Gone Girl Not the Movie

*Grandpa Hodge (James) and me at Niagara Falls

I’m sitting in Santora’s restaurant by the UB North campus and it’s all TV screens and loudness at 7:30 on a Saturday. Greg and I have landed here after a failed attempt to see “Gone Girl” at the Maple Ridge movie complex. We didn’t get busted for the bags of popcorn we tried to smuggle in under our coats, but instead were told that the only seats available together would be in the front row, which at $12.50 a pop, what would be the point? Do we really have to buy seats online in advance for $3 more to watch a movie in the theatre these days? Of course, this one has swanky reclining seats, but still. No wonder we wait until they come out on DVD or stream them on Netflix.

            So here we are at Santora’s feeling a little grumpy amidst the beer and chicken wings when the room empties out a little and we see this magnificent couple enter and sit down a few tables away from us. They are so stunning that I literally cannot look away, as if Kate and William have just arrived in a motorcade with paparazzi snapping pictures behind them. Here in our midst is a little blonde girl about six wearing a sparkly headband and sparkly sweater to match. Her movements are graceful and light, her presence both grounded and ethereal. She smiles sweetly at her companion, a man in his seventies with tousled grey hair and glasses, who smiles back leaning in to speak to her softly. It’s an intimate encounter that we strangers bear witness to, so much love radiating between this lovely pair. And yet it feels familiar and somewhat personal. Am I really seeing strangers here or visitors from my past and future selves? Is this little blondie a perplexing vision of a gone girl who used to be…me?

I have been lucky enough to know all my grandparents and as I’ve written about before, my maternal grandfather was a big fan of my sister and me, bowing to our every whim. He took us on “dates” like the one I’m witnessing, hung on our every word and delighted in our smallest achievements. My paternal grandfather lived in South Carolina so we didn’t get to see him as much, but when we did it was the same kind of love fest. He would do crazy southern things, like let us sit on his lap and drive his car, and give us gifts of dyed baby chicks at Easter. In my mind he was as tall as Abraham Lincoln and I loved when he carried me around so I could see things from up high like he did.

My grandmothers were equally indulgent in their own ways. Gammy would sit on her porch doing paint by numbers with us then take us out for lunch and order us kiddie cocktails so we could follow in her footsteps as alcoholics. Grandma Hodge would make pajamas and beds for our dolls to match our own. She would spend her last pennies to buy us candy and when we got older, drive around Sumter like a maniac pointing out and honking her horn at all the cute guys she’d picked out for us.

We all love our children unconditionally, but with the added burden of making them into responsible, loving human beings which requires guidance that sometimes feels like judgment. Grandparents don’t have to do that. They are free to love recklessly, indeed spoil us, when all they expect and long for in return is our presence to receive their unbridled affection and adoration. We are their futures and we hold so much hope for them.

When I visited the Spiritualist Community, Lilydale, a few years ago with my friend, Tim, we sat outside where practicing mediums chose people from the group assembled to give them their messages from beyond. I was chosen twice. Both times they were from an older gentleman named James (my paternal grandfather) offering vague assurances and guidance about important life decisions I was dealing with at that time. While not a complete skeptic, I am leery of the idea that my southern grandfather, who died when I was still a child, would be hanging around in New York state waiting for me to show up at Lilydale this first time and make contact. But I was deeply touched by the thought that though over fifty years had passed since we were together on Earth that there was still some connection. That somehow Grandpa Hodge had managed to continue seeing me as I grew into an adult and made himself known so he could offer his advice…twice.

The holidays are hard for a lot people because so many have passed on to whatever or wherever your beliefs make sense of what happens after death. I am uncertain of what this is but what I know right now is that distance, time, and even death don’t separate us from those with whom we are deeply connected. The love continues and we are never gone to each other.

***

*Photo sent by Aunt Peggy. Thank you!

A Small Thing at the Playground

My beautiful young Mom

            I’m walking back home from the grocery store across the field near the playground and I notice this sign that says, “No smoking, young lungs at play.” It makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time because when I was growing up and all the horrors of secondhand smoke were known and ignored, people smoked everywhere. And God forbid anyone should object to people smoking outside! It’s outside for Christ’s sake! What could be the problem with that?

My mother was a smoker so I got to enjoy secondhand smoke in my very own home. Everyone smoked back then, (except my dad) especially on T.V. and in movies, so it seemed like the most glamorous thing for my beautiful young mom to be holding a cigarette in her hand or to her lips nearly all the time, except for when she was drinking or eating. The way she would hold it, just so, was nothing short of graceful; Ingrid Bergman Casablanca graceful. Smooth, romantic, utterly cool.

I think I was around five when I started picking up my mom’s cigarette and pretending to smoke it, holding it exactly right between my two stubby fingers then sweeping it to my lips, where I just, you know, placed it gently and kind of puffed. This was all fine and dandy until my dad saw me one day and decided to teach me a lesson or kill me, I’m not sure which. He told me to suck in on the cigarette like Mommy did and low and behold I nearly choked to death. I don't know if I turned blue, but I never did smoke or even touch a cigarette after that. Lesson learned. Stay away from Daddy.

