In 1987, I was doing a planetarium internship in New York City and moonlighted as a bartender at The Ritz concert club. I had to wear business attire during the day, including panty hose I loathed, and would go back to the boarding house to change into my rock and roll alter-ego and head for the East Village at night.
Continue reading Finding Joe Strummer
Category Archives: The Past
Sultans of Swing
No money in our jackets and our jeans are torn
Your hands are cold but your lips are warm
—Down To The Waterline, Dire Straits
Pentecost
My parents didn’t drink much. Sweet wine with Sunday dinner; maybe a can of beer with pizza on Saturday night. There were some bottles of liquor that would come out if there were visitors on Christmas, and a bottle of whiskey that came out for a couple of male visitors: a family friend who was like a grandfather to us, and the monsignor from church.
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It Was Beauty Killed the Beast
I’m surprised when I find writers who can describe a particular point in their lives: the point at which they shut something down inside themselves. It sounds like something that would happen unconsciously, but what is interesting is that so many really do seem to be conscious of it.
Continue reading It Was Beauty Killed the Beast
Rivers and Bridges
She’s about twelve, and very shy. She doesn’t speak English well, and I don’t know her name because I can’t understand what she is saying when she tells me. She is one of the neighbor kids who frequently visits my porch, alone or with others.
Continue reading Rivers and Bridges
In the Beginning
Also written on Oct. 6 but could not post until today. One I’ve been meaning to write for several months now.
Not an Astronomer
I’m not sure when it really happened, but I know that at a very young age, I became very manipulative. It wasn’t that I wanted to be evil. I just didn’t think I was worthy of getting what I wanted because I wanted it. I had to find another way.
What I wanted most of all, of course, was to be loved. But I had love confused with approval. (True fact: I actually had love and approval confused until just a couple of months ago…seriously! I still have to ponder the difference for a while to really get it.)
Perhaps, for me, the opposite of approval was anger. I dreaded anger, especially the anger of adults. I harbored a lot of fear that wasn’t really based on reality. I didn’t have a Toto to pull away the curtain that revealed that the wizard was only a man.
I got the idea that if I did the right things, I could keep the adults from getting angry. This wasn’t the simple, usual “if I’m good, I won’t be punished” kind of mindset. This was much bigger. I operated on a principle (that was not concious) that if I did everything right, everyone would be happy. So if I managed to chime in at the right time, or deflect attention in some way, I could prevent the anger that I dreaded.
A good example of this was during family car trips. If there was tension, I knew that the way to prevent a blowup would be to get a different conversation going. The best way to do this was to ask my dad a science question. Dad is smart and he loved to teach us. If I could get him going about something scientific, then we would just have a science lecture to sit through instead of an argument. “What is electricity?” was a really good one, as was (on stormy nights) “What is lightning?” I never understood the explanations, so I had no trouble asking those, time after time. I always pretended to understand.
In junior high school, our science class did a section on astronomy. For homework, we had to actually make little astrolabes out of protractors and go out and observe the planets and the moon, and chart their path from night to night. I loved it, or at least loved the idea of it. I was pretty bad at the follow-through, but found that I could look that stuff up in Sky and Telescope and mark it down on the charts on the day we had to hand it in.
I mentioned that, since I liked this so much, I thought that perhaps I’d be an astronomer when I grew up. This was met with lots of approval, and I ate it up. I couldn’t get enough.
Science fairs were another part of junior high school, and then high school. I got good at them. I won trophies and medals. It gave me the attention and approval I craved.
I got a summer job working at the planetarium at the University of Toledo. This was really a big bonus…not only did I get the approval for being so career-minded as a 17-year-old, but I got to move away from home a little earlier than most other kids my age. I worked there for four summers, sometimes getting to help out during real observation time with the big 40″ telescope on campus.
All this time, during high school, I was struggling with math. I hated math. I didn’t apply myself. I actually got some C’s, which shocked my parents and shamed me. I remember at an open house, my English teacher suggested that, when I got to college, I might find that astronomy wasn’t a good fit for me…the reading and writing in her classes came to me without effort. But I thought that was just silly, because I was clearly going to be an astronomer.
