Category: Day by day (Page 1 of 4)

Joe Biden and I both tested positive for Covid on Wednesday, July 17. For the next few days, I kept expecting the president to experience this as his turning point. The debacle of his televised debate loomed ever larger in my own mind. Would he finally see, with this further debility of the virus, that it was time for him to retire from the field of combat? Day after day, he didn’t.

On Sunday morning, I read in The New York Times that Biden was feeling resentment for Barack Obama and the Congressional leaders who were urging him to withdraw—and I felt a flash of anger. This was more than hubris; it was delusion—yet one more sign that Biden could not succeed in a campaign against the Big Orange Felon. Here was the most important presidential campaign of my lifetime, and the candidate and President I had supported with all my heart for five years was showing himself not even able to assess the fight.

Fortunately, within an hour of that juncture, Biden had made his momentous and strategic retreat.

I was thrilled. I am thrilled. I am rallying behind Kamala Harris, whom I have always liked, always supported. As the friend-of-a-friend pointed out, Kamala is a Black Indian, and she’s married to a Jew. Given my personal background, you couldn’t get any better than that!

A friend of mine says that there is a moment in the classic Indian scripture, The Mahabharata, when the world is in danger and women are sent into the breach to save things. I just now spent some time looking for such an instance, and I cannot uncover it. The story may exist, you understand, but I can’t attest to it right now. What I know for certain is that at a time when the demon Mahishasura was a threat to the universe, the gods—all males—were powerless to stop him and created Goddess Durga to defeat the demon. The story is told in the Shrimad Devi Bhagavatam. Goddess Durga took form specifically for this battle and—using the weapons of the gods—this female deity defeated the monster definitively, as the male celestials had been unable to do.

Yes, this is legend.

Yes, this is metaphor.

Yes, it may be wishful thinking, but I have given money to Kamala Harris’ campaign, and I will be writing postcards to Democratic voters in certain battleground states to encourage them to cast their ballots. I’m not much younger than Joe Biden, and there is only so much I can do right now. (Like him, I still have Covid.)

Yet I think it’s time for all of us to bring forward whatever we can to support our chosen goddess to defeat this demon. As Kamala’s campaign says, “Let’s Win This!”

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it means to create a home for myself. This is something I have done, on my own and from scratch, ten times in my adult life. I’m not talking about simply moving, as I did from California to Oklahoma at age ten with my parents and younger brother. This did present difficulties, but creating a home was my mother’s bailiwick, not mine. Nor am I talking about going off to a state college at seventeen or transferring to a school in Chicago two years later. In both of these instances, I was entering new cultures, but I did so with hordes of other young people. I wasn’t alone in my adventure; we were all in it together.

At twenty-one, however, when I traveled to Honolulu to be in my college roommate’s wedding, I actually was on my own. The wedding covered a few days, but then Barb went off on her honeymoon, her family returned to California, and I was in Hawaii by myself—learning my first big lesson about security and self-care:

1. Make sure you have sufficient resources to survive.

When I flew to Hawaii on a one-way ticket, I had only a hundred dollars in my pocket. Barb had told me I’d have no trouble getting a bread-and-butter job as a cocktail waitress in Waikiki, but two days after I arrived, an airline strike started. By the time I was looking for work, the tourist places were laying off staff; they were not hiring. It was a little scary. For a while I was eating Carnation Instant Breakfast powder because it was cheap and living in a room I’d rented for twenty-five dollars a week in the Waikiki Jungle—a slum that existed beside the hotels. This was a spectacularly unsatisfactory “home,” and my first night there, I discovered I wasn’t even living in it alone. The minute the lights went off, the room came alive with hundreds of cockroaches—and in Hawaii they’re flying cockroaches. Hawaii itself is magnificent, but my first place of residence there left a lot to be desired.

Immediately, I put my energy into finding work. After an eye-opening stint as a cocktail waitress in Kalihi—which is Honolulu’s factory district and, thus, not reliant on tourists—I landed a job as a reporter on the largest of the two local newspapers. It was a relief, but, truthfully, I don’t feel I began putting together a real home for a couple of years. That’s when I married. The marriage didn’t last, but it was good for me. While I was with Ed, I learned how to cook and came to understand my second big lesson for home and nurturance:

2. Home is where you feed yourself and the people you love.

For some reason, my mother had never taught me how to prepare food. One of Ed’s friends gave us Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking as a wedding present. I would get home from my job at the paper, prop up the book on the kitchen counter, and endeavor to make something, taking my lessons from a real chef. I started drawing up weekly menus with colored pens and posting them on the refrigerator. I thought of it as homey.

