Savannah Lee

I recently found this old interview with Jamaica Kincaid. I remember reading her classic "Annie John" in my high school library and feeling punched in the gut. I wasn't the only one, either; this was a new book, less than two years old when I read it, but the copy was already dog-eared and battered.

Famously, Kincaid had one of the more difficult mothers to come down the pike. She has struggled to deal with that tragic legacy in her work. The interviewer asks her if her mother has ever read any of her work, and she says no, probably not, "But if I were dying she would. She loves us when we are dying."

It's a two-line poem: a condensation of suffering and mystery.

Mary Lefkowitz says that ancient Greek religion works better than monotheism--it encourages questioning, thought, tolerance, and healthy pessimism.

I.e.:

"So which god and his or her elemental forces would be behind *this* FUBAR, Aristophanes? Let's examine the evidence!" Straight line from there to chemotherapy and cellphones.

I firmly agree. I was a polytheist when I was little. I loved the Greek and Egyptian gods and was a particular devotee of the beautiful winged Isis (scroll all the way down on that last one for the images). The Greeks identified her with Demeter, who I saw as an entirely less glamorous figure; my favorite Greek goddesses were Aphrodite and Athena--love and wisdom--although I did like Artemis in her somewhat softer Roman form of Diana.

As an adult, in fact, I almost became a neopagan. I got all the books. I was all set. But somehow it never...quite...happened, and so I had to conclude that I just wasn't meant to go there.

Maybe it's because today's neopaganism tends to be mashed up with revivalist witchcraft, which is a lee-tle bit different. It's one thing to give Apollo a pinch of incense and quite another to plunge the athame into the cup and cast a spell. It's not my path to do that. I'm a 'yin,' dark, waiting, receptive type. (That's part of the reason I resisted becoming 'a writer' for so long. I was resisting 'being' and 'doing.') Winged Isis kneels.

But if you take that Gardnerian/Alexandrian witchness out of the mix, it's less clear what you're left with; incense for Apollo, I guess. But as Mary Renault said, "You can't step twice into the same river." I didn't just love Isis, I worshiped her. That's what you do with gods, right? But she answered this twentieth-century girl with silence, which was of course an act of love itself.

The Greek gods have given us their gifts. The truth is, the One Gods have too--the line "God is no respecter of persons" pretty much created the concept of equality before the law as we know it. And you can't beat the Golden Rule.

I say, don't bring back the Many Gods. Or the Ones. Go forward like grateful children to what's next. As with our own families of origin, these mothers and fathers in all their beauty and terror will be out there waiting for us anyhow. In other forms.

Sit through an ad to read Glenn Greenwald on Mukasey's nomination for AG.

Money:

"[Mukasey's] beliefs [about torture and executive power]...would have been unthinkable six years ago in an Attorney General. But now, it and he are well within mainstream Beltway ideology..."

Six. Years. Ago.

That's how it goes. A country makes a wrong turn, and all of a sudden it doesn't recognize itself.

Waterboarding and domestic spying are on the table.

And there's a "police state atmosphere at the legal border."

It happens *fast* when it happens.

Obviously. Because if people slowed down and thought about it, they wouldn't do it. Extremism can only be plunged into.

Well.

Maybe we'll be okay.

I'll be back tomorrow.

See you then.

Asked the gentleman I met at yesterday's conference.

You have simply not lived until you've told a complete stranger that, yes, you do have a story online...at an erotica website.

Mr. Conference Guy, it was my first time, and you were indeed gentle with me :)

Seriously, he heard the news with complete aplomb. As for me, I could not deliver it without turning red as a beet. Kinda like my main character, actually, who has something of her own to tell someone in that little tale.

At college, I used to walk past this book every day because it was always in the window of the bookstore. One of the editors or contributors was connected to the college in some way, so the college proudly claimed it.

There is now an essay asserting that Barack Obama is the Clintonian "bridge" to the 21st century.

"Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. [By virtue of his post-Boomer age, biracial identity, experience living abroad, and late conversion to a moderate faith, he] is a bridge between [competing] worlds."

So in other words, he's a symbol. A living symbol.

Well, okay; a leader *is* partly a symbol.

