Enough Flowers or, A Solo Labor Day Weekend

Usually my friend David comes up from New York for Labor Day Weekend— we cook lobster and scallops and corn and tomatoes and talk nonstop. But this year, because of the Pandemic, he was staying put in Germany. During a bad patch in my life I spent a lot of holidays alone — the secret is to plan something special, something you really want to do, and not compare yourself to other people or imagine the great times they are having. This year, knowing that a lot of other people weren't going to parties either helped. And so did an article in the NY Times about things to do. I chose to pick flowers and pay for them by the pound at The Farmer's Daughter in Rhode Island.

It was a longish drive, but so worth it: fields of dahlias and zinnias and flowers like red clover but bigger. I chose yellows — sun-yellow, primrose yellow, pale yellow, oranges from bright to pale peach, 

creamy white for contrast, some pinks and red — but mainly the sunny happy colors I love.

For once in my life, I was going to have enough flowers.  I filled three buckets full. The girl weighing my flowers seemed as enthusiastic about them as I was. We debated how to get them home safely — it was a hot day and a long drive, and I bought the buckets so I could keep them in water the whole way. Just looking at them made me happy:

“It's like buying joy!”  I said and she smilingly agreed and helped me carry them to the car.

At home I had the fun of arranging them, though really, they looked their best — their most exuberant —  all heaped together in the buckets:

I filled the house with them — it was such a luxurious, happy feeling — to have flowers everywhere I looked. For once, enough flowers,  I thought.

And then, I remembered when I was living in Boston, working three days a week because they thought I had fibromyalgia. WARNING: Stop reading here if you'd rather end on an upbeat note!

Years later I found out I had celiac, but that's another story.  It wasn't a happy time; I hated my job at Fidelity, I was really sick — so sick that I went to bed as soon as I got home from work, I was obsessed with a bad man (this was so painful even to witness that none of my friends would talk to me); but I did do two good things in those years. One was write Blow Out the Moon and get it published. The other was to volunteer in a school for kids who had been kicked out of regular public school. 

Every Friday, I met one on one with each boy in the class (there were no girls). They seemed more like me than anyone I knew in Boston, and I realized for the first time that I, too, had ADD. When I was young I don't think they knew about it; if you didn't do well in school, you were considered lazy or stupid or, my teachers' word for me, “careless.” 

But the boys had been diagnosed. A nurse wheeled a meds cart around twice a day and when one ran out of his meds, I saw someone literally bouncing off the walls: he'd jump up, hit the wall with the soles of both sneakers, land, and do it again. As the teachers said,

“He's a poster child for Ritalin.”

The  teachers were saints. When one of the boys, they knew, wasn't getting any Christmas presents, the teacher filled a sack for him (and asked me to get things too which of course I did). 

But this story is about a  bright  boy whose twin sister was at Boston Latin. He, Jonathan, had trouble reading and concentrating. When one Friday he wasn't in class, the teachers told me that he'd been put into a home by his mother — The Home for Wee Wanderers, it was called then. I promised to visit him there each week, and the teachers gave me schoolwork to bring him.

The place was at the end of the subway line, and a long ride. Some of the children had been born with aids, and weren't expected to live. I remember a small pale boy who talked about this calmly. Some were mentally ill: I remember a girl with crazy grey eyes who got too close to everyone. Jonathan, normally a cocky, swaggering boy — so cool that I was a little intimidated — seemed seemed subdued and more serious than usual.

At the end of the first visit, I asked him if I could hug him good-bye: I asked because at McKinley they told us always to ask (you never knew if a child had been abused) and he said yes and clung to me like a frightened child; well, of course he was a frightened child, but one of the things that poverty does to kids is make them seem adult.  

It was a hard place to visit — it's panful to witness the kinds of situations the children were in: not that they complained. Their bravery was one of the moving things. Jonathan was brave, too, but he did tell me that he worried (not his word) that they thought he was “slow.” I said he wasn't, and reminded him of a brilliant poem he'd written.

He smiled a little at that.

On perhaps my fourth visit, I didn't want to go, but I had promised Jonathan, so I did. That day, one of the adult workers, a young man who'd been a final candidate for a place as a composer at the Berkley School of Music, gave me a ride to the subway station, which I appreciated — it was a long walk. By this time I knew him a little and asked how he managed to stay.

“I've learned that the children are more than their tragedies,” he said. 

