Why I Blog

Ian tagged me for this meme, and I must say, it's had me a bit puzzled, which is why I've been doing things like writing about hangovers and hotdogs instead of tackling it. (In fact, I almost ignored it for another day in favor of one on my favorite reads of the first half of 2007, but that one will have to wait.) I mean, should I pretend there are all kinds of really good, sane, altruistic reasons I blog (after all, I wouldn't really be pretending. I've got some hidden away in a dusty box somewhere that I could drag out if they're not too pissed at me to let me), or should I just come right out and say blogging has been one of the biggest ego boosts I've ever gotten in my life? Well, now that I've said it, and I haven't had to go in search of it, I might as well go with the latter.

When I was in high school, I didn't have much of a reputation for anything except maybe being one of the most quiet kids in the school. However, I was considered to be a good writer, as evidenced by the fact that I was chosen as the copy editor and writer of our yearbook; all the kids in my creative writing class praised what I wrote (although we all praised everything everyone wrote, so that's not the greatest evidence); and my English teachers encouraged me to enter writing contests. But I was in a very small school in a small city in North Carolina, not New York or Paris or something. We've all read plenty of stories of people who thought their talents were greater than they were due to a lack of any real competition.

College was much of the same. I worked on the literary magazine for a semester, but quickly became very disillusioned by the rather nasty ways in which this small group of people, all full of themselves and pretty convinced they would have been sitting around that round table at the Algonquin or something, had they been alive at the time, approached the efforts of their fellow students. I wasn't about to let them see anything I'd written, despite the fact they kept asking if I planned to submit something, and I don't think I even lasted a full semester with them. My professors praised my writing ability, which was something, especially in what is regarded as an excellent English department, but once again, this was still a pretty small world, and they were comparing me to other students. I knew full well what kind of efforts some of those students were putting into their work.

When I worked at the library, I would write tributes to retiring colleagues and humorous columns for our staff newsletters, and everyone, once again, told me I was great. Now this made me stand up and take notice somewhat, because, you know, librarians read. A lot. If they thought I could write, having all that material for comparison right at their fingertips, well, then, maybe I could start taking myself seriously as a writer.

What does someone who takes herself seriously as a writer do? Why, she joins a writers' group, of course! I did. I chose a group of women writers, thinking this would be a nice sympathetic bunch with whom I could comfortably explore my craft. I have no idea why I thought this. Looking back over my life as a "writer," with a few exceptions, it has almost always been male friends and mentors who have encouraged me most to write. I should have known it would be disastrous, and it was. You know those all-so-earnest, intellectual-poser types who wear thick glasses, not because they have to (like I do, which I don't. I wear contact lenses), but because they think it makes them look more studious and serious, and who try to make those who don't have degrees from Ivy League schools feel like idiots? Well, we had four of those in our group, and then we had me. Needless to say, nothing I wrote "rang true."

Writers are nothing if they're not sensitive. I struggled along with this group for a while, thinking all this criticism was good for me. Eventually, though, it wore me down, and I didn't stop to think something was wrong with the group. I just decided it was me and my lack of talent. You know, maybe a woman really shouldn't try to write a ghost story with a sympathetic male character and a touch of humor.

One night I had dinner with my former boss and another colleague, and they slapped me around a bit for paying any attention to what that group had to say. Without actually coming right out and saying it, they made it clear the problem had been that group, not my writing. I was once again buoyed, so when people then started encouraging me to blog, I decided to give it a try.

That first try was unsuccessful, but then I tried again, and here we are. Maybe it happened because I had absolutely no expectations, but I've now found the sympathetic, encouraging, and wonderful support group I was seeking when I joined that horrible writers' group. And in a world where the competition is fearsome (not to mention international), I'm getting praise for what I do. So, yes, my head is growing, and that's not a pretty sight, but it's worth it to have this new feeling of talent.

And then there's the other reason I blog: it's just so much damn fun.

Tagging: Dorr, Hobs, Becky, and Courtney.

Tom Brown's School Days in a nutshell: this was not one of my better choices for my 2007 children's classics challenge. I'm happy there was more to it than that awful fire scene I so vividly remember from my childhood, but it was an odd little book, never seeming to be able to quite make up its mind what it wanted to be: social commentary, a wistful look at boyhood, a lesson in morality...Still, I stuck with it to the end, and some of it is fascinating from a historical perspective.

The Little Known Big Day

I have a dirty little secret, which is probably the main reason I am not and will never be a complete vegetarian: I love hotdogs. You can tell me all you want that they’ve got pig bladders or rat tails or human tongues or whatever in them, and you’re not going to get me to swear off them. If this is what human tongue tastes like, then sign me up as a card-carrying cannibal. As far as I know, I’ve been a hotdog-lover all my life, so much so that I can’t eat split pea soup unless it has hotdogs in it (a sneaky little trick my mother used to pull to get us to eat split pea soup was to cut up hotdogs into the soup). I’m actually pretty amazed we were allowed to eat hotdogs when we were kids, because my mother kept us on a pretty strict and healthy diet, but I guess even the most diligent parents occasionally have to give into ease and providing meals that their kids will eat without complaining.

So, here’s my question. How can I love hotdogs the way I do and have had no idea until Bob went online this morning and discovered it at dogpile.com that today is National Hotdog Day? That’s like a chocoholic not knowing that it’s Valentine’s Day or Easter. But I know why. It’s because Hallmark is falling down on the job. There may be Halloween cards in all the gift shops already, but I’ve seen not a single Hotdog Day card. You want to know what’s worse? This is actually National Hotdog Month. This is America, the country of consumerism! Why are we ignoring such an important month? Forget Christmas in July. Stores could be making a killing off of 31 days of hotdogs in July. I can see the giant buns parents would buy that would be stuffed with toys come July 21st by Sir Frankfurter, a jolly guy who comes in the middle of the night, carrying toys in a hotdog vendor’s cart. Sixteen-year-old boys could be enticed to give their sweethearts fake diamond hotdog pendants. Okay, maybe it’s not so odd that this important occasion is being ignored by gift shops and toy stores, but the grocery stores should at least have their banners flying. When Bob and I were at Trader Joes the other day, no one seemed to be the least bit aware that hotdogs should have been front and center for today’s big event.

It turns out that for me, though, this was the perfect day to be National Hotdog Day. Last night, Bob and I got together with our friends Becky and Mike for mint juleps and dinner. I’ve mentioned before that my tolerance for alcohol is about the same as that of your average white rat, and mint juleps are pretty potent, so I’ve learned that getting together with Mike and Becky for mint juleps and dinner guarantees a hangover the next day. I don’t really mind it, though, as long as I can sleep it off, because the fun and the conversation we have is worth it.

Thus I spent most of the morning sleeping off a hangover and watching DVDs. I was just beginning to feel like I was finally getting hungry for more than my standard hangover remedy of chocolate milk and toast with honey (have no idea why I crave these things when I’m hung over, but I do), when Bob announced we ought to go to our local hotdog stand, because it was National Hotdog Day. I wondered whether or not I was really up to it, but soon my stomach was really kicking up a fuss to be fed, so I pulled back my unwashed hair, threw on a baseball cap and my sneakers, and said, “Let’s go.”

Most of the time, when Bob and I are together, I tend to think about how much alike we are. We love to discuss the same sorts of things. We’re both huge worriers. We’re both extremely passionate and opinionated. I’m always pooh-poohing the notion that “opposites attract.” But then we do things like go to the hotdog stand on National Hotdog Day. This is when I remember, way too late, that I’m a shrinking violet, never wanting anyone to know I exist, hoping to get in and out of places barely having to say a word to anyone. Bob, on the other hand, is the friendly, gregarious, talk-to-strangers-on-the-New-York-subway-which-just-isn’t-done sort. Why, after nearly twelve years of marriage, I hadn’t realized he would feel it was his duty to inform everyone who worked at the hotdog stand as well as everyone who walked through the door that this was such a big day, is beyond me. Chalk it up to my inability to learn from experience or something.

So, there’s Bob, talking it up with everyone from the teenagers taking our orders to the two women who seemed to have spent a little too much time in the sun without sunscreen this morning to the guy who was way too old to be sporting that earring and those sorts of tattoos who had come in with a woman who looked like she really shouldn’t be eating hotdogs, and there was Emily wondering if we were ever going to get our food and be able to leave. I did leave, as a matter of fact, deciding I’d be the one to go stake a claim to one of the dozens of empty tables outside. This wasn’t enough, though. Everyone still knew I was with the crazy “National Hotdog Day guy,” because Bob knew perfectly well my embarrassment was the reason I’d left, so he made sure to wave at me from inside.

Like the hangover, though, all the embarrassment was well worth it, as the hotdog was sublime, despite the fact they forgot to put the cheese on I’d requested, and I wasn’t about to go back in and request it. And that crazy “National Hotdog Day guy?” Well, he turned back into the man who is so much like me as we sat at our little table discussing The Time Traveler’s Wife, one of the few books he and I have ever read simultaneously, and what we should read together next, because we had so much fun reading this one together.

The Tragedy of Comedy

Years ago, for a book discussion group to which I belonged at the time, I tried to read An American Tragedy. I made a gallant effort but just couldn’t get through the whole thing. I’ve never been quite sure why. I’ve gotten through and even immensely enjoyed other great American tragedies written by the likes of Russell Banks, Wallace Stegner, and Richard Wright. I think it’s because Dreiser was just so earnest, and it seems to me he had a nasty way of tantalizingly dangling some hope in front of you and then yanking it away without an ounce of irony or humor to ease the pain. That’s been it, as far as reading Dreiser goes, despite Bob’s urgings for me to revisit An American Tragedy and to try Sister Carrie.