But you know what? If it's come to that, if "greater danger lies ahead" and we're seriously "vulnerable," if we need That Guy who's going to pull our bacon out of the fire, then I tell you who you want. You don't want Obama, who is indeed a symbol, but who right now is very little more.

Here's who you want:

Edward Kennedy.

Oh yes. The wounded lion. In the Senate longer than God. Ancient in statecraft. Washed in the bile of tragedy and fate. Survivor of his own illusions, whatever they might have been, and everyone else's too. Symbol, not of hope, not of promise--those things drowned in his brothers' blood and in a darkling lake--but of what remains. I've had enough goddamn idealism. I want the man with the scars.

You want a bridge? Here's a bridge. A bridge to ourselves, our secret and forgotten history, our good and our bad, our power and our limits, our beliefs and our more complicated truths. He is them all. And I think the very walls of the Senate must know him now. The building itself is only waiting, waiting for his time.

Everybody in America, write him in. If it really is that bad. If this really is the moment. Then write him in and let him do what only he can do right now.

Sorry about that.

When I got off the plane.

It was a dark blue and green plaid flannel. We lost track of it a long time ago, but back then, it was my favorite of his shirts. I walked into his arms.

It was still relatively early in our relationship, so the fierce hug he gave me was a revelation. Had it been that hard for him to be away from me?

We learn these things one step at a time, and build our lives with them.

"I got *my* dad to spend a *weekend* with me, and I thought I was doing pretty good."

It was 1990. I had just told Elissa that my dad and I were kicking off the summer by going on a two-week road trip. What got her was that I said it like it was nothing.

For me, it was. I'd gone off with my dad for two weeks *lots* of times.

My dad was born in 1934. Not that many men born in 1934 would grow up to take an interest in their children as people. This one did.

Both my mom and dad had to work in the evenings pretty often. Of the two, my dad's workplace was more relaxed, so he would pick me up after school, drive me the 45 minutes to his job, and teach classes while I half-listened and did my homework. Then we'd eat a late dinner and go home.

On the way down, we talked. At dinner, we talked. On the way back, we talked. Somewhere in there, I'd usually stretch out across the back seat (the country was a bit less safety-nazi back then) and fall asleep. There's nothing like falling asleep to the hum of a car.

#

My dad didn't have a dad.

I think that might have been the making of him.

First of all, he never got the bad example--he never saw That Guy sitting on That Chair hiding behind That Paper and That Cigar. So he had to invent his own ways of being a dad, and in his complete naivete, he assumed this meant he would have to put in a lot of work and emotional investment. And, you know, the lack of That Guy in his own life made him feel like all that work was worth it.

He told me once, "I made up my mind that any children of mine would know me."

I'm looking forward to seeing you. Dad.

Speaking of my dad.

He used to have his students keep a journal through the semester for extra credit.

"Now don't," he said, "try to pull an all-nighter the day before it's due and write all your entries at once. You may think you can fool me by switching pens now and then and spilling coffee here and there.

"I. Can. Tell."

And stopped--right in the middle of the street.

I half expected our seriously tough old bus driver to plow into whoever this was and crush them right off the road.

But none of us cared about that for long. Because the door of that car opened--

--And a pair of arms pushed out a bewildered adult golden retriever.

On our gasps and shouts, the car door slammed and they shot away.

The dog seemed to know that it was hopeless. It didn't run. It stood still in the road, shaking all over, looking around with huge eyes.

Well, the bus driver knew what to do. She simply opened the door.

Two or three girls at once went out and held out their arms. The dog made the momentous decision to trust some members of the species that had just betrayed it, and the girls led it onto the bus. As they debated which of them would actually bring it home, the driver got back to work.

You know, it's funny...our school was called Mercy.

If you think of it as a complete indictment of American culture, rather than the story of the criminal and the police officer who captures him, prosecutes him and then becomes his best friend, then "American Gangster," though still fairly boring, at least makes sense.

If, however, you do want the story of the criminal and the cop who captures him, prosecutes him and then becomes his best friend, you have a problem.

