More than a Vegetable Quest

Somebody on Facebook said he realized what he misses are non-essential businesses and touching his face. I miss browsing vegetables. I miss grocery shopping.

It’s hard enough saying goodbye to the farmers’ markets in the fall, those luscious, healthy, green and orange and red and gold vegetables in all their glory. But at least I could go to the grocery store and see my vegetables up close. I could observe them, evaluate them, choose them.

But now I’m supposed to use the free pickup service, to send in my list and have some stranger decide which bananas to give me. Would they be the just right greenish-about-to-ripen ones, neither too big nor too stubby? And what about asparagus – would they choose the young, skinny ones or the old, fat, stalky ones? If the eggplants were no good, how could they revise the menu I’d planned and skip the mozzarella if they didn’t know what meal the eggplants were for?

Obviously, this is a control issue. In our upside down world where we’re losing control over so much – seeing friends, teaching students in person, being able to travel – here I am, fretting over being able to pick my own vegetables.

My friends say, “Stay inside.” My friend Margie says, “Adapt.”

She’s right. This is just my own personal stumbling block. I have to get over it.

So I do. I go online to the Fred Meyer website and am pleasantly surprised by the range of selection: they have photos of everything, detailed descriptions of brands, and even a whole catalog of things I’ve purchased in the past. I’m so relieved, I don’t even freak out about how much Fred Meyer and Kroger know about me.

I place our order, but pickup is five days out. Although I’m still just cooking dinner – same as what I did Before – it’s now a much bigger process. I don’t cook meat, so I rely on vegetables. But now I have to plan meticulously, maximize my resources without any waste, get what I need because I can’t just dash out if I forget something, make sure I use all the spinach before it goes bad. It feels like a strategic operation, a battle plan. It takes way more time.

But all goes smoothly. A friendly young man delivers the groceries to our car. We get home, stage some things in the garage, wipe down the other things. The bananas are just right, so is the zucchini, the eggplant, the green pepper. But what’s this? Where I’d asked for about four stalks of celery, I now have four whole bunches of celery.

What can someone do with four bunches of celery?

At least it’s not what happened to my friend, Michele: she ordered four chicken thighs and got four PACKAGES of ten thighs each.

My friend Sharon of the 400+ cookbooks went on a research mission to find me celery recipes. I now have jars of pickled celery brewing, but the most promising recipe, the one that could make a real dent in four bunches, called for Half & Half. I didn’t have Half & Half.

So, for the first time since before quarantine, I donned my double-layer-batik-quilt-fabric mask and went into society. I went to Fred Meyer very early. The store was mostly empty. I passed by an enticing, colorful, delicious-looking produce section – oh the temptation! – but raced to the dairy cabinet and grabbed the Half & Half.

The cashier was behind Plexiglas, but afterwards, I felt compelled to thank her for being there, for coming to work, for being so essential to us all. She thanked me, told me to have a nice day. But when I got home, I realized that in thanking her, I was probably beyond the Plexiglas. I’d probably leaned closer, probably closer than 6 feet. I’d put us both in terrible danger!

I thought of the 1980s, when I lived in San Francisco and friends were dying of AIDS right and left. One night, a gay friend called me, totally distraught: he had just had unprotected sex – what had he done?!? How could he have been so reckless?!?

That’s how I felt for starting a conversation with a grocery store cashier.

Unprotected conversation. How could I have been so reckless?!?

Tab Hunter -- the Corrected Memory

Uh, oh. My little Tab Hunter post has opened up a can of worms. I could put it all down to a memory problem, but ... it’s a bigger story than that.

It all started with Tab Hunter dying and my thinking of “My Future World,” the novel I wrote about our married life together. That reminded me of The Little White Closet, the chest of drawers that held all my stories and creative ventures when I was little. Unfortunately, when I was away at college, my stuff disappeared, replaced by my mother’s financial folders. Gone was the novel. That part of the story you’ve heard.

In order to paint The Little White Closet for the blog, I needed to remember the colors of the drawers. So I put the question out on the sibling email. My sister, Allison, and I shared the dresser. We emailed back and forth with images of the drawer layout, trying to remember, but ultimately I had to guess at the color scheme. We emailed about the bedroom layout, the stuffed animals we each had on our beds, the old, clunky TV. It was a real trip down memory lane.

And then Allison wrote this:

I was just looking for that email again so I typed in “Tab Hunter” and I just found an old email of ours from 2014 where you, Barbara, wrote about finding your novel about marrying him.

Pause for major mental readjustment. I’d found it?

Pause for major hunt through boxes in the downstairs closet and … the discovery of “My Future World.” Or the re-discovery, as the facts show: on June 8, 2014, I sent an email to the siblings announcing the discovery of the novel. It’s there, in my sent mail. I even mention my author’s note:

That was 2014. It is now 2018. Where did that memory cell go?

