May 8, 2010

Learning to Fly

Posted by butterandtoast under Childhood, growing up, how we live, post-30, To Do | Tags: , , , |
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When I was in high school, my best friend and I sneaked out of her house at night and walked around the golf course, looking at the stars (we were bad-ass like that). We were deep into Seal at the time and we sang the lyrics to “Crazy” at the top of our lungs as we waded through the damp, tall summer grass: In a world full of people, only some want to fly, isn’t that crazy? In a sky full of people only some want to fly, isn’t that crazy? Crazy…


Seal really knows how to drive home a point.

As we sang the words, my friend and I had a teenage epiphany–it is crazy, we thought, that we can all fly but don’t. We should get our pilot licenses this summer.  And fly to Hollywood. And see if The Peach Pit really exists.

Though our goals were a little ambitious, the nugget of truth, encased in solid ’90s pop lyrics, is an important idea that I still think about: There are plans we make when we are young with every possibility in front of us, but then we start making other plans along the way and all of the sudden flying seems dangerous,  The Peach Pit seems silly, and Hollywood seems cliche. We become more risk averse and more cynical.

For my 29th birthday I asked my husband for a flying lesson. Thirty was looming before me and we were talking about having a baby in the near future, and I thought, It’s now or never.

And then Chicago’s fall was too blustery to go up in the plane. And then it was winter storm season. And then I got pregnant.

So I guess it’s never. On the flying thing anyway. I knew the moment I saw the positive pregnancy test that my days of risk-taking-that-could-end-in-physical-harm days were over. I had a clear responsibility to my child that, first and foremost, involved being alive.

www.agdesktop.com

(I’ll admit that I entertained the idea again recently. But, being heavily influenced by fictional characters, I put my wings away forever when I saw Lost‘s John Locke had put his father and himself in a wheelchair on his first solo flight. I mean, John Locke is man of faith, so if he couldn’t make it past lift-off, my chances seemed slim).

However, there is a difference between physical challenges and mental challenges. I can’t say I’ve dabbled much in the former–a belly button ring at age eighteen…pregnancy…one time in NYC I moved an air conditioner across town by myself–but I’ve never been the marathon-running, mountain-climbing, master-cleanse-drinking kinda gal. I dislike feeling chilly, let alone physical pain.

But mental challenges I can do. Auditioning as an actor in New York City was as cruel and unusual as it gets in that department. Or, day after day, week after week,  standing in front of 34 eighteen-year-olds who’d rather be anywhere but my class, trying to connect Beowolf to their difficult, stressful urban lives. (I get sweaty just thinking about some of my first classes in the large urban school system where I taught).

Besides, physical challenges are so 2004, when Gwyneth was still macrobiotic and people still cared if David Blaine survived in his stupid Plexiglass box above the River Thames. If it weren’t for my husband’s obsession with reading the Patagonia Catalog like it were a lost book from the Bible, I would toss it into the recycling bin faster than I do my mutual fund’s annual report (am I seriously supposed to read that? it’s a phone book).

Physical risks out, mental risks in.

So I am starting a To Do list. The goals are mine, for myself or my family. It would be way too easy at this point in my life, with a lot of big details settled, to forget to set any new goals unless I write them down, get them out there, and think about them every now and then. Just like everything else, it’s a work in progress.

 

April 30, 2010

Sidewalk Philosophies

Posted by butterandtoast under City Life, how we live | Tags: , , |
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http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c233/adamslifeblog/delavega.jpg

My block is covered in trash (largely by virtue of living off of a major avenue where styrofoam cups and cigarette packs seem to consistently redirect themselves onto my quiet(er) street), and it’s a good thing my little pal and I have suspension on our stroller or we would sometimes have a hard time getting to the park between the empty milk cartons and (bizarrely) full, yet abandoned, gallons of laundry detergent.

Yesterday I found a quarter pound of deli-sliced turkey outside my doorstep. The mind reels.

And while the trash bothers me, I have to admit, the graffiti covering most of my neighborhood does not, in fact, bother me as much as it sort of amazes me: Where do they find the time?

