past present

There is a beautiful old French saying that goes something like this:

“The manner of giving is worth more than the gift.”

It sounds much better in French, though I forget who said it exactly. But based upon personal life experience, I’d like to offer this somewhat less eloquent, Americanized variation:

“The entertainment value of the receiving experience can be worth WAY more than the gift, the manner of giving, your car payment, and the national debt combined, depending upon who’s currently President.”

This might sound a lot better in French too, or maybe even Portuguese, but I digress.

My point is this, and perhaps you can relate: I have had some decidedly wacky gift-getting experiences. As I get older, I realize that I’m losing my ability to remember the actual gifts themselves, but the ordeal of receiving remains uncomfortably vivid.

Exhibit A: my mother, who for years worked in the customer service department of a major department store. Combine mom’s employee discount with her God-given ability to sniff out bargains, and you’ve got the recipe for some amazingly good deals. So good, in fact, that our beloved matriarch developed a habit of screaming out the purchase price as the gift was being opened. It was almost like pulling the string on my old Chatty Cathy doll. Rrrrip goes the paper. “TWO DOLLARS!” Rrrrip goes the paper. “A BUCK EIGHTY-NINE!” Bridal showers, memorials, you name it, didn’t matter. No occasion was too solemn for what we eventually termed MMMT, Mom’s Markdown-Motivated Tourette’s. At some point, you’d realize everyone in the room had begun silently calculating your personal discount quotient in their head.

Moving on to my 23rd birthday. It started out as a nice enough occasion: family, cake, double-helpings of Lou Malnati’s pizza. I’m not sure whose idea it was to hire the surprise entertainment, but I do know that’s not where the real problem started. The real problem started when the agency sent my perfectly appropriate G-rated birthday clown to the bachelorette party, and the bachelorette party stripper to me. Things got worse when this individual, a burly fellow named Basil with what can only be described as deeply impaired powers of observation, launched into his act with such unrestrained gusto that he failed to note the preponderance of 5-year-olds in the room. What ensued looked like a tame version of Godzilla vs. Mothra, with clothes flying, kids and parents screaming, food splattering and furniture smashing as every last guest fled the area. There was even the brief threat of blood as my boyfriend at the time, probably more shocked than anyone, actually picked up Basil and tried to deck him in mid-act. But ironically, and fortunately for his face, Basil had at least opted to keep his glasses on.

And then there’s that time-honored practice of re-gifting. Once, when I still lived in my tiny efficiency apartment, a neighbor presented me with a marginally-used canister of blue crystal bath salts. This was intended as a get-well present following surgery. Yes, Harbor Mist – I remember the name and the scent to this day. There were only two real problems:

1) My doctor had prohibited actual bathing for two weeks; and
2) My bathroom was only equipped with a shower stall.

I gazed at my well-meaning friend as she beamed at me over the giant utility container -- the fragrant aroma of Harbor Mist suffusing our nostrils -- struggling to formulate just the right words of gratitude. I envisioned myself running in small circles around my cramped shower enclosure, stitched up like Raggedy Ann, tossing handfuls of Harbor Mist bath salts in the air so they would stick to my damp skin like kitty litter.

Fortunately, the reason for her unusual gift selection soon became fairly obvious as she sneezed mightily, then sneezed again, and again, spraying half the container contents all over the room.

Price of the actual gift: Free, minus the cost of professional carpet cleaning. Memory of the look on both our faces: Priceless. And I guess that part is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

counterintuitive

Thought for the day: "Within dedicated commitment lies incredible freedom."
~ Author Unknown

our own beds

True story: While running some errands the other day, I spot a middle-aged couple casually strolling across the four-lane highway. They’re deep in animated conversation, walking against the signal with oncoming traffic swirling around them.

These two continue chatting away as they amble right in front of my car, which forces me to a complete stop as I approach the right-hand turn lane. Eyebrows suspended, I wait maybe half a beat before tapping the horn and gesturing at the green light dangling 20 feet yonder.

