Other Journeys » Sherry Roberts Notebook

I Heart You Not

Holidays, Love, Relationships No Responses »

Feb 122012

I despise holidays based on either extortion or expectations of the heart.

Everyone knows my feelings about Halloween. (See “Why I Spend Halloween in the Basement.”) Valentine’s Day ranks right up there with it; I was tempted to name this post “Why I Spend Valentine’s Day Under the Bed.”

I didn’t always think Valentine’s was a total waste of pink, doilies, and red construction paper. I’m not a complete ogre. I still have those homemade love notes from my kids, and they still make me cry. And then I remember those same kids, years later, sobbing in my arms because some elementary school doofus gave everyone a Valentine but her or because she did’t receive a rose that day from a single high school moron.

This holiday is rife with expectation, hope, and sentimentality. It makes me gag. It makes my heart hurt for all those sitting at home waiting and for those coerced into going out on a miserable date not because you want to but because that’s what you’re supposed to do on February 14.

Romantic love is not dashing into Cub Foods at 5 p.m. and snagging the last bouquet or giving, heaven forbid, a love coupon worth one heck of a time at a future date. It is not having a jet waiting to fly you to Paris (althought that could earn massive points).

Romantic love is giving and receiving a smile EVERY day. It is keeping your mouth shut when you are jumping-around-inside-of-you dying to say something.

You want true love? I’ll give it to you.

One day my husband (whom I shall call Rubbertoes) and I were arguing in the backyard. I forget what it was about, but it started to get heated. Finally, my normally peaceful Rubbertoes flung his gardening trowel into a bed of impatiens and shouted: “And that’s your heart!” For a moment, the world stopped; the birds ceased singing; the children gasped.

And then I burst out laughing. I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my lawn chair.

No one sends a spade spinning into the aorta of a garden unless they truly care. When we drive each other to the edge and still hang on, that is love. It does’t have anything to do with chocolates or jewelry or tattoos.

My curmudgeonly advice: Don’t do anything special this holiday. Instead, make all the other days of the year special. That’s my plan—do nothing. At least until the grandkids come along.

_______________

Do you celebrate Valentine’s Day? How? Are you a curmudgeon or a mushy, chocolate-loving, diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend sort?

Drawing on the Walls

Art, Creativity, Maud's House 2 Responses »

Feb 052012

This is a story of a woman who drew on the walls and the stove and the breadbox. Her name was Maud. And I fell in love with her spirit.

Folk artist Maud Lewis of Nova Scotia was a wee woman with such a great artistic spirit that her entire house has been preserved in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. The diminuitive dwelling doesn’t take up much space; it was only a 10 x 12 foot fisherman’s shack to begin with. Yet it was bursting with life when Maud lived there.

“Once this house was covered in tattoos.” That was the first line I wrote for my novel Maud’s House, after reading about Maud Lewis and seeing her artwork. Although my novel has nothing to do with Maud Lewis or her life, I hope it is imbued with her unquenchable desire to create. I couldn’t help but name my character Maud because she came to be as driven as the real Maud.

Pictures of Maud Lewis nearly always show her smiling and hiding her hands, which had begun to curl and become misshapen when she was 15. Her art is always joyful: brightly colored flowers, oxen with large curling eyelashes, glorious butterflies and birds. These were the things Maud saw from her window every day.

When I get stuck and consider complaining about how lousy the writing is going, I think of Maud and kick myself. She was a sickly orphan passed around from one poor relative to another until one day, in her thirties, she walked down the road from Digby to the isolated cabin of shy fish peddler Everett Lewis. Everett was impressed that his dog didn’t bark at their uninvited visitor. Apparently, Maud had passed some kind of test. Within weeks, they were married and living in their closet of a home.

Everett encouraged Maud’s love of painting and scrounged paints for his wife. Soon she was riding along on his fish route in the Model T selling hand-painted postcards—five for a quarter. In the 1940s, Maud put out a roadside sign, “Paintings for sale,” and began selling small paintings to tourists for $2.50. By the time she died in 1970, at the age of 67, her paintings were being shipped to collectors all over the world.

