Spring Cleaning

I was throwing out a pair of red sandals that I had worn a few times, but which always made me feel a little dowdy. A pair of black flats that I never wore, not even once, followed them into the large garbage bag that the Vietnam Vets will pick up next week. After that came a pair of white sandals that I liked so much I bought two pairs. They were pretty well worn but even those make me feel like someone I am not feeling like anymore. All three pairs have been in my closet for a ridiculous amount of time. I think I had the never-worn black flats three years, the white sandals five years and the red sandals eight years or more.

A lot of things ended up in the bag for the vets that had suffered long neglectful relationships with me, but none longer than a yellow silk scarf that I had only worn a few times.

A French girl named Catherine (pronounced Cat-trine) spent a summer with us as an exchange student when I was eight years old, and we all fell in love with her. She was beautiful and kind. She wore colorful silk scarves on her head. I was a covetous little girl and I coveted those scarves and she promised to send me my own when she got back home. I made her promise again and again, knowing, even at that age, that France is a long way away and that when she got there that she might very well forget her promise to the little American girl she had spent the summer with. Months and months later she might come across something that would remind her of the promise, but by then she would think the little girl had already forgotten and she might let it go, the way any nineteen year old girl lets things go.

But she didn’t and about six weeks after the end of the summer, a flat package arrived in Brooklyn from Catherine. Under the brown paper with my name carefully written out in her swirling French handwriting was a square, flat, thin cardboard envelope with a fancy design on the outside. It was cream colored with a long fine line running diagonally across the front of it, and a single French word in chocolate brown lettering underneath it. That must have been the name of the place where she purchased the scarf. I remember opening it and feeling surprised and disappointed. I was expecting to see a single square scarf just like the ones she wore on her head all the time, tied back around and under her long brown wavy hair that made her look like a milk maid or something. There was a square one that was pink, but it was not the same as the ones she wore. The pattern was much finer, less bold. And then there was another scarf that was not square. It was a long rectangle and it had a sort of artistic, painted, yellow and white design instead of the intricate pattern of small shapes, like the other one. I was intrigued by the yellow one but also disappointed in both because somehow they just weren’t close enough to the ones she wore and I wanted to look just like her. I folded both of the scarves back up and replaced them neatly inside the cardboard envelope and closed it. For a long time I never wore either or them. I didn’t try to be just like Catherine.

That envelope stayed at the bottom of my underwear drawer in Brooklyn, and ten years later when I went to college it came with me. As I packed it, now the age Catherine had been the summer she stayed with us, I still harbored the desire to wear the silk scarves on my head the same way she did. Maybe now I could be like her. But college life never seemed right for the silk scarves and when I moved back to Brooklyn four years later, into a tiny room in a shared apartment on Dean Street, the scarves were still lying quietly at the bottom of my underwear drawer. Sometimes, I would take them out and unfold them and think about how I might wear one of them. I would hold them up and fold them again, admiring their intense colors. Maybe I would even go so far as to try them on in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, folding the square one into a triangle, placing the long edge along the front of my hairline and pulling the two corners down along my face and then underneath my hair and tying them together. I would look at myself, trying to see if I was getting close to looking like Catherine did that summer, and I would pull the scarf down, dissatisfied, again.

I never lost hope for myself in those scarves and I know I tried on the yellow one once in a while too. And I never lost my affection for them either. My initial disappointment upon opening the cardboard package all those years before was long gone and replaced with a feeling that the scarves were totally unique and unattainable. My friends could not go out and buy scarves like these anywhere. They were from France and not just anywhere, they were from the little town where Catherine grew up. She said the town was famous for them. I knew they were special and I kept them folded up in their flat container, carefully hidden in my underwear drawer for many more years.

Today looking once again at the yellow scarf I noticed it was stained. The pink one had gone by the wayside at least a decade or two ago. The cardboard flat envelope I kept them in for so long was also missing. I remember its getting very worn finally, but I think I probably got rid of it and the pink scarf at the same time and kept the yellow one because I thought I might actually wear it. It had grown even more interesting with time.

