Constance, Totalled

She was a 1990 Camry. Cranberry in color. Stale old-car smell, with a sort of sweet-spicy overlay from a scented candle I stuck in the pocket in the driver-side door in a half-assed effort to combat stale old-car smell. One headlight not working. Antenna broken off. Needed axle work, needed brake work--and had for some time. Didn't maintain speed going up even unassuming hills. Badly needed to be washed. She was my first car. I loved her.

It was midday on a Sunday, on the way back from the grocery store, Cassie in her car seat in the middle of the back seat (when Cass was still a tenant of my uterus, Pete studiously read up on optimal car seat placement--central is safest). Pete is forever taking "shortcuts," which of course, in stereotypically wifely fashion, I reserve the right to privately consider "longcuts." But on this day, I thought, what the hell. Maybe I should try to cut through, here. Taking Main Road 1, as I always do, is somewhat the long way around. By a tiny bit, but still. So I tried it. But I botched it, missing the crucial second turn on the little side street, thinking it was too soon for it. So I ended up sailing past and having to turn onto Main Road 2, the one that runs by the other end of our little street. Well, whatever. I'd wasted 5 minutes at most, no biggie. Cassie was starting to get a little restive, but we were really really almost home. 4 blocks, 3 blocks...

For some reason, from Main Road 2, I always want to turn left onto Little Street J, one block too early, so I have to pay attention and make sure I wait to get to Little Street A. So there we were, there was Little Street J coming up, and I didn't want that one... WHOA! HEY! [swerve, brake] BANG. A light blue American car (not an SUV, thank goodness) was making a left-hand turn onto Main Road 2 from a little side street on my right and for some reason was undeterred by the presence of oncoming traffic. Which is to say, me.

After a split second of denial that this just actually happened, followed by a fleeting thought that maybe if I just drove home as if nothing had happened, the day could just go on normally, I snapped to and realized that I had been knocked into the oncoming lane and should probably at least move my car out of the way of traffic. So I gingerly stepped on the gas and eased us into Little Street J (which of course I'd been trying to avoid) and pulled over. By this time, Cassie was crying hard. We'd been jolted, but it didn't seem like we'd been jolted that hard. I could just feel the slightest ache across my collarbone, where I'd been thrown against the seatbelt, and that was all. So it didn't seem as though Cass, strapped down into her padded car seat, should have been hurt too badly. But still. Maybe she had bitten her tongue? I got out and opened the back door and leaned in to try to figure out what the bawling was about. Cassie finally calmed down enough to be intelligible--"Broken!" she was wailing. "It's broken!" She was worried about the car.

The light blue car, airbags deployed, windshield broken, front end crumpled, pulled in in front of my car, and the driver got out. He was in his late 40s, maybe, early 50s, with an almost Californian post-hippy look--longish hair and tradesman clothes and a little bead necklace. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" he said. He had a thick local accent. He said he was hurrying home to get the car to his wife, who had to go somewhere. He said he'd driven a school bus for 15 years and never had an accident. He said the car had been his father's, and he'd inherited it when his father died 2 years ago. He talked about how shaken and upset he was, and he thought he was having a heart attack (which he quickly clarified was just a joke when I looked up with flared nostrils and what must have been a slightly alarmed, how-much-CPR-do-I-remember? expression on my face). He apologized some more.

Being a relatively new driver, I had just a vague notion that now we were supposed to "exchange information," but my thoughts were all blowing around in shreds, and refused to coalesce into anything more helpful than that. He got out his license and proof of insurance and laid them on my hood. I didn't know what I was looking for. I copied down his name and address, and he gave me his phone number. License plate number? Insurance company? Policy number? VIN? Not so much. I'm just lucky that he was an honest guy and not an asshole. It turned out that it was actually his father's name on the paperwork I was looking at, so I didn't even have his name right. But we agreed that we'd talk by phone in about an hour, after we'd both calmed down a bit, and then got in our cars and limped home. And sure enough, he called me, and we did a more thorough job of exchanging information on the telephone--it turned out that he'd been at least as flustered and not substantially more experienced in these things than I, never having had an accident himself, so he'd been kind of stumped too.

My first impulse was to minimize what had happened. When I told Pete about it, I characterized it as a "little" accident, "not that bad." He went out to look at the damage and came back in looking kind of serious. It was actually pretty bad, he said. I had to sit on the couch and cry a little bit. I didn't really know what I was crying about, exactly. I mostly just wanted it to go back to being a normal Sunday. (Fortunately, Cassie was by this point semingly entirely recovered from her emotional upset and was twittering around cheerfully, dressing Pink Bunny up in bandannas and Kleenex.) I went back out to look at the damage again. The front passenger-side door was pretty crumpled in, as was the front fender, leaving the right front wheel looking weird and naked. The rear passenger door didn't look that bad, but it wouldn't open, either. Even the glove compartment had been knocked out of true.

I was extremely grateful that the accident hadn't been my fault. Since I started driving in November 2003, I'd definitely been in situations where I thought, "jeez, if that had been an accident, it would have been so my fault." But this time, when the actual metal-crunching happened, I hadn't been doing anything wrong. I didn't have to feel guilty. Phew. An added plus was that it was the nice man's insurance company that would pay out money, and my rates--already astronomical from my being a new driver living in a high-rate area--wouldn't go up. I did feel bad about the nice man's insurance rates, especially since I had a "there but for the grace of god..." kind of feeling about the accident. I could have done something stupid like that. I had done stupid things like that. Just, as it happened, none that resulted in contact with another vehicle or other solid object.

