Serious

 

My kindergarten picture makes me feel an enormous sense of relief. It grounds me. It makes me smile. I'm not the sort of woman who smiles easily, and I've been the sort of woman who, when asked to smile (usually by men), feels but doesn't act (I'm that kind of woman) irritated. That's partly because it's always annoying to be told (by men) to smile (and also to be called, cheerfully, by medical professionals Mom), but also because a serious person generally has a lot of wackadoodle inside herself, no small amount of weird and a predilection for dark humor that those who wish for smiles don't see. At worst, the men who tell me to smile might/would prefer that I not be so serious, that I look pretty or would look pretty when you smile. I was serious at five years old for my very first school picture. I didn't like birthday parties or cartoons, and the show Zoom gave me a headache. I read every single book in the children's section of the library, made my way methodically through even the biographies. I imagined myself a changeling, dropped in the middle of a cheerful family. I grew up in a happy family, but I imagined myself somewhere else, a  Jane Eyre, an orphan. Being serious doesn't mean I'm not joyful, though. I know that I was filled with joy that day despite my serious expression. I'm a serious woman who doesn't smile easily but am busy, in there, laughing. 

That's all I'll say about that.

I've been thinking a lot lately about my Italian grandmother and my Syrian grandfather. I've been wondering how they'd respond to this weird world, this circus, this Terrible America. They lie on opposite sides of my family tree, my father's mother and my mother's father. I've been thinking about them because of two separate details I remember, that stand out, that define them for me, decades after they died. I feel both of them in my bones. My Nonni wore a black dress and rolled thick stockings with black shoes for as long as I can remember. In her later years, she stayed with my family for a significant part of the summer. She walked around the house with her rosary beads, muttering, Pray that I die, pray that I die. Over and over she prayed that she'd die. She was serious. My Syrian grandfather chain-smoked even after having part of a lung removed. When he got riled up, which was a lot, he yelled the Arabic word for SHIT! which is pronounced Cutta! with a hard back of the throat c. He was serious, too.

Beloved

The world is in this room. This here's all there is and all there needs to be.

Sethe, from Beloved 

It seems like everyone is mourning the death of Toni Morrison, and I've been tearing up off and on all day thinking of her, of her spirit, her words, her regal presence, her books, what she meant to me my entire adult life, as a reader and a writer and a human being, and then I was thinking of all the people slaughtered over the weekend, of the piles of dead children, of the human stain of racism in our country, of all that we have to do, to fix and how to be. I first saw Toni Morrison at Spelman College in the late 1980s, shortly after Beloved was published, and I sat in a huge auditorium with hundreds of people, mostly African American young women, and before She walked out onto the stage, a group of women played drums, the beat so steady and rhythmical they presaged her voice, her voice with the words, always, that she put on the page. She walked out, probably at the age I am now, and I was struck then by her presence and by the impact she had had on the women in the room. She was their voice. I read nearly every single thing she wrote. The second time I saw her was not too long ago in Los Angeles, in a theater downtown filled with the mix that is Los Angeles, yet when she walked into the room, she was so grand, so regal, her voice so rich and deep with humor and wisdom, all of us so rapt and smiling and nodding our heads that I thought then: she is all of our voices.

Rest in peace and power, Toni Morrison. Thank you.