I did wear it, finally, as a grown woman in her thirties. But not on my head. It was just long enough to tie around my neck and knot in what I felt was a European fashion that gave any outfit quite a lift. It was very bright light yellow, the color of the yolk from a store bought egg. There was white writing on the yellow, that looked like battique, which was unreadable. I wore it from time to time, to work, or to a party. Anytime I wanted to look smart and feel French. I may have worn it three or four times.

Tonight when I pulled it out of a drawer full of silk scarves and large wraps, none of which I ever wear, I dropped it in the pile of clothes for the Vietnam Vets without a lot of thought. I guess that is because I haven’t worn it for ten years and it had a stain on it and because I had long ago lost the desire to be just like Catherine.

Dreaming of the Albatross

Today as I read Dr. Suess' "The Lorax" to Frances, I was reminded suddenly of my dream last night about the albatross. The giant bird flew through an opening of some kind, and when it flapped its enormous wings they became wild and unkempt like Dr. Seuss' birthday bird. In the dream I pointed it out to the girls exclaiming, "Look! An albatross!" knowing I was right without having seen one before. Then another one flew through the same opening, with a younger and smaller bird riding on its back.

I retold the dream to the girls and forgot about it until later, when I was working on my new book and suddenly thought of the metaphoric albatross. The one that hangs around necks. I had been writing about myself as a teenager, precisely the moment when I felt completely misunderstood by my father and step-mother. The albatross had me thinking how traces of that same feeling had traveled with me all these years and was still cropping up, unexpectedly. Specifically around the book I just published and am starting to promote. The one about grief. Maybe not coincidentally, it was my grief that felt unsupported all those years ago. It was the grief that I was taught (in silence) to ignore. And here I am, count them, 3o years later still in the business of acknowledging my own adolescent grief. It is amazing when I think about it, how resilient and tenacious the human emotional cycle can be.

When I was a little older, in my twenties, my step-mother told me the story of the albatross. How they mate for life. How they circumnavigate the globe in a year, landing back at the same nesting site annually. How they can fly a thousand miles in a day, searching the open sea for food. How they can live 50 -70 years. How they only lay one egg, both parents raise it together, and it takes a full year until that fledgling is able to fly and find its own food. I remember, as she told me the story, realizing how interested I was in story-telling, specifically in the the sounds and the rhythm of the words.

Today I looked up the origin of the metaphor, never having known it before, and the poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written in 1797 by English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (all this from Wikipedia). It's a long tale about a seaman who kills an albatross, thought to be good luck, thus subjecting the ship to a curse. The crew make him wear the albatross around his neck as penance, but his real punishment is to wander the land retelling the story, of how all except he were lost at sea because of his thoughtless act. I like Wikipedia's definition of albatross metaphorically as "a psychological burden that feels like a curse."

That albatross of mine, the thirty year burden (that sometimes feels like a curse) that I have carried in various forms and which has plagued me in different ways until now, was flying in my dreams last night. Newly free from the old story, from passing it on to my young, and searching for someplace to land.

There is

nothing more sublime than this old photo of Frances asleep

Three Days of Grief

This week I did a lot of pretty interesting stuff. I took a three-full-day course on my favorite subject, which is grief. I also had an astrology reading and danced with a large snake. Really. I did all that in five days. But the grief training was the most exhilarating and life affirming of the three. Which is saying a lot, because it was a perfectly profound reading and I don't think there is anything quite like dancing with a snake.

During the grief training I kept wondering, what is it about grief that I find so fascinating? Why does it feel so good to talk about pain? I decided the answer was that everyone there was someone who knew a lot about the subject already. So there was a lot to learn from each other. And a lot to teach too. I was the only non-therapist or caregiver in the group. I was the only artist, so I got to talk a lot about my experience of making art and how grief informs my work and how my work expands those feelings of sadness or longing into something bigger than me. Something tangible that I can show or read or give to someone else to be experienced in an entirely new context that has nothing to do with me. And that in that process, the feelings, my feelings, are also freed.

But the main thing I came away with from listening and talking about grief is that the best medicine for grief is retelling the story of the loss. Who they were. How they died. What happened. The whole story.

