Monday, November 16, 2009

Crossing Bridges


There are almost as many ways to get somewhere as there are roads, rivers and walls in the way. I grew up on a hill that overlooked Detroit's Rouge River and the bridge I used to cross it consisted of a willow tree--a very old one judging by the girth of its trunk.

I was about ten years old and had become accustomed to spending afternoons in the woods that flanked this creek behind my parents' home. The woods were remote and quiet and offered reprieve at a time when I needed it desperately. I was the oldest of seven and lived with our parents though my father, a travelling salesman, was rarely home. The river and its wildlife provided a sanctuary from the uncomfortable days I spent at school. Fifth grade was the beginning of my awareness that I was not a very social young lady and, as much as recess and lunch periods, I dreaded afternoons at home when my mother suggested I should be involved in more social activities.

I took comfort knowing the mallards, chipmunks and raccoons became so accustomed to my presence that they carried on with their business as if I belonged there. I would sit on this bridge to observe the choreography of the mallards' descent-- and the grace of their aquatic meanderings. How they dropped their tail feathers and spread their wings upright to steady their descent and to soften its impact. How they never missed their target, never sank and never showed concern that the mallards already swimming the river would shun them for who they were or weren't.

I don't know where I thought I was going after I crossed this river but I was determined to overcome the challenge. The trunk fell so that its span stretched five feet above the water level once it left the banks. Its trunk had peeled away to a smooth, blond veneer. It would have been simple enough to straddle but a number of intact limbs jutted up and out and down from it so that walking the bridge--what at first glance seemed the most difficult--was actually the only sure way of getting across. The thought of slipping off made my heart pound. Not only was the river-bottom thick with muck but the river was polluted by residential practices that still make my skin crawl.

For the first few weeks I could only muster the courage to crawl across on hands and knees, thankful that no one was watching. Then I was able to stand and take tiny steps while steadying myself on a very long walking stick poked into the muck below. By the end of the summer I could cross upright. I learned it was easier to cross that river if I didn't look back or look down--if I focused on the bank of lush, green ferns on the other side. And while the ferns offered a fine place to sit and contemplate what I had done--they were the end of it and after a month or so they succumbed to winter's frost and shriveled away and I had no place to sit anymore without getting covered in the same mud I'd just crossed over.

A more contemporary bridge spanned that same Rouge River and we crossed on the way to and from my elementary school. It was too narrow for more than one car at a time but I remember it more because of two separate conversations that took place while crossing it--conversations about two significant deaths...my parakeet’s and my Grandfather’s.

“We think it was old age,” my mother said about my parakeet as we headed home from school.

I had spent that week with my cousin's family while my parents were away on one of their many overseas vacations. And, I knew my sweet spring-green feathered friend had actually died at three months from neglect. The woman my parents hired to care for my siblings had more important things on her agenda.

“We can get another bird if you want,” she added in an effort to quench my sobs.

But I didn’t want another bird. I wanted the one I'd just taught so say 'thank you.'

Three months later on that same bridge my mother announced that my ailing Grandfather Miller had passed on. He loved his granddaughters especially myself and my two cousins. I often walked to his house for lunch because he lived with my Grandmother less than two blocks from school. He had a round bald head and much larger round belly and rarely left his family room chair. He spent so much time in it watching George Pierrot that his butt left an imprint in the leather. He drank a lot of whiskey in that chair and it smelled of urine.

Grandfather didn’t talk much but I knew he liked me being there. He’d wave me to his side and rest his large hand on top of mine. It was smooth and rainy-day gray. We'd watch television together, though I had little use for travelogues. Sometimes he would forget I was there and after a while, he’d fall asleep. I'd wonder what it was like to be him--to spend so much of each day asleep.

My Grandfather was very wealthy. His business was selling cotton and wool fabric to the automakers for car seats. When my father took it over, Grandfather spent his afternoons in Palmer Park at a long picnic table where he and other old men played cards. Grandmother didn't care for these men--they didn't own businesses. She convinced him to move to the suburbs when Detroit went through the change. They bought that house near my school. Every afternoon Grandfather would drive across that narrow stone bridge, back to Palmer Park, and play cards with his buddies. When he was too old to drive and had no one to take him, he stopped going. He didn't like to talk about it much and his eyes misted over when did. I felt sorry for my Grandfather. He was lonely and I knew what lonely was.

Every summer for as long as I can remember my mother would pile her gaggle of chicks into her station wagon and drive to her home in Dubuque, Iowa where we visited my other grandparents. About every five years my father joined us. The trip was two full days of air mattress battles, Dramamine, sour pillows, silly car games like 'My Grandmother's Cupboard' and heat...lots and lots of insufferable heat. My mother’s psyche usually burned out by Benton Harbor, about a five hours into the trip and we’d drag our sweaty and sugar coated little bodies into a hotel room for the night. Barring disasters like leaving a kid behind at a service station, it was another five hours of tangled torsos and tested tempers before our car reached the bluff and the majestic suspension bridge that took us across the Mississippi to Iowa. Grandma and Grandpa Hilvers were not rich. They shared their two story bungalow with my Aunt, her alcoholic husband and their three children. Adding our eight into the mix led to interesting memories but still, this bridge was one I recall fondly.