And off to college I went. My first quarter, I took Astronomy, Physics, and Calculus (and started a 20 hour/week job in the astronomy department, doing mind-numbing work for a professor emeritus who really had no idea of what to do with me.) I think I got a B, a C, and a D. That same quarter, I discovered binge drinking and hangovers. It’s a wonder I got grades that good, honestly.
To say that I struggled through college would be a great understatement. No matter how painful it became, how obvious it was to everyone else that I was in the wrong major, I would not give up.
I got pretty far in, and then started the electromagnetics course. I had this idea that if I just memorized the equations, I would be able to figure out how to apply them. But nothing made sense to me. When the first midterms were handed back to us, my score was “0”. That was zero points out of 100.
I dropped the class. I decided that I’d do better the next year; I’d take five years to graduate after all, as many did. I took some extra math in the meantime, because I had a crush on a grad student who I thought would help me. I did well in those courses, partly because of my interest in showing off, and partly because, at a certain point, all the numbers drop out of mathematics and somehow that seemed easier to me.
Next fall, I tried to take electromagnetics again. But it was more of the same. I never would understand electricity or lightning! I didn’t even make it to the first midterm…I just quit going and officially failed the course.
I decided to change my major. I went to my advisor and told him of my plan. I knew it was going to be a lot more work, and that maybe I wouldn’t even be able to swing it financially. But he looked at my record, and with some clever substitutions (“History of Astronomy” instead of “Electromagnetics”), I was able to graduate. I got a B.S. in Astronomy. Everybody was happy. Right?
Well, my friends at the bar I worked at said they would miss me, because somehow I talked my way into an internship at Hayden Planetarium in New York City. I definitely wasn’t going to graduate school, so planetarium work seemed like the only option to make use of my degree.
New York was a great experience for me. I lasted about seven months there, living in Manhattan, working days for the planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and bartending nights at a club, “The Ritz”, where I got to see some of my favorite bands and swiped drinks for myself. If I had any energy left, my museum ID got me into any other museum in the city for free; I haunted MOMA and the Whitney whenever I could. I started looking more and more like a punk, which didn’t go over great at the museum. Eventually, it was all too hard to keep up. I also started having panic attacks. I finally admitted to myself that I really had no interest in astronomy. I missed my boyfriend terribly…he was living in Columbus, and I was grateful to move back there to be with him.
There was enormous freedom in making that decision. But it also felt like I was letting people down…my parents, and everyone who had helped me with jobs along the way. And, perhaps most painfully of all, it hurt to think that my college experience had been a waste. I worked hard and suffered for that degree, lousy as it was. It cost me a lot, in more than just dollars and time. But our path is our path. It shaped me in ways that I may still learn to appreciate.
I do know this: when I see parents celebrating the ways their child is unique, a part of me worries. Does that child understand that they are allowed to change? And when I hear about encouraging girls to go into math and science, I cringe. What about just not discouraging them from going into anything? Because I was on the vanguard of that girls-in-math-and-science wave, and I feel that, as a girl, I was very very susceptible to doing things for approval rather than out of my own true nature.
What was it that got me into all of this trouble over astronomy? It was my own need for approval, my own way of manipulating the world to love…or at least approve of…. this dumpy, clumsy girl with glasses. Because I myself didn’t think what was really inside was worth loving, and so I lost track of it.
And now I’m 46 years old and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
Fox Medicine
Not long after my sister was born, when I was two, my parents heard that a mother fox had been killed nearby and there was a litter of fox kits. My mother bundled me up so Dad could take me to see them. Somehow, we came home with one of the kits. It’s easy to imagine a toddler me, babbling with delight over the baby foxes, and somehow also easy to imagine my father giving in to the impulse to bring one home with us. Kippy became a pet.
There was also a puppy, “my” dog, Puff. They tell me that I would shuffle around the house in my footed pajamas, Kippy hanging onto one ankle and Puff the other, growling and tugging furiously as I dragged them over the hardwood floor, laughing.