And where did all the false memories come from? Why, for instance, was I positive that Tab and I had 26 children, named alphabetically? The real novel: “You all know he was a bachelor but he finally married a young girl by the name of Barbara Brown. Mrs. Hunter was an actress and a very fine mother of a family of 12 boys.” 12, not 26. And it was not written on a Big Chief pad.

Especially shocking to me were the number of pets: six dogs, five cats, and a bird named Twinkles. In real life, I am not a dog person, not a cat person; I guess Barbara Hunter was. But even she had her limits. Chapter 2: Worse than an Elephant. The boys got a duck and named him Blabby. He jumped on beds, tore pants, and ate greens. He was given away to Uncle Larry and Aunt Dot, who also lived in Hollywood, along with Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Eric.

Yes, Allison was still in New Hampshire, but in Chapter 4, the whole family visited her:

So it wasn’t exactly banishment. Even though the Hunters lived at 62 Maple Avenue, Hollywood, California, they could visit Aunt Allison on a weekend. On the way home, they stopped off in Alabama (Alabama?!?) to visit Barbara’s father.

All siblings accounted for, Dad accounted for (in Alabama?!?), but where is Mom?

Uh, oh.

In college, I discovered The Little White Closet was emptied of all my childhood writings. I blamed my mother. Despite her denials, I “mentioned” her transgression often. Maybe every trip home.

1989: I pack and mail a box of Long Island things to Anchorage. The address label is in my handwriting.
2014: I discover the box with my novel inside it.
2016: At my mother’s funeral, I again mentioned how she’d tossed my writings.
a few days ago: I wrote a blog post and clearly insinuated that my mother had thrown them out.

I absolutely, positively believed my mother had thrown out my stuff despite all the evidence to the contrary. Shit.

Today, I have an announcement: My mother did not throw my stories away. Tab Hunter died without seeing my novel, and my mother died before I could ever acknowledge she hadn’t thrown it away.

Did my mother feel as wronged as I had?

A Snag

My Third Third has hit a snag.

Me.

When I am terribly depressed, I still go to social events, fulfill my commitments, wash my hair, and do laundry. I volunteer. I get out of bed.

Unfortunately, I do that while dragging grand pianos around on my feet. Everything takes an enormous amount of energy, and I’m oomph-less. Which mostly you probably wouldn’t ever know because I am so very high-functioning and well-trained not to ever be oomph-less in public. Mostly, I look and sound energetic.

 What I can’t do is write.

I do get inspired and energized by art and theater, a good book or movie, and good conversation. My curiosity still works. But lately, that only lasts for the nanosecond in time while I’m in the theater or the conversation or the activity. Joy doesn’t linger. Mostly, it only makes rare appearances.

Writing happens at home when I’m all by myself. I don’t have to ratchet up for company, and I’m not distracted by the brief interlude of fun. I’m just sitting at my computer with just me.

And my lack of motivation.

And the whirling thoughts that come with that.

And the grand pianos.

I feel a need to explain (to you? to myself?) where I’ve gone in my head for the last six weeks as the blog went quiet. The blog went quiet; my mind went noisy. Bad noisy. This post is a fight to the light, a reach for interior quiet.

Unwritten rule: Never blog while depressed. Because then I end up with posts like this. But maybe, if I get this one out of my system, the pump will be primed and I’ll be able to write again.

The thing is, if you know me, you’d think of me as my funny stories. Well, yes, I still have lots of funny stories. But they travel with my sad heart. They’re a team.

I can’t just jump in and tell you about the probiotic soda class I took and the bottles of ginger beer and carbon dioxide waiting to explode in my pantry. It would seem so fake. So here’s this big sad thing hovering over me … and I’m going to tell a funny story?

We’ll see.

Two months ago, I took a class on “Design Your Energy (and your life).” Instead of trying to manage our time, we were asked to manage our energy. We had to list our top energy giving or energy draining activities in a week and then make a graph with energy going up or draining down.

I realized that all my things took lots of energy to make them happen so they could give energy afterwards. In order to go on a refreshing and exhilarating camping trip, for example, you have to pack, organize, plan, make arrangements. That takes energy. So my graph had activities going up and down, but they mostly went up. That was a surprise to my energy-drained self, reminding me that any energy drain yielded a reward.

Three months later, my graph looks much different. Things take a lot more energy to get above the line. Staggering and paralyzing energy. And sometimes I ruin the reward by crying. It’s those grand pianos.

Why would I ever tell you all this? Why would I subject anyone to the pathetic whining of a self-absorbed crazy lady? I think it goes back to why I even started this Third Thirds blog: to understand, to maybe connect with people going through the same passages, to gain some clarity about ups and downs and detours on my Third Third path. Sometimes there’s a restless unease, a disturbance of the spirit before creativity strikes. If I can verbalize, I can move on. Maybe if you’re in this place, too, you will feel less crazy.

