Beside the Stone Wall

Coming Out to Play

2010-04-28T09:59:00.000-04:00

I'm going to my happy place in a few days to celebrate my 40th birthday with my mom and my sister. Yippee! Well, I have lots of happy places, actually. In Henry's arms. Where two rivers meet in Vermont. A certain chair in my livingroom when a fire is burning in the fireplace. Sunday mornings in bed. The library. The front seat of any car at the beginning of a road trip. Martha's Vineyard any time of year. That's just the beginning of a long list.

On the other hand, I am a worrier. A thinker. Angst is in my genes. I don't know if it's the Irish or the Scottish in me. We work our worries over and over until they're barely recognizable. What did they even start out as in the first place? Give me a person, a place....I'll find something to be concerned about. Give me a topic. I'll give you an angle to look into. I'm a digger. Surfaces have never satisfied me. If I don't know someone's story, I'll fill in the blanks...usually assuming the worst. I'll imagine the saddest, sorriest stories....whether it's a dog loping along the side of the road looking over its shoulder back at me or a young girl alone on a park bench. Before I know it, I'm involved.

But I can't imagine another way of life. And I don't want to. This is the stuff of life. Right? This is how lives are made. What would life be if we minded our own business all the time? To connect is all! Who said that? E. M. Forster? Whoever it was...they were right. What else is life about...besides connecting with other human beings, other living creatures, with our living, breathing world? That's all there is. What else could we possibly be here for?

The flip side...ah, yes, there's always a flip side.....of connection is the need to disconnect. The need to disconnect in order to recharge. This is most definitely a part of my life as well. I retreat from the world it with books and movies, mostly. I love to read. Always have. And I can while away most of a day watching old movies. I'll watch them all...everything except the Westerns...John Wayne gives me fits, Clint Eastwood gives me hives. I love going out to the movies too. I'm a little more discerning about those though. But I really like going by myself, sitting in the dark with my popcorn and Milk Duds when the previews begin. But there are times when even these diversions are too much about the real world. There are times I need something even more divorced from reality in order to disconnect.

For those times, I always have my soaps. Yes, I can go from reading Dostoyevsky or watching The Visitor to zoning out in front of the Young and the Restless without a problem. And no, I don't suffer from any cranial whiplash. Sometimes, I just need to be in la-la land where people's problems are completely fake and men wake up in full makeup and women slip off their earrings to answer the phone. (Love that!) I come from a long and proud line of women with both high and low brow tastes. My mother will just weep listening to Jessye Norman sing one night and then pee her pants watching Reno 911 the next. She'll attend a lecture on Palestine one afternoon and rock out in the front row of a Tire Biter concert that same night. I wish I was as cool as my mom. She teaches an ESOL class on Thursday mornings for Literacy Volunteers and then sometimes gets so depressed after giving a student in particularly dire straits a ride home that she goes directly shopping, does not pass Go because life is so damn sad and nothing cheers her up like some mindless retail therapy.

Well, I have a place that I go which is my own version of sticking my fingers in my ears and singing, "Lalalalalalalalalala!" at the top of my lungs. Are you ready? You have to promise to keep reading after I tell you what that place is. Okay. Deep breath.

The place I love to go, where I can just check my mind at the door......is Disney World.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking! I can hear you...What a sap. What a sucker. And you're right, probably. Well, I don't care if I am the world's biggest. Just listen to my story.

I went there as a typical, cynical thirty-something with Henry and the kids oh, maybe four years ago. My mother sent us there for a vacation. (I know! So incredibly generous!) We were excited to go but thought the trip would mainly be about the kids. I was ready to be very judgemental about the outrageous materialism and the capitalist-machine that is Disney. Right? I walked in there with my analytical skills sharpened and at the ready.

By the second day, I was wearing the mouse ears.

I lost my ever-loving mind. Completely. Gone. Gonzo. I loved it beyond words. More than the kids even. I started planning my retirement operating the Peter Pan ride. I'm serious. I am still kind of considering it.

And after I got home and framed the picture of all of us with Jiminy Cricket and hung it up on the wall and decided I didn't care who saw it... And after I looked at pictures of us about a million times on all the rides and with the Fairy Godmother and with the Princesses (who were actually kind of kick-ass, by the way...the princes are really an after-thought).... And after I'd decided I actually did not want to wear my Tinkerbell t-shirt out in public after all and folded it and pushed it into the back of my bureau drawer....I realized why I had gone completely berserk in Mouse-land. It was simple, really. It was just because I had gotten the chance to be a kid there. Really, totally, completely a kid. And I loved it!

You have to understand, I wasn't much of a kid as a kid. I was pretty serious from about the age of four years old on. You know, the kind of kid who stayed inside and read while the other kids were outside running around yelling like maniacs? I was that kid. I was more comfortable hanging around the edges of the grown-ups' conversations than I was talking to my peers. I used to climb through a hole in the stockade fence behind our apartment building when I was very small and walk a route I'd set for myself in the woods. I'd take notes inside a notebook I carried around with me. I don't know what the hell I wrote; I couldn't read or write at the time but I took it very seriously....it was my job. I also decided I didn't believe in god when my grandmother died when I was 9 years old. Fascinated with old cemeteries by then, I wrote long odes to them. I think I would have been Goth in 5th grade if that had been a thing then. Exceedingly shy in elementary school, I was more comfortable in the made-up country that my across-the-street-neighbor and I invented than I was in my actual neighborhood. We had a language, a national color (purple) and we were the queens. It was a two-person land.

By the time I hit junior high, I was seriously pre-occupied with nuclear war. We're talking nightmares. Lying awake in my purple room, night after night, I'd obsess about nuclear winter. (Remember The Day After? Never should've watched that. Ne-eh-eh-verrrrr.) I lost my innocence at a very young age. I hung around with some pretty serious friends too. We became deeply concerned about starving children in Guatemala after seeing a commercial on tv starring Sally Struthers. Remember those? (In case, you're wondering, guys, my parents took over sponsorship of Norma Yolanda after we flaked out...) Then, while other teens were hanging out drinking beer in high school, I was dating a guy in college and starting a high school peace group. When my classmates were at parties in the woods, my gay and moody (who could blame him?!) friend and I would go for long drives on the weekends, listening to angst-ridden protest and folk music, watching the small towns fly by in the dark and judging the people in them for what we perceived as their passivity. What was wrong with people?! God. Why weren't they out in the streets....protesting.....like, everything?! My favorite hangout as a teenager was the feminist bookstore in our state capital. There'd be me and about a dozen 40 year olds in the joint...more than a few of them, I now realize, clinically depressed. I had an interesting adolescence.

And, while a lucky marriage and three sprites of my own have helped take me out of my own head more than a bit....(who has the energy to worry about nuclear winter every single night? I've been dealing with three pregnancies in four years, colic, breastfeeding, post-partum depression, jaundice, attachment parenting, sibling rivalry, career choices, speech difficulties, lack of sleep, cooperative preschools, boys who think farting is the funniest thing ever invented, moving our family three times in three states, lactose intolerance, equitable distribution of housework, homework, bullies, adolescence, how the HELL did the kids figure out how to unlock our bedroom door on Sunday mornings?!! teacher conferences, 5 human beings' diets, 4 dogs and 1 cat)......I'm still essentially me. My nature is to mull. To analyze. To parse.

But when I go to Disney World, I don't read the New York Times front page to back. I don't read any newspaper. I don't listen to NPR. I don't listen to anything besides soundtracks to movies that all have happy endings. I don't drive a car....I don't have to be that high-functioning. I adjust my conversation level to that of, possibly, a 10 year old. And my thoughts seem to follow. It's extreme, I know. That's what I have to do to disconnect completely.

Yeah, I know it's an illusion. I'm not stupid. I know all those people can't really be that happy to work there. I know there must be labor issues in Disney World just like most everywhere else. (I read Walt Disney's biography. I know he wasn't pro-labor. Do you think Michael Eisner was?) I don't even want to begin to think about the environmental impact of a place that large. Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala! (And if you know anything about any of the above, I DON'T want to know about it.)

It's my happy place. Dammit. And when I get there, it all falls away. I'm not a mom anymore. I'm not a worrier. I'm not the kid inside with a book. Look at me! I'm outside with all the other kids! I stop looking for who's hurt, who's in trouble. I stop looking for the seams, the cracks. I'm just a kid who believes in magic. And I truly do. That's the flip side of me. It comes from seeing the sad and the rough stuff in life. That's forced me into becoming a person who believes just as fiercely in possibility, hope and, yes, even in magic.

So, when the fireworks burst over that castle, which I know no one really lives in and which only appears that large due to forced perspective.....and when the Fairy Godmother sings in her wobbly voice, "No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true..." I believe her. I cry a little bit and then I'm ready to go home. I'm ready to face the real world again and try to do my tiny little part to make it better.

So that's it. That's my happy place. Yes, Tinkerbell and all. And my mom and my sister are taking me there for my 4oth birthday. How lucky am I?

What's your happy place?

Trust Women

2010-01-22T13:21:00.000-05:00

If you end up behind me on the twisting roads of my small New England town you'll probably see the heads of several children (mostly) happily bopping around the backseat of my Volkswagen van, some of them mine, some of them friends. You'll see me trying, in vain, to keep order. You'll also probably notice the Keep Abortion Legal sticker on the back of my van. More than one person has commented on the incongruity of the two images: the van nearly constantly full of children and the pro-choice bumpersticker.

I don't see it.

I'm not anti-children. I just want women to have children only when they want to have children. I kind of trust women to be in charge of their own bodies. Is there something weird about that? Being a mother only made me feel more strongly about that. Now I really know what it takes to make a baby. I know what it takes out of you physically. I know what you have to give emotionally. It's nothing to enter into lightly. Or by force.

A friend's father said to her after giving birth, "Still pro-choice?"

She answered, "Even more so." Looking down at the wonder of life in her arms and all the responsibility that this new little being entailed, remembering everything she'd gone through to bring that baby into the world she couldn't imagine being forced to do so. Could you?

