Tag: memories

A loss

Back in 2006, I woke up one morning and posted about some of the books that “created” me. Among them was Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. A friend of mine once wrote to me, “I knew my marriage was doomed when I read The Women’s Room during the week after my wedding.” My own copy of the book was a paperback that looked like this. It was passed among so many of my friends and relatives that it took on a tattered look suitable for its subject: the wear and tear on its female characters as they tried to redefine their roles in male-dominated institutions and society.

I mentioned in my 2006 post that I wasn’t sure how dated the novel would seem to me now, but it had an explosive effect on my attitudes at the time I first read it. It provoked many, many discussions among some of the smartest women I knew, becoming a touchstone for things that troubled and challenged us as we walked down a path just being cleared by strong and independent-thinking women ahead of us.

There are times I feel that generation and my own made great progress. Other times I think the backlash for our audacity was so severe that it set us back decades. Sometimes when I see how even the most forward-thinking men so easily call women names that I find hateful and demeaning when they disagree with how we use our voices, or how viciously women trash one another, I think we haven’t progressed at all.

When my mother died last year, I finally got rid of my old, battered copy of The Women’s Room, replacing it with her hardcover. We had a lot of conversations about this book, she and I, and about women and our relationships with men. Though I’m not the feminist I once was, I think anyone who reads my stories will understand that my female characters are less interested in finding a man than in discovering themselves. (This could be a reason why I’m not a brilliant success as a writer of contemporary romance!) In my created worlds, romantic love is usually the dessert in the great big banquet of life: desirable, but not everything one needs for nutrition.

The Women’s Room was translated into twenty languages and sold more than twenty million copies, but it was only part of a career that included other novels, memoirs, essays, and literary criticism.

Marilyn French died last weekend at age 79. A memorial service is planned for June in New York.

Hump Day Happy

Sometimes I forget what I’ve posted about on here before, but it’s not like you all remember every word, right? RIGHT? (Other than you, Mark G. Harris.)

I don’t have many favorite memories of ninth grade Home Ec, but one of them involves Lynne’s mother, Elnora. I was finishing my sew-something-at-home project, and my mother agreed to let me spend the night with Lynne for the only time ever on a school night so Elnora could teach me buttonholes. Now I know my mother, who sewed all the time, certainly knew how to do buttonholes. Either she was tired of me and my fabric (Why did I choose brown?), or Elnora’s machine had a buttonhole function and Mother’s didn’t. In any case, Elnora taught me how to stitch buttonholes by hand, and I remember finishing up late at night when everyone was asleep, my eyes blurry and my fingers stinging from numerous needle sticks.

I thought about that incident last Friday when I was sewing–badly–deep into the night and getting frustrated. More than anything in the world, I wanted to call Lynne, wake her out of a sound sleep, and shriek, “I CAN’T MAKE THIS YOKE WORK!” She’d have deserved it, too, because of that time she threw The World According to Garp at my sleeping body in the middle of the night, but that’s a different story.

When Timothy, Mark, and I were sewing for Runway Monday, we made our own patterns. In my infinite quest to frustrate myself, I bid on and won some Barbie fashion patterns on eBay. Here, my model Faizah is wearing the result of my Friday night dementia. It doesn’t look exactly like the dress on the front of the pattern, but at least I overcame my Aries nature and FINISHED it. That makes me somewhat happy. Comment with a page number between 1 and 611, and another number between 1 and 25, and Faizah will find YOU something in this book to be happy about.

It’d better not involve sewing.

 

 

Of sneakers and birthdays

Every human at The Compound has been in need of new sneakers (which is what I call tennis shoes and some of you call trainers) for a while. As longtime readers know, Timothy and I don’t like to leave The Compound, much less go OUTSIDE THE LOOP. On Saturday, Tom bravely did reconnaissance for us at one of the outlet malls, where The Brides and Lynne had told us we could find an amazing NIKE store and a CONVERSE store, among other retailers.