So. The nice man's insurance company did pay out money. They sent a guy out a couple days later to look at smushed Constance, and then contacted us to let us know that they considered her totalled. Pete was home when the guy came over, and said that he'd been impressed with what good shape she'd been in. Yeah. She was. I mean, except the headlight and the axles and the brakes and the antenna. But still. My heart hurt thinking about it. They cut us a check for $1900-some-odd.

So. She's still sitting in our driveway, waiting to be towed away to a junkyard. There are a lot of 1990 Camrys still on the road, so her parts probably won't go to waste.

And I'm driving a new car. I'll tell that part of the story tomorrow.

At Least My Feet Didn't Hurt

I went to my grandfather's funeral last week.

It was in many ways a really lovely event. The church (the main building built in 1919--soaring whitewashed walls with dark beams; burnished wooden pews) was full, despite its being a Tuesday afternoon in what is still, in northern Minnesota, full-on winter, snowflakes whirling outside. A minister, Reverend Brandt, who had been moved a couple of years earlier to a church in Iowa, but who had known my grandfather well, returned to do the service. His words were personal, fond, and, by all evidence, deeply heartfelt. He spoke in superlatives and invoked the Prayer of St. Francis as genuinely describing my grandfather's life. He talked of my grandfather saying "I love you" freely and always seeming to turn up to offer support whenever he (Rev. Brandt) was feeling particularly down.

Rev. Brandt went around with a microphone, and some in attendance talked about their memories of Carl Bonner. He ran a men's clothing store in town, and apparently gave great encouragement and marriage advice to young men in to get their wedding tuxedos. He approached church newcomers and welcomed them and made them feel at home. He and my grandmother, church members for 67 years, had helped to found the church's "Calling and Caring Committee." He never had an unkind word. One man in his 90s struggled slowly through his testimony, perservering though his speech was halting and nearly unintelligible because of some apparently neurological ailment. My grandfather's physician took the mic to tell us how much himself he was to the very end, joking self-deprecatingly and taking an interest in the well-being of others.

The whole place sang "How Great Thou Art" and recited the 23rd Psalm. My grandfather's physician also turned out to be the featured solo soprano and sang something called "Because He Lives" in a beautiful, strong, soaring voice. The congregation said the Lord's Prayer in unison ("debts," not "trespasses," in case you were wondering--I guessed wrong) and sang "Abide with Me." Toward the end, a man played an infectious, swinging, joyful version of "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" on the clarinet, accompanied by his wife on piano. My dad's sister Linda had done a great job with the central flower arrangement, and there were other nice bouquets besides. There was no body--my grandfather had chosen to be cremated. Afterwards, we all went down to the (spacious and windowed) church basement, where there were ham salad sandwiches on white rolls and frosted cupcakes and homemade donuts, plus a choice of coffee or ice water.

It was, all in all, pretty much a funeral best-case scenario. Well, Minnesota Protestant version, anyway. Had I been there accidentally, a random out-of-town visitor brought along, say, by a cousin in the congregation, I think that I would have found the occasion moving and beautiful. I might have found myself inspired by the descriptions of a life lived with such grace and care. Most of what was said sounded quite genuine to my ears, and didn't have that tinny ring of empty post-mortem platitudes. It made me think about the complexity of a life.

As a child, we visited my dad's parents once or twice a year (Christmas or summer or both), and I knew my grandfather as a vaguely friendly but somehow neither comfortable nor particularly interesting presence. As I grew older, I began to form an image of him as straitlaced and moralistic, uptight and maybe not very nice. I began to know how much my mother (married to my father for ten years before separating when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade) disliked my grandfather. (Ten years after her marriage to my dad ended, she told me she still occasionally had nightmares about ol' Carl Bonner.) I knew that he favored my brother, and memorably gave him a green leather box full of old silver coins that he had saved for his first grandson (my cousins and I, all older than Eric, were girls and therefore unsuitable recipients).

Then came the mystery banishment. A school friend, Ellie, and I stayed with my grandparents after a month at French camp the summer I was 12. After that, my grandfather cut off all contact with me without ever issuing a statement as to why. I still don't know. There were two things I can remember from that visit that could possibly explain my condemnation. One was that my grandfather drove Ellie and me to a local shopping mall and dropped us off so that we could see The Empire Strikes Back, which had just been released. Unfortunately, the 7:00 show was sold out, and the 9:00 show was going fast. Ellie and I stayed in line and bought tickets for the 9:00 show, and then went to a pay phone to call and explain the situation. (I had at that time no idea that anyone went to bed before 11:00. In my inexperience, I thought that was just the default adult bedtime.) My aunt Liz, who was staying with my grandparents then too, came to get us when the later movie let out and gave us a stern lecture in the car about how my grandparents went to bed at 10, and about the (apparently) terrible and thoughtless thing we'd done. The other transgression that I can think of that might account for the bad feelings was that in the privacy of the room I shared with Ellie, with the door closed, downstairs from my grandparents' bedroom, I waxed indignant to Ellie, and I specifically remember telling her that my grandparents had "sticks up their asses." If this had been overheard, which I certainly didn't think it would be, I suppose that could have been my hanging offense as well.

And so I had nearly no contact with my dad's parents for nearly 20 years. I saw them at my brother's wedding, where they sat stiffly at a corner table looking miserable, and I overheard an uncomfortable and syrup-covered comment from them about how nice it was that Eric had so many Black friends there (they might have actually even said "colored"--I have to admit I don't remember). I saw them by accident once at the Minneapolis airport--I was passing through the concourse on my way to Christmas with my mom and her mother. My Bonner grandparents were sitting at a gate, and I went up and greeted them warmly, as if nothing were weird. They looked uncomfortable and said very little--just made some strained, patently insincere exclamation about how nice it was to see me--and I moved on pretty quickly.

