Insights in Odd Places

The NYC Writer's Agent is on the left--You could have spotted her, I'm sure

Maybe this doesn't happen to you, I've never asked. Do you ever see a scene in a movie, read a sentence in a book or hear a line on a TV show that throws you for a loop, sends your brain to places it's never been before, clarifies an issue you've had in the back of you mind? It happens to me sometimes and it happened last night in the oddest way.

Michael had to go to bed early because he was so tired from working overtime and so I decided to watch an episode of "Men in Trees" that I had recorded. This series is sometimes pretty silly, but it's nice, light entertainment and I like to look at Jack, the hunky, handsome boyfriend of the main character. For those of you who haven't seen it, the story is set in Elmo, Alaska (fictional town) and the premise is that Maryn (Merrin? Merin? Meryn?) is a writer about relationships who has gotten herself stranded in Elmo and then ends up staying and putting roots down with Jack, a naturalist. The program is winding up because it hasn't been renewed. A little too silly to catch on, I guess.

Anyway, there is a relationship on the program between an outdoorsy Alaskan man and a New York City agent (Maryn's writing agent). Their relationship is one of the silliest and most unbelievable ones on the show; at least it seemed that way until I watched the episode last night. They have been going back and forth about where to live--Alaska or NYC--and can he live in a city and can she live in an extraordinarily wild and unsophisticated Elmo. He went to NYC, where they actually got married, and got a job as a garbage man. But in last night's episode they are heading back to Elmo in an RV. All along there has been conflict between the characters because they are opposites. Last night it was conflict and different attitudes towards money, one of the Big Three Issues, as we all know, in relationships. The Alaskan was thrifty, planning a route to Elmo that stopped only at "Potatoville" restaurants along the way. The NYC agent wife was snobbish about the baked potatoes at every food stop, though she was trying to go along with his plan. Finally, though, when he had loaded per purse with rolls and butter from the restaurants, she blew. "We have plenty of money! We don't need to eat at these cheap places! We don't need to be taking this RV, we could have flown first class! Do you realize how much money I have?!" He gets perturbed with her and instead of clamming up, which non-
TV character men might have done, this guy pulls over, gets two slips of paper and asks her to right down her worth and he writes down his. They exchange the papers. The look on her face tells us she thinks her worth is much larger than his and the look on her face when she looks at his paper tells us that she is wrong. She is incredulous and says, "How did you get this much?"

This is the "insight moment" for me, because my husband and I have had many, many confrontations about his "thriftiness" and what seems to me like unreasonable economy. I have gotten used to the beef sandwiches at Arbeys, but understanding it is hard for me when I'd much rather go to the Waterfront Bakery and have a piece of quiche. I've gotten used to the obsessive researching before buying anything with a tag over $50 when I'd much rather make a snap decision.

To the question, "how did you get this much?", we all knew the answer. "I don't have to economize, but I CHOOSE to. Let me show you the picture of this house I've always wanted to buy." He showed her a gorgeous, rambling house with porches all around it. He said, "And now I can afford to buy it for you". Ahhhhh, sweet. But for me, it was the lightbulb turning on. Perhaps I couldn't HEAR my husband saying almost these exact words to me, because I know he's said them. Maybe it had to be someone else, a character in a silly show, or a therapist could have said them to me. Whatever the case, no matter how I heard the words, coming from another source, they got into that part of my brain that changes behavior--that part that lets me open my eyes a little wider. My husband is very frugal and some poeple look at that and wonder how I can stand it. They've said so. But the fact is, he gives me incredible presents vacations and his worth is high for a civil servant--a worth he could never have attained unless he was careful and saved. We will have a successful, easy retirement because of him. I knew these things but I didn't KNOW them, I didn't accept that the results had to depend on the means.

How odd that a breif part of an entertainment series could have grabbed my attention in the way this program did. Boing! Understanding flew in like a bird through an open window. I got it.

Jet Stream

Okay....So....I woke up at 4:30 this morning, on a Saturday, and I'm retired. So what's up with that?! I know! I start my traveling today, another trip. This time to meet my mate in Florida. He has been there, in the hot, sweaty sunshine, for a week. I have been here in the cold, drippy clouds all week. I cannot wait to get some of that hot into my chilled bones.