The most popular tagger is a guy who writes Oh Shit on everything from mailboxes to doorways; fire escapes to picket fences. Oh Shit is relentless. It seems he either has a very flexible work schedule or simply no other hobbies, because I find his tags covering every immovable object within a four mile radius. I really don’t know how he keeps up, what with all of the pre- and post-gentrified businesses going in and out of storefronts, and the city’s Graffiti Busters making the rounds.

And what does he mean when he writes Oh Shit? His inflection isn’t clear and I run the phrase in my head countless times a day as I pass his tags:

Oh Shit, I did it again!
Oh Shit, my rent is due!
Oh Shit, I look good!
Oh Shit, my hairline is receding!

Less proliferate, but more intriguing, is a tagger whose message is more clear: Forgive Yourself. I love this guy. I fancy him to be some sort of street philosopher in the tradition of De La Vega.

When I lived on the Upper East Side, De La Vega was everywhere, especially on sunny spring days. Considering his method of delivery was sidewalk chalk, the weather had a lot to do with how often I ran into his work. But when I did (and sometimes it could be ten encounters in one walk from the train) I always smiled and slowed down and felt happy that someone in New York City was self-possessed enough to take entire afternoons to write messages of hope and intrigue from 52nd to 96th Streets: Become Your Dream, Enjoy Today As If It Were Your Last, You Can Sell Your Soul and Not Even Know It, and, one of my favorites:

Imagine running into that on the sidewalk?

It always felt like De La Vega was talking directly to me, but I felt it most strongly when I read this bit of advice, walking home from a temp job in my Payless shoes. At the time I was a struggling actress, keeping the tags on  clothes in my closet in case I needed to return them for extra cash come the first of the month. And this was before iPods or cell phones, when there were few ways to shut out the crowds of people and really think about your life and the choices you were making. When I ran into De La Vegaisms, I always felt singled out for serendipity; I walked away more hopeful, peaceful, and re-focused.

And the real beauty of his words is that they are universal, like a chalk fortune cookie. It was an obvious connection for me–I was an actress in New York City, looking for encouragement that I should continue to pursue my dream. But others–social workers, lawyers, garbage collectors–had dreams, too. Dreams of being of service to his clients, of paying off her debt, of sending his kids to college. And those people needed some reminding of the value and legitimacy of those goals. I always felt that De La Vega was generous to provide that for so many people.

And now, as I walk past foreclosed houses on my street, boarded up, with bright neon stickers on the door (Scarlet Orange Letters) I am comforted by the Forgive Yourself that has been sprayed onto the plywood door that now bars the owner from entering his home…Or what was his future home…Or his dream home. And with such a simple phrase, this nighttime philosopher seems to give both the owner and neighborhood a chance at rebirth.

Sometimes he only writes Forgive–I wonder if he ran out of paint, was caught by the police mid-spray, or just wanted to expand his message a little–in any case, I like it equally well; it seems to say, others need forgiveness and you are the one standing in the way. After seeing this word, I often think about how I have to forgive someone important in my life–my spouse, a family member–but sometimes I just have to forgive the cashier at the grocery store whose idea of customer service was a snarl and an eye roll. Forgive her; who knows what kind of day she’s having. (And then, Forgive Yourself for thinking you are better than she is.)

I wonder if Oh Shit and Forgive Yourself ever meet, walking the streets late at night with spray paint cans rattling in their pockets. Do they know of each other’s existence? If so, are they annoyed when one has stolen prime real estate from the other?

Are they friends? Enemies? Are they strangers? Are they childhood acquaintances? Or, maybe, serendipitously, are they the same person?

Oh, Shit.

 

April 13, 2010

The Antedote to Watching Hardball

Posted by butterandtoast under education, how we live, Reading and Writing | Tags: , , |
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The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

by Wallace Stevens

 The house was quiet and the world was calm.
 The reader became the book; and summer night
 Was like the conscious being of the book.
 The house was quiet and the world was calm.
 The words were spoken as if there was no book,
 Except that the reader leaned above the page,
 Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
 The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
 The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
 The house was quiet because it had to be.
 The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
 The access of perfection to the page.
 And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
 In which there is no other meaning, itself
 Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
 Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

I love this poem. I wanted to paint it as a border along my son’s room when I was decorating his nursery, but it wouldn’t have fit in the space. It is the kind of poem that seems onomatopoeiatic: As you read you become more calm, and figuring out the sense in who is reading, and who is leaning, and what “perfection to the page” means, simply falls away by the end of the read. Who cares? It feels so good just to hear the words.