These are the things you should remember about Maud Lewis:

She never took a drawing lesson, read a textbook, or saw a work of art.
She contracted polio as a child and later was afflicted by arthritis. She lived in constant pain. By the end of her life, Everett had to lift her out of the bed in the morning, dress her, and set her by her easel and paints. And still she painted: everything in her house (even the windowpane), driftwood, cookie sheets.
In her final years, in the hospital with a broken hip and no longer able to control a paintbrush, she made Christmas cards for the nurses with felt pens.

When she was creating her art, Maud Lewis escaped pain, poverty, and the Nova Scotia cold.

She proved that the creative spirit makes everything seem bigger—life, love, even a painted doll house with no insulation or running water.

____________________

Visit the Painted House of Maud Lewis.

Watch Where You Put Those Memories, Buddy

Aging Parents, Memory, Nature 2 Responses »

Jan 162012

My 81-year-old father claims he’s 91. What day is it, Dad? He looks befuddled and asks for multiple choice. He calls my sisters: “Come help me find my phone, hearing aids, teeth.” My father is taking the strongest drug for Alzheimer’s, and it is not holding the line.

I am concerned about memory preservation because of my father and his sister, a former beautician who was found wandering in her pajamas with wild hair. This is looking more and more like a family thing, which I think about every time a word slips away just as I am about to nail 4-Down in the crossword. Daily crosswords and sudokus are my line of defense.

I write memories everywhere, and my scrapbooking has taken on a whole new intensity. But recently, I have read that water has memory. This gives me hope. After all, 60 percent of the human body is water.

Independent scientists in Japan and Germany have conducted water experiments to figure out: Is water capable of storing information and retrieving it? Researchers at the Aerospace Institute of the University of Stuttgart maintain that each drop of water has a face of its own, like a snowflake, but can be changed by the memory of what it comes in contact with—such as a person’s finger or a flower.

In Japan, Dr. Masuru Emote has taped words, such as “peace,” “love,” and “I want to kill you,” on separate beakers of distilled water and left them over night. In the morning, Dr. Emote took samples from the beakers and compared them to the pure, distilled water crystals taken from each beaker prior to the experiment. They were different. In fact, the loving word samples created beautiful crystals, while the hateful word samples made ugly and fractured crystals. He has performed similar experiments with music and meditation. Each time the water was changed.

With this new information comes responsibility. I live in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes. So I have been thinking that all this water around me is retaining memories of me as I swim or fall out of my canoe. When our family vacationed in Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota, we frolicked in the headwaters of the Mississippi River, where you can walk across the Big Muddy in but a few steps. We filled the river with happiness until I stubbed my toe, lost my balance, and dropped my shoe in the effing water.

The German researchers hypothesize that a river is picking up information from its source to its mouth. That means people in New Orleans are drinking memories of me hopping on one foot and cursing in Minnesota, not to mention the kid who decided to take a whiz while fishing in Missouri, and the street musician playing a tune on the Memphis waterfront.

Whether water has memory or not, I have decided to be more cautious of H2O in the future. I don’t want to be responsible for planting some horrible, murderous memory in the nearby lake. Note to self: do not rant while swimming.

Maybe these theories about water could lead to practical applications. Memories could become the eco-weapon of tomorrow. Imagine throwing a bunch of happy people in that scummy pond down the street. Clean-ups of ecological disasters could become a snap, if we could find enough people in a good mood.

But before I save the world, I should look closer to home. Maybe if I get my dad to drink more water, he will fill up with other people’s memories and not miss his own so much.

Bet Hemingway Was a Whiz in the Kitchen

Cooking, Writing No Responses »

Jan 092012

The last cake I baked drifted out of the pan as if it were an angel descending, settled on the platter, and promptly split down the middle. The fissure was about the size of the Grand Canyon. Since it was a birthday cake and, thus, not expendable, I made repairs. It takes a lot of frosting to fill the Grand Canyon.

I am used to such misadventures; they do not faze me. My husband says these things would not happen if: 1) I read more in the kitchen (as in Julia Child or Betty Crocker), or 2) I didn’t read as much (as in Hemingway or Steinbeck).

But why should I read cookbooks when I am such a marvelous cook to begin with?