Because deep in my heart, I believe that crazy is valuable. Stigmatized and painful, but valuable. Within limits.

And maybe your reward is a funny story I can tell tomorrow.

A Kink in the Universe

Look at all of us who know what a Fraud Bomb is! My friend Connie says “Me, too” is a powerful affirmation of belonging to the human race. Thank you all for sharing.

Quite a while ago, I witnessed an astonishing example of how the universe can annihilate someone’s day. It was so supernatural, I’m repeating it here, and I bet you’ll laugh.

Years back, when I was a manager for Federal Express, part of my job involved going out on check rides with the couriers. The couriers would tell me about their regulars, about wild things that had happened, about life-or-death “saves” with speedy deliveries. They took a lot of pride in doing their jobs, and we had a good time.

One day, it was time to ride with Rick, so off we went on the airport delivery route.

As we pulled into the airport terminal, Rick unloaded his packages and headed inside. The airport was deserted – that midmorning, uninhabited wasteland kind of feel to it – and Rick strode over to an airline counter. As he approached, the agent disappeared into the back room, so Rick chose to stop at a different airline first. Pretty flexible, I thought, chooses the most efficient option.  He delivered the one package and turned back to the first counter. Eight people were now on line! Where had they come from? How did they get there so fast? Rick waited it out, obviously frustrated.

Afterwards, we got in the van and headed to the international terminal. Inexplicably, Rick’s ID card wouldn’t work in the electronic scanner; we had to wait for security to clear us. It was a big delivery – was that when the wheel on the hand truck rolled off? Rick had to haul the packages in separately. Two deliveries and his deliveries-per-hour had bitten the dust.

Finally, finished with the airport, we headed out. The road was pretty clear, not too many cars. Out of nowhere, a renegade car cut right in front of us and signaled for a left turn. Rick stopped quickly and then waited. (There was no room to go around.) Suddenly, cars FILLED the other lane; it could have been a funeral train. It went on forever. Finally, there was an opening...and the car in front stalled.

Rick turned to me and said, “Can you see it?”

Astonished, eyes gaping, I whispered, “Yes, what is it?”

“This,” he said, matter-of-factly, “is a kink in the universe. Things are not flowing, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. We’d do better just to stop for a while and wait it out.”

Now I had expected to observe a courier doing his rounds, not catch an eyewitness view of a cosmic phenomenon. But it couldn’t be denied: Coincidence couldn’t have been as devastating as this kink was. Any minute, someone was going to drop dead as they reached to sign for a package or an earthquake was going to swallow the van in a crack. Instead, customers and drivers just kept doing bizarre, unpredictable, incredibly inconvenient things right in front of us.

You can get up on the wrong side of the bed, you can imagine that things are simply not going your way; but Rick and I had witnessed something truly profound: The whole universe had ALIGNED to screw up Rick’s day. I was there; he had a witness. Nothing was catastrophic, and I’m inclined to think it wasn’t INTENTIONAL, but the events of the day were uniformly annoying to a scientifically astounding degree.

We pulled to the side of the road and waited.

Now, I should have thought of Rick as soon as every chore seemed to require a customer service live chat. Instead, I waded through an entire morning of cancellations, misprinted phone numbers, malfunctioning equipment, and absurd bad luck. It wasn’t until a receptionist told me the doctor was running behind and would have to reschedule my appointment that I realized what had happened. It was bigger than both of us. Calmly, courteously, and fully comprehending, I went home and took a nap.

When I woke up, the kink had passed.

Facing down the Big F

I’d first discovered Brené Brown back in November when I wrote about her work as a “vulnerability researcher.”  So now I’ve just finished her book Daring Greatly, and there’s a couple of things that really resonated with me.

Brené’s daughter was freaked out about having to race breast stroke at a meet, that the breast stroke wasn’t her event, that she’d be the last girl in the water. Brené asked her, “What if your goal for that race isn’t to win or even to get out of the water at the same time as the other girls? What if your goal is to show up and get wet?”

Brené explained that there were many things she’d never tried in her life because she feared failure. As a result, she’d missed out on feeling brave. Her daughter could have scratched, could have avoided the whole contest. Instead, she “got wet,” performed pretty badly, but felt brave afterwards. I guess Brené’s advice is what being a “vulnerability researcher” is all about.

Elsewhere in the book, Brené thinks about the well-known quote, “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” And instead she asks this question, “What’s worth doing even if I fail?”

That’s a whole different question! In the first, you’re evaluating your choices while liberated from potential failure; you’re saved from failure in advance. In the second, failure – in all its soul-crushing devastation – descends. The second question forces you to confront the experience of failure, forces you to decide whether to be brave and still do it. It presupposes failure and then asks, “So what will you do with that information?”