This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

Toni Morrison, in an interview with writer Pam Houston, Oprah Magazine,  2003

for your eyes only

I need to get back to writing a little bit here every day. It was a good exercise and occasionally I'd type out some really good stuff. Thoughts and musings or what passes for thoughts in my beleaguered mind these days. And nights. I went to see Dr. Jin today. I have mornings when I'm taking care of Sophie and feel tears in the back of my throat that I swallow. A sea. So I went to Dr. Jin and she tried, again, to stick a needle in that fleshy space between the thumb and forefinger, but I knew and then she knew that I knew what was going to happen and that is pain, and it's a weird pain that I just don't can't take. So she didn't stick the needle there. After she finished with the needles she turned on the Chinese music and shut the door behind her, and I swear it's the same music that they played in the Chinese restaurant where I worked for a brief time in Carrboro, North Carolina. I was the host and seated the few customers we got in dark booths and I've written this before, but there was a Chinese waiter named Jackson who was in love with my young college self and he was always somehow behind me whispering in low tones under that Chinese music. One day he came in with a perm and I noted the perm and he said for your eyes only which I believe was a Bond film of the era. I still remember Jackson and the bags of food that the cook in the back dumped in woks and stirred around and I wonder what happened to all of it. I think about Jackson every time I lie on Dr. Jin's table with needles between my eyes my breasts and down somewhere on my feet and that Chinese restaurant music plays. I'm the hostess, still, and he's at my back, whispering in my ear and there's something so relaxing about letting it all go or come, these memories of darkness and men and food and the way light falls in a late-afternoon booth. It's not nostalgia but a meditation and after a while the Chinese music tape clicks off, Dr. Jin comes in and takes out all the needles and tells me to take these pills for my sadness and she does this for me, she says, and I love her.

Burn It All Down

Rage.

That's what we feel.

Rage.

I wish I could find a photo of my eighteen year old self, the innocent self that attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who pledged a sorority, who attended fraternity parties, who got drunk only a few times, but one time in particular at a party and afterward when a boy whose family name emblazoned a dormitory took me back to his dorm room and when I felt woozy (I had never been drunk) and said so, he told me to sit down on the bed lie down you'll feel better and then with lie simultaneously put his very large hand at the top of my stomach, just below my chest I think it's called the solar plexus and pushed me backward but I knew in that moment, I knew his hand, and even as I looked up into his nostrils so wide, so long I knew what was happening and my head cleared and I struggled up his hand there and sat up and stood up and walked out the door and ran down the stairs and out of the dorm and on to mine. I don't remember if I told anyone about that, then. I was a little bit drunk. Maybe he really wanted to help me. 

I went to college with lots of Kavanaughs. 1981-1985. The parties, the garbage cans filled with Hawaiian Punch and grain alcohol. The ancient black man who tended bar, at the "cocktail" parties and called every girl Miss and her date's last name, his voice soft as he handed out gin and tonics. The rumor of girls pulling trains. Girls who woke up and had forgotten what happened the night before. The smell of piss and stale beer in the hallways of the fraternity houses in the morning. The boys in one fraternity who hung tampons from their Christmas tree in the entrance of their "house," just at the bottom of the winding staircase where girls and boys far wilder than I disappeared. The secret societies where the most privileged boys belonged, along with professors and alumni, the Castle and the Lodge, their arcane rituals. The parties there where lines of cocaine were sniffed up with dollar bills, where girls' boyfriends had nicknames like "The Doctor," the wink wink of dealers, the wall-crawling thumping of music and ecstasy-fueled camaraderie. The teeth grinding afterward. I knew all of it, participated in little of it, was usually sober, my own boyfriend and his friends drinkers but never all that. There are always choices to be made. I watched it. All rich. All white. The Daddies. The privilege. The entitlement. The racism. Yes, the racism. Antebellum parties with blackface. The laughter. No integration in the sororities and fraternities despite attempts. My grandmama would never pay for my membership if we let black girls in, I read on a slip of paper when we canvassed for reactions. I could never live in the same room with a black girl, another.

I don't think the men on either side really get it, do they. And the women on one side, yes there are sides, yes there are tribes and that is not the real danger. The women on that side who just don't can't won't get it. So much hurt and darkness and once they were little boys and yet, still.

As much as we've been taught otherwise, I say burn the whole thing down. 