In recent years, I've also learned more about my dad's childhood. This has been from Susan, my dad's wife, and not from my father himself. Ol' Carl was apparently an abusive, violent father and husband. He beat his wife and all his children, though my Aunt Liz, the eldest, bore the brunt as a particular target of his bitter verbal scorn. (This is a role she has played ever since--Susan says she has witnessed numerous occasions of my grandfather belittling the grown-up Liz in recent years. Liz herself maintained a kind of slavish devotion to the self-righteous tyrant.)

I've also become aware, as the years have gone by, of how damaged all four of Carl Bonner's children have been. My father and his siblings all have troubles in their dealings with other people, though they've manifested in very different ways. When they're all in the same place, the combined social awkwardness just about sucks all of the air out of the room. None of them is at all easy in his or her own skin. Liz embodies some mid-century notion of spinster librarian (both of which she in fact is)--sanctimonious, churchy, gossipy, grudge-holding, bitter. My dad, the second-born and family peace-maker, rejected religion and became a staunch atheist, a thoughtful and knowledgeable, deeply principled man, but with an absolute tin-ear for the predictable irrationalities of human behavior. Dad's little sister Linda was the golden-haired, pretty, wild thing in her youth, was then born again, and became a sugary Christian stay-at-home mom and Avon lady. (Susan tells me that Linda has also in the past decade or so "recovered memories" of her and older sister Liz being sexually abused by her father as children; Liz denies this happened; my husband Pete points out that even if the recovered memories are not literally factual, they could have a certain emotional truth--"you don't have to be molested to be f**ked.") And baby of the family Tom moved to Alaska, never married, and is currently a financially struggling massage therapist. (To be fair, he at least seems pretty content, in an introverted, odd-duck kind of way.)

And so there we all were, at this lovely, touching memorial service for a man I had long assumed was basically a bad and/or sick person. Of course, one conclusion might be that the service was false, the product of some combination of deception, self-delusion, and reluctance to speak ill of the dead--that Carl Bonner was a thoroughgoing sonofabitch, and that's it. I suspect that the truth is more complicated than that, though. I think maybe it's all true. I think maybe he was a domestic tyrant and a real pillar of the community. He was a devoted and an abusive husband. He was petty and vindictive and welcoming and generous. He was thoughtful of others and deeply judgmental of their shortcomings.

Reverend Brandt actually told a story in his eulogy that struck me because it seemed to be so three-dimensional, and to catch my grandfather being both how I saw him and how his fellow churchgoers saw him at once. The anecdote was intended to illustrate Carl Bonner's "vision" for the church and the town, his drive to make things better. Reverend Brandt said there was a time in the history of Vernon Hills when a regional private power company (let's call it 10,000 Lakes Power) was negotiating the possibility of locating in town. The mayor, however, was reluctant to sell Vernon Hills Municipal Power to 10,000 Lakes Power Company, which 10,000 Lakes insisted upon, and the deal was stalled. At some point during the stand-off, the mayor went to Mankato on business for a couple days, whereupon my grandfather called an emergency session of the Town Council, called a vote on the sale of VH Municipal Power to 10,000 Lakes, and got it passed. The minister's conclusion was that the economic well-being of the town was saved, and it was a happy ending. (In fact, when I had asked my cousin earlier in the day about the sources of employment in Vernon Hills, she said the big two were 10,000 Lakes Power and the regional medical center.) So you could certainly say that my grandfather was being clearheaded and responsible, taking it upon himself to do what it took to ensure that the right thing happened for the community. You could, of course, also say that he was being a power-hungry asshole who found a devious way to steamroll legitimate resistance to his own agenda. And maybe both are true.

Meanwhile, we, the family, were there in our front pews, caught between the worlds. The result was a strange kind of nonchalance, a sort of matter-of-fact cheerfulness in all of us but my grandmother (who looked drawn, exhausted, and really terribly sad). My aunts and cousins complained about their aching feet (all of them wore fashionable pointed-toe pumps--I myself was decidedly behind the times in square-toed black boots from several seasons ago). We behaved ourselves during the service, naturally, keeping our faces somber and our voices low murmurs. And I suppose I can't know what depths of feeling lay hidden in my aunts and uncle, my cousins, my brother, my dad. But my sense is that any emotional connection to the deceased Carl Bonner was so stunted and shriveled by his behavior in his lifetime that there wasn't much left to bleed when he was finally gone.

It makes me think of a moment at my grandfather's 90th birthday party a few years ago. My aunt Liz had gotten this godawful tacky ice cream cake with blue and white icing, and "Happy Birthday Carl" in that transparent color gel they use for personalizing cheap cakes. Everyone had gathered, including my reluctant aunt Linda, who since her recovered memories tried not to be in the same room with her father but also kind of tried not to be too obvious about it. My grandfather was sitting at the large, dark wood dining room table with all the leaves put in (this was before their move to an assisted living facility--they were still in their house on the lake). There still wasn't quite room for everyone to sit, so nobody besides my grandfather was sitting, instead all standing uncomfortably around the margins of the room. A candle was lit; we all sang Happy Birthday. My grandfather blew out his candle, and then launched into a sentimental speech about how special it was that we were all there, and how grateful he was, and how proud he was of such a wonderful family, during the course of which he actually started to cry. Not just moist eyes. He was weeping. He couldn't even keep talking and just sat there and cried. And his family, this family that he loved so well, they all stood around silently, looking uncomfortable. Nobody was within 6 feet of him. Finally, I just couldn't take it and went over and stood by him and patted his arm. With his long history of cruelty and anger, repression and sanctimony, he'd starved his relationships with his family to the point where tearful confessions of love were just not enough.