You may be surprised, then, that I’ve been reading Hoosier Holiday by Theodore Dreiser. I discovered this book when I was looking for books about Pennsylvania at the library. I know, the title and author don’t exactly scream “Pennsylvania.” However, I wasn’t doing a title or author search, and this book came up under my subject search. It’s all about a trip Dreiser took in 1916 with a friend of his, artist Franklin Booth, driving from New York City to Indiana. They decided to take a route that took them through Pennsylvania. I thought I'd give it a try. Some might say this was a pretty stupid thing to do. Why choose to read one of the most depressing writer's take on the state to which I'm moving? Would I be screaming and crying to Bob by the end of it that we'll be moving over my dead body? Not one well-known, however, for her ability to avoid doing stupid things, I crossed my fingers and took it home with me. From the cover copy and the bits of the introduction I skimmed, it didn't seem it was going to be at all like Dreiser's more tragic works.

What a joy (and relief) it’s been, and I’m almost ready to re-visit Dreiser’s novels to see if I can find in them even the slightest hint of the very funny, romantic, sentimental, and opinionated man found between the pages of this book. I’m sure he isn’t there, because if I’d caught even a glimpse of him in the pages of An American Tragedy, I don’t think I would have abandoned it until I’d reached the end. I mentioned this to Bob the other day, and he said, “Well, of course it’s different, and you’re seeing a different side of him; he’s not writing tragedy.”

This, and a comment I made on Ian’s blog recently about Shakespeare and his comedies, has gotten me thinking quite a lot lately about tragedy and comedy. There’s a reason courts of old needed jesters (wouldn't it be wonderful if American businesses employed jesters?); we all need comic relief. I mean, even in his most tragic works, Shakespeare adds at least a touch of comedy. Aeschylus had a great knack for making good use of the relief a few chuckles can bring. If you’re not going to give us an inkling of hope, it seems to me you’d better at least give us a laugh or two.

When I worked at the library, my boss, who was an extremely insightful person, once said, “Writing good comedy takes much more talent than writing good tragedy. We all cry over pretty much the same things. It’s much harder to make everyone laugh.” I’ve never forgotten her words (obviously), and it’s made me think about the courses I took in college, in which tragedy was revered. Loving comedy was treated almost as a vice. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a professor at my alma mater who would tell you that Shakespeare’s comedies are really his greater works, and yet it was his comedies that turned around the grudge I’d held against Shakespeare since he was forced on me in sixth grade, led me to see him in a different light, and eventually had me appreciating the likes of Hamlet and King Lear, which I had found unbearable in high school. Likewise, no one at my alma mater would have dared to announce that Aristophanes was greater than Sophocles or Aeschylus. So, I’m standing up for comedy. I agree with my former boss. The fact that these writers' works still have me laughing out loud so many, many years after they were written is pretty amazing.

And when you think about the great comic writers you’ve read and enjoyed, most of them are really writing tragedy. All those laughs are about covering up devastatingly depressing events in which humans find themselves engaged or mistakes we’ve all made. I was listening to NPR the other day and an author, whose name I forget at the minute, was being interviewed to discuss a comic novel he’s just written about the Iraq War. One of the more idiotic questions the interviewer asked him was, “Don’t you expect criticism for writing a funny novel about such a serious event?” I mean, I know, she had a right to ask it, because America has lost its sense of humor, but really, my first question was, “How else does one deal with such a tragic event as the Iraq War?” My second question was, “Would you ask the same question of Jonathan Swift or Mark Twain?” (Actually, someone from NPR, whose recording studios must be one of the most earnest, humorless -- except when the likes of Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris are visiting -- places on earth, probably would.)

So let’s hear it for Dreiser the humorist. I wish he’d written An American Comedy instead. With his eye for detail and the absurd, I’m sure it would have been great.

Not Exactly Minding My Own Business

I’m an eavesdropper, something I’ve been all my life. In fact, I’m so bad that often if I’m out at a restaurant, I might be more tuned-in to the argument going on at the table behind me than I am to the conversation at my own table (depending on how interesting the conversation at my own table is or isn’t). When I was growing up, this habit of mine was considered rude, and I had to be very discreet to avoid being chastised for it, but I’ve decided this is an etiquette standard that needs to go the way of such antiquated standards as insisting men be the ones to walk closest to the building when escorting women down the street so that anything being dumped out of windows, like the contents of chamber pots, won’t land on delicate females. I mean, how can one possibly avoid eavesdropping when stuck in airports and on airplanes for as many hours as I have been over the past two weeks? And if you’re going to hold loud, personal phone calls in public places, you have no right to complain if others are straining to listen, nor do you have any right to complain if said phone call ends up in a blog post or in a book or a movie one day. As a matter of fact, I’d like to create some rules of etiquette for such cell-phone users to follow that demonstrate their thoughtfulness toward the poor people stuck eavesdropping on their conversations.

I used to find loud cell phone conversations extraordinarily annoying, because being an eavesdropper, I can’t concentrate on the book I’m reading when someone is telling his daughter she’d better be home when he gets there, or she’s not going to be allowed to see Ralph anymore. When I’m calling Bob for the fifteenth time to tell him my flight has been delayed yet again, no matter how frustrated I am, I’m always barely whispering into the phone, hoping I don’t disturb those around me.

Then, I got stuck sitting next to the woman in a seat on a plane that was about to taxi out for take-off who was barely whispering into her cell phone and crying. The only thing I managed to catch was, “His kids wouldn’t even say ‘goodbye’ to me.” Come on. If you’re going to whip out your phone for such a call in such tight quarters, the least you can do is speak loudly enough for those of us who have immediately decided this is far more interesting than Tom Brown’s School Days and are dying to know what’s going on. Especially those of us who never, ever cry in public places unless others are crying – those of us who catch tears the ways most catch yawns. There I was, sympathetic lump forming in my throat, and confound it (as someone in Tom’s school would say), I didn’t even know why.

Of course, she had to put away her phone once we were ready for take-off. She wiped her eyes, composed herself, and asked the man next to her if she could borrow sections of his WSJ. I hate to talk to people on airplanes, but I was dying to talk to her. The problem is, I wasn’t dying to talk to her about where she was going, where she’d been, what she does for a living, the way most gabby people on airplanes do. I was dying to ask her why she was crying. I didn’t, though, not even when the drink cart came, and I had the perfect opportunity when she looked at the label on the wine she’d ordered, snorted as she told me she normally wouldn’t drink this stuff, but then explained she needed it after the day she’d had. I just nodded my understanding and kept all my questions to myself. Perfect opportunities hate me, because I always ignore them when they make their appearances.

As soon as we landed, she whipped out her cell phone again, and there I was, trying to catch snippets of what she was saying: something about the need for the youth pastor to go visit him in the hospital. What? Here I’d spent two hours conjuring up some soon-to-be-ex-husband (I’d checked for a wedding band as soon as I’d caught the bits and pieces of that first conversation) or maybe a brother or something who even had his kids giving her the cold shoulder, when there was some young person in the hospital needing a youth pastor? Forget speaking a little louder, so I can hear you. Put the damn phone on speaker and let me hear the whole conversation, please. But I realized I deserved this, as I watched the back of my missed opportunity stepping off the plane.

Next up was the high school kid whose whole conversation I could hear during the few moments she sat next to me at Gate C26 in O’Hare airport. Until she sat down, I’d been busy figuring out that the kitchen could go right there behind the counter, and my bedroom would be right by the windows, so I could have perfect views of all the planes taking off while lying in bed, in my new permanent place of residence. Before I knew it, I was saying “goodbye” to my architect as this kid’s conversation walked through my imagination’s door without knocking and sat down in my favorite chair without asking.

She was talking to some friend about some girl she’d pissed off for not inviting her to be in a dance she’d choreographed. She explained that she wasn’t going to talk to Miss P.O.ed if Miss P.O.ed couldn’t learn to talk on the phone without screaming at her. Miss Choreographer wanted her friend to inform Miss P.O.ed that she (Miss Choreographer) had never said she couldn’t dance. All she’d done is made up a dance that was for four dancers (sorry, but Miss Choreogrpaher wasn’t polite enough to explain to those eavesdropping around her how the lucky four chosen to be in the dance had been chosen. If Miss Choreographer had been the party responsible for choosing the participants, then I would tend to agree with Miss P.O.ed that Miss P.O.ed had not been invited to be in her dance. However, she did give eavesdroppers the news that her dance had most definitely not been a rip-off of some dance on YouTube, because, how stupid would it be for 15-and-16-year-olds to be copying 18-year-olds on YouTube -- you know, there being such a huge difference between the two?).

I think Miss P.O.ed then got on the phone herself, because Miss Choreographer started explaining to this new person she’d never rolled her eyes at her and had never told her she couldn’t be in the dance. However, Miss Choreographer was most definitely going to ignore her now at practices, so don’t be surprised. Just as she was explaining exactly why she can’t be friends with someone who ___________, Miss P.O.ed must have hung up on her. She jumped up from her seat next to mine, informing her poor mother, who was patiently sitting in another row of seats near two younger sisters, she was going to walk around, as she pushed her re-dial button (her story all the more intriguing, because this oh-so-American girl's mother sat dressed in the attire of her native country: India).

I wanted to yell, “Come back!” This had just begun to get really good. I wanted to hear what type of person a girl had to be in order to be her friend. I wanted to know if Miss P.O.ed would get her way. Would she ever get to dance? Would she make up her own dances, with YouTube debuts, and exclude Miss Choreographer? I’ll never know.

But the one that grabbed hold of the romantic who’s a permanent resident at Emily’s Imagination was the guy on another taxi-ing airplane who was obviously in the beginning stages of a new relationship (I’m assuming it was with a woman, as he seemed to be about as heterosexual as they come). Listening to a one-sided flirtation is highly amusing. He was dressed in a Harley Davidson t-shirt and baseball cap, but was asking her if she liked wine, because he had tickets for a wine-tasting and jazz event somewhere (her response caused him to assure her she wouldn’t have to drink any red wine if she only liked white, thus dropping her a notch or two in my estimation). Then he joked about how she was going to think he was all “cultured.” My thought was, “if this is a blind date, and you show up dressed like that, no need to worry.” However, he was so cute in his excitement (the flight attendant had to tell him to turn off his cell phone), and he called her again as soon as we’d landed, I found myself hoping the woman on the other end was as into him as he seemed to be into her. I wanted to follow him around, spy on him, see if I felt she was worthy of him (already suspicious she might not be, you know, because of the whole red wine business).

