Sitting in an auditorium on a beautiful May day

You probably spent the month of May attending picnics and frolics and lilac-picking excursions. I spent it in an auditorium, sitting in a folding chair for two hours at a stretch. I waited through hours-long programs for the two minutes I could clap for whatever beloved child was the most special that particular day. May is the month of extreme Special Specialness, so I thought it might be a good time to re-post my musings on the topic, curmudgeonly and gender-bashing as they are. And hey, if you're going to a graduation party this weekend, tell the harried mom in charge that she's never looked better, and then clean up your own damn paper plate and punch cup. She's got enough to do, trust me. 

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2012

Special Specialness

There are seven billion people on the planet, and sometimes I feel as if I’m responsible for baking a birthday cake for every damn one of them.

My name is Julie, and I have a problem with special specialness. If last year’s “fill the house with balloons until Mom passes out” party was a hit, what about a color-coded scavenger hunt this time? Original sonnets for every party guest? Goody bags that rival an Oscar nominee’s swag bag? Sure, just let me slip on my comfortable shoes and I’ll get to work.

If I can't control my crazed event-related behavior, at least I realize I’m a victim of my gender. Garrison Keillor (a man) once said that Christmas, in its current over-the-top incarnation, would not exist if women weren’t around to perpetrate it. The same, I feel, goes for birthdays, book clubs and every grade school production ever mounted since Jesus was in First Grade.

Only women are willing to turn themselves inside out to please others, or at least to attempt to impress them. Don’t believe me? Exhibit A: High Heels. 

Exhibit B: The special specialness that turns up every February at my house, when my daughters celebrate their birthdays. The fact that one of them was studying in Beijing this year didn’t stop me. I drove myself crazy trying to come up with thoughtful gifts that could lie flat in a first-class envelope – a newly minted DVD of videotaped birthdays past, a hand-made accordion-fold card with recently scrounged and reprinted photos of her blowing out the candles on the specially special cakes I’ve baked her over the past 16 years. Just reading this makes me want to smack myself and go mix up a pitcher of martinis.

If something can be done with that magic combination of sickening thoughtfulness and insane exertion of effort, women will find a way. There's no point in blaming Martha Stewart, either, because I've done it to myself -- no one pulled that trigger on the glue gun for me.

I’ve been in a number of book clubs in my time, and every single one has started with a “wine and chips” motif that quickly escalates in one-up-woman-ship into a multi-course, sit-down dinner, served by a sweaty and stiffly smiling hostess, with every morsel themed to a chapter of the book in question. (Don’t even ask what my latest group did when we read “The Help”).

I know a woman who is an absolute marvel – the sort who hosts a meeting of the planning committee, gathers silent auction donations and bakes one hundred dozen cupcakes for the school Bake Sale, all before noon. I serve on a board with her, and, on a recent day, we arrived and walked in to a meeting together. I noticed that she was carrying a giant armful of agendas and reports she’d prepared for this deserving nonprofit. With grace and good cheer, she mentioned that she’d been at her child's school since early that morning, toiling at an event.  As we reached the door of our conference room, she stopped. “I just need to run back to my car and bring in the crock pot of jambalaya. I thought we all could use a snack, and today is Mardi Gras!” she said, brightly, as she trotted off.

I used to be a feminist. I subscribed to Ms. Magazine (remember that one?) I believed that some day I would be living and working in a world with total gender equality in pay, recognition and social status. And now I’m blowing up balloons, and she’s toting crock pots through icy parking lots.

I wonder if Gloria Steinem wakes up every morning and smacks her head against the wall. Possibly, but then she runs to the kitchen to whip up a batch of jambalaya for that board meeting tonight.

I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart

Patsy Montana and the Prairie Ramblers, 1935

I don’t know how she got the name Putszy, but, what with her being Catholic and all, it wasn’t pronounced the way you might think, more like “POOT-zie.” Something tells me it was a “y” on the end, not an “ie,” and I’m pretty sure about that “sz” combo, but I’m not sure I ever asked anyone. And I have no idea how she ever got such an odd moniker. She was just one of the gang of girlfriends my mother palled around with, women with names like Eileen and Mary Margaret and Thelma and Marcella. When they all got together and had a few highballs, they loved to sing. Like, campfire singing, but in living rooms, with cigarettes.

