A Little Actual Magic

Before the pandemic, a friend and I were talking in her antique store. She was telling me, in some detail as women friends do with each other, about what was going on in her life. She wanted to make some changes, but wasn't sure if she should.

I listened — really listened — and made some comments, as women friends do; and suddenly a huge painting on the wall CRASHED onto a table of crystal glasses — expensive ones — and porcelain plates, even more expensive. Crystal flew all over the shop — onto tables, the floor, even chairs. We were nowhere near the painting when it fell.

We ran over. None of the plates had broken; and really, considering how big and heavy the painting was, and how full the table was (far fuller than the one above), not too many crystal glasses. Seven from one set, a few from another, she said.

Once, when none of my old friends would talk to me because my boyfriend was so awful, I consulted a gypsy regularly.  “How's the crazy man?” Christine would say when I walked in, and then lay out the cards.  I didn't really believe what they said, but I was isolated and needed someone I could talk to honestly about what was going on. At least I was sensible enough not to give her the large sums she requested to buy special candles and other things she needed for what she always called “the work.” 

I didn't believe in her sort of magic, but I did enjoy talking to her, and learning a little — a very little, she was guarded about the gypsies — about her life. After many years, she did tell me that they didn't believe in girls learning to read, and that she had never gone to school. Being psychic (or a psychic) ran in her family and she had been brought up to do that and trained by her mother and grandmother.

“A gypsy I knew once said in her family, when they wanted to change something, they broke glass: at least three pieces,” I said to my friend while she swept and I got the big pieces off furniture. “They did it to end the old situation and make room for the new one: it cleared the way, she said. The universe just did that for us. It's the first day of the moon, too.” 

“That gives me goose bumps,” she said.

“Me, too. We just did magic.”

A few months later, I went into the shop again and she told me things had changed — she started doing things differently before the shutdown, after that incident. During the shut-down, her business actually grew. And I told her, truthfully, that things had shifted for me, too. 

And yes, I do know that change comes anyway, whether you do anything to hasten it along or not — but we both felt different after those glasses broke. It was a  startling, laden moment, and we witnessed it together, felt it together. There's power in that.

The glasses that didn't break; there were 12 of them, and now there are 5. Seven broke— when I was a child, we thought 7 was a magic number.

Santa Scorned

Whiteley's, London, 1958

I came across this while looking for another photo. I burst out laughing — and a friend my own age said  our “uninterested if not downright scornful” expressions were hilarious. She also said the one time she was taken to a department store Santa, she had the same reaction.

All I remember about that outing to Whiteley's (a huge department store near our flat) were the Christmas dioramas of Alice in Wonderland. The people and settings  looked exactly like the illustrations, and they moved. The Duchess and the cook and the pepper, complete with repeated hitting, were especially realistic. I was fascinated by them.

Maybe I wanted to get back to them  — but I don't remember. My sister says it looks like she and my little sister are watching something. My brother looks indignant; and I seem “scornful,” a more common reaction to adult plans among privileged children then than it seems to be now. When children now don't want to do something, they're free to say so (all too free, their parents probably think sometimes!).

But in those days, in our family at least, when your parents told you to stand with Santa, you did, without complaining.  You had to. But you didn't have to pretend to like it. 

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.

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

"Suddenly nobody can make a sandwich"

Last week I started talking to strangers: not just saying hello and smiling at people on the street. Everyone's doing that now, and it‘s a really fun feature of social-distancing, at least for people who live alone in this normally reserved and somewhat snobbish — though beautiful —

seaside village. I'm not counting those hellos as conversations with strangers.  I'm having long talks — 45 minutes,  an hour — on the phone with people I've never met and never will meet:

• the young mother taking the Sears repair-center calls from the office, not her house,  

“because it's driving me crazy to be home! When I’m around suddenly nobody can make a  sandwich! When I'm not there, they all cook. But when I'm home they want my help with everything, even the cats are driving me crazy, we have seven and.....’’

There was an almost hysterical energy to what she was saying: it sounded as though she hadn't talked to anyone who had listened to her in weeks, months. Maybe she hadn’t.  

• the twenty-five year old  assistant to my financial advisor in NY, now in Pennsylvania with 3 siblings and both parents; everyone's working in their own rooms. 

“I only brought 4 outfits with me –– I expected to be back in my apartment in two weeks.’’ She and her room-mate have been paying rent all this time, and their landlord won't reduce it. I advised her  to use her security deposit for her last month’s rent and she said, “Thanks, that’s a really good idea!”

We talked about how lucky we are, she to still have a job and me not to need one (and be in this beautiful place), and how many people her age had been fired.