I think you can understand now why I’m feeling the need for a few new rules of etiquette. I’d like to propose the following. Perhaps Miss Manners will include them in her next book.

1. Speak loudly and clearly, so the eavesdropper next to you can get the full story
2. Before dialing that number, turn to the people sitting around you and give all the background information they’re going to need in order to understand the conversation
3. Do not leave your seat until you have finished the entire conversation
4. When you’ve hung up the phone, invite those around you to follow you around for a few days, so you can meet the people who were on the other end of the phone

The Wives of Others

When I was single, I had one major hard-and-fast dating rule: do not go out with married men. Not that I had hundreds of married men (or any other men, for that matter) lined up, eager to date me, but if I had, they would have been turned down. Even if I hadn’t witnessed a number of friends being crushed and nearly ruined by men who were “on the verge of divorcing” their wives (most of them were still with the same wives years after my friends had moved on), I like to think I still would have been wise enough to think two things: 1. a man who would cheat on his wife would probably cheat on me and 2. that poor wife! You see, I was raised in an era in which all statistical data pointed to the prevalence of cheating husbands and the scarcity of cheating wives. I’m perfectly aware that much of the evidence that was collected to support that finding was gathered when it was more socially acceptable for men to cheat, much less so for women. Thus, results were skewed by lies. My own (completely unsupported. I should have stuck with psychology, so I could design experiments and study this stuff) theory, though, is that women probably did stray less than men, especially in the days when they needed men to support them and to help take care of the children, so were strongly vested in keeping the family together (besides, taking care of a husband, the children, and a house all by themselves was so exhausting, who had time or the energy to stray?).

Being married, on some levels, has made life so much easier for me. I no longer think of any men I meet as potential dates; I'm more relaxed than ever around them; and I no longer shy away from men wearing wedding bands. What I’ve discovered is that if I meet an adorable married man, I’m almost guaranteed to meet a woman I’m immediately going to want to befriend. In fact, the difficulties I’ve often had throughout my life in getting along with women (I’m just not a stereotypical woman. I don’t like to shop; I have an extremely high tolerance for messy houses; I don’t mind if my husband spends hours watching sporting events, because either I am watching with him or I view it as wonderful, extended “alone time;” I don’t have children and am not as crazy about babies as most women seem to be; and I can’t stand to talk on the phone, unless I’m talking with someone I never get to see, and it’s been a while since we last spoke) disappear when I meet the wives of male friends. I seem to meet women who are much more like-minded when I start with their husbands.

Let me give you some examples. I knew Becky’s husband Mike long before I met Becky. Before she came along, I hated his first wife for not treating an obviously wonderful, sweet, and well-rounded man the way he deserved to be treated (mind you, I’ve never laid eyes on the woman, but she couldn’t possibly have had any real taste). I don’t hate her quite so much anymore, though, because that relationship obviously wasn’t meant to be. I loved Becky before I’d ever met her. You would have, too, if you’d seen how giddy Mike was when he announced to me he was getting engaged, and when he said, “If I’d known this is what it’s supposed to be like, I never would have gotten married the first time.” Of course, the fact she’s English helped my empathetic heart. Poor thing was moving to this insane country, coming to work for our insane company, and embarking on her first year of marriage (not always an easy time for those of us who never planned to get married) all at once. She handled it all much better than I would have (I probably would have been on the first flight back to Heathrow after about two months).

Then there’s my friend Ann. I met Ann’s husband Vince when my former boss was wooing him, trying to convince him to move from California to Connecticut. My boss got it into his head that I needed to introduce Vince to my hometown (which I have to admit, if you’re going to move to this area of Connecticut, really is one of the nicest towns), and I was granted a day off to look at real estate with Vince, who is very friendly and a real “guy’s guy.” I quickly decided I liked him very much (good thing, because when I left that company, he took over the supervision of the editors I’d been supervising. Being a “mother hen,” I was very worried about leaving them all to flounder under some complete stranger). It was a while before I got to meet Ann, but we were instant friends as soon as we did. You know how you often feel you’re never going to have friends like the ones you had in college, people with whom you can talk about anything? Well, Ann is one of those friends like the ones I had in college.

And then, of course, there are blogosphere friends. For some reason, I actually “met” Hobs before I met Dorr and was instantly converted to reading his blog religiously. Then I began venturing over to his wife’s blog. Both of them were a bit intimidating at first, so much more well-read and knowledgeable than I, but then I met them in person, and all that faded away. I adore them both, but in real life, I hang out more with Dorr than I do with Hobs. As soon as we’re comfortably settled in PA, Bob’s and my campaign to get them to move down will begin in earnest.

Finally, I still have wives to meet. I’ve known Danny for two years now, but he lives all the way out in California, so we don’t see each other much, and I’ve never met his wife. I’m absolutely convinced that when I finally meet her, though, she’s going to be like a long-lost sister. Poor Danny won’t be able to get a word in edgewise. Oh yes, and when I eventually visit France to meet and tour cheese caves with Mandarine, I can imagine that his wife (provided she speaks English) and I will be so engrossed in conversation, I might forget to taste the cheese. If she doesn’t speak English, I’m sure I’ll pick up French in no time.

Why would any woman want to have an affair with a married man? Isn’t it much more fun to get to know and love their wives?

In Search of Pandas

Thoughts on:

Croke, Vicki Constantine. The Lady and the Panda. New York: Random House, 2005.
This was the third book for my 2007 Nonfiction Five Challenge.

Whenever I pick up a book like this one and begin to read, my first reaction usually runs along such lines as, “Man, all these people lead such exciting lives, and here’s boring old me, barely able to muster the courage to move 200 miles south.” I read a little further, become completely infatuated with a character such as Ruth Harkness, am right there with her as she boards her ship to China, and think, “That’s it. No more boring living for me. I’m going to take advantage of the brief amount of time I have on this exciting planet of ours. It’s high time I sold everything to finance an expedition to China to bring back a panda.” (Disclaimer: I would never dream of kidnapping a baby panda from its poor mother, but maybe if some special herb that only grows on mountain peaks were needed to save lives all over the world, and someone were to be offering monetary rewards to those who would bring it back, I could go collect that. Don’t point out to me that maybe the herb has a family, too.) But then I read passages like this:

The terrain was as formidable as most adventurers would face in a lifetime. Not
only were they climbing steeply at high altitude, but every step held another
obstacle: dense stands of head-high bamboo, great dead logs covered in slippery
moss, fields of knee-deep sphagnum moss engorged with icy water, and snow
slipping off branches onto cheeks and down into coat collars. The constant fog
kept everything wet, conspiring with the moss to make the footing as slippery as
if it were oiled. (p. 121)

I don’t know. I think it’s all that treacherous moss, and my tendency to slip even on dry ground that gets me, but suddenly I find I’m perfectly content to sit in my own home, surrounded by piles of books and merely reading about the Ruth Harknesses of the world rather than trying to become them. I know many might be inspired by such a passage, feel some sort of “conquering the wilds” urge or something, but I’m perfectly content to let them do all the hard work while I sip my tea.

What a remarkable woman Harkness must have been, someone I would have liked to have known. I love the way Croke traces her evolution from witty, life-of-the-party New York socialite and dress designer to a person who was transformed by a country and its people, who wanted to do everything she could to help them, as well as to help the plight of the giant panda. She’s admirable in all kinds of ways, but one is that she made her first panda expedition in 1936, not exactly a period in which most women went trekking around the world on their own (although one soon discovers “on their own” had a very different meaning in those days, when explorers had great “teams” of people, completely ignored in all accounts of the expeditions, they led with them. But, you know, all those Chinese men carrying all the Westerners' supplies and setting up the camps weren’t really people).

One of the things I loved about this book is that it has everything: biography, zoology, travel and adventure, history, romance, psychology, cultural differences. Really, you name a field or genre that interests you, and it’s probably somewhere in this book, which is extraordinarily well-written. (Oh, yes, and the pictures of the pandas are wonderful. There’s one in particular I love in which the baby panda is posed such that he looks like nothing but one big, black and white, fuzzy head.) Croke could win some sort of painstaking research medal with all her fascinating details and 60 pages of endnotes.

Reading is an occupation that rarely fails to keep me constantly amazed by my own “uh-DUH-ness factor.” When I found this book on the sale shelf at Borders last Christmas (shopping for others, of course, and rewarding myself for doing so) and then chose to read it for the nonfiction challenge, I honestly didn’t expect to learn much about pandas. I thought it was really going to be a “tales-of-remarkable-women” type book, all biography and adventure with very little about the animal Ruth Harkness was pursuing, even though my love of pandas is what drew me to pick it up in the first place.

Well, of course there would have to be details about Pandas, especially with someone like Croke writing the book. Did you know that pandas' bodies are those of carnivores, built to eat meat (their teeth have evolved to better chew plants, but their stomachs have not evolved to be better-suited to eating plants rather than meat), and yet they’re herbivores who’ve managed to survive millions of years, while other species, seemingly better built for survival, have not (pp. 73-74)? This information set me off on a tangent, wondering if humans are headed in the direction of becoming herbivores one day, since many already are, and since we haven't been around as long as they have and thus haven't had as much time to evolve. My completely unscientific study of my own friends leads me to believe that some humans have already evolved to be able to live extremely healthy vegetarian lifestyles. I, on the other hand, having a voracious appetite that only seems to be appeased by daily doses of animal fat in my diet, would end up being like the poor panda, who has to spend almost all her time eating, were I to try to live off nothing more than bamboo.

