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Trawling the past is not all bad...I remember the thrill or chill of a plunge into a small pool shaded by ancient oaks and the near hysteria of a run through the garden sprinkler with neighborhood kids.
What's your favorite chill-out summer childhood memory?
Is anger genetic? Why do so many of us assume a red-head will have a hair-trigger temper? Or is it a long-line of environmental factors which contribute to the hot-head behavior? If you've witnessed rage in response to a not unusual life stress, say your car won't start in the morning and you are going to be late to work; do you shake your fist at the heavens and demand to be justified, or do you call your office and then the auto service?
Sitting quietly with these thoughts bubbling this morning...until at last the breathing calmed and a still voice spoke, "Repair the past in the present and in the present, prepare the future."
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Thanks for your comments on the topic of women and anger. It seems to be an expanding topic. I am going to let that project brew for a bit.
Meanwhile, a remarkable thing was handed to me the other day. It's a big envelope filled with yellowed news clippings reporting on the professional boxing scene in the Mid-West in the 1920's. All the clippings feature my grandfather, Frances Walker Whalen, fighting as "Grub" Whalen a mid-weight and his older brother, Hilary Thomas Whalen, a bantam weight, boxing as "Red" Whalen.
Written on the envelope, with a fountain pen and with flourishes from a 19th century schooled hand, "The record and obituary of Frances Walker Whalen," signed Thomas A. Whalen, his father.
The obituary cites a bout of heat-stroke that contributed to Grub's early passing, he was in his late 20's when he died at the State Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. But I know his cause of death was something dark and agonizing.
One reporter covering one of Grub's fights wrote, "...though he was knocked down hard, Whalen came up grinning." It's worth noting that some of these fights were bloody, bare-knuckled bouts...and Whalen came up grinning. Though we never met, Grub, I think I know you.
From his memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars:
"Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame...You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller on an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers...Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you are shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaqken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning."
( I need a mouth wash that could rinse the taste of self-pity from me once and for all. I have a feeling this might be it. So, here goes.)
For the first ten years of their marriage, my mother and father survived the Marine Corps, a move to Southern California followed by a move to a small town in Southern Missouri where my dad attended college and worked at a pharmacy and my mother having completed a four-year degree in nursing was at work in the local hospital.
In 1951 my mother lost her father and he was only 50 years old. My grandmother dove into a depression from which she never reappeared. Polio struck the small town where my parents lived and my mother worked night and day on young children struck down by the disease. And a life long friend of dad's, an attorney in St. Louis, called to say that an eight-month old baby boy was available for adoption.
More, much more to follow......
Prayer is a good thing, definitely. But according to the mystic sage, G. I. Gurdjieff, we always imply only one kind of prayer - petition.
That's a method of prayer I know very well. I prayed as a young girl for my family. It was very confusing to wake up in an empty house on a summer morning at eight or nine years-old. I prayed that my mother could stay home and be with me, but of course she had to work. And a some point my dejection turned to anger. An anger full of resentment. And you know what they say about resentment: It's like I drink the poison and wait for you to die!
In my twenties and early thirties, societal expectations demanded that I look like Farah Fawcet, consider birthing babies as naturally as Ma Kettle, bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and serve it like Martha Stewart. So naturally, I fell far short of my projected expectations.
And is the generation coming up now faring any better? I don't know. Suicide among college students is on the rise and the number of anorexics climb and that disease is being discovered among pre-teens.
So it's been said, anything that can be written about can be survived. I want to write about anger. Take a look at these suggested chapter headings and please chime in with thoughts on these and suggest other takes, too. (Photo credit: BBC)
Remember this nursery rhyme? "What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice!"
Well, times have changed. And growing up I was more like this old rhyme: "There once was a little girl, with a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. And when she was good, she was very good and when she was bad, she was horrid." If I had a dime for every time that was recited to me...so, I had a temper. I am going to use the past tense, but the headline above the photo relates to an incident, oh let's say an encounter I had with a local Union at a San Francisco hotel.
I had to deliver four or five cartons of books for an event. And from past experience I knew that if I had to come through the service entrance, I would be stopped by the catering director, who would then call the Union event people and for upwards of $300 they would transport the books to the banquet room.
So I tried to go through the front door, but the doorman stopped me. I loaded the books back into the card and proceeded into the alley looking for the service entrance and had spotted the driveway when my car was side-swiped. That took a bit to sort out as my Farsi is really not up to snuff.
I pulled up to the door, took out my phone and called the sales office, asked for the manager to join me at his back door. Like rabbits out of a burrow, out came the sales manager, the Union coordinator, various heavy lifters with a fork lift, all to meet me. We wrangled. The sky darkened. Large rain drops speckled the cardboard boxes of books sitting on the asphalt.
Finally the sales manager in a fit of detente said, "Look lady, if you'd just asked us nice, we would of helped you." And ordered one of the heavy lifters to walk the books in to the event.
My moment had arrived. I said, "Look friend, this is as nice as it gets."
What glorious freedom! In that moment...I was an adult. I didn't fear authority, worry about my appearance, what did they think of me? No, all that disolved with the words, "this is as nice as it gets."
And when she was bad, she was horrid! (Chapter headings for As Nice as it Gets, to appear tomorrow.)
Photo by BBC Spice Seller, India
I developed an outline for a proposed book on women and anger. Every time I mentioned this to women from all walks of life they would practically pump their fists in the air and cry "yeah! about time!"
So tomorrow, on a peaceful summer Sunday morning, I will post the chapter titles and please, if a subject resonates with you, let me know how and why and maybe you will be in the book!
I recently read Flaubert's "A Sentimental Education," which took him twenty-five years to write. The breath and scope of the political upheaval in France in the early to mid-1800s is astounding, yet the trains ran, the bread baked, the children nursed.
These young officers from France's Saint-Cyr military academy could have marched out of Flaubert's novel. But as it is Bastille Day, they are standing guard ahead of a parade through Paris marking the storming of that notorious prison, Le Bastille.
If you have ever dreamed of a life in the South of France with a handsome French husband, children and an engaging extended family click here for a little taste. Marchons!
Would you offer a stranger in the desert one of these succulent figs? If you knew he was hungry, thirsty, what would you do?
I ventured forth from my coastside retreat yesterday to go to the theater and dinner in Berkeley. Walking back to the parking garage with my dinner left-overs, I was approached four times in as many blocks by street dwellers asking for change and my dinner leavings.
In the city I grew up in, there were a few rules for taking a walk as there were panhandlers way back then, too. The rules: 1) Keep change in your front pocket in case the beggar gets aggressive and/or 2) Keep a book of matches in your front pocket in case the beggar really intends to mug/rob you. These two rules were instructive as the intent was that you keep your eyes on the panhandler, not distracting yourself by rummaging in your handbag. I discovered a best practice was to toss the matchbook at the suspect, and when you're in your 20's they are all suspect, and keep moving.
Those two rules came back to me in an instant as the first beggar stepped out of a shadowed doorway.
"What's for dinner?" He asked. "I don't know what you're having," I said and kept moving.
One little guy, who clearly had been in Berkeley since 1969 but surely couldn't remember yesterday, got to me but not my dinner. The look in his eyes was as empty as his pockets and he could only mumble "Like, wow..."
So here I am, back on the West side of Highway One, the sound of the surf and chimes from my neighbor's balcony co mingling, the sun shining on the Bird of Paradise on my patio exploding with orange blooms.
I had a lunch a bit ago, but not the leftovers from Le Bistro...maybe tonight.