By the time I got off the subway in Back Bay, it was late — and someone was selling peonies. They're my favorite flower and I chose some; and then the guy offered me all he had left for $5. That was enough flowers, too — enough to fill every vase in the house. I thought at the time, and still think, that it was a reward from the universe.

Jonathan came back to school. Some said his mother had only put him in there because she was afraid he was going to do drugs — or was doing them. Others said she had broken up with the boyfriend who didn't like him. But he came back.

I don't know what happened to him, or any of the boys I knew there; I've googled them but haven't found any. My life had a few years of the chaos created by bad choices (and a bad diagnosis) left before things got better, but for me, they did. My guess is that the boys haven't been so lucky; as my friend Wendy, who in those days worked with poor children in Vermont said,

“Ten years old, and already a lot of doors are closed to them.”

That was probably true. I made my own bad choices, but my life turned out happily enough anyway; I'm grateful for enough flowers and all the other things I've been given. Those boys were dealt a different hand.

Lost cousins

   © Copyright Tatler
I know my Scottish great-grandmother came from the Highlands or islands, because when her son died at 25, she keened, in Gaelic. By then, only people from the Hebrides and Highlands still spoke Gaelic. So, hoping my ancestors had come from the islands I'd fallen in love with (and seeing those islands was love at first sight — that instant, deep recognition), or the one that became my real home, or even that some of my friends were distant cousins, I started doing ancestor research. 

I took DNA tests and found birth and wedding records on Scotland's People. It's quite a feeling, to see the signatures of people you hope are your ancestors: “hope” because there's no way to know for sure that you have the right person.

Before I found anyone, I learned that one great-great-great-great grandfather's surname came the Isle of Yell, in the Shetlands. Partly because of that, partly because I was getting obsessed with it, I stopped searching: I had island blood — just from the wrong coast. But while I was looking for photographs for this blog in a big box of old family photographs, I found a brochure of Oban, the port from which you get to Coll.  I recognized it even before I saw the 

     Imagine the hills green and the water blue.

name — I've walked those streets and stayed in those hotels and taken the boat through that Sound many times. Getting to Coll means an overnight in Oban — more than one, if the swell is so high the big boat can't tie up on the island, or the clouds are so low that the little plane can't make it over the mountains of Mull. 

The Sound of Mull, on the way to Coll

It was a strange feeling to look at those old photographs of Oban, and think my great-something-grandmother and her children had walked there, too.

And I found a photograph of my great-great grandmother with four of her six children (including one of Libby, who married the Scottish painter David Macgregor) sitting in front of this cottage — 

My great-great-grandmother, Jessie Blair, who married Peter Crichton; her son John (she had another named Blair); and 3 of her daughters. Libby married the painter Douglas MacGregor. My great-grandmother Margaret Crichton was already in America.

Sadly, the place wasn't identified, but I bet it's somewhere else in the West of Scotland. Maybe they stopped in Oban on their way to an island, too.

 I know they lived in Edinburgh, I've been to the house; this cottage isn't it. So, probably, they were on holiday — those look like best clothes, too — maybe where they'd come from originally? Jessie's brother lived in Glasgow.  I can hope they came from an island in the Hebrides.

                                             A little bay on Coll. The water is always clean, and often 

                                         this color.

There were 6 children, and only Margaret went to America, so I have cousins all over Scotland; this isn't just wishful thinking, DNA tests say so. But I'm not going to write and say, “Hi! We're third cousins!” 

Or could I? I got an email yesterday from a cousin in England who'd found me with DNA and Ancestry.com, telling me that my great-great grandmother on that side of the family, the English side, Rachael Saunders, had a child “while working on a farm” and had given him, John Saunders, to an aunt to raise. She asked if I knew any more.

Sadly, as I wrote to her, that side of the family — the Rumble side — specializes in secrets. I told her I was glad to have a new cousin and told what I knew: that Rachel married my great-grandfather, presumably without telling him about her other child. Their son, William E. Rumble (portrait to come, I hope) was taught to read by the village minister in Little Wittenham. 

St.Peter's Church Little Wittenham © Copyright Steve Daniels

He must have gone on to a scholarship somewhere, too, because I have his geography book with his name, 1877, and Stoke Rockford, a town with a good school. He saw an ad in the Times of London for  “free farm land” and set sail for America, from Glasgow (so maybe he met Margaret Crichton in Scotland?). The ship's menu, passenger list and his comments on the other passengers were in the box of family things, too.