My great aunt was married with 3 children when she had to have an illegal abortion. Her husband was a no-good lout who was already cheating on her every chance he got. She had never gone to college nor had she worked a paying job. She loved him and depended on him completely...always thinking he would change. It was what she was raised to do. Her mental health was already precarious and she knew she wouldn't survive another pregnancy. She never knew when she was going to be left with 3 children on her own. The illegal abortion was just one more humiliating brutality for her to survivie in an already grim existence. She committed suicide while waiting another night for a husband who never came home.

When I went for a pregnancy test in high school, I walked alone to a clinic after school. I snuck there before play rehearsal. It was a nondescript place behind the school, not far from the hospital. I'd found it in the phone book. It advertised as a place that would give girls free, anonymous pregnancy tests. I told no one I was going. I didn't have really close friends who I knew were having sex. I didn't have anyone to tell. I felt completely alone. The boy? Please.

The woman in the cardigan seemed nice enough when I walked in although the place looked more like an office than a clinic and when she took my blood her hands shook. I ended up reassuring her that she did ok. But then she gave me all these pamphlets about adoption and fetal development and said, "You know you might have a baby in you, right?" I was in too much shock to do anything but stare at her. Was she kidding me? Would she still give me my test results if I disagreed with her? I had to come back to this creepy place in 3 days to find out if I was pregnant or not. I didn't want to make her mad at me. I felt like I was completely at her mercy. Had I written down my phone number? What if she called my parents?

As a parting gift, she gave me a hollow pink plastic fetus. She told me that this was what my baby looked like inside me. This thing was about 6 inches long and had the features of about a 6 month old infant. My period was only 3 days late! Luckily, even at the age of 17, I had the sense to know this woman was nuts. I threw the plastic baby in the bushes on my way out and made it back to school in time to rehearse the second act. Of course, my biggest act was pretending to be a normal teenager when really I felt like my life was about to be over. Thankfully, my period bloomed the bright red flag of independence the next day and I never had to go back to that awful place or see the cardigan lady again.

But I've never forgotten her and I call my senators and congresspeople every chance I get. I do it for my great aunt and for teenage girls who are alone and scared. For every time the condom breaks, the diaphragm slips, the times you missed one pill. For the times you said yes when you really wanted to say no. For the times you said no and he didn't listen. For the months you couldn't afford your birth control and he didn't care. For the times you thought it was safe and it wasn't. For the times you were just plain dumb. For the times he said c'mon baby baby just this once and you listened. For the times you forgot. For the times it turned out menopause wasn't really here quite yet. For the times no one taught you you could get pregnant the first time. For all these reasons and more, I call and write and email and donate and talk. And I won't stop.

Today is the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in this country. Roe v. Wade is not enough. The religious right continues to intensify their attacks on women's legal right to abortion. They target the most vulnerable among us. The poor and the young. If you are wealthy and middle-aged, it is possible to access abortion in this country. If you are poor, live in the middle of nowhere or are a teen, good luck. If you listen carefully, you'll hear the right is really more interested in controlling women and their sexuality than anything else. If it was about more than that, the religious right would spend more time and energy focused on the needs of children who have actually been born...finding families for the children who languish in foster care and homes for the children who are homeless.

Look for me. You'll find me in my van, usually packed with kids. Kids I had when I was ready to have them. Kids who are cherished and adored. Kids I'm raising with my husband to feel respected, to have a sense of dignity and to respect other's rights. No child should get any less. And neither should their mother.

Christmas in a Minor Key

2009-12-16T17:21:00.002-05:00

"Do you remember that first tree?" Henry asked me the other night with a smile. He was watching me try to hang a few more ornaments on our already-stuffed Christmas tree after the kids had gone to bed. Some trick of memory and light had made him think he'd spotted a gingerbread ornament from years ago. I was having trouble finding room for another single solitary ornament. Our tree tells the story of many Christmases. There are, of course, the requisite gilded macaroni wreaths with our kids' shining faces sticking out of their middles, some early 1900's glass balls I'd inherited from my grandmother, the growing collections I'd started for each of the kids, a few from my childhood, plus those I've picked up over 17 years of married life.

"Yes." Of course, I remembered that first tree. I'll never forget it. Our first married Christmas, Henry and I lived in a three-room apartment right outside of Boston which we thought was a palace. The apartment was on the first floor of an old 3-story Victorian which was painted peach, purple and green. No, those colors aren't a typo. We'd gotten a reduction in rent because Henry repainted the exterior the summer we moved in. It had an iron spiral staircase on the outside of the house crowned by a styrofoam head with a wig on it. We were in heaven.

We were 22 years old. We didn't have much money. We brought home a fat white pine that Christmas which took up one-third of our petite livingroom. I spent the next week rolling out and baking fragrant gingerbread people, trees, hearts and stars from a recipe in a red Good Housekeeping cookbook we'd gotten from a wedding shower at my grandmother's house. I still have that cookbook and still use that same recipe. I made holes in the tops with the eraser end of a pencil and strung them with twine I bought at Tony's Spa which sat kitty-corner to our apartment. ("Spa" is what corner stores around Boston used to be called and some still are. Tony's still was.) I cut out snowflakes from plain white paper making the cuts as tiny as I could get them. Those I fastened to the tree by slipping some of the long soft needles through the holes I'd made.

My cousin Jane had made us a few ornaments as a gift at that same wedding shower. I hadn't known how important they'd turn out to be. Some looked like funny little rainbow windsocks and some were red airplanes made out of clothes pins. I added those and one solitary string of lights. We couldn't afford any store-bought ornaments that year. That was it. We needed a tree-topper so I made an angel out of a scrap of material, a silk flower that I ripped to shreds and some moss. She was a little strange but after I tied her to the top of the tree with some purple curling ribbon....she looked ok. In fact, the whole thing did. It didn't look like any tree either of us had ever seen but it was ours. In fact, there's a picture of the two of us in front of that tree, holding the first of our shelter dogs, Sally, and looking so very young and hopeful. The tree doesn't look bad either.

A few years after that first tree, my grandparents decided they weren't going to get a Christmas tree that season. Too old. Too much work. They were in their early eighties by then. Still newly minted entrants in the marriage game, this seemed completely unacceptable to Henry and me. We borrowed a car, tied a tidy and reasonably-sized fir to the top and headed for the northwest hills of Connecticut and the small Colonial my great-grandfather had built for his son's family 50 years earlier.

Henry climbed up to my grandparents' cold, dark attic and brought down the boxes of painstakingly well-wrapped ornaments. Then he carefully carried down the lights with their brittle wiring which my grandfather had meticulously wrapped around rectangles of cardboard. He moved the rocker that usually stood in the tree's place of honor and followed my grandfather's every other direction with a smile. God, I loved this man. We had only the vaguest hint of understanding that they felt frustrated not being able to do everything they wanted to themselves.

I unwrapped the ornaments from their newspaper nests with Grammy, listening to her tell me the vintage of each one. Grammy was always full of magical baubles like these: trinkets with stories. Just like the charms on her bracelet...she could rub their surfaces with her bumpy, arthritic fingers and out would flow the tales for each one. When we were done, that tree was loaded with both sparkling and faded ornaments not only from my father's childhood but also from my great grandparents' homes. And, of course, my grandparents had married decades before the subtlety of white lights came into high fashion. The big brightly colored bulbs they owned clacked when you knocked them together and the wires connecting them were covered in stiff fabric. They generated quite a bit of heat so you took your life into your hands if you left them plugged in too long. My grandfather was an electrician and his handiwork could be seen all along their dark skeins. Back then, people didn't go out and buy a whole new string of lights if one broke. You fixed it. Or, at least, my grandfather did. I can still hear him, almost completely deaf, singing to himself, "Ho dee doe, doe, doe. Dee, doe," in his deep rumble as he approached a task like that with some glee.

When the tree was completely dressed, my grandparents were beaming. More pleased with our attention, I think, than with the actual tree. But I was happy because it felt like we had staved off the something that was looming over us for another year. They couldn't really be getting that old. Not really. Not if they still had a Christmas tree in the same corner of the livingroom same as every other Christmas. If nothing looked different, then life could continue as it always had on New Litchfield Street. That was my deepest wish.

In the car, just the other day, my youngest, Lucy, asked me if I knew why so many holiday songs were written in a minor key. What? I didn't even know she knew what a minor key was. I can't exactly define it myself....it's been more years than I'd like to admit since I sat in a music class....other than to say that I know those sadder, more serious sounding notes when I hear them. They must have been talking about it in her 3rd grade music class with her hip and knowledgeable music teacher with the spiky hair. "Yeah," Lucy elaborated, "like Blue Christmas...and Silent Night...and then there's The Little Drummer Boy...." Hmmmm. Yes. She was definitely onto something. Struck, I told her I didn't know why Christmas songs were often written in minor keys but asked her why she thought that was. Her answer was to launch into a loud rendition of a Kwanzaa song. In a minor key.

Well, I fibbed a little. I think I do know why so many Christmas songs have that melancholy sound. Don't you? But it's a lesson my daughter's much too young to have to know yet. At least, not too intimately. Inside every Christmas we celebrate is the kernel of a Christmas past. Or of every Christmas past maybe. And there's something sad about that...no matter how happy some or most of those holidays may have been. And, like nesting dolls, those Christmases gone-by get unwittingly unwrapped along with all those boxes of decorations we lug down from the attic. They're the extra ingredients we mix into Christmas supper, some bitter, some sweet. And we're placing those old Christmases under the tree along with all the other gifts we're offering, whether we intend to or not. No wonder the holidays are so exhausting!

They're that vacant spot in the corner of the livingroom, the empty place at the kitchen table. They're even the new faces we wish so badly someone had been able to know. Mixed in with all the joy of Christmas is always a little bit of sadness. For Christmases, that for whatever reason, just can't be the same. Life changes. I think that's the reason we sometimes go overboard this time of year. I know I do. We're trying to reach back for something that's gone with....things. But we can't reach back to those Christmases with stuff. It just doesn't work. The irony is that, often, all we need is something small and simple to acknowledge a loss. A word. A small ritual. A quiet thought. I miss... Do you remember? I wish...