Weather Empathy

Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles

Around five o'clock this afternoon, it got really quiet and still and I said to Henry that I thought something was going to happen. I texted The Bird Photographer, too. It feels weird. Something is going to happen. We thought earthquake. Everything was quiet. The only thing I heard was the air-conditioner kicking on. No birds, no cars, no horns, no ambulances or helicopters. What would I do if there were an earthquake and I was in the backyard? Henry asked on his way into the house from the backyard where he'd been hitting a lacrosse ball. I was lying on my bed reading. I figured it was a rhetorical question and didn't answer. Henry is feeling anxious about college. My schedule! My future! What will I do? What if I don't do well? I reassured him that no one knows the answers to those questions when they go to college, and if they do, they will probably change their minds once they get there. I told him that it'll all become incredibly clear one day. Ha. I said no such thing. He has no idea that it was only yesterday that I was walking through the Arboretum near midnight with my books on my hip, quickly, back to my dorm where I'd join my Jesus freak room-mate in our Carolina blue room. I'd go down the hallway, take a shower and wrap my hair in a wet towel, go back to the room and sit in front of the window, the fan blowing high, cooling the drops of sweat already beading on my skin.












It rained. Actually, it drizzled. Still! It's August! Well, it was more like a few drops. The sky got dark, there were a few rumbles of thunder and I saw a picture online of a lightning strike in Orange County. So that's what happened. At least for now.

How We Do It, Part (Lost Count) in a series

photographer: Carl Jackson

When I was a small child, I lay in the grass or up in the cherry tree and stared up at clouds, floating. I did more than imagine shapes when I was a child, a rabbit, a snowman, a man shaking a stick. I called a tree, flower and a flower, tree. Cloud, sky and sky, cloud. I thought Smell and then pick that tree. Climb up into that flower. Words. What they meant when I said them, how I made them up. It was the same with God. How I made Him up. Or wondered if I was making Him up. I imagined Him like the clouds, floating, shaped. And what of it and what of Him? Were we His dream? Were We his dream? Had He made us up? I saw the world through God's eyes, made up, a ball, a sphere, a reflection. Trees, clouds, flowers, grass, me on my back, ground, perched on a branch, bark, cherries. I had a lover once when I was very young and when we left one another (we left one another, over and ever), I was certain that I'd made him up, yet I made another again. Another lover. God is now god and He is he or him. I made a baby that we named Sophie. I made her up. She has no words and yet is made.


When I sit in meditation, breathe in, breathe out, my thoughts are words. I make them up, I make them clouds. I watch them float. On by.

Remember Me?

So, I've been absent for a while and just like exercising, once you miss a day and then another and another, you're back to being grotesquely inactive and have gained a thousand pounds.

I was quite literally on the road last week, touring a few possible colleges for Henry. We had an amazing time, driving through the beautiful country-side of North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland. Henry is a joy -- always cheerful, relaxed and so very funny. I feel incredibly blessed to have had the opportunity to hang with him, nearly 24/7 for a week.

What else is new? Things good that I won't blog about yet and things bad that concern the great job that I've had for the past couple of months. I won't blog about that either but would appreciate words of wisdom, jokes, some anti-corporate America ranting or whatever you hold in your dear minds and hearts.

Here are some pictures from my trip.

My beautiful friend Louise and I at her river house in Virginia

Gorgeous burst of forsythia yellow at the river

East Coast sunset at the river

Henry and I at The Old Well, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC

Henry on his device and me saying "grrrrrrr" in front of my beloved Wilson library
Chapel Hill, NC

Henry looking over Fetzer Field, home of UNC lacrosse

Henry running up stairs of beloved Wilson Library, UNC

Henry posing with the Salisbury University seagull mascot

The spectacularly beautiful, but way too conservative and country clubbish Washington and Lee University

Right after I snapped this picture of my adorable son, he picked up the tab on our fancy dinner. 

Robert E. Lee, rightfully overshadowed by Henry

Road fare, along with filling up the tank of the car for only $20!

Can I tell you that Henry was overwhelmed mainly by the amount of road kill that we saw along the way? I am not certain why there isn't nearly as much road kill in California, but I will admit to you that I actually peed my pants a tiny bit laughing at Henry counting the numbers of carcasses he had seen. Along with the usual squirrels, rodents, cats, dogs and possums, we counted two deer -- one being gutted by a bunch of buzzards and another being heaved into the back of a pick-up truck. Holy southern schmoley.