I can boil down sentences until there is only the essence left, the true flavor of the words. They cling delicately to the bone of meaning and taste full and round in the mouth. They form such vivid images you can almost bite into them and feel their juices running down your chin.

A good story takes some preparation. Call it marinating. True, there are a few storytellers, such as Garrison Keillor, who pop out stories like microwave ovens. But I, and probably most other writers, take a while to collect information and ideas. After I gather the ingredients, I throw them into a pan, cover them with sauce from the subconscious, and wait.

Sometimes, I wait for years. Good cooking cannot be rushed.

Even after I have made the story, I must wait, let it simmer, let it age. For a story made today has a different taste tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that. Good writing, work studied and hailed and read over and over again, never loses its taste, never goes sour.

Of course, errors do happen. I forget to add a thought. Or I beat an idea instead of folding it in with gentleness and patience. Or I sprinkle in too many adjectives, and the story becomes not only runny but run on.

The best cooks never follow the book as if it were a drill sergeant. They improvise, feeling their way by taste and touch and sound. With practice, you get to know what will work; you have a sense of what the story needs, when it is missing a pinch of this or a dash of that.

And, of course, I have burned things. Everyone does. Cooks on scaffolds building skyscrapers, cooks in operating rooms navigating jungles of tiny veins. Cooks speaking before juries, exploring the ocean deep, patrolling lonely city streets. They make mistakes, but they don’t give up. They go right back and beat that steel beam again, cut out that diseased organ, flambé their opponents’ arguments.

Nothing is more disheartening than to hear someone cry: “I can’t cook.” Nonsense, everyone can cook. We all have our specialties, and none is greater or less than others. We all have some dish inside us with our name on it. Sometimes, we just forget to look for it. We let people sidetrack us. Categorize us. We don’t listen to our hearts.

I say get out your pots and pans and descend into the Grand Canyon. I hear the view is stunning.

Cat Smarts: When Playing with Your Food Is OK

Cats & Dogs 2 Responses »

Jan 022012

I have always been of the mind that my cats should take what they get and be happy about it. Apparently, this is the wrong attitude. Some pets require interactive pet feeders, which make meal time an intellectual challenge. These devices pose puzzles and provide interesting hidey-holes that one’s pet must master before being rewarded with pellets of tuna or beef.

The interactive feeding station for cats is supposed to stimulate the cat’s natural instinct to seek and hunt, something our civilized kitties have lost over generations of coddling. Personally, I don’t know if encouraging the wild side in pets is a good thing. I had enough trouble handling the tame ones. Let’s see, there was:

Stormy, the dog, was rescued in a thunderstorm, of course. She required an immense amount of expensive dental work, and that was BEFORE she ate the deck.
Luna and Eclipse, the cat sisters, alternately grew fatter and skinnier, until it was tough to tell who was eating what. After Eclipse died, Luna aged into a slow and snooty grazer. Always aloof as opposed to her cuddly sister, Luna took on some of Eclipse’s personality in her later years, seeking attention at all hours of the day, even when it meant flopping on the keyboard or the middle of the dictionary to get it. Then the Intruder came to live with us, and Luna became an entirely different cat.
Midori (a.k.a. the Intruder) was a cat child, always bugging the older cat to play and never staying Luna-slapped for long. Midori considered ALL food to be “mine, mine, mine.” The cute Siamese would have eaten until she exploded, I am sure. So her owner (my daughter who was living with us while attending grad school) put her on strictly proportioned and timed meals. I had to lock Luna and her meal bowl away in my bedroom at night to keep Luna’s kibble safe from Midori.

Luna has passed since those days, and Midori has her own house to terrorize now. My daughter has invested in an automatic feeder. At various times during the day, it dumps food into a bowl, which contains a golf ball. Midori has to chase her food around the ball, which slows the little gnosher down and, my daughter hopes, helps with her digestion.

That is as high tech as Midori’s interactivity is going to get. Because Midori is a smart one. I shudder to think what she could do with an interactive feeding station at her beck and paw. Rule the world perhaps.