Basically, the movie just takes way too long to get anywhere. For a character-driven, anti-buddy movie, that's bad. But again, it's entirely possible that the film was hijacked by a deeper need to criticize the entire American edifice. There are little clues, like an older gangster's speech about how everything is going to hell these days and subsequent events proving him so utterly right. As in "Boogie Nights" and "Blow," similar stories of 1970s decadence and decline, things just keep getting worse and worse. In fact, it's a little disturbing how often we've had to keep telling ourselves the same story. But in this case, the 1970s clearly stand in for the 1990s. The project building in which a key police raid occurs is straight out of Jonathan Kozol. It is a 1990s project building, not a 1970s one. Among other things, those buildings were simply not that old back in the early 1970s. At that time, they were the solution, not the problem.

The movie therefore is a comment on the entrenchment of urban poverty, a comment which is made with such despairing ferocity that the filmmakers had to have been thinking of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as well. The lighting and setups are often so ugly that a person feels as though that is where we are. Ridley Scott appears to be telling us, "You Americans are such a bunch of savage thugs that the halfway decent among you have to join forces with the bad among you to hold the line against the even worse, and that's the best you can hope for." Unfortunately, Scott, in his understandable despair, neglected story values to such a degree that the viewer remains unengaged.

I asked my friend Gwen.

When Gwen had called me and asked me to come over, I'd gotten the feeling that something was wrong. She'd sounded funny. I had not, however, anticipated that something would be as wrong as a decapitated hamster.

There the little body sat, by the wall of its glass cage. It was a lump of fur with two dainty forepaws poking out in just the right spots, but with the head, which should have been between them, missing.

I looked at Gwen again. "Where," I asked, "is the head?"

She said, "I don't know."

The reason I was asking is because it was actually quite plain to see that it wasn't in the cage. Which led to an unfortunate conclusion about the surviving hamster.

This would be gross enough for anyone, but particularly for the approximately-eleven-year-old that I was. I took refuge in a mantra: "This is no time to be weak."

"This is no time to be weak," I told Gwen, ordering her to get me some toilet paper.

"This is no time to be weak," I reminded her as I used the toilet paper to fish the corpse out of the tank.

"This is no time to be weak," I added, wrapping the little thing up and demanding more impromptu graveclothes.

"This is no time to be weak," I encouraged her, wrapping and wrapping and wrapping. I continued with that theme all the way downstairs and out to the back yard, where we dug a shallow hole and laid the gauzy hamster to rest.

#

Much personal writing takes the form of secular homilies in which some kind of revelation, meaning or, in a worst-case scenario, lesson is learned. I am here to tell you that I did not learn a goddamn thing from burying that headless hamster. Nor did I reach any new stage of friendship with Gwen (not her real name, btw). We were just shellshocked. I went home, and the next time we saw each other, we pretended that the whole thing had never happened.

Gwen died young. Leaving a five-year-old son. And I didn't learn a damn thing from that either.

That is what I said upon learning that Norman Mailer, who cannot be contained by labels but who wrote for a living, had left the building on Saturday.

Why did I worry about Vidal, who is now our last remaining lion?

Vidal and Mailer have been friends/rivals/friends for years. I felt that Mailer's spirit might call to his counterpart, his fellow lion: "Allons! to that which is endless, as it was beginningless." (Whitman, Song of the Open Road, 13:169.)

Who could fail to answer?

#

They don't make 'em like Mailer (or Vidal, who, despite my fretting, is still with us) anymore. In some respects, that might be a good thing. But what we're losing, as Mailer's vast 20th-century life and those like it come to a close, is irreplaceable.

#

"Song of the Open Road" again, 14:190-195:

"Forever alive, forever forward,
Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied,
Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,
They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go;
But I know that they go toward the best--toward something great."

The ER doctor didn't want to admit me--it was just gastroenteritis--but the nurse bent over me like a mother bear. "She's just a little bit of a thing," she argued. "She can't take all that vomiting. Can't we just admit her and give her an IV?"

The doctor rolled his eyes but humored the little woman. Down the hallway I went, somebody already wiping my arm to get it ready for the needle.

I was not really present and accounted for during these events. Apparently what I'd done at the admission desk counted as fainting. Leaning on it heavily, head on my arms, I had confided to the admitting nurse, "I really need to sit down." She looked me right in the eye and said "You need to *lie* down." And got an orderly.

Through my fog, however, I was acutely aware of one thing, and kept repeating it to myself:

If this was the nineteenth century, I could be dead.

There was no question in my mind. I'd gotten too weak too fast, and had not felt like there was any end in sight.