Tom’s mission was a success (he’s actually a New Balance guy, but whatever), so on Monday, Timothy and I ventured not only outside the Loop, but beyond the Beltway, and met with equal success. Here’s what I got, among other things:

I never don’t get all-leather tennis shoes, but these are comfortable, so I was willing to give them a chance.

By the time we left, Tim also had several shopping bags. I feel we did our part for April’s retail economy. Because no good deed goes unpunished, we were later pummeled by rain walking between the gym and the car. Cold rain blowing sideways. I thought we were finished with rain by late Monday night, but apparently I was wrong, as a few blocks away from The Compound, sometime in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, an ENORMOUS tree came down and blocked one of the ‘hood’s busiest streets. Flashback to Hurricane Ike. EEK.

Tuesday was the birthday of my late friend Steve R. As I do every year, I made a chocolate cake decorated with Pooh characters. Lindsey and Rhonda came over to help us eat it, while Sugar and The Compound hounds guarded us from leaves on the front porch (a dog has to watch those things; they’re cunning).

It makes me happy each year to celebrate Steve’s life with friends. Even if they never met him, his zest for living and his love of chocolate are great parts of April 28. Also, where else can you hear Rhonda say, “I’m licking Pooh butt?”

Stranger than fiction

I declared Sunday “Becky Day.” Having already prepared dinner so it could be eaten whenever it was wanted, I left The Compound for the gym just after ten a.m. I didn’t realize that the pool doesn’t open until noon on Sunday. My plan had been to swim, shower, and go to Murder By the Book for a signing. Instead, after a few minutes in the whirlpool, I showered and drove to Starbucks to read the paper and drink coffee until it was time to go to the bookstore.

I went to see one of my favorite mystery writers—I think I’ve posted about signings for her first three books, and now her fourth, A Date You Can’t Refuse, is out. I’m speaking of Harley Jane Kozak.

I got lucky and ran into Dean James at the signing, as well. Sometime back, I accidentally missed Dean’s signing for the release of his final Trailer Park Mystery, Leftover Dead, (written under the pseudonym Jimmie Ruth Evans). So I hadn’t read it and didn’t have a signed copy; I got to rectify that on Sunday.

Two authors, two books. A good afternoon.

One of the things Harley Jane Kozak talked about was how the reviews for her mystery series often mention the crazy situations she creates for her heroine, greeting card artist Wollie Shelley. Kozak does a great deal of background research, and while she admits that some of Wollie’s adventures may be implausible, she always makes sure they are possible. This led to a discussion between Kozak and her readers at the signing about how real life is often far more bizarre than anything fiction writers can contrive.

I’ve talked about this before on my LJ—how people sometimes criticize the TJB books for some of the coincidences found within, but those things are far less frequent in what we write than in how our lives unfold.

All of that was in the back of my mind as I ran more errands and continued “Becky Day.” I ended up at another Starbucks and opened my laptop to start working on an e-mail I’d promised to send Dean. But I’d been trying to find some older photos of Lynne’s grandbaby Lila that weren’t on my PC, so first I checked to make sure they were on my laptop. They were. In looking for them, I noticed the folder containing myriad photos I’d used for a slideshow I created and played after my mother’s memorial service.

I haven’t watched it since August, and I wasn’t sure if a public place would be a good time to revisit it. Curiosity got the best of me, however, so I muted the sound, thinking that maybe the photos without the music wouldn’t have the same emotional impact.

Of course, I ended up sitting in Starbucks with tears streaming down my face, but fortunately the only other customers were not in my line of vision. The last photo in the slideshow is one of my parents walking together down the beach as the sun sets. I could hear the music in my head that would be playing if the sound was on—the last few notes of a piano instrumental, fairly obscure now, that was popular in the 1960s. My parents used to slow dance to it in our living room—”Last Date,” by Floyd Cramer.

When I reached for my mouse to close the slideshow as it ended, the song changed on Starbucks’ sound system—to someone’s** rendition of “Last Date.”

