guiding Light on the radio with her Scottish-born mother. Later, she watched it on television with her 3 daughters. The middle of those daughters grew up to be the mother to whom my younger sister and I would run home, down the hill after school every day. We’d sit next to her on the couch with her cup of tea and watch the last half of Guiding, as we called it. Tired from our long days, we didn’t talk until the ending credits rolled. During my teen years, I fell in love with Phillip Spaulding, the oh-so-sensitive-would-be writer/adopted son of a millionaire who was devoted to his troubled girlfriend, Beth. My sister and I would sigh and gnash our teeth over how Springfield (Guiding Light’s Anytown, USA) was so cruel and unfair to those two. It was easy for us to tell who to root for..a clarity I appreciated in my increasingly confusing pubescent world. I vividly remember a prom scene gone awry that left me in tears. My mom soothed me, saying we all can use a good cry sometimes. As an adult with kids of my own, I’d call my mom after a particularly good episode of Guiding and we’d soothe ourselves through a rough patch cackling, “Well, things might be bad but at least we’re not as crazy as those people!”


I also wiled away many cozy afternoons watching with my father’s mother, Grammy, in her carefully china-filled home in a small factory town about an hour away. This was an entirely different experience. A devout Irish Catholic, every once in a while Grammy’s mouth would form a grim line during some scenes that my mom seemed to have no problem with. I’d sit in the nubby orange chair in front of her tv, on the alert but unsure what I was meant to do. I’d cross my legs and try to look innocent. Yet, she’d always turn it on every day at 3 o’clock on the dot. Grammy was clear about one thing. She loved the Bauers -this big family that was often featured in their kitchen and whose entire lives revolved around their mother. Bert Bauer's sons were always surrounding her and everyone was always asking her for advice. “She,” Grammy would tell me,”is a such a lady.” I dutifully filed this information away from my chair and kept watching.

I still felt connected to my Grammy and my mom’s mom and my sister and that adolescent self whenever I watched Guiding Light as an adult. I thought about my Scottish born great-grandmother who never learned to drive listening to it on the radio at home. It all feels part of the same story. That’s the thing about soap operas. They’re a continuing story being beamed into your home. Every day. No repeats. And Guiding Light had been going on, starting from its radio days, for 72 years. That’s the longest running show in broadcast history. In some ways, it’s the longest continuous story ever told. A new twist added every day for 72 years. It was like an heirloom passed down from mother to daughter. Slightly tarnished maybe but one you wanted to keep in the family anyway. And on Friday, September 18th after over 15,000 episodes, that heirloom got tossed out. Why?

Well, it's complicated.

• It’s partially because there are 300 channels on television when there used to be three. (A fact my kids think I am making up.)
• Also, the soaps rely heavily on the automobile industry for sponsorship and we all know how well they’re doing.
• Women's lives have changed and not as many of us are home during the day to watch.  Although many of us record our favorites soaps to watch later, ratings don’t count those viewers because sponsors know good and well that we zip right through their commercials. (Where’s Irna Philips when you need her? What ever happened to good old product placement? When have the soaps ever been above that? )
• Also, the women who became soap opera fans with their mothers have grown older and their kids haven’t gotten hooked. And you and I both know how advertisers feel about older women.
• Mostly though, I think the networks that produce the soaps haven’t found a way to keep up with women’s changing lives or to fully explore new media for the soaps so we can keep up with them.

And why haven’t they bothered?

That’s simple. Soap operas are primarily made up of women’s stories and they’re told mostly to women. Those stories don't matter to the larger television culture and women as a group don't matter to advertisers. Soap operas are the most parodied of all broadcast art forms. We’re constantly told they’re inane, right? Ridiculous? Mind-numbing? Trash? But the stuff of daytime drama is the stuff of women’s lives...with better hair and make-up, of course. Not to mention a much better wardrobe budget. Daily domestic drama: who loves who, who’s hurting.,who needs help. No wonder women are so drawn to them! That’s what we traditionally do: we look after people, care for them and talk about it in the meantime. Whether we work inside or outside of the home, that hasn't changed.

And soap operas are told, in many ways, the way women tell stories. Generously. With repetition. So that anyone can join in and catch up. With a lot of sympathy. With an eye for detail and scene. Their narratives are complex, can go back decades. Yes, they can require complete suspension of disbelief at times but more often a memory passed down through generations. This is why when a woman meets another woman who watches her same soap, she feels as though she’s found long lost kin.

Soap operas are also an escape from life. There’s their duality: they’re about domestic life but they also act as an escape from domestic life. God help you if you come in between a woman and her soap at the designated time. She may have taken care of you all day, kissed your scrapes when you fell down, gotten up early to work at a factory to pay your school tuition, have your dinner cooking in the oven or worked in a office all day to buy your clothes but don’t interrupt her show!

The stereotype of the soap opera fan is an unintelligent, lazy, inarticulate, bored woman who has nothing better to do with her time. No wonder the genre is dying. We're afraid to come out of the closet! Fans of daytime drama are among the most degraded and ridiculed, despite the fact that most people have a mom or grandmother or aunt or wife who watches. On the contrary, the more I come out as a soap opera watcher , the more I find women of all walks of life who watch too, women who cut across all demographic lines, even women new to this country who use soaps as a way to improve their English. But one fact is indisputable, we are getting older.

So the same kind of wise television executives that weren’t sure if women would take a break from housework to sit down and actually watch a soap opera, don’t think the aging women who watch Guiding Light are worth much. And so on Friday, September 18th, Guiding Light ran the words across the screen that no soap opera is ever supposed to say: The End. I thought of my grandmothers long gone, my mother’s cups of tea, Phillip who was supposed to be mine, the nubby orange chair, my sister and I had a good cry.


Yeah, Guiding Light had it’s fair share of melodrama: babies switched at birth, cars driven off of cliffs, and even a cloning or two. But that’s not what drew me. It was the more regular stuff. The tough decisions, losses, friendships, the love.

In 1965, Irna Philips was quoted as saying, “None of us is different, except in degree. None of us is a stranger to success and failure, life and death, the need to be loved, the struggle to communicate.”

 

 Love between the laundry cycles. And, god, I’ll miss it.