The guy flinches as if I’d pulled up and beeped in his bathroom, then shares a couple creative gestures of his own. Next he starts hollering something about the sidewalks being blocked with snow, and where else are they supposed to walk. Okay, can’t argue there. Except that he’s making this perfectly valid point while standing smack in front of my idling two-ton CRV -- which still has the green, mind you -- with honking vehicles hurtling just inches from his waving arms. His companion finally runs back and drags him to the curb.

True story: Three powerful Pacific storms pound California with heavy rain and snow in January, forcing hundreds of evacuations; flooding major interstates; unleashing lightning strikes on two commercial jets; and spawning multiple killer tornadoes.

Despite urgent pleas from authorities, some residents simply refuse to heed evacuation orders. One couple puts their faith in a 2-foot-high wall of sandbags surrounding their home.

“Look at our house,” says the wife. “We’re well-fortified here. If any rain or mud or anything comes down, it’ll be blocked by our barricades and we’re stocked with food and water.” Police deputies ask the couple to sign actual forms stating they’ve been advised of the danger. They also warn them against pleading for rescue later, recounting the post-Katrina chaos of New Orleans.

Despite these painstaking efforts, officials report only about a 40 percent compliance rate by residents throughout the region. “We’re not going through all this because your carpet is going to get wet,” laments one exasperated sheriff. “We’re doing it because your flipping life is at stake, and other lives will be jeopardized trying to save you later.”

True story: Jet-setting White House party crashers the Salahis invoke their Fifth Amendment right repeatedly during a preliminary House hearing; so many times, in fact, that one aggravated committee member finally asks whether the couple is actually in the room. The couple’s lawyer reiterates his clients’ belief that they were entitled to be at the dinner, neglecting to mention the reality TV cameras that have followed them around for months.

Defending our right to our position is a big deal in this country. I guess that’s what being “free” is all about. But does anybody else feel like we increasingly invoke principle at the expense of common sense? Does it even matter anymore what gets compromised, or who becomes inconvenienced – even incapacitated – so long as we get what we want? Do we stop to think about the bigger impact … which, all too often, comes back to haunt us as well? Case in point: today’s headline about growing disenchantment with the ongoing economic stimulus effort, positioned right next to a headline about homeowners continuing to walk away from outsized mortgages.

My great-aunt Florence used to have a saying: “If God didn’t want us to use our brains, he would have stuffed our heads with ricotta cheese.” I’m starting to wonder if maybe he didn’t, and so he did. Buy hey, you know, I guess that's just not my problem.

vital signs

“They’re right: I have lost something. I'm not exactly sure what it is; but I know I didn't always feel this... sedated.”
~ Lester Burnham, in American Beauty


Have you ever seen the movie Fight Club? I guess you’d call it a coming-of-age story about an unremarkable everyman who feels compromised, confused and disconnected from his life; and about where those feelings lead him.

The film’s director once gave an interview which, in my opinion, summed things up very nicely: “We humans are designed to be hunters, and we find ourselves in a society of shopping and consumerism. There's nothing to kill anymore -- nothing to conquer or overcome in our daily reality. We’re not even really necessary to a lot of what's going on. It's already been built; it just needs to run now.” What results, I suppose, is perhaps the ultimate form of emasculation … and the hands-on-violence-seeking members of Fight Club explore one way to recapture that connection.

It surprised me to find I was most affected by an earlier part of the film’s setup, wherein the protagonist (if that’s what you’d call him) attends a disjointed series of support group meetings to encounter individuals “with real problems.” And even though the film spends limited time with these people, to me that’s where the bona fide fighting occurs. A more quietly desperate kind of fighting, maybe, but no less brutal and bloody than the battles depicted later in the film.

I’m not sure if I’d have noticed this distinction even a decade ago. But in the intervening years, I’ve had the gift –- oddly uncomfortable term, but yes, the gift -- of climbing into the ring with people who have not been granted the luxury of disconnection. Maybe, like me, they existed for a time in that predictable, sanitized sameness that many come to occupy –- commuting back and forth to work, watching TV, folding laundry, wondering what’s for dinner. And then one day, maybe without any warning at all, they were jolted to the realization that they live on a fault line.

For some, that fault line might be an addiction; for others, a loss; for still others, a threatening health condition. But no matter how you label that fault line, there’s one consistent truth: It forces its inhabitants to redefine everything they know. They become exceedingly, even excruciatingly aware of a certain ... volatility. And those who summon the courage to exist in that space, those who muster the resolve to push back, are irrevocably, electrically awake.