I was twenty-one. It was quite a thought.

Disclaimer: I have no memory of this. I was three years old.

But here's the story.

The dancer Edward Villella had come to town and my parents took me to see him. The show was proceeding as normal when all of a sudden my dad looked around and saw that I was not in my seat. I was, in fact, almost at the stage. I had evidently decided that this world of grace and beauty would do very nicely and was taking the logical next step.

#

Naturally I was prevented from actually rushing the stage and we probably left.

In case you're wondering, no, ballet lessons did not ensue. That was left for the next generation. I did start drawing ballerinas obsessively, but my parents interpreted this as having to do with art rather than dance.

The thing is, I didn't stop. Into my twenties, I spent a couple of hours a day drawing dancers.

Is that why I was here? Was I supposed to do this thing that I did not in fact do? Am I an amputee from myself? Left to make do with what remains? Will I never actually be who I am? Is that the source of my panic?

Is that why I write? Is that why we all do? Because for each of us, a door shut somewhere else, so we had to live in the hall? It would explain a lot.

#

I wish I could step back into that memory. What did I think I was seeing? People, or angels? 'Dance' or just sheer beauty? What made me think that I could somehow become part of it by going up on stage? What did I think would happen if I made it? Did I know?

Or had I just gone forward on trust?

Has a forbidding cluster of faceless and anonymous concrete buildings. She loves them. Down she goes into the basement entrance and the distinctive scent of the building's hard skin enfolds her. It's not a real smell, though there are hints of chlorine in it. It's more the lack of the organic. The lack of anything alive.

Flattened and beaten down by the last thirty years, there are gold carpets. That sounds garish but it's not. It's perfect.

She spent a lot of her childhood riding and waiting. Riding in cars, then waiting in places like these.

The barrenness here is so beautiful. She can *see* into the walls.

Someone once said of her, "She sees the madness in me." Someone else told her, "You hide behind your eyes."

Last year Mama told her she was sorry for the waiting. Or more precisely for what it cost her. “You never got to have the fun of being young.” Mama doesn't understand her or she wouldn't have said that. Or maybe Mama understands her too well. Was she made by these walls, then? As her mama fears? Or did she make them? Is she what's left after the ambitions and duties of those she waited for, or was she here all along? Way before them, waiting in a different way?

Why not both.

#

It's another rehearsal. Her dad this time. He's doing some kind of voice-over. Undergraduates with instruments file in. They don't even know how new they look. None of them want to be here. It's late and they're tired and have other things to do. "Your own damn fault," she wants to tell them. "Nobody asked you to play the violin." She's seen so many people run around trying to get at everything. When in the end there's only one thing.

But of course people *did* ask these kids to play the violin. Told them to. Do this, do that, develop this, enrich that. *They* had parents who drove and waited for *them*.

She pans that insight across their faces. She should study them more. She should look until she finds something she can understand. But she feels better with the walls. She eyes away.

#

Now it's a presentation. Some friend of Dad's from a class they audited together. The friend looks at her with chagrin: "You're being dragged around to this!" He's one of the few who's ever noticed.

"I've got a book" she says.

And the walls. Faces without eyes.

But they see too. They wait with her.

It was a dull, punishing red. Felt cutout Christmas trees grew on it underneath a sky of tiny star-shaped buttons. It screamed READER'S DIGEST NORMAN ROCKWELL HUMMEL FIGURINES WILLFUL LACK OF CURIOSITY at the top of its metaphorical little lungs.

Its owner, seated near me in the station, did nothing to dispel the impression it created. Her face was smooth with triumph over thought and feeling. She nattered on to her husband about the certain precise lunch she wanted to have.

And I thought, no, this is just too easy. She cannot actually BE what she looks like. She cannot BE the person that I could kill on the spot by firing up my (nonexistent) notebook computer and going to capturedguys.com. No. If I did that, I knew that she'd point at the picture on the left and say "I did the rigging on that one. You have to be so careful with that kind of tape. But such nice boys they were." I knew it.

I knew that her name was Svetlana and she was a spy in deep cover who'd been cut adrift in '91 and had gone on living her lie in a swirl of terror and habit.

I knew that that husband of hers was actually Number 5, and she looked so blank because she'd worn herself out from blood and thunder on the sand.

