Sometimes the gratitude I feel at how wonderful life can be seems impossibly grand, too big for my being to hold. Today has been like that. Just a regular old great day of easy and beautiful moments with friends and family. Pancakes. Bacon. Coffee. Tea. Laughter. Sunshine. Children yelling from joy, clumping up and down stairs. Lights. Mud. The best part is those moments is sometimes their recognition. The wish to mentally store those feeling for the less lovely days when I need a reminder of how good life can be. Days like today reminds me of Leo Lionni’s book, Frederick.
I just read an interesting story about piece of history owned by a psychologist, Dr. Barry Lubetkin, who treats hoarders. From this New York Times article:
“A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Lubetkin was idly trawling the Internet for information on Homer and Langley Collyer, urban hoarders known in the 1930s and ’40s as the Hermits of Harlem.
Elderly scions of an upper-class Manhattan family, the brothers had barricaded themselves in a sanctuary of clutter at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 128th Street.”
Turns out that Dr. Lubetkin owns the face of a clock that his father bought from the Collyers’ estate in 1947. (If you have not heard of the Collyers–and I had not until today–they were Homer and Langley Collyer, who, according to the oracle Wikipedia, “were eventually found dead in the Harlem brownstone where they had lived, surrounded by over 140 tons of collected items that they had amassed over several decades.”)
All this reminds me of a recurring dream. (There are two kinds of people in the world: people who recount their dreams to others, and people who cannot stand it when others recount dreams. If you are from the second category, please stop reading now.) My dream takes place in various settings, but the plot is always the same: I am looking around in a junk shop (or sometimes it’s an antique shop–there is a distinction, in life and in dream logic) and there, for sale, I see the Steiff and Schuco bears and various other toys (most often mohair stuffed animals) from my youth. I always have to buy them back, and it always seems strangely unfair. (And in a weird way, this recurring dream is one of the original germs that started me writing my novel, The Watery Girl.)
In real life, I still have those bears. I used to think I wanted to be buried with them. (I’m not kidding.) Interestingly (to me), lately I’ve been thinking about the difference between collector and hoarder. (There IS a difference, right?) For years now, my bears have been in boxes with the furniture and clothing I collected (and often made) for them when I was a child. Soon, I hope to realize the waking dream I have of setting up a dollhouse for them, so that I can look at them. So that they will haunt my waking as well as my sleep.
(And it’s not a coincidence that I write this post on the day that, at her request, I moved my six-year-old daughter’s dollhouse and all its contents from her room to the attic. She’s not ready to get rid of it yet, but she never plays with it, and wants more space in her room. There is something here. Something about generations, echoes, and ghosts…in finding this article about the clock face, and in my recurring dream plot, and in my writing this post today. Something that I need to mind.)
If the world broke and this song had never happened…I wouldn’t know what I was missing, but everything else would be a waste of breath, and the narrator would know something wasn’t quite r i g h t
(Little Hands of Concrete and always with the good hat, this guy.)
(And this version is quite Hendrix-Fripp-tastic. Enjoy.)
I know it’s good practice for writing (and living!) to slow down and listen to children. Their work (in my daughter’s case, drama and storytelling, the elements of theatre, almost every sentence beginning with “wait, pretend that…”) is as important to them as our work (making dinner, job stuff) is to us. This morning, keeping up with my daughter’s work was aerobic, and impossible. I was exhausted by the rapidity of the “wait, pretend that…”s coming from her mouth. But then–for an instant–I was able to step back and realize something. “Wait, pretend that…” is exactly what I want her to be doing. It’s how I want her to be in the world. It’s the stuff of childhood. I never want to squash that spark. I want to give it as much room and air and light as I can. The collision of the “wait, pretend that…”s with the things I must do to get through the day defines a certain kind of tension, a tension that is maybe necessary for creating things (I tell myself). And yet I wish that I could slow down enough to bask in her world of “wait, pretend that…”
And then I remember that I am a writer, and I have to “wait, pretend that…” if I want to do this work (that my soul calls upon me to do).
And then I hope that this tension will resolve itself into something beautiful. (And I watch, in my home, as sometimes, it does.)