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Yesterday, I had lunch with the group I call The Ladies Who Lunch, which I stole from Stephen Sondheim's song of the same name that Gwen Verdon sang with such pizazz, a glass of booze and cubes in her hand. This group isn't Sex and the City; for one thing we are in Bremerton, not New York, and we are more apt to wear clogs than Jimmy Choo's, and we're either married or too old to still be in "the scene", but we do have a good time together. Yesterday we ate at a terrific little cafe', The Hi-Lo, on 15th street. It's like a 50s musuem with food. It's exactly my favorite kind of place. You get to choose your own coffee mug from 4 rows of old mugs--I chose the Cowboy Kitties mug--and get your coffee at a bar that is the open back of an old VW van. There is a great collection of lunch box thermoses, an inspirational framed bunch of cassette tape boxes (I have to do this!), a picture of Elvis, a painting of Ziggy Pop( I think it was Ziggy), a small picture of Bowie, a frame with 8-tracks inside! And just 3 doors down is an Italian Bakery, called Luigi's! I bought a big, round perfectly fresh loaf of Whole Wheat Bread with Walnuts and a cinnamon roll. That cinnamon roll was not your usual goopy, sloppy frosted roll ala' that place in the Mall that smells so good. This cinnamon roll was lots of cinnamon and only a little sugar surrounded by a wonderful sweet bread. I'm telling myself it's really a guiltless cinnamon roll and it tasted fabulous.

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The previous makes me think about the way I eat when my Mate is not here to cook for. All my great nutritional aspirations go right out the window. There are no menus, no grocery lists, no well-balanced meals with 4 or 5 servings of vegetables, a small amount of starch and a piece of meat the size of a deck of cards. Here are some of the things I ate for dinner this past week:

• One cinnamon roll/1 piece of toasted wheat-walnut bread with no butter/1 whole bunch of popcorn with a little butter/chocolate chip cookie
• One tuna fish sandwich with lettuce and Kettle potato chips
• One-half a peanut butter and marmalade sandwich with an apple
• One big salad (I was feeling a little guilty on that night!) and later, some crackers with hummus.
• One avocado, halved, with tuna fish in the middle and pine nuts, walnuts and pecans on the side. This was a good one!
• Tonight I plan to finish the two boiled eggs and the tuna fish in the refrigerator--probably mix them together and eat them out of a bowl. I also have half an English cucumber to get rid of. Wait a minute--this sounds like a nice tuna salad! Put a few pine nuts on top and some Paul Newman dressing and ta-da! Oh, and maybe a little dusting with Romano cheese.

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What do these three jobs have in common?

Finish lettuce

Charge phone

Wax face

These are things I have to do before I leave for Florida tonight.

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I just tried to get on Alaska Airlines website--I want to preprint my boarding pass. Guess what?! The site is not available. I bet they are rewriting the whole thing in light of all the changes the airlines have decided they must make. Crapola! Best laid plans and all that. I'll try again later. In the meantime, let me rant about the airlines.

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING? If they cut flights and they increase fares and they make it worse than riding on a bus to take a flight, who will fly? And won't that mean that they'll have to cut flights and raise fares further and then WHO will fly? I think only the wealthy will fly--and the wealthy will require things that we who flock like lemmings into the coach seats have learned not to need. We've given up our peanuts and now even our dry, awful pretzels. We've learned to live with that blood clot thing in our legs, with the unsanitary pillows that are as fluffy as hard-tack, with the blankets they probably just stuff into another plastic bag complete with cooties, for the next unsuspecting lemmings. We've learned to live with the not-so-polite attendents who are getting closer and closer to surliness--wouldn't you be near to snarling through your clenched teeth if you had to serve unhappy lemmings all day and night? We've learned to bring our own food, which we try to eat while keeping our elbows tightly at our sides and our feet wedged between our under the seat carry-ons, trying not to spill or drink too much because, heaven forbid you should want to get OUT of where you are sitting to clean up or pee! We've learned not to attempt to bend over to reach anything on the floor if we don't intend to get our heads stuck against the seat in front of us half-way down. We've learned, that if we can get OUT to the miniature cubicle called a restroom and we can get INTO it, we had better lose weight before next time, because that damned miniature toilet in that damned miniature "room" doesn't seem to accomodate so well anymore as our asses aren't MINIATURE! (although with the food they are NOT serving anymore, we might be miniature before we reach our destination.)

But those wealthy fliers are going to want MORE. Won't the airlines find themselves in a miniature pickle?

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I have gotten so annoyed with the Bremerton Sun, oh, sorry, the Kitsap Sun, lately, that I have subscribed to USA Today. The Sun had so little national news for the past many years that I felt isolated in a backwater and the nightly news on the TV wasn't doing it for me. On every trip I take I buy a USA Today because it's so interesting. Now it's delivered to my mailbox Monday through Friday. I am in newspaper heaven. It's serious enough, but not too serious, colorful, good entertainment news, pretty good book news, GREAT internation news and national news, a wonderful weather map and if you were into sports I bet you'd love the fat sports section. I love to read about the most expensive house on the market today. In Friday/Sat/Sunday edition this week there is an article titled "What is your favorite food memory of a Specific Destination?" This is in the TRAVEL section! On page 1 and 2 of the main section are huge articles about McCain and Obama. I am in heaven! On page 6A is an article about "Blacks optimistic and anxious about Obama". On page 11A the article "Pop culture vies with conservatism in Afghanistan". I don't think the Sun even HAS an 11A! It's gotten so tiny, if I had a bird I'd have to buy two or three Suns to cover the bottom of the bird cage!