Or it was those years in the rain with the blacklist and the FBI tail, and the long despair of seeing her red-diaper babies grow up to be yuppies.

Anything. Anything but the book turning out to be like its cover.

"I want *meat,*" she was instructing her husband. "I want *meat.*"

A veteran. She'd been a nurse at the front in Italy; she'd grabbed a machine gun off a corpse once and started firing. After the woman she loved was shot down beside her. (Nurses were front-line casualties in that war; Iraq's not the first.) She'd married a man because she'd only seen Rebecca in every other woman's eyes.

"So if we see a Burger King," she went on, "we'd better stop there."

I turned the page of my book. I was rereading Simon Napier-Bell's I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch. I hadn't noticed it the first time, but the two narratives--arranging Wham!'s concert in China and going on ever-stranger adventures with the mysterious Professor Rolf Neuber--commented on each other directly. I hadn't thought they were meant to; I'd thought they were meant to provide contrast. But Rolf Neuber affects Napier-Bell the way Wham! affects its fans--Rolf is enigmatic, fascinating, and 'beyond,' and only gets more so. But he has another life, another side, which is not at all what Napier-Bell expects. In the end, Napier-Bell withdraws rather than jeopardize his image of "his" Rolf. It's an obvious comment on stardom. And stars.

The stars on the sweatshirt rose and fell. "I just don't want to miss my chance at Burger King," said my lesbian nurse spy activist bondage rigger. "I want *meat.*"

I closed my book and closed my eyes.

The button stars danced inside them. Where had she found them, I wondered. Perhaps the future sky, too hot for real ones, coming closer.

I used to paint. This was one of them.

In retrospect, it was a postpartum thing.

Louis Menand summarizes Norman Mailer.

He says that Mailer literally made "himself a character in his nonfiction writing." This showed us that "a book is written by a human being, someone with professional ambitions, financial needs, tastes and distastes, and this human being is part of the story whether he or she appears in the story or not." Pointing out that Mailer never hid from his many failures, but lived them out in his chosen public arena, Menand says "Not many...have been so brave with themselves."

Sounds like he would have made a hell of a blogger. Maybe he was born too soon.

Acrylic on paper.

When my daughter was newly born, she would struggle vaguely, clench-eyed and red-faced, as if she wasn't sure she was entirely through the doorway and safely in life. My father said it reminded him of the throes of a friend of his who had died. He'd been in the doorway too, only heading the other way.

"Which Way Are You Going" is about the doorway. People hurry past each other in opposite directions but much the same ways, and things can get confused.

Summer on a mountain is very green, but it *feels* blue and cold and rainy, with those tiny gusts that slice into your flesh. And you're always aware of that dark heart. It's there in your inner eye.

I think it was '92 or '93. I'd picked up a fascinating little flora on a toenail--the result of a brief and highly out-of-character fling with a gym--and was telling the derm precisely how it had evolved over the past few weeks. ("It flowered upward from that initial line in a kind of crystal pattern, which was white, but then the left side of it took on a yellow tinge...")

She said "So you're a biologist."

"What? No, why?"

"You describe things so precisely."

"But I'm an art historian." Which at the time was true; I was a master's candidate knee-deep in Odilon Redon, Gustave Courbet, and the Yoruba and Dogon, with a couple of Hopewellian monitor effigies thrown in (scroll down).

She was not convinced. "You must be a biologist."

"No, but it's the same skill set." So obvious when you think about it--in both cases, you have to learn to really see what you're seeing. And say so.

Comes in handy for writing too. The complication there is that you have to learn to really see what you're seeing--*in your head*. Which is sometimes a little less straightforward. ("What's over there in that corner? Yeah, that one. What do you mean 'nothing'? Turn the light on. YAGH!" Raw subconscious goo. You've only got a limited number of times you can look at that before you start to see the tentacles of Chthulhu. "I need the rest of the room, Herman. No, in point of fact, I do *not* know if I will actually include it in the story. But I need it. I will go eat some breakfast while you project Somebody-or-Other's personality out into their space in ways I would not have anticipated. Get going.")

It actually has its similarities to Method acting. Actors and writers should form a Union of the Living Out Of Our Heads Batshit Insane. Actors are frequently very good writers of scenes because they're smart about the ways people bounce off each other--but they can have problems with overall priorities, the same way they often do when they direct. Their brilliant pursuit of the moment can handicap them when it comes to seeing the bigger picture.