I'm glad I went to the funeral. I'm glad to have gotten that glimpse into the layers of complexity in what you might even call a tragic life. I'm grateful to have spent that time with my dad's family, and to have been there in some small way for my grandmother. I'm also glad I wore my dowdy square-toed boots.

Can't Figure Out What to Feel

Well. My grandfather died yesterday afternoon. He was 94, and had head & neck cancer. He'd had part of his jaw removed and then radiation treatment, and he couldn't swallow and had to get sustenance through a tube into his belly. He still stuck around for 2 or 3 years after all that, cursed with some kind of genetic physical vigor (his mother lived to 99).

The thing is, he was kind of a bastard. Well. He was actually a real shit. He beat his children and his wife (this I only learned a couple years ago, actually). He was smug and "Christian" and a steely disciplinarian. He was also soft-spoken and sanctimonious and butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Everybody in town thought what a gentleman he was, how charming. He never drank alcohol (somebody in his family--I forget the exact story--had died in a boating accident, stinking drunk). He ran a men's clothing store in a Vernon Hills, a small town in Minnesota, until he retired. His wife spent her life in the kitchen. They had 4 children.

My dad was a kind of shy, studious, quiet kid. My grandpa wanted him to play football, and forced him to, even though my dad would cry and shake and throw up before games. Finally my dad's younger brother was old enough to play football and actually enjoyed it, which finally let my dad off the hook.

There's a bunch of other stuff, too. For some secret reason I still don't know, I was persona non grata with him starting when I was 12, starting at one certain visit. When my dad remarried a few years later, apparently my grandparents asked that I not be invited to the night-before restaurant dinner. (My dad's always been a dutiful son, but he did draw the line at that, and I was of course included.) When I was married (at age 31), I sent my grandparents an invitation (out of respect to my dad), and got back the response card, in my grandfather's handwriting: Name: Mr. & Mrs. Carl Bonner, Number of Persons Attending: 0. That was it. Ooo-kay. (Actually, my grandma sent me a nice card a couple weeks later.)

The thing is, I then went to his 90th birthday party, four years later, and the old coot greeted me like I was his long-lost favorite and made a point of taking me down to see all the old family photographs hanging in the downstairs hall, and walking me through every one, including the ones of my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. He told me the story of how he met and courted my grandmother, which I'd never heard. He was making up for lost time. It felt a bit weird, but by that time I'd been estranged from him for so long, he no longer even really felt so much like a relative. I felt myself slip into "geriatrics clinic nurse" mode and was warm and polite and deferential and... professional. And from what felt like a great distance, I could just look at him and feel sorry for him. I could easily be guessing wrong, but it seemed to me at the time that he had realized at this late date that he had screwed up this whole living thing pretty badly, that he was trying to make his peace.

Over the course of that weekend, I watched him try to reach out to his children, who were all there, but of course, it was just too little too late. They were too scarred by him, there's too much history. They didn't trust him an inch, emotionally.

So oddly enough, having been spared a painful history with him because he had not deigned to see me for 19 years (except unavoidably at my dad's wedding, and then later my brother's first wedding), I was the one best able to connect with him. And he just seemed so pathetic and old to me, any anger I had at him over his treatment of my dad and his siblings, and my grandma, and me, just kind of oozed away.

So that was my grandfather. I saw him once more, on the occasion of my grandma's 90th birthday last summer, but I was mostly chasing a very mobile but not very cooperative Cassie, so didn't get to talk to him too much. I knew that he and my grandmother had done a lot of travelling when their health still permitted, so I asked him, when conversation lagged (and conversation always lags at gatherings of that family), about where they'd gone, and what moments he remembered, which places were his favorites. He lit up and talked about Peru. And some place in Asia--I don't even remember. I was too distracted by how happy and animated he was talking about it, when most of the time he looked pretty stony and miserable.

And now he's dead. And I don't know what to feel or to think. I hope that my grandmother is okay. Taking care of her family, and then just him, has kind of always been her raison d'etre, you know? But beyond that, I just feel strangely oppressed by the news of his death. It doesn't make so much sense. After all, he was in his mid-90s, and he'd been suffering. Besides which, he was for much of his life a real sonofabitch. Maybe I just don't want to admit that sometimes it's too late for redemption. Sometimes (as on Seinfeld) the story doesn't end with learning and hugging.

I'm going to go to his funeral. It's this coming Tuesday. I'll let you know how it goes.

100 Things

A pleasurable exercise in navel-gazing, inspired by elswhere's 109 things.

1. I’m a bit pigeon-toed, the left side more than the right.

2. I’m made ridiculously uncomfortable by sitcoms and even dramas where characters are lying, acting inappropriately, and embarrassing themselves—sometimes I even have to go in the other room until that part’s over.

3. Since 1993, I don’t eat birds and mammals.

4. But I did when I was pregnant. (Pete and I even went to a steakhouse on our anniversary.)

5. When I was 10 months old, I got a systemic staph infection called Ritter’s Disease, and all my skin peeled off, and they weren’t sure at first that I was going to live.

6. I failed my first driver’s test on my 35th birthday, for going through a red light.

7. I won our town’s spelling bee when I was in 8th grade. My best friend came in second.

8. I was always the slowest typist of my group of friends in college, but when I had to take a typing test recently, to temp, I typed 64 words a minute, and the agency people acted all impressed. Go figure.

9. I used to hate pine nuts, but they’re starting to grow on me.

10. Um. Not literally.

11. When I get extremely angry, I get all quiet, and everything goes white, and my mouth gets dry, and sometimes people can’t even tell that I’m upset at all.

12. I don’t get extremely angry very often. I can think of maybe 5 or 6 times.

13. The traditional academic regalia for graduation at my college included a white rabbit fur collar, and although some people got a more contemporary white velvet substitute, I got the real bunny.