I try to imagine myself with my friends, sitting in my living room and singing songs, and it’s not something I can imagine I would ever want to do. But for my mother and her friends, learning how to amuse oneself cheaply had always been a part of life: dancing, cards, Monopoly games. Singlaongs were part of that Depression-era ethos, and that willingness to make one’s own fun instead of to demand entertainment.

I haven’t thought about those singalongs in a long time, but yesterday I was in a core class, of all places, and the ghost of Putszy Wyland came right up and touched me on the shoulder. The teacher, whose taste in music is wonderfully eccentric, had passed over her usual mix of merengue, bluegrass, African drumming and 80s hair bands. Instead she’d picked an all-country set. And there the song was, spinning into my ears as I struggled to remain upright on a fitball: “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” the one song Putzy could reliably be called upon to sing at any gathering. (Here's a link, so you can hear experience its grandeur for yourself.)

I thought about Putszy, and my mom, and I tried to remember some of the other songs they sang together, but I drew a blank. As I listened to Patsy Montana and the Prairie Ramblers, I wondered in anyone in that group of friends could yodel. After enough highballs, I suppose everyone can yodel. Once again, I found myself wishing I’d paid attention back then, but my mind was always on other more interesting topics, like myself.

Then, that afternoon, I received a beautiful reprieve from the singalong gods. I was in my office, clicking away, when a bit of song came floating up to my window.

You're a grand old flag, You're a high flying flag, 

and forever in peace may you wave.
You're the emblem of the land I love, 

the home of the free and the brave.
Ev'ry heart beats true 'neath the Red, White and Blue, 

where there's never a boast or brag.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 

keep your eye on the grand old flag

For a moment, I could hear my mom, gathered with her daffy girlfriends and their agreeable husbands, raising their highballs for this rouser. Here it was, a number one hit on the singalong hit parade, and people were boisterously singing it, right in my neighborhood. Either that, or I was having a major hallucination. I shook my head for a moment, then realized the voices I was hearing were not the Costellos and the Rothers and the Kelleys. It was the kids next door, hanging from their jungle gym and belting out a George M. Cohan tune, for reasons mysteriously unknown. I wondered if they had highballs and little candy cigarettes in their hands. Determined find out what was going on, I hit “send” on an email and headed outside, just as they were launching into “America.”  

“Kids!” I said, trying hard not to be the crazy old neighbor lady, but suspecting that’s exactly how I sounded. They looked up, startled into silence. I steamrolled on: “I LOVE your songs! You are great singers! WHERE did you learn them?” I was secretly hoping there was an old highball-sipping granny tucked away upstairs, someone I could bond with and maybe bum cigarettes from, while she patted my hand and called me “hon.” But it was not to be; as the mom-in-charge reported: “They have a new music teacher at school, and they’re doing a unit on patriotic songs.” Hmmm, I thought, I’ll bet that music teacher is the one with the granny.

I briefly flirted with the idea of teaching the kids “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” but didn’t want to freak them out completely. So I wrapped things up with another compliment on their fabulous pipes, and headed back home. As I pulled on my gardening gloves and started weeding, I reached for my earbuds and my nightly NPR fix, then stopped.

Encouraged by the knowledge that they had an actual fan, the kids had kicked it into overdrive, and were belting out “Grand Old Flag” to the top of their tiny lungs, relishing their reception by an appreciative audience. I kept the earbuds in my pocket and let their voices be the soundtrack of my evening, laid over that cracking vinyl sidetrack in my head of the way my mother’s voice sounded, especially when she sang with her friends.

Putszy is riding out through the plains and desert now, as her favorite song says, out west of the great divide. There are so many things I don’t know about her, or about my own mother for that matter, but sometimes, I realized, it’s just not important to remember every detail. We hold on to what we can, even if it’s nothing more than a scrap of song on a summer night.