(Okay, tangent over.) On some levels, this book was difficult for me to read. I loved Harkness and her spunk and spirit, as well as her sense of humor, which comes out in many wonderful quotes, well-chosen by Croke, mostly in the letters she wrote to her friend Hazel Perkins, but I was appalled by the panda carnage. Ruth eventually becomes someone who is appalled by it, too (my guess is that she was pretty appalled by it from the beginning), but I couldn’t understand how her companion Quentin Young (isn’t that a great name?) could help her nurse and care for Su-Lin, their first baby panda, grow so attached to this one, and still go out and shoot others. And, as noted earlier, my first reaction to their snatching the baby from the nest while the mother had most likely gone off on that arduous task to get those bamboo stalks she constantly needed in order to keep going and keep her baby alive, was to feel so sorry for the mother panda. Imagine going to work one day, thinking you’ve left your baby safe and sound, only to come back to find he’s been kidnapped by aliens.

To read this book is to realize what damage can be done in the name of science. Once this rare animal was “discovered” and the quest to learn more about it was embarked on by so many zoos, teams of adventurers and explorers contributed to the demise of the species (and I’m sure did irreparable damage to other plant and animal species in that remote region of the world). As much as I was rooting for Ruth (because she was much better than some of her rivals, many seeking their own fame and fortune through the misfortune of pandas), I found myself rooting for the pandas, hoping they’d all stay hidden, hoping the mothers could keep their babies safe. Harkness’s expeditions added to the problem of endangering the species, but she eventually recognized what she was doing. The ending is marvelous, and she definitely did her part to raise awareness in the public eye, both in China and the West, about the need to protect the giant panda.

One added bonus was reading this book so soon after reading M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me. Fisher and Harkness were both independent American women, traveling during the same era. They were both wildly imaginative, determined characters who suffered from bouts of depression and who lost their husbands to untimely diseases and death. Fisher’s life continued, and I know (even though I haven’t yet read those books) that she went on to re-marry and have children. Harkness never re-married. Her pandas were her surrogate children. She died at the age of 47, shortly after one suicide attempt, in what may have been a successful second suicide attempt (no one knows for sure, just that it was some sort of alcohol poisoning).

Litlove asked me, as I complete this challenge, to think about perfect nonfiction reads and what makes them such. This one definitely fits that category, mainly for being so many different types of books rolled into one, while also being so readable. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Kevin Bacon's Got Nothing on Tina

A long, long time ago, when Kevin Bacon was still one of the guys in Animal House or someone you may have seen in Diner, I met Tina. Tina was my college roommate. Complete strangers when we first met on a hot August day, we soon discovered we both had a fondness for laughing until it hurt and that we found the same things amusing. We ended up rooming and laughing together for four years.

Tina is someone who could have written all the questions and answers for the "Silver Screen Edition" of Trivial Pursuit. This is a game I would never choose to play with her unless she were on my team. In all honesty, though, it’s a game I would never choose to play. I am a complete movie illiterate, the kind of person who’d never seen such film greats as West Side Story or The Graduate until I’d met Tina, and she started a somewhat hopeless period of educating Emily, taking me to see many, many classic films that were shown on the university grounds during our tenure there. Poor Tina. She was the Queen of Classic Movies stuck with a roommate who would announce something like “An Officer and a Gentleman is the most romantic movie I’ve ever seen.” I still remember her astonished response to that, “Oh, Emily! You haven’t even seen Casablanca?!” (A lapse that was fixed as soon as we were able, not an easy task in the days when VCRs were only just coming onto the market, and DVDs were just somebody's pipe dream.)

Tina is the one who invented what is now called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." It wasn’t his idea. Don’t believe Wikipedia, which will tell you this game was first being played on college campuses in the early 1990s. I had long since graduated from college by then. This was Tina’s game, and I’m still upset that Kevin Bacon is getting all the credit, even more so because she played it in a more interesting way (not being egotistically focused on herself). As a matter of fact, I never actually played the game. What I did was watch her play it. We all did.

Tina’s goal was not to have six degrees of separation, but to make it fun, to make it long and complicated. She poohed-poohed stars who could be linked in less than six movies. She wanted stumpers, those that obviously required a PhD in film knowledge, and we all wanted to come up with one she couldn’t solve, to discover the only two actors or actresses who could not be linked through their movies and their co-stars. I’d try to stump her (the first-grader pitted against the PhD) by coming up with such winners as Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Most of my choices would elicit rolled eyes, and an “Oh, that’s so easy, Emily,” as within a minute, she’d have linked the stars with three movies.

Others (those who were at least at the twelfth-grade level) would give her really good, chewy near-stumpers. She’d think about them for a long time. She’d puzzle over them. She’d assure us she’d eventually get it. We’d all forget about it. We’d think she’d forgotten about it. Then suddenly, just as we were turning off the light to go to bed, she’d say, “I’ve got it,” and would proceed to reel off a list of ten movies, most of which I’d never heard of, that connected the stars. Of course, I was so ignorant, she could easily have just made up movies, but Tina’s not that kind of person.

Tina and I were talking the other day (I’m all excited because with this move to PA, I’m going to be within a very easy drive of where she lives instead of a six-hour-long drive), and we were reminiscing about her game. Well, we weren’t actually reminiscing so much as I was informing her how pissed I am that Mr. Bacon is getting all the credit for her game. She remembers that my boyfriend at the time almost did stump her once by throwing out Leonard Nimoy with someone, just the sort of obnoxious thing he would have done. Thank God she bested him, or we never would have heard the end of it.

I didn’t remember that near-stumper of his, but I was laughing (we still laugh!) about how I was always thinking I’d come up with some clever choices like Madonna and John Wayne, and she’d tell me they were way too easy. Well, wouldn’t you know, she’s still got it? We went on to discuss many, many other things, and just before we hung up the phone, she said to me,

“Oh, and I did this one quickly. Madonna was in Dick Tracy with Warren Beatty. Warren Beatty was in Splendor in the Grass with Natalie Wood. And Natalie Wood was in this old John Ford movie called The Searchers with John Wayne.” Eat your heart out, Kevin Bacon. I’m wondering, though, if by the time we’re 80, I’ll finally manage to come up with one that’s more than three “degrees.”



Aeschylus in a nutshell: made me wish so badly we had managed to salvage everything he wrote. If you haven’t read him since you were in school, I promise he’s worth re-reading, although very depressing to realize we human beings haven’t changed much in all these years. Also, I prefer the ones that aren’t so focused on war, like Prometheus Bound.

The Interview Meme

All right. I won't do anymore memes for a while, I promise. I've got too many other posts patiently awaiting their turns in the spotlight. However, I just couldn't resist being interviewed by real, live journalist Charlotte.

1. You come from a family where humour is very important. Who is the funniest person in your family and why?

Boy, am I glad I wasn’t sitting on Good Morning, America with you, Charlotte, trying to come up with an answer to this one on the spot. Everyone in my family is funny, but we each seem to have our true specialties. Forsyth, for instance, is the one-liner-at-the-right-time pro. You know how you have all these encounters with people in annoying situations, and afterwards you think, “Man, I wish I’d said that, instead of standing there, my tongue seemingly attached to the roof of my mouth with Super Glue?” Forsyth is the person who did say that. Lindsay (no surprise given that she’s an artist) has taken the art of self-deprecating humor to levels never before reached. She rivals David Sedaris. Ian’s the person you want to invite to any dinner party you might be having if you want everyone rolling on the floor in stitches as he tells hilarious story after hilarious story. I’m the Queen of Sarcasm. My mother is the one who can find humor all over the place and is really good for getting you into a fit of hysterical giggles over the most banal situations. Maybe my father is the funniest, because he’s equally good at all five of these types of humor, although each of us excels a little more than he does in our own particular specialty.

2. If you were given the chance to meet your favourite film director or writer, who would it be? What would you want to ask him or her?

Another toughie, because I have such a hard time deciding on favorites. If the director in question can be dead or alive, I’d love to meet Stanley Kubrik, but I’m sure I’d be way too intimidated by his genius to ask him why he decided to go with the American ending of A Clockwork Orange as opposed to its original ending. I don’t believe his claim that he’d never read the original until he was almost finished with the movie. He was too smart not to have explored both versions before filming. Maybe I would believe him if I asked him and he were to expound on that answer. If the director has to be living, I’d go with Jonathan Demme. I can’t claim to have seen all of his films, but I love what I have seen, and I love his originality and stick-to-his-guns mentality. I have a billion questions for him about working with David Byrne and making Stop Making Sense, as well as lots of questions about his cousin Bobby.

3. You are about to move home. What are you looking foward to most/ dreading most about the imminent change in your life?

I’m most looking forward to setting up a new house and “doing it right” this time. I’m sure I won’t “do it right,” and I’ll end up arranging and re-arranging, just as I’ve done with my current house, but one can always fantasize when reality hasn’t yet set in. I’m also very much looking forward to long walks in farm country and lots of very fresh produce for my kitchen experiments. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m looking forward to having a husband who’s once again gainfully employed.

I’m dreading packing up this house. And I’m dreading trying to make new friends. I have a completely irrational fear, which I’ve had all my life, that I won’t be able to make any friends. This isn’t quite as bad as it was when I was younger, because my best friend is coming with me, but still. I’d like to have more than one friend, especially since that friend is soon going to be very busy taking care of others and won’t necessarily be available every time I want to watch a movie with someone or discuss a book or go get ice cream or something. It’s irrational, because I’ve never been anywhere in my life in which I wasn’t able to make friends (even as a teenaged American moving to England for a year), but I’m always convinced with every new move/job change/etc. this will finally be the place where everyone realizes what a dweeb I am, and I’ll be avoided like a fourth-grader who hasn’t had the sense to get a cootie shot.

In the both dreading and looking forward category: having a nearly-200-year-old cemetery in my back yard. I’m dying to see a ghost, so I can really believe in them once and for all. According to books I’ve read on the subject, every cemetery is just loaded with them, so chances should be pretty good that I’ll finally encounter one. But I want any ghost I see to be a friendly, happy ghost sipping tea in the cemetery or something, not some chain-rattling, headless ghost who walks up from the cemetery and appears at the foot of my bed in the middle of the night. I’ll let everyone know if either happens.