Here are some pretty road pics:

And here are some photos of our last day when we strolled the campus of UNC, again.

The main quad of UNC, whose trees originally made me fall in love with the school

The beloved Wilson Library Reading Room where I spent many an hour studying and mooning over the boy I loved

I would caption this "where my orgasmic pleasure in the Wilson Library Reading Room was misunderstood by my son" but that sounds inappropriate. His disinterest was entirely appropriate

A William Wadsworth collection in Wilson Library. I lovingly gazed at everything, much to Henry's horror

Seriously, how did thirty years pass because I could have taken this in 1985

A great demonstration against the bullshit law recently passed in North Carolina legislature

Add caption

a moon, worn as if it had been a shell

Don't forget to send me your wisdom and jokes as I'm feeling beyond anxious, like the carpet's been ripped out from my feet (cliches come in handy when you're blown away).

Memorial for Dr. Viola Frymann, D.O.

I drove down to La Jolla early this morning to attend Dr. Frymann's memorial service. I wrote a little about Dr. Frymann's life and death a few weeks ago, and I had hoped to take the children with me, but it was difficult to rouse the boys on a Saturday morning, and I wasn't quite up to the task of taking Sophie alone, so I headed down there by myself.

Even though I was running late to make the 11:00 service, I pulled over at the overlook near Camp Pendleton because I always pulled over there back in the days when I drove down twice a week with a very young Sophie in the back of the car. We'd get out and stretch our legs and look over the wide expanse of blue. I wanted to make a ritual of my journey, and today was particularly beautiful -- the ocean a soft blue that lightened and deepened and melted into the sky. The gulls wheeled around catching the currents, and I stood and looked out over the Pacific.

When I got to the church, the service had been going on for at least a half an hour, but the Episcopal minister was giving the homily, and it only took a few minutes before I began to cry softly in the pew. Dr. Frymann was described as a woman of steely intellect and discipline who, after injuring her ankle and giving up her dream to be a ballerina, gave her entire life over to improving the lives of children through osteopathic medicine, particularly those whom other physicians had given up or declared impossible to treat. The minister aptly said that when she looked at you, it was as if her eyes were x-rays, and she could penetrate to your soul. Yes. That was my experience. I realized quite suddenly that it was almost exactly twenty years to the day since I had first brought Sophie to see Dr. Frymann, when I travelled from my home in New York City in February of 1995 and walked through the white gate of the little yellow house that sat on the bluff of La Jolla Cove and handed my sick baby over to her.

Raoul, the pianist that accompanied Dr. Frymann's treatments of Sophie and many other children back then, was there today, playing Chopin and Beethoven and Bach.  I also saw many of the people that worked at the Osteopathic Center for Children, a couple of familiar faces belonging to other mothers,  and a few of the osteopaths that were family to us all those years ago. One of them, Dr. Morelli, remembered me, and when I gave her a hug she told me Sophie taught me about angels. She always looked so intently up and around, like she saw them. I thanked her for that and for literally picking me up off the floor where I sat crying one day, overcome by fatigue and worry.

After the service, we proceeded outside to the Memorial Lawn where Dr. Frymann's ashes were interred. The minister crouched down over a small square cut out of the ground and gently shook out the ashes of this dear and powerful woman, blessing and chanting over them. I saw them swirl up and around from the small impression in the earth, the fragments blown a bit by that gentle breeze that seduced me into moving here so many years ago.

How grateful I am to have known her and to have had her hands touch and treat and heal my three children. When invited, I took the small shovel and gently placed some dirt on top of her ashes, closed my eyes and heard her voice over the gulls. I still heard her voice when I left the reception afterward and drove down the drive below the yellow cottage that is now a busy restaurant. I got out of the car, my back to the motel where I'd lived with Sophie and stood at the bluff and watched the waves crashing onto the rocks.