The College that Censored Firefly

Art, Censorship, Reading, Writing No Responses »

Dec 292011

I entered the Best Tweet About the College that Censored Firefly contest today. My chances of winning are looking about as good as my chances of using my new snowshoes in Minnesota this brown winter. I never win anything, which is fine by me. I am the Rodney Dangerfield of contest winners. So don’t vote for me and ruin my record.

I put my silly tweet in the pot just for fun, but also because I really hated what the University of Wisconsin in Stout tried to pull on theater professor James Miller. In September, Miller posted a quote from the television show, Firefly, outside his office door: ”You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.” The sentiment is about standing for a certain set of values, of being straightforward and honest with your fellow humankind. No threat was intended.

But campus police were having none of it. On September 16, they removed the “unacceptable” poster because it referred to killing. In response to this censorship, Miller launched a second salvo poster, which read: “Warning: Fascism” and included a cartoon image of a silhouetted police officer striking a civilian. The poster warned, “Fascism can cause blunt head trauma and/or violent death. Keep fascism away from children and pets.”

Again, the university responded by removing the poster. Quickly, the incident blew up into a public relations nightmare for the university, fueled by tweets, blog posts, and articles by Firefly fans, free speech advocates, the media, celebrities such as Adam Baldwin and Nathan Fillon, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). On October 4, the university put out the publicity wildfire by reversing its decision to censor Miller.

This may sound like old news, but a similar incident will likely surface somewhere in the world tomorrow or the next day. Censorship seems to never go out of style. And so, FIRE is sponsoring the tweet contest to draw attention to a new video on censorship featuring author Neil Gaiman.

Now, I have a few disclaimers: 1) I am a Firefly addict and take umbrage at people messing with this rag-tag crew; 2) I am a free speech nut; and 3) I have written a novel about a town that censors books called Book of Mercy. Even if you are or have done none of these things, please watch the video.

Oh, and my tweet? Here it is:

Son, if you don’t know #censorship is wrong, you just don’t get it. #Firefly in a jar w/no walls. http://bit.ly/tGzd0o

My way-too-literal friend complained, “How can a jar have no walls?”

“It’s about freedom,” I explained.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

This is why I will not win this contest. I suck at jingles.

Feel free to RT in the name of Browncoats, TV shows cancelled before their time, and the way fireflies make you feel on a summer night.

12 Shameless Reasons to Shop the Indie Book Blowout

Book of Mercy, Books, Christmas, Holidays, Kindle, On Writing 20 Responses »

Dec 122011

This time of year you are inundated with promotions—every single one of them shameless. I’d like to keep Christmas pristine just as much as the next guy, but what’s an indie author to do? I’ve got birds to feed, kids who need more electronics, and an 81-year-old father expecting something for Christmas.

We’re all—both indie and traditional publishers—fighting for your attention. Hey, you out there in cyberland, yes you, look at me, look at my book (major waving and jumping around). Put down that L.L. Bean catalog and come to the Twelve Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout.

The Blowout is like that annual book sale you wouldn’t miss for the world, the one held at your church or your local library. Every year you go, slowly making your way down aisles between tables crammed with books. Your neck gets a crick in it from turning at just the right angle to read book titles on old moldy spines. The room smells of books—and excitement. What treasure will you find this year?

The Twelve Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout is full of treasures. Here are twelve shameless reasons why you should explore it:

