…in which she climbs onto her stand next to my desk, then lies down on my hand while I scratch her and she writhes for several minutes, her full weight on my wrist, and bites me if I stop, and if I withdraw my hand, plants her self between me and my computer monitor and walks across my keyboard until I return my hand to her stand so she can hop back on it and writhe some more, hurts.
My first name was invented by the 16th century poet, Sir Philip Sidney for his long pastoral poem Arcadia. Presumably, it means “filled with honey.”
It got picked up again in the 18th century by Samuel Richardson, as the name of a virtuous teenage servant girl who spends much of the novel being sexually assaulted, kidnapped, and imprisoned by her upper-class, “importunate” employer. I took a stab at reading it when I was fifteen. A quarter of the way through, exasperated, I flipped to the end, learned the “happy” ending is that she marries the man and reforms him with her piety, and gave it all up as a bad idea. I wish I could say I was indignant as an incipient feminist whose keen insight cut brutally through the romantic conventions of the time, but I wasn’t. I just didn’t believe a word.
At the time I was born, the name my mother chose for me was at the height of its popularity, though I don’t think she knew that. It was her third choice. Her first was flatly and reasonably rejected by my father because, coupled with my surname, it would have doomed me to a lifetime of bad jokes. Her second would have made my full name sound like someone walking through slush. So she chose another name she liked, it worked, and now it’s mine.
It’s not exactly exotic. There was always at least one other girl with my first name at school. When I moved to San Francisco in my twenties, there was another woman here with both my name and surname. We never met, but we did keep stumbling across each other when we applied for library and video rental cards.
The advent of the internet revealed just how common is my full name. At one point, in my forties, I got a cluster of emails congratulating me on graduating high school and asking when I would come visit relatives in Israel. I wrote back, explained my location and age, and then, rather tentatively, asked how anyone with my Irish surname ended up in Israel.
The response I got was polite, amused and kind. Theirs was a shortened version of the name of a shtetl in eastern Europe, that, in turn was named after the French city from which its population had been driven after a pogrom — the same city that had given my family its name. So, the email writer observed, if our ancestors had not been relatives, they had been neighbors.
I believe I sent back thanks and an apology for my forebears.
The first was just after I moved to California in 1986. My boyfriend, a software engineer, was following the Silicon Valley gold rush. Everyone knew why he was moving to the Bay Area, but when they asked me why I was going with him, I felt something more than “the weather and the sushi” was called for. I was in my twenties and had a degree in writing, so I would say “I want to work for a magazine.”
“Any magazine in particular?” they would ask. I only knew about one that was published in the Bay Area.
“Locus Magazine,” I said.
Yeah, right, a voice inside me would mutter.
I spent my first few days in Berkeley happily discovering the local bookstores — Cody’s, Shakespeare and Company, Dark Carnival and The Other Change of Hobbit. It was at that last store that I saw a notice on a bulletin board in the back. Locus Magazine was hiring.
One of the store’s owners, Debbie Notkin, noticed me writing down the information and came over. “I wouldn’t,” she said. “Charlie’s impossible as a boss.”
“Oh?” I asked, vaguely.
“You should talk to someone first. You should call…” She gave me a name and wrote down the number for me. “She can tell you all about what it’s like working there. Nobody lasts there more than a couple of years.”
I never called that other name. I called the number on the job notice and got an immediate callback.
The next day I sat in an armchair in Charlie’s living room. “You don’t cry easily, do you?” he asked, near the end of the interview.
“No,” I told him, truthfully. There was a slight, awkward pause as I considered asking him if he cried easily. A boss I’d had in Greensboro, the owner of a very successful restaurant, had been a nice man, but he’d cried sometimes. Usually it was after store meetings, when he’d mention something like the fact that we were using commercial cleaner instead of white vinegar while wiping down the tables. He’d burst into tears and say we were all ruining him, and we’d all gather around to tell him everything would be all right and we loved him.
I kept cagily quiet. Asking a question implying I had made my last employer cry would send the wrong message.
Charlie hired me, I agreed to come in the following morning, and just as I was about to rise from my chair, the hinges of one of the old fashioned, adjustable standing lamps nearby gave way. The lamp fell, bonking me neatly, but not painfully on the head. I refused to take it as an omen.
And so, I got my “dream job.”
Debbie’s prediction did not come entirely true. I lasted, not just a couple of years, but four. I did leave — as so many did — with much yelling and slamming of doors. But I was never, never sorry for having worked there.
Over a decade would pass before I got another “dream job,” one I liked as much as I’d liked working at Locus. That time, nobody asked if I cried easily and nothing hit me in the head during the interview. I stayed for twenty years.
Like “courage,” leadership is a morally neutral virtue. Great people and despicable people have been “good leaders” in that they were adept at capturing the imagination of crowds, lining up people behind a good — or a bad — cause.
A rock song — and video — back in 1988 by Living Color sums up the pitfalls. “Cult of Personality.”
