Archive for June, 2010
It’s official. I’m old.
Last week while eating my Irish cut oatmeal with fresh berries and a splash of nonfat milk, Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro”video came on MTV. German-esque military men dressed in tight uniforms and bike shorts (??) paraded/danced around a Lady Gaga who was costumed (or not) in a red pleather nun outfit, a S&M black leather ensemble with machine guns protruding from her breasts and other disturbing outfits.
What the buck?
When the director of “Alejandro” Steven Klein, the famed fashion photographer, was asked the meaning of the video, he said, ”I was not thinking in terms [of influences.] I saw it more as a combination of cinema and theater. [It is] about a woman’s desire to resurrect a dead love and who can not face the brutality of her present situation. The pain of living without your true love.”
What? Oh, I thought it was about a young woman-girl in a blonde wig and red lipstick in provocative S&M outfits, simulating tie-me-up sex and then having a “gang bang.” Pardon.
See what I mean; I’m now too old to get these kinds of videos without thinking of my recent adult daughters processing their “meanings.” I’m sure I’m reading too much into this. Maybe my girls haven’t given Lady Gaga a second thought, the way I didn’t when Madonna was rolling around in white lace singing “Like a Virgin.” Back then I loved Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video even if I didn’t “get” the black Jesus and the burning crosses, and it caused her to lose her Pepsi contract. 
I am just as surprised as you by my prudishness. I was a reality show ho. I religiously watched “Real World” before the show turned into a bunch of pickle-livered kids running around naked and punching each other in the face. No thank you. This was also about the time I warned the girls if I ever caught them on “MTV’s Spring Break,” I would fly (yes, on a plane…me, on a plane) down to wherever, pick them up by their ears and lug them back home. I wouldn’t care if they were eighteen or eighty-one. No girls of mine were going to be in a wet t-shirt contest or whip cream wrestling with another inebriated bikini-clad chick.
I say bring back Madonna. I know she’s busy adopting children. But I implore you, Madonna, we need you back for your cone bras, vogueing, and kissing Britney and Christina. We need you back for your subtlety, innocence and creativity.
Who would have dreamed?
COMMENT OF THE DAY: Claire Fadden says, “I laughed outloud reading this. We are turning into our parents, but it’s a good thing. Someone’s gotta keep the world in balance. Thanks for the reminder.”
Mother following Daughter after graduation
I wasn’t the valedictorian of my graduating class and hence didn’t make a speech. Maya Angelou wrote a book called, “Letters to My Daughter,” and she doesn’t even have a daughter; Oprah Winfrey doesn’t count. Kelly graduated from high school last Wednesday and I have seized the day (carpe diem) and have written a valedictorian speech to my daughter.
As you spread your wings…
If I might quote from a Chorus Line song,”Kiss the day away and point me to–
Over your eighteen years, I hope I’ve taught you many lessons. When you feel uncomfortable in a situation, say “No” because “No” means no. Have the courage to be yourself, since you’re spectacular. Clean your room.
No. No. No.
Okay, okay, here we go.
I hope you dance. Not in the way that Lee Ann Womack sang that song. I mean I want you to remember all those years of you dancing around the table while the rest of us tried to eat dinner. Remember how I said, “Kel, sit down.” I take it all back. I miss those days. Now I want you to get up from the table because you can’t sit still, and dance again. I want you to have fun. Smile. Laugh. I don’t want you to take life or yourself too seriously the way I have. After you graduated Molly turned to me and said, “I wish I hadn’t taken high school so seriously. I should have had more fun.” There’s still time. We all have plenty of years to have fun, or maybe we don’t, which makes it even more important to enjoy this moment.
Finally (I’ve always appreciated short valedictorian speeches. Don’t you?), I have a favor to ask you. When I ask, and I promise I won’t too often because I know you have a life full of friends and things to do, will you go to CostCo with me? Remember all the times you went because you were too young to stay home by yourself. Then you wanted to go because you loved shopping. You still do. I know you’d rather be at the mall buying clothes, but on those occassions when I ask will you go grocery shopping with me? And when we’re in the car, will you talk about your day? Will you share stories the way you used to when we I’d pick you up from school? Will you?
I love you!
Follow me to my happy place. Where are we going? New Mexico.