4. If I could guarantee you a no strings attached, fully paid for, holiday, on your OWN for a month, where would you go and what would you do?

Oh, I want to do a month on a freighter trip that’s traveling around Europe, reading and writing while out to sea, and exploring and eating at every interesting port of call. Of course, I’d also love to find four English-speaking families in different parts of China, and spend one week living with each of them. And then there’s my idea of getting a sleeper car and riding Amtrak all around America and Canada (but then again, I can’t imagine doing that one without Bob. We had such a blast taking Amtrak from Manhattan to Santa Fe).

5. You have a very happy marriage. What's your secret?

When Bob and I were soon to be married by his uncle (who was also a Presbyterian minister before he retired), he met with us and counseled us that communication was the most important thing in a marriage. We smugly felt, “well, no problem there.” From the moment we had our first phone conversation; to our first date in which we almost missed the movie, because we were talking so much over dinner; to that very lunch with his uncle, Bob and I had talked incessantly with each other. It’s true: communication is very important. So is the other cliché about being each others’ best friend. But I don’t think either of those would work for us if we weren’t both madly in love (emphasis on “mad,” as in “insane,” as in “ready-for-the-loony-bin,” willing to do and be things we would never dream of doing and being for anyone else we know). Of course, don’t let us fool you. There have been plenty of times I’ve huffily walked out the door, claiming he’s never going to see me again (over something extraordinarily important, you have to understand, like who threw away the top to the olive oil), only to wonder what the hell I was doing and where I thought I was going, after an hour or so of aimlessly driving around with nowhere to go (because this always happens when the library is closed). However, once such moments are safely in the past, he and I are almost always able to laugh at ourselves. So I guess the fact we both have good senses of humor also plays a big role.

This is really fun. If you'd like to play along, here are the directions.

DIRECTIONS FOR THE INTERVIEW MEME

1. Leave a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. Please make sure I have your email address.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment, asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Panic at the Airport

It finally happened to me. I ran out of books to read while traveling. Typically, when I go on a business trip of more than two days, I take about five books to read with me. If I’m very lucky, I may manage to get through one. My business trips normally consist of days that start at 8:00 a.m. and don’t end until 10:30 p.m., after late-night dinners, and I’m usually a zombie, unable to read my own name, let alone 200 pages of a book by then. In other words, not much time for reading except on the airplane.

As I packed for my trip to San Antonio last week, I thought to myself, “Let’s be smart for a change and only bring one book.” (Someone please come to my house and slap me silly next time I have such very “un-smart” thoughts.) I’d read about 40 pages of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City at that point, thus qualifying it as a book I planned to finish (I give every book 30 pages, and if it hasn’t grabbed me by then, I don’t finish it). But I knew I more than just planned to finish it. I was enjoying it immensely. It seemed like a good choice.

I’m a math editor, though. I can’t look at books without thinking in terms of page numbers and average reading speeds. I quickly deduced that despite my glacially-slow reading pace, even I would be able to read 332 pages well before completing my combined flying time of 8 hours to-and-from Texas. And then there’s all that time in the airport, because I pay attention when the document says, “Make sure you arrive an hour before departure,” tacking on at least half an hour. You learn to do this when you've had some pretty horrific flying experiences in your lifetime. I decided to throw in The Lady and the Panda, because I had about 60 pages of it left to read, and the Aeschylus collection I had was nice and small, so in it went as well.

Well, the first mistake I made was not bothering to find out that traveling to Texas in June is tantamount to traveling to Buffalo in January (I did find out, but not until I was having a discussion with the cabbie, a native Texan, on the way to my hotel, after spending thirteen hours in airports and on airplanes waiting for weather patterns to change). If you’re very, very lucky, you just might board a plane that manages to land during the 2-hour window of opportunity in which massive thunderstorms (and I mean MASSIVE. It’s true everything is bigger in Texas) have subsided before rolling back through again. But we all know, “very, very lucky” I am not. Maybe I’m “very lucky,” because my flight to St. Louis was only delayed about an hour, and we managed to land just as the heavens opened up there, shutting down all departures and arrivals for about an hour, but that’s about as much luck as I’m allowed (and it’s probably meant to last me the rest of the year). At least in St. Louis, this sort of weather seemed to follow a pattern with which I’m familiar, rolling in and out relatively quickly. No such luck in Texas. Thus I sat, long after flights leaving St. Louis had resumed, reading, looking up every so often at the board above my gate to discover my connecting flight was leaving later still.

This is when I realized I’d made a miscalculation in my reading needs for this trip. I’d already managed to read through the four professional magazines I’d brought for the trip, since my flight had been delayed to St. Louis. I’m not one who likes to deal with laptops in airports or on airplanes, so that was it as far as getting work done was concerned. On the flight to St. Louis, I’d begun to read Tales of the City.

After about half an hour of reading this book, I suddenly realized I was reading it at an alarmingly fast rate. It was as though I’d attended some sort of speed-reading class without my knowing it. By the time I’d stepped off the airplane and into the St. Louis airport, I was over halfway through the book.

I began to panic. I put the book away, made my way to my departure gate, and once there, pulled out The Lady and the Panda. I’ve been reading this book very slowly, savoring it, writing notes in the margins, etc. This one would have to take a long time to finish. But then my flight was delayed an hour, and I’d already been reading for an hour. And then my flight was delayed another hour.

Now, you can tell me all you want that being stuck in an airplane with nothing but the fluffy airline magazine and its easy-answers-already-filled-in-by-somebody-else crossword is not the same as being sent to Guantanamo Bay. When I’m sitting at home, surrounded by more books than anyone could possibly read in a lifetime, I will heart-heartedly agree with an “Of course not!” However, strand me in an airport for a few hours, with a 2-hour-long flight ahead of me and rapidly-receding reading material, and I will vehemently disagree with “Of course it is!”

Thus, a trip to the airport bookstore was in order. Here, I was met with a wall of shelf-to-shelf third-rate mysteries, thrillers, and chick lit. Sometimes, I like a good third-rate mystery or thriller, but I wasn’t in the mood. And when you’ve been reading Armistead Maupin, I’m sorry, but third-rate chick lit just won’t do. First-rate, like a good Marian Keyes, maybe, but certainly not third-rate. What I really wanted was the next Armistead Maupin, but that, of course, was sitting at home where I’d blithely informed it I’d never get to it while I was away, and besides, it’s a very rare author whose first book in a series I will read and immediately want to pick up the next one with nothing in between. What a time to discover such an author.

Eventually, I turned around to find the tiny little “literature” section. I’ll quibble a little with some of the choices in this section (Tim LaHaye?), but they did manage to have the likes of Jasper Fforde and Julian Barnes. I found myself longing for my TBR list, which was also back at home, because why would I have needed that? I don’t read a whole lot of contemporary literature unless it’s recommended to me (which is happening at an alarming rate now that I blog), and I don’t tend to remember what’s been recommended without referring to my list. Stuck without it, I had to see if anything seemed familiar.

I was slightly tempted by Beverly Lewis, because she writes about the Amish, and I’ll be living amongst them soon. But I don’t know anything about her, and I was a bit concerned she might be Tim LeHaye Goes to Amish Country or something. I looked for Jacqueline Winspear, because I just read Maisie Dobbs and loved it, but no such luck.

Finally, it boiled down to two titles I recognized: The Red Tent and The Time Traveler’s Wife. What a tough choice! I toyed with the idea of buying both (just in case the one I chose wasn’t as good as everyone says it is), but my luggage was heavy enough. I ended up with The Time Traveler’s Wife.

There are probably those of you out there who are disappointed I didn’t choose The Red Tent, but I’m feeling right now I couldn’t possibly have made a better choice. I haven’t read a contemporary novel that I’ve felt was so perfect since I read The Thirteenth Tale last year (a book, by the way, I can happily say Bob is currently reading and loving as much as I did). I’m funny about time travel. I love nothing better, but I’m highly skeptical and demanding of anyone who takes on the task of writing novels about it. The editor in me is always ready to leap at the slightest inaccuracy or inconsistency. Niffenegger has done such a good job with the topic (much like Connie Willis did in To Say Nothing of the Dog, another one of my favorites) that I’ve readily suspended all disbelief and have forgotten to look for errors.

All I can say is, if I’m not the last person in the world to have read this book, and you’re reading this post and would describe yourself as someone who would like a really good, complicated love story paired with the magnificence of time travel, pick up this book. You won’t be disappointed. (Oh yes, and the speed reader has gone back from whence she came. I’ve been reading this one at my normal pace. I did, however, finish reading all three of the other books before I’d stepped on the plane to come back from Texas.)

A New Meme

Well, since I'm on the road with all kinds of ideas for my blog but not much time, I've decided I might as well take another step closer to the meme rehab center. I'm brewing my own this go-around, but, you know, as long as it serves its purpose, who cares if it tastes a little too sweet. It's a feel-good meme. Here are the rules:


1. Get out of your thought-this-was-gonna-be-the-best-summer-ever-and-it's-already-disappointing-me funk
2. Not out of that funk yet? Then think of ten (that's ten, not eight, because I've still never had anyone tell me why memes fixate on the number 8) great compliments you've received throughout your life
3. Write them down
4. If you're not out of your funk by now, come over and have a mai tai with me, and then we won't give a damn whether we have the best summer of our lives or not
5. Tag a bunch of people

10 Great Compliments I've Received

1. The sweetest, most brilliant, most kind and gentle man with the best sense of humor I've ever met (sorry to disappoint all you males out there who think I'm describing you. Unless you're married to me, I'm not, although I'm sure you're a very close second) chose me to be his lifelong partner. And he hasn't changed his mind. And he still laughs at my stories and jokes.