The most shameless of the shameless: my new novel, Book of Mercy, is there. Where else will you get a serious topic—censorship—all wrapped up in a funny novel? (There’s pie throwing, a wife who binge drives, a navigationally challenged husband, a villain who wears Prada, hubcap art, and a bad guy who likes Richard Nixon masks.) FOR JUST 99 CENTS. The first three chapters alone are worth that. And once it’s on your Kindle, it’s easy to get to, unlike some partridges in pear trees.
Turtles (not to be confused with turtle doves) are fearful things. They duck back into their shells at the slightest provocation. At the Blowout, you can work on facing your own fears. You WILL find the perfect book for Uncle Harvey or Aunt Rose. There are more than 200 from which to choose—and every book is only 99 cents.
Looking for something foreign? I don’t think there are any books in French or about hens. But you should examine every one, just to make sure.
If you hadn’t read this far, you wouldn’t know that the famous holiday tune actually sings of “colly birds” on the fourth day, not “calling birds.” What’s a colly? It’s a blackbird. In England, a coal mine is called a colliery, and colly refers to something being black like coal. Isn’t it great to learn new stuff? No doubt you will access all kinds of new information in your Blowout books.
I cannot promise you that you will receive five gold rings this Christmas. However, if you shop at the Blowout, you could win a new Kindle. Buy a book and get entered into the giveaway. What will you do with another Kindle? Keep it for yourself and give your old one to your kid.
Don’t lay a goose egg this Christmas. You can give Blowout eBooks to friends and family who don’t even own Kindles. They can download a free Kindle app and read into the wee hours of the morning on their computer, iPad, or smartphone.
Duckling or swan? Shopping at the Blowout will bring out your inner beauty. Because that’s what reading and books do. They grow our spirit, make us laugh, and feed our dreams.
If you’re a maid who has a lot more milking to do before the sun sets and can’t face the mall, simply turn on your computer and head to the Blowout. You can satisfy any reading appetite without leaving your desk: scary horror stuff, fun romances, intriguing mysteries, smart contemporary fiction, mind-blowing paranormal tales, and in-your-face nonfiction (it’s all true, baby). Every book is 99 cents, which fits perfectly into a milkmaid’s budget.
Remember the Black Friday riots: people grabbing toys out of other people’s carts; shoppers shoving, pushing, and pepper spraying? At the Blowout, we are all about decorum. You can act like a lady or a gentleman—and still stuff your stocking to overflowing with Kindle books. Go ahead, do your happy dance now.
Every day of this special sales event, the Blowout will be giving away Amazon gift cards to winners randomly selected from the Indie Book Blowout subscriber database. That ought to set your lords to leaping. Enter the giveaway with each purchase. That’s extra smackeroos to supplement your Christmas budget (or to pack your Kindle with more Blowout deals).
Sorry, there is no music being sold in this holiday promotion. You will have to get your pipers piping elsewhere.
Drum roll, please. This wouldn’t be a shameless list if I didn’t mention my book again. Book of Mercy: a funny novel about a serious issue—censorship. Don’t fall for a book of similar title by some guy named Cohen; that’s poetry. I don’t write poetry, and I don’t sing. But I have always wanted someone to dance me to the end of love.

So let’s get in the shopping, er, holiday spirit. Go to the Twelve Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout NOW and begin wandering our virtual aisles. The Blowout only lasts from December 12-24, 2011. It is sponsored by the Indie Book Collective, a group of authors who believe readers rock.

Happy holidays and enjoy your books.

_____________________________________

MORE! Check out these blogs by other Indie Book Blowout authors:

Rachel Thompson: Indie Book Blowout Begins!

J. Sterling: Being an Indie Author

Shannon Muir: The 12 Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout

Abbey MacInnis: Twelve Days of Christmas Event

Ron Vitale: The 12 Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout

JC Andrijeski: 12 Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout (with free Kindle and Kindle Fire!)

C.K. Bryant: 12 Days of Christams: Indie Book Blowout!

Christmas Unplugged: A Short Story

Christmas, Holidays, Married Life, Short Story 2 Responses »

Dec 042011

Jenna already has her lights up, of course. I would have mine up, too, except ever since Sam fell into the Grand Canyon, I have been a little behind on things. I told my husband, leaning over the edge like that, that there wasn’t anything down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon but river. Well, he proved me wrong. Men dance on the edge of the abyss, not even thinking about the mess they’ll leave behind.

From the moment Sam hit that rocky bottom, my world changed. It didn’t help that the stock market went splat, just like Sam, shortly thereafter. I have held on to my 1940s St. Paul bungalow by judicious spending, prodigious coupon clipping, and lowering the thermostat. It’s not so bad. Zoey the cat and I burrow under the down blankets and listen to the snowplows at night.

My one worry is the Christmas lights. Electricity is expensive, and I simply MUST have at least 5,459 lights. That is the number smothering Jenna’s house, trees, and that tacky plastic North Pole diorama. She’s been bragging all over the neighborhood about this year’s display. If I can’t produce one light more, she will win.

