Homebound In the Time of the Corona Virus

Three weeks homebound.  Amazing how at first, instead of how I imagined, I did absolutely nothing except make dinner, feed the animals and do the dishes, yet during the second week, for a few hours in the morning, I started to write stories, little vignettes about all the animals we have had in our life, for the simple reason of doing something I enjoyed.  By the end of this third week I found myself wondering if I was getting depressed for I certainly wasn't tackling any of those jobs about which I always claimed:"If only I had the time".  Except for the writing, it has been as if I am apathetic. That was a little scary until I found myself wondering if I wasn't wallowing in the luxury of doing only what I chose to do after these past eleven years of balancing a full time job and household obligations. Sure, I could have used some muscle memory to address all those ambitious tasks at a slower pace, instead I followed my inclination to do nothing, ignoring the clutter of mail that sits at the far end of my kitchen table, and wondered that if I'm not actually depressed, which occurred to me, could I instead have been creating a vacuum, a space, enabling the return of my forgotten pleasure in composing and writing observations and stories.  I know they energize me.  So, perhaps if this lockdown continues, that energy will spill over into my day, maybe I'll get to that mail, but for
now, I'm in position to see this imposed isolation as an unexpected opportunity to welcome back a side of myself I had almost forgotten and once thrived on.

Back on the Grid-2013 Curious to find myself in this sixth decade of my life returning to memories of my father

It has been curious for me to find myself in this sixth decade of my life, returning to memories of my father, as if I see him now as someone who had a much larger affect on my life than I had noticed.  I assumed that my mother was the major influence in my life simply by the amount of time and energy I had devoted to reconciling myself to her ‘unusual’ disposition.  Now there you have it: whenever my father consciously avoided saying something critical of someone, he would resort to the word ‘unusual’.  “An unusual looking woman” was code for she wasn’t attractive by many standards.  Another lasting memory was from the earliest years of my marriage and I was pregnant for the first time.  In the home space of my parent’s living room I announced that I had to pee.  He responded with the memorable words: “Marguerite, we must keep up the amenities.”  These two examples sum up a lot about this man who was born in London in 1917.  He came from an era and culture that were to define him throughout his life.  His dad was a WWI veteran who suffered from PTSS and died from the effects of mustard gas poisoning.  His mother married his father’s widowed brother and they emigrated to America when my father was around twelve, bringing with them their custom and culture, which they carefully preserved in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.  

So what is it about my dad that resonates for me this past year?  I could start by pointing out that somewhat like myself, my mother was a woman who put obligation and responsibility first, and was not very good at having fun.  Now my father was just as responsible yet he considered enjoying himself an integral part of daily life.  It was known that he would have preferred in life to be a concert cellist, yet he got his masters in accounting at night school when my mother already had two children.  He worked for a big corporation his whole life, had seven children, and in his retirement bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate the last college tuition payment.  Yet, if he couldn’t be a concert cellist, he made Sam Goody’s rich with his vast collection of classical music.  The neighbor across the street said there was nothing she enjoyed more of an evening, than watching through her window, my father conducting some symphony in his summer pajamas.  He was careful with his money but made sure he had the best Fisher stereo that money could buy.  He brought us to concerts and ballets in New York City or Paris.  He loved good food, could recite the exact menu of a meal eaten in some restaurant in France where we lived for four years back in the late fifties when he was transferred to the Paris office.  He was a man who could be maudlin, wiping the tears off his cheeks at weddings and funerals.  He never once hit me.  He could get mad but mostly that something occurred that could get him mad, in the sense that his day had been dis-ordered.  

So here I am pondering why it is that in this last quarter of my life, I keep saying to myself: “I am my father’s daughter.”  If so, I’m not very good at it, but then neither was he.  He didn’t have some master plan that worked like clockwork, but rather carved out for himself a version of the good life in America, and I believe that after thirty years of responsible parent mode, that’s why I’m turning to him.  I know he had a difficult time retiring; it wasn’t simple to live a daily life with my mother, a restless person in her own right.  He got depressed the same as a lot of men do when their day job is no longer.  Always a man who enjoyed cocktails, a bottle of wine open at meal times, I know in his later years his afternoon Scotch was required to punctuate the day; in this observation I recognize my own restlessness at wondering how to define myself at yet again another stage in life.  In her retirement years, my mother did good works in the community through her church; my dad drove the three plus hours to take cello lessons.  The actions my mother took to make others feel better, made her feel better; the actions my father took were to enrich his life for himself.  I think that’s a critical point.  He was a collector in a manner of speaking, a collector of enjoyable experiences.  I admire that, it is what leads me to enjoy my little camera and the photos that I take of the Catskill Mountains day in, day out throughout the seasons.  I collect pictures of my yard with the goat and the horse, in the spring and in the snow.  I chronicle my walks with my dogs in the woods, and the chickens that peck away in the yard.  That is my delight.  I still cook with care, even though I am aware that many wives after forty-seven years say ‘enough’.  But somewhere in there, while cooking for seven, I realized there was an art to the well-prepared meal, and it is this art that I aim for.  My dad loved the ‘mot juste’ finding the perfect one word summation and had a uniquely British way of obliquely making reference to one thing while in fact humorously commenting on another.  When our house burnt down in the 1980’s, he made sure to send the a book of the complete works of Beatrix Potter, aware we lost the small editions  he had sent us.  In a way, he loved to share his English-ness with us.  I’m probably the only sibling who made steak and kidney pie for my husband when I was young married.  It seems strange to write this, but my mother didn’t have many traditions to give us, while my father thought it was perfectly ordinary to invite you for a walk after a big holiday meal.  He had a walking stick, naturally.