Someday, Lucy, Sam and Finn will understand why there's always a little bit of tears mixed in with the smiles this time of year. Why I just have to make my mom's sour cream twists. No matter what. Why my mom gets pretty sad at Christmas missing her parents. Why we give Grandpa Harry extra hugs. Why their Papa wasn't that crazy about Christmas until they were born. For now, I'm so glad all that's a mystery to them. We'll teach them that lesson in time...that it's all right to mourn while we celebrate, to miss while we enjoy. That the two don't cancel each other out. We'll teach them that it's all right to make room for both at Christmas. That their Papa and I made a beautiful first Christmas out of practically nothing. That I miss my grandparents like an ache in my belly at the holidays. But my grandparents also gave me so many of my best Christmas memories that they're closer by at this time of year than at any other.

One thing my kids already know for sure is that the three of them are my deepest wishes come true. And when I see Christmas through their eyes, music blasts from my heart in a major key.

Me and the D.C. Sniper

2009-11-13T14:21:00.001-05:00

I don't remember too much about how that day started. But I can't seem to forget the hours that followed. I was on my way back from Dunkin Donuts when I learned my 2 year old daughter, Lucy and I were in the path of a shooting spree.

We had stood on the sidewalk beside the long, low brick elementary school watching with the other parents in a crowd of strollers and milling younger siblings while Finn and his classmates lined up behind his hawk-nosed and eyed kindergarten teacher, Ms. Blumenthal. Then, back in our trusty silver van, Lucy and I drove 4 year old Sam to his very first day that year at Cedar Lane Cooperative Nursery School. Sam's school was in the basement of the Unitarian Universalist church which was tucked into a leafy glen across the road from Rock Creek Park, itself a sylvan sanctuary and unlikely partner to the clamorous Beltway it ran beside. Both were steps from our front yard. Waking up at 2 in the morning to nurse Lucy, I would pretend the low roar I heard was the sound of a rushing woodland river. The reality was just too unnerving and the power of my imagination is strong. There was no time of day or night that the thundering hiss would stop.

Sam had attended the same free-spirited nursery school the previous year and went off happily. Henry and I volunteered once a week but that day was not our day and I was immediately lightened by the feeling of going from three children to one for a few hours. I felt so good about where both my boys were. The elementary school was excellent. And we'd chosen this nursery school based on its child-centered, play-based rather than academic approach. Somewhat of a nervous nellie about my kids' safety in general, I felt relaxed about both these places. This did not come easily to me. It was a good day.

I looked at Lucy and gauged her sleepiness. Could I make it to the Dunkin' Donuts drive-thru and all the way home again without her falling asleep? As any stay-at-home parent knows, moments like these cannot be squandered. If a child falls asleep in a moving vehicle she may not be transferred to a crib and stay asleep. Could I take the chance? Lucy was bright-eyed. So we headed for a cup of coffee and the familiar friendly face at the drive-through window. I had Lucy nestled in her carseat right behind me while I chatted cheerily and loudly the whole way, keeping her talking and wide awake.

From his usual perch in the metal frame of the drive-thru window, the young guy I always chatted with had pointed urgently at the gas station catty corner from Dunkin' Donuts and said there had been a shooting. At least, I thought that was what he might have said. His usually mellifluous Middle Eastern accent was so rapid that morning I couldn't grab all he was saying. I was troubled and made noises to that effect but I wasn't clear what had happened. And truthfully, I was more focused on getting Lucy home quickly before she fell asleep in the car and ruined my chances of a much-needed break from kids. I thanked him, told him I'd see him tomorrow and said goodbye. He looked at me like I had lost my mind. I sipped my medium decaf, light and sweet, while the van hummed out onto Connecticut Avenue and we headed for home.

And then, my cell phone rang. It was Henry.

"Where are you?" He sounded weird.

"I'm out. Near...Home Depot."

"Get off Connecticut Ave.! Now!!! Get away from there!"

My husband is not the dramatic sort. He's doesn't over-react. Well, to a few things he does. To certain lost major league baseball games. To empty cereal boxes left in the cupboard. To the use of your when you're is what's needed. But not about real life stuff. He was yelling. My heart thumped.

He said four people had just been shot up and down Connecticut Avenue in the last few hours. It was all over the news. He said I needed to get Lucy and me off that road. Now. What? At first I couldn't take in what he was saying. Then he started to name places. The Michael's craft store in Aspen Hill. Well, that's where I am... A gas station near Michael's. Wait a minute....The guy at the drive-through said something about a shooting at the gas station! And Leisure World... Okay, that's the other direction. Not towards Bethesda. It's amazing how quickly your mind starts trying to normalize even the strangest situations. Ok. There may be danger nearby but it's moving away from me and the people I love. Henry kept talking and telling me the crazy things they were saying on the news. There wasn't much else to say to each other but we didn't want to hang up.

I stayed on Connecticut Avenue because it was the fastest way to get home. It's a huge six lane wide road that passes for an average thoroughfare in the exurbs of D.C. I didn't really know any other way. I didn't want to get lost in the maze of neighborhoods between Dunkin' Donuts and home. Plus I couldn't truly take in the possibility that Lucy and I could be in any danger. Then it hit me: The nursery school. Looking at the car clock, I suddenly saw eighteen small bodies tumbling out the door onto the woodchip-laden playground. Call the school, Henry! You have to call the school! Cedar Lane is two turns off Connecticut Avenue. We hang up. Minutes go by. I'm driving. Listening to the radio. Trying to find out what's going on. I don't know what I'm trying to find out. I keep looking back at Lucy. She's falling asleep. I let her. Henry calls me back. There's no answer at the pre-school. They must be outside. I'll keep trying. I tell him I love him and I hang up and drive. Henry calls me back again.

Jane?

Yeah?

There's been another shooting.

Where?! Where?! I'm getting mildly hysterical now.

The gas station in front of Safeway. The Shell.

Our Safeway?!

Yeah.

I'm going to the school. Keep calling.

By the time I passed the Shell station moments later, it had actually been a full half hour after Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, a mother of a 2 year old little girl, was shot to death while vacuuming out her mini-van. In front of the Safeway, where I'd go to buy the kids' Cheerios and milk. Where Henry got gas. Where I vacuumed out our van. Cars drove by the scene seemingly unaware. It was about a mile from Sam's preschool.

My heart was racing as I pulled into the shaded Unitarian Universalist church parking lot. I could see kids scrambling over the wooden climbing structure there and their beatific teacher, Miss Marion, watching over them with a gaggle of co-oping parents. What had been happening around the corner hadn't intruded yet. I approached them, trying to contain my panic but still the first words out of my mouth were, "We have to get inside!" The parents acted as though I could have been overreacting. But they hadn't heard the radio. They hadn't seen the police tape at the gas station. The guy at the drive-through window. I left Sam there with his classmates in the safety of the basement. He didn't know anything was wrong. I didn't want to panic him. I didn't want to be the crazy mother. But by the time I got home and watched half an hour of panic-inducing media coverage, I was frantic - wanting nothing but all 3 of my boys in our home with the doors bolted against the threat.

You have to understand, we had already lived through September 11th in D.C. Many of us drove past the wounded Pentagon on the Beltway every day. We were told to have a safe room in our homes to prepare for a chemical attack. Local authorities were so unrelenting that even the most lackadaisical among us had at least a few days supply of water in the house. The stores simply couldn't keep up with the demand for supplies with which to seal ourselves into a room for 24 hours. Many hardware stores updated their signs hourly: We have plastic sheeting NOW! More Duct Tape JUST IN! We had lived through the West Nile Virus epidemic when birds were randomly dropping dead out of the sky into our backyards and folks from the County would appear, bag the carcasses telling us not to worry but not to come out of our houses after 6 o'clock at night either. We had opened our mail with gloves on, standing in the open air on our porches away from our kids, holding our breath after anthrax had penetrated our mail system. It had been a rough couple of years on the D.C. area psyche.

We became glued to our television sets. I loved and hated the sight of Charles Moose, our Chief of Police for Montgomery County. He seemed so calm. Competent. I can't remember the last time I wanted to believe in someone so much. But everytime he appeared my stomach dropped. Had there been another shooting? Where was it this time? Please let the person be alive. Or was this the time Chief Moose was going to announce they'd caught him? We dreaded the sight of him, then hung on his every word.

At first none of us had gotten it right. The first shot had been fired the night before my coffee run. At the Michaels across from my Dunkin' Donuts on Connecticut Avenue in Rockville. It hadn't hit anybody. Just gone straight through the huge floor to ceiling windows that front every Michaels craft store exactly like so many other big box stores. And then preventing any of us from entering another one without a palpable sensation of fear for 3 weeks. An hour later, a man had been shot and killed in the parking lot of Shopper's World in Glenmont, a nearby town. When Henry called me late the next morning, a man mowing the lawn of a car dealership on Connecticut Avenue had already been shot and killed at 7:41 am. About a half hour after that, the poor man filling his tank at the gas station across from Dunkin' Donuts had been shot and killed. Another half hour later, a young woman sitting on a bench reading a book outside a shopping center further up Connecticut Avenue was shot and killed. At almost 10 am, Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera was killed vacuuming out her mini-van. That night a man walking on a street in downtown D.C. was shot and killed.

The next day, we all thought we'd woken up ready to face a new day. But the nightmare had another plan for us. It continued. A woman was shot and wounded in a Michaels parking lot about 40 minutes outside D.C. near Fredericksburg, Virginia. What the hell was going on? It was the familiarity of the places where the shootings were happening that made them so utterly paralyzing. Michaels? That innocuous place of silk flowers, glue guns, pompoms and scrapbooking supplies? It's the mecca for every person who strives to fluff up the rough edges in life with a little glitter. To showcase the little moments in their family's life with some decoupage. And suddenly that was no longer safe? The gas station? The grocery store? These were everyday places. Some of them necessary for the every day living of life. Two days later, in what was probably the most awful of all the shootings for the parents in the area, a Montgomery County Middle School student was shot as he entered school. He survived. But the message that shooting sent to area parents was paralyzing. Not even our children were safe. Hawk-eyed Ms. Blumenthal didn't line her students up outside anymore. No one did. No one was that sharp-sighted. No one could be positive their kids wer safe anymore.There was no outside for anybody anymore.