“You and Jenna have been competing with each other since the cradle,” Sam always said.

It was true. I took the crown at the Beautiful Babes Contest when we were four; Jenna threw a tantrum and ripped out her pink bows and half her blonde hair. But she came back swinging at the State Fair when we were sixteen, becoming one of the beloved dairy princesses. As I fumed, my mother said, “Now be Minnesota nice, Abigail. Besides it’s cold sitting in that freezer getting your likeness carved in real butter.” I wanted to knock that tiara off Jenna’s butter head with a hot dish.

And that’s the way we’ve gone on for fifty years: frenemies. Neither will be the first to let our hair turn gray or admit our true age. She even moved in right across the street from me. Her house is bigger than mine, and newer, but mine is an original Craftsman, not one of those knockoffs.

I tear my gaze away from Jenna’s house and pluck the electric bill from a nest of bills in my lap. “Zoey,” I stroke the cat nestled on top of the bills, “where can we save a hundred dollars and keep my lights on?”

“You could put up fewer lights,” Sam would say.

“Not on your life,” I tell Zoey.

Outside Jimmy, the boy from down the street, is doing Sam’s old job. He is my new light man. He lifts and untangles and hammers and strings. It will take him two days, and I just hope he knows his way around a roof.

While Jimmy works on the lights, I walk to the hair salon. This time of year, I always take a route that passes the Black Rooster because it offers one heck of a Christmas display. As I’m taking in the decorations, I peek through the diner windows and see Bennie Nordgaard, Jenna’s husband, in a booth, giggling and patting the hand of a woman who is at least twenty years younger. He glances in my direction and jerks back his hand. I raise an eyebrow. He looks away.

That night I can’t sleep. Zoey is hogging all the covers. She is fifteen pounds of Maine Coon dead weight. I look like crap the next morning when Jimmy knocks on the door. He spends another day untangling and hammering, finishing about four o’clock. He has tested his work and swears that every one of my 5,460 bulbs is working. Five thousand four hundred and sixty—I make Jimmy count them twice.

That evening I bundle up and go outside to stand in the street and bask in the glow of my Yuletide extravaganza. Before long, Jenna joins me. As she stands beside me, the smell of her Chanel reaches across to me in the cold. We both stare at my house. I cross my arms. She crosses hers.

“How many?” she asks.

This is when I do the victory dance in the packed snow. I have the numbers and the money to keep them lit. But for some reason, I don’t jump to respond. I find myself thinking of the blonde in the booth at the Black Rooster.

Before I know it, I lie: “5,458.”

Jenna stands a little taller and gives me a satisfied smile. “Too bad. 5,459.”

“Well, there’s always next year,” I say.

“Yup, next year.”

As Jenna minces her way across the icy walk back to her house, I return to mine. Zoey greets me at the door. I bend to stroke her then whip off my hat and shake out my hair. I examine my gray roots in the mirror. Sam had been pushing me to go au naturale for years.

A dye job at Missy’s Mane Event costs about a hundred bucks.

“Merry Christmas, Sam,” I whisper.

__________________________________________

If this story brought some holiday cheer to your busy day, please take a moment more and check out some of Sherry’s other fiction: Book of Mercy, a funny novel about a serious issue—censorship, and Maud’s House, about what happens when creativity goes missing in a small Vermont town.

Confessions of an Inept Yogi

Parenting, Yoga No Responses »

Nov 212011

It is easy to be a yogi in a cave in the Himalayas. Ascetics don’t realize how good they have it. They don’t have to worry about how to make the next college payment or tolerate telemarketers at dinner. No one cuts them off in traffic or expects them to put their world on hold for the Super Bowl.

I think it is especially difficult to be both a mother and a yogi. It’s the whole detachment thing. Mothers who tie themselves to other humans with that most intimate of tethers, the umbilical cord, can’t just cut loose the people, concerns, and joys in their lives. It’s a snap to detach in the bowels of a mountain. But just try it when your ailing nineteen-year-old calls from some under-staffed, low-tech hospital in a Third World country thousands of miles away. Or when your other daughter, the cheerful one, is crying her heart out, right there on your shoulder, over some loser who didn’t call.