As Harley Jane Kozak had said only a few hours before, “You can’t make this stuff up.”

**ETA: “Someone” turned out to be R.E.M. Who knew?

An essayist’s tool

This is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me. I’m not sure what year they gave it to me–this is a ninth printing of the fourteenth edition. I think it was a Christmas gift.

It was the starting point for many essays I wrote in college. A reference to help me jump start literary criticism from time to time. I used it to find quotes that illustrated my points in letters to friends (I used to be a voluminous letter writer; whereas I once hoped people would save my letters, now I fervently hope they disposed of them). It was my ally in composing cleverly subversive screen savers on my monitor when I was a corporate drone. Along with some other references, it’s helped me pair the thoughts of the brilliant and the famous with photos right here on this LiveJournal from time to time.

I see that it’s in its seventeenth edition now. I suppose I could update my library so I could access quotes from more modern and contemporary thinkers. But I have such affection for this physical book and can’t imagine getting rid of a happy connection to my parents. This is another of the times that I can see the value of Kindle. I could have the newest version, and it wouldn’t nudge my old companion off of its shelf space.

Because of Mrs. Rhodes…

It was time to discuss bones in my anatomy and physiology class, and Jana, my instructor, dragged out Bob. I stared at him for a moment, and suddenly inside my head, I could hear a litany that began: frontal, mandible, maxilla… and other names that included clavicle, scapula, sternum… and coccyx, sacrum…humerus, radius, ulna, carpals, metacarpals, phalanges right down to femur, fibula, tibia, patella, tarsals, metatarsals.

Was I some kind of skeletal savant?

No. I was the product of a good teacher.

Twenty-two years before that day when I mentally recited the names of bones, I’d been in Mrs. Rhodes’s physiology class during my last year of high school. I admired everything about her. She was poised and calm. She had complete control of our class of seniors anxious to graduate from academic prison, including a group of practical joke-loving jocks and their audience of boy-crazy girls.

Mrs. Rhodes was in no way a babysitter. She was there to teach; we were there to learn: It was as simple as that. Her material was challenging, and the tests were hard. Also intimidating: Mrs. Rhodes was a looker. But behind her beautiful, determined face, one could always see a glint of humor and an understanding and balance that transcended our little classroom in our little school in our little Alabama town.

I completely adored her. She didn’t cut me any slack because I was her assistant principal’s kid (this wasn’t always the case with other teachers). I respected her so much, and I wanted her to know I had a good mind. For the first time ever, I made straight “A”s in a science class.

One advantage of being my father’s daughter was that if I wanted them, he’d buy my textbooks for me instead of making me turn them in at the end of the year. While it’s no surprise that I have several English texts, it’s significant that I’ve also held on to this:

Two decades later, proof of Mrs. Rhodes’s teaching ability showed up as I breezed through Jana’s anatomy and physiology course. Everything was as familiar as if I were back in that little Alabama classroom, sitting next to my boyfriend while Larry cracked jokes about the skeleton or Debbie wrinkled her nose at the fetal pigs we dissected.

Eventually, the boyfriend and I married and divorced. Debbie died of leukemia when I was in college. I lost contact with Larry after he came (with my ex-husband) to my father’s funeral in 1985. And I never knew what happened to Mrs. Rhodes.

I made a little attempt to pay tribute to her in Timothy’s and my book, The Deal. Our narrator, Aaron, teaches English, and one afternoon the school secretary warns him that it’s a day of crazy shenanigans, including an incident in which two fetal pigs have gone missing from Ms. Rhodes’s physiology lab.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some recent friendings on Facebook, and one of those is Sandra Rhodes. She’s enjoying her retirement after a long career in education that included teaching and administration. She has children and grandchildren, and she’s still beautiful, smart, and balanced. I’m so glad I can honor her outside of fiction for being one of the people who helped shape the better parts of who I became as a student, a teacher, and a person.

Thank you, Mrs. Rhodes, for being a superb teacher and a great example.