We began to feel that we were living in a war zone. The person doing the shooting was a sniper. Shooting once. From a distance. After a shooting, the surrounding area would be shut down for hours of gridlock as police, FBI searched every car. I, like so many other moms, was shut in the house with three children five years old and under with the shades drawn all day long. We drove far out into the country to do our grocery shopping on the weekend. Breathing better the farther north or west we drove. I drove up to Connecticut with the kids to be with my mom to escape the constant anxiety. I hated leaving Henry behind but I wanted to put as much space between the killer and my kids as possible. I wanted to drive and drive and not stop until there was a whole country between us and this nightmare. Henry would promise he would stay indoors and I would drive north with a knot in my diaphragm.

We were told to serpentine to and from our cars when entering and exiting buildings by Chief Moose. He also told us to watch for tiny red lights being shone on us. That could mean someone was setting a sight on us. All outdoor events were cancelled. Every soccer game. Football game. Track meet. Walk-a-thon. Tag Sale. Field trip. You name it. It was cancelled. Every school in Montgomery County was in lock-down. The windows were covered with paper or the shades were closed. At Sam's pre-school, Miss Marion had the kids color huge swaths of white newsprint paper with fanciful drawings. They colored their hearts out then used the results to block out a murderer's view in. And also their view out. There was no recess. No walking to school. There were police officers at every school. Stores were covered up too. You'd be surprised how many stores have floor to ceiling windows. You don't notice until they're all covered with paper or sheets. Everything took on the flat quality of a bad horror movie. Where was it safe? Was there any place? We started to plan for indoor trick-or-treating.

Two days after the child was shot, a man was shot and killed at a gas station in Manassas, Virginia. A half hour from D.C. Two days later, another man was shot and killed while pumping gas near Fredericksburg. Gas stations hung tarps up to shield their customers from view. People would crouch down in the protective shadow between the gas pump and their car. Grown men in suits. Teenage girls. Grandmothers. We lived, like every other house, with our shades drawn all day long. No outdoor play despite the beautiful weather. Making a game with the kids out of running to the car from the house. Ridiculous, really. They wouldn't be on our street, right? But where were they? Anxiety-prone to begin with, this was not good for me. Henry would pump gas for me. Crouching down if I asked. He didn't want to give in to the fear. What were the chances? But I couldn't get the thought of Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera out of my head. Vacuuming her car out where I'd gone so many times to vacuum out ours. If it could happen to her, why not us? That's what everyone thought.

I remember one time coming home from being with my mother. It had been a whole other season up there in New England. The trees had already completely turned color there even though it still felt like summer in Maryland. My mother and I had taken the kids to a cider mill and held the kids as they'd ridden an elderly pony who lived with the kindly couple who ran the mill. I'd started to relax just a little. There hadn't been any shootings in a few days and we thought maybe it was safe to come home. I needed to get the kids back in school. And I hated being apart from Henry. I purposely didn't listen to news on the radio driving home. It was starting to feel like a toxic agent in our lives. We listened to Kidz Bop instead and sang along loudly. Goofily. And then, as soon as we passed into Montgomery County, I saw them. Lying in wait. In the darkness near the end of every exit on-ramp. Police cars. State troopers. And I knew right away. There'd been another one. And I had no choice. The radio switched back on, I had to continue on home even though home wasn't a safe place anymore.

I began to feel capable of murder. For the first time in my life. We all say it, right? We throw those words around like they mean nothing. I'm going to kill you! I could kill whoever invented this game... But I started to really mean it. I began to fantasize about it. Especially when I was driving around in my car. When I had to drive the kids somewhere or go out to pick something up. I felt so vulnerable. My family was threatened. And it enraged me.I cannot overestimate the constant feeling that anyone could be shot anywhere at anytime doing anything. I felt that if I somehow found the person who was causing this terror, who had done this evil...I would try to stop them. Physically. That's how desperate I began to feel. I've been a pacifist since I was a very young teen but I began to feel capable of real violence. If I spotted them - whoever they were - crouching in the woods with their gun I would steer the van off the road and run them over. Looking them right in the eye. I would run them over and hope they died. This was the only scenario I could conjure up. I've always felt empowered (maybe a little too?) behind the wheel of the car. People up north would talk about how unnerved they felt by the whole scenario. How freaked out they felt at the gas station. I felt like slapping them.

Three days after the Fredericksburg shooting, a woman was shot and killed in a Home Depot parking lot near Falls Church, Virginia. Everytime a few days would go by with no more violence, we'd think it might be over. But then Chief Moose would appear again and say the words we didn't want to hear. Five days later, a man was shot and survived outside a Ponderosa in Ashland, Virginia, about 90 miles south of D.C. This was the farthest away from us the shootings had been. Maybe, this insane person/people were leaving. Maybe it could be ending.

But then three days later, they were right back they had started. A bus driver, on the job one morning. was shot to death standing on the steps of his bus in Aspen Hill, Maryland right outside the Home Depot. Next door to the Dunkin' Donuts and the gas station and the Michaels. It had been three weeks and they were right back where Ruby and I had been the morning Henry had called to warn me to get out of their way. Three weeks later and not only was it not over, they were back where it had all started.

I was ready to pack up our entire house, have Henry quit his job and move to my parents' Cape Cod house and make a new life for ourselves.

Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the twilight zone that had become our lives, ended. Two nights after the bus driver was killed, a man pulled into a small rest area by the side of highway 70 out in Myersville, Maryland and noticed the car that, by that time, police had notified the public to be looking for. He blocked the exit of the rest area with his truck and called the police. John Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo, the men responsible for these weeks of murder and terror, were found sleeping in their car. Along with the illegally-bought weapon that was later ballistically linked to 11 of the 14 shootings. It was finally over.

I've been haunted by those weeks when Muhammed and his 17 year old accomplice, Lee Boy Malvo, killed 10 human beings, wounded 3 and held thousands of people, including me, my husband, and our 5, 4 and 2 year old children, hostage. We did eventually move back up to New England that following summer. There were a lot of reasons but the so-called D.C. sniper was definitely part of the straw that broke this camel's back. I've read everything I can about those two men since. I guess it's been part of my way of processing what happened to us those few weeks in October seven years ago. Trying to understand what would motivate someone to commit such heinous acts of violence and to want to terrorize an entire community.
Muhammed's ex-wife says he was never the same after he came back from the Gulf War. I do believe violence begets violence. In the excellent documentary, The D.C. Sniper's Wife, Mildred Muhammed also contends that Mohammed meant for these attacks to end with her death. There was a history of mental illness, domestic violence and threats that Mildred Muhammed felt she could not get the authorities to take seriously. This is an old and familiar story. One that desperately needs a new ending. Muhammed frequented his ex-wife's neighborhood during the attacks and some of them did take place nearby. There was also evidence presented at trial that both John Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo held belief in an Islamic Jihad against America and saw their attack as part of this war. Details about a plan by Muhammed to take money extorted from the government in exchange for stopping the sniper attacks and open a terrorist training camp for homeless youth in Canada came from Malvo. I read all these things and more but could glean no real meaning from them. In the end, they've both said very little. There was no nice and neat Barbara Walters interview that came along with this story. These were sick, angry and deluded men. One, Malvo, was barely a man at the time. There really was no easy explanation for this madness.

John Muhammed was executed in the Commonwealth of Virginia this past Wednesday night at 9 pm by lethal injection. Lee Malvo will spend the rest of his life in prison unless the Supreme Court reverses its decision stating that a minor who commits a crime can no longer be put to death as an adult. In both cases, we are safe from harm from these men but in Muhammed's case, we have killed a human being as punishment for his incomprehensible crimes. To what end?

Did we do it as a deterrent? As a warning to other delusional, homicidal maniacs? Actually states without the death penalty have no higher rates of murder than states with it. Same with developed nations throughout the world. Did we do it because it was more cost-effective than keeping him alive in prison for the rest of his life? Actually, the average cost of imprisoning a person in the U.S. for life is far less than the cost of the appeals process associated with executing one. Did we do it as an act of revenge for the amount of pain he cause, the terror he wielded? Is that what we think justice looks like?

Justice is not about revenge in our society. At least it shouldn't be. If we want a society where human life is valued, or even treasured, then we have to stop throwing away even the most damaged and disgusting parts. I felt like I could have killed those men to protect my family. I really did. And my experience was mere crumbs of suffering compared to what the families of John Muhammed's victims suffered. I can only begin to imagine it. I don't want to. But that's why victims cannot be jurors. Their pain is too great. We have to decide, as a society, when we are one step removed from being victimized, that we do not kill as punishment. This does not lessen the horror of the crime. It does not lessen the seriousness with which we see the crimes. But it does increase the value that we place on all of our lives and on all human life to come. It brings us one step closer to a world that doesn't produce men who become killers like John Muhammed. It separates us from the craven and the blood-thirsty.

I kept hoping there'd be some kind of miracle and Muhammed's execution wouldn't happen. Especially because, in my own fear, I had once wished him dead. I was not my best self in those weeks when I was hiding in my house with the shades drawn, crouching beside the gas pump, serpentining into the grocery store, leaving my husband behind in order to get the kids out of state. I was scared and fear had diminished me. We can't make our best decisions out of fear. Nor anger. It's not that I care about that shell of a human being. Or because I think he can be rehabilitated. But when we allow the State to throw out a human being....in our names...we're endorsing the kind of base, meaningless world that sick men like Muhammed and Malvo crave. We're working against our best selves. That's the story I really dread telling my children. Not just how,one day, their childhood was interrupted for a few weeks because we had to hide from a killer...but that,one day, that killer was punished by being killed himself...by us. Because that's a crime too.

Sexy Witch Costume From Hell

2009-10-31T00:53:00.001-04:00

Lucy was tromping and harrumphing a stormy path through the aisles of the costume shop. She looked askance at one plastic-trapped costume after another. Her green eyes narrowed and her freckled brow furrowed into an angry stamp of rejection. Over and again.

We were on the hunt at the local temporary Halloween store that pops up every year. Like a mushroom. It just appears one day. I don’t know why I bring my daughter in there every year. It’s like I get holiday amnesia. The kids’ costumes are, of course, completely divided by gender. And the girls’ costumes…talk about scary. They are totally mislabeled. The tags should say: Child-Prostitute-Vampire, Child-Beauty-Pageant-Princess and the old standbys: Slutty-Witch, Sleazy-Witch and Sexy-Witch ….all beginning with size 4T.