14. I have this weird intolerance for caffeine and can’t have more than one cup of coffee, and even that’s pushing it. Maybe I’m missing an enzyme or something.

15. I taught myself to wiggle my nose in Math 12.

16. I took Math 12 and calculus at the same time, which in retrospect was possibly a mistake.

17. I’m pretty messy, but much more at home than at work.

18. For Christmas one year, my mom gave me this extremely cool 19th-century thingy that has a carved stone seal on the bottom and a compass on the top, and you wear it on a chain or a ribbon. The compass still works, and if I remember to, I wear it when I’m going someplace new.

19. I really, really love goat cheese. Also ceviche. And dark chocolate. And those airport/movie theater nachos with the gloopy orange cheese-food on top and lots of pickled jalapenos.

20. I generally have a very good visual memory, but strangely not for faces.

21. I took 3 years of high school Latin.

22. They tell me I loved to watch football when I was little. There’s a photograph of me in a walker, avidly watching the very first Superbowl on television.

23. My little brother and I used to fight like cats and dogs, and he would dig his fingernails into the backs of my hands until they bled. I secretly encouraged this tactic of his because it actually didn’t hurt that much, and it looked absolutely terrible.

24. I went to an alternative elementary school, where we got to pick a lot of our own classes and called the teachers by their first names. I loved it passionately.

25. My daughter and I have a ritual of spending a couple minutes smelling the scented candles together when we go to the grocery store.

26. I’ve always really hated my belly, which has a very pronounced shape and is where I gain weight. Since having a baby, though, my belly looks way worse than ever, and I miraculously almost don’t care at all any more.

27. I hate telling people what kind of music I like, because it makes me feel like they’re trying to peg me, and I’ve just never really defined myself that way.

28. Okay, okay, Joni Mitchell and the Clash and Luscious Jackson and Aimee Mann and 70s funk and Bing Crosby and Judy Garland and Gang of Four and Rickie Lee Jones. Ooh, and the Au Pairs.

29. My dad taught me to swim, so I have a pretty clean, streamlined crawl stroke.

30. My eyes are blue, with little yellow bits. There is no green.

31. Even though I considered myself too old for Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood at the time, I was actually very relieved when he talked about how you can’t go down the bathtub drain.

32. I had a crush on Neil Armstrong, the astronaut, when I was 3.

33. My family lived in Honduras when I was very little (ages 1 ½ to 4 ½). I remember that we had maids, and iguanas in the back yard, and drank our milk with ice cubes in it. I loved arroz con pollo and desperately wanted long black hair like all the pretty ladies.

34. My first pet was when we lived in Honduras, a yellow dog named Tara (after the name on the milk truck). She started getting out and killing the neighbors' chickens, and they had to take her out and shoot her.

35. I have a streak of something that might be gullibility or might just be literal-mindedness. My first impulse is usually to take what somebody’s saying at face-value even when I know better.

36. My first sexual experience was a torrid 10-month affair with another girl when I was 14 and 15. We had sex in the high school girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, among other places. It was really great. Until she broke my heart in a thousand pieces.

37. My first sexual intercourse with a boy was when I was 17.

38. I’m a “non-taster” of that bitter stuff that genetically you can either taste or you can’t, and so I love broccoli and brussels sprouts.

39. I have freakishly small ears.

40. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually getting a tiny bit tired of Jon Stewart.

41. I have never owned a PDA and maybe never will.

42. I realized only this past week that I like the idea of taking baths more than I actually enjoy taking baths.

43. I secretly want to shuck it all and just go to art school.

44. When I learn foreign languages, my accent gets good prematurely, and so I get into trouble because people naturally assume I understand more than I do.

45. I’ve had one manicure and one pedicure in my life (about 10 years apart).

46. I had a dream last night in which I was yelling at somebody about the lack of statistical soundness of a third party’s study design, and how it would make the research useless.

47. I made way, way too little breastmilk for Cassie—almost none at all—which just crushed me because I had big plans for breastfeeding exclusively.

48. When I was a kid going swimming, I would stay in the water until my fingernails turned purple and even longer if my mom didn’t notice.

49. One summer when I was maybe 6 or 7, I spent a piece of my vacation with my cousins. With them I went to church and participated in “daily devotions” and read bible story books for kids. Under my aunt’s careful tutelage, I “let Jesus into my heart” and then cried myself to sleep for weeks because I was going to miss my Mommy and Daddy when I was in Heaven and they weren’t.

50. Relations are apparently still strained between my dad and his sister.

51. Peonies and gardenias are my favorite flowers.

52. In my 22nd month of trying to get pregnant, one night I had very strong images of white lilies during sex, and the next morning on my way to work I thought, “holy shit, white lilies are an annunciation symbol! maybe I’m pregnant.” And I was.

53. When I was in high school, my friends nicknamed me Smack because I acted so calm all the time it seemed like I was on heroin.

54. My daughter is a Year-of-the-Horse Pisces firstborn girl with A-negative blood. Just like me. Only I was a Wednesday’s child (“full of woe”), and she was “born on the Sabbath day” and therefore “bonnie and bright and good and gay.” (whew.)

55. For my first few years of babysitting, I charged a dollar an hour.

56. My mom pulled a few all-nighters with me when I was in high school (and one in college), typing my papers as I wrote them.

57. When I was working as a clinic nurse and under a tremendous amount of stress, my fingernails grew very fast and strong.

58. My mom was involved in Re-evaluation Counseling (a.k.a. Co-Counseling) for a few years when I was in my teens, and little patches of my worldview remain based on those principles.