As Kippy got older, she was put away after each playtime, into a pen on the screened-in porch. One day as Mom was putting her back in the pen, Kippy bit my mom. After that, Kippy had to live in a pen in the garage, and our play times were over. When I was five, we moved to another house. Kippy did not come with us. (You knew it wasn’t going to end well, didn’t you?)
I don’t have a really conscious memory, in the usual sense, of playing with Kippy. But I know that there are feelings I have when I remember that time. Feelings of warmth, of sunlight on wood floor, and a very strong sense of play. I have an unmistakable sense of hearing a sudden noise, and all three of us turning our heads towards it. It was right and good back then to be a sensitive creature. Fox is able to remain unseen in plain view, the protector of the family. As you might suspect, I have great affinity for the fox clan.
I can’t tell you why I need wild nature, quiet places, and connection with the furred and the feathered. I only know that I do, and I need to keep remembering and honoring that, and to reject the guilt I sometimes feel over needing that as the daughter of people who never got such choices in life. I need to remember to pull myself away from the computer, the chores, the endless parade of crap that I get entangled with, my futile worrying and planning and arranging to make everything come out my way, in constant search of instant gratification or ego strokes. To get outside…out out out.
There used to be a me who had no trouble living in the here and now, a me who played with a fox and a dog, a me who was perfectly content in a perfect world.
She’s still there sometimes; I find her maybe watching a family of White-tailed Kites in a tree, or listening to the delicate sound of pelican wings overhead. She is the best part of me.
Disco Inferno
It was eighth grade CCD class…those were the classes we went to at church on Wednesday nights. We never knew what CCD stood for, but it turns out it’s “Confraternity of Christian Doctrine”, something established in Rome in the sixteenth century. Basically, it’s religious ed for those of us who weren’t attending a Catholic school.
That year, they split us up into small groups and we met in the basement of the school. I was in a class of about six kids, all of them from another school. Our instructor was the owner of Fast Eddies, a drive-through carryout store, where you didn’t even have to get out of your car to buy your beer and wine.
There was a boy in that class who was acting out a bit; let’s call him Brad. He’d make outrageous comments during class, and would draw elaborate depictions of pills and syringes on his class handouts. The other kids in the class made fun of him and informed me that he liked me. I didn’t really like him, but the idea of any boy liking me was such a novel thing, I went along with it. I drew mustaches and devil horns on pictures of the pope on my own handouts to show solidarity.
They had a retreat for junior high school kids that year, on a day when our schools were all closed for a teacher in-service day. This was 1977, and the folks running the retreat were the same folks who made the hippy banners for the church and struggled to strum their way through guitar mass. 1977 might seem a little late for that, but this was small-town Ohio…we were always behind.
During a break at the retreat, I was swinging on the swings. Brad wandered over to talk to me. As he talked, I pumped my legs harder and harder, flying higher and higher on the swing, full of nervous energy. I don’t remember what he said, but I remember not wanting anyone to see us talking.
Later, during the retreat, they split the boys and girls up, took us to different rooms for a sex ed type of session. It was painful for me; they didn’t really teach us anything, just encouraged us to ask questions. I didn’t know enough to have any questions. I felt humiliated when we were asked who had gotten their periods already; I felt that the girls who raised their hands already knew how much wiser and more sophisticated they were than me. I can’t remember what was actually discussed, but I remember being shocked by some of the candor. I couldn’t imagine not being ashamed to talk about my body so frankly.
A couple weeks later, there was a dance planned at my school. I usually went to the dances with my friends, holding out hope until the very end that a boy would ask me. I figured that this boy from CCD liked me, so I’d ask him to the dance, and somehow I managed to do that. Funny, I can’t remember how. Maybe a note? I was a coward, so probably it was a note. The year before, I’d given the boy of my obsession a note:
Do you like me? Check one and send this note back to me:
The first time I put the note in his locker, he ignored it. The second time, he checked the dreaded box #2, and gave it to his friend to give back to me. I saw them talking, then the friend walked down the row in study hall and flipped the note onto my desk, saying something nasty and hateful to me.
I’m sure I was no less elegant with asking Brad to the dance.