At first, I was in shock. Even though we’ve seen it every other year I still get completely flabbergasted by the fact that there are people out there who want to make money off of sexualizing my daughter and other young girls. So I’m following Lucy around like an idiot mumbling soothing things to her about how she and I could sew things onto this costume here and glue gun stuff onto that costume there and totally transform them into whatever we want. Doesn’t that make her feel better? She's clomping up and down the aisles, ignoring me. Meanwhile, motorized headless zombies are popping out of cardboard coffins at us as we walk by and a grey rubber corpse keeps revealing its pink guts to the sound of agonized moans every time we round a certain corner. And I’m thinking…I am in hell. I don’t know why I didn’t just grab my kid and scram.

Luckily, Lucy, for one, was actually using her brain in the midst of this madness and just got plain pissed. She clucked her tongue a several times in disgust. Pushed at a couple of the hanging plastic bags impatiently, folded her arms across her chest and announced, “Mama, there’s nothing here I want to be.”

Silently, I scream: Yessssss! Thank god! Thank god! Thank god! Go back to the fires of hell you-sexy-witch-costume-that-fits-an-eight-year-old! Take that!

To Lucy, I very calmly and coolly say, “Oookay, sweet pea. What do you think you might want to be?”

“A goblin.”

In between scooping guts out of pumpkins and kicking up storms of leaves, we stare into the fire after supper in the weeks before Halloween and talk endlessly about what kind of costumes the kids should wear this year. I, of course, miss the days when the boys wriggled happily into spider and ladybug costumes, running around with pompom antennae flopping in their eyes. And when Ruby happily let me dress her in layers of tulle and silk leaves in my own rendition of an autumn fairy costume. Those days are long gone. Along with baby teeth and car seats. The kids have developed minds of their own. I seem to remember that was the general idea. This has lately become their time of year for playing at feeling powerful, for trying different identities on, seeing how they feel.

In this nonviolent household, where they’ve had to make their own guns if they wanted to play war, this is the one time of year our kids can get swords if they want to. This is a big deal. So we’ve had a lot of ninjas in recent years. One grim reaper with a scythe. A Darth Vader with a light saber. One year, Lucy wanted to be Lucy from The Chronicles of Narnia because for one thing, in the movie, the courageous, diminuitive character got to carry a dagger. I draw the line at blood and gore but otherwise the kids get to experiment with evil for just that one night. All these weapons are miraculously “lost” as soon as Halloween is over and life goes back to normal.

This year Finn has decided to be an ancient martial arts master. With swords. Why a martial arts master needs swords I couldn’t tell you. Sam has chosen to be some kind of horror movie killer. The one with a chain saw. I think he was attracted to the noise the chain saw made. This is the closest to gore we’ve ever come in this house at Halloween. I feel we’re walking a fine line. The boys were with their father when they picked out their costumes. I wouldn't have gone for the horror movie killer thing or the bloody knives that the martial arts master has. Finn keeps pointing out that the "blood" is contained inside the knives as if this somehow makes a difference. Henry is not as anti-gore as I am and, well, I pick my battles. I'm trusting that years of parenting will not be undone by one night of madness.

But, as for Lucy, that's a battle I won't lose. It turned out there was a woman who worked at the nefarious Halloween store who had tons of ideas for costumes beyond what they had hanging in those plastic bags. She pointed us towards some elven ears we could stick onto Lucy’s wee round ones, a tube of green goo for her face, some green clawed fingers to stick over her own and we were off! Lucy doesn’t want to be some cute and friendly little goblin either. Far into the sixth book of the Harry Potter series, Lucy wants to be a cranky, kind of mean goblin like those that inhabit the tunnels beneath Gringotts Bank. A little ugly, maybe a little smelly, definitely scary, she wants to creep around the edges of Halloween, freaking people out like a true Halloween spirit. Not prematurely sexing it up like the marketers of those costumes want her to.

There is really something evil out there that wants us to accept the sexualization of our children. Not just at Halloween. And it’s seeping into our culture to the point where some perfectly well-intentioned moms and dads are getting confused and thinking it’s okay to send our daughters out into the night in corsets that suggest cleavage in 6 and 7 year old girls. It must be okay if that’s 95 percent of what’s for sale at the costume shop, right? But those costume manufacturers don’t care about kids. They care about making a buck. And Halloween shouldn’t be about sexy for little kids. It shouldn’t be about off-the-shoulder pirate blouses, ripped mini-skirts, thigh-highs and high-heeled boots for elementary school girls. That’s a different kind of power that we’re leaving kids to play near when we're allowing them to dress up like that. Kids don't even know the rules of the game they're playing at that point. Or who else is playing (watching). They’re not the ones in charge of their play when they put on those outfits.

We want kids to be able to tell their own stories, feel their own power and make up their own endings. Girls and boys. Not be objects of someone else's fantasy. Kids need to be able to choose from a multitude of identities to try on and play around in; not a narrow, gender-rigid selection that is trying to foist a premature, adult sexuality onto kids. That's not only gross but just wildly unfair. But kids aren't the ones pulling their wallets out at the cash register. And kids don’t know what is really being sold in those plastic packages hanging from the costume shop wall. We do. We know what it is. And it’s a nasty trick.

Stirring Things Up For Halloween

2009-10-25T12:44:00.003-04:00

Grammy and Papa drove over two rivers and through the woods to be at our house every Halloween that I can remember growing up. We would gather for a somewhat fancy family dinner, my sister and I keeping our eyes on the clock throughout the meal, not wanting to be a minute late for trick-or-treating. For one of those suppers, my mother took an adventurous culinary left turn, serving a meatloaf that featured a bright orange carrot mash rolled up into its center a la an autumnal buche de noel. My poor mother. We still talk about that meat loaf. Not kindly. Then my grandparents would see us off trick-or-treating with our friends, exclaim over neighborhood kids' costumes, help my parents pass out candy (it seemed like a big job) and, the night would end, every year, with my nearly deaf grandfather rumbling how, boy, he remembered how far our father used to go trick-or-treating when he was a kid. I thought that was what all families did on Halloween. Maybe that's what first planted this magical time as a major holiday in my mind. Lately, it's become my favorite.

There's so much to love. I love the quiet magic of the season the most. But I also like that there's not a lot of pressure involved with Halloween. There is no gift-giving to stress about. No major feast to prepare. (I didn't follow in my mother's footsteps there. I don't have family over on the big night. Just my mom. I'm too excited to entertain.) There is decorating to be done...which I love. But this time of year, most of the design work is done courtesy of Nature. The world is gloriously disheveled in fall. Talk about shabby chic! Piles of leaves in your yard? Fine. Kale wilting and tumbling out of your window boxes? Au courant. The crab apple tree that is so out of control as to look menacing? Perfect for tapping trick-or-treaters on the shoulder. Gourds fallen over by your front door? Abundance right on your stoop. My house, which looks just slightly worse for wear, never looks better. As though I planned it this way all along. And best of all, no one's trying to dictate your emotions on Halloween. No one's trying to force you into a feeling of togetherness with your family, trying to make you grateful for anything, trying to get you to believe in Jesus if that's not your thing or invoking a prescribed version of patriotism. There's nothing worse than trying to call up feelings on someone else's time schedule. That's not on Halloween's agenda. Halloween is just for playfulness, magic and wonder. Anything goes.

Our family takes its cues for our Halloween countdown not from the poor sucker in the neon-colored ape suit waving the Halloween Sale sign on Rte. 6 but from the weather when it cooperates and from our own seasonal rituals. First to arrive are the pumpkins. I love the fatness of pumpkins. The plumpness that sums up the fecundity of this time of year. They come home from the farmers' market and the grocery store where they're cheapest. These orange orbs are chosen based on which are the weirdest-looking, longest-stemmed and which we feel the most sorry for. By the time Halloween arrives, we have enough to fill a small patch. When we're done with them, the remains rot in the garden and the deer eat them in the winter. The birds and field mice snatch up most of the seeds we haven't roasted in the spring.

As soon as the first cold wind blows, I brew up my first batch of Carrot Sweet Potato Soup on the stove in the biggest pot I have. Then I just wait for my brood to come in from the weather. Adapted from the Moosewood cookbook, this concoction is my family’s truest sign that fall has been let in the door. This soup's as orange as the pumpkins piled up on the stoop. It tastes like no other soup you've ever made. I add a sweet potato instead of a potato. I use at least half a cup slivered almonds, 1 cup milk, 4 cups vegetarian vegetable stock and no other seasoning or garnish. You must eat it with warmed-up, crusty wheat bread. Everyone loves this soup.

Next, when I have time, I set up my funny little Halloween village. A mixture of dried moss and gourds, curly willow branches and a generous helping of glitter, it’s a wee land that I made by hand for any fairy folk who wander into our home. The kids have loved it since they were little and ask when it’s going up every year but I think I love it more than anybody. It reminds me of when Captain Kangaroo had people who lived in the bookcase near his desk on his show. Remember them? Every few episodes, not nearly often enough for my taste, Captain Kangaroo would say, "Let's go check in on our little friends..." and pull the book aside. There they'd be..these tiny people...busy living their lives in the bookcase. That transfixed me as a child, the idea that there could be people living right inside my world that I couldn't see...that their whole world could fit inside a SHELF. I don't think I ever quite got over it. The other day when I left the back door open for the dog, a bird flew in. Straight inside the kitchen and made a beeline for the shelf that I've cleared this year for the gourd houses and curly willow branches. The bird started scuffling around in the moss among the Halloween houses and knocked down some of the little fencing I'd made. I don't know what she was looking for. She poked around the gourds and moss for a few good solid minutes, darting with intent. Then, satisfied, she flew back out the way she came. Just checking, I guess.