59. In biology lab in junior high and high school, I would do the dissections, so my lab partners only had to watch.

60. I went to Spain all by myself for two weeks in 1993 for no really good reason.

61. I was a very serious child; I’ve lightened up as I’ve aged.

62. I was a Brownie, but then only was a Girl Scout for a month or two. I had some kind of camping phobia.

63. I almost always give money to buskers in the subway.

64. Jews for Jesus handing out leaflets, on the other hand, make me disproportionately furious. I’m not entirely sure exactly what that’s about.

65. The first time I went to Prague (with Pete, who had lived there a while during graduate school), it was late December and very dark and continually overcast, and I found it grotesquely ugly and unsettling.

66. Codeine works really, really well for my occasional migraines. It even makes the nausea go away.

67. I once researched and wrote a syllabus chapter on geriatric sexuality because none of the physicians was willing to do it.

68. I have a soft, gentle touch when I draw blood.

69. I’ve struggled on and off with urge urinary incontinence at least since junior high. Since giving birth it’s even worse, and compounded by stress incontinence.

70. Cassie weighed 10 lbs., 4 oz., at birth, and I delivered her vaginally without drugs.

71. My husband often thinks I’m stubborn and pedantic. (He should talk.)

72. I strongly dislike “new car smell.”

73. I find it very pleasant to be around outspoken people with big, huge personalities. Something in me just relaxes.

74. My skin is so pale that when I used to bleach my hair platinum, people sometimes thought it was my natural color.

75. I wanted to adapt Gertrude Stein’s “Lifting Belly” into a two-person play, and I still think it’s a good idea, but I bet I’ll never get around to it.

76. My feet have unusually high arches, and sometimes it’s hard to find shoes or boots that fit over the top.

77. Sometimes I think that only teenagers should have sex.

78. I was married in yellow. A 1914-style dress made for me by a local seamstress/designer for $200 out of a very lightweight pale/soft yellow wool that I picked out at a fabric store, with subtle matching braid trim.

79. For deeply embarrassing reasons of supreme lameness, we never sent out all our wedding thank-you notes. If there’s an after-life, I know I will have to pay.

80. I give very good backrubs.

81. When I read Susan Sontag essays, she just makes me want to yell at her, argue with her, except I know that she’s much smarter than I am and would win even if I were right. (Well, plus she’s dead now.)

82. Because I love lattes, Pete says, “for someone who despises coffee with milk, you’re sure willing to drink milk with coffee.” I think the thing is that American coffee is more water, and so you’re mixing milk and water, which somehow grosses me out. But espresso is more concentrated, and smaller volume, so adds not very much water to the milk.

83. I could spend hours looking through fonts, or paint color sample strips, or stationery choices.

84. I went to the orthodontist for 11 years.

85. My dad taught me to read when I was 3 ½, out of an old copy of Dick and Jane that he and my mom borrowed from a friend of theirs who used to be a school teacher. Dick and Jane seemed like big kids to me, and I identified more with little blonde sister Sally. Sally’s daddy gave Sally a ride on his shoulders, and when he was walking behind a tall hedge, Dick and Jane were very surprised because Sally looked so tall. (This was clearly a narrative that made a big impression on me at the time, since I still remember it.)

86. I’ve worn Dioressence since I was 16.

87. For ten years of my childhood, my parents (and then my mom, after the separation) drove a gold 1970 Buick Grand Sport. It had a raised ridgey stripe down the middle of the backseat, and my brother and I would bug each other by “accidentally” putting some body part over the line.

88. When I was growing up, my grandparents (on my mom’s side) lived on the banks of the Mississippi river, and we could sit out front and watch the barges go by. There were also trains that ran along the river, down a steep embankment that had rattlesnakes. I loved listening to the trains as they went by at night. It was a feeling of utter contentment.

89. I don’t really get schadenfreude. I think maybe I’m too earnest and goody-goody.

90. The last bicycle I owned was sparkly purple, with a flowered banana seat. It was stolen out of our garage.

91. I really hate how in order to choose one thing, you have to un-choose a bunch of other things.

92. I love to go to supermarkets in other countries.

93. Despite some pretty strong competition, seventh grade was hands-down the worst year of my life.

94. I really wish I could go back and take my pathetic, awkward childhood self shopping for clothes.

95. At the beginning of my junior year in France, our group went to visit Chambord, and a few of us managed to sneak into the locked central tower (by trying each of our housekeys in turn until one worked) and climb all the way up.

96. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on, it penetrated my unconscious in a way that no show or book has before or since, and I regularly had Buffy-based dreams.

97. A long time ago, I went swimming in a fjord in Norway. It was a record-breaking warm summer, but the water was still quite brisk.

98. When I look at a digital clock to check the time, and the time is my birthday, that’s good luck.

99. I’d rather be cold than hot.

100. I love to dance so much that I don’t even care that I’m not so good. Except one time in San Francisco, dancing in a lesbian club, a skinny little Black drag queen told me, “Girl! You should be on Soul Train!” Which is my favorite compliment I have received ever.

Cassie Speaks

Last night as I was getting Cassie ready for bed, she lay on her changing table drawing on one of those little boards where you make pictures with what I assume is some kind of iron powder, with a magnet pen. Cassie has just started to draw faces--two dots for eyes, a short vertical line for a nose, and a longer horizontal line for a mouth. She made one of those and told me it was a picture of Mama.

"Cool," I said. "Can you give me short hair?" Cassie made a scribble above my eye dots.

"Can you give me earrings?" She made two little vertical lines on the sides of my face. Unfortunately, one of my earrings veered off and eliminated my left eye, which was after all, only a dot to begin with.

Cassie got frustrated. She said, "I'm going to draw my other mama!"

"Your other mama?"

"Yeah."

"What's your other mama's name?"

