WARNING: Once a month, I will post a personal essay here. Sometimes the essay will contain swear words. I have a fondness for swear words. Occasionally they are all that stands between me and violence. My swear words distress my husband as he comes from a family whose women did not swear. I, on the other hand, come from a family where any number of the women swore. It never prevented them from being kind or generous or intelligent or gifted.

At the moment, I can think of no other warning to issue to the unwary unless it is that I am a knee-jerk Liberal, knee-jerk being the only kind of liberal I can imagine being. These matters dealt with, let us begin.

****

May 1, 2012

MORE ESCAPE

Before I fall asleep at night — though God knows I can fall asleep during the day, walking to the post box — I read from an old Georgette Heyer mystery, or an Agatha Christie, or any “cozy” in which seemingly intelligent, smartly dressed Londoners motor down to the English countryside in a Duesenberg or Bentley in order to be murdered.

Though she doesn’t really pen cozies, Martha Grimes will do as well. She has, after all, created the impossibly sexy (in my opinion) Melrose Plant, who eschews his title (Earl of Caverness), yet drives a Bentley and serves as sometimes-sidekick to Richard Jury of Scotland Yard.

With my good right ear I hear sniggers. Cozies, you are thinking. Old lady fare. Well, yes. I am not too proud to admit being old. This despite my only slightly squashed figure and freckled arms which some — no longer intimates — insist are age-spotted.

The thing is, regarding cozies, I feel free to fall asleep during them, a thing I’d be loathe to do during a Nicholson Baker or Penelope Lively. And they are pure escape. Escape is as essential to good health as Vitamin D.

We are all escape artists. Some escape in gardening or drink or drugs. Or, God save us, knitting. Personally, I prefer escape with a cup of tea, a plate of fairy cakes, and a Bentley parked in the graveled drive.

****

March 1, 2012

THOUGHTS ON THE DAY AFTER ST. PATRICK’S DAY

It was late afternoon when we arrived at Cousin Danny Daly’s B and B on the green edge of green Killarney where everyone is named Sullivan, except, of course, Danny Daly. We took tea and cake with Danny and his wife Hannah, and, later, enjoyed supper of lamb and root vegetables.

Following breakfast the next day, we strolled — my Dan and I — in the misty, west Irish morning. West Irish moorings are mostly misty, with nothing lying between them and Newfoundland but the churning gray North Atlantic and an erratic escarpment of stony islands.

Down a gravelled road we wandered, into a petering-out of the city; into what in famine time had been wild countryside. Our glance was all to our left where pleasant modern houses stood with wide lawns rolling down toward us, brilliant flower beds tumbling and tumbling down the gentle slope. Flowers thrive in these misty mornings.

When we had ventured perhaps a mile, we turned back. Now on our left as we neared Cousin Danny’s was a strange, tossed, lumpen landscape, obviously nothing created by Nature, yet as brilliantly green in knee-high grass as the rest.

Drawing closer, we noted white-painted pipes poking up out of the ground higgledy-piggledy. A tall wire fence and a gate enclosed this odd patch of countryside. We thought of entering, but were constrained by a silent voice. Or perhaps that’s putting it too strongly. Nevertheless we did not unlatch the gate but, rather, turned to the right and into the curving drive of the B and B.

Back in the bright comfort of Danny’s home, we asked at once, “What is that place across the road with the white pipes sticking up from the ground?”

“Oh, that,” Danny said, “that was one of the places along the roads where folks came to die when there was no one to bury them at home. The pipes once had cross-pieces, but those have fallen off, y’see.”

If you’re a Yank whose grandmother or great-grandfather came across a century or more ago, often as not you eschew the poems of the Troubles, of the Black and Tan, even as you avoid, except at St. Patrick’s Day, songs of the famine and the wide ocean that forever divided families. You’d rather not think about those girls in villages who were sent across the Atlantic because there was not enough food, but were first shamed in the public square by having their heads shaved because they were going and the others couldn’t. Never forget to be humble.

Now and then, you come across an old photograph or family story, or you stay at your Cousin Danny Daly’s B and B at the edge of Killarney where the flowers tumble down to the road, and you understand again St. Patrick’s Day. It’s not about green beer or the eternal, infernal tappety-tapping of Lord of the Dance. It’s about respect. That says it all, I think. Respect for those buried beneath white pipes and the girls in the square with shaven heads, and those who survived and wrote the poems.

February 14, 2012

IT’S ABOUT SEX, RIGHT?

