Parades: They're Not Just For Candy Anymore

Memorial Day. We always said memorial day weekend. It was always about the weekend. Yooo hooo! Three day weekend! Three day weekend! Three day weekend! The holiday was always just a day off. An extra day to play, to escape. Memorial Day. I never even thought about the what or the why. Honoring the dead soldiers. The dead soldiers. The dead soldiers.

It doesn't matter how we feel about the war, it has nothing to do with the people who come back, and the people who don't.

Memorial Day is for the people who don't come back.

It didn't fully register in my frame of consciousness until this one. When some people convinced themselves that because of 9/11 we had to go mess with Iraq and Afghanistan. Can't have the rest of the world thinking we're all a bunch of pussies over here if we get hit and just lie there and take it.

Memorial Day is for the soldiers who didn't come back.

I have to keep saying it/writing it—the soldiers who didn't come back—it's the tape loop in my brain all day. Their families will never be the same without them. Mothers fathers, daughters and sons. In families who have always served they might be more slightly more prepared. But it doesn't ache any less. The hole they leave isn't smaller.

For Garrison Keillor

I.

My very good friend writes to tell me about her joy
in finding an iced tea pitcher just like mine.
Can an iced tea pitcher be life changing? she asks
Why not? I say life changes every day anyway
so why is an iced tea pitcher any less entitled
to be a force for good than anything else?

II.

I live by William Morris' rule “Have nothing in your house
that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
It is as simple as that.
I choose each item that enters so carefully
The things I am put upon to tolerate itch like that spot
on my back that I can never quite reach
Very often when I ask for help, the other person misses it entirely.

III.

Genuine physical discomfort must be contained

when the Disney character sleeping bags from Walmart arrive, 

made of nasty slippery poly-something or other
I judge them toxic, both aesthetically and corporeally 

But after repeated attempts to roll them up and hide them away
countered by my boys' delighted retrieval, and incessant cozy snuggling 

I admit defeat. 

Despite their hideousness they remain firmly, almost willfully 

in the "useful" category.

And the Eyes Are Waiting

New glasses are coming. And with them more babble from the girl with long brown hair and glasses.

Caught By The Past

Ahhh, the golden years of the Hollywood studio system. I can't imagine ever tiring of it. And so I get diverted almost daily. I confess I am caught in a web of my own making. I am loathe to confess my guily pleasure, but I have committed myself to unfailing honesty where my faults are concerned. On the mornings when time permits, I often plan to catch up on one or two of the shows I've taped. Obviously I'm hooked on Mad Men, and I'm crazy about Nurse Jackie and The Big C. And I'm still amazed that a show as seductive as The Good Wife exists on broadcast television. But the default channel on my TV is set to TCM, and lately there always seems to be something really good on. Just now it's Bette Davis and Charles Boyer in All This and Heaven Too. Now, that's a title that positively screams "Ladies, bring your hankies!" Of course in 1940 everyone always carried a handkerchief anyway, but never mind about that. Even though I really shouldn't spare the time to watch the rest of the movie, I've had to pause it so I can type. And now I find myself pulled in three directions. I must keep writing, I must attend to countless chores, and I simply must watch the rest of this movie goddammit!! It's Bette and Charles! Who could look away? It occurs to me that the peak--the best of the best were produced between 1938 and 1942. Plenty of my favorites came before or after, but I think those four years were something amazing. So here I sit, caught in the mid nineteenth century, as told by the mid twentieth, and I can't walk away. Mr. Boyer had a good reputation as a romantic lead, but to me he will always be the villain in Gaslight (1944). Such a delicious role-I must look in to how and why he went against type and took it.

The view from up there

As told by one myopic, short Jewish girl. As an adolescent I aspired to 5'6". It seemed the ideal height. I believe my younger half-sister (with the 6'+ father) achieved 5'6", but of course she wanted to be taller. I am, and always have been listed on my driver's license as 5'4". The only nice thing about the DMV is that they take your word for it. They might give you an eye test, but they don't measure you.

But am I really 5 feet and 4 inches tall? Not really. No. It hurts to admit my true height is five feet, three and three quarter inches. Does it sound taller writing it out? Even standing up as straight as I can, I've never hit that 64" mark. I've studied this, and people over six feet seem to only ever roughly know how tall they are. Unless they play for the NBA they'll say, "Oh, about 6'1" I guess". People under 5'6" always know exactly how tall they are, at least to the quarter inch.

My mother was tiny, maybe 5', and petite too, as her mother was before her. I think by the time we were 13, our shoes were too big for her to steal. She always told me that one day I would tower over her, always holding her hand high above her head. In later years I was indeed taller than her, but I never felt that I towered. Rather I felt like a bull standing next to a baby deer. But that is an entirely different subject.
So I find myself saying the same thing to the monkeys, although their father is 5'6", while mine was 5'9". They are shorter than most. Jon Stewart is also 5'6" and I always pay careful attention to how tall he is in relation to the guest he is greeting. Why? I cant help it.