You have to look very closely. Because outwardly, this awakening often fails to resemble the kind of thing a caffeine-charged society might expect. It may show itself as nothing more than an awareness of moments, a tone of quiet thoughtfulness, even a tendency toward stillness. But inside, the gloves are off as an old reality shatters, pretext evaporates, pride and vanity clatter to the ground like some gilded shield discarded.

The rest of society –- the ones Fight Club was meant to reach, I imagine -– often consider these people fragile, broken, weak. Interesting. Because I’ve noticed that as they struggle and thrash to get up, and get up, and get up, they frequently manage to lift others with them.


"When I was little, my cousin had a pregnant dog, just a mutt, who was due to have her puppies in about a week. She was out in the yard one day and got in the way of the lawnmower, and her two hind legs got cut off. The vet said, "I can sew her up, or you can put her to sleep if you want, but the puppies are okay. She'll be able to deliver the puppies."

My cousin said to keep her alive.

So the vet sewed her backside and over the next week the dog learned to walk. She didn't spend any time worrying, she just learned to take two steps in front and flip up her backside, then take two steps and flip up her backside again. She gave birth to six little puppies, all in perfect health. And when they learned to walk, they all walked just like her."
~ Gilda Radner (1946 – 1989)

in the cards

Before my grandmother suffered the stroke that would eventually debilitate her, she'd apparently meant to give me something. I learned this weeks after we moved her cross-country from an urgent care ward to a round-the-clock nursing facility, when my mother was going through her belongings. In Grandma's purse was an old mass card wrapped in wrinkled paper. On the paper, written in my grandmother's wispy-thin penmanship, was my first name and the beginnings of a sentence. It's not clear what the sentence was destined to mean; my grandmother was evidently interrupted while she was writing. But it is clear that she wanted me to have the mass card. Looking back, she'd actually mentioned it over the phone once, the very last time I heard her voice.

My grandmother was always the kind of grandmother who loved with such stifling ferocity that, as a child, it instilled actual fear in my heart. When I developed a case of winter bronchitis, she'd be on the phone letting me have it for leaving my coat unzipped at recess. She'd follow that up with advice for such complicated vitamin concoctions that I had to pass the receiver to my mother for interpretation. Later, when I'd suffer breakups and dating fiascos in high school, each hapless young man would become the unassuming target of Grandma's wrath -- whether he deserved it or not. "You tell Eddie," wheezed my grandmother, whose asthma was no match for her hair-trigger Italian temper, "that if I ever see his mother on the street, I'm going to ask her how she could manage to raise a SON who apparently has NO CONSIDERATION WHATSOEVER for the upstanding young women the GOOD LORD has sent into his UNDESERVING LIFE." Her ire whipped into a frenzied, irrevocable crescendo, Grandma would then typically launch into a string of old-country curse words with such vigor and gusto that she'd ultimately break off into a series of rattling coughs, forgetting to hang up the phone altogether.

Over time, age and a string of health challenges managed to mellow my grandmother oh-so-slightly. She still dispensed her hard-won wisdom with refreshingly feisty candor. She still believed, deep in her heart of hearts, that massive quantities of garlic would alleviate just about anything. But Grandma's overbearing passion gradually softened from the fiery mama-wolverine variety into a fiercely supportive loyalty. Always, her pointed words of encouragement were grounded in her devout Catholic upbringing, emphasizing the importance of faith and the enduring love of God. And somehow, nothing could make me feel more secure and protected than that familiar, wizened old voice.

As I wade through my own challenges today -- some so troubling that I'm virtually paralyzed at the thought of their outcome -- I find myself pining to hear that voice once again. Yet I know its time is expired. Grandma now sits in her wheelchair, her whispers unintelligible, laughing at everything, smiling at nothing, sealed away from the world's trials and triumphs and tears. And as she nods benevolently I clutch that final mass card like a talisman; the one wrapped in that wrinkled, coffee-stained scrap of paper, the one that bears my name. I turn it over and over and look at it, like some obscure baton that's been passed, straining to remember the echo of fiercely reassuring words that will never come again no matter what the future might hold.