St. Valentine notwithstanding, beneath the romance and roses of February fourteen, runs a warm chocolatey river of sexual expectations or at least tensions. In considering this, I was oddly reminded of a dinner table conversation when our three children were young — maybe 9, 6 1/2, and 4. One warm summer evening, they asked where babies came from. That is, one of them asked, glancing at Dan, and the others looked mildly interested.

I’d imagined that children asked this question when they were about five, as in, “Allison’s Mommy is going to the hospital to get a baby. How much do they cost and can we get one?” From which dear innocent query, appropriate sexual information would ensue. But our children had waited until this evening to cut to the chase. “Where do babies come from?”

How, you ask, did the older two get so old without being curious? Well, on our block there were no young mothers bursting with babies. There were a lot of 45 and 50-year-old mothers looking immensely relieved. Those fecund mothers who accompanied a child to the little school attended by our brood, were dismissed as grossly overweight.

And, remember, this was around 1974, and the Sullivan children were only allowed half an hour of television per evening, this on a 12-inch black and white screen — a half hour usually given over to something starring Bill Cosby or Dick van Dyke and containing precious little of a salacious and informative nature. By the time they were old enough for Benny Hill, it was too late.

When you have three or more smallish people hanging around the house, they gather in dimly lit corners, giggling and speaking in hoarse whispers behind hands held in front of their mouths, always keeping a sharp eye peeled.

In these Machiavellian sessions they determined which of them would ask the current hot question. But Dan and I had witnessed none of this usual hole-and-corner goings-on previous to the where-do-babies-come-from query.

Since it was Dan who’d been asked, he fell to with admirable aplomb, as if he’d long awaited this question and at the dinner table no less.

I wish I had taped what followed for it was masterful, beautiful, leaving nothing out, but handling each step with such tender poetry that personally I was moved to tears. My only fear was that he had made it all sound so attractive, they might get some pretty premature notions into their curly tops.

As his recitation drew to a hushed and reverent close, and Dan was at the point of asking, “Are there questions?” the three children, without a concordant glance passing between them, screamed, “Eeewwww!” jumped down from their chairs and ran from the dining room, through the living room, and out into the middle of the street, still screaming “Eeewww!” and now performing a kind of stomping dance of horror.

What passers-by who drove around them, or neighbors with open windows, made of them we’ll never know. But, for some time, the neighbors kept a polite yet watchful silence.

It’s my belief that, without even trying, Dan had postponed the children’s serious sexual experimentation by any number of years.

January 15, 2012

THAT THING ON YOUR EAR

    Hey, kid. Or old lady. Or guy in business suit.

    What’s that thing hanging on your ear?

    A cell phone, you tell me. I see. And you’re saying important stuff into it. None of my business, you say. This is true, but I’m curious. It’s been hanging there for hours.

    You’re busy, you say. Appointments to nail down. The hair dresser. The eye doctor. Is the dry cleaning ready? Can you pick up your re-soled wingtips? Has your cousin Martha’s niece’s daughter had her baby?

    Listen, you say, how ’bout the buyer at Slomo’s Gizmo Factory? You gotta get to him before somebody else does, you say. You think I like this thing hanging on my ear all day?

    Well, actually, you say, you’re shopping for a dress for a friend’s wedding, but first you have to find out what Eleanor’s wearing. You and your sister Eleanor should turn up, both of you in coral?

    Well, if you must know, you say, your girl friend’s stuck at home doing algebra problems. Algebra. And she’s seriously bored. Seriously. She’s your good friend, so you’re going to, like, fill her in on what you saw in Devon’s  locker.

     Well, you say, you’re driving down Interstate 94 West. Or maybe it’s up Interstate 94 West. Ever drive 94 West to St. Cloud? Well, you know what I mean. Exits to malls. Exits to malls. Exits to malls. So of course you’re talking to your friend Jane to pass the empty time. And, after all, Jane’s laid up with a cold.

     What did you do before the cell phone? How did you pas the empty time?

     Well, let me see, you say. That’s a good question, you say. You did a lot of things, you guess. You thought about the crossword puzzle you hadn’t quite finished this morning. That upper left-hand corner sort of stumped you. A seven-letter word for disorder? What’s that word you like so much but can never remember? The one that’s kind of like your life?

     You’ve almost got it, you say. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Sort of like “trophy.” That’s it! Entropy! Wonderful word. And that reminds you…

     And sometimes, while you were driving, you say, you’d think about the things you wanted to say to the kids, grown now. Like, you miss the way Caroline used to play “Fur Elise” hour after hour. And Buddy practiced baskets out by the garage til it was pitch dark and your head ached.

     You say you dreamed, between Maple Grove and St. Cloud, that you and Eleanor would take a cruise through the Greek Islands. Samos and Mykonos and the rest, the water there as blue as your sister’s eyes.