I had an uncle whom I still remember as a sort of prophet. He had the beard and the fiery eyes and, like most prophets, he was considered slightly mad. A geek before his time, as early as the 1970s he hauled a “portable” computer — a rectangular slab the size of a large suitcase — to and from his no-doubt-thankless job connected to the EPA in Louisiana.
And well before then, what had truly made everyone shake their heads, was his opposition to Eisenhower’s Federal highway project in 1956.
“We all thought he was crazy,” I’ve been told.
American southerners across the political spectrum were likely to be enthusiastic about any effort at improving roads — which tended to be underfunded and badly maintained in poorer states like Mississippi, Alabama, etc. My uncle, however, could not be moved on the subject. This project, he said, would benefit mainly the highway, fossil-fuel and automotive lobbies and would result in even greater dependence on cars & trucks, more pollution. It would be far better to invest in a good rail system and public transit.
As usual, he was right. Trains were uncermoniously dumped as a pleasant and efficient option for cross-country travel, replaced by broad, bland, interstate highways that can make even extended journeys thuddingly monotonous.
And yes, I mean “dumped” rather than died out naturally. A railway historian at a lecture I attended described how, sometime in the sixties, entire carloads of railway passengers were told in mid-journey that passenger service had been discontinued, and they’d have to get out at the next stop and fend for themselves. The future for trains was strictly freight, no matter how much people liked using them.
I love road trips — but they aren’t really road trips unless you get off those pale interstates and explore. If they’re only by way of the major highways they are mere exercises in getting from point A to point Z using what feels like a long, white concrete tunnel with much the same view no matter what state or region you pass through.
I spent a summer as a college student in Europe studying art history and at the end of the term, I got stuck in Paris for two weeks because the plane that was supposed to take me home was grounded. Paris is a great place to be stranded, but after a week I was ready to see my family, and I was glad when I finally managed to reschedule my flight and let them know when I’d be back.
Somehow, a couple of days before I was due to fly out, I got wind of another seat on another flight taking off that afternoon. I packed, grabbed a taxi, and got to the airport just in time to board.
In that era before cell phones or the internet, I had no chance to let my parents know I’d be arriving two days early, and by the time the plane landed in my hometown, I’d decided to surprise them.
As I said, I enjoyed France, Italy, and Greece, all the places I’d traveled as a student, but it was wonderful to walk through our front door at dinner time, announced and escorted by our dogs, hearing my mother’s voice in the back, slightly raised as she told one of my brothers, “go see who just came in.” It was wonderful to smell dinner being cooked as I walked towards our back patio and stepped out into the start of a long, velvety Louisiana dusk. But best of all was the way my father’s face lit up as he rose from his favorite chair on the patio, threw open his arms and sang out my name.
When I first left home for college, I was dissatisfied with my dormitory room because I had only one or two books on the wall shelf over my bed. It looked skimpy.
My parents had three walls of fat, hardcover books, two in the living room, another one in the den. And a shelf of mass-market paperbacks. That was my idea of how a home should look.
I have now reached a stage of life where, if I consider buying a new book, I must decide which old book to give up.
I can’t be trusted with flora, but I like most fauna. If I had a favorite, I suppose it must be cats, because I have always had cats. I can count off my life with them. The two Siameses we had when I was kid; the bobcat hybrid I adopted in college; the Abyssinian I adopted with Tim and later, the Abyssinian’s roommate, the Boston Charlie; the yellow Maine Coon who inveigled Michael into bringing it home; and now Emmeline, who is a “dilute calico”, mostly white, with gray and brown patches.
Of them all, the bobcat hybrid was the most fun because bobcat hybrids don’t stop being kittens. He was always bouncy — never entered the dozing throw-pillow stage most cats go through. Once, because the guy kept blinking, he launched himself into the face of a Mormon missionary who was sitting on the sofa — the cat hit him full-on with his soft furry stomach, then slid into his lap, purring. The man was startled, but very nice about it, considering. Just straightened his glasses and went on talking.
The Abyssinian was the most elegant and affectionate. The Boston Charlie was the shyest, but the best climber.
The yellow Maine Coon was the most aggressive. For some reason, my using the tv remote could enrage him, and occasionally we’d have to lock him in the bedroom.
Emmeline is the smartest. She allows me to use the remote and watches tv with us, and by that I don’t mean she sleeps on the couch while we watch tv. She watches it, commenting whenever any animal appears on the screen. During ball games, she’s been known to sit up and wave a paw at the screen as if trying to catch something.
I do like dogs. I’ll go out of my way to walk past a dog park so I can watch them.
Also, when I was twelve I was acquainted with a hippo who loved it when I scratched his gums. He was far from my favorite, but I think it’s worth mentioning.
I hope. That’s not always easy.
This is a shortened version of a piece I posted to a discussion forum. It was probably after yet another extended thread on an interesting topic had devolved into name-calling, insults, and calls — from the namecallers and insulters — for the thread to be shut down. Discussion forums, alas, seem to have largely died out on the Internet, but this piece still sums up my view of talking online.
