War wives

Reading about Karilyn Bales’ blog (now removed because her husband is Staff Sgt. Robert Bales) brought me back to those horrible days when Chip was in Vietnam.

Days of waking up to news of Pleiku, where he was stationed, the place they called Rocket City. Days of listening to the tapes he sent, explosions in the background. “That was outgoing,” he’d say. “Oh, that was incoming.”

The dream I had, the consoling but unlikely-seeming dream, that the war was over and we returned to Nha Trang, where he began his tour; in the dream it was a tourist resort (as, indeed, it now is).

He was just there once, of course. I can’t imagine going through that four times. Or, being not just the spouse, but the person actually experiencing it four times.

The Army says it’s not unusual, these days, to be deployed four times. It’s a volunteer army. They all signed up for this. But Bales is 38. When he signed up, conceivably, Bush hadn’t started all those wars.

And are Iraq and Afghanistan any better off, after all the collateral damage?

Bird by Bird

Bird by bird pic, taken by me (a lilac breasted roller, as common in Botswana as sparrows are here)

I heard Anne Lamott on Studio 360 this morning, and although I have very mixed feelings about Anne Lamott, mostly tending toward extreme dislike, and although she does seem quite odd, with her (white, old lady) dreadlocks and wound-up affectless voice, I did like her book Bird by Bird that advised writers to just do it: just go sit there, in the chair, every day at the same time, and just WRITE.

In other words, stop thinking about Who Cares and How Boring My Life Is and Why Bother and Let’s Just Check Who Has Played Words With Friends and JUST WRITE (even if writing in capitals is way too much like Heather Armstrong of dooce.com, who has her own problems these days anyway).

So here’s a spring solstice resolution: I’m back, at least for a while.

On our way to Antarctica, we went to a funeral

Ernest Shackleton, in addition to rescuing his crew by sailing 800 miles across the Drake Passage and scaling mountains of glaciers on South Georgia Island, had a very wide part in his hair.

This, oddly, was the first thing I noticed when I met his granddaughter, Alexandra, on board our ship.

I could hardly believe it, that first night, when I found out what a historic voyage this was. We had on board not only Shackleton’s granddaughter, but the ashes of Frank Wild, his right-hand man; Angie Butler, the journalist who found the ashes in South Africa; Wild’s nieces and nephews from Australia; and a documentary crew from the BBC covering the whole event.

Some background: Frank Wild, who actually had more Antarctic experience than Shackleton, died obscurely in South Africa in 1939. According to his widow, he’d always wanted to be buried next to Shackleton in the Grytvicken whalers’ cemetery on South Georgia Island – but his ashes were lost.

Angie Butler found them, wrote a book about him, and planned this voyage to return him to “The Boss.” We picked up a minister and a tombstone in the Falkland Islands, and we all went to the funeral service in Grytiviken – the now-abandoned whaling town.

The ashes, the minister, and the BBC went too.

Then, flanked by growling seals, we all processed to the cemetery.

Now he’s there, in his proper place …

and we hadn’t even made it to Antarctica yet!

Why I am going to Antarctica

I have been thinking about courage. If I’d been on those airplanes, for example, would I have been among those who rushed the cockpit on Flight 93, or tackled the underpants and shoe bombers? If I’d been in that locker room, and saw a man raping a 10 year old boy, would I have intervened?

I can’t think of very many times when courage was called for in my life. Once, in my business partner’s private plane on our way to a meeting, we lost all electrical power, meaning we (he) could no longer navigate. The traffic controller guided us to the nearest airport for an emergency landing, and everything was fine. All I can say for myself is that I became preternaturally calm – but there was really nothing for me to do, other than not panic.

Sometimes in stores I see people yelling at their kids; I may have even seen a slap. I’ve never intervened.

But in that locker room? I have to think I would have done something. Screamed, at the very least. Not been calm. Not have called my father; not have gone home.

All of this is to explain why I am going to Antarctica tomorrow. I want to see the sites where, to my mind at least, one of the greatest acts of courage ever took place. Ernest Shackleton’s incredible voyage. I want to see the Weddell Sea, where the Endurance was stuck in the ice from January, 1915, until it sunk the following November. I want to see, if only for one night, what it’s like to camp on the ice, the ice that Shackleton’s crew camped on for two months after their ship was lost; then trudged over, dragging their three boats on sledges, till they could go no farther and had to camp again, at “Patience Camp,” for another four months.

I want to see Elephant Island, the first solid land for those 28 men in 17 months, where Shackleton left his crew and rowed and sailed, in a little wooden boat, 800 miles to seek rescue. I want to experience the Drake Passage, the roughest body of water in the world, which he and his little crew of five endured, coated with ice, for 17 days. I want to walk on South Georgia Island where they landed, where they marched for 36 hours, climbed the mountains and slid down the other side, finally reaching Stromness Whaling Station.