Though my Mom was the lone smoker in our nuclear family we often went to my grandparents’ house where everyone (except my grandfather) smoked. My mother had three siblings and among them were more than ten marriages so it’s hard to keep track of how many of the spouses smoked, but I know that my sister and I and our revolving door of cousins often were stuck in a fourteen by eighteen foot room with as many as fifteen smokers. We repeatedly complained of headaches and were told to go outside or down cellar to my grandfather’s office but not without first being reprimanded for whining and complaining about something that had nothing to do with their smoking.

My grandmother believed in smoking like her mother believed in Jesus. She allowed her children to start as early as they wanted, my mother at eleven! She also encouraged my sister and me to try it and not be such “goody-goodies.” We would have nothing to do with it, but I did enjoy eating the gin-soaked olives she left in her martini glasses that (sans pimentos) fit very well on my tiny little fingers.

I know this sounds like child abuse by today’s standards but these are not unpleasant memories, except for the smoking. We also ate at these gatherings and my grandmother, “Gammy,” made this salad we called “Gammy Salad.” It consisted of soggy iceberg lettuce, mayonnaise-drenched tomatoes, onions, and (here’s the really good part) little slivers of Swiss cheese! The reason it was so soggy was because of the endless cocktail hours that preceded dinner. There were pitchers of martinis that kept getting emptied and refilled, I kept eating the olives as an appetizer, and before you knew it, the main course, “Gammy Chicken soaked in French Dressing” was so over-cooked that it was falling off the bones (yes, chicken had bones in those days) and it was delicious!

Gammy never quit smoking, even after several operations to reopen the collapsed veins all over her body. She never got lung cancer. She did have emphysema, but I don’t ever really remember her being very sick. Near the end of her life, she brought a handsome young man as her escort to my mother’s third wedding. This same guy was a pall bearer at her funeral. She did whatever the hell she wanted. She was not a nice person, but she was an accidentally amazing cook!

My mother was the only one amongst her siblings who died directly from a smoking-related illness; emphysema at the age of 64. She did quit smoking in her late 50’s but by then it was too late. Her husband died of lung cancer seven months before her death.

Smoking kills people. It really does! I’m glad that a few young lungs will be spared by the sign next to the playground. But I also wish that the people I loved who got killed by cigarettes were back with us to enjoy a few moments of smoke-free air around most everywhere now. I’d stand in the sunlight with them, watch the children play and just breathe in all that fresh air.

***

This week’s blog post came from reading (well, skimming) William Zinsser’s The Writer Who Stayed. At age 87 he offered to write a personal essay once a week for the web version of the Scholar and wound up doing so for 19 months! Like me, he also taught writing and loved helping other writers find their voices and get over whatever it is that’s holding them back from writing. For me, it’s finding a subject that I feel comfortable writing about each week and keeping to the deadline like the word dead means something.

I thought about small hands, young lungs, the little mouth that puffed the cigarette and slurped the salad. The joy of childhood, the weirdness, the photos and fragrances (acrid sometimes) that take me back there. And Gammy. She surprised me.

There’s always something worth writing about, if you think small and dig in.

What I Wrote When I Wasn't Writing

 

   

    I’ve always identified myself as a writer. At least since the day my grandfather (who was also a writer) visited my fourth grade class and talked to us ten year olds about what it meant to be one. He gave great advice; always have a pen and paper handy so you can write ideas down whenever they come to you, notice the little things, and make a commitment to writing everyday.  In his case this meant getting up at five A.M., trudging down to his basement office reeling from a hangover, and banging away on his manual typewriter before heading off to his real job as a roofing contractor.  But even at the tender age of ten, I knew that my grandfather was not only a writer but an alcoholic, both a genius and a failure, my greatest supporter and for that I loved him.

He wrote philosophies, huge, sprawling manuscripts that lie unpublished in musty boxes in my basement. Now as I try to decipher the words on those pages, I realize that what he was writing, though jammed packed with long words and references to important thinkers, his ideas made little sense and his letters to publishers are heartbreaking as he enthusiastically explains his new philosophy as if he were the next Aristotle. Because in addition to all the aforementioned attributes, my grandfather was also delusional and manic depressive.

My path as a writer has been a little different. I don’t write philosophies (or drink myself into oblivion every night) and though I often think I haven’t gotten too far with it, I have had some small successes that have kept me going on and off over many years. Awards, recognition, productions, all affirmations that my grandfather did not get. And yet…

The last production of a play, which I wrote and directed myself, was seven years ago and though it was well-received and got a great review, I have been somewhat stalled in completing my next writing project. Maybe it’s Theatre, or no longer wanting to be part of the collaborative process that Theatre insists on, often putting the writer at the bottom of the totem pole in the list of its contributors. But during this time, these seven blank years, I have written many things; scenes for plays, notes on plays, poems, children’s book treatments, journal entries, memoir chapters, novel chapters, and general ramblings of an unspecified nature. Reports, proposals and even published op-eds and essays.

So why do I say I’m not writing? Because I’m not working on anything that I would consider substantial that I am finishing and preparing to somehow share with the world, or at least a few of you out there in it. And maybe that’s where this blog comes in,which I have pondered and avoided for years. Like filling “one inch picture frames”or recalling “school lunches” as Anne Lamott suggests in Bird by Bird. These tiny pieces of something.   

 Words on the page like soft unknowing footsteps following one another, leading to a yet unexplored landscape. My virtual basement, where I bang away at my laptop, begin and end these small observances. A brief, yet complete experience. Like prayers or yoga, staying present in each moment. Stretching, breathing, noticing the little things and honoring where I came from.