I listened to the tantric dance teacher talk about snakes for a long time today. When she talked about their shedding I thought, grief can be a lot like shedding, after a while. For some, it may seem to disappear completely after a long time. But for most of us, grief is something that comes up, over and over again. It revisits periodically and when it does, it's an opportunity for shedding some of the feelings, again.

old shoes

These shoes were purchased at Target and worn by both my daughters to this beautiful state of shabbiness. You could say they were loved to death. I don't think either girl thought they were any less beautiful when they grew out of them than the day they were purchased. They are pink with sparkles, and that made them both very happy.

Disney Day

Sometimes Disneyland really is the most magical place on earth, and I don't say that ironically. I knew we were going to have fun. I was with my kids and my 21 year old niece Robin, who is visiting from New Zealand and who we haven't seen for 5 years. I don't know if it was the perfect weather or my niece, but I wasn't expecting such a fantastic day.

Disneyland used to bum me out. I would get caught up in all the waste, the commercialism, the obesity, etc. and just find the whole thing ugly and distasteful and corny. Of course I had to pretend to have fun, which only made it worse.

But in the last couple of years, I have gotten into the spirit of being there, mainly brought on by watching my daughter light up when she saw a princess or devoured a wad of cotton candy. And today I found myself able to just be there, to be carried by the girls excitement and to feed off the joy that almost every child I saw was showing on their fat little faces. Kids love Disneyland! They don't mind the racks of junky stuff that is being pushed on them, or the fatty food, or the sugary treats. They are fine with long lines and long walks from place to place. They know they are going to get on some thrilling rides, eat some delicious food and easily talk their parents into three souvenirs. They are set. And if they see some characters along the way, all the better. The whole day is about them having fun, and they know it. If I let myself be a care-free kid again, it's easy to have as much fun as they do.

What I realize after a few years of carting kids to places designed with them in mind like the zoo, the over-designed kid's "museum", the aquarium, and other theme parks, is that Disney has a way of making sure everyone is taken care of. The place is clean, well organized and designed, and the staff are not allowed to be rude or pushy. Even on a day like today, when it was absolutely jam packed with people, everything flowed pretty well. We never waited that long for a ride and we got on everything we wanted to. We found the good food (which exists if you know where to go) and managed to avoid over eating. Amazing!

I also had a great time taking pictures. I saw things I'd never noticed before. The way the pink and blue sky at sunset matched the castle. How many birds there were. How great the fake trees look next to the real ones. How photogenic Tarzan's tree house is. And all day, the winter sun made everything sparkle.

Finger in the Blender

A finger, an absent mind, and a long history met on the sharp blade of a blender. If you know what an immersion blender is you might think me a little less stupid. And, as I said, I can’t blame my mind as it wasn’t involved in the incident. It was the pure non-thinking mind, the kind I try to reach in meditation, that managed to take over in what seemed at the time to be a very inopportune moment. It was a mind devoid of thought that had me stick my finger in to the small area around the blade to push out the black beans that had gathered there, just having finished pureeing a huge pot of soup. Blood was gushing from my finger as I dropped the blender having pressed the on button inadvertently while my digit was still cleaning out the beans. I could see the nail was sliced in half and there was a gash below the edge of the cuticle, but with all the blood I couldn’t tell if my finger was still intact.

It’s funny what happens in my brain when my body is in trouble. I appeared calm on the outside. Beyond a spastic yelp when it first happened, I was silent as I made my way to the sink, turned it on and ran water over my torn up fingertip. Wild thoughts were running fast through my mind: “Oh God, I have chopped off the end of my finger! I’m going to have emergency surgery!” But as I stared at the mass of bleeding flesh under the faucet, I realized it was just a deep cut. The question of whether it would warrant stitches remained, but that determination could wait. I was leaning on the edge of the sink with all my weight on my forearms, which felt like they were glued to the sleek black countertop. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I eventually stopped rinsing and pinched my finger back together with the thumb and forefinger of the other hand. I held it hard to stop the bleeding. Good thinking.