Lastly, down from the attic, dear Henry lugs the boxes full of cool weather clothes and Halloween treasures. Most sought after are the Halloween books. Some of them date back to my mother-in-law’s days as a teacher. Favorites include The Night the Scarecrow Walked and The Littlest Pumpkin. The Littlest Pumpkin is about a little, misshapen pumpkin who waits the entire day on the last day before Halloween to be taken home and made into a jack o’lantern. He dreams of being placed at the center of a happy party and danced around by children in costumes. But no one chooses him because he's too small. So the Littlest Pumpkin is left all alone on Halloween at the pumpkin stand, lonely and sad. But wait! He's not really alone! The mice are there! and they bedeck and bedazzle him and make him the center of their celebration! This oft-repeated story has forever convinced my children that pumpkins have feelings too. (Hence, the strange-looking pumpkins we end up with every year.) The pen and ink drawings of The Night the Scarecrow Walked show a to-be-pitied scarecrow stuck on his pole at the beginning of Halloween day. Later, he looks so much like a strange, raggedy man that the brother and younger sister see walking a country road that same night as they return home from trick-or-treating. It just couldn't be.... But when they pass the scarecrow's field on their way to school the next morning, the scarecrow's pole is empty! Unsure they want to hear it, my kids insist on having this one read and reread anyway. It captures the duality of Halloween: excitement and creepiness- two sides of the same sweet candy treat. Somehow that feeling goes down this well only at this time of year.

Lucy was born the day after Halloween. There is a picture of me sitting at home that Halloween night, swathed in a long, tight brown stretch of a warm dress waiting for my two tiny trick-or-treaters to come home, two firefighters that year, my own belly a ripe pumpkin. The look in my eyes that the camera captured that night is one of expectation, impatience and more than a little discomfort. And yes, I’ll say it: it’s half-crazed. With power, hormones and a tetch of panic, the way we women are in the hours just before we push a fully formed human being from our pelvises. Somehow it didn’t register as discordant that it was on Halloween that I was preparing to push Lucy out into the world. In fact, it seemed just perfect. To me, it’s always been such a magical night. The one night a year so many of us seem to feel comfortable acknowledging the thin veil between this world and the next. When it’s okay to smile about spirits swooping around the night. Spirits entering and spirits leaving. It's the night to acknowledge that death can be frightening, yes, but that we can be friendly with it too.

On a different October evening, six years earlier, my Grammy had a fairly peaceful death on a hospital bed in the home of her daughter, Helen, and her daughter’s dear partner, Emma. They had cared gently for her for weeks in their small, wallpapered dining room where, years earlier, Emma's brother had also come to die. It was kind of becoming their specialty. I was walking through the gate into my small yard and climbing the stone steps towards my porch some 140 miles away in Somerville, Massachusetts when I felt her go. I knew before the phone rang.

On Halloween, a few weeks later, I asked some of my women friends to come to dinner. I stirred up a pot of my soup and left it slowly bubbling on the stove. I set out a plate of lemon squares on my porch. I ironed one of Grammy’s outfits. The iron must have been unnerved to find itself in my hands but I had to. Grammy was never wrinkled. I hung the clothes on a hanger on my trellis where it was sheltered a little from the autumn wind and where the lattice also held a creeping autumn rose. Grammy loved roses. The wind blew strong that night and a little warm for October.

I wanted Grammy to know she was invited too. That she was always invited. I set the table with care. I used her dishes: Briarwood Rose Spode. Her wedding china. A year or so before, when she was still in her own home and her spindle bed had first been moved to then dining room, we'd talked about her china in the hutches that were then surrounding her. These were her diamonds, her pearls. She wanted me to choose which ones I wanted. There were multitudes of dishes, china patterns and glassware that she registered for or bought on a schoolteacher’s and Southern New England Telephone electrician’s salary and on which she'd served recipes clipped out of Gourmet magazine. Each piece had a story. I'd sat and listened to so many. Now she wanted me to pick. I chose the sweet rose-covered pattern that she chose herself, as a not-too-young bride in the 1940‘s. She watched from the bed as I wrapped each piece in newspaper. Twice. That Halloween night I carefully placed the lemon squares I'd made for her on a Briarwood Rose dessert plate and put them on the porch under her fluttering clothes. I knew she'd be pleased.

Throughout the season, as our family's Halloween preparations build, I love to step out into our back yard at night after dinner and breathe deep. I inhale the sweet decay of fall. I listen for the humming rumble of our furnace and the rhythm of my family's clothes flapping in the dryer behind the cellar wall. Time seems like such a long story back here behind the house at night where the stone wall, built by long-gone hands stretches down into the woods until I can't see it. But looking back inside the warm, litup house is like peering in on a movie and the story, it feels far too brief.

That's just a piece of the magic of the season. In the everyday. The regular. In remembering. In birth. Death. Plates. Pots of soup. The extra ingredient is this: infusing them with whatever meaning you want to find there. In a bird. On a shelf. Leaves on the ground. Clothes blowing in the wind. A gate banging shut and your step on the path. The phone rings and you already know. We read the same stories together each year savoring the unchanging endings, their familiarity serving as both the mystery and the comfort we crave. Halloween holds them both like a fat, ripe pumpkin, like my belly held Lucy ten Halloweens ago this year. I still like to be at home on Halloween. These days, I'm greeting trick or treaters in my cobweb-strewn witch’s hat at our door, exclaiming over their disguises, handing out candy in my chocolate-infused hall, wondering how far my kids will go this year. Waiting at my post, I'm listening for the telltale sound of shuffling feet through the fragrant leaves across our yard. And for whatever else is out there.

Wild Things! You Make My Heart Sing!

2009-10-18T18:53:00.002-04:00

Unless this story has become dislodged from your subconscious since childhood and you've forgotten that Max doesn't get eaten by any Wild Things, then there is only one suspenseful moment in the film version of Maurice Sendak's story. Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are" is hardly a plot-driven movie so there's no need for any spoiler-alerts in this quasi-review of mine. For me, the suspense comes only when the most deeply mournful and mute Wild Thing finally speaks. Shuffling around in the shadows for the whole film and grunting from time to time, the melancholy and rather threatening Bull, seems to stand for the saddest part of the main character, Max. Or, more precisely, for that creature inside all of us. That's what that stuff would look like if it had fur, horns and feet. As the hurt we all carry around but shove into cramped corners and hate to have to look at, he was the scariest Wild Thing of all. But when he speaks, it's not to say what you'd expect.

The film is book-ended by the same two scenes that wrap around Sendak's magical book: wild Max in his wolf suit chasing his small dog around the house at the start and then eating his dinner in the warmth of his home in the end. In the middle is Jonze's intense but playful riff on kids' inner lives. I loved it and so did my 8 year old. His rendition of Sendak's dark childhood fantasy was pitch perfect to my ear. I mean that figuratively, as well as, quite literally. So often, when children's books are translated onto screen, as soon as the characters open their mouths, I cringe. The tone is usually all wrong. The characters' voices are almost always higher-pitched than what I had heard in my head as I read. So off-putting. Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker and James Gandolfini, as you might imagine, kvetch, demand, moan, chuckle and even snore as Wild Things in voices that are the stuff childhood dreams are made of. Not the dreams that Disney sells. Or the ones you can buy at Toys R Us in a plastic box. Spike Jonze's dreams are the ones that you can't remember clearly in the morning. The ones that leave only a vague feeling behind. You know the ones.

The dreams brought to life in this film include all the old childhood standbys like sleeping all together in complete warmth and safety...and nobody is left out. Except this version takes shape as a fantastical furry pile of overwhelming, chuckling bellies and snorting noses and the king of this hill of love is in minor danger of suffocating to death. And then, there's that old anxiety about not wanting to let any new people in...the new people here being two know-it-all owls named Terry and Bob. These are the kind of dreams where you're a fantastic builder and a destroyer both. A world where you can go around licking people in the face if you feel like it! Where someone will even let you climb inside of them to keep you safe. Even if it is hard to breathe in there. You'll have to see the movie to believe that one.

Jonze never calls these creatures Wild Things in the movie. At least not that I heard. Well, they're not Wild Things to Max and the story is told from Max's perspective. They're his royal subjects and friends. And, as in the book, the film never suggests that Max has fallen asleep when he sails off to the island where the Wild Things are. That's up to you to decide. I saw this movie with my daughter, Lucy who still travels freely between these two worlds: the imaginary and the solid. She saw this film as very straightforward. "Max got in his boat and sailed to the island and came back when he was done and went home." Of course.

You'll watch this film partly as a kid yourself remembering the story, simple as it was, and thinking, Hey, I think I know what's going to happen next and feeling satisfied when it does. But I also felt it wash over me as a mother. I thought a lot about my 2 boys who are leaving some aspects of very young Max-hood behind. Although, I'm not clear on the status of their wolf-suits. I remember so clearly the surety I felt when each of my children was born that they were perfect and would live to lead charmed lives. Not because I wanted superstar children but because I just couldn't imagine any heartache befalling these perfect vulnerable beings the Universe had bestowed on Henry and me. Too bad for all the other people in the world. These little glowing fragile infants were perfect and would have fairy tale lives. Not rich, not famous, none of that ..... just untouched by suffering. And then came the first cold. The first croup. The first brattiness. The first time they said no and meant it with all their might. Then the first trip to the ER. The first tantrum at the grocery store. The first lie. The first heartache. And it turned out..as it does for every parent who silently promises their child, the moment they lay eyes on them, a life free from suffering...that there is no such thing. No child would be better for it even if there was.

And luckily, it turns out, kids have something much more useful in tow as they set out in life. Something more than any parent could ever promise. Every child carries a whole world around inside them, an inner world that helps in their navigation of this overwhelming outer one. And Jonze lays out Max's interior world in a magically moody way that basically unscrolls as a news flash to big people across the big screen: Hey! It doesn't look like Disneyland inside kid's minds. It's a place where it's all or nothing. Until they learn it's not. It's a pretty tough part of town. It's dark in there sometimes. That's a truth Maurice Sendak understood perfectly and that's why his book had a real edge to it. It wasn't the sweet bedtime pablum so many children's books are. And guess what? Kids loved it. Kids aren't the ones who need the fairy tales. It's the grownups.