I discovered Taos in the winter of 1998. I was blown away by the beauty of the desert and the people. I went back for the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference in 2004, and have been every summer since.
The Taos Pueblo has been continuously inhabited for the last 1000 years making it the oldest “apartment” houses in the United States.
See where D.H. Lawrence lived and wrote.
Where is your happy place?
Lupie and Molly
Before Molly, there was Lupie. Lupie was named after Lisa Lupner from Saturday Night Live. Bill and I had dressed as Todd and Lisa Lupner on our first Halloween together. Seven years later and married for three, we’d gone to the pound. Like a lot of couples we were making our move from owning a goldfish, to a dog, to having a baby. We walked into the pound and saw the Collie/Springer Spaniel mix in her cage. It was love at first sight for Bill.
“I’ve always wanted a Collie,” he said, standing outside her cage. She had big brown eyes, and wore a perpetual grin. At the pound that day and every day for the next fifteen years Lupie greeted us with a wag of her tail.
Lupie was our first “child.” She became part of our family the year before Molly was born. When Molly came along and then Kelly, Lupie stepped aside as the center of attention. She never once ate a shoe, shredded a rug or scratched our hardwood floors. She never growled or showed any aggression toward friend, family or stranger. I can’t remember her even barking. In fact, about a month after we’d moved into our new house, the previous owner’s son came in and robbed us. I imagine Lupie welcoming him with open paws.
Lupie acted as if, “You rescued me and I am forever grateful.” And she was. God, I loved that dog.
When Bill and I divorced, the girls and I got Lupie.
A couple of months later, Lupie was doing what she did every day, visiting the neighbor’s dog when she somehow blew out her knee. There was never a question of getting the twelve hundred dollar surgery. The divorce had rocked the girls’ world. And I wanted to ensure that some things remained the same like staying in our house and keeping Lupie alive.
Kelly, Grandpa and Lupie Sneaking Away to the Neighbors
After surgery and wearing a cast for a couple of weeks, Lupie could walk but she was never the same. She never went next door to visit her dog friends anymore. She spent her days sleeping.
Within two years of Lupie’s surgery, I had married David and had Jack. By this time, Lupie couldn’t make it outside to the grass to go to the bathroom. She couldn’t negotiate the slickness of the tile and hardwood floors. I’d find her splayed on the tile, laying in her own mess. She’d look at me with such sadness and I swear she was embarrassed.
I still held on. I’m not proud of this.
And I’m not proud of how I yelled at Lupie because I was constantly cleaning up after her, and I had to get the girls off to school, and I had a baby, and none of this could interfere with how “perfect” our lives were. I couldn’t let the girls see how tired I was from having Jack, from being up all night and breastfeeding. Everything was fine. Just fine, damn it.
One night during this time, David and I were eating dinner. Jack was asleep and the girls were over at friends.
I’d just gotten done cleaning up after Lupie again.
I sank into my chair, sighing.
“Michelle, don’t you think it’s time for Lupie…”
“I just wish she could talk,” I said. “I wish she’d give me a sign.”
“I think she’s been pretty loud and clear.”
Both of us laughed. It was absurd. My precious dog was being kept alive by my will and denial.
Not long after this conversation David took Lupie to the vet for what I insisted was a check up.
Before the appointment, Kelly and I stroked Lupie’s oily matted fur. “You are such a good girl. I love you. You are the bestest dog in the whole world.”
David had made the appointment. I heard him say to the vet he wanted to bring in Lupie for a visit. We all held out hope there would be a cure for a fifteen (one hundred and five human years) year old dog who was incontinent and couldn’t walk.
“Call me and tell me what kind of medication they’ll give her to make her better,” I said as I followed David to his car. He held Lupie in his arms, since she couldn’t walk down our stairs.
I kissed her nose knowing this would be the last time I saw her and whispered in her ear, “You’ll always be my girl.”
Kelly will graduate from high school next week. This transition is bringing up these memories. I held on to both Lupie and Molly, when both of them were begging me to let go. I hope I’ve learned something from these events. Sometimes it feels like I haven’t.
Comment of the day: Linda at Bar Mitzvahzilla says, “This reminds me of the cat my husband and I had, also kept alive by our sheer will for her to live, and not by her own will to live. The IVs we gave her, the medicines, and how miserable she was. And how it was finally the most charitable thing we could do, letting go.”