I know that Dr. Frymann rests in peace after a life well lived. She was one of the most influential people in my life, steadying me on this path. Her remains are buried under the grass in front of the church she loved, a bit of her blowing over the majestic Pacific. She'll live in me, in Sophie and Henry and Oliver and countless other people and children, forever and ever. Amen.

Other posts about Dr. Frymann:

Dr. Viola Frymann (1921-2016) 

How We Do It: Part XXXVII of a Series:Fragment

Dr. Viola Frymann, D.O. (1921-2016)

Dr. Frymann and Sophie, 1997

I learned today that the beloved osteopath who changed Sophie's and my family's life over twenty years ago died this week at the age of 95. All three of my children were patients of Dr. Frymann -- Sophie began treatments at ten months, when I'd fly to La Jolla for six week trips, living in a little motel by the sea. When I gave birth to both Henry and Oliver in Santa Monica, I traveled down to see Dr. Frymann when they were each less than ten days old so that she could give them a newborn treatment. She believed that treatment at birth and through infancy and childhood was of enormous benefit and freed the child from digestive issues, colic and the ailments that we've grown to expect and accept as we age (ear infections, "growing pains," back and neck pain, etc.). Over the next fifteen plus years, we made the trip down to San Diego multiple times a week and then month -- a drive that I never complained about because I knew what lay at the other end.

I credit her for setting Sophie on the path to true healing (something distinct from curing), and for ensuring the boys' vitality and ease (they were, quite simply, always jolly and rarely ill through childhood and neither ever on any antibiotic because of her treatments). I couldn't possibly describe this woman's impact on my own life and thinking. She is probably the only true healer that I will ever meet, the woman responsible for our move to California and for setting me on the path of integrative medicine and treatment. She guided me forward when I didn't know what to do. I believed Dr. Frymann when she told me about the body’s inherent ability to right itself, to heal itself, and that her work was to help the body find its optimal path. She never claimed to cure a person but to rather help that person reach his full potential. When she did speak of curing, it was in religious terms, an expression of her deep faith in Christianity and God’s power. Her work, though, was not religious, in the sense that she was a scientist who had studied and practiced osteopathic manipulation for over fifty years. If it weren't for Dr. Frymann, I have no doubt that Sophie would not be alive today nor she and her brothers in such good overall health.

She was your first ray of hope, my father emailed me this morning when I told him of her death.

Yes. She was my first ray of hope. She taught me nearly everything I know about healing and curing, about what it means to be human and whole. Her life not only affected ours but those of thousands of people around the world, and she worked and traveled and taught until her retirement at age 90, five years ago.

We will miss her and are grateful to have spent so much time, literally, under her powerful hands.

Here's an excerpt from a chapter in my book-in-progress about Dr. Frymann that gives you a small idea of her power and worth.



_________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Frymann believed in the inherent dignity of each child, no matter how “damaged.” She never used the word “damaged” at all, in fact. Every child is worthy and has potential. Every child can understand what is going on around him or her, able to sense the environment and whether it is positive or negative. Her beliefs resonated with me and with those who made such an effort to bring their children to her. The simplicity of those beliefs tapped into our most fervent hopes but also affirmed the things we already knew about our children.

I sat in the “quiet room” at Dr. Frymann’s office while Sophie got her treatments during my first few visits to California at the La Jolla office, flipping through old Reader’s Digests and prayer books. Sometimes, I closed my eyes and leaned my head back on the old chintz-covered armchair, my hands loose in my lap. I knew that outside the sun was shining and that the palm trees were swaying from the ocean breezes off of La Jolla Cove. I heard the faint sounds of piano music coming from the music therapist in the treatment room and the gentle opening and closing of the front gate. When I opened my eyes, I saw that a woman had walked into the office with a girl in her arms. The girl appeared to be made horizontally the way she lay flat on top of the mother’s bent arms. Her feet, twisted inward, stick-straight out, level with her head, a long black sheath of hair hanging down over the other bent arm. She made no sound and there was no way to tell, really, what her age might have been. I tried not to stare, smiled awkwardly, instead, and said hello to the woman. She sat down, still holding the horizontal child, murmuring to her. The girl didn’t move in her arms, lay straight like a board.