I remember vividly the mental landscape of childhood. Even as a 6 or 8 year old kid. Don't you? In between the escape of Saturday morning cartoons and my favorite books, running around with friends and playing with my Barbies, there was more than the occasional stark thought. How did I end up in this family? Are my real parents somewhere else? If I got really good at gymnastics and a bad guy came to the playground at recess I could do backhandspring after backhandspring and kick him in the face and I would be really popular. If I stare at that dot on the ceiling without stopping then daddy won't die bringing the babysitter home. What lives behind the paneling in the rec room? If there's such thing as God, why did he let Nanny die? What's behind me if I don't run up the cellar stairs fast enough? The world looms large to a child. Shadows take different shapes depending on what storms a child is riding out at the time.

Children. We really watch from the outside from the very start, you know. Hoping our love goes with them when they raise the sails and set off in their own small boats to romp with the wild things in their own heads. Because, in the end, it's their world in there. And that's okay. This movie is a lovely reminder of that.

Soft bellied Woman

2009-10-15T20:31:00.001-04:00

One of the many things that distinguished Nanny from all the other grandmothers in the world was her belly. Nanny's arms and legs were really skinny but she had this belly. It wasn't large but it was soft and a little rounded. And every once in awhile, she'd flash it at us. Yup. Nanny was nothing if not mischievous. And, at some point in her hard-working adult life, she had herniated her belly button. I never knew how. Pushing furniture around? Gardening? Working in the little grocery she wasn't too fond of? I don't know. But what had once been small and whorled was now blown out like a smoothed over jelly donut. That big. I don't think it hurt her. A perfect oval in the middle of her belly. All she'd had to do was show it to my sister and me and our three rolicking boy cousins once. That was it. We were hooked. We'd plead with her to let us see it. Over and again. She'd be laughing and protesting the whole time. Calling us crazy kids. Telling us no, no, no. As she peeled up an edge of one of her countless mock turtlenecks (sleeveless if it was summer) and quickly tugged it back down again as if she'd changed her mind and was going to walk away. After immediate squeals from us, she'd look smile at us from under her salt and pepper forelock of grey curl and relent when we least expected it. Up, she'd yank her acrylic top in barely a flash of pale stomach in a corner of her red-carpeted livingroom. It always was a little shocking to get to see a part of Nanny that looked so...vulnerable. But she'd quickly turn the moment light and make that jelly donut belly button growl at us the closer we peered at it as if this mutation of hers was somehow a menace to our youthful physical perfection. We'd scream obligingly every time, then fall into giggles-at least my sister and I did- I think the boys might have just stood there and stared. Nanny would gather us in her arms, squeeze us and give out glamourously-red-lipstick kisses. It was never scary. It was just our Nanny's belly. And we loved it.

I can't lay claim to a belly button quite like Nanny's but I do have a round soft belly all my own. Like many of the women in my family, I've got long skinny legs and lots of middle. That’s me! Between my breasts and my belly, I couldn’t find my waist if my life depended on it. Haven't seen it since about 5th grade. And my sweet daughter seems to have inherited my build. Her legs just go on and on. And she can rub that beatific bulb of a belly of hers for good luck. It positively blooms when she’s in her bathing suit. A perfect half moon of warmth. It waxes and wanes depending on how fast she’s growing. Just like mine did. Right now, it's a slight crescent. In between growth spurts it fills in again. But, so far... fingers crossed... at almost 9 years old, Lucy is perfectly content with her body. In our size-zero-worshipping society, where girls start dieting in elementary school, I count that as a victory.

I love her body. I love her confidence. So different from mine at her age. She walks like she’s imitating a child on a city street playing at being cool, acting tough in order to keep up with her two older brothers. Actually, with Lucy it's not so much an act. This kid would have kept even Nanny on her toes. She plays basketball at the hoop on the side of our uneven driveway like she means it, rides her bike down our hill at frightening speeds and shoots herself in powerful bursts through the water of our backyard swimming pool. She owns every inch of that body. Other times, she’s just grooving to her own beat. She's all arms and legs shooting out in four entirely different directions. Head going. Feet churning. Oooh, ooh, hoo! she sings at the top of her lungs. I want to cry when I see her like that. To get to watch my daughter grow strong and uninhibited is a greedy joy unmatched by anything else I've yet to experience. Always feel that free! Love that body you‘re traveling around in! I just want to imprint that decree onto her little brain. Ignore everything else you hear.

Because lord knows, she will hear a lot.

My sister, Mary, and I weren't much older than little Lucy when we started obsessing about our own weight as kids. We hopped around religiously to Richard Simmons many elementary school and junior high school mornings trying to get rid of our “pots”. Our exercise ensembles consisted of leotards, shorts and tights. We felt the tights were absolutely key to our efforts. Somehow, we had taken in at a very young age that these bellies of ours had to go. In our livingroom, Richard drove up to his set in his shiny Cadillac with the license plate that read: YRUFAT. We pondered dutifully. We watched as he strapped on roller skates, slapped on some angel wings and accosted some unsuspecting elderly woman at the deli counter of her local grocery store. You had to admire his style. We watched when he had women (always in leotards and matching tights - no shoes- it’s a miracle no one broke their neck!) exercising behind grocery carts while he was exhorting them not to reach for snacks! Oh, that Richard. He was one adorable little sadist. But the creme de la creme was at the end of each show when the lights would dim, one spot would alight on him and Richard would perch on the stairs to his little stage and give his mandates. He’d bite his lower lip, furrow his somewhat earnest brow, shake his halo of light brown hair and chant some version of, “You can do it! I know you can! I used to be 300 pounds!“ Then he’d sign off, music swelling, blowing kisses and doing some jumping jacks. I’ll always love Richard. I can’t help it. But when I look back at pictures of me and my sister from those days I don’t know what the hell we were thinking. I mean we were two skinny ass kids. I may not have had a waist but I was skinny. It didn't matter. We felt fat. Richard spoke to us.

When Henry and I first got married, he’d roll over and slide his hand around my warm belly and I’d…suck that belly in! Every time! So often did my stomach recoil at his touch that it became a reflex. And, poor girl, back then, I didn‘t even know that I barely had anything to suck in. It didn't matter. I wasn't concave. And this person is my partner. My best friend. It's me and him against the world. But this is how I know I’ve gotten better, softer with myself. Because, now, 3 kids and 17 years later, I have enough sense to simply move closer to that warm embrace.

It started happening around the time I had my babies. I had them all three close together and, very quickly, Henry and I were surrounded by all these orbs of baby and toddler bellies. Buddha bellies we called them. We doted on them…. loved them and kissed them and gave juicy raspberry kisses all over those delicious tummies. Round bellies meant we were feeding them right. We were actually figuring out how to take care of these marvelous creatures! Meanwhile, my belly was stretching and deflating three times in a matter of 3 and a half years. And my rotundness meant my belly was working right too. I was growing the baby inside me right. I felt filled up with the power of my own body. Three times over. Look what I can do. Watch me! People walked right by me in the street, unimpressed, while I felt like shouting: I'm a freakin' miracle over here! Hey! Don't mind me...just growing a human being!! I remember going to a public meeting in the small city we lived in when I was pregnant with Finn. It was about McDonald's wanting to move into our rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts. Representatives for McDonald's were there looking smug. I remember wielding that bulging belly of mine like a weapon. You want to put what where? I stood up and showed them my belly. Did they realize who they were dealing with? I was going to be a mother now. This was serious. I had a whole new identity I was trying on and a whole new investment in the world. That was powerful. And I felt so beautiful when I was pregnant. A lot of the time anyway. Stretch marks aside. Huge and beautiful. Imagine that.

Those early years with 3 children under four, we were home-bound in so many ways. Nursing, feeding, napping. It was a cozy time. And me, as Mama, I was a big, soft cushion. (This was also a claustrophobic and insanity-inducing time that made me want to scream when anyone else even tried to touch me by the end of the day but that’s a story for a different day.) My belly was the safe place for Finn, Sam and Lucy to bury a head into when the light was too bright or the noise too loud or when the world just seemed a little too much. I was someone to push against when they tried to stand. Someone to fall into when that didn’t work out as planned. I was the warm place to nurse. I loved it when they would sigh after they'd settled in to drink for awhile as if to say, “Yup, that’s the stuff.” My lap was the softest place to drink a bottle...their bright, round eyes intently locked on mine. And when they were colicky, as two of mine were, nothing soothed them more than walking around- a hard, tense, tiny baby-belly pressed against my big, soft, warm mama-belly- doing the circuit of our small kitchen to living room and back again. How can you not love a belly your children so clearly love? Like Nanny's, my belly didn't have to be perfect for my children to love it.

And now, Lucy is still young enough that she rushes off the bus and down the driveway towards me every day after school. The boys used to do this too: break into a run as soon as their feet stretched down to touch asphalt from that tall school bus step. Backpacks whacking their sides to the rhythm of their gallops. Now it's mostly just Lucy who performs this ritual. The boys have usually already come home on the middle school bus and are inside doing homework. So it's just her but, man, she goes at it full blast. She tears at me, red hair whipping behind her. She flings her whole body against me and presses her face right into my belly and stands still and silent while I stroke her hair. “Sweet pea,” I always say. Eventually, Lucy’s reassured face will emerge and our eyes will lock, “How was your day?” And as she answers, her strong little arms will squeeze tight the waist that she somehow always manages to find. She knows where she comes from. And so do I.

Wednesday, October 21st is Love Your Body Day. It's aimed at doing for all little girls and mamas and daughters and Nannys what I'm trying to do for Lucy. Help us know that we are more than what the media tells us our separate parts are worth. Remind us that our beauty lies in our strength, our softness, our diversity and our intelligence ...both as we wax and as we wane. What will you, dear Internet, do to celebrate Love Your Body Day for yourself or the women in your life? They have amazing ideas at http://loveyourbody.nowfoundation.org/ Please come back and share what you do to celebrate your shape. Me? I'll be reminiscing about Nanny's fantasical belly button, rubbing my little bodhisattva Lucy's tummy and snuggling with Henry. I most definitely will not be wearing a belt.

Lemon Squares in the Loop

2009-10-07T12:47:00.005-04:00

I had a small secret this Summer. Remember all those unseasonably brisk days we had early on? When the clouds obscured the sun on the East Coast for weeks on end and the temperature dwelled in the low sixties into early July? When it rained grey and claustrophobic day after dank day? I coveted each of those days. Just savored them. Maybe it's all that moody English blood I have in me. The few drops of Scottish. Or those morose Irish genes my grandmother left me. It's just in my nature to revel in murky days. Where's the nearest moor?