I sometimes say that I was married for five of the happiest years of my life, and then I have to add that, unfortunately, the marriage lasted for seven years. Basically, the last year and a half Ed stopped speaking to me. There were reasons, of course. I understood this, even at the time. It wasn’t my fault, but my husband was in pain, and I was right there as the person he could close himself off from. This served, for me, as a vital lesson about what a home is not. Now people ask me how I can be happy living alone. So easily! What’s impossible, I found, is to be happy while living with someone who doesn’t want to live with me. Leaving my husband was a way to care for myself, and I learned something about home from it, too:

3. Don’t allow your sense of home to depend on another person.

So, I left our home and went off on a great adventure. I traveled on the staff of an Indian master of meditation, starting my life all over again. For the first year, I was living out of a suitcase—three weeks here, a month there. Finally, I realized that even though meditation is amazing, even though I spent at least some time every day in a state of unconditional love, I was not truly happy. It came to me one day with the force of revelation that if I was going to live out of a suitcase, I had to make that suitcase beautiful. It was an understanding of what I needed to feel at home.

4. You have to make your home beautiful—as beautiful as you can.

I started working on that, consciously, and within a month, the swami’s tour came to stop for a year, in an ashram on the West Coast. Then, instead of having just a suitcase to work with, I had a whole bottom bunk. And, understanding that beauty is a need of mine, I did make it beautiful.

I spent years in ashrams, but I also moved between ashrams in different countries and sometimes from an ashram into a community that was new to me. Each of these times, I was entering a new space and creating a home for myself.

When I was living in Washington, DC, for instance, I shared an apartment with the daughter of the congressman I was working for. She was a government lawyer and a sweet young woman, but she was completely utilitarian about our living space. She had a huge running machine set up in the middle of the living room. I couldn’t do anything to make that room beautiful, so I focused all of my energy on fixing up my bedroom and let it go at that.

The following year, I was in Knoxville, Tennessee, and I was working again for a newspaper. I had moved to Knoxville knowing no one, simply for the sake of the job. My first evening in my new furnished apartment was bleak. What I’d hoped for was an A-frame in the woods. What I’d found was a shotgun apartment behind a pizza place on Chapman Highway. (A shotgun apartment, by the way, is a small, rectangular residence where the rooms connect with no hallways. The idea is that if a gun were fired at one end, the bullet would pass through every room before going out the other side.) That first day after I’d made the bed with my new sheets, put the towels into the bathroom, and unpacked my clothes and the bargain dishes given me by my brother, I opened some sparkling water to drink with dinner, thinking this might make the meal special. It was pathetic. It all felt so flat. That was when I figured out another of my truths about home-building:

5. For a place to feel like home, you have to live in it for a while.

Before long, I adopted two cats… I put some art on the walls… I had friends over to dinner…I watched Miami Vice (that year’s cutting-edge TV)… I set up a little puja, an altar, in the bedroom… and there I had a life-changing meditation that I will remember forever. And, yes, by living in that space, over time and in my own way, I made that shotgun apartment my home.

I find that my daily rituals of living matter enormously, and that holiday rituals matter too—birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day. I especially love the winter holidays. This year, I put up my tiny artificial Christmas tree the day after Halloween. Why wait! It’s all so festive: the lights, the ornaments, the wrapped presents. All of this holds such a lovely sense of celebration. And this is my final understanding to share on this topic:

6. Home is where you celebrate your life.

I have come to realize that this challenge of creating a home is vital for me. Astrologically speaking, my north node is pointing toward Cancer, a water sign associated with nurturance, compassion, security, and home. In Latin the word cancer means “crab,” a creature who carries her home on her back. In my chart, Cancer appears in my first house, the house of self, and sitting squarely on top of Cancer is Saturn, a planet known as the taskmaster, the disciplinarian. Whatever is indicated by Saturn is something you absolutely must do—and is also something that’s not easy for you. So, my life direction requires steps that are particularly difficult for me to take.

On reflection, I can see that I have come some distance in this endeavor. I’ve been living in the same one-bedroom apartment in Langley, Washington, for more than dozen years now. I don’t even like the idea of travel anymore. Stay in a hotel? Why would I want to do that! It’s not home!

On an impulse, I asked a friend who had stopped by for chai one morning what she would change in my living room if she could. Eva hesitated—as any intelligent person would do in that situation. “I really mean it,” I told her. “I may not do what you suggest, but I would love to know what you’d tell me.”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” Eva said, “it seems to me that those four paintings are fighting with each other…”

A half-hour later, I was so glad I had asked. Eva suggested changing the placement of just three paintings, and the difference this makes in the room is breathtaking. There is now space in two places that needed space, and the result is that the paintings appear to flow across the walls. One small, intense piece is in a spot I never would have imagined for it, and a large gold-framed painting of my own is back in my bedroom, where it belongs—and where it looks perfect.

My first thought was that the value of an artist’s eye is unimaginable, but as I consider this further, I think it’s more to the point to say that what cannot be imagined is the value of our friends.