“There are so few jobs that it’s really competitive.”

We talked about how appalling the news is, how when it first started we were eagerly reading every day and now, less....she said what a waste it is to spend all this money on the election — “It could feed everyone!” and how most politicians seem to “care only about money and power.” She said this have to change and sounded hopeful that it will.

•  the young Apple customer-service rep who shares an apartment in Oregon with three other guys; they, too, are all working from home. They don’t go out and see each other at meals, sometimes.  He said Apple is treating its people well.

It's actually been really interesting talk  to them all— I live in such a New England (and, as my friends my age and I frequently comment, privileged) bubble.

The young mother is in Florida; her children both speak 4 languages,

“I don't know where they got the other two!”  The whole family speaks Spanish and English, and the oldest girl is on a “full scholarship” at her high school.

“Is it a private school?”

She wasn't sure –– she just knew that the scholarship paid for “everything” and that her thirteen-year old daughter always gets As, never anything else, and rides the bus between two and three hours every day to get to her school. The nine-year old is just as smart and she, too, knows four languages.

Call me corny, but especially with all the horrible horrible news this week, I’ve been heartened and buoyed up by these talks. It's not just the human connection, though there's that of course. It's that all these people –– people for whom life is hard and the future uncertain –– are managing and upbeat. It gives me hope that, somehow or other, the country will be too, someday.

Instacart Here

I used to really love grocery shopping — choosing my avocados and Little Leaf lettuce and deciding about other produce depending upon what looked best. Now, though,  anxiety kicks in —not about getting the virus but about rudeness. The aisles at our Big Y are one way, and people mostly stay 6 feet apart; you can't really walk past someone.

So if I am reading the ingredients, or trying to choose, and someone is waiting, I get flustered. I don't want to keep them waiting and just end up grabbing something. Not that I am exactly Miss Manners! If other people take forever, or push past me, I  fume and give dirty looks. Thus the whole shopping trip turns far more intense and dramatic than it needs to be — not that it has escalated into outright fights. At least, so far the most I have said is,

“Hey! What about our six feet?’’in a pleasant tone.

This is in the supermarket. The next time a jogger runs within a foot of my face, though — as one did yesterday while I was walking  — I will say more than that, quite a bit more. This is fraught, I know. People here are mostly polite but a few days ago someone from New Jersey shouted:
“What are you doing taking our picture? Are you nuts?’’ when I pretended to be photographing her and her husband parking on the sidewalk.

Today, I decided to skip the drama of the supermarket and order from Instacart, something I've never done before. And yes, I do realize that another solution — theoretically — is to just stay calm, not let people push my buttons, put my meditation practice into action.

I chose Instacart. It ended up taking about the same amount of time as going to the store would have, between the texts from the young shopper:

“They don't have any ripe avocados, only firm ones....the only green banana isn't organic...no toilet paper...’’ and me texting back that firm was better than squishy and I hadn't wanted toilet paper, had meant to order paper towels — and him saying that was his mistake, he had misread it, they did have paper towels....he was so helpful! Finally we just talked, as that was faster and easier, as he made his way around the store.

Like many people in his generation, he was much nicer than my friends and I were at that age  — I can't imagine any teenager in the 1960s being that patient with an old lady who was a picky shopper! He even carried the groceries upstairs for me:

And set them down with great care, too.

This strange pause — global reset — has changed me and the world.  What things will be like afterwards I don't know. My generation grew up in a time of change, too: civil rights protests that led to new voting laws and affirmative action, for example. We thought racism would end; it's worse, we've gone backwards — and this generation needs more drastic changes than we did. We grew up during rising prosperity that we took for granted. 95% of boomers earned more than their parents — and most of those who didn't started near the top, not the bottom, of the economic ladder. It's different for people Randy's age: those at the bottom stay there and many in the middle are going down, not up. The gap between the rich and everyone else is widening.

(from the census -- https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2019/11/26/u-s-household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective)

Randy is a college graduate, and he's delivering groceries. He wasn't complaining, far from it: his face lit up when he talked about an old couple he met and is helping on his own:

“They needed bleach and cleaning supplies and I said I could get them. Her eyes filled with tears when I brought them over. Now they email me what they need and leave the cash in an envelope.’’

For people his age, any job now is hard to find. Only massive government action can change that.  I wish I believed it will, but seeing the young (those trusting, hopeful eyes! that energy and eagerness to please!) makes me sad — for their future, for how life in this country is ending for my generation. As someone said in the NY Times — if change for the better does come, we won't be alive to see it.

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.