Four boats later (the first three got stuck in the ice), Shackleton arrived back at Elephant Island. All 22 men, who had lived there for five months, were rescued.

Shackleton died six years later at Grytviken, on South Georgia Island. I want to visit his grave.

Fat Cats

I had a hard time finding a job only once in my life, but I still remember that feeling of desperation. We were living in Germany; Chip was making around $300 a month as an Army enlisted man, and we were living “on the economy,” as it was called.

I’d worked every summer since I was 17. When I graduated from college I got a job doing research for a psychoanalyst, which I held till Chip (who’d been forced to enlist or be drafted) got orders for Heidelberg. I’d saved up some money, but in Germany it was disappearing fast. Finally, I found one job answering a very shady so-called travel agent’s phone (for a dollar an hour), and then another transcribing grades for the University of Maryland’s Overseas Division.

Back in the States, I worked again for the psychoanalyst while Chip was in Vietnam, and then found a much higher-paying job through a friend at Scott Paper (even though I had to look up the definition of the job I’d be doing – marketing research – in a book). Eventually I migrated into Marketing, and then (after a 20-year career at Scott) started my organizational change consulting firm, which brought in a lot of business even though it didn’t change many organizations.

All of which is to say, we Baby Boomers had it easy. Our demographic bulge shaped society in our own interest. Our sixties protests seemed to work: the war ended; Nixon resigned; colleges reformed their curricula. Jobs just weren’t that hard to find – the “silent generation” cohort wasn’t all that large, and its women tended to stay home. Retirement accounts were invented, the stock market boomed, and arcane financial instruments were devised to make us even richer. And now? Guess what – we’re retiring, and everyone’s afraid to take our Medicare and Social Security away.

What happened to our idealistic generation? We lost our way, maybe because we got everything we wanted. We forgot about everyone but ourselves. We became fat cats.

As I look back upon my lucky life I’m glad I had that experience in Germany. I can understand what those ragtag Occupiers are feeling; understand their anger at us. Let’s just hope they’re more successful in their idealism than we were.

Rolfing Ten Series: Session Five

I’ve tried physical therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture, Pilates, sacro-wedgies (further info on request), yoga, weekly massage, cortisone shots (well, just one), hip-strengthening machines, ice, heat, and I’m sure I’m forgetting something else. Hip, back, leg: still hurt. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but never gone.

Rolfing feels different, somehow. It felt very different last week, when all my bones and muscles and tendons were complaining. I’ve worked so hard all these years, my body says, to let you walk so stiffly. I’ve immobilized your sacrum, tightened up your psoas, ignored that nutty Atlas vertebra in your neck – and now all of a sudden you want me to loosen up? Well, I’ll show you.

But yesterday when I stood up from the table that tug of war had ended. I felt substantial on my feet. They pressed evenly into the earth; I could feel gravity. And yet, when I walked, I was light, filled with helium. And nothing hurt.

Halfway through. I have one foot in each world, she said, and today that’s just how I feel. A little bit tugged, but in the right direction.

 

 

Swimming in the Fifth Dimension

I like to think about people jumping (or being forced) out of their goldfish bowls of certainty. The sun revolved around the earth, until it didn’t. The earth was flat, until it wasn’t.

Paradigm shifts, in other words. When the aliens arrive, or we go there. When neutrinos go faster than light (maybe).

Last week, on Thursday, I had lunch with a friend who’d decided, for some reason I couldn’t quite figure out but which sounded like a good idea, to start doing things she hated. Like shopping, or reading historical novels or books about dreams.

I hate shopping and historical novels too, but I’m pretty interested in dreams. It’s so weird, making up all that stuff in the middle of the night when, by the looks of it, you might as well be unconscious.

So that was a fun conversation, talking about things we hated and why (she’s not interested in any of the things my erstwhile (and late) friend Connie used to call “the spooky stuff” – dreams, or telepathy, or God (my friend’s goldfish bowl is atheism.))

On Friday I walked with another friend, who told me about the time her partner’s obese mother got stuck in a bathtub and had to stay there till her caregivers arrived to haul her out. She (the obese mother) thought it was hilarious, laughing and laughing as they pulled her out.

On Saturday I got an email from my Thursday friend (whom I’d not spoken to since then). I quote:

After all my badmouthing of dreams, I had a weird one last night and told [her husband], who thought it was pretty funny. It involved a bunch of country dudes in their sixties, trying to heave a laughing, nude 300-pound woman out of a tub. Take that, Sigmund.

The scientists at CERN (maybe feeling a little defensive since they haven’t found the God particle yet) are busy coming to Einstein’s defense – like maybe the Opera physicists didn’t measure the neutrinos’ tunnel right, or maybe they forgot about tidal effects (I didn’t realize physicists could be so prosaic).