Of course when you're talking about a toenail, the moment *is* the bigger picture.

"We're going to treat this very topically," smiled the derm. "Simple as pie." She wrote out a scrip and flourished it over.

I stopped going to the gym. Really, I don't know why I ever started.

Ever since we had to remodel our bathroom, I've been studying the trends.

You know what bothers me?

It's not the 'home spa' thing, where people are eating up smaller bedrooms to create ginormous master baths which feature seating areas, his-and-hers vanities, built-in flatscreen TVs, piped-in audio, and walk-in dual showers with benches and multiple water jets. No, that fascinates me. I don't think I'd ever do it myself, but it doesn't bother me.

What bothers me are the colors.

Not just in the bathroom but all over the house, people are turning their interiors into voices that speak in warms and jewels. They're using stone accents. They're setting it off with dark wood finishes.

The philosophy behind that doesn't work for me. The idea is for the room in question—bathroom, bedroom, rec room, kitchen—to set a certain mood when you walk into it.

That is exactly what I don't want. I want the bathroom, bedroom, whatever, to be a receptive canvas. Not even 'neutral.' No. Simpler than that. Less than that.

To me, the best way to do it is with white. If I'm feeling cheery, the white walls will smile back at me. If I'm feeling sad, the white walls will absorb it. If I have the flu, the white walls won't tax my aching head or prod my roiling stomach the way a rich plum or a soprano cerulean would. (Even earth tones can be dangerous under those circumstances. *Especially* earth tones can be dangerous under those circumstances.)

Also...darker interiors tend to date badly. Tones which are warm and welcoming in one era can turn sour in the next. Paler schemes, by contrast, don't suffer as much. A person can tolerate, if necessary, a beige 1980s space. A person *cannot* tolerate an avocado-and-dark-walnut 1970s pad.

#

The real story here is that people are doing so much renovation in the first place. Everyone's cocooning. I've heard this a lot as a freelancer too. People who could have afforded to travel are putting the money into fixing their homes so they don't want to leave. Making home special so they don't feel like they're missing anything by not booking that week at Miraval. You can even make it better than Miraval, the theory goes, because you can make your space exactly and precisely what you want.

Raises interesting questions about what makes home “home.” Necessarily, for most of us, it's about adapting ourselves to our space. The space we're born into, the space our parents move us to next, the space we get assigned to or are able to find in college, the space we can afford afterwards.

We dialogue with these spaces. We make them more like us...but they also make us more like them. If you completely renovate your space to impose a vision on it, do you take away some of its power? Do you lose part of what it would have given you? And isn't that part of what going to a spa means anyhow—going someplace totally *other*, which is *not* your own, in order to be changed?

Interesting to see how all of this evolves. Meantime I'll be keeping my walls the way they are...

At home we still have old-fashioned sidewalks and curbs. That's the thing, that's the detail that says 'home' to me. I look at the curbs.

Otherwise, things look the same but not. I can be at the same intersection I used to go through at least twice if not three or four times a day, and it hasn't changed, but I'm seeing it from a different angle somehow. I'm in the driver's seat now, which I rarely was before. Or I'm an inch taller and that's throwing everything off.

There's this one room upstairs that I used to sit in and look out at the huge old trees down the street. That still looks the same.

I'm lucky they still have the old house at all. Most childhood bedrooms belong to someone else now. Mine is still mine. I got to stay there with my daughter this summer: "This is where Mommy went to sleep every night." I must say that my younger self was not understanding at all. She had no sentimental welcome for these ghosts from her future. She didn't see life that way. We left her alone.

This time, it was just me. That was okay.

I have spent several hours writing two lengthy posts, neither of which I liked.

It's just not going to work today. I'll see you tomorrow.

He was trying to explain about 'control/neglect.' "You got a lot of attention paid to you and a lot of involvement in your activities, but none of it had anything to do with who you are. So you had exactly the right reaction. You became confused."

Even though she must have given him the raw material from which he drew this conclusion, she found it hard to understand. She had to come at it from the outside, as a concept. Neglect-through-attention. Hm.