I remembered when he did answer, it was after CCD class. He came up to me on the playground while we were going to our car in the dark October night, and I was with my brothers and sisters. I was in a panic that he would talk to me around them. They mustn’t know! I let out some horrible tirade about him being gross and of course I didn’t like him. It was if I couldn’t help myself, like I was watching myself do it from outside. I am still miserably ashamed of myself when I think about it now.
The next Wednesday, I talked to him again, and explained that I was around my family at the time and was sorry I’d said all that. He didn’t seem to mind…the poor guy was probably used to it, to be honest. But we arranged for him to go to the dance with me.
On the night of the dance, I waited in the lobby of school for him. Word got around and some of the other kids waited around also, to see who would possibly go to the dance with me. When he came in the door, of course, they all laughed. But we made a quick escape into the dark gym, and went to the top of the bleachers to sit.
He held my hand, and we talked. I felt frozen with fear and tension. There was no punch bowl at this dance to alleviate my edginess; those appeared later, in high school. My best friend and her new friend, Cindy, came to talk to us. Cindy never hid her loathing for me. They stood and talked to us for a while, then Cindy suddenly grabbed my hand and shoved it into Brad’s crotch. I was angry, but Brad didn’t seem to mind.
We slow danced during the slow songs and talked during the fast songs. He brought up the retreat and when they split up the boys and the girls and said that he thought it was wrong that they did that. He thought they should have kept us all together and that it would have been much better. I tried to change the subject.
The dance ground down to the bitter end of the evening. Brad tried to grind his erection into me while dancing, and I pretended not to notice and shifted away each time. Right here in the junior high school gym? Ew.
My dad came to pick us up at the end of the dance. We climbed into the back seat and sat next to each other, maybe holding hands. The radio in the car was broken, so we tried to make conversation all the way back to Ayersville. (My mom said later that Dad vowed to get the car radio fixed right away after that.) I can’t remember…when we dropped him off, did he give me a kiss on the cheek? I just remember being horrified by the whole experience, there with my dad. We drove away, and I climbed over the seat to sit in the front on the way home.
I didn’t really talk to Brad much during the rest of the year. Later, I noticed him in church because he became an altar boy and seemed to find religion and got more involved with the church. But we never really had conversations or were even friends after that. And for the rest of junior high and high school, I never did go to a dance with a boy. Eventually, I just didn’t go to them at all.
Despite the feelings of humiliation and shame that I still feel when I remember this story, I laugh at myself more. I’ve become an adult who’s still quite awkward in social situations. Most of all, I’m struck by the sense of isolation I felt and how I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone then about my real feelings. I’d like to time-travel back to the person I was, and to tell her, “Hang in there. You’re going to be fine. It’s going to get better. It’s going to get much, much better.”
Confirming
I went through confirmation in fifth grade. As a Roman Catholic, this was the sacrament where we made our real commitment to the church. Through baptism, we were already a part of it, but that had been conferred onto us by our parents. With confirmation, we were confirming as adults (ahem) that this was our faith.
It was a Big Deal. All our religious ed classes on Wednesday night revolved around training us for it. The bishop came to our little country parish for it. And the Knights of Columbus, in all their finery (and with swords!) came in the lead the way for the bishop to make his grand entrance.
As part of confirmation, we each got to choose a name, the name of a saint that we liked. This was the best part. I loved my little book of saints. It had some of the raciest pictures I had access to at the time (Saint Sebastien!). It was so hard to choose, but eventually I decided on “Mary”.
After the ceremony, there was a family gathering at our house. Someone who hadn’t been at the service ask, “So what’s your confirmation name?”
“Mary!” I said proudly. “After Mary Magdalen!”
“Oh no, honey,” interrupted my dad, immediately. “You mean the Blessed Virgin!”
“Oh no!” I replied, very self-importantly, “I like that story about Mary Magdalene. She was a sinner and then was Jesus’ friend!” I really did like that story, and all they ever said about Mary Magdalene was that she was a “sinner”. I thought I was kind of like that. I knew I sinned a lot, and I also really liked to hang out with my guy-friends-not-boy-friends. I could imagine Mary Magdalene and Jesus playing baseball or rolling around in the giant fertilizer truck tire on the school playground.
The other adults must have been amused.