I want to be a cowboy's sweetheart, 

I want to learn to rope and ride

I want to ride through the plains and the desert, 

out west of the Great Divide

I want to hear the coyotes singing as the sun sets in the west

I want to be a cowboy's sweetheart, 

that's the life I love the best

I want to ride Old Paint moving at a run, 

I want to feel the wind in my face

A thousand miles away from all, movin' at a cowhand's pace

I want to pillow my head beneath the open sky 

as the sun sets in the west

I want to strum my guitar and yodel-le-hee-hee, 

that's the life I love the best

Micro-climate

The city of Minneapolis only charged $15, so I was skeptical, but the cherry tree in the front yard is proving to be a real treasure. One of its long and lovely branches has extended over the sidewalk, creating the perfect spot for lilies of the valley to thrive. Last year was the first I had enough to justify putting them in a vase, and I wrote this blog about it, which I'm re-posting.

TUESDAY, MAY 27, 2014

Rose and the Lilies

When I was in my 20s, I had an awful boyfriend who had only two things in his favor:  he taught me how to parallel park, and his mother was wonderful. Other than that, well, thank God I didn’t marry him, because I would be writing this from the loony bin, and you know how bad the Internet service is there.

He taught me to parallel park because he lived in a cramped part of the city, it was the only parking available, I could not do it successfully, and he liked to shout instructions at me in a disdainful manner, so it all worked out. And now, while I can drive only passably, I can park anywhere. But enough about him and my skill acquired through scorn. On to his mother.

Golly, Rosemary was a great lady. She was spunky and sassy and opinionated, but in a way that was always motherly and kind, at least to me, not that I always deserved it. Her kids were all variations of her husband (mean drips like my boyfriend, or just general all-around drips, like the dad), but she was a rose among thorns. I don’t know if any of them ever appreciated her, but I did.

I would have married that guy, just because of her, but she died before we got around to it. I was at her deathbed. We played a Cardinals baseball game on a transistor radio that we held up to her ear, and then, eventually, the game was over, and she was over, too. It was just a few months after my father had died, and all of that seemed to make a good enough reason not to get shouted at by the mean drip any more. Besides, I had learned to parallel park by that time, and without her around, there just didn't seem to be much point to any of it.

I thought of Rose yesterday, and I haven’t done that in a long, long time. The reason was that, after years of trying to get lilies of the valley to grow in my front yard, they finally did, this year. When I walked outside and saw all of them, going crazy against the edge of the sidewalk and looking like they had plans to grow right through the front door, I thought of Rose. She had loved lilies of the valley, and they had bloomed profusely for her, those couple magic weeks a year. I can remember walking up her front sidewalk and seeing them, there on my left and for as far as I could see, it seemed.  I can’t remember why I just walked into my own kitchen fifteen minutes ago, or what I was looking for when I got there, but I can remember those flowers, clear as an Instagram, which hadn't been invented yet.

My lilies are only blooming, I realized yesterday, because our $15 tree from the City of Minneapolis has grown enough, these past two years, to give them the required amount of shade. I put this together in my best scientific method by realizing that the flowers on the other side of the front path, the ones without shade, were not growing, but were looking as miserable as the whole bunch of them had looked, all these years, until yesterday.

As soon as I made the connection between the lilies of my memory and that dear departed woman who was almost my mother-in-law, God help me, I sat down, fast, on my own front walk. I thought of all those old-timey gravestones in cemeteries that say “Say a Hail Mary for Me,” and I said one for her. And then I remembered one time when I took some significant umbrage with something she had said on that very topic. She had mentioned something about going out to cemeteries for an afternoon and tending the graves of relatives. I shot off a hasty remark, in my mid-twenties-I-know-everything way: “What a waste of time,” I snorted. I was nothing if not productive in those days. “They’re dead, what do they care?”

Because she was a very kind lady, she settled for giving me the fish eye instead of a smack on the back of my head, which I richly deserved. And now the cherry tree has shaded the ground, and I wish I knew where her grave was, because I would take these newly blooming flowers straight to her, and offer up a few more Hail Marys while I was at it. Yesterday, I had to settle for just the prayer, and a long-overdue apology, sent out, vaguely, to wherever she might be. I cut a few of the flowers and put them in a tiny vase on the kitchen counter. 

Every time I've walked in the room the past couple days, wondering why I’m there or what I’m looking for, I’ve seen the flowers. I've offered them to her - these delicate little marvels of complicated architecture and saintly smell. I wish I could see her again. I wish I could listen to a baseball game with her, one called by Jack Buck and Mike Shannon. But still, with all of that, I'm really, really glad that I didn’t marry her son. And she probably is, too.