Other paradoxes were easy to see. Generosity as selfishness: sure. When you give to get something. Even love as hostility. But attention, involvement, as a form of neglect or effacement? That was a sidewinder for her.

But there was actually a perfect metaphor. (She smiled in the office.) Caffeinated drinks. They took away what they seemed to give. The more of them you drank, the drier you became inside.

So it was possible. Strange, but possible, and even simple when she thought about it. A single ingredient did the job.

#

Paradoxes.

I think it was in an M. Scott Peck book. I read a comment on the Bible. As best I can remember:

"When I thought it was a book of orthodoxy" (said a woman) "I couldn't stand it. Now that I realize it's a book of paradoxy, I can't get enough of it."

#

Paradoxes.

"See how we shine," snarls Dio, "we're the last in line."

"I know I got to be right, now," says Kanye West, "'cause I can't get much wronger."

"Like a prisoner who has his own key," philosophizes Wham!.

"Nor ever chaste, unless thou ravish me," pleads John Donne.

"It rained all night/the day I left/the weather it was dry/Sun so hot/I froze to death/Susannah don't you cry."

#

"And when you're confused," he added, "you're paralyzed."

The paradox of paradoxy is that it's as confining as it is liberating. The door is open, but there's no ground to step on.

Maybe there's a look to people who can't tell the way forward because there isn't one. Who can't figure things out because those things *are* their own opposite. Because motives are fighting each other.

That's where all the stories are.

Not "old" old. But in a way it does seem like a lifetime ago that we shamelessly used our then-preschool-age daughters as excuses to get together and talk for three or four hours. ("The girls need to play together!" Honestly, not half as much as we needed to talk to each other. It's really lucky the girls got along.)

#

What will I call you, Good Friend? You're strong, practical, and self-determined. I've always admired your clarity. You have excellent judgment about people. You know I don't choose any kind of professional (therapist, realtor, you name it) without asking for your recommendation.

Your real name, simple and classic, reflects all this. What would be a good echo?

Jane. No, too old-fashioned and plain. Your real name, although strong like that, is less limited.

May: too soft.

Alice: too stuffy.

Patricia: right idea, but not quite.

Louisa? It's not a name I like, actually, but it has deep classical roots and a good mix of assertiveness and poetry. It fits you conceptually, even though no one who knows you would associate it with you.

Okay, I'm going to call you Louisa. If you hate it, let me know, and I'll change it to whatever you like. But since you're probably not prepared to discuss pseudonyms at 6:39 AM and I have to get this done now, we'll just go with Louisa.

#

So: I heard from Louisa this morning. She was pointing me to another friend's blog. He moved away last year, and we miss him.

Louisa and I grew up in Southern New England but only met when we moved to the midwest. In its own quiet way, New England is as distinctive a region as the South; it does mark people, though subtly. (ED.: I am not talking about the crusty Maine lobster fisherman of stereotype. I'm talking about suburbanized Southern New Englanders whose origins will not be obvious if you spot them in O'Hare, but who do nonetheless have deep and particular traces in them.) You tend to be somewhat reserved with strangers. If there's going to be friendliness or chattiness, the other person will have to initiate it. You tend to come off as hurried during shopping and blank or impersonal during commercial transactions. A New Englander would call that 'focused' and 'appropriate and respectful.' You tend not to be too sentimental. However friendly you may be, you do not actually *make friends* easily. That takes time. With a real New Englander, there's always a barrier to cross. If a New Englander accepts you as a friend, you'll know it; there will be a moment when they really look at you or the air shifts around the two of you.

It was nice to have all this background stuff in common with Louisa. Other than that, we are, of course, completely different.

Louisa told me once that her childhood house had raspberry bushes outside. In the summer she could go out and eat as much as she wanted. Right off the stem. None of this $3.49 per quarter-pint at the supermarket stuff, and the bottom ones are pulped. Ripe raspberries, whole and perfect and free, were her birthright.

The question is whether it could balance in any way what she was denied at the same time.

Our local Barnes&Noble has a holiday program where there's a shelf of books for young people behind the checkout. Customers are invited to purchase a selection of their choice and donate it to foster children.

When my husband and I first found out about this, we held up the entire line standing there picking books. One was not enough. We had to pick one for a baby, one for kids our daughter's age, one for preteens, one for teens...we ended up spending $40. "It's okay," I told him. "God protects you when you buy books for foster children." And I'm an atheist.