When Dr. Frymann came out with Sophie, she handed her to me and told me that she’d see us in two days. When I asked how Sophie “did,” she replied, “Fine. Her vitality is much better.” She then turned to the other mother and lifted the girl into her own bent arms. The transfer was effortless, and now it was Dr. Frymann who carefully balanced this child over her arms, walking back toward the treatment room. “You are an Indian princess, yes, aren’t you,” she crooned to the girl as she walked away.

Old Books, Old Memories, Fresh Paint

Haysoos, Maria and Josef!

I'm having the old homestead painted for the first time since we moved in nearly fourteen years ago. Those are only some of the books that I had to pull down from only some of the shelves. Oliver told me that I had too many, and Henry reached up for the ones on the tallest shelves and wondered if I'd read any of them lately. Probably not, I told him. But they are who I am. I could give a flying foo-foo about that Mondo Londo woman who tells you to get rid of everything unless you can say that it brings you joy. The little French paperbacks of Balzac and Sartre and Rimbaud brought me nothing but agita when I read them thirty years ago, but when I run my fingers down the yellow pages and bury my nose, I remember Dey Hall and how hot it was in the fall without air-conditioning, how insane Dr. Daniel, with his American South French accent, pounded on the table and shouted OUI, OUI, OUI, HELL OUI! if we answered a question correctly, and how hard Sarah and I laughed when we quizzed one another on idiomatic expressions -- all 350 of them -- useless then and now. Il n'y a pas un chat dans la rue! we'd repeat, over and over, downing our Tabs and Mello Yellos, Sarah's curls riotous and as disheveled as her backpack whose contents slipped out and left a trail wherever she walked. I read La Nausee while swinging on a hammock on the rickety porch of a house we called The Shanty where I lived with my friends Missy, Hilary and Julia during my junior year. I felt literally nauseous while I read, the first time the body met the mind and one recognized the other and the exhilarating freedom of being alive. I'd meet my boyfriend Luke under the trees whose arching boughs had convinced me to give up my spot at the University of Virginia -- I loved the UNC campus, not the UVA grounds, loved the brick of Dey Hall, not the formal colonial architecture of Jefferson -- and we'd lie there on the grass in the quad, reading Auden and Williams and Yeats, Li Po and Tu Fu. They are who I am.

Cast my memory back there Lord, sometimes I'm overcome.

Love Me Anyways

Sidewalk graffiti, La Brea Blvd.

A girl I went to high school with in Atlanta had a thick brown braid, about two inches across, that she wore down her back. I always wanted a braid like it and have the thick hair but could never get it to grow that long. Or maybe it's that as it grows longer and longer, it feels like more of an encumbrance than a crown of glory. I cut my hair today from quite a bit past my shoulders to just above. It was the longest I'd let my hair grow since the last millenium when married to my college sweetheart and living in Nashville, Tennessee after which (both the marriage and the city) I wore it the shortest I'd ever dared and moved to New York City. While I enjoyed the don't give a flying foo-foo about how I look mentality it took in this millenium to let it get as long as it did until this morning, I felt increasingly -- let's say -- haggard. How much can I possibly write about my hair without resorting to tired cliches about age and sexuality and what the hell has happened to me and where are you tonight, sweet Marie?  The tiny, wonderful hairdresser used a flat iron and a blowdryer on it, so I look a tad Barbra Streisandish (and not in a good way), but overall, it feels good. I think when I let it dry naturally (as I don't own a flat iron or blowdryer and plan on never doing so), I might hitch a ride in a convertible Mercedes like the one the girl with the brown braid drove in Atlanta and take off for my next destination.

Well, anybody can be just like me, obviously
But then, now again, not too many can be like you, fortunately.