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Yaktrax

January 16, 2011 - View Single Entry

"The road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor . . ." So wrote Alfred Noyes in "The Highwayman," and so sang Phil Ochs and Loreena McKennitt in their settings of the poem, with minor tweaks to fit the words to the music.

Replace moonlight with ice and purple moor with leafless oaks and you'll have an idea of what my road looks like. Halcyon Way is a ribbon of ice weaving through the trees. Pine Hill, the back way to the town dump and State Road, isn't much better. Thanks to Pine Hill's ruts and bumps, the ice is pocked in places, meaning a person's boots or a dog's paws can get a little purchase on it. Every dirt road and driveway I've been down in the last few days looks similar.

A friend who's unsteady on her feet tells of getting into her car on her glare-ice driveway and then realizing that the windshield wipers were sticking straight out, perpendicular to the glass. (This is common storm prep in these parts: if the wipers are sticking out, they won't be buried under snow or frozen fast to the windshield.) Rather than get out of her car and risk a fall, she drove out to the nearest paved, plowed, and sanded road, pulled over, and laid the wipers down.

On most terrain, I'm very steady on my feet, but half a mile of glare ice? Wearing my winter boots I could probably make it from one end to the other without bruising or breaking anything, but it would take most of an hour. Holding Travvy's leash in one hand would not improve my odds. But Travvy and I are out every morning, covering ground at a close-to-normal clip. He slips more than I do.

The secret? Yaktrax. Talk about indispensable! No ad campaign was necessary to sell me on Yaktrax. All I had to do was pull them onto my boots and go walking on the ice. To spare you an extra thousand effusive words, here's a picture:

This is my brand-new pair. The old ones were day-glo green, but they didn't have that strap over the instep. Occasionally they'd snag on underbrush or a fallen branch and pop off without my noticing. When I retraced my steps, the bright green was easy to spot against the snow.

The rubber that holds the treads in place is very strong, but though the small size is supposed to be right for a ladies' size 10 shoe, which is what I wear, these particular boots have oversize feet and I think they overtaxed my Yaktrax. When a piece holding the tread in place broke last week on one -- what? Yaktrack?, I went looking for Yaktrax on Martha's Vineyard. No luck. So I ordered a new pair from Duluth Trading, the "Pro" model with the strap, size medium.

Then the other one snapped along the perimeter of the sole, meaning it no longer stayed on my boot. I walked around one-Yaktracked for a couple of days, haunting the post office for my parcel from Minnesota. Daytime temperatures in the mid-30s melted the surface of the ice, evening temps down into the teens froze it again. The ice, in other words, got slicker and smoother.

Yesterday morning, en route to Rally practice, I stopped by the post office. No package, and -- Monday being a holiday -- no mail until Tuesday. At practice my missing Yaktrack was noticed -- and Karen said Brickman's carried them. After practice, I drove immediately into Vineyard Haven, found a parking place on Spring Street, and walked down to Main. Yep, Brickman's had them all right. That's where the pair in the photo came from.

I could return the mail-order pair when it arrives, but I won't. Even if you only wear one pair of boots at a time, you can't have too many Yaktrax.

Harmony

January 11, 2011 - View Single Entry

Nick Page, musician, composer, educator, and workshop leader, is on the island this week working with kids in the school, and this evening he led a singing workshop for adults. (More about Nick on his website, which he said was in need of updating but it'll give you an idea of what he's up to.)

We gathered in the high school's music room, where the Island Community Chorus rehearses. That means it's big! I'm not sure how many attended, because I was sitting in the front row with some of my old front-row alto chorus buddies, but it had to be more than 60, maybe closer to 75. Lots of chorus people, including director Peter B., and people (like me) who sing regularly with Roberta K.

What a blast. Nick teaches everything aurally/orally, line by line, no written music. This means you can participate whether you read music or not -- I read music, but my sight-singing skills are rudimentary -- and it also means that leader and singers communicate directly, without the distraction of a paper score.