That ad turned out to be a hoax, and the letter he wrote to the Times about that was published there.

He stayed poor, but his son,  my grandfather, became a lawyer without going to law school — you could do that in those days if you could pass the bar. And it's thanks to his hard work, success,  and my mother's good investments  that I could buy my land and hut on Coll. And it's thanks to the opportunities he had in America, too — which, like many people's in those days, came at the cost of lost families.

(To be continued if I hear back from the English cousin: third cousin, not that distant.)

Took the MOCA (the test Trump "aced")

Most of the questions were super-easy, but the first one had me stumped. How could you connect those dots into a cube, starting and ending where they wanted you to start and end???

I tried and tried, but I couldn't do it. The closest I got was a sort of rectangle — and even then, I put some of the dots in the middle of lines, not at their end points, and skipped one:

                                   Erasure marks are from earlier attempts -- and I know I can't draw.

Could it be a trick question, designed to see how people thought “outside the box”? I know those exist, but the rest of the questions were so simple that much as I wanted to believe that, it didn't seem likely. It was frustrating to be unable to see the answer.

I know I'm a bad spatial thinker — and I also know I am not senile. Yet I had failed  this part of the test. I began worrying that some day, my mental state WOULD be tested by someone and I would be judged incompetent because I couldn't do it. I began planning what I would say:

“I've always been a bad spatial thinker! Even when I was young I was! Look how many words I could think of that began with F — more than a hundred! Besides, lots of creative people...” Then they would just think I was crazy and difficult as well as senile. So I decided I better practice this skill, starting by looking up the answer to that question.

Plus, I admit, a stronger motive was: I just HAD TO KNOW HOW TO DO IT OR THE ANSWER! 

It turns out that those first two items are two different questions. First, you form the dots into a sequence numerically and alphabetically, then you copy the cube. Easy peasy. No need to even do it, I knew I could.

I was relieved, and also reminded of all the times my imagination over-complicates things or doesn't see the obvious — like the time my friend Grace and I planned to bind the drafts of our novels by punching holes into the paper, then looping ribbon through the holes to make beautiful bound books like our friend Alissa's, whose super-power is making everything perfectly, even her potholders. She makes designs with scraps and pieces each potholder to fold in just the right spot for her hand.

   Copyright Ⓒ Alissa Imre Geis, Alissaimregeis.com

But Grace and I couldn't make books like hers: our holes were never in the same places on all 200+ pages, the ribbon wouldn't go through them — only string would. The finished “books” were messy papers, nothing like Alissa's tidy creations. Punching the holes was really hard, too.

Then one of us emailed the other in the middle of the night with a revelation: “We can just buy three-hole paper!” But we hadn't seen it that way, even in all the time we spent punching those holes.

As artists the way we see things (ridiculous as they sometimes are) and do them (obsessive as it sometimes is) are all we have — there's no choice.  Sometimes doing it brings us joy, sometimes not; but we have to do it our way.

An artist in Stonington makes the wrapping of each package a work of art —

Copyright Ⓒ Pamela Zagarenski, sacredbee.com

I get caught up in my own ideas and expressing them as clearly as I can. But that isn't always a good plan. In a test situation — if my competence ever is tested — it will be better to just answer the questions and keep what interests me to myself.  And I won't over-think the questions, either, as I did when I was a child taking an IQ test.

The question was, “What would be the best size for a living room?” I hesitated between two of the choices: 

b)12 x 14 

or

c) 1200 x 1400. (A & B were ridiculously large or small.) I knew most living rooms were 12x14 — but they didn't ask what was average, they asked what would be  “best,” so I chose c, with a nagging feeling that that was the wrong answer.

So when I got home I asked my father about it.

“For an IQ test, Libby, you probably got the answer wrong. But I like the way you think: why not have a living room the size of a king's?”

If my competence is tested, though, I'll play it safe — and, I hope, pass the test.

One good writer

                           

Awhile ago I became obsessed with THE LAST HUNDRED YEARs, Jane Smiley's trilogy following an Iowa farm family from 1918 to 2018 — well-written, funny & exciting & sad, so many characters you had to keep going back to the family tree — and insights (increasingly dark) into us as a country. All day I looked forward to reading it (I only allow myself to read after dinner unless I am sick) and when I got to the end, I burst into tears, partly because the ending was surprising and sad.

