The Storyteller

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The Storyteller

I was in Santa Fe in 1995 and in a jewelry store in the center of town was a beautiful silver pin of a mama-sized Indian woman with about 12 babies all over her.  I was just starting to write then and I thought it was prophetic that the woman was an Indian icon called the Storyteller.  I misplaced the pin somewhere and now I want to replace it….does anyone know where I can get one?

The Dark Angel in the Mercedes Benz Smart Car

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end-timies, Mercedes-Benz Smart Car

I was in Frenchtown, NJ this past Sunday, driving around the Delaware River and stopping for coffee at the Bridge Cafe, waiting for hubby to come out. There was a man wearing shades in a Mercedes Benz Smart Car playing the Rolling Stones really loud. Two groups of women came by and asked him what mileage he got and he ignored them, so I was surprised when my husband came out and asked the same question, he answered “90 miles a gallon, Nazi engineering. You wouldn’t get a car like this in Haiti or the Dominican Republic” and of course we were sucked into his world of end-times economics. The thing is: I’m terribly attracted to world views, mostly because I don’t actually have a philosophy at this stage of life other then, wow, we’re all stupid and I don’t see it getting any better and in fact in my own lifetime, I see all pretense of intellect being stomped on, so when someone has a whole system worked out, I have to listen. So, this guy, who now has an audience, starts spinning his world view and all of a sudden I see us boarded up in a house with heavy artillery and gold bouillon in the floorboards and staking tomatoes and eating radishes out of the ground, I want to escape. Here’s the thing: remember those movies where space travelers go to other planets and find–hurrah!–other humans? I used to cheer with everyone else, but now i, with the wisdom of grandma years, think, “Oh, God, we screwed up another planet.” because those humans aren’t reading Erasmus and Plato, they’re reading Yahoo! and wondering how to subvert nature to do its bidding, which I guess is what makes us the dominant species, but I’m a little tired of it. I am looking now at all the websites that Vince (I decided to call him Vince because every overbearing male I have ever known has been called Vince and he wouldn’t tell us his real name) told us to go to and make comparisons between now and the Weimar Republic. So, can’t I just like, smell the roses and imagine nice times? No. I guess you have to pay at the front end or pay at the back end, and I had a pretty swell beginning, so maybe I have to eat radishes at the end.

Mrs. Hixon

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Mrs. Hixon, tree guys

Our neighbor, Mrs. Hixon, was already old when my husband and I bought our house eight years ago. One of the reasons we bought the house was because it had a gigantic back porch and a humongous yard and we saw ourselves getting married in it, which we did. It was a great September bash and we invited all the neighbors, except Mrs. Hixon, who frankly scared me a little. She was tiny and tidy and was the type of woman who dusted the ivy growing on the bank, whereas we are laissez-faire gardners–my husband because of asthma and me because it’s one of the last things I get to. A number of wedding guests told me later that she directed them to our house: “That’s where the party is!” she told them. Maybe I should have invited her. But I made it up to her by shoveling her walk in snowstorms when I could–we both live on corners and have a long side street to clear–giving her my novels when they were published, she always insisted on paying me. Picking her up when I saw her at the bus stop–going into town (a town dominated by Latin King and other drug gangs) to do her banking with her little purse and her weighing about 90 pounds, I thought, God help her, but I wouldn’t tangle with her and I hoped no one else would either. You just could tell she had a couple of self-defense tricks up her sleeve and anyway, her authority was bred in the bone. About three years ago, I started seeing a little black van with the name of a sports therapist on it and I assumed she broke something, but soon she was out dusting the ivy and decorating for the seasons again although she appeared to have lost weight and was suddenly old. I was out cutting some evergreen branches for decorations last December for our annual winter bash and on a whim, I crossed the street to her house to invite her. Her daugher, about my age, was there from Ohio with her husband. When Mrs. Hixon saw me with the branches in my hand, she said, “You cleaning up out there finally?” and I had to say, no, maybe later. She and her daughter and son-in-law came to the party and I don’t think I ever saw anyone enjoy themselves so much at a party. She was mostly deaf, but people found a way to communicate with her and up close and both of relaxed with a little gin, I could see she was actually cute and pixie-ish. And it was the last time I saw her. A tree guy knocked on our door in January and asked us if we wanted any of our trees cleaned up or taken down–we did. He was from Ohio (we’re in PA) and he was here trying to get work cleaning up from a freak ice/snow storm we had in the fall. We did need him. I asked him how he found us and he said Mrs. Hixon flagged him down and when he was finished with her work, she sent him to us. Indeed. A neighbor came to our house last night and told us Mrs. HIxon had died in her living room. She checked on her every day and found her. She was ninety-three. She made it to ninety-three in her own house, still flagging down burly tree guys and giving a damn about how the neighborhood looked. And I will miss her enormously.