We learned several songs from South Africa and Zimbabwe, some from the American gospel tradition, and more. Nearly all of them lent themselves to harmonizing and improv. Nick said harmonizing was like no-fault driving -- go where you want, and if you hit something, turn! No note was "wrong," but you can hear what works and what doesn't. Vocal harmonies are my favorite music. I'm not all that good at it, but in a group that size the sound is much more than the individual voices that create it, and being part of it was wonderful. I could hear my voice, and the voices around me, and the ensemble sound rising up to the ceiling.

At the end of the two hours, one woman said, "That was the best ten dollars I ever spent." Yeah!

No Expectations

January 10, 2011 - View Single Entry

At long last, another segment of To Be Rather Than to Seem. This one was hard to write. I think of this period as my "lost year," but it's more like a winter that went on for 18 months. Something was going on deep underground, but that didn't become apparent until spring finally arrived.

When I returned to my hometown from England in late November 1976, I crashed. The crash wasn't spectacular. No one saw or heard it.

Looking back on my life, though, I can see it coming. I see a young woman who was either very brave or very clueless, or perhaps a messy mishmash of both.

Finally, at age twenty-five, I was done with school. Pursuing a master's degree at Sussex University, I'd decided that an academic career was not for me. I could think, I could write, I could do research, but I was already starting to chafe at the restrictions of academic writing. I could build a logical, well-supported case as well as anyone, but my best insights usually came from juxtaposing images and ideas that didn't usually hang out together. My long self-study of the Arab world had ranged across politics, history, religion, economics, psychology, sociology, literature, and art with little awareness of the boundaries between the various fields. In the mid-1970s academe considered these distinct disciplines and built sturdy walls between them. The separation didn't come easily to me.

I'd already ruled out law school, the other obvious option for a bright, articulate female college graduate with a liberal arts degree. I was drawn to law as a tool for fighting injustice, but I also knew that the practice of law involved building logical cases that were rooted in and supported by existing law. Law school meant three years of intense immersion in that law. After several years of antiwar and student organizing, not to mention my ongoing interest in cultures that were on the losing side of Europe's imperial adventures, I suspected that the law would change me far more than I could ever change it, and not for the better.

Like my father, I was willing and able to use my intellect and verbal prowess to bully, silence, and ridicule. I'd grown up watching my father use his superior knowledge to humiliate my mother, and once I was old enough I did likewise. In the college classroom this was a useful skill: I used it to skewer pompous students and impress my professors. I was well on the way to becoming what novelist Joanna Russ called a "female man" when my nascent feminist consciousness started whispering that I had at least as much in common with my mother as with my father, and what kind of person got satisfaction from squelching those who couldn't or wouldn't fight back?

So I turned away from both law school and grad school. These were good calls, both of them, but they brought me to the brink of uncharted territory: the rest of my life.

Finally I understood why so many of the grad students I'd known remained within the university's gravitational pull. Some never managed to finish their dissertations. How did they finance their unending studies? Fellowships didn't last forever, and teaching assistantships didn't pay much. Family money? Invisible, endlessly patient wives? Since I moved in left-of-center circles, no one ever copped to inherited wealth, and by the early 1970s most right-on male radicals could talk a good line against the assumption that a woman's role was to put her husband through school. I had neither family money nor a long-suffering and employable spouse. None of the perpetual grad students I knew were female.

At best, graduate study might lead to a Ph.D. and a college teaching job. Did I really want to stay in school for the rest of my life?

For women the default option once schooling was done -- including college-level schooling -- was still marriage and motherhood. If you married and had kids, you didn't have to worry what to do with the rest of your life, or at least the next twenty-five years or so of it. Once you struck off down the marriage-and-kids road, other options vanished off the map. In return, marriage with kids, or even without, provided structure in an otherwise mysterious, mist-shrouded landscape.

On December 20, 1972, during my junior year at Penn, Grandma threw a twenty-fifth anniversary party for my parents. I begged off, saying that my last exam was on the 21st. This was a lie. My father had a girlfriend. My mother was an alcoholic. My parents' relationship was bicker, bicker, bicker, punctuated by the occasional explosion. I didn't want to be anywhere near a party celebrating my parents' miserable marriage.