Happiness waited on the other side--days spent at Grandpa's river cabin fishing for catfish and smoking them. Afternoons spent jumping into the creek from the rickety bridge that took us to the cabin. We'd plunge to the swimming hole clutching a tractor's giant tire tube. No theme park ride could match the feelings in our stomachs.

Beyond and above this bridge was another--an ominous wood train trestle. Its massive timbers painted black with tar, it was at least four stories tall with a very narrow walkway flanking one side for workers to access the rails. The very presence of this bridge sweat danger. We were forbidden to go near it which only meant that when we got caught Grandpa would take us to the smokehouse and throttle our behinds. A number of shirtless, shoeless trailer boys who lived at the edge of Grandpa's property took great amusement from daring us to walk this trestle. They'd lead us to it like sheep then sit in their rowboats and watch and for many summers we never made it to the other side, certain we'd heard a train's whistle in the distance. I'm not sure whether their dares or Grandpa's threats released more snakes into our stomachs the day we finally made it all the way across.

I’d all but forgotten about my childhood bridges until my three grown daughters set out to start their own lives. To visit I’ve had to cross the Chicago Lake Street Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge and Boston’s Longfellow Bridge. But I have no feelings of apprehension or loneliness when I cross these bridges. I know when I get to the other side there is always someone I love waiting for me.

I walk my three dogs along a river now--the same one that flowed behind the home where I grew up. With enough practice I could probably cross one of the many logs that have fallen across it. But I don’t need the challenge any more. I’ve married and raised three daughters and along the way learned to appreciate life’s simpler solutions, so I use the wooden footbridge.

Besides I am not as lonely now. Maybe it was knowing those bridges that helped.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Monday Musings--Designer Gowns and Journalists

Two good things in the NYT today. Both are upstarts that have thumbed their noses at this economy. The first that caught my eye is a company that is Netflixing (is that a word?) designer gowns. Called 'Rent the Runway', it intrigued me because, first of all, I am inherently frugal (some would call it cheap) and, second of all, because I've always been a tad envious of women who can carry off wearing one--both the expense and the savvy of it. The rental prices range from $50 to $200 plus $5 for insurance. With the holidays coming into view, I just might try this. Maybe once I wore a designer gown to a party that would be enough--I would be disappointed enough in the results that I would shift my envy (seems like the grass is always greener somewhere). I guess my only concern is whether the thing ( you have 4 days to keep it) fits.

So the second upstart is in Texas--called the Texas Tribune. It is an online news organization that has set its sights on monitoring news and policy coming from Austin. The non-profit (what news organization makes one anymore?) has already won financial support to the tune of 3.7 million dollars and is well on its way to making a fresh sustainable mark in the decimated world of journalism.

“I began to see journalism as a public good, like national defense or clean air,” said John Thornton, an Austin venture capitalist who has invested $1 million of the $3.7 already put up for the project. The theory is to pay good journalists well for serving their readers with healthy, clean portions of news.

Not too shabby.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

You Say Goodbye and I Say Hello

Today Susan Dominus, in her BIG CITY column of the NYT, speaks to a topic never far from the lips of writers lately--the demise of the literary world as we knew it. She wraps her column in Joan Didion's famous essay, "Goodbye to All That," which as "an elegy to the passing of youth," talks to Didion's disenchantment with New York City and the literary culture that was her world. Written in 1967, Dominus writes that the essay still strikes many familiar chords.

Part of what has disappeared, Dominus says, is the "glittering, gluttonous self-indulgence" of the publishing business. It was a comment that struck home to me as I had been privy to the same self-indulgence by Detroit's corporate world back in the mid-eighties. As a florist, I was often hired to perform extravagant botanical feats for the conference and party tables of the executives--feats that often added up to $50 to the per-person tab picked up by stockholders and ordinary citizens. God only knows what the rest of the bill totaled.

It was, and is, the crux of our economic woes. The rampant wanton greed of the people in charge--often at the expense of the people at the opposite end.

Dominus comments that at least "The New York magazine and book-publishing scene is no Detroit." (How unfortunate that Detroit has become the metaphor for abject failure.) But, she goes on to mention the silver lining of all this. "People will keep making cars, only somewhere else; people will keep making literary culture, just not at the same scale, or in the same hallways, or for a living."

In part, I disagree. To the wanton greed I say, with relief, "Goodbye to All That." But unlike Dominus, who concludes that "even the most jaded among our ranks are not ready to say goodbye to all that," I say I am. and I am ready to welcome the era of the internet that will hopefully put more commercial endeavors on an even plane so that the executives and the foot soldiers are equally rewarded. The essence of cars--transportation--will not disappear; and the essence of literary culture will be just fine. People, by their very nature, crave to tell and read stories, to fantasize, to learn and to opine. So while the paper industry and the bookshelf industry might suffer, the new scene--the internet and the electronic media--will enable literature to thrive on an equal, if not larger, scale and it will be possible to make a living providing it. We just won't be able to gorge on the pocketbooks of the general public like we used to.