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Some friends are asking me to blog more about Greece and I will later. Let me just put this in for now. It's a list I made near the end of our 2 1/2 week most recent trip:

Things I Wish I Could Take Home With Me

1. The birds that sing so loudly I can hear them

2. The train--convenient!

3. The sun

4. The ice cream

5. Mary and Lambrose and Eliza and Pan (cousins) Mary and Lambrose are movie loving intellectuals, Eliza is their 7 year old daughter and Pan is 38, a computer nerd like my Mate.

6. The marble floors

7. The refrigerators--the freezer on the bottom has 3 drawers in it, like a dresser! Ingenious!

8. The c'est la vie attitude (litter-oh,well. Striking worers-oh, well. Grafitti-oh, well-what can you do? Let's go have ice cream and Kaffes!)

9. Frappes (made with Nescafe' and ice, shaken to make a foamy head)

10. The friendly dogs--all were friendly. Michael was anxious of them at first, but learned they were harmlesss, even when barking.

11. NBN-translated Evie-soda--orange or lemon, less sweet than any soda I've had in the US

12. Fresh vegetable markets open all year long

13. The fresh bread bakeries (bread, butter, marmalade and coffee for breakfast every day)

Things I would not bring back:

1.The litter

2. Rude Greek men--I ran into them, or rather they ran into me, more often this time than during any previous visit. Maybe they are mad at Americans more than ever.

3. The Greeks love of liver and other organ meats. Yuck!!! Kokoretsi for Easter looked wonderful, barbecued over the same coals as the lamb, but ACK! Nasty!

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Last post for a week. I'll tell you about Orlando and the hot humid heat when I get back. My wish for you is good weather in the coming week, maybe a surprise or two and a discovery of a good show on the TV.

Happy Father's Day, Dad

Dad and me at my 49th Birthday. Dad was 71.

Me and My Dad in 1947. He was 26, I was 3.

I woke up thinking about Dad’s today. There aren’t many Dads in my life anymore. My Dad died in 2001 and my husband’s Dad died in 2005, and my third husband isn’t the father of any of my children. The only Dad in my life is my son.

I had a love/hate relationship with my Dad. I think that’s true for lots of people. I heard someone on the radio say it just this morning. As I look back on all I learned from him, the influences he had on me, I can see that our relationship was more positive than negative and this may be the first day in my 64 years that I’ve realized that. For most of my adult life I couldn’t see past the rages that scared and angered me. It is true that my Dad was a moody person and that rage was his weapon of choice. There was no telling what mood he would appear in when coming home from work. We kids learned to assess his mood before we would say or do anything, just in case. If the mood was bad, we would walk on egg shells, if good we could be more carefree.

Dinner was always a place to be on our best behavior as it often turned into a battlefield, especially between my Dad and my brother. My brother was picky about his food and stubborn—two qualities my Dad had little patience for. I, on the other hand, learned to clean my plate and, when not chewing, to keep my mouth shut. Actually, one major rule was to eat with your mouth closed, not an unusual rule in American households. Other rules were: Don’t sing at the table. Don’t whistle at the table. Clean your plate. No dessert without cleaning your plate. No elbows on the table. Most of these rules were common to most households in the fifties, but the consequences of breaking them may not have been as common. I recall one long night when my brother sat at the table well into the night, a victim of his stubbornness and my Dad’s conviction that his son must finish his dinner before he was allowed to leave the table. I couldn’t understand why my brother didn’t just eat the food. It didn’t occur to me that my Dad could have relented. He never, never did. I think on this night my Mother intervened. Somehow, my brother was allowed to go to bed.

There were many, many rules in our lives and many times when I was frightened of my Father and his Temper. He didn’t hit us or my Mother, though he did believe in spanking. He didn’t use a belt or a wooden spoon or any other implement other than his hand and, since it was the Fifties, my Mother used the “wait until your father gets home” threat on us. She was small and didn’t know the first thing about disciplining children. He was big, strong and knew how to spank. I wonder how many times the spankings my Mother asked him to perform were hard for him to do. I’ll never know. I wish I’d asked him when I became an adult.

Dad’s most effective weapon was his anger. It could be huge, overpowering, thunderous. As a child and young person I was frightened of him, as an adult his rages angered me. One evening, as my husband and my two little daughters visited my Dad and Mom, Dad went into a rage for a reason I’ve forgotten and picked up a dining room chair and threw it across the room. I became extremely angry and told him, as we were leaving, that we would never visit again. I believe my ultimatum had an effect on him. I don’t recall a scene like that one ever happening again. Of course, he asked for my forgiveness and I forgave him. I didn’t want to stop visiting.