#

I was ready for the book donation opportunity this time, and, divine protection notwithstanding, I was going to limit myself to one. But which? I had *liked* all the selections we saw before, but none of them truly moved me.

Wait! There it was. How could I not have seen it the last time? Had it even been there the last time?

"NEXT!" barked the cashier.

I walked up to an older middle-aged woman who was blank-faced, dead-eyed, and, for all the seeming authoritarianism of her let's-move-along attitude, resigned.

Ordinarily, I like cashiers like that. Maybe it's Teh New England talking (scroll down), but I don't believe that service workers exist for their customers' validation. You know? Just ring me up. Don't be my buddy, and I promise I won't try to be yours either.

(Besides regional culture, there's something of a family argument here too. My dad can get offended when service people aren't friendly, and that drives me NUTS. This is not social hour! You are just buying cereal! Nobody owes you anything here except accuracy!)

But this woman did not seem indifferent in a businesslike sense. She seemed genuinely unhappy. That's another matter. I felt bad about that.

But what can you do? And I was focused on my special donation anyhow. I could not wait to give a child this book. I pointed behind the cashier: "'A Wrinkle In Time,'" I said in my strongest voice.

And her eyes changed.

She turned and picked up the book like it was the only copy in the world.

Looking right at me, she told me quietly, "When I was in college, my roommate and I read this aloud to each other."

If you were there, you would have heard in her voice that this was a precious memory to her. Vulnerable and fragile--not everyone would understand--but, like all such things, made of joy.

She and I will never know who receives the treasure that I feel we both chose on that day. But I hope it brings them joy.

I lift a headphone. "Yeah?"

"Can I have my music on too?"

She's sitting at her computer near mine, playing World Dress Up on girlsgogames.com. I notice, by the way, that they have Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Sweden....and 'Africa.' As if Africa is one big country, instead of 47 different ones on the mainland alone. 'Africa.' WHERE in Africa? Because there are some teensy little ethnic, cultural and linguistic differences between, say, Tunisia and Zimbabwe. Kenya and Senegal. Ethiopia and Libya. Benin and, yes, Egypt. Madagascar and Central African Republic--where I bet you don't even know what's going on, like I didn't until I read that.

(Oh, and if, like me, you were vague in your understanding of these events, then you owe it to yourself to face up to the apocalypse happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo too. Money's right in the first grafs.)

"You can play your music, but softly," I tell her. "I need to concentrate."

"Mom?"

"Yeah."

"It's okay, I'm going to go brush my teeth."

"'Kay."

She gets up and points at her screen. "Here, do this game. It's really fun. It's 'Make Over Studio.'"

"I can't right now, hon. But you leave it up and I'll try it if I have time."

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

(Very quiet) "I don't want to go to school today."

"I know, hon. Most kids feel that way. But you'll see 'Ashanta.' You'll see 'Jelicia.' You'll see 'Antonia.'"

Yes. That's right. She nods. Heads for the door. "--Mom?"

"Yes honey."

"Can I eat a banana in the car on the way to school?"

"Sure. Just brush your teeth first."

"Mom?"

"Sweetheart, I need to finish what I'm doing before we have to go. You go brush your teeth."

"Okay."

The Hon. Dr. St. Rev. Bradley S. Rocket, Esq, PhD, MD (at Sadly, No!) explains why he would vote for a Kucinich-Paul Unity Ticket in '08:

"Face it, foks: people who claim to have seen UFOs and who want to return America to the gold standard aren't trying to deceive the American public by telling them what they want to hear."

In a nutshell: Tell them that hard work is all that matters. Intelligence is a kind of muscle; it gets bigger and harder the more you use it. In other words, it's not what you've got, it's what you do with it. Intelligence improves with effort.

Or, even more subversively: intelligence improves with *belief.* If you really read that article, what you see is that kids' performance reflects what they *believe.* If they believe that working hard will make them better at something, they work hard and get better. If, however, they believe that their abilities are fixed, so they'll never be able to master something if they can't do it right the first time, then voila.

What if they were told that working hard would stop them from getting *worse,* but could not make them any better. I bet they'd proceed to work hard and make absolutely no progress.

Scary.