"Shakira!"

I know it really doesn't mean much, but I have to say that I'm pleased as Punch that despite being raised by a straight couple currently in a very white suburb, Cass was able to drum up a Black second mom from somewhere.

And while I'm telling Cassie anecdotes, maybe I'll just slip in a couple more recent ones. (Cassie has long been a fairly productive generator of little stories and bon mots--among her very first sentences, a year and a half ago, were "Night-night, Daddy's shirts!" and "Mama, Daddy, bottle gin!")

--

Transcript of a conversation from early February: Cassie (perfectly healthy) is sitting on one couch in the living room. Pete is on the other couch, reading the paper. I'm just hanging out with her for a few minutes before supper.

Cassie: I can watch television, though, because I'm sick.

Mama: No, sweetie, you're not sick. And besides, it's suppertime. We need to go wash our hands.

Cassie: No, I AM sick!

Mama: You're sick, huh? What do you have?

Cassie: Sickness.

(Daddy laughs.)

Cassie: DON'T LAUGH AT MY SICKNESS!

--

We spent Christmas at my brother Erik's (big ol') house, and then flew to Philadelphia to stay with our dear friends Josh and Tommy for a couple days. Pete had gotten there before Cassie and me, since the MLA conference was in Philadelphia this year. He met us at the airport, but my mom (who flew with Cassie and me on her way to other engagements) still said she would give us a ride to Josh & Tommy's house in her rental car. She'd parked it at one of those remote lots, and so we all took the shuttle together to get her car.

When we got to the lot, the smell was just terrible--like the whole world was made of exceedingly ripe camembert or something. In talking to somebody, Pete found out that there was a sewage treatment plant right next door to the parking area. That got us talking to Cassie about sewage treatment plants, and for the next few days, we'd periodically get asked about it again. We'd talk about how all the stinky stuff from people's toilets and sinks from all over the city all goes to the sewage treatment plant, where they do things to the water to make it clean again.

Anyway, about a week after the last time we'd mentioned it, Cassie was watching the water go down the drain at the end of her bath. She was on her hands and knees, peering down into the drain, talking about cities and all the stinky stuff... And I prompted, "and then where does it all go?" Cassie looked up and replied promptly and proudly, "Grandma Sal's rental car!"

Vaguely Nurse-ish

In which I let the wrestling gerbils out to get some air

Well, I say it at parties, and on census forms, and as you see, it’s even pretty prominent in my blogging profile. I’m a nurse. I’m a registered nurse. Rosie Bonner, RN. And it’s true. I am. I went to nursing school (graduating with my BSN summa cum laude, thank you very much) and passed the nursing board exam (the NCLEX) and got a license with a license number. I can take a blood pressure and give a shot, and I know what a SOAP note is and how it differs from a DAR note.* But I can’t help but feel like I’m lying a little when I claim the status of nurse.

For one thing, I haven’t touched a patient in years. My last few jobs have been of the administrative/research variety. I actually only worked clinically for a year after graduating from nursing school, in a geriatrics clinic affiliated with Fancy University (the same university where my husband Pete used to teach, but he’s in the humanities, so that was mostly coincidental).

For another thing, I never was a hospital staff nurse. I never (with the exception of my rotations in nursing school) took care of hospitalized patients, passing meds and hanging IVs and hurrying around in rubber-soled shoes and scrubs with a stethoscope around my neck. And that’s not nothing to nurses. For nurses, being a hospital staff nurse is paying your dues, and there are those who will never consider you a real nurse if you haven’t done it (or haven’t done it for long enough, or haven’t done it recently enough…). Of course, there’s a vocal camp on the other side, people who will earnestly reassure you that since nurses do a staggering variety of kinds of work, we are all real nurses, all of us important in our own special way. You know. Like that. The we’re-a-happy-rainbow people. And you know, I do kind of believe them. Politically, I more than believe them—I’m one of them. A nursing perspective is vitally important in outpatient care, in home care, in mental health, in public health… blah, blah, blah. But still there’s this irrational but nagging sense, and it won’t go away, that none of that is really real until you’ve proved yourself on the floor.

Finally, and probably most centrally, I hesitate because… because I’m just weird. I’m not like regular nurses. Personality, education. I’m geeky and wonky and grandly idealistic and big-picture-y (an ENFP in a nursing world of ESFJs, if you go for all that Myers-Briggs stuff). I went to a Seven Sisters college as a matter of course, and a lot of my friends are similarly Ivy-ish in one way or another. Which brings us to social class. I guess a lot of it is about social class. As Americans, we just don’t talk about social class that much—it’s not polite, I guess. After all, we’re a classless society, damn it. And as the Republicans have taken it upon themselves to define the terms of the conversation, just noticing that some people have more stuff and get more breaks than other people is tantamount to fomenting “class warfare.” But the fact remains that it was not surprising that I went to a Seven Sisters college; it took no triumph of will against unbeatable odds. I applied; I got in; my parents took out loans; I went. (Of course, all of this class stuff is relative. I arrived on campus thinking that I was upper-middle class because my parents went to college; I later learned from a classmate I was close to freshman year that she arrived thinking that she was lower-middle class because her family didn’t own horses.)

So to some degree, I think I will always feel like I’m “passing” as a nurse. I actually entered the profession in the first place with the intention of skipping over working as an RN entirely. I was going to go straight through in my nursing education to get a master’s degree and become a nurse practitioner. When I lived in San Francisco, in the early 90s, at both my paid job and my volunteer work, the primary clinicians were nurse practitioners, and I admired them fiercely. They were so medically knowledgeable, but at the same time so connected to the reality of their patients’ lives. They seemed like grown-ups. (By contrast, the physicians who provided clinical back-up and putative supervision to the nurse practitioners struck me as overgrown, high-achieving adolescents—protected and entitled and occupying their own little world.) So I decided that that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was a little scary, because I’d always been a head person. I wasn’t entirely sure that I could actually relate to the physical world in any useful way. Volunteering at a women’s health clinic, though, I learned to take blood pressures and do finger-sticks and spin urine. Then, as I moved into an HIV-test counsellor role, I also learned to draw blood. It wasn’t much, but it reassured me at least that my hands worked.