“Does it hurt?” Grace wanted to know. She was standing beside me having witnessed the event, and her question brought my focus to her and my nerve endings, both for the first time. The shock was making my brain operate like an internet connection that is weak and slow. My awareness finally landed on the fact that she was frightened. Her eyes were full of tears and she was gripping my other arm hard with both hands. I was barely keeping it together so I had no resources to calm her down, other than staying so myself. The cogs turned back to the tip of my left index finger. Quickly and evenly as an ocean wave, the pain rolled in. I realized yes, it was hurting more every second. “No it doesn’t really hurt,” came out in response.

It’s completely automatic for mothers to lie in order to reassure a child and it made perfect sense to me, in that moment, to do so. I added calmly, slowly, “Grace, can you please get Yoly?” She ran at lightening speed to the next room where Yoly, our babysitter, was reading to Frances, yelling: “Mom cut herself and it’s bleeding really bad! Come quick!” Yoly appeared at my side with her composure in tact and I asked her to get me some gauze to wrap around the cut. While I waited I started to feel dizzy. I realized my legs were getting too weak to support the rest of me and I started for the couch, unsure if I would reach it before collapsing.

By the time I got to it, I felt a thick fuzz coming over my whole sensory system. The room was closing in, I heard only the sound of my heart, I felt nausea and tingling and a wave of heat that made my hair wet around the edge of my scalp. I closed my eyes to relieve the dizziness and with hindsight I know I felt the way one feels just before a faint, but in that moment all I felt was sheer panic: “I am not going to make it! This is really, really bad! How could this happen?” Yet hovering above and overriding the chaotic thoughts was a sense of deep peace. It was a wordless feeling of serenity that had me sit there, still and with eyes closed, knowing I would be all right. That there was nothing to do but wait.

It was beginning to dawn on me that I had been here before. About fifteen years ago while watching a particularly gruesome scene in an episode of X-Files where evil aliens were cutting in to someone’s body to harvest organs, I started feeling the same waves of dizziness and black out. I had rushed out of my house and into the backyard to get fresh air. It took about thirty minutes before I felt normal again.

That was my first and worst panic attack, but it was not the last. For about a year I had them, all brought on by images of skin opening up. It didn’t have to be mine, it could be any picture of a cut. Eventually, and with a little help from a therapist, I worked it back to an incident when I was ten. My mother had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and I watched her get upset when her incision opened up a week after her mastectomy. I have recently been writing about this event and not ten minutes before cutting my finger, I was reading my mother’s own account of the very same incident, which did not include my memory of watching her. In her version, I wasn’t there.

Back on the couch, I am beginning to recover and Grace is sitting next to me getting hysterical. Since the moment I dropped the blender, she has been expressing my panic perfectly so that I don’t have to. Frances is there too but she has taken on the role of nursemaid. She is holding out a Band-aid. She has taken off the wrapping and the little white tabs and is ready to put it on the finger which I have still not looked at since the bleeding stopped. I am starting to feel better. The layers are gluing back together. But I don’t want to take any chances looking at it, so I ask Yoly to examine it. My nail had apparently protected my flesh from being cut at the top part of the finger and then the blade had come around again making only a single gash which was pretty deep but short in length. No stitches, we decided. I was lucky.

It was a perfect little storm of emotional and physical pain, designed to pull me forward, or back, or both. The way everything lined up to remind me that that moment when I was ten years old is still with me. Some pretty strong strings are still tied back to that scene. My mother sitting on the edge of her bed looking at her wound, the stitches recently removed and now opening up. Her fear. Her panic. I felt them, but I absorbed the feelings as hers, not mine. Just like Grace expressed the panic I was working hard to contain. I wonder what Grace will remember. I only remember feeling numb.

When I was thirty five, I had a lump removed from my left breast, the same side my mother's breast was removed from. Immediately after my minor surgery, I collapsed outside the OR, suddenly feeling the enormous toll of watching her sit there, terrified of what was happening. In a hospital waiting room in Westwood California, twenty five years later, I finally felt it.

Now here, with a band-aid (thank you Frances) on my finger and the recognition that this was no “accident”, I will paraphrase something I recently heard Patti Smith say in a radio interview: That time does not heal all wounds. You just get to know them better. And eventually, they become your friends.