2. Despite the fact I'm extremely flattered that this man has chosen me, he sometimes forgets how lucky he is and has to be reminded. For instance, he has a tendency to walk about twenty paces ahead of me when we're, oh, let's just say, on 42nd Street, racing to get tickets for the theater and then to get down to Yankee stadium for a game. One day, we find ourselves in this very situation and a wonderful, charming, extraordinarily insightful shoe shine guy (and I have to point out, he stood no chance of making any money off us, because we were both wearing sneakers), said to me "You are beautiful," and called out to the back of Bob's head, "You slow down for her and quit running her so hard. You're a very lucky man!" (Imagine how often those lines get repeated, substituting "me" for "her," of course.)

3. A few years back, I bought I Capture the Castle for a friend who'd never read it. When he finished it, his comment to me was, "You could have written that book." If you were to put a gun to my head and say "Name your favorite book," this would probably be the answer. To have someone tell me I could've written such a book...well, the man can now do no wrong.

4. Oh, and speaking of men who can do no wrong, we all know what Mandarine did that moved him into that category. Of course, he's also offered to take me touring cheese caves, which is extra insurance.

5. When I left my former job, 2 of the editors I'd supervised also left within months. I know, this may have been a coincidence, but I like to think it's because they didn't want to work for the company without me there. I had a hint this was the case, because when I held the meeting to announce I was leaving, one of them said, "Do we slit our wrists now or later?"

6. Our first year in college, my roommate and I went to see It's a Wonderful Life together. Afterwards, she said to me, "Emily, if you'd never been born, I wouldn't have survived this first semester." Up until that point, I'd never watched that movie thinking in terms of how I might have affected others in my life, so focused was I on what a true hero old ordinary George Bailey was.

7. My twelfth-grade psychology teacher told me I was one of the most discerning young women she'd ever met. Hmmm...I wonder if that's why I went on to become a pscyh major in college.

8. My brother, who is the best chef I've ever known, not only will eat what I cook, but will also praise it. And I know he's not just being polite, because he'll also have seconds.

9. I was carded at the liquor store when I was 37. No, that's not a typo. I didn't mean 27, I really did mean 37. For some reason, I had a bit of a hard time finding my licence, and I remember saying to the woman, "Forget the gin. Don't sell it to me if you don't want to. You just made my day, and I want to find this, so I can show you how old I am." I found it, and she said, "Really, you look like a college kid." I almost jumped over the counter and hugged her.

10. A few years back, my sister sent around one of those emails in which the recipient was supposed to come up with a one-word description for the sender and send it back, while passing on the message to others to do the same. If you replied to the sender, she was supposed to send back her one-word description of you. (Can you tell my sister had pre-teenaged daughters at the time?) My sister's one-word description of me was "funny."

Tagging: Litlove, Courtney, Charlotte, Dorr, Hobs, Ian, Froshty, Becky, Cam, Stef, Fem, and The-Man-Who-Can-Do-No-Wrong-Who's-Invited-Me-To-Tour-Cheese-Caves. (I'd tag you, Danny, but I know how you feel about memes.) If you're reading this and feel the need to get out of a funk, consider yourself tagged as well. Throwing caution to the wind and briefly being immodest for a change is better than ten sessions with the best shrink in the world. I'm sure of it.

Lies, Lies, All Lies (and Irritability)

Katie Couric lied to us all. On national TV, no less. I mean, I believed her when she cheerily told us all that having a colonoscopy was no big deal. I suppose we should forgive her, though. After all, she wasn’t really lying. She had just completed the easy part of the procedure, the part in which the patient is drugged into La La Land. A person awaking from that, still woozy and relaxed would likely be willing to announce cheerily to us all that being mauled by a tiger is no big deal.

What she neglected to do was to tell us about the day before the procedure. The day before the procedure is a big deal. I know. I just went through it last week.

People don’t normally have to have colonoscopies until they’re at least fifty. However, I happen to be one of those lucky people blessed with the sort of body that when someone just very quietly whispers, “possible stressful situation ahead” fights back with such lovely weapons as migraines, walking pneumonia, and irritable bowel syndrome. Thus, in the summer of 2001, when I was beginning to wish I could just skip all this food-to-mouth-to-stomach business and be fed intravenously, my doctor recommended I have my first colonoscopy, to be sure it was nothing but IBS (read, "to be sure he didn't get sued for telling me it was just stress when in reality, I only had six months to live"). The results concluded it truly was nothing but IBS, and once I got a new boss at my old job, the IBS mysteriously became much less of a problem. Since switching jobs and becoming a telecommuter, I’ve had no problem at all with grumpy intestines, but my GP still thought it would be a good idea for me to start having regular colonoscopies, so, this, unfortunately, was not my first.

I’m beginning to understand a tiny bit why women suffer through the agony of childbirth and then decide to do it again. My female friends have always explained to me that women begin to forget that horrible pain once they have their little bundle of joy. By the time that “bundle of joy” has become a handful, a woman has all-but-forgotten the agony of childbirth in her desire for yet another “bundle of joy.” I’ve always thought all this was a bit of a lie and part of the conspiracy to get those who’ve never given birth to go ahead and try it. “Oh, yes, giving birth is painful, but you forget all about it, you know. I barely remember a thing, and besides, it’s just ‘baby pain,’ which is so different from other sorts of pain.’” No big deal, just like Katie Couric’s colonoscopy. All women must have a little of that “delivery-pain amnesia” stored somewhere, though.

You see, the last time I had this procedure, I don’t remember it being all that bad, despite warnings from those I knew who’d had one. Either I’ve become extraordinarily frail and intolerant since 2001, or some of that “delivery-pain amnesia” managed to snake its way from the back of my brain where it’s been sitting, convinced it would never find a use, up to the front. I seem to recall that last time my appointment was in the afternoon. Bob and I went out looking at kitchen cabinets and bought new running shoes. We hit traffic on the way to the surgery center, and I was a little late. The nurses all joked about how it was a good thing the doctor was always late, because wouldn’t it be horrible to have gone through all that prep for nothing. I distinctly remember thinking it hadn’t really been all that bad. I don’t remember spending that much time on the toilet, and I certainly don’t remember starving to the point I would gladly have begun gnawing on my arm if I’d been allowed to do so.

This go-around, I had to keep reminding myself that people pay money (good money. Really good money) to go to spas where they flush out their systems this way. These thoughts occurred, quite obviously, early on in the ordeal. By the time 9:00 p.m. on Procedure Eve rolled around, I was thinking “What a sick, sick society I live in. I can’t believe people have managed to convince others to pay them for this sort of torture.”

To tell you the truth, the worst part for me is not being able to eat. I’m not someone who would make a good candidate as an “orthodox” anything, if it involves fasting, since I consider a fast of five hours to be way too long. You can tell time by my stomach. If I eat breakfast at 7:00 a.m., I will know it’s 10:00 a.m. when my stomach starts growling. If I ignore its warning, I’m likely, within an hour, to start snapping off heads of people who happen to get in my way.

You know how you’ll read books about Native Americans and the shaman who was able to induce trance-like states, often by foregoing food for days on end? Or maybe you’ve read books like A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which the monks do the same. I have friends and acquaintances who’ve talked to me about out-of-body experiences, or experiences in which they’ve felt overwhelmed by some sort of other-worldly possession or presence. I’m jealous. My brain is way too skeptical of such things. I'd love to believe in them, but although I've managed to believe in many things I've never seen or experienced for myself (like the existence of Antarctica), these are the sorts of things I just don't really believe happen, despite the fact my imagination longs for them to be real. I believe they happen with the help of hallucinogenic drugs, but many things can happen with that sort of help.

When I do go without food for any length of time, I’m always sort of hoping that maybe I’ll benefit by having some sort of mystical, monk-like, momentary transformation that will make me truly believe in such things. After all, since I’m someone who gets hungry after three hours, maybe I don’t have to disappear in the desert for days on end with nothing but bottles of water in order suddenly to find myself in a trance-like state. The day before a colonoscopy is a good day to hope for such things.

But no such luck, of course. I just find myself getting hungrier and hungrier, my stomach now gone from growling to roaring. Everything I pick up to read annoys me. Do you know how often authors describe some sort of meal being served and eaten? I struggle through these passages, sipping my low-sodium chicken broth that makes me long to go out and kill a few chickens, just because I can. Then what happens is I get incredibly weepy. Everything just seems so, so sad. If you doubt me, just know that my eyes were tearing up while reading Maisie Dobbs. Those of you who have read Maisie Dobbs know perfectly well that The Yearling it is not. On a full stomach, I wouldn’t be caught dead crying over such a book.

Truly, my only salvation was knowing that in less than 24 hours, I was going to be blissfully sedated. For someone who has suffered on-and-off from insomnia since age 13, anesthesia certainly rivals the nectar of the gods. To be instantaneously whisked from telling your doctor that you’re moving soon to seeing bunnies is enough to confirm your belief in some place called “heaven,” whatever it might be (perhaps a place in which anesthesia is needed for survival the way water is needed in this world?).

And that’s where Katie Couric was when she lied to us all on T.V. She’d probably just been skipping through fields with bunnies. And now I’ve done my bit to set the record straight for you.

Who'll Come a-Waltzing?

Bob made a huge mistake when he was a teenager. He sized up the situation and came to the conclusion that a boy could only get the hottest girls in one of two ways (until he told me this, I’d never known teen aged boys were so calculating): 1. learn to dance or 2. join a band. He’d been subjected by his parents to miserable ballroom dancing lessons, so he chose to pick up a guitar. In fairness to him, he had no idea he would one day marry a woman who thinks nothing is sexier than a man who can dance, but still. I’m sure he gets very annoyed every time I express the sentiment that I wish he’d chosen dancing, but he's too sweet to tell me how much it annoys him.