“What’s a snow cone?” my almost-six-year-old said this evening. I’d been telling her a story about a girl and a mouse who thought it was hailing. (“Tell me a Sally and Joey story and they think it’s a storm.” For this section, she’d specified that it had to be hail. In my fiction, quickly spun, the hail was actually someone shaving a snow cone.) Her question was earnest, so I explained. Then she asked, “Like an ice cream cone of snow?” Yeah, something like that, except we’ve had real snow ice cream (bowl of snow with honey, or maple syrup, and sometimes for mama, smoked paprika and cinnamon) and we’ve had cider slushies at the local apple orchard. But never the iconic Snow Cone. (How I’ve failed as a parent, I thought.)
Later, in the kitchen, she described her method for peeling garlic. “You start with the tail,” she said, and demonstrated how. (Maybe not a failed parent after all, I thought.)
And in this way, success and failure curl their necks around each other and get tangled, unsure of who is whom, and whether it matters anymore.
And today in that tangle for me is one of the sweetest bits of being alive.
I was sealing my payment for my Target Card Services payment today. On the back of the return envelope (which they kindly included with my bill, so I could send the payment) this message is printed in Target red letters:
“THIS ENVELOPE IS 100% RECYCLABLE. PLEASE RECYCLE.”
Perhaps they were trying to fool anyone reading it, using the word “recyclable” to imply (the way our eyes can fool us when we are reading words) that the envelope itself is made from 100% recycled paper.
(I read it again.)
(It’s the return envelope which they included with my bill, so I can send them my payment.)
Underneath the “100% recyclable” message, with an arrow, I wrote:
“I hope someone at Target Card Services reads this and recycles this envelope, because I need to use it to make my payment, so I cannot recycle it right now. And to answer the ‘PLEASE RECYLE’ please know that whenever I can, I do.”
In case it wasn’t clear years ago, this is just more evidence that I am a proud member of the curmudgeon club.
(Lou Reed rocked and took some trippy photos, too.)
When my daughter was about two and a half, we were listening to Velvet Underground and Nico sing, “Sunday Morning” on a Sunday morning (as is often our practice. And “I’m waiting for my man” was soundtrack to French toast and pancakes–whichever vessel we chose for the morning’s drug: maple syrup. For a while, we would alternate between that album and the Fugs song “Nothing.”). As a surprise, while my husband was out of the room, I coached my daughter to say “Lou Reed is an icon.” (She said it right on cue and got the laugh I was hoping for.) “Lou Reed is an icon” became a sweet little joke in our house, an illustration of how we adults were indoctrinating our child. (I make no apology about this.)
When my husband came outside into the sunshine today and said that Lou Reed had died, I cried. Of course I didn’t know Lou Reed, and at first it felt hyperbolic, crying, but it came from a sincere feeling of shock and loss. (How can Lou Reed die? Right, I know we all die, but how can that apply to Lou Reed?) I hugged my husband. He said I was going to make him cry. I explained to my daughter why I was crying. We had a good talk, defining the word icon. We talked about some of our other icons. Some are famous, some are not. The constellation changes, and also doesn’t.
I’ve just read the most ridiculous and wonderful novel. It’s called The Young Visiters (sic) Or, Mr. Salteena’s Plan by Daisy Ashford. Written around 1890 by nine-year-old Daisy Ashford, the novel was published in 1919. (I love the internet. You can read the original text here.) According to the Academy Chicago Publishers 1991 preface by Walter Kendrick, J.M. Barrie, my icon and one of my favorite writers, doomed this novel to obscurity in our time. Kendrick writes: “I would lay the blame for juvenilizing The Young Visiters on Sir J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, who wrote a treacly preface to the 1919 edition. Barrie drew a precious picture of little Daisy at work, now with ‘the tongue firmly clenched between her teeth,’ now with ‘her head to the side and her tongue well out.’ He imagined her sucking her thumb and called her the ‘blazing child.’ The British stomach such goop better than Americans do; they seem to place a smaller premium on growing up. Barrie, however, falsified The Young Visiters for all readers when he made it out to be merely the product of a precocious imagination. It is that, of course, but it is also a Victorian novel in miniature, a tidy précis of English fiction circa 1890.” (I know that’s his opinion, and I might argue–have not yet read Barrie’s preface, but will later, as it’s online at Project Gutenberg. Stay tuned. And more on Barrie in a moment.)