     Whatever happened to empty-time dreams? Whatever happened to empty time? Whatever happened to me-alone time, just me inside my head, luxuriating there, writing poems, designing next year’s garden, inventing the next big thing in telecommunications or space travel or kitchen gadgetry?

     Do you still know how to dream? Do I?

****

December 18, 2011

ANGEL HAIR

Perhaps you remember it. Angel hair. I think a law was passed forbidding its sale because it was spun glass, bits of which could get into your skin or eyes.

You brought it out at Christmas. It was a little like cotton batting, maybe not quite so thick, and you pulled it, thinning out gauzy strands you then arranged on the Christmas tree, especially around the lights, those jolly fat lights that, wih metallic reflectors behind them, looked like psychedelic flowers.

Grandma left the tree-decorating to others. If the weather was sunny, she might be in the kitchen making divinity. You didn’t make divinity in the winter, when the air was damp and gray, as the candy would never “set.”

Since it took nearly forever to beat the candy by hand, I sometimes helped. Grandma did own a Mixmaster, but she didn’t use it for the divinity or for beating angelfood cake batter, either. Perhaps she was saving the Mixmaster for “good.” Any number of things were saved in Grandma’s house for “good” — things too dear in cost or sentiment to be taken for granted and possibly broken.

To help with beating the divinity was both a chore and an honor, a sign that I was growing older. Besides, I could steal a bit while it was still gooey, the best time. That divinity and angel hair could heighten the holiday together, was surely apt.

In the living room, the angel hair was catching the colors of the lights and the ornaments, softening them and dispersing them in a pale foggy haze. Magical. I would lie on the sofa staring into the tree, wanting to crawl inside, where further magic might be found.

In the soiled slush of March, angel hair dreams drowned. But in the dark heart of the next dying year, someone, Grandpa maybe, would set up a tree. Good smelling, yes, but just a tree like every other good-smelling tree — till the moment where the lights flared on and the watery, gossamer hues of angel hair drew you, as before, into freshly spun dreams.

                     Happy Holidays! 2011

****

Nov. 1, 2011

What About The Candy?

Halloween is my least favorite holiday, if holiday it is. I don’t remember enjoying it even as a child. Well, not beyond the candy.

Late October in Minnesota is usually teeth-rattlingly chilly, especially on the prairie where the wind screams across the Dakota border. When Dakotans say Badlands, they know whereof they speak. Consequently, when I was little, we wore winter coats over our costumes and, frankly, fairy princesses and ballerinas lose something in that translation.

By middle school or, as it was once called, junior high school, we were old enough to stay out til ten, soaping windows and stealing unpicked apples from neighborhood trees. High crimes and misdemeanors in 1946.

In high school, the boys took to tipping over country outhouses while some of us walked through the cemetary without flashlights. One of us fell into a newly dug grave. That was sort of interesting.

But, truth to tell, in childhood I was surrounded by family women who, had they lived in a different country, might well have been shunned as witches.

They read tea leaves, coffee grounds, and tarot cards, and deciphered the lines in our palms. They interpreted dreams and knew their way around a ouija board. When we children were sick, they dosed us with weird tasting herbs they had gathered along roadsides. Ghosts visited them, and my women dared to talk to them. If they dreamed of death, invariably someone close too the train west, as they say.

Compared with them, Halloween was ho-hum.

****

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

A Cry in The Night

It has started. It started last night, the night of September 12, 2011. The bedroom windows were open. A full moon, or one that was so nearly full as to make no difference, shone through the windows at the head of the bed.

Returning from the library, I enjoyed a Scotch-on-the-rocks, read a chapter of Georgette Heyer, and was about to drift off when I heard it. The cry announcing death, in this case, the death of summer.

The temperature had risen into the eighties during the afternoon. I’d worn white linen pants and a linen shirt to the library. White linen pants mean summer.

But there it was, the cry. High in a moon-bleached night, a squadron of Canada geese were gathering into their arrow formation and discharging themselves southward into the night. “Good-bye,” they cried again and again. “Good-bye.”

Every year, at the sound, a chill gathers around my soul. I am not a winter person. I once thought I was. I was mistaken.

When the snow is fresh, winter is beautiful. In movies.

A second home is out of the question, and Dan likes it here. I like it, too, except for winter. But as days grow short, I begin to gloom. One of my excellent daughters gave me a full-spectrum lamp, and that’s fine. God knows I wouldn’t send it back. But the lack of warm is as insidious as the lack of light. I want to walk in warm, swim in it, eat it and drink it.

And so, the cry in the night follows me into sleep, where I clutch the covers, wrapping them tight around me under a hot September moon.