Why RickSantorum and Rush Limbaugh keep me up at night

And no, it’s not because they’re so sexy hahahaha…it’s because they’re so weird, so obsessed with female genitalia and reproduction and sexuality and then I realized…THAT’s exactly it…they came of age in the 60s when girls were giving it away and pre-AIDS when boys were giving it away and EVEN IN THAT CLIMATE they weren’t getting any.  Of course they’re bitter.  Of course they hate women and gays;  gays and women don’t fancy them.  It’s like a bad Steven King revenge novel, except now the whole country has to pay for the fact that Santorum and Limpdick weren’t attractive.  What can we do to make it up to them before they run totally amok?  This is the sweet old grandmother in me talking.

Woman proposes legislation on men’s sexuality

The everything-old-is-new-again contraception war.  I thought we already fought and won that war. I could say it’s not my war.  I’m in the Grandmother’s Hut!  But it is, because I am alive in my culture that values the wisdom of its seniors (joke).  As a  resident of the Grandmother’s Hut, I have to say there is something very wrong with men in business suits, who probably look at porn on their work computers and fondle boy pages or at the very least subscribe to Victoria Secret’s soft porn catalgue, telling women that sex without a live birth is evil.  So, instead of a bunch of creepy men legislating what women do with themselves, my modest proposal is that we legislate the men.  Men cannot ask a woman out on a date unless he has at that moment enough money in his bank account to pay for the raising of a child, which money will be transferred to the date/potential mother in case they slip up and have sex and the woman conceives.   She can receive the check–I’d say $250,000 with child care, college, bail, rehab–when she presents her ultrasound picture.  Also, Santorum, listen up, wanker, I’m talking to you:  since it will not lead to a live birth and since the Bible (your play book) even says not to spill your seed (love the image) men can no longer pleasure themselves (love the phrase). Maybe we can get it into Obama care hahahaha.  Okay?  Can we pahleeze talk about something else now?

Daughter of a Grandmother

My mother went to Florida yesterday; not uncommon all the blue/white/blond hairs fly South this time of year a flock of pastel fantasy creatures. My mother has been crushed by the death of her husband, my father, several years ago and she has been stooped since; a walker or a cane the only thing keeping her from succumbing to the now-irristible pull of the earth wherein Daddy lies. She requested a wheel chair, not unreasonable I guess, but then I saw six seven eight others being pushed to the check-in counter, to security. We are a tired society, I thought. We can’t get the umph to walk to an airplane. Am I being too harsh? Can I say these things because I have always prided myself on some basic level of fitness and I am (honestly) repulsed by people who give in to desire to give it up without officially giving it up? When the security guard asked if she had any metal plates in her body, the woman responded with her medical history. Or maybe we’re just lonely and I just should have said “hi, howya doing?”

The Journey

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Alzheimers, grandmother, time

Life at this age no longer seems like a journey….the searching for Oz, the great and the powerful, now I have Dr. Oz to help me through the hiccups of middle-age, but here’s a thought: the air this morning was wet with unfallen snow, the hyacynthes are already poking through the mulch and such mulch, much mulch, and it’s only January, but time has lost its meaning. It lost its meaning in winter 1996 when I drove across country with B. and we transversed longitudes and latitudes and saw daffodiles blooming before President’s Day and dove into the Pacific Ocean while the East was covered in frost and then, when I came back, I woke up and no longer had a temporal compass about where I was in the space-time continuum and I remember thinking, is this what it’s like to have Alzheimer’s? because I would wake up and not know anymore where I was or ever who I was, but was that because I was no longer in bed with B but P and that was the year that it all fell apart…or maybe it was the year that I became unmoored from body and started the free float in time.

What the world needs now….

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pop culture, religion, Santorum

Santorum wins over voters in Iowa…it’s a defeat for liberalism, for our “no one’s to blame” attitude, for our lack of a vision of what the nation should be…people flocking to religion because the pop culture seems bankrupt….and I think so too, but what do you expect from a society fueled on capitalism…nothing wrong with capitalism per se, but the end result is that everything is for sale and pretty soon your soul is on the block…all the pop culture feeds us is the worst of us: fame, corruption, violence, thuggery. By blowing up everything that appeals to people (plot in writing, coherent images in art) the liberal culture has alienated the average person from the only alternative to religion and so here we go again….people are looking to religion. Happy 2012.

When the waistline goes, Hello, Eileen Fisher

There’s no question about it.   Eileen Fisher has the BEST clothes for a wobbly waist.  Check her out.

We really need a book about this…

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living alone, over fifty, over sixty

Attention all you authors out there…we really need a book about how to navigate our fifties and sixties alone.  A lot of us, I think, upend our lives at fifty thinking that we can start over, start better or get a second chance only to face the reality that at fifty the only men who want us are over 70, our kids are embroiled in their own dramas, the only employment open to us is entrepreneur, and we’re still competing with our girlfriends.  Oy!  Some of us, me included, have never really lived alone and it doesn’t seem like something we want to embrace, although intellectually, I think it might be a cool thing.  Let me know if you are a writer who wants to write this!