But rather than tell about the novel, let me show. On p. 86, Miss Ashford treats the reader to the following, with the original spellings:
Chapter 9: A Proposale
Next morning while imbibing his morning tea beneath his pink silken quilt Bernard decided he must marry Ethel with no more delay. I love the girl he said to himself and she must be mine but I somehow feel I can not propose in London it would not be seemly in the city of London. We must go for a day in the country and when surrounded by the gay twittering of the birds and the smell of the cows I will lay my suit at her feet and he waved his arm wildly at the gay thought. Then he sprang from bed and gave a rat a tat at Ethel’s door.
Are you up my dear he called.
Well not quite said Ethel hastilly jumping from her downy nest.
Be quick cried Bernard I have a plan to spend a day near Windsor Castle and we will take our lunch and spend a happy day.
Oh Hurrah shouted Ethel I shall soon be ready as I had my bath last night so wont wash very much now.
No don’t said Bernard and added in a rarther fervent tone through the chink of the door you are fresher than the rose my dear no soap could make you fairer.
I have never read a book like this. The allure for me as reader hides in its layers, and in the child’s awareness of the weary adult world. Her prose. Her exuberent misspellings. And the allure is also in imagining this nine-year-old in the context of the nine-year-olds I know–smart and imaginative as they are–writing a book like this.
As Kendrick writes in the preface on p. xvii, “Ashford’s masterpiece truly deserves the overworked adjective ‘unique’: there is nothing else like it, and nothing can match the special pleasure it gives.”
In writing this post, I thought about a presentation I gave in graduate school about J.M. Barrie and the story behind Peter. I forgot how deeply I had then delved into Barrie’s work and life, but here are some of my presentation notes, which explained (in my words from twelve years ago, which I would re-write today, but for expediency, won’t) why this is interesting to me: “I have been working on an adult novel from a child’s point of view. I did not anticipate the power of looking through a child’s eyes at all the small things adults tend to overlook. This has been a great lesson in detail and imagery. Perhaps to normalize my obsession with childhood and the connection between child and adult, I keep coming back to Peter Pan as an important emblem. Reading Peter and Wendy has helped me think about the layers a writer can use to involve both child and adult awareness.”
Peter And Wendy, the edition I read as a child, and still read
I’m so grateful to my daughter’s teacher, Ann Guthrie, who knew of my fasciation with this kind of story, and loaned me Daisy Ashford’s book.
In which Amy Acker (and others) rocked Joss Whedon’s kitchen
My five blog readers might recall that I don’t get to the movies often, not as often as I’d like to. Since I became a mother in 2007, I’ve been averaging fewer than one movie theatre trip per year. (The last one I saw, I believe, was Beasts of the Southern Wild.)
Last night I saw Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing. As a long time fan of all things Joss, I was expecting a lot. But this film surpassed my high hopes. I anticipated a romp, and plenty of Jossy humor. I got those things, but what elevated the experience beyond my hopes was how stylish the production was, and how much depth it had. The light and darkness of the story, illuminated in black and white filmmaking, were equally present and resonant. I am not a purist about Shakespeare, nor am I a scholar, so I can’t catalog the liberties taken. This in mind, I don’t mind adaptations, but please, let them make sense, and let them work. This one did, and did. Joss took liberties–gender-bending, reading sex into places that it might not naturally have been, but it worked. The wine-at-all-hours, casual glitz garden party was such an escape, such a vacation from my everyday life which contains real things like gravity that I can still feel it in my bones as if I was there, hanging with that wit and language and drink, plot-twisting alongside those indie-iconic actors. One layer of decadence for this fan was seeing where Joss lives–the film was shot at his home. One imagines the proto-productions when King J. and his friends got together to read some Shakespeare. (She typed, and swooned…)
(Ten years hence, one asks, Branaugh who? Okay, that was a cheap shot. Apologies. I liked that film, too.)
On a larger level, I love how this film might introduce Shakespeare to people who haven’t gotten there yet. It makes the play accessible, but not in a dumbed-down way. To my eye, it makes the play sexy and relevant. A shiny hipster debauch, once more, with feeling. We could do much worse! See if it you can.