And finally, somewhere in my Dad’s later years, he relaxed. He stopped being frightening, he laughed more, he showed affection more. As I think back, I believe it was around the time he retired. Could it have been that after he retired the pressure was gone? Was he one of those people who handled stress with anger? Whatever the reason, his last 20 years of life were easier for all of us.

I began by saying that my Dad’s positive influences outweighed the negative ones. For some reason I decided to emulate him. I might have chosen him, rather than my Mother, because he “put her down” often. She was an artist/singer and didn’t have the common sense that he esteemed. (I’m sure that’s exactly why he chose her. She was beautiful and vibrant and lively.) I wanted to win his admiration (and not get insulted or spanked) and so I became the good daughter, the girl who got good grades and had good sense. No matter why I chose this path, it has helped me get where I am. Perhaps I was hard-wired to be responsible, to be a leader, who knows? They say ¼ of your character is in your genes, the rest a product of your environment. If so, then my choosing to be more like Dad than Mom was important in how I turned out.

Even during the raging years my Dad was a funny and silly man. He used to come out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and his dark, wavy hair combed up into some crazy “do”, which made us all laugh. He used to imitate Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks and Milton Berle. He told jokes constantly, some that wouldn’t be politically correct these days, but were still corny and funny. He was good at it and could ALWAYS remember the punch line. He loved to fish and to bowl and to golf. He was what was called A Man’s Man. He watched football, baseball and basketball and the Friday Night Fights and I watched all of them with him, learning all the rules, because he was happy to share them with me. He tied flies for his fishing trips and let me watch and explained why he was putting this blue feather, in addition to this little red one, on this small hook. I still have some of the silver reflectors he used when he fished for salmon. One year he made my brother and me a sled; on it he had painted in script: Chris and Dan. He liked to take my Mom and us kids to the drive-in theater in the summer and made a game out of it. “Get in the back seat and close your eyes and don’t open them until we get there”, he’d say. He’d have to carry our limp, pj-clad, sleeping bodies into bed when we got home.

He wasn’t the conventional Dad of the Father’s Day cards, or at least I didn’t think of him in that way. I always had a hard time finding a Father’s Day card that fit his and my rocky relationship. He would try to do the right things, try to teach us how to fly a kite, but then get mad at the kite or us. He’d try to play board games with us and then get upset because we hadn’t “told him ALL the rules”. He took me fishing once and I caught a fish, but he never took me again. He tried to teach me to drive, but I nearly hit a stop sign and he didn’t take me out again. He did not have the patience of what we would consider a “good” Dad. But nearly everything I learned as I grew to be an adult, I learned from him and apparently, it wasn’t all bad. I say “apparently” because I have made a modest success of my life. I have had children and kept jobs for long periods of time and have many friends. People seem to like and respect me. You could say that is a testament, at least in part, to the parent I decided to emulate.

I got my wit and love of comedy and joking from him. I am tidy like he was and love organization. He was a fastidious dresser; I try to be that way, too. He sang and played the saxophone. I am musical, too. Anyone who knows my Mother will ask, “Didn’t you get your musical ability and love of music from her?” I will answer, yes, probably, but it didn’t hurt that my Dad revered those things, too. I used to have good penmanship (before arthritis), copying my Dad’s beautiful handwriting. I believe my Dad was helpful in leading me on the path of being a life-long reader of classic literature. I will never forget the thrill I experienced when he gave me his Robert Benchley book to read. I was 12, I think, and already read lots of books, but his sharing a book he loved with me, meant everything to me. Robert Benchley was a British humorist; my Dad loved humor. My Mom loved movie magazines and mysteries, but I chose to go a more serious route.

As I said, Dad tried. He especially loved mathematics and so when I struggled with a math homework problem, he would help me. The problem was that he always went on too long with his help. I felt later that he might have enjoyed being a teacher, but the temper would have gotten in his way. I love Math, too, and was always good at it. Another positive Dad-gift.

I wish I could write about my family like Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris. They make it all seem so wonderfully funny. I’m sure my childhood was funny, too, if only I could get that perspective. It wasn’t tragic, it wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t sad; it was a childhood with all the emotions that entails. Yes, I was scared of this big Dad, but I loved him and I wanted to be like him in lots of ways. I hope I managed to distill the good bits, even as I absorbed some of the bad bits, too.

Okay....so....If I was going to make a Father's Day Card for my Dad right now, what would it say?

To My Dad

You are dead now

and way too late,

I realize that you gave me so many gifts

I can barely count them.

Thanks, Dad. I love you. I hope you knew that.

Love Always, Your Daughter