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.

A Sunny Kitchen of the Mind

            

Painting Ⓒ Laura Heyward         Almost all my life I’ve been on the alert for catastrophes — that’s “anxiety disorder,” I know now. I  thought it was just life.  For me it means muscles tense and ready, eyes and ears alert, and imagination filling in when they don't come up with anything. I startle easily, not just when I’m awake. For decades into my adult life I jolted awake, terrified, whenever it rained in the night: had I left my bike out? And then I remembered that I was grown-up, there was no bike, no one was going to yell at me about that.

But the anxiety was still there  — underneath, or hanging over, everything, a vague expectation that something awful was going to happen. This was sometimes conscious, but usually not; I woke up in the morning, body braced for it. Whatever “it” is — that was rarely defined. I only became aware it from listening to dharmapunxnyc.podbean.com. Josh explained the body chemistry and neuroscience and yes, psychology, of anxiety and sometimes, while we were meditating and even after, I’d feel ease — a sense of delicious relaxation and well-being all over. My mind became that bright pool Buddhists talk about. That never lasted long, though.

And so I never expected anything different, until a few weeks ago I dreamed I was in a sunny white kitchen with a wooden table and high white ceiling. Through the tall window I saw a river, rusty bridges, flat roofs — the dirty, semi-industrial landscape of old New York. But the kitchen was sunny, the table pale wood scrubbed clean, and around it, some of my siblings were talking in a relaxed way about everyday topics. This in itself could never happen, not least because none of us visit each other and few of us speak to each other.

Some people even had partners — nice, normal partners, children. The conversation was relaxed, pleasant, as the sun streamed in through the tall white-framed window and one of my sisters stood at the old gas stove, getting dinner onto the table. There were no hidden tensions, no dramas. Everyone was at ease, even me.

“Where am I?” I said, blinking.

The sister who in real life is the only one of us to have a child looked puzzled, and I told her I really didn’t know where I was, I had no memory of getting there or of anything since Memorial Day. She told me and talked eagerly and excitedly about  the apartment and how lucky they were to have it, where they had been living before. Normal conversation. The mood stayed relaxed, everyone talking pleasantly about everyday things; and in the dream, that didn't seem unusual. This was just how we were — at ease with ourselves and each other.

When I woke up, I felt that ease and relaxation all over my body and with it came this surprising thought: “Nothing terrible is going to happen today.”  I believed that, my body believed it. I felt different.

I don’t know why this happened— maybe all that meditating is paying off. They always say  “your practice will start showing up for you in your life.” It has been nine years, after all. Or maybe it’s because terrible things are happening, in real life, though not to me.  Many people besides me have been expecting a disaster ever since the 2016 election and now we have one. Now “it” is defined and happening.

But there IS a sunny kitchen of the mind and I can inhabit it....not all the time, but more and more, wherever I am, whatever is happening. And when all this is over, I'll invite people into my actual kitchen, and things can be as relaxed and pleasant as they were in the dream.

Painting Ⓒ Laura Heyward


A NOTE ON THE PAINTINGS: Not urban landscapes, but sunny kitchens of the mind for sure! I asked my friend Lolly if she would send me paintings from kitchens and these are only some of her beauties. To see more -- http://www.lauraheyward.com.       

                                                                                                          

                                                             Painting Ⓒ Laura Heyward

Free From

I haven't had dinner with a friend since March 11; I know the  date because I got my last haircut then, too. Amy and I, childhood acquaintances who re-united at a writer's conference (she as an editor at Scholastic Library, me as a new author at Little, Brown) met in Madison, CT. We noticed that the town seemed empty, but didn't wonder why, just enjoyed our dinner and conversation. It wasn't until NPR on the way home that I got how serious things were getting.

In the weeks since, I've self-isolated and let go of a lot of shoulds. I used to feel guilty and anxious that I wasn't leading the glamorous, active life other people seemed to be — traveling; going to plays, the opera, museums;  going to exercise classes; volunteering more; dressing well;  giving and going to parties; writing and publishing novels.....there are more. But now that I'm social-distancing, I can't do any of them except the first half of the last. 

It's freeing. The anxiety is gone and the guilt is going — it was only as I was writing this list that I realized how contradictory some of the shoulds were. You can't, for example, do all those things and write a novel. At least, no author I know does.

So I started doing what I wanted to do instead of what I thought I should be doing.
One of the first shoulds to go — a prohibition that started in my teens with the Atkins diet — was avoiding carbs. I've always known, theoretically, that carbs have fewer calories than fat (like the olive oil I ladle on), but they seemed more fattening. I didn't even keep them in the house.

I let that should go in a delicious way — pasta with tomato sauce, every night. I found an Italian gluten free pasta 

and made the sauce with fresh shrimp, garnished with fresh oregano from my porch. The pasta itself is from Italy, and expensive. The Italian government  pays celiacs  a gluten-free pasta supplement  — no one,they feel, should have to endure life without good pasta. Now that's a good government policy!

 I know I'm happier with it. Sometimes I sing the Gershwins' dummy lyric for “I Got Rhythm” as I cook:

“Roly poly, eating slowly

Ravioli

Better watch your diet or bust!”

And guess what? I have lost, not gained, weight.  And, maybe because I allowed myself to have it every night, after awhile, I stopped wanting to. Now I have it a few times a week, as a first course. And I eat it in Italian portions (the package makes it easy to measure those) a few times a week. 

I still walk, I still do yoga and meditate every day, but because I feel better when I do, not because I should. Yes, I have to nudge myself sometimes  — but that's different from yelling at myself. By “nudge,” I  mean: remind myself that I'll sleep better and feel better if I move. So I do. 

Last week I let go of the idea that  I “should” be writing a detective novel. To write it, I often had to argue against the voices that said — each time I sat down to write — that I was wasting my time,  that it wasn't good enough. If I won the argument, I wrote — sometimes, with enjoyment and a feeling of excitement and pride, but more often than not, with aching neck muscles and doubts when I finished for the day. And whether I wrote or whether I didn't, it was always tugging at me, sometimes in a good way (an idea popped into my mind) but often in that nagging “should” way.  So I stopped.

Maybe I'll go back to it, maybe I'll start another novel (a detective novel is probably not my forte when it comes to writing, much as I like to read them). But if I do write another novel, it will be because I want to. And in the meantime, I'll live my life, as it is, here and now, free from shoulds.