___
An evangelical hostility to smart, extended debate has become the norm all over the Internet.
Here and elsewhere I’ve seen people apologize for either posting OPs that resulted in long and fascinating discussions, or for taking part in such discussions. (In contrast, I’ve seen very few apologies posted for almost interminable threads in which people do nothing but post sex jokes, funny pitchers, and links to comic sketches.) I’ve seen people hop onto interesting threads and deliberately derail them into nonsense. I’ve seen reasoned disagreement equated with “trolling.”
There seem to be several factors at work. One is an inability to distinguish polite disagreement from personal affront. Another is the fact that it’s easier to offer ‘tude in lieu of logical argument, which can involve a certain amount of work (as opposed to making faces and thinking up insults.)
Yet another is the notion of online forums as territory. Sometimes people who have an established presence on a forum believe they should be able to browse the thread headers on the homepage without being upset by the subject lines.
And finally, there’s the widespread belief that one is entitled to the last word. A bizarre but common reaction to argument I’ve encountered online is the poster who objects to getting civil and thoughtful responses to his or her own posts and plainly considers it harassment — even as he or she continues to respond to the person he or she is complaining about.
Surely there’s room for a few small pockets of sense online? Let’s stop apologizing for spending time actually talking about issues rather than playing video games and browsing for funny cat pictures. If you enjoy discussion – even debate — then politely discuss and debate as long as you have time and the subject interests you.
And if you don’t, well hey, there are plenty of threads and forums where you can indulge in a taste for nonsense. Nobody is forcing you to read or take part in, or even continue in a thread that makes you uncomfortable.
Please don’t try to get them shut down.
If I’m wrong, and in fact, someone is standing over you with a sharp stick or gun forcing you to respond to posts in a thread you dislike, you should know that this is illegal and people who do that should go to jail. I suggest we use a safe word you can gently work into the conversation, like “eggplant.”
If we see that, we’ll continue the discussion – but discreetly signal someone else so they can call the police and get you out of there.
The Appalachias aren’t like mountains in the western United States. They are old, very old, worn down into what look like gigantic, solid ocean swells and they are lush. Their skeletons sometimes burst through the brush as dark, vine-covered rocks glimpsed through trees, often with small waterfalls trickling over them. In autumn the changing leaves are so spectacular people make weekend road trips through western Carolina just to look at the colors. In winter, those mountains occasionally turn white with snow — but not often enough to make the southerners who live there adept at negotiating icy roads not built with ice in mind. It’s best to wait out freezes inside by the fire.
In summer there is no place in this world that is greener or more beautiful.
So last June, Michael and I rented a car after visiting his relatives in Illinois, and drove to see my family in North Carolina by way of the mountains.
This meant taking narrow, winding roads crowded with trees on one side, heart-dropping distant valleys behind flimsy guardrails on the other, through and past little towns that seemed sprinkled rather than built on the green shoulders of giants. Most of those towns were glimpsed solely as solitary, white, wooden Baptist churches alongside the highway.
Always Baptist. I believe we saw one Lutheran church, which prompted speculation about whether we were passing a community of heretics. Once we passed two white wooden Baptist churches built across the road from each other. No doubt there’s a story there, but we didn’t stop to hear it.
My Asheville uncle had recommended we stop in a little town called Spruce Pine. “Go to the Fox and the Fig,” he’d told us. “Trust me, it’s worth it.” So we followed the signs to Spruce Pine, the entrance of which was announced by a large sign promoting a Rhododendron festival the following week.
To describe a North Carolina mountain town as “tiny” seems redundant. Barring summer resorts like Blowing Rock or college towns /literary meccas like Asheville, almost all of them are tiny.
Spruce Pine is typical in its single, old fashioned main street lined with two story, flat-faced brick buildings from the early 20th century. It looked less typical in that it was jammed with a line of slowly moving cars, occasionally pausing to allow clots of pedestrians through, many of them pearshaped, bearded men wearing headbands with bobbing antennae. We were plainly too early for the Rhododendron Festival. The Alien Festival, however, was in full swing, and popular. Crowds of costumed attendees walked past welcoming store-signs depicting bald, green, big-eyed extra-terrestrials.
It took us a while to find a parking space near the Fox and Fig, another square, brick, flatfaced 1900s-era building at the end of the street, but we managed well enough. Michael may have been a bit unnerved. He chose to stay in the car. As an ex-Locus employee I felt in my element, so I went into the Fox and Fig to pick up two muffins and a cookie, and enjoyed the banter of the cheery, twenty-something employees. Judging from the conversation, Spruce Pine has a festival every week or so in summer. “More than the Trout thing last week,” one of them commented to a customer. “And next week with the Rhododendron people is just going to be cray-cray.”
As I said, it’s a given that towns built on the sides of mountains are tiny.
“Tiny,” however, does not mean either poor or stupid.