But now, having survived the miasma that was the rest of this Summer, I am in my glory: Autumn! The wind! The hues! The change! There’s a thickness, a different kind of adhesiveness to Fall that I love. It’s a season of bounty for those of us who tend toward the ruminative . It's a season of layers. Suffused with memory, it's Fall, I feel sure, that is the truest time of the year for beginnings and renewal.

Let me explain. It was my own erstwhile, early childhood school days that marked this season, not January, as the real beginning of each year for me. That permanent imprint of my own first days of school was what sealed it. Wearing pulled up knee socks and carefully chosen, thin-ribbed corduroy skirts, clogs from Thom McCann with a braid of leather that encircled the bridge of bones on top of my foot, I was a quiet, but sharp, observer in ribbon-encased barrettes. There were chalkboard- mornings and rolling-down-the-hill-home afternoons, kicking my way through the piles of leaves neighbors had raked into the street. The days were shortening each week further into the Fall and I ran faster to get home before the dark could catch me. These scenes play on a permanent loop in my mind every year, somehow getting more techno-color with every leaf-fall I live through. I look forward to hitting the play button every Autumn. That's how I know. Not from looking at the calendar tacked to the kitchen wall. Another year has started. Isn't it the same way for many of you?

Now, in my fortieth year, when the geese appear in the sky in their V, it’s as if, somehow, the fast forward button has been pushed. Another school year begins.The big yellow buses tug up the hill. Stop and pull away again. This time, spiriting away three children to the brick buildings a mile up and down the hills of our former hat factory town in the New England woods. This time, I have a new part to play: I am the mother in the story now. I wait at our worn wooden table to give them a soft landing when they tumble in the door, words, bodies and book bags falling over each other in their rush to be the first to reach me, to be the first to touch home. I am the mother now. Yes. But somewhere, I persist as the girl in ribbon barrettes. Each Fall, the loop rolls again. Except, it's playing on two tracks now. Renewal and memory, side by side.

Fall is the season for change and permanence in the garden too. I don't do much of anything but stay out of nature’s way out there in the Fall. Not in my live-and-let-live patch of earth. This is when Nature shows you its plain, working parts. I think this is when it's at its most beautiful, making every other part of the year feel like an overly done-up illusion. This is the real stuff. Now, we see plants begin to strip down. Fruits hang low and full. I love the colors. Not the bright pinks and yellows of summer for me. I’ll take the dark maroons, deep purples, dark greens, the browns.

I love the smells too. It’s as though the Earth is taking deep, satisfied sigh, after sigh. The smell of the dirt and leaves getting messily reacquainted after being kept apart for a year by the trees. That loamy musk! The apples in our backyard are on the ground and getting into the mix. At least, the ones the deer haven’t eaten. There are a few acorns in there too. Some rose hips. It’s the aroma of a wonderful decay. And then the Autumn wind stirs it all together. Some days, gently. Some days, hard. On especially quixotic afternoons, the gales of Fall blow right under the door of our somewhat sound, little house. Through the cracks in our cellar windows and in through the keyholes. Our foxhound lifts her nose to them. She sniffs at scent-stories travelling from the next hill over. The fox in the woods behind us. The dogs next door. The cider donuts at the mill two hills over. I smell other stories on those same currents.

My grandmother often flies on the Fall wind. For me, she does. I'll get glimpses of her around the turn in the road when a brightly lit yellow tree is just coming into view. There she is. She's improbably riding her bike down New Litchfield Street in her navy blue Keds and brown-rimmed plastic glasses. Waiting for me in her kitchen. White hair. Just so. Glass jar of collected matchbooks sitting on the dryer behind her. Open smile. Bright yellow teeth, but no one minds. Long skinny nose. Little blue eyes. Arms wide. Lord & Taylor costume jewels to match her blouse. Skinny belt to match her pumps. Missy, she says and squeezes me tight. Somewhere lemon squares are cooling in wax paper with dots of confectionery sugar popped on top. I can taste them just as plainly as I can see that tree. Memories travel easy like that on the Autumn wind.

That is Fall to me. It’s memory and it's beginnings. It’s both. Something old. Something new. It’s harvest time. Winter is coming. The children are at school. The dog and I both smell memories on the wind. For her, maybe it’s days in the fields of West Virginia, her home before she came to us. Chasing foxes across the field? Does the wind blow that far? This is the time for reaping what we’ve sown. For fruition. We think of Spring as a time for birth but truly fall is the time when things come into fullness. We plant in Spring. We pluck in Fall. I’ve been thinking about writing for so long. Just these little pieces. Thinking. Thinking. Not doing. This Fall, I finally began. I don't know what they'll yield. Maybe not much. A person's stories may not mean much to anyone but themselves. Maybe it's just between me, my dog, my not so-long-gone grandmother, the Fall breeze and a few lemon squares. But I’m chasing them down. My nose is to the wind. I’m running down the hill. I’m kicking up the leaves. This Fall, I’m harvesting some of those thoughts. Or I’m trying anyway. I’m chasing them down where they’ve been wheeling in the wind, lingering by the side of the road, and muttering beside my stone wall. It just seems like the right season to bring them home.

A Few Rounds with Mother Teresa

2009-10-01T18:41:00.000-04:00

I really didn’t want to yell. It was such a nice day. The sky was clear. The birds were chirping. We’d had so many days of rain this past summer and then, finally, a beautiful day dawned. When I left the house that morning bright and early, I promised myself I wouldn’t yell. I’d be civil and dignified. And I was. I was...for a whole two hours. And then, he had to do it. My Congressman. That cutie pie. Chris Murphy. He just had to call on the woman a few feet in front of me to the right. The one who looked like she usually only left the house on grey, cloudy days and then, only if she really had to. The one who looked like the sun hurt her eyes. I mean, was she actually wearing a mantilla? Or am I just embroidering the memory now? She was dressed in black from bun to pumps except for the dull cross weighing down her neck. I don’t know why he did it. There were so many more normal looking people there…stretching their arms up to that clear, happy sky, just waiting to be called on. People who wanted to ask questions about the public option and Tort reform. But no, he called on Lady Gloom and Doom. And so she began.

“Oh, I’m very worried,” she labored. “I just don’t know. I think the new health care..it will make people pay for..ABORTION when they don’t want to.”

“That’s not true.” I civilly and politely corrected her. What, dear Internet? Yes, you're right, it was her turn to talk and not mine. I was just trying to be helpful. I didn’t go into all the ways in which it wasn’t true but I could have. I just didn’t want to take up too much of her turn. Wasn’t that civil and dignified of me?

“Yes! Oh, yes, it is so true!” This scolding, nasal voice came from a burly man who appeared to be accompanying Mother Teresa. I looked up at him. His arms were folded and his tone was similar to that of my little brother, if I had a little brother. I made a civil and dignified decision not to talk to him.

For one brief moment, the woman in black looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to go on. Alas, she decided she could. “And, as a Christian,” she quavered. Here we go, I thought silently. To myself. Silently. How civil and dignified was that? “I’m so worried that people who don’t want to…you know….doctors and nurses and those people…those people will have to do abortions even if they don’t want to. Even if it goes against their beliefs!” She clutched her chest when she said beliefs. Then shot me a look and said, “And there will be vivisections!” her voice rising.

“Oh, come ON!” I interrupted loudly. This was too much! Civility and dignity could take a flying leap! I looked around me for support. I couldn’t be the only person who was outraged by this. But no one would meet my eyes. Maybe they were all trying to look dignified? Instead, another rather rotund man turned around to tell me helpfully that it was, in fact, true and that I should go home and look up vivisections in the bill myself. Rrright, I civilly scoffed.

“And,” she said triumphantly, “ I just don’t believe in abortion.”

“THEN DON’T HAVE ONE!” I yelled. At the top of my lungs. As loud as I could. I had crumpled up civility and dignity and fashioned them into a megaphone.

Maybe it was the loudness. Maybe it was the fact that I yelled this at a woman, obviously, well past her childbearing years...I don’t know, but that’s when that cutie pie Chris Murphy told us both to pipe down and reminded us all that he was pro-choice. Well, dear internet, at this news, Mother Teresa kind of tottered over to the edge of the stage where Chris was speaking and just collapsed right against it. Mind you, this woman had already stood through about two and a half hours of the town meeting on healthcare reform with the stamina of a workhorse but apparently the last two and a half minutes were just too much for her. A small crowd gathered around her in sympathy. She leaned into the middle of it, all the while giving me the evil eye. I don’t know how civil that was.

In the meantime, another quite elderly gentleman next to me (they just kept appearing!) spat at me: “Why don’t YOU have one?" Then he appeared to stew for a moment before he spat out some more, "Maybe it’ll make you less angry!” Huh. Wiping away the spittle and wondering if this fellow had oatmeal for breakfast, I thought to myself, I’ve heard many reasons given for terminating a pregnancy. All personal. Never that one. I looked at his unshaven face and unfocused eyes and decided I wouldn’t discuss my family planning options with this particular gentleman in this particular venue.

So, in case you were wondering, as you were sitting on your sofa this summer watching the images of irate folks at town hall meetings across the country on your television set…who were those crazy people? Exactly who were those lunatics standing up and yelling at each other? Well, now you know. One of them, at least, was me. I didn’t want this whole healthcare debate to end without identifying myself. Just your average, everyday woman: a mom of 3 who shops at Target, drives a beat-up van, walks her dog, volunteers at her kids' schools and watches way too black & white movies on TV. And who also happens to believe with all her heart that women’s bodies belong to us alone, along with all the decisions that come with them.

And, yes, when it comes down to it, I will make a lot of noise to protect women's rights to make those decisions ourselves even if you do come to the fight dressed like Mother Teresa.

Me and that Pro-Choice Cutie Pie!

New National Holiday

2009-09-29T16:59:00.003-04:00

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

2009-09-22T20:59:00.005-04:00

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!

2009-09-20T14:54:00.002-04:00

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.