Then I went back and read the whole thing again from start to finish, not hurrying the second time. I think I enjoyed it partly because of the large cast and multiple points of view — I like big, sprawling novels that (like life) aren't all one mood or one thing. 

But then I was stuck in that horrible place of not having anything to read. As usual I reread old favorites until I could find something. Finally the library opened and I got everything by Jane Smiley they had.

I started with One Thousand Acres, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. The flap copy told the whole plot! As if that wasn't bad enough, it's based on King Lear. Not surprisingly, I guess, it seeemed pretty depressing. My interest waned after a few increasingly ominous chapters....and I think she found it depressing, too, because her next book, which I am reading right now, is MOO U and it's hilarious.

The title is an agricultural university's nickname, and the book is a really funny send up of academic life, complete with not just turf wars and insane egos but a hog whose secret pen (he's part of an experiment and grant) lies at the center of the campus. His thoughts are given, too — Jane Smiley is really good with animals, as I know from the first book of hers I read, HORSE HEAVEN.

In every room his wife had laid a Persian carpet of exceptional quality — his wife had an eye for quality in all things — and it seemed like every Persian carpet in every room every morning was adorned with tiny, dark tense turds deposited there by Eileen, the Jack Russell terrier....Rosalind, who sent her underwear to the cleaners  and had the windows washed every two weeks and kept her oven spotless enough to sterilize surgical instruments, tried to take the position that the turds were small and harmless, and that the carpets could handle them, but really she just thought the dog was cute... [not the end of the sentence but you get the idea]

The characters, animal and human, in MOO U aren't as three-dimensional as those in Horse Heaven, which I also read twice, but it's even funnier, at least for anyone who has suffered through working in academia. It's satire: over the top situations and exaggerated characters that sent me to sleep in a good mood from laughing so much. And I woke up in a good mood, too — of how many books can one say that? 

Full disclosure: I didn't start the book at the beginning (unusual for me) — I was just flipping through to see if I'd like it when something caught my eye and I kept reading.

Once in the early 1990s, my friend KC, who lives in New York and recommended HOG HEAVEN, and I were in a bookstore in Calistoga, CA. The store sold only books. A sign by the cash register — a long sign — said in big letters that the store reserved the right to refuse service to anyone and then in smaller letters explained.

KC said, polite but puzzled,

“Do some people take too many?” The cashier looked puzzled. “Do you sometimes have to cut people off?”

The cashier explained that people sometimes tried to pay with credit cards they didn't accept — and we all laughed as KC said, “No more for you, you've had enough!” like a bartender. 

But I love KC's interpretation. I'm probably someone who reads too much— but some books make reading a lot of fun, so much fun that it cheered me up.

Dappled moments (#1 and #2)

Painting copyright © 2020 Tasha Wainwright.

Writing novels always felt forced and contrived to me: I don't see my life, or anyone's, as one grand story with a continuous plot that reaches a satisfying climax. My writing, at its best, is a series of moments, vividly described — and that's what any novel I tried to write always ended up being, with most of the moments not even related to the main plot.

That's how my life has been, too — the image that comes to mind is the sea when sunshine stipples bits of water, making sparkles.  So I've decided to just write about those moments. Maybe they'll add up to something or turn out to be related in ways I don't see now, maybe not.

On a good day, the moments are enough — I don't have grandchildren, but I've known lots of children; a friend told me a few days ago that hers still quote me. Just that day, her daughter had sent her a photograph of her puppy, with the caption “precious loaf.” That's what I said when I first met baby daughter, and the saying passed into their family lore.  

I don't remember saying that, but I hope my life holds more moments like that, things I said or did that meant something to other people. But here are the ones that meant something to me.

My grandparents' house on the visit below, in my young uncle and aunt's living room (my grandmother would never have allowed the beer bottle and messy papers in hers). I am the big sister.

One of my earliest memories is of overhearing my parents talking about whether or not to send me to nursery school: I must have been in bed, listening; there are no actual images at all attached to the memory, just what I imagined as my mother said,

“I think she'd get a kick out of it.”

I was fascinated by the phrase and pictured a child kicking a ball into the air. I didn't know exactly what that meant — “get a kick out of it,” but it sounded fun, and as though she thought nursery school would be.