My point.  Just recently I read Roger Kimball’s great book, “The Relevance of Permanence in an age of Amnesia,” and I am surprised to connect its relevance to my feelings these days.  I am looking to my cultural inheritance for clues as to how to transition stages of life and, I recognize how challenging it is in this age of iPods, for want of a better description.  Because somewhere in here, or there, I recognize the experiences of our elders informs us for better or worse.  It would appear I am mining his experience of custom and culture for time proved relevance about what it simply means to get through life in a mannerly way. 

I had the unusual experience of living in France for four years when I was eight years old, while for my father, it was a return to Europe.  For him, it was not the transition it was for my mother.  Déjà vu you could say.  He was comfortable and that was very reassuring to me as a young girl.  He expressed little anxiety.  If it was old fashioned, it was recognizable.  Our kitchen stove was a coal stove.  A simple two-burner gas plate was for summer use.  Potatoes were store by the ton in the back room, and there wasn’t a window screen in site.  A huge gate blocked our house with a bell that clanged when it was opened, and at night it was closed, effectively sealing our home behind walls.  A smaller door was cut into one of the side gates for daily access.  I chipped my tooth slipping against the brass handle that opened it.  Still chipped.  

Yet, I have to wonder that my children don’t see me as reluctant perhaps?  Mom doesn’t like change.  She’s set in her ways.  Is she happy?  They who live with their big screen TVs with access to a myriad of stations are perplexed that I have little interest in mastering a cell phone and enjoy not being in constant touch with ‘the world’.  The chickens will at times meander into the house, she takes the phone off the hook when she needs space.  It’s almost as if she is resentful of the changes that they see as ordinary.  I wouldn’t say that; I’m just not interested.  Face it, I pay my bills on line, I’m not off the grid, and I am grateful for Netflix, and Facebook keeps me in the loop.  But I haven’t had a TV for thirty-seven years.  That’s probably one of the points that puzzles me today, this sort of belief that life, a life shouldn’t be idiosyncratic.  My father’s generation still took that seriously.  It was yours to give meaning to, whether through family or opportunity or simply custom and culture.  There was still plenty of room within society’s constraints for individualism.

I guess in some ways I miss my dad because he’s not there to back me up.  If he were still around, or if my children had known him better, they would not see me so much as 'unusual' but as familiar, recognizable, an extension of my dad, who was a man who didn’t worry about what you might think of how he lived his life.  He appeared to simply assume it was his choice and his alone.  As long as he was a good father, husband and citizen, what possible reason could anyone have to question how he determined what suited him.  That is an incredibly liberating concept.  I believe that only now do I recognize how deeply this concept reverberated in me, for I ended up living a most ‘unusual’ life and, validating this premise is how despite all the many unusual choices I made, and I made quite a few, it never appeared to occur to him that it had anything to do with my love for him or his for me.

8:24AM

Morning meditation, a quiet revelation
About this worldly place I love.
Withdrawing into meditation
As the dawn begins to break,
Going from darkness into light,
Leads me to discover anew
The comfort I do take,
Living in this earthly space.
The dawn appears to caress,
The familiar is seen afresh,
And I am inspired once again
To see the world as my friend,
To see this day as another chance
To engage in the joyous dance,
With expectation unfettered.

