Saturday, October 19, 2013

"When you get to be my age, baby, you have to pay time respect." -Ava Gardner

I've fallen into the most wonderful well of comfort and fulfillment recently.  We're marking the year anniversary of Dad's death, and there is something magical about the year-long grieving loop.  I feel that we've given the run a complete circle.  We're fast approaching Mom's eighty-fifth birthday, which is happy, spiced with a little bit of sadness.  The number eighty five seems perilously near eighty eight, which is when we lost Dad.






Although I would argue that 2013 has been a nightmarish year at times (global events, national news, and even some local drama to soften (or harden) one's heart) I seem, somehow, to have staked my claim at longevity on this planet.
Somewhere along the way, I put my umbrella in the sand and said: these are the things I like to do, these are the things that I have to do, these are the long-term projects that I'm going to sustain in an effort to stave off the cosmic loneliness of inhabiting a doomed planet (puzzles, yarn-work, Ironman, creativity, food).


I've also, naturally, found tremendous life giving strength, first, in my kids, but also in my wonderful spouse, community, near and far, of friends and family.




So...well of comfort.  I hold, in my very hand, a book that I've been anxious to read.  It's about the secret conversations of Ava Gardner and author Peter Evans.  Ava, ever iconic, beautiful, witty, ribauld, tragic, leads us through a delicious tale of her life, her loves, her Hollywood, and more.  But here I am, on my perfect day on my porch with the light just right and as I read her story my own father jumps into my head. For instance, when I read the following passage:
       

"I might have worn hand-me-down frocks, and had dirty knees, maybe I didn't always scrub them as often as polite little girls should--but we were never dirt poor. I was the goddamnedest tomboy you ever met. In the summertime, I went barefoot, that was what farm kids did. Of course, we were poor. It was the Great Depression, everybody was poor. It cost you just to create. But being hard-up didn't make us dirt poor, fahcrissake." -Ava Gardner

Any conversation about the Depression reminds me of my parents, and my Dad, in particular.  He was born only two years after Ava Gardner, in 1924.  My Mom, four years younger, was of a more middle class family, and was young enough to escape the total experience of the Depression.  Dad's stories were a bit more robust...especially his most heart-wrenching, which involved a fire at their general store when Dad and his family were on a weekend fishing trip.  This story, one of the few terrifying tales told to me during my idyllic childhood, clung to me for years and years.  Finally, I have a print of a photo of the General Store in Wimer, Oregon, which was unearthed by an old friend of Dad's not ten years ago. It hangs in our dining room here in Oak Park.


Imagine the small jolt when I read Ava's words:

"No running water, no electricity, the privy at the bottom of the backyard--yeah. I probably had a suspicion of how horse-and-buggy life was for us...But you don't care about those things when you are a small child and your Daddy's the best lemonade maker in the whole world. And daddy had plans. He always had plans. He built a tobacco barn, and he opened a little country store across the way--Grabtown was just a crossroad in the middle of nowhere, really; God knows where the customers came from, there can't have been too many of them; I hope to God they were loyal--but the buildings caught fire and burned to the ground one night and that was the end of that little enterprise. Rumor had it that my brother Melvin Jonas, everybody called him Jack, started the blaze when he slipped into the barn to roll a ciggy and dropped the match...
I remember that night--I must have been about three...I remember the flames...I remember Daddy crying. You don't forget things like that. ...We were broke, really and truly broke, not just poor, out on the sidewalk broke, honey."

And there it was, that silent inquiry.  A story that mirrors my own Dad's in remarkable fashion, yet I don't remember, ever, in all of the times that we went through different tellings of the story...I don't remember, ever, that simple question of expression of the reaction of my Nana (Dorothy) or her husband, also, Jack Steward.  What did your parents do or say when you all saw the cinders and smoke?  Did they cry?