But I’m hoping what the guy (Joe Lykken) from Fermilab said is right:

“Special relativity only holds in flat space, so if there is a warped fifth dimension, it is possible that on other slices of it, the speed of light is different.”

And that in that warped fifth dimension, my Friday conversation met my friend’s dream.

Rolfing, Session Four

In the middle of the night, at 1:11 to be exact, fire engines showed up at the apartment building across the street, which happens every so often but never results in anything like the incineration of the infernal air handler that handles its air with such gusto right across from our bedroom window. They left, but some sort of electrical-problem-fixing truck remained, idling its wheezing, creaky engine.

I know this much about it because at 2 am I walked across the street to find out what was going on; the extraordinarily rude guy (probably awoken from a dead sleep just slightly earlier than I had been) says to me, of all things, “What’s going on?”

When I responded with the same question he says “Electrical equipment shorted out.”

“Does this truck need to keep idling?”

“Yes it does, until someone gets here to help me.” (very helpful)

“What electrical equipment?” (hoping it was the air handler)

“A cut-off. You know what that is?”

It’s hard to be treated like a dumb blonde anytime, much less in the middle of the night. I crept back home, and so, while listening to the truck idle for a few more hours, had time to think about my bones busily rearranging themselves.

Everything ached, especially the very end of my spine, which apparently curves nastily to the left, toward the aching hip, before dipping back to the right. It felt so good, there on the table as she nudged it back, as I rhythmically pointed one heel, then the other, at the far wall. (How did Ida Rolf figure out all these things?)

When I stood up I felt light, filled with helium. Walk, she said. Remember the bobble-head.

It takes some rearrangement of thought to connect an aching hip, which mine had been for the last week, with that wonderful Atlas vertabra. I’d totally forgotten about it.

A very obvious thought suddenly occurred to me: Rolfing is a partnership. It’s not like a massage, where you lie there and feel good and go home and feel good for awhile and then ache again and go back the next week to do it all over again.

Here I am today, bones rearranged, truck gone, bobbling.

 

 

Rolfing, Session Three

I walk from one foreign language to another, from one fugue state to another, as I move from my Italian class to my Rolfing session, just a few blocks apart. What is that blasted word for “fifteen,” which was right there where it belonged as I recited 100 numbers on my way to the train. In the class: gone.

Rolfing fugue: things float back to me haphazardly as I lie there. The goal of the first session is the breath, she says. The breath? I forgot all about the breath. I did the scary thing with eyes and mouth wide open, but you were also supposed to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. Totally forgot.

Foreign language: We round to the form, she says. This has something to do with connective tissue reshaping itself to hold the newly Rolfed structure in place (I think), but conjugating essere suddenly seems a lot easier.

As she explores my lateral alignment, the goal of the third session (the second had to do with feet, apparently – that didn’t penetrate my fugue last time), I learn that my twelfth rib (one of those two weird ribs that float) is right on top of my ilium on the side that hurts. Very confusing to hear as I float in and out – I never realized part of the intestines and the big hipbone were homonyms, and so I’m trying to picture my rib floating down among all those twisted tubes. Italian and anatomy – neither one comes easy.

Quindici.

ten years hence

It’s not even here yet and I’m sick of all of it, guilty that I’m feeling sick of all of it, yet obsessively reading the retrospectives and everybody’s accounts of where they were and what happened to them and how they felt … yet I too am remembering that day.

After I retired from my organizational change consulting business (that, unfortunately, didn’t really change any organizations), in the process of searching for my new place in the world I discovered Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat and study center in the next town over. I’d been going there for over a year, taking classes and, every weekday morning at 8:30, going to Meeting for Worship. When I got there, that sparkling September morning, the room was dark, empty. No one was there, no one arrived.

There was no Meeting for Worship that day – all the staff was on a retreat.

I went back home, and at around 10 of 9 Chip called. A plane had flown into one of the World Trade Towers.

I never went back to Pendle Hill. God, if there was such a thing, was no longer there for me.

It was only after I’d told this dramatic story for a few years that I realized it wasn’t true. It all happened, but on different days. I’m not even sure of the sequence anymore.

This much I know is true: Benjamin, who was living here at the  time, and I watched the smoke and the flames and wondered why there weren’t any helicopters to rescue the people on the roof, until the towers fell. And then we realized there hadn’t been any people on the roof – they couldn’t get to the roof. I told him everything would be different from then on; that we were going to go to war. His generation had never known war.

Phoebe and her then-boyfriend, who had broken up at the beginning of that first year of med school, came here and held hands on the couch.

We had a comfort-meal dinner: meat loaf, potatoes, peas.

And then there was the Anthrax and the plane crash on Long Island and two wars and Bush and more Bush and yes, everything was different.

All these memories take us back to the time Before. On September 10, 2001, America was at peace, we did not torture, and comfort could still be found at Pendle Hill.