I and many of my peers had been raised by mothers whose lives were accurately sketched in Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, and not a few of our mothers were in the process of being dumped by our fathers for younger women with wider horizons. Some were sure that they could and would do it differently: they wouldn't get trapped, they'd never turn into their mothers. I had no such faith. As I saw it, getting married was one thing if you had no other options. If you did, it looked like a classic Faustian bargain: in return for something attractive in the short term, you gave up your soul.

I did have other options, I was sure of it. I just didn't know what they were. I was back in suburban Weston, where career options did not grow on trees. I hadn't gone to the public junior high or high school, and all through college I'd come home as seldom as possible. As a result, I knew almost no one in town. Having no money and nowhere else to go, I was back under my parents' roof, a long way from the scenes of my adult life and caught up in family dynamics that for years I'd managed to avoid. I'd just spent three months hitchhiking solo around Great Britain and Ireland; I couldn't imagine hitching anywhere in the United States, except on Martha's Vineyard. Slowly I started to slide backward. Soon I couldn't see over the edge of the hopelessness I was mired in. There was a world out there, but before long I could barely remember it, or imagine any way that I could find it again.

One evening in early February Grandma and my uncle Neville stopped by, chilled but exhilarated by the first of our town's bicentennial celebrations. I still remember them framed in the front doorway: Uncle Neville on the right, slight and pale in a dark wool coat and muffler, holding the door open for Grandma, who was bent slightly forward with the mild stoop that my father and two brothers would later develop and telling us who they'd seen in Weston Center. About two weeks later, with no warning, Grandma had a massive stroke. When my father and I visited her in the hospital, she couldn't speak and was only dimly aware of our presence. My father said, "I love you, Mother." I'd never heard him say that before. Ten days after the stroke, my Grandma died.

Not long afterward, my uncle Neville had a nervous breakdown. I knew people who had had nervous breakdowns, but what did a nervous breakdown look like? Swinging fists, gnashing teeth, tearing hair, hysterical voices yelling gibberish? Nervous breakdowns, I learned, could be quiet. Nev, a quiet man, quietly committed himself to a psychiatric hospital. This turned out to be the beginning of a new and (I think) happier life for him, but at the time it raised a pressing question: Who was going to look after Max, Grandma's Labrador retriever?

Who else? I moved in with Max. Grandma's house was much bigger and grander than any single woman needed. From South Avenue the driveway curved past old oaks bordering a meadow; above the meadow was a long neatly kept hedge, a wide but narrow lawn, and overlooking it all the house's elegant brick façade, tall windows flanking the rarely used front door. Behind the house the drive circled past a three-car garage and brought visitors to the door everyone came and went by. Shading house and garage was a huge maple tree.

I had a place to live, a sweet foster dog, and the use of Grandma's Rambler sedan. I taught myself to bake bread in Grandma's big country kitchen, ever mindful that whatever bread had been baked there before had not been made by Grandma. But though I was no longer sleeping in the house I'd grown up in, it was barely a mile away. After I knew everyone was gone for the day -- my mother had just started working at Beacon Press in Boston, my father had an office in Cambridge, and my sister was in her junior year of high school -- Max and I would walk there through the woods. At the dining table I'd read the newspapers and play a few games of solitaire. Then we'd walk back to Grandma's, where I'd read and play a few more games of solitaire till it was time for supper. After supper I'd read, watch TV, and play some more solitaire. Once in a while I'd go to the movies in a neighboring town. Eventually it would be time for bed.

Several years later, I described my routine to a friend who had done time in mental hospitals. She said it sounded very much like the repetitive and soothing activities mental patients were encouraged to pursue in hospital day rooms.

Linda, my father's girlfriend, was the only one who realized that I was in trouble. She must have discussed it with my father, and somewhat insistently, because one afternoon in my grandmother's living room my father awkwardly broached the idea that maybe I should see a psychiatrist. My father would never, ever have come up with this idea on his own: New England WASPs don't take kindly to having outsiders muck around in our heads, and the resistance doubles if we're expected to pay for it. Linda, however, was very into psychoanalysis. She had lived in London and known Anna Freud.