I applied to the program they then had at UCSF for people with bachelor’s degrees in something other than nursing to become a nurse practitioner in three years (the first year to get the RN training, and years 2 and 3 for the master’s and NP certification). My application was rejected (reasons still unknown). I moved across the country to join Pete where he’d just started teaching at Fancy University, and ended up going to nursing school in that city. It was during the course of my nursing bachelor’s program that I sort of fell in love with nursing qua nursing. I ended up getting all flag-wavy about things like the primacy of the whole person over the (diseased) parts; caring as a central professional value; and nursing’s proud history of courage and altruism. I also learned that hospital staff nurse jobs were not the only ones available to BSNs, and decided to take a bit of time away from school before continuing on to get my master’s.

For my first year out of school, I exhausted and discouraged myself working at Fancy University’s geriatrics clinic, where I was the only nurse on site (not an ideal situation for a new graduate, to say the least). The physicians all had young children at home and so were out the door by 4:30. I would work late every evening, calling patients about medications and lab results, and doing paperwork. Phone calls can take a long time with elderly patients (Mr. Williams? IS THIS MR. WILLIAMS? SIR, THIS IS ROSIE, THE NURSE FROM THE CLINIC. I’M CALLING ON BEHALF OF DOCTOR NELSON. HE WANTS YOU TO STOP TAKING THE DYAZIDE. THAT’S YOUR WATER PILL… YOUR WATER PILL. RIGHT. THAT’S THE RED AND WHI… NO, SIR, THAT’S YOUR SUGAR PILL. YOUR WATER PILL IS THE RED AND WHITE ONE… RIGHT. NO, STOP TAKING IT…), and I’d work until I was so hungry and tired that I was about to cry, at which point I’d drag myself out the door feeling terrible and guilty about the fact that there were still a stack of phone calls to be made. I did like the interactions with patients. Some of my favorite moments were when I had a scheduled appointment to do foot care, during which I could take some time to chat with folks while I was shaving their calluses and cutting their toenails and rubbing in lotion. I liked the simplicity of it, the humility of it, and the basic human connection involved. I liked how straightforward it was, how it gave me a little break from my nearly constant self-doubt, how genuinely I could be of service. Sometimes the person would do a little half-dance after I was done and exclaim how much better her feet felt without the corns digging in. But it wasn’t enough to keep me sane. When a friend who worked in the Chairman of Medicine’s office called me to say she was writing a job description for a new position and basing it on me, was I available?, I said “No, really, things are getting a tiny bit better at the clinic, they really… um… what is it?”

Since then, I haven’t taken care of any patients. I’ve done asthma information sessions at supermarkets and health fairs and a nationally notorious public housing development. I’ve done focus groups with nurses about their relationships with physicians, and vice-versa. I’ve written small grant proposals and helped to write big ones. I’ve written newsletters, chaired subcomittees, done surveys, participated in grassroots health groups. I’ve soothed and flattered the cranky and the defensive; I’ve stuck up for myself and for others with the arrogant and oblivious. Occasionally I’ve led the way good lady ballroom dancers can if they have to, facing backward, appearing to follow.

But the fact remains that if the question is, “do his lungs sound wet?”, or if a catheter needs to be inserted, or if a dressing needs to be changed, then I’m not your gal. In fact, I feel nearly as blithering and all-thumbs as I ever was. And that’s not what nurses are. Nurses are brisk and efficient and capable and practical. Nurses know how. I know intellectually that it’s a matter of training, of experience, of practice. But it truly feels as if it’s part of a person’s identity, just part of who she is. And that’s what tells me I’m not a nurse. I go back and forth about this in my head over and over, the thoughts and feelings cycling almost predictably, like gerbils rolling around wrestling.

So this is where I am now. I have come to a decision that is not one I ever expected to make. I am going to be a hospital staff nurse. Not forever. For a few years. It might kill me—it is true that in some ways I’m supremely unsuited to the work. I’m by nature ruminative, and I’m really only comfortable if I have a thorough overview of a situation before taking any action at all. I don’t very much like being busy-busy-busy—it makes me feel harried and jangled and as if I must be missing something important. But I’m going to do it. Starting in April, I’m going to take a nursing refresher course (there are a lot of them out there now—I admit that there are things about the nursing shortage that I’m grateful for) so that I can improve my clinical skills, and then I’m going to get myself a job taking care of hospitalized patients. I will be one of the ones listening to breath sounds and putting in catheters and changing dressings.

And then I will know. I will have experienced the process from the inside, so that I can know whereof I speak as I spend the rest of my career trying to improve the process. I will store up a stock of insights and anecdotes and epiphanies. I will earn credibility. And though it is perhaps on the surface not a great reason for making a career decision, I will know that I can do it.

And I will let you know how it goes. It has occurred to me that writing regularly about the process will be an enormous help to me in getting through my first year as a staff nurse. (That and the Prozac, of course.) And for this, I thank dear elswhere, who a few weeks ago, on the phone, suddenly asked me, “if I set up a blog for you, will you write in it?”


* These are two standard formats for writing notes in medical charts, both taught in nursing schools. SOAP stands for Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan; DAR stands for Data, Action, Response and happened to be favored at my nursing school.