Trees

Trees

I would write of Trees, what they mean to me.
I know there are places where they are a rarity.
But I live in a space, where trees predominate.
On these mountain slopes, by these rushing streams,
Along these foot-worn paths, they congregate.
Sometimes densely, at times alone,
In wordless state they stand,
Informing me of something I need to know.
For even as I see them on a daily basis,
Acknowledging their size and form,
I rarely take the time to greet them.
Instead I see them for their name,
Their colors, shade and shape;
As squirrels highways or rotting logs,
Instruments the winter winds do play on.
Yet there are moments that arise
When I see them with different eyes;
As individuals as individual as I,
Standing in their space, in all their grace,
Fellow travelers, albeit at a different pace,
They each have a story as varied
As the one you or I might carry.

Julie's Special Soup

Julie has been my older sister for all of my fifty-nine years. She was the city mouse while I was the country mouse. She worked in the same office for over twenty-three years while I raised a family. She went to plays, I kept dogs and chickens, and although we kept in touch, I rarely got to the city and she hadn’t been upstate in years. Three years ago, she experienced a midlife crisis that brought her to her knees. She has lived alone her adult life, dealing on and off with depression, so when she buckled, she didn’t reach out for help. Knowing that were I to ask her if she needed help she would say no, I made my way down to the city, a hundred thirty miles away, and showed up at her door on New Year’s eve. It was to be the beginning of a new relationship between us. For the next six months I regularly traveled to the city on the weekends in order to clean and shop, do her laundry and keep her from the shame of no longer being able to keep the standards we had been raised with. Together we worked out using up her sick leave and taking early retirement. Eventually she had to be hospitalized, and we always joke how lucky she was that it occurred during a heat wave. But Jul needed a support system and I knew that I actually couldn’t be that system for her, so our next challenge was to find one.
My brothers, sisters and Aunt who all live far away chipped in and we got her a laptop, which meant she could order from Fresh Direct and have her groceries delivered to her apartment, as well as receive and send email. That was really something because she rarely answered her phone. Her good friend since college, Maryanne, helped her home from the hospital and made sure her cobra payments were covered, all the while giving her much loving support as well as her neighbor Janice who kept her in library books and took out her mail. It was heartening how many other people rallied around her. She had made so many friends over the years. My son, who lives in Brooklyn, bought her an air-conditioner and with the help of his handsome friend Flannery, installed it in her bedroom, and then through one of those serendipitous connections, a neighbor from upstate with a practice in the city gave her a two-hour session, gratis, and recommended a good therapist who lived in her neighborhood. It was slow going but through her therapist she found a psychiatrist who made home visits and a year ago she began medication.
The thing is that we had come from a troubled childhood, and on those Sunday mornings, in the last hours of our visit, we always found ourselves reminiscing on the past; her memories, mine: the good and the bad. One of the consequences of this past has been a reluctance to turn to God. He hadn’t appeared to listen then and besides, we had so often been punished in his name that there didn’t seem to be much point. So on my latest visit, it was with interest that I observed both of us tentatively exploring the deep wish within ourselves that we could be more like those people who openly trust in a higher power. It’s a beginning, or it could be the end, of a long journey home.
And speaking of home, this sister of mine who has always lived alone, asked me this time in a round about way: “Had she made a home?” I thought about the scrumptious soup we had shared the night before with the French baguette I always pick up, the sweet feeling of arriving at a place that I could claim as a family home, the pleasure of relaxing in a clean, comfortable environment with someone I had shared my childhood with, the new found intimacy we had established these past three and a half years, and realized that my older sister had more than made a home, she had come home.

Julie’s Special Soup:
One can: Progresso Chicken Noodle soup
One can: cannellini beans
One small can: sweet corn
One pack: frozen broccoli cuts
Put all ingredients into a saucepan and let simmer one half hour, serve with grated Parmesan cheese…and a fresh baguette.

"My Aunt Eileen" from my creative writing class 11/1/06

My Aunt Eileen, now in her late seventies, in her prime was a true Grace Kelly. If you were to put them side by side, you’d be hard put to tell which was whom. Uncle Dick was no slouch in the looks department either. A military man, with his brush cut hair and pressed khaki uniform, he evoked the confidence we carried from our successes in WWII. They were a snapshot of the fifties. They were from an era when communities were smaller and families went to church on Sunday morning without question, dressed up in their Sunday best. I remember the significance of dressing up for the occasion. It involved such womanly considerations as seasonally appropriate attire. God forbid you wore white shoes in winter, unheard of, and hats were de rigueur. I still remember being mortified in Macy’s when my mother asked a stranger if he didn’t think the hat on my head suited. Gloves, you had to have a white pair and a black pair and stockings still had seams; getting them straight was a torso twisting affair in the mirror. In those days, the Saturday night bath was the ritual that signaled the gravity of Sunday’s church appearance. All this could lead to some pretty high tension levels for some families and to this day, the residue of it surfaces when ever I have to get my family ready to go to a formal function. For that was what this was all about, formality. Formality as it created an appearance that was worn no differently than the selected attire.