The suggestion blasted through my torpor like a fire alarm. I knew I was stuck, but maybe if no one else noticed, it wasn't all that bad? Linda and my father had not only noticed, they'd said something out loud. I had better get my act together. No way was I going to see a psychiatrist -- but it did occur to me that if I didn't do something, I might not have a choice in the matter. I started baby-stepping my way out of my lethargy. Linda enlisted me to help research an article she was writing, about England in 1776. I went to a campaign rally for Fred Harris, senator from Oklahoma, who was running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. I became a full-time volunteer for the campaign to ratify the state ERA, equal rights amendment, which was going to be on that November's ballot.

These baby steps were crucial. Working with other people; discovering or rediscovering that my skills and knowledge were useful, indispensable even; expanding my knowledge and learning to use new technologies -- the outside world suddenly seemed less terrifying, and I seemed more capable of dealing with it. The Susanna who had done interesting things in high school and college gradually coalesced as a credible memory, not a figment of my imagination.

That Susanna had thrived in Washington, D.C. I returned to D.C. for the bicentennial Fourth of July celebration, stayed with old friends, and still have the T-shirt I got at the 1976 folklife festival on the Mall. The way out of depression, I became certain, led southward.

To move back to Washington, I had to be able to support myself, which was to say I had to be employable. I'd been applying for jobs, mostly on newspapers; I didn't have a journalism degree, or serious newspaper experience, but writing was the only possibly salable skill I had. The response to all the résumés I sent out was not encouraging. I did get an interview and tryout, for a paper in the New York suburbs, but that left me dubious about both my aptitude and my desire to be a reporter. I didn't want to write stories about preteen piano prodigies, the subject of my trial assignment. I tended to sweat blood over every word I typed. Good reporters can turn out prose like yard goods even when phones are ringing off the hook. I couldn't then, and I can't now. My aptitude was more on the editorial side, but I didn't realize that then because I didn't know what an editor was.

I did answer a classified ad and get hired as the part-time evening proofreader for the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, which was published by the same company that published the local paper. I liked the work and was good at it. With my earnings, I enrolled in an eight-week secretarial course for unemployable (female) college graduates. I finally learned to type competently and how to take shorthand well enough to put it on a job application.

In April 1977 I headed south. Within a few days I'd found a room in a boardinghouse near Dupont Circle and a secretarial job at the national headquarters of the American Red Cross. The boardinghouse didn't allow dogs, but another home was found for Max. I returned to Weston, borrowed $200 from my father, rented a U-Haul, and moved the first week of May. Within days of my departure, a late-season snowstorm hit eastern Massachusetts and knocked a large limb off the huge maple in front of Grandma's house.

Another 2010 First

January 05, 2011 - View Single Entry

Forgot to mention this one: In 2010, my studio apartment became a two-computer household. In July, Hekate the laptop moved in. In August, I took her on a short road trip to Fitchburg; that was the Rally trial where Travvy exited the ring during a nice stand & walk around because he thought the stuffies on the other side looked more interesting. For the first time I received and sent e-mail using public wi-fi. Hekate came to Norway with me in December. I made a hotel reservation while sitting in the international terminal, using Logan Airport's free wi-fi. I felt very grownup, or with-it, whatever it is. I almost said "wired," but since the whole operation was wireless, that doesn't seem to apply.

I'd been considering laptops on and off for several years. Sure, it seemed everyone had one -- at least one -- but I didn't need a laptop. Morgana V has been the most persnickety desktop I've ever had -- really, four major crashes that required Windows reinstallation, when I'd never had to reinstall an operating system before? Editor friends insist that anyone who depends on a computer for her livelihood should have access to a spare, just in case. I concede the point, but I also think "just in case" regularly seduces people into springing for excess capacity -- buying more than they need, like they buy a Suburban because once a year they have to take the whole soccer team out for pizza.

It also seduces governments into follies like TSA airport inspections, but I ranted about that last month and the rant hasn't changed much since then.

So after Morgana's most recent Windows reinstall, my Internet access disappeared. I couldn't figure it out, Comcast phone support couldn't figure it out. The Comcast tech guy who came to my house did figure it out: Morgana V wasn't acknowledging my cable modem because the drivers and other files and inexplicably wound up in the wrong place. Fixing it was beyond his capability, though, so Morgana went to MVTech in Vineyard Haven, and they fixed it.