If you stand up straight you can pass for taller. I think I've succeeded in that. Some people my height can't leave the house without an extra 2 or 3 inches added.  Personally I am incapable of wearing high heels or platform shoes. I've never wanted the height badly enough to suffer in uncomfortable shoes. My vanity expresses itself in other ways. We'll get to that another time.

Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper and  Joel McRae, are some of my favorite- and the best- classic Hollywood actors. They were very tall and very, very lean, which made them look even taller. Standing next to one of the great tiny actresses made the difference even look more extreme, yet somehow they don't look silly together. I tried to find a quick list of contemporary actor's heights, but found instead a number of sites devoted to the speculation and "outing" of the shoe lift wearing leading men of today.

Conan O'Brien is listed as 6'4" in the IMDB, yet I've always thought he was 6'5". I remember passing him on the street in Harvard Square, and feeling as if I'd suddenly turned into a hobbit, and slipped into a Tolkien novel. Loping down the street, he seemed not of this world.
Jimmy Stewart: 6'3"
Gary Cooper 6'3"
Joel McCrea 6'3"
Ray Milland: 6'2"
Clark Gable 6'1"
Cary Grant: 6'1& 1/2"
Robert Mitchum: 6'1"
Humphrey Bogart: 5'8"
~~~~~~~~~~
Many of the the famous starlets of yesteryear were 5'4" or less.
Elizabeth Taylor: 5'2"
Carole Lombard: 5'2"
Margaret Sullavan 5'2" & 1/2"
Jean Arthur: 5'3"
Bette Davis: 5'3"
Claudette Colbert: 5'4 & 1/2"
Ginger Rogers: 5'4 & 1/2"
If you don't know who all of these people are, then you shouldn't be reading this. Unless you look them up and watch their movies right away.

What about the O'Haras?

Why does Scarlett's father talk like a commoner who just came over on the boat? This has been bugging me for a while.
Dug into Wiki on this one. In the pre-war South the Irish were pretty low on the social hierarchy. In the description of the novel it is clear that Scarlett's mother was from upper class French lineage, so it follows that her grandfather wasn't pleased with the match. There is also a reference to O'Hara winning Tara in a poker game. The "better" local families would most certainly have looked down on them, but I can find no suggestion of that.

Time and place

So here I am walking around in a haze, late for nearly everything, ignoring so many of the simple daily tasks that would actually make me feel better. I'm pleased with myself when I get the dishwasher emptied first thing in the morning. Boiling noodles and slicing some veggies for monkey dinner feels like lugging firewood. Always on the verge of tears.

Just now I had a brief chat with the cashier at WF. It was a good connection. He loved it when I told him that I live with two six year old boys and my house mostly smells like pee all the time. I assured him that whatever the mysterious wet substance on his counter might be, it was highly unlikely to gross me out. He said how great it was to talk to someone real, not uptight like most of the people who shop there. Then he noticed my necklace, and grabbed a girl walking by to make sure she saw it too. I explained that it's a serotonin molecule. We talked about various art projects he could make with the image.

As I turned to leave I saw the perfectly packed paper bag in front of me. We laughed when I realized I'd been too distracted to give him the bag I'd brought. He asked if I could used the paper anyway, so I explained one of the endlessly amusing--to me anyway--ironies of my daily life: I need paper bags to put my paper recycling out in, and I need the plastic ones for all my plastic recycling. So if I had my shit together enough to always remember my reusable bags, then I'd have nothing to put all the stuff I recycle in.

I walked away with a happy spark. I felt alive again. My brain had been turned back on. And before I made it though the second set of doors I was about to cry again. When the spark ignites and the energy is firing I'm smiling and in motion. I realized how small a moment can make me feel that way. I felt the pain of the stark contrast between that and most of the other moments. I began to ache with the desire for more connection and energy, and to cry for the rest of my day without it.

I seem to have a very rich social life in my dreams lately.

More pancakes anyone?

I dreamt I was hosting the most amazing party...it went far into the night, and by the time I was serving pancakes at 4am I was planning the next one.

If I didn't have a really wild party last night, why did I wake up feeling so hungover?


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Faced with the blank page, I freeze

... two minutes ago there were at least three things in my head that wanted to get out. Why did they all run and hide?

One image that will never leave me comes from when I was about six. Coming in from upstate somewhere, dropping my mom's friend Paul off at his apartment. Walk in to the kitchen, flicking the lights on, and seeing thousands, thousands of cockroaches scurrying from the light. They covered every surface and almost before I could blink they were gone. But that one moment of frantic escape, of furious, focused fleeing is frozen in time.

Such a vivid contrast brown and white.


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