That afternoon I had a Zoom conversation with my friend of longest standing. I had to think of how to put that because Pat is not my oldest friend; what she is, is the only friend I’ve known since the sixth grade. We were both new in the school that year. We didn’t connect with each other then, but the following summer our families both moved to another neighborhood, where we were two blocks apart, and at that point Pat and I began to bond. For years, we hung out at each other’s houses. We were maid- and matron-of-honor in each other’s weddings, and we’ve kept loose track of one another in the years since. It’s always a joy to talk with her. Now, she’s the only friend I have who knew my brother, Geoff, and who also knows that he had a daughter, Heather.

Pat asked about Heather, and after a while I was telling her that Heather was the daughter my mother had always wanted—“She’s little and cute,” I said; “she’s sparkly.” Because Pat knew my mother, she understood.

When she learned that I hadn’t been in touch with my niece recently, Pat said, “You should write to her. Family is so important.”

That was how it happened that, for the second time that day, I followed some excellent advice from a friend. I emailed Heather even though I didn’t feel I had anything special to say. I simply told her that I often think about her. Heather wrote back to say, “I think about you a lot, too.” Her words warmed me.

These threads of love knit us together in a way that I find unutterably beautiful. We’re all individual creations, pieces of art. We have somehow arranged our lives so that there is a great deal space between us, but the flow—the connections—are the very heart of life itself. They’re what matter.

A few weeks ago yet another big man was being accused of sexual harassment, and I was talking this over with some old friends—“old” in two ways: women I’ve known a while and also women, like me, of a certain age.

“What he did was nothing,” one of these women said. “Anybody our age who has ever had a job has dealt with things like this.”

“Actually,” another put in, “in some contexts it would be considered a compliment to have a man come on to you. It’s what we used to call flirting.”

Flirting? The anger that came up in me was utterly disproportionate to the company, to the topic, to what was called for in the moment. Still, I was mad, and I jumped into this conversation with both feet. In an I-am-not-kidding voice, I observed that kissing a woman twenty-five years younger than you on the mouth at a party is not flirting—and is especially not flirting when she neither expects nor wants that kiss.

“And an older man asking a young woman how she feels about having an affair with an older man?” I said, “That’s just creepy!”

Well, perhaps it is, but why was I so angry about it? Where did that reaction come from?

It’s not that I’ve been the recipient of so very many salacious moves in my life. I’m tall, bespectacled, flat-chested, and I have what someone once described to me as a Modigliani face. I’m not the sort of woman who inspires such advances—yet they frighten me. I think that’s because I’m also not the sort of woman who handles them well. As the child of alcoholics, I’m grateful for attention. Yet having grown up with the double standards of the 1950s—men can do anything; women have to handle whatever comes at them—and a certain kind of attention scares me.

And when the man throwing out loaded compliments to women isn’t some movie producer or sports star or blowhard talk show host, when he’s a state governor and a liberal politician, when he sponsors egalitarian legislation and says all the right things from a podium, when he’s the kind of person you want to trust—it’s all the more horrible.

I don’t have a really pithy and incisive wrap-up for this. The other day I was in the Costco parking lot, trying to figure out what exit to take so I would end up traveling north on the road my GPS had identified as the route home, when I stopped in front of some workmen who were obviously taking a break. I rolled down my window, and asked, “Can you tell me which of these roads is ____ (whatever the name was)?”

“Hi!” one of the men called out. “Nice hair!”

It was a bit of a non sequitur. “Thanks,” I said. I asked again about the road, but the compliment wedged in me. There’s no other word for it. Getting my directions, I drove away, thinking, Nice hair. Well, good. The fifteen minutes that morning with a hair dryer and brush had been worth it. I turned onto the right road. Nice hair. I patted it… and then I groaned. What was wrong with me! How could it matter—at all!—that some guy in a Costco parking lot had approved of my hairstyle. Miles on and minutes later, I was still thinking, Nice hair! By then I had to laugh.

It’s one of the things I like the very least about myself. I am so hungry for praise that the odd compliment, a little personal attention, is like manna for me—especially when it comes from a man. When I was growing up, it was a man’s attention that mattered.

I remember the first time I ever received male approval. I was fifteen. I was at a football game with some girlfriends. I had just gotten contact lenses and that day I was wearing a padded bra. A group of boys from the rival school walked past our little clutch, and I heard one of them say, “Tall one, mmm,” and I knew he meant me.

I also knew that the impression I’d made was artifice and that if we’d had even a ten-minute conversation, his interest would probably dissipate. Still, the feeling of receiving that superficial approval was so sweet that I remember it even now, sixty years later.

Last week in my Zoom hatha yoga class, the teacher spoke about what a challenging time this year—and perhaps especially this winter—has been for so many people. “We’re not at our best,” she said, “any of us.”

Then she added, “You know that wonderful feeling you get when someone accepts you just as you are? Wouldn’t it be liberating for us to give that kind of acceptance to ourselves! We could feel that kind of security all the time.”

I’ve been playing with that suggestion, considering that radical self-acceptance might be the only solution to my feeling of vulnerability. What would that even look like? Maybe a first step would be to look in the mirror once in a while and tell myself, “Nice hair!”

Why not! It couldn’t hurt.