So that is why I always enjoyed my aunt’s retelling of her favorite Sunday story. She has a great sense of humor and doesn’t shirk from laughing at herself, which makes her endearing. She loves recounting how the solemnity of the occasion was rarely reflected in the preparation. As she tells it, by the time they got into the car, she and Uncle Dick were arguing heatedly, while the children sat mute in the backseat. Does anyone remember that? I know I do, I can still hear the wilting exasperation in my mother’s voice as she said “Oh, Arthur” which was certain to be followed by “When are you going to…” or “How could you…” Blah, blah, blah which in a convoluted way taught us kids the power of a church service. For as Aunt Eileen recalls it, there was something deliciously dissembling about that moment when the car turned into the parking lot as all arguments ceased and faces were composed into equable expressions and the family disembarked to go pray.

Little Murders

We are gathered once again in the small one bedroom apartment in the city. This is our fourth year. It was interestingly enough the youngest of the four sisters who began this tradition. There we join for what she terms a sister’s slumber party, forty eight hours of togetherness, four women over fifty in various stages of recovery from our abusive yet privileged childhood. Talk about little murders. Invariably we spend the first twenty four displaying ourselves as we see ourselves, and it is only in the last few hours of the Sunday morning that we speak of the past. You’ve got to admire how we stick to form. Friday evening it is fuss and womanly noises as we flutter to this perch on 105^th St. This year, the youngest and I set off to one of those epicurean supermarkets to pick up goodies as my friend Marie always calls them. “Oh! How about some of the pine-nut salad and let’s get some of the roasted vegetable salad with eggplant.” She kids me about insisting on the vegetable sushi rolls, “They don’t belong!” she says but I tell her I’ll pay for the bottle of wine. We’re tired, we all got up early to make the cross country trek and so we soon roll out the mat on the floor and once again, I am sleeping with my sisters.

Saturday is usually spent doing something or as we were raised to say, being constructive. Now it wouldn’t be fair to say that my older sister suffers the most, she just hides it the worst and that is a crime coming from our English family. So in truth, I can’t say that we don’t all suffer the same but it is inevitable that I find myself thinking about who is doing better than whom. I know that last year I was the loser. As I said then, "Forgive me for bleeding in little spurts now and then, I can’t help it but I’m trying." This year I am more assured. Yet, as I see my older sister’s distress from the pressure of this forced intimacy, I find myself suggesting that maybe this year we could tackle it? It always surfaces and we’ve always handle it the same way we were taught to: Using politeness, we wait till the moment changes and then move on. But the two youngest are not ready for such healing moments and switch the topic to the beautiful fall day and the delight that comes from searching out the treasures that the city offers. “We can’t help, really”, they say, “So let’s not deprive ourselves.” “Come with us”, they urge, and I must look at my love for them and for her. So I choose to stay. I guess I can’t bring myself to reinforce their choice for I have come to cherish my sister despite her vulnerability. As they are walking out the door, the youngest says to me, “She scares me, what if what is in her is within me?” With those words, I realize that I am not afraid because I have accepted it is within me. I get my older sister to reluctantly go out with me and we have a fabulous afternoon. So this day is passed and once again we feast, this time on Indian take- out and we share another bottle of wine. But actually it is only two of us that drink, the youngest and I, and I am drinking too much, using that correct upbringing to not get sloppy, but as I lay down on the mat I think to myself, “What led to that?” “Why do I always think it comes out of the blue as if it’s the wine and not me.”

Come Sunday morning we’re all up early, breakfast is leisurely, there is time to spare. And then as we sit to wind down this ritual, again it is the youngest, the most reserved and proper of us, who brings up molestation. “Did we know that it was cousin Joe who told our youngest brother that cousins were for fucking?” Gasping, we all inhale in astonishment. Me, that she was the one to mention it. But from there the conversation turns to the past and we begin the ritual of recalling its radioactivity; dealing with the alcoholic molesting uncle and of course, our own family’s burden’s, the hiding in closets, the listening to and enduring of beatings and rages. What a coincidence this year to realize that while she hid in the closet, I determined to get out, and eloped two weeks later. I didn’t know that.

We make our departures, this one to catch her plane, me to get the train. Our farewells are so gracious. We do love each other. Can these yearly visits repair the past I wonder? Does acknowledging the little murderous moments we sometimes shared and sometimes didn’t, promote healing? I tend to think that in truth, we do it on our own and these visits are a form of updating our progress. As if to say, “How afraid am I still, in the recesses of my mind and am I free enough yet to be kind?”