The sentence scribbled at the bottom begins "I will always" before trailing off into nowhere.

picture this

When I was younger, somebody (okay, an old flame) once told me that I didn’t inspire a lot of “Kodak moments.” It was during a breakup – the final parting shot, actually – and let me tell you, it scored a direct hit on the nerve it was targeting. I have always been somewhat solitary and reserved, a bit of a loner, and a chronic worrier to boot. You can imagine how this could potentially suck the life out of any wild parties waiting to happen.

So I did what any sane, dejected, mortally insulted person would do: I took it to heart with a vengeance. In fact, over the next several years, you could say that being crowned the Kodak Poster Girl became my mission in life. I hung out with musicians, tattoo artists, celebratory divorced people, and other spur-of-the-moment types. I became nuanced in the art of club-hopping and buying complimentary rounds of shots; carrying on futile conversations with my victims who, once propped securely yet contentedly against the bar, insisted on calling me “Marge” or “Amy” or “Sharon” in slurred and raspy voices. I took cruises and road trips and vacations to party-friendly places like Cancun and New Orleans, sleeping on hard-backed chairs or piano benches in those frequent instances when inert, bleary-eyed revelers had claimed every other square inch of surface area. And of course, I took pictures of every single slice in time.

Recently, I came across this mammoth box of photographs which, as you might imagine, had grown to approximate the size of the Berlin Wall. I flipped through hundreds of images showing that blithe, carefree person –- here in a sombrero, there dancing on a picnic table. She looked like an incredibly fun, energetic gal to hang around with. Exhausting, really. I felt kind of winded just looking at her. I also felt a strange sense of detachment. Because as I thought back over that entire span of time, so help me, I couldn’t remember a single moment when I’d felt truly connected to life.

And then I began to muse over more recent, more difficult years; remembering hardships, tears of worry, even fear. But I also recalled watching our dogs romp through a meadow. Adorning our fridge with the faces of sponsored orphans in Africa. Cutting my grandmother’s hair as she sat in her wheelchair, regarding her withered hands. Walking arm-in-arm with my husband, talking and dreaming. Feeling amazement and absolute awe at the unconditional love all around. And as I thought over these images, I realized each one was clear and vibrant and sharp -- both heartening and heartbreaking at once. Because life is a balancing act, and we fall down and get up repeatedly as the balance continues to shift.

And those Kodak moments? I think it’s possible to make such a frantic, driven rush toward something that you actually hurry right past it. Because the real Kodak moments are constantly there for the taking. And the best ones don’t require a camera.

lessons of the fall

When I was young, I hated fall. Short, chilly days. Slate grey skies. Stubby staccato shadows on the sidewalk. And that awful, omnipresent smell of leaf-burning -- a dark, smoky stench that lingered in your clothes and whispered, “Summer’s dead and gone.” To me, fall smelled exactly the way it felt: deflated, defeated, cut off from sunny warmth and reassurance. If summer was the pinnacle of the year, autumn was the plunge down a steep and craggy ravine.

Which is why, driving down the street the other day, I was surprised to catch myself admiring an autumn tree. It really wasn’t much of a tree, just sitting there by its lonesome on someone’s front lawn. But its leaves were its crowning glory: a rich, radiant mix of golds, rusts and reds that burnished to bronze when the light hit them, swirling down to the sidewalk in a lazy confetti spiral that formed a vibrant carpet across the grass.

And as I sat watching this striking display of slow-motion fireworks, it occurred to me that I could identify with that tree. That maybe I could finally appreciate its beauty because I understood that the days of warmth and radiance were mostly behind it. The abundant green foliage had faded away. It stood huddled in the chill; thinking of the winds to come; waiting for the certainty of dark snowy days, frost, freezing rain that would steal away whatever remaining softness and beauty it had.

But there it stood regardless. It stood straight and proud. And it shook down its final adornments in a dazzling firestorm, a gilded and glittering grand finale that rivaled anything the memory of summer could muster. Or the coming of winter could diminish.

I drove away slowly. Cracked the window just slightly. And breathed in the sustaining aroma of that sweet, smoky air.