Mini Me

Does God give us second chances? Can we sometimes set a howling wrong at last and finally right?
When I looked at you and thought, you're me. . . it changed everything. Can I love you the way I was never loved? Will the stars permit it?

Can I, must I steal away the chance, before anyone can see?

Love rushes in, before the question's even asked.

Does everything happen for a reason?

For more years than I can count, I carried a little slip of paper around with me with a few lines of what looked like poetry on it. I remember what it said by heart, but cross-checked it on the internet just now. The title is, "I don't know".

I don't know where to start
There are scars I could show
If I opened my heart
But how far, Lord, but how far can I go?
I don't know.

What I need I don't have
What I have I don't own
What I own I don't want
What I want, Lord, I don't know

What I say I don't feel
What I feel I don't show
What I show isn't real
What is real, Lord - I don't know
No, no, no - I don't know

Once in a while I risked showing this  slip of paper to someone, and they read it in blank puzzlement and handed it back to me. One woman - God, how I regret giving it to her - read it out loud in a sweet, querulous, schoolteacherish voice, the final "I don't know" in a fluffy little voice out of a '50s sitcom.

All right, I don't know. I don't know what this piece is going to be about. The quote is from Leonard Bernstein's Mass, a mammoth undertaking that was a cross between a formal Latin mass and the hippie-ish Hair sensibilities of the day. It had only mixed success, and I have never actually heard it.

I got thinking this morning about Fate. God is kind of beyond me right now, though I will blushingly admit there was a time not so long ago when I thought I understood God, or knew what God meant. Now I wonder. Is there a "something" that shapes our ends, rough-hew them though we may (to paraphrase/massacre Shakespeare)?

How many of us get what we want, what we really think we want? Might it be true that on our deathbed, we will suddenly sit up and cry, "That's it!" - then fall back lifeless? (For a long time I had this odd vision of a monk in that situation exclaiming, "I could have had a woman!", then collapsing backwards forever.) Conventional wisdom says things like, "You can do/be anything you want to, so long as you want it enough and work hard enough." But what if one day your doctor calls you up and says, "I'm sorry. It's MS." (Or ALS, or pancreatic cancer, or schizophrenia, or . . . ) What if your lovingly-raised children, hopelessly embroiled in a miasma of drugs and despair, can't look after their children, and you suddenly find yourself raising them instead of retiring to a carefree life of sun and surf?

I'm talking about the curves life throws at us, some of them fatal. I'm talking about a beautiful young woman shot in the back just as her life is starting, with a "loved one" suspected. If this is love, how do we define hate? Almost all murders take place within families. Most of them are perpetrated by spouses, with husbands predominating. What am I trying to say here?

Another trope that bugs me no end is, "Everything happens for a reason". People say this at memorial services all the time, and it makes me want to scream. If a baby has a convulsion and dies in her mother's arms, it happens for a reason. If a person finally commits suicide after 40 years of endless turmoil and failed dreams, it happens for a reason. If the bottom falls out, people whose lives still have a bottom spout this bit of cowardice and ignorance, then, having done their philosophical duty, go home.

What's reason? It's an explanatory thing, isn't it? Or else something logical, almost cerebral. Isn't this just people's way of rationalizing and taming a reality which can be ferocious and terrifying? Does God keep score, have a little abacus up there (and it's always "up there", not inside us or around us), and dole out lessons as per our spiritual needs?

I can think of a worse thing. These tin-plated philosophers secretly believe that because the tragedy has a reason behind it, it's - well - almost deserved, isn't it? It's all part of a mysterious higher reality or karma or Fate, and whether the person has done something in a previous life or just stepped on a crack in this one, God has just decided, well, that's it - I'm really tired of all this transgression, intended or not. For what else could this "happens for a reason" mean?

I also have trouble with angels. The angel fever has died down somewhat, but for a while the books were so stupid, one of them had instructions for finding your wings. I mean it, trying to find the actual spot on your shoulder blades where the wings sprouted out, or would, I assume after you croaked.

The idea was, if someone was falling off a 70-story building and fell on an awning and didn't die, their "angel" must have been looking after them. It came rushing up underneath the person like Superman catching Lois Lane.

OK, then. . . you know where I'm going with this, don't you? How then do you comfort