The other early memory had to have been when my mother, sister, and I flew to visit her parents. I remember a small white dish holding green gum, not wrapped, Chiclet shaped, which, the stewardess said, was to keep your ears from popping. And I remember above the seats opposite, where the luggage racks are now, was a made-up bed: dark blanket, white sheet tightly folded over it, white pillow, and my mother reading aloud to us from an orange book, Now We Are Six. 

I still have the copy that was hers when she was a child, printed in 1927.

My grandmother's living room on that same visit.

This wasn't planned, but those are the chairs I posted about in “Small Town Story,” and the punch bowl is now for sale in the antique store where "Some Actual Magic" happened. That's not much of a pattern, but I already see two others. 

 

Small Town Story

It’s hard for me to throw anything away — especially anything that came from my mother. But my sofa, which she had reupholstered in the 1960s in gleaming silk damask, almost-peacock blue —  has faded to grey.

Reupholstering it would cost two trips to Scotland even in cotton. I reupholstered a couch once myself and would never have done it if I'd realized how much work it would be; I'm not making that mistake again.  I bought a cheap slipcover and it looked so awful that I threw it out. I searched and searched; there is no inexpensive solution or even anyone willing to do the work that I could find. But I just can't stand looking at that dingy couch any longer: it depresses the whole airy room. 

So finally I decided to give or throw it away and buy an armless chaise from Ikea (modern, takes up less space, new).

Just as I was about to press “Next” a local upholsterer called me back. She said she had a waiting list about a year long. 

“I think you once reupholstered a chair for me a long time ago,” I said. “I loved what you did. I had two of them, and you let me trade one in partial payment —”

“I remember the chair!” she said. “It's in my spare room.”

I told her, truthfully, that I'd always regretted getting rid of that chair. It, too, came from my mother.

“Would you consider selling it back to me?”

“Sure.”

It will cost even less and take up less space than the Ikea chaise — and I can get the couch out of the apartment! If I just can't throw it away (why? why is it so hard?), I can put it in the basement until Eva can re-upholster it. Or until I summon whatever it is one needs to let things go, even inherited ones.

But in the meantime, the couch will be out of here and I'll have another comfortable chair,  filled with goosedown. It's like my other one, but upholstered in my grandmother's pattern — pale yellow damask. If I'd moved away after five years as I usually do, I'd never have gotten it back — another example of why staying here was a good choice. 

The Last Dozen

Four of the Blue Rose Girls in 2006

Google told me I had run out of storage — even though I have 15 gigabytes. So I looked for big files to delete and found videos from when 6 children's book illustrators, authors, and one editor had the Blue Rose Girls blog. A male author was making a promotional video and asked us BRGs to contribute a spoof of SEX AND THE CITY.

His video was about publishing and how agents and editors had all the power. We came up with a silly skit: 3 of us  talking about our editors the way the SEX AND THE CITY characters talked about their boyfriends.  One take began with Anna sighing heavily and then saying,

“So, Grace, how have you been?’’ as though she knew the answer wouldn't be good.

We each told a made-up story of the perfidy of editors (men). After Anna had described HER editor having coffee with another author at their restaurant, 

            “They were sitting at our table and he was even feeding her cupcakes!’’ (Grace made and we ate a lot of cupcakes in those days),  we recorded this:

If anyone had told me that afternoon where we'd all be and what we'd all be doing twelve years later, I would have been astonished. Humans aren't very good at predicting the future.

I've stopped writing children's books; fallen in love with a remote Scottish island, bought land there, put a shepherd's hut on it, and now spend half the year there (when we're not having a pandemic!). I've also bought a condo here in Stonington. In 2008 I was supporting myself by writing children's books  amd earning about $6000/year from that and thus also babysitting. So I would never have believed I'd have the money to do either let alone both — nor could I have predicted finding that island and being so welcomed. 

The changes in the others' lives have been more dramatic, but it's for them to tell about those, not me, so I'll just say that they include some leaving children's books (I'm not the only one who's done that!), others winnnig major awards, and, more marriages and and deaths than I would guessed. 

Before they all got married we spent the weekend together about once a month; now, some of us Zoom every Sunday morning. I couldn't have predicted the reasons for that change. Nor when I had my first computer, the Macintosh 512 — that's  512 kilobytes —could I have imagined 15 gigabytes, even if I'd known what a gigabyte was.