Now, I do have to admit that I’m not immune to the sexiness of members of the band (especially when they can dance), but I never even benefited from his being a band member. Sometime long before I met him, he read Nikos Kazantzakis and fed into the author’s notion that a human being can only be “great” at one thing. Bob liked to play the guitar, and he liked to write. One would have to go. He chose to put away his guitar (good thing really, since a pastor who writes and delivers a sermon every week is probably going to fair a little better than one who plays a song on his guitar every week). The only time he’s played it since I’ve known him was at his bachelor’s party (a night on which I was absent, but we do have some rather incriminating photos as proof, since he doesn’t remember that evening too well).

I don’t at all subscribe to Bob’s either/or approach to life. If the guy can get the gal by either dancing or being a band member, reason would lead one to believe he’d double his chances if he could do both. And what nonsense that people can only be great at one thing. Look at George Bush, the great liar and the great moron.

But I’m digressing. What I really want to talk about is my fanaticism over dancing men. I first realized how bad it was when attending a happy hour one evening in which the following question was posed, “Which celebrity are you most embarrassed to admit you find physically attractive?” and I found myself (let’s blame some of it on the fact that this was happy hour, and we’d all been there for more than an hour by this time), no hesitation, blurting out, “Drew Carey.” Drew Carey! He’s not my physical type at all and not the least because he wears those awful sorts of glasses that I know are supposed to be so stylish, but that still make me think, “Ewww. 1955 ended 52 years ago.” Besides, he’s a Republican. But have you seen him dance? Maybe those glasses aren’t so bad after all, and you know, some Republicans are actually very nice, charming people.

And it’s not just Drew Carey. There’s Fred Astaire, for instance. I will drop everything to watch Fred Astaire dance. Oh, to have been Ginger Rogers! (Or anyone who showed up on a movie set with him, actually, even the person who brought him his water.) If he’d had no moves, though, I probably would’ve pronounced him the perfect man to play The Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz – with no makeup. Instead, I happen to think he was one of the sexiest men who ever lived.

When I was a kid and watching Welcome Back Kotter was demanded of me by my peers the way wearing powder blue Levi’s corduroys was, I was the only girl who preferred the cutely gap-toothed and sweetly tough Epstein. All my friends were gaga over Barbarino. I didn’t see Barbarino and his feather-winged hair’s appeal at all when there was Epstein with his afro. But then I saw Grease (my parents having declared I was too young to see "that awful" Saturday Night Fever), and I began to understand. Centuries later, I saw Pulp Fiction. So John Travolta’s gotten a little pudgy-faced, and he’s a Scientologist, those things don’t matter in life, really, right? What matters is that his dance scene with Uma Thurmond still sends chills up my spine. I could sit and watch that one scene for hours. The only thing better is watching Patrick Swayze (a man I used to think I wouldn’t look twice at if I passed him on the street, my preference being for the thin, bookish types not the rugged, overly-muscular types) giving lessons to Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing. Actually, there is one thing better. He could come give me some lessons.

Music video was the death of me when it first became all the rage in this country. Listening to Van Halen on the radio, I was able to maintain my music snob’s attitude that this was one of the most highly mediocre bands out there. Then I saw Eddie Van Halen “jump.” Can that boy jump, or what? I suddenly became addicted to Friday Night Videos (we couldn’t afford cable with MTV when I was in college) in the hopes of catching that one each week. Meanwhile, David Bowie, who’d always had a piece of my heart paired up with Mick Jagger (who never had) for that “Dancing in the Streets” video. All my life I’ve been so disdainful of screaming young women grasping at Elvis’s leather jacket or at John Lennon’s hair, but if Bowie and Jagger came dancing down my street, dressed like that, I think I just might begin to understand.

I am, naturally, completely unfair, because “Two Left Feet” might as well be my middle name. Why should I expect men to be able to win Dancing with the Stars, when I can barely do a simple twist? It’s common knowledge that women are the ones who are supposed to be the dancers in our society, the ones dragging reluctant men out onto the dance floor. But then I realize I’ve known an awful lot of not-very-attractive guys who expect women to be drop-dead gorgeous, or they won’t go out with them. I’m not so bad after all. I’ll go out with you if you can’t dance. I’ll even marry you (although Bob can dance better than he thinks he can. He just doesn’t really like to do it). I just hope you don’t mind if I spend a little time watching the guys who do dance.


Note: my blog posts will be a bit sporadic for the next ten days or so, as today we're headed down to Pennsylvania where Bob will run his "candidating" service, and we'll be officially accepted into the church by the members of our future congregation, and next week I'm off to San Antonio, TX for a math conference. If you're not already doing so, spend some time with all the great writers on my blog roll. You won't even miss me (but promise not to desert me in favor of them).

Nobody Drinks the Way They Used To

We all know who the famous American literary alcoholics were. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Pound, the members of the Algonquin Round Table, just to name a few. Many an English major has been forced to consider the influence the bottle had on these writers. The big question often seems to be: did it help or hurt them when it wasn’t the cause of death? My big question, however, is: how did anyone ever manage to distinguish the alcoholics from everyone else?

When I was in college, my grandmother wistfully used to say, “Nobody drinks the way they used to.” I had no real idea what she meant, as I watched her lining up many bottles of wine and cans of beer (while making sure she had one or two bottles of bourbon and gin on hand “just in case”) for a dinner party of six. After all, all my friends and I seemed to be drinking up a storm with our keg parties and mysterious “punches” sloshing around in seemingly-bottomless garbage pails. Seemed to me were “drinking the way they used to.”

But these days, I’m beginning to understand from whence my grandmother’s sentiments came. I read and hear about the “old days” of publishing and law, when three-martini lunches were standard. I’ve been known to drink my fair share of one-martini lunches in my day, but if I were to drink 3? Well, you might as well just consider me to be a part-time employee with as much work as I’d be able to get done passed out in my office. But what really kills me is that, then, those people would apparently go home to their “cocktail hours.”

I was reading Peg Bracken a few years back (by the way, if you’ve never read her do. She’s a must read for anyone who’s ever once had the thought, “I wish I didn’t have this family and house to care for”), and in one of her books (it may have been I Try to Behave Myself, but I’m not sure), she echoed my grandmother on the subject of everyone’s drinking habits (back in what I would have thought were the “’old days’ of publishing and law”). She then proceeded to provide advice on what cocktails to prepare for a cocktail party and how to serve them that had me thinking, “Well, not if you don’t want to wake up the next morning to find innert bodies lying all over the house right where they fell around 7:00 p.m. last night.”

Most recently I’ve been reading things like M.F.K. Fisher. You wouldn’t believe how much alcohol that woman was able to imbibe, and I haven’t a clue how she managed to remember every single thing she ever ate from age two on when she must have been killing brain cells at the speed of light. Maybe all that booze focused on killing the cells that make a woman feel guilty for lying when she announces that she and her husband didn’t drink that much. Let’s just say, one day and one night with these “light drinkers,” and I’d be dead from alcohol poisoning.

I’ve also been reading The Lady and the Panda. Now that I'm aware of what and how those explorers drank, I’m beginning to understand why quite a few expeditions in China might have ended with falls from mountainsides. Especially when you add the fact that, apparently, opium was also often being smoked by the Chinese men hired to do all the heavy lifting and carrying.

Although I despise the New Puritans whose thought bubbles forget they’re supposed to be hidden and come churning right up to the surface, reading, “She’s having a third glass of wine?” when I’m out enjoying myself immensely at a dinner party, I’m quite relieved we no longer live in a society in which so many adults are basically drunk every day from noon until they go to bed at night. First of all, we have enough insane drivers on the road as it is. Secondly, I stay out of bars unless I’m with Bob these days, because I spent enough time in my twenties warding off the attentions of drunken men who wouldn’t have given me the time of day if we'd been in a business meeting together at 10:00 a.m. Imagine if those drunken men started showing up at 2:30 p.m. business meetings. And thirdly, I know I’ve got about as much willpower against peer pressure as, oh, your average twelve-year-old, and I value my liver. Quite highly, actually.

So, I’ll leave that sort of drinking up to the Dorothy Parkers of the world. And I’ll steal my grandmother’s phrase, re-shaping it a little to make it my own. Read this in a very wistful tone: nobody reads the way they used to.

Ten Things I WILL Miss About Connecticut

Yesterday, I had to drive down to N.J. and back for a sales meeting (which is worthy of a post in and of itself, but I’m going to leave that up to your imaginations. Suffice it to say that driving while exhausted is not a good idea and can easily turn what should be a 2-hour drive into a 4-hour drive, even without the help of rush hour traffic, especially if you refuse to spend a fortune on a GPS and have maps in your glove compartment for every state except – you guessed it – New Jersey. I mean, when would you ever decide to go to New Jersey, except to just pass through it? And the maps for New York and Pennsylvania show enough of it to help you do so. I’m still wondering, though, why a car that lives in Connecticut and has never been west of the Mississippi, houses a map of California in its glove compartment). Because I ended up taking a rather circuitous route, I was hit over the head with how beautiful this part of the world is (not Jersey City and Newark, I promise you, but upstate New York and Connecticut). Thus, I was reminded that Charlotte had requested a post on things I will miss about CT. How can I deny Charlotte? Here are my ten things I will miss about this state:

1. The Long Island Sound
Before I’d ever been to Connecticut as an adult, my friend Kathy, who is basically the reason I ended up here, made me very jealous by telling me she could ride her bike to the beach. You have to understand that I grew up smack dab in the middle of North Carolina, a state in which you can drive from the beach to the mountains, in oh, about eight hours (yes, it’s one of those states where we always think in terms of hours, not miles). To get anywhere on the coast was at least a four-hour drive. If my father happened to be at the wheel, make that six. However, when you arrived at “the beach,” you were greeted with miles and miles of sandy shoreline and wondrous waves crashing in from the depths of the Atlantic. If you were lucky enough to be up at the Outer Banks, you were greeted with sand dunes so high people hang glide off them. When I came to visit Kathy for the first time, and she took me to “the beach,” my question was, “Are we there yet?” What I saw was a lake with a sand lot and lots of rocks. Twenty-two years later, I’ve come to love the placid Long Island Sound, having discovered what fun it is to explore the jagged coast line with its rocky sand bars and little islands.