This was the first time I'd needed to pay for outside help to fix a computer. True, I paid a guy to set me up with a wireless receiver when I moved in here (and was using my neighbors' wireless, with their permission), and also true, I've twice paid another guy for not-fixing something. But mostly I've been able to diagnose and fix things with occasional assistance from (free) tech support and the astonishing knowledge base that is Copyediting-L, also free. One baffling problem in 25 years was not, by itself, enough to make me decide that I had to have a second computer.

I was, however, starting to travel more. Portability was looking attractive, and having a backup machine sure wouldn't hurt. So, enter Hekate.

No regrets, no regrets at all. I can now write and edit onscreen while sitting in my favorite chair. I do that a lot. I'm doing it now.

The Year That Was

January 01, 2011 - View Single Entry

Now that I have successfully typed "2011," I can indulge in some reflections on the year just passed. As a salute to continuity, here is a photo that was taken when the old year was still with us, which is to say yesterday, at the airport restaurant, where Cris and I were having breakfast. She took the picture. Best breakfast place on Martha's Vineyard. That's the sweater I got at the Christmas market down by the fjord in Oslo.

Long time ago, in my D.C. days, my friend Susan mentioned that at the end of every year she made note of everything she'd done for the first time since January 1. I still love this idea. Most years I manage to at least make a mental note of things I did for the first time in the old year. Among other things, it's a way to tell if I'm taking chances, trying new things, or am I getting stuck.

2010 was a year of continual, monumental unsticking. I could list all the ways my life on December 31 looked different from my life on January 1: On January 1, I had a horse. On December 31 I didn't. On January 1, I was driving a pickup. Now I'm driving a car. On January 1 I didn't have a passport. Now I do.

I left the country for the first time in almost 20 years, and crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 35.

When 2010 began, Travvy and I had been to two Rally trials. In the course of the year, we earned our Rally Novice title, and then our Rally Advanced. At the beginning of October we went to a weekend dog-and-human campout in western Massachusetts, and while there Travvy earned his Canine Good Citizen badge. (Whether either one of us is really a good citizen remains open to question, but he at least has got a certificate to prove his credentials.)

Workwise, I did more editing for individuals and small presses (as opposed to large trade or university presses) than in previous years. Three new clients, two small presses and a quarterly magazine, are based on Martha's Vineyard. All of these jobs came looking for me, the result of word-of-mouth communication over which I had almost no control.

That's a common theme in the great unsticking that was 2010: outside intervention. Going to Norway wasn't my idea. Neither was participating in the program about the troubadours and trobairitz at the West Tisbury library. Neither was serving on the 2010 fantasy/sf/horror jury for a literary award program: my ties to the f/sf world have grown tenuous, though they still exist, and this particular literary award program is one I've been ambivalent about for years.

What's encouraging about all these things is that they draw on my past experiences and established (though sometimes rusty) skills and point me in some new directions. What makes me uneasy is none of them are about writing. The universe, if I'm inclined to find meaning in the signs it's sending my way, wants me to edit, perform, and review other people's work. It doesn't care if I create my own.

And truly I'm having a hard time motivating myself to keep writing. My writing isn't going out into the world, it's not replenishing the energy it takes to do it. The best things I've done in the last 10 years have gone nowhere. I'm having a hard time convincing myself that I have anything to say that needs to be said -- and even if I do the prospect of its ever getting to people who could use it seems remote. You can't get there from here. I'd settle for a little community of writers, artists, and musicians who egg each other on and inspire each other when the outside world doesn't give a damn about what they're doing.

Which is pretty much the impulse behind The Squatters' Speakeasy. Plenty of writers write the books they want to read, and creating the world you'd like to live in makes sense too. But how to muster the energy it takes to do it, one word, one line, one page at a time?

Damned if I know. The only thing I know how to do is turn it over and over and over again. The tectonic shifts of 2010 rearranged the landscape of my life. It may be that the energy reservoirs haven't had time to replenish themselves. Maybe the editing roads that are opening up will reveal new paths for the writer.