To the yogi, even-mindedness is everything. We search for balance in mind, body, and spirit. We flow through poses meant to make us strong and centered—and presumably able to handle with equanimity the day the washer overflows and the cat barfs in front of guests and the sturdy oak shading your car falls like a giant flyswatter.

I meditate and practice asanas and read yogic texts—and I still fall apart in the midst of calamity. I still burn with anger and sink into depression. It is quite obvious. I am an inept yogi.

I don’t look like a yogi. I have the kind of shape that runs screaming from a unitard. I have fat cells as old as my children.

I don’t eat like a yogi either. Although I avoid most red meat, I still have occasional moments when bliss comes as a burger and fries. Vegetables are still my enemy, and vegetarianism is just an excuse to eat bread. Some days I wonder why I even unroll the yoga mat.

And then something unusual will happen and I will discover a tiny corner of yogi in me. Maybe I’ll be packed in a shop with all the other Christmas shoppers, clutching a paper in my hand, and waiting for the clerk to call my number. The woman next to me is transferring a fractious baby from one hip to another. I notice her number is higher than mine. And before I even realize what I’m doing, I offer to trade numbers. She declines, but I see the hope in her eyes and insist. And as the trade is made, the moment our fingers touch, a wave of calm and patience swamps me.

And then there was the time my cat was feeling poorly and I rushed her to the vet, only brief hours before I was due to drive halfway across the country. I thought the vet would simply give me some pills, the administration of which I could pawn off on the pet-sitter. But the vet said, no, my cat was dying from the advanced stages of renal failure. I had a choice: let her suffer or put her under.

I have had to put pets to sleep before. But this time, yogi mind reared its head and I was filled with ethical issues. Grief and sorrow mixed with the confusion of karma. Ahimsa is the yogic concept of: harm no being or creature. My rational husband assured me it was the right thing to do. (I’d even consulted with him on the cell phone before holding Eclipse the cat for the last time, and he’d said: do it; make it merciful.) Yet I still cry for Eclipse sometimes.

Now, as a yogi, I don’t assume every good snake is a dead snake. When a spider invites itself into my shower, I don’t automatically reach for a shoe. I call for my husband to capture the creature and release it outside. Although it is a challenge, I try to refrain from glaring at impatient and rude people who shout in cell phones in public places.

As I said, being a yogi isn’t easy, especially in the wireless age, but then maybe it isn’t supposed to be.

Why I Spend Halloween in the Basement

Holidays, Married Life, Relationships 8 Responses »

Oct 282011

Our marriage is a Halloween-free zone.We also avoid restaurants with themes, ever since the waiter at Renaissance Buffet plopped down on one knee, thumped his chest, and said, “My liege, might I suggest a hearty meat pie or a joint of our finest mutton roast?”

That put my husband off his feed. “I don’t like people in costumes touching my food,” he said. “They unnerve me.”

“Hmm?” I said, studying the menu. “What’s in the Borgia Burger?”

You might wonder how we raised two daughters with these types of phobias. We did okay until they hit preschool and learned from some loudmouth that other kids actually procured bags of goodies on Halloween. That happened to be the Halloween they both had chicken pox, so after much begging, I relented to conjuring up two princess costumes. I smeared white makeup on their faces to hide the red spots and pronounced them ghost princesses. I agreed to let them extort candy from one house.

When we returned, my oldest said with dreamy eyes, “That was so much fun. Next year, can we do two houses?”

And that was the end of my Halloween bliss until they got old enough to make their own costumes and preferred parties to walking the streets.

Really, I don’t think we need to teach our kids about extortion. There is enough of that in the world already between South American kidnappers and Somali pirates. Maybe, instead, we should turn the day upside down and have our kids give out treats instead of asking for them.

Being a chocolate lover, I could get into that. But wait, I’m not allowed to answer the door on Halloween. Ever since our daughters went to college, our tradition has been a simple one: we hide.

We order Chinese takeout, pull the shades, turn out the lights, and go to the basement with our moo goo gai pan. There we watch a romantic comedy, where no one is terrorized by little beings in costumes or overzealous waiters.

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