2. Tree Tunnels
When we were kids traveling around England, Ian one day noted how he loved all the tree tunnels. The way the tops of the trees grew into each other above some of the roads, it really did seem as if the little roads had been carved through the trees, just as roads are carved through mountains to make tunnels. From that moment on, we kept a lookout for tree tunnels. We thought they were grand in England, because we hadn’t spent much time in Connecticut. One doesn’t keep an eye out for tree tunnels in this state. This time of year, on the “back roads” we all travel in order to avoid the traffic on the highways, one keeps an eye out for patches of sky through the leaves. It’s lovely, and it’s really not all that hard to believe that when the first settlers arrived in this area, it was nothing but trees. I’m moving to farm country. I’m sure I can find a tree somewhere in Lancaster County, but I’m going to have to drive quite a ways…

3. Unexpected Snow When the Leaves Are Still on the Trees
It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, we’ll get a snow storm in October. This is New England. One thing no one can deny is that fall is spectacular here. If you’re someone who happens to think snow is beautiful settled on the branches of evergreens, that bright white contrasted against the dark green, just imagine what it’s like in contrast to fiery orange, yellow, and red oaks and maples.

4. Stone Walls
Centuries-old stone walls are so much a part of the Connecticut landscape, they can’t be used as landmarks. You’d have one terribly confused driver if you said, “Turn right when you get to the stone wall.” Lots of people repair their stone walls, but I like them best when they’re crumbling. On the woodsy part of the walk I take every day, we've got some wonderful crumbling ones that just begin and end with no apparent rhyme or reason. It’s hard to believe they could possibly have once been markers for fields, but then again, see point number #2. I once heard on the radio that whole ecosystems in the state are completely reliant on these man-made treasures, a fact I find very cool, because it gives me a little hope. I suppose, sometimes, through dumb luck, our industry actually creates havens for those sharing this planet with us.

5. Pizza
Sorry, New York. All your best pizza-makers must have moved to Connecticut. The only places you can get a bad pizza in this state are chains like Dominoes and Pizza Hut. The fancier places are really good, but try some small, unimposing place (most likely called John’s Best Pizza or Pepinos or something) situated in the middle of some strip mall someplace, with just a few tables, and an Italian flag proudly on display. I promise you, you can’t go wrong.

6. “Olde” Taverns and Inns
If you want a really good New England clam chowder and a chicken pot pie you’ll dream about for weeks afterwards, stop in at anything that describes itself as a tavern or an inn. You’ll most likely get to eat them in a wonderfully warm and friendly setting (in some places, even surrounded by bookshelves. Just don’t look too closely at the “books,” which are probably fake), with wooden chairs and tables. Expect a roaring fire in a huge old fireplace in the winter (don't forget how long I told you that season is, so as long as you aren't here in July and August, you're likely to have one. I'm feeling as though I could use one right now as I type this).

7. The Long Wharf Theatre
Broadway, Schmoadway. If you want to see something really good, something you’ll be discussing for hours after you leave, and you’re stuck on 42nd Street, just walk on over to Grand Central Station and catch the Metro North line to New Haven.

8. Coyotes
There is nothing more eerily beautiful than to wake up and hear them howling somewhere “just out back.” Everytime it happens, I think of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

9. The Library System
Connecticut spends a lot of money on its libraries, and it shows. Most of the libraries in the state have reciprocity. This means if you live somewhere between two or three major cities, you can go to any one of those cities and check out books with your hometown card. And they attract great authors from all over to come and speak. My favorite was hearing Mark Mathabane years and years ago. I recently discovered I’d just missed seeing the other Emily Barton speak at one of the libraries I frequent. Too bad. I bet you all would have loved to have read a post on that.

10. My friends
This is self-explanatory, don’t you think?

The Gastronomical Me in a nutshell: Shhh. Please don't tell Rose Macaulay I have a new infatuation for whom she's going to have to make room on the shelves. Although M.F.K. Fisher has a way of leaving out personal details (what happened with that first marriage to Al? How, exactly, did she and Chexbres come about? Her brother died? When? How? In WWII?) that left me hungering for a big, juicy biography, her details about food leave me completely satiated. In fact, her details about food leave me thinking, "Man, I don't pay nearly enough attention to what I'm eating, where, and when." Combine the food and the many places in which it's eaten with a way of making the reader's emotions run cross-country and you know you've got me. Caution: don't read this book if you're hungry and have no means of getting any food for a while.

The Fifth Thing You May Not Know About Me

(I promise I wrote this before I read Ian's post, but it kind of makes you wonder about sibling connections that we were both writing about the same subject in the same week, doesn't it?)

Remember last year when I was expanding on the five things you may not know about me? Well, I don’t blame you. I barely remember it myself. If you want to refresh your memory, before you read on as I attack the fifth one I never got around to doing, here you go (first link takes you to the original post, second link to my explanation for expansion).

The thing I think I feared most when I was a kid was attention in public places. I wanted to be left alone and to make it through each school day unnoticed by any except my few friends with whom I quietly played until I could get back home where I could play and read books. I paid careful attention to classroom dynamics in order to figure out how to achieve this goal, and thus I discovered that the best way to be left alone was to pretend to like things I didn’t and not to be afraid of anything. The boys were constantly trying to scare the girls, and the girl who was targeted and reacted would immediately become the center of attention.

Basically, I didn’t have too much trouble when pitted against boys trying to scare me. The only reptile I didn’t adore (I’ve always loved frogs, lizards, and turtles) were snakes. If I had such a creature (with the exception of the snake) thrown at me, I was more likely to make sure it didn’t get hurt than to scream. And (truth be told), snakes didn’t show up, because not many of the boys were particularly enamored of them, either. We lived in Copperhead territory, where parents warned their children from a very young age to stay away from snakes, terrified of bites from this poisonous variety. We all pretty much heeded out parents’ warnings on this one and kept our distance.

I thought women who screamed and jumped on chairs over a cute little mouse (as depicted on such shows at The Brady Bunch) were absurd. Spiders fascinated me: the bigger the better (although I didn’t particularly want them crawling on me, but it’s easy enough when you’re fascinated by them not to show fear when one is discovered crawling out of a hole, so that no one thinks of picking it up and letting it crawl on you). I was the kid who went around purposely picking up rocks to see all the creepy crawly things residing under it. Yes, they might be somewhat gross, but they were also very intriguing.

I’m pretty sure I held the position of “best ghost story teller” amongst my peers for a number of years. I was always disappointed when ghost-story-telling sessions came to an end due to some coward’s tearful race to the grown-ups or, worse, to loss of interest from others. I always wondered how they could lose interest while I was still waiting for a story that would scare me even more than the last.

So, I managed to avoid drawing public attention for being a scaredy cat. I wasn’t quite as adept at avoiding attention for being the class klutz, but at least no one could get me screeching and acting like a baby on the playground or in the classroom. I was just as tough as the boys.

However, there was one fear no one ever tested. No one ever thought about the fact that someone might be afraid of heights. I mean, it’s not as if we had cliffs or skyscraper scaffolding out on the playground. The greatest height we had was the top of the monkey bars, from which a kid could fall and break an arm (as some had), but that was about it. No one knew as I began to develop this fear that it was happening.

I wasn’t always afraid of heights. I don’t know when the joy of climbing to the tops of trees and racing around on rooftops ended, but I do know that by the time I was in 8th grade, no one would catch me even on the lowest of tree branches. This is sad, really, because up until that point, I’d loved climbing up into a tree with a good book or playing Tarzan with jump ropes for vines.

My fear of heights is extremely particular, and I’ve come to realize over the years that it really has more to do with having been that class klutz, probably, than anything else. I’m not the least bit afraid to be up in an airplane, say, or on a mile-high swinging bridge, or at the top of The Empire State Building (a spot I adore). However, put me anywhere I have to rely on my own two feet to keep me from dropping a few yards, and I become paralyzed with fear.

This fear of mine probably wouldn’t be much of a problem if I hadn’t happened to marry someone who has to climb to the top of every cathedral we come to while exploring The British Isles (have you seen some of those precariously-balanced little ladders you have to climb in some places in order to do so?), scaling the sides of ancient pyramids in Tikal, and hiking up cliffs in Maine. He’s become extremely patient with me over the years, but there is usually some point during these sorts of vacations at which we’re stopped, and I’m tearfully announcing, “I just can’t!” And I’m always like a cat: quite often I can manage to climb up something, but coming back down becomes an exercise in torture.

Many of you are probably thinking, “Why does she go?” “Why doesn’t she send him off to these places alone?” Well, you’ve obviously forgotten I’m somewhat of a masochist. I actually do want to see all of Salisbury from the top of the cathedral; I want to watch the sunrise from the top of a Mayan pyramid; I want to see the ocean from that mountain peak in Maine. I just don’t want to have to get there. And I want to make sure I’m a good 100 feet back from the edge at all times.

I’ve been known to say, “I’ve really got to get over my fear of heights.” I’m sure I could do so with a little intense psychotherapy. But, at a company Christmas party a few years back, I found myself actually admitting my fear to the boys. I was the only female manager in my department at the time, and for some reason, we were being cliquish (which was unlike us), and all the managers in my department were sitting together. Once the admission was out, I noticed that none of them immediately hoisted me up onto a ladder somewhere. None of them decided to drive me to the edge of a cliff or to take me out onto the roof of the building. As a matter of fact, when I announced it was a fear I felt I ought to overcome, one of them turned to me and asked, “Why?” Another immediately echoed this sentiment.

Why indeed? After all, I’m not a roofer. I don’t install telephone lines. I’m not in the practice of washing skyscraper windows from the outside. And if I’m at an age at which fears no longer excite the boys into action, causing me to be the center of attention, I can live quite comfortably with them. Just don’t put me on a trapeze in front of a huge audience, please.