And that's the rub, right? The rub of loss is that despite my many attempts to cherish time with Dad in the end, honor his memory by thinking of all that we shared,  reflect on the many times together, especially in the last twenty years or so...we can never have those quiet times at the dinner table, over a fresh meal or pie or coffee in the morning.  All the times that Peter and I sat with Dad and asked questions and kept it close as possible, there's no going back.  So many lost stories.  So that's another of my life-long passions.  Tell stories, listen to stories, read stories.  Our history made us.  History is our greatest gift.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Dolls that Swear, Dolls that Sweat, Dolls that don't always make everybody happy.


We took these photos a few weeks back.  I was awful proud of my kid for creating this outfit, and I began to teach her some basic sewing skills that I am sort of aghast that she doesn't already know, considering my sewing/needlework filled childhood.

So...Did you hear what they said about the prez?

This gem is a Gotz doll, a brand which I've admired for years.  When my older child was about this age (nine) we fell into the dreaded "you-know-what-doll" trap.  My response, of course, was to hunt down the cutest doll that I could find, not created by the Pleasant Company.  At this time, some five to seven years ago, I quickly discovered that American Gotz, along with just about any other maker of girl-child-dolls, had folded....hmmm....wonder why?  A particularly brutal and savage competitor on the horizon, perhaps?  One which lures children (usually girls) and their parents (usually mothers) into a ginormous shopping store in Chicago in order to buy and clothe doll (usually girl) and provide all matter of accouterment at tremendous expense, with saccharine story already in place and lacking any irony or true power (as in, when exercising power, one must do the hard thing and be unpopular, sometimes).  OK, so the cat's outta the bag. I. Don't. Like. A. G..

Yeah, well, I heard that all those r-cans are a bunch of stupid idiots, and they wouldn't have their jobs without those gerrymandered districts.
In fact, the topic came up in conversation recently, and I proceeded to spend an entire weekend scanning New Yorker archives for the article that I read, quite a few years ago, about Pleasant Rowland and the Company she built.  Where has it disappeared to?  I have no idea.  I think, actually, that the Pleasant Company article has been spirited away with all the other unmentionable attacks on major business interests including but not exclusively natural gas companies and major agriculture firms.  And, for me, what's the point, really?  As a parent, here in Suburbia, my chances of making any traction with my rant on Pleasant Company will fall on deaf, even hostile ears.  It's been said, Often, that she at least, "is not Barbie".  Well, this may be true, but since Mattel bought Pleasant in the late nineties....AG sorta IS Barbie, at least, she's her younger, totally un-hip, totally un-ironic, cousin who worries all the time about being nice and everybody liking and going to the right schools and doing all the right things in life and not hurting anything...like animals or kids (hmmm....why do middle class parents live AG so much?)....

as far as I can tell, we're all going straight to hell if they get their way, so you might as well come in and we can have a chat.
But if she grows up and moves to Suburbia and has kids of her own and she needs to turn up the heat, or crank the AC, or buy all that crap at Target (or AG), then it's OK, since she's not really, like, personally, hurting the world, because, after all, her hands never got dirty.
Those f*&-ers think they can do whatever they want, but this is my planet too, and I'll die  trying.
Not like her cousin, Barbie, always going out with guys and wearing hot clothes, and making out with all the other Barbies, and Ken, and anyone else who wanted to try some stuff out.   Sheesh...everyone knows....(whisper whisper) that Barbie had it real rough and she had that weird boyfriend, and then she spent all that time with that other Barbie (you know, the brown one) and then, finally, she settled down in that resort town and she was doing something pretty cool (what was it?).  OK, so, LF, you might get my point.

 I'm proud of our Julia, of Gotz Dolls.  She's not a far cry from AG and she can wear her clothes and all that, but I've avoided that place and all it stands for in the modern family pantheon.  And look, there's still a touch of that charm, that desire to glam things up, since, of course, we've got almost three generations of Barbie in this house (if we include nieces Barbie clothes, born in 1983)....Julia has a beauty mark, installed by lovely daughter, and she's got a swag haircut and the ensemble today, thrills me to the core.  Photo-shoot enhanced by the slightly wistful look of a girl, a girl who knows she's gonna catch shit for already wearing lipstick, nails, cut her own hair and painted on eye makeup, but she's worth it, baby, and life is her oyster...