In November of the same year that Didion published her essay, the Beatles released their hit song, "You Say Goodbye and I Say Hello." Paul McCartney's summary of his lyrics was this: "The answer to everything is simple. It's a song about everything and nothing. If you have black you have to have white. That's the amazing thing about life."

That sums it up better for me. Life goes on and what we are passionate about will survive--might even get better!

Monday, November 2, 2009

Inspiration or Discipline?

Is inspiration or discipline more important in creating art?

This is an ongoing discussion in two of the online writing/reading groups I've joined--Backspace and Goodreads.

In my first life, as mother to three daughters and florist for 34 years, I followed the discipline road and reached some level of success despite frequently being singed by both ends of the candle. I hadn't placed much emphasis on inspiration mainly because I didn't have the confidence that it would take me anywhere. Don't get me wrong, I placed an extremely high value on inspiration and the art it nourishes. I just didn't believe I had any seeds to begin with. And I was extremely frustrated.

Then about six years before I retired I gathered the courage to create inspired floral creations rather than pump out cookie cutter FTD designs. I had admired for over a quarter century designs by florists all over the world but never thought myself capable of attaining that level.

I guess I liken this to the difference between works by Stephanie Meyer or Nora Roberts and those by Jayne Anne Phillips or Andre Dubus III. All certainly very worthwhile reads but I have to think the two former authors are more focused on discipline and are probably more commercially successful whereas the two latter focus on inspiration (no doubt combined with discipline) and are more artistically successful.

I will grant that floral designs are in a different world than fiction. But I learned something during those last six years--I learned that if I had the courage to allow inspiration a seat on my wagon I could, indeed, create more artistically successful designs. I had the seeds all along! What a surprise when that art was validated by my clients who then inspired me to reach even higher.

So now here I am holding both ends of a new candle--the 'chronological one' that says I should retire, not rewire. The other--the one desperate to create. Does that mean I discipline my self to crank out fifty novels between now and the end of the rainbow (even assuming I find an audience!) or do I discipline myself to sit down every morning and listen to my muses and follow their inspiration?

Yep, you guessed it.

I'm an old friend to discipline--a newer one to inspiration. Who knows--maybe the three of us will be surprised with an audience. If not I have these two friends who've helped me enjoy the process of trying.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Be Curious, Not Furious

I attended a new yoga class today--the class was new for me, yoga is not. Actually I attended it several years back and have recently returned to the Y where it is held for free three days a week. Anyway, the young woman who teaches it relayed a mantra early on that she'd borrowed from another teacher whose name I did not catch. The mantra is, "Be Curious, Not Furious."

For the class it applied to some of the more difficult moves she was planning to impose upon us. But, of course, it has a wider range of implications. I can start with what makes me furious, the least of which is having trouble with a yoga move. What does make me more furious is my dog not obeying my requests, as if I don't exist or she has temporarily lost her hearing. What also makes me furious is someone who steals a parking place in a crowded downtown location after I've been patiently waiting for the previous driver to exit it. And, being furious about the incessant rain that has plagued us lately here in Michigan.

Now for 'being curious.' Why does my dog not obey my requests? If I might refer for a moment to a book I recently read, ANIMALS MAKE US HUMAN, by Temple Grandin with Catherine Johnson, the premise is that dogs don't listen to us usually because they don't understand our request and not because they are being stubborn. We need to think like a dog and to frame our expectations within what comes natural for them. The ultimate joy for a dog, Grandin says, is to satisfy their basic emotion of Seeking. The other three dominant emotions for dogs are Rage, Fear and Panic so clearly Seeking is their favorite. It leads to such behaviours as sniffing at the bases of trees, running like banshees in the woods, exploring the orifices of other dogs and chasing after a Frisbee. So when training our dog if we can turn our expectations into a Seeking activity they will delightfully latch on to it. So why doesn't my dog come when I call her? Because I haven't made a game out of it. Or, because (this is my most common resort) I'm not holding out a bowl of food (another bonus of the Seeking emotion).

If my request were to escalate to the level of inciting Rage, Fear or Panic in my dog I may get a positive response simply as her way of eliminating the stress. But, who knows what response I might get the next time--maybe she'd run away and what good would that do?

As for the parking lot event--I have to admit I was furious. How much more positive would it have been for me to be curious about what drove that soul to be so wicked as to steal my space? I might even have been empathetic determining that perhaps they had some kind of emergency or were late for a critical appointment or were about to lose their job because they were late for work.

And finally, the weather. What would being curious instead of furious accomplish? Perhaps it would lead to introspection on my own mindset. Why do I waste my energy on something I cannot control?

Back to Grandin's book--I'll review it in a later post and I highly recommend it!