Over the last three years, I’ve been enmeshed in other peoples’ lives. I read memoirs.
By the simplest definition, a memoir is an autobiography or an account of an author’s life. But there are others.
Memoirs are the backstairs of history. George Meredith
- Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction. Frank Harris
- A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving. William J. Clinton
- People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up. Tom Robbins
I started reading memoirs when I began mine, HOLDING ON AND LETTING GO: A MOTHER’S STORY, about Molly, my oldest daughter, going off to college. I needed a way to sort out my feelings (read: sad, depressed, catatonic) about my baby leaving. Amy Williams, a literary agent, says we read memoirs to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. Memoirs, such as The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr and Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs are both stories about being raised in dysfunctional families (read: understatement), and I suppose I read memoirs to make myself feel better about my childhood, my life, and the way I’ve raised my children. I get to say to my kids, “See it could have been worse.”
But I also read them because memoirs seem more intimate than fiction, more truthful. I know this is an illusion. Will Rogers said, “When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do–well, that’s Memoirs.”
Memories are slippery buggers and selective memories rise to the top. Can I remember the exact conversation I had with my dad at age nine, ten, twelve about his drinking in Pacific Beach or was it Alpine? No. But I can write about how that memory affected me and what it felt like, and I hope I tell you in a way that makes you feel you are sitting across the table from me sipping a cup of coffee while I drink a Diet Coke.
Whether you believe a memoir tells the absolute truth or not, all memoirs tell a story. Here are some of my favorites:
A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas. I loved this memoir so much I have five copies to give out to family and friends, although I hold on to them. I’m not sure people will appreciate this memoir in the way I did. Thomas tells the story of the night her husband went out to walk their Beagle; Harry came back with his leash still on but her husband didn’t. Richard had been hit by a car, and his head injuries, which caused memory loss, hallucinations and rages, forced Thomas to commit her husband to an institution. She doesn’t abandon him though. Instead she sells her house to move closer to him and gets two more dogs to keep her company. The last page of the memoir will knock you out or as Stephen King says of the entire memoir, it will feel like a “punch to the heart.”
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the memoir of her unforgettable parents and family. Walls tells her story with a good amount of humor, despite the fact her father was a raging alcoholic who stole the kids’ money to go drinking while his family ate out of trashcans. The mom is an artist and views herself too gifted to work sending a young Jeannette to get a job instead. Walls begins her memoir with the image of her mother digging through the trash as Walls is in a taxi headed for a posh awards event. How did Walls survive her childhood and prosper? Find out.
The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer is a story of a boy “raised” in a local bar. He goes there to find a father when his own leaves the family. The only access Moehringer has to his father, a DJ, is through the radio. At the bar, Moehringer finds a culture of men who provide companionship and guidance (or misguidance) on life and love. This is a coming-of-age memoir where Moehringer discovers his way in an unlikely place, a bar.
Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality by Mabel Dodge Luhan. It’s hard to believe Luhan, a rich socialite, left New York for Taos where she fell in love with the desert and the land and with Tony Luhan, an Indian from the Taos Pueblo. But that’s exactly what she did in 1917, and what a journey it was. Luhan is a beautiful and poetic writer and does justice to Taos, the town I’ve also fallen in love with, too.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion is the author’s telling of the year after her husband of forty years died of a heart attack. “We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss,” she writes. “We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.” This “magical thinking” is the kind I did when Molly went off to college. She’d left her Toyota in our driveway and every day I’d look at it thinking at any minute she’d barrel out of the house and get in her car. There were times I’d drive in it just to smell her smell.
What are your favorite memoirs? Why?
Comment of the day: Susan at Welcome to the Middle of Life says, “Oooooh! Thanks for the book recommendations. I haven’t come across any of these. My favorite fictional-ish memoirist is David Sedaris. Talk about feeling better about your own upbringing after reading about his. But it’s his humor that I’m drawn to and maybe applying to my own life story to make it seem more like a comedy than a tragedy (not that it was a tragedy, per se, but there were some dark parts). And as a fiction writer, there is a lot of non-fiction thrown in. Our life experiences always show up in our fiction – at least mine, anyway. The flip side being, there will be some fiction in the memoir.”