It’s nice to have a cup of tea and read a good poem, but I don’t do it very often–and I am an English teacher. What is it about poetry that we love and hate at the same time, with the same forcefulness? A poem I give to one student might make his head want to ooze. And the same poem can create calm or comfort for another student in a way she’s never had before.

And the world was calm…

There is a great non-profit called The Favorite Poem Project. They interview regular people (and famous people) about a poem that has meant something to them. Lots of the responses are surprising. And, though one of my all-time favorite poems, “At the Fishhouses” by Elizabeth Bishop, is featured by a professor of law, my favorite video is of  a retired anthropologist in his eighties who describes the comfort Shakespeare’s Sonnet #29 gave him while patrolling the night shift in the Navy. I had to memorize #29, in an acting class in college, and its surprising optimism and honesty has always stuck with me:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Shakespeare knew what he was talking about. Who hasn’t wished to be more hopeful and easy-going? Or looked at another person who seems to have more–more friends, a more exciting career, more talents and abilities? The narrator touches on a feeling everyone has had over centuries and centuries…I love that. It’s comforting.

And what’s more comforting is the turn in the Sonnet #29: Yet. You can’t beat that word when things are looking bad:Yet. Yet gives us hope that things can go a different way.

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
…that then I scorn to change my state with kings.

And thee’s not a bad close second as far as good words go. Haply I think on thee. And it’s so true. Right when we feel like someone else has more, more of something we desperately want, then we remember someone that we have that no one else does–our spouse, our kids–and we can say, So What. I’m happy.

There’s something so awesome about the timelessness of a poem, relatable to many people over many generations; we have such a lack of history in our culture these days. I am a Lost fan, and there is a reoccurring idea on the show that if you are traveling through time, the only chance you have at enduring the transitions is to have A Constant–a person or thing that will be there as a stabilizer through the changes. On the show, Desmond has Penny, the love of his life and his best friend. Her companionship is stabilizing for him as he travels back and forth over decades.

In such changing times, it might be nice to have a constant like a poem. A stabilizer in a very unstable world. So, I say, if you don’t like poetry, give it second chance. Think of it like Match.com: Keep looking until you’ve met the one for you. You’ll find it. And, if you do, you will always have the comfort of a companion.

Even if it’s a paper-thin one.

 

April 13, 2010

Butter and Toast

Posted by butterandtoast under kids
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s an English teacher, I have favorite words. Sometimes they are just favorites for how they sound: scurrilous, obliterated, velour. And sometimes for what they mean: hug, simple, moonlit. And then there are rare words that fall into both categories.

When my son was six months old, I was nursing him in the rocking chair and glanced down at his sleeve. He was wearing a cotton one-piece from Children’s Place; it was striped and too long on his little body– I can’t think of anything cuter in the world. Children’s Place had rebranded their infant clothes under the label Baby Place, so the label on his sleeve read just that. But in all lower case: baby place.

I stared and stared at the label, and thought about how wonderful life was since the birth of my little pal. I hadn’t ever been so happy. Every day was full of hope and joy and fun. And then it occurred to me that the simplest, softest, loveliest word in the English language has to be: baby. A perfect little word to represent a perfect little world. A world where needs are met, smiles are freely given, and enthusiasm pops up unexpectedly and more often than one ever thought possible.

baby

Isn’t it cute just to look at?

Whatever sentiment the marketing geniuses at Children’s Place stirred in me that day is the same sentiment that I want my son to feel as he continues to work his way (hopefully not too quickly) through childhood. I want his days filled with dandelion bouquets, balancing spoons on the tip of his nose, crabbing with string and a clothespin, and eating butter and toast with a sprinkle of cinnamon.

There is no greater happiness than that.

Life will get harder and less exciting. More mundane and worrisome. But if my little pal has a simple childhood filled with good things, I hope his essential blueprint will be full of big joy for little things.

 

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