I often tell new mothers about the “many weanings” a woman goes through and that weaning a child from breastfeeding is just one of many. Now I’m going through another weaning myself: as of this week, all my children will be living on their own.
My oldest son lives back east with two roommates in a rental house. My youngest son is moving into a rental house with three friends. My middle son is moving to a house his girlfriend bought. They’ll be fixing up, painting, installing, redecorating, and clearing the land for many months. I may bring over a KFC bucket and a bottle of wine once in a while, and they may even deign to come over to my house for an actual home cooked Sunday dinner, but things will never be quite the same. The intense living-together time, where people get up in the morning and sit at a kitchen table together, the time when people sleepily wish each other good night: that time has passed for me. (Continued)
I was browsing a department store when I saw them. A beautiful pair of black-and-white checked pants with one-inch cuffs, zippered fly, and a thin black belt. Very Lauren Bacall. I bought the pants and modeled them in front of my mirror several hours later. I’ve never looked good in patterns or pants with flies, but these were so 40s cool and full of vintage glamour. I could BE Lauren Bacall in these pants. My husband would be Humphrey Bogart and I would croon to him, “Just pucker up and blow,” when we did the To Have and Have Not whistling foreplay bit. And we would be romantic and admired and go out dancing somewhere and everyone would say, “Wow, she looks just like Lauren Bacall!” I would be adored, envied, followed, sought after.
After all, I felt a weird connection to Bacall after my family inadvertently camped in the vicinity of the Ohio farm where she and Bogart were married in 1945. Forty-four years later in the spring of 1989, we set up our pop-up trailer in the mists of leafless trees near the fields of Malabar Farm. Malabar was pretty unassuming for the wedding place of such mega stars, but I’m sure Bogie and Bacall must have had the privacy they wanted. Sitting in our trailer–my hair smashed under a wool cap nursing my five-month-old, chilled to the bone as my husband cooked breakfast–I could just stare across withered corn stalks to a site of American movie royalty. (Continued)
Sometimes I think my whole adult life I’ve been searching for the eight-year-old me. The eight-year-old who was so confident, creative, and sure back in 1956. That little girl who wrote stories about collies and Army men and nuclear war, who made up plays with her marionettes, held circuses in her backyard, directed plays, and painted the paint-by-numbers sets sent by grandparents.
I wanted to be an archaeologist and live outside Cairo, dig up ancient tombs, and carefully brush sand off of mosaics and painted sarcophagi. I remember sitting in Principal Virginia Gerling’s office and paging through a huge book on excavating Egyptian artifacts. I wanted to sit under a canopy swathed in white cotton in the Valley of the Kings with my whisk broom, paint brush, and dental tools picking at dirt surrounding golden statues. Where’d that little girl go? (Continued)
Goodbye parties: first of all, you don’t get many. Second, they’re a unique opportunity to honor someone when they’re alive. Along with weddings and showers, a goodbye party is a chance to gather, appreciate, love, and give credit. But, as this cautionary tale will tell, at many public occasions, there’s also a chance to blow it.
We were leaving our small southeastern New Mexico town at last. After a two-week glad-you’re-on-board trip back east, my husband was set to drive all five of us to our new home in western Ohio.
I’d supervised the household packing weeks before, our three-week-old baby on my hip. The house was for sale and we were now living out of a hotel. The moving van was already on its way east. Our driver had seemed a little too energetic to me, and I worried he was doing drug deals with the local muscle men he’d hired to help him. Maybe he’d get stopped and our household goods would be impounded while the police sorted out the driver’s real cross-country mission. (Continued)
I love the desert. I’m getting a divorce. I’m selling my suburban Salt Lake home. And, for the first time in my entire life, I have the chance to decide where to live all by myself. Right now I’m choosing Moab, Utah. To me it seems a combination of Hawaii, Nome, and Borrego Springs: all oddball places whose quirkiness and remoteness appeal to me. But here’s what some of my friends and family are warning me about.
Moab’s too remote.
Yes, it’s four hours from Salt Lake City. You drive there by taking the dreaded Route 6 with lots of curves shared with trucks, occasional washouts, and godforsaken Helper and Price which are charming in a boom-town-gone-bust-with-nice-waitresses kind of way. Or you can buzz down I-15 and I-70. But, Moab isn’t remote in a scary-weirdo-Charles-Manson kind of way. To me it seems more Burning-Man-Wall Drug-Park City: arty, outdoorsy, creative, upscale, no apparent zoning, and drink-beer-on-your-porch remote. (Continued)
My dad was a brilliant suburban Cleveland kid, a loner, and an only child till his little brother came along when he was 12. Starting his teenage years with a little tag-along brother couldn’t have been easy. He wasn’t brilliant in school academics, though, telling my brothers and me that his teacher separated the class into the Flowers and the Weeds, and that he always sat in the Weed Row.
He met my mother in the high school band: she played clarinet and he played trumpet. Dad courted her by blasting trumpet fanfares in the elementary school playing field across the street from her house. Their first date was on a band trip in Elkhart, Indiana, where they went to a movie together while the band was doing I don’t know what. The band trip chaperons perhaps didn’t even know they’d gone missing. I never asked which movie they’d gone to see. (Continued)
Saturday, November 17, 2007
I finished my 60th birthday present of spending 60 days in Paris: one day each for 60 years lived. I’ve tabulated below my activities, whereabouts, and visits for those 60 days.
Tuileries Garden: many walk-throughs
Notre-Dame Cathedral: many walk-bys and visits; walking up the stairs for view from the top: 1 time
Louvre: 4 visits
Musee d’Orsay: 3 visits
Pompidou Center’s museum of modern art: 3 visits
Basilica of Sacre Couer Church in Montmartre: 3 visits
(Continued)
Friday, November 16, 2007
I’ve listed below my top ten reasons to travel to Paris. Maybe you’ll be able only to visit a day or two, or stay for a week, or maybe you’ll be able to move your household to the Left Bank. In my modest 60 days here, these are the reasons I think make sense for making the effort to visit this spectacular (the Eiffel Tower!) and difficult (this is the third day of a transporation strike and I’m not sure how I’ll get to the airport on Sunday) French capital.
10. Paris is part of your literary culture. You’ve read literature based in Paris or you’ve seen plays and movies based on French books. From Honore Balzac to Victor Hugo to Jules Verne to Marcel Proust, Paris holds much of your impressions of the world of words. I saw Victor Hugo’s home today on La Place des Vosges. I saw Marcel Proust’s bedroom reassembled in the Musee Carnavalet yesterday. And I’ve seen Auguste Rodin’s plaster and bronze images of Honore Balzac at the Rodin Museum. This is the real deal.
(Continued)
Thursday, November 15, 2007
It was supposed to be foggy and cloudy, but it was sunny. We were supposed to be tired, but we were energized. There was a transportation strike, but we were walking. These factors all made a perfect combination for a trek up la butte of Montmartre. I hadn’t realized we were walking up to the Montmartre’s old gypsum mines.
Walking straight north from the apartment, my friend and made our way to the old village of Montmartre, originally a Roman temple, then a Benedictine monastery. Montmartre is still the highest point (at 420 feet) in Paris and is topped by the Basilica of Sacre Couer (pictured below). Montmartre was its own village, separated from Paris by a wall, until 1860 when it was incorporated into the city.
(Continued)
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Sometimes you fool yourself into thinking you’ve pretty much seen all the gorgeous art there is to see. You’ve seen towering sculptures by Michelangelo. You’ve seen the sketch-like brushwork of Fragonard. You’ve marveled at the pastels of Cassatt, and you’ve looked goggle-eyed at works by Van Gogh, Soutine, Lautrec, and Monet. I just hadn’t realized some works of medieval needlepoint would take my breath away.
The Musee National du Moyen Age–the National Museum of the Middle Ages–better known as the Cluny Museum, is a Left Bank treasure of stone heads, Byzantine ivories and altarpieces, stained glass, fabrics, and tapestries. This museum is in a medieval house built on top of Roman baths (one of three sets on the Left Bank) on busy Boulevards St. Germain-des-Pres and St. Michel. ”The Cluny” may be built of stone, but at its heart are works of sublime beauty: the six tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn.
(Continued)