Failure is a profound experience. Such a bottoming-out, crushing, unpleasant experience. I failed so badly at graduate school, I think it left me with a stutter for a while: I was afraid of expressing myself and being shot down yet again. But it set in motion a new plan for my life, new paths I’d explore. It helped me define what I wanted and where I’d find it. Mostly I think if I’m happy with my life, even the bumps, the mistakes, and the failures got me here so they all served a purpose.

My mother used to say whatever doesn’t kill you outright makes you stronger (which drove me crazy as a kid). That whole graduate school experience made me a little less fearful of failure. It did something to my self-esteem, too. After a while, I could look at academia and critique it instead of feeling demeaned by it. I could understand the influences I’d let operate on me and instead know that I had to make better choices for myself. I began to know myself as resilient.

But twice (at least) I dodged the bullet, didn’t get in the water. Both involved travel to somewhat risky locales, but I think I exaggerated the risks to justify my fears. I still feel squirmy about them, knowing that I caved, knowing that I missed two extraordinary opportunities.

So what does all this mean for my Third Third? How much of my future planning is constrained by a fear of failure? What if I sat here and said, “Try it. It will all go wrong, but will that matter in the end? Will you feel squirmier for not doing it than you will for trying it?”

The thing about the fear of failure is that you have to dissect it. Is it fear of failure or are you just not interested in pursuing something? Are you just fooling yourself (“Oh, I don’t really want to do that anyway.”) or are you backing away? Sometimes we’ve become so practiced at eliminating options that we don’t even know why they fall off the radar. And sometimes, we just dawdle them away.

So now I’m going to look at my assorted Third Third scenarios and examine them: would I feel brave afterwards? Would I feel squirmy if I didn’t pursue them? “What’s worth doing even if I fail?”


* Special little technological treat that I just discovered from Pogue’s Basics by David Pogue. He has all sorts of handy dandy little tricks, like this one: if you have to write Brené with that accent over the é, and you have a Mac, you hold down the e key and – lo and behold – seven different variations of e show up and you get to pick the one you want! That is my delight of the day!

A Room of My Own

For all the time we’ve lived in this house – 25+ years – my office has been a small room downstairs, off the laundry room. That’s where my drafting table, desk, and table sat. There’s a big window onto the back yard.

That’s where I wrote my newspaper columns, filed my papers, and scheduled radio recordings. That’s where I did calligraphy, kept my bookshelves, and stored my office and art supplies.

And every time I went down to it, I felt like I was walking down, down, down into a dungeon. Tim would turn the heat on early; didn’t help. It could be toasty down there, but it was still a dungeon. It was light and I had beautiful art on the walls, but it was still a dungeon.

When Sophie was five, we moved her to the neighboring guest room downstairs: a double-sized room with space for her “stations”: dress-up area, reading area, monkey bars across the ceiling. That made my downstairs dungeon a more pleasant place; I had company. I even set up the table in my room as her craft table to finish a project.

But it was still a dungeon. Eventually, a junk room. I’d just throw stuff in there because all I needed really was a little hole to get to the computer.

Five months ago, I decided Sophie-the-adult was no longer thinking of this place as home. So I moved in. I took over her desk, moved out her bed. Moved in my desk and drafting table – with no junk on them so they could actually be used for drawing and painting!

I even took Sophie’s tiny tea set collection in the display case and moved it piece by piece to my old room. I had to take photos of each shelf to make sure I placed them just so.

What I have now: three windows that look in three different directions; the computer, the printer, and the scanner all in the same room; a place to write and then casually walk over to the tables where I can paint.

I come down here when it’s dark, when the sun is shining, when it’s early, when it’s late. I come down here at three in the morning. I come down here because simply walking in the room stimulates my creative juices. I come down here when I have too many ideas upstairs and I have to start working on them … downstairs.

I am a conscientious shopper: I check Consumer Reports, I get references, I research and research. Except when buying a house: for that, the clincher is walking in the door and if it feels right and comfortable and welcoming, I know it’s right. Our house home is all that and more for me … except for that little room that was my office (but now which makes a perfectly pleasant guest room).

I love my new room! I love how it makes me feel. I can’t really empirically describe why, but it feels right and comfortable and welcoming. If in my Third Third I want to feel at home in my life and skin, then it’s only reasonable to feel at home in my room.

Best advice I ever got:

A hum is when your decision feels just right, when the choice you’re making matches with the whole universe. It’s a hum through your whole being.

A snag, on the other hand, is a kink. A stumble. A rough spot in the smoothness. You can try to ignore snags, try to pretend you didn’t notice them, but really, you KNOW. You know it’s not right. Period. A wise person taught me to listen to my hums and snags when making choices. They don’t lie.

My new room is a hum. My old room was a snag I should have listened to years ago.

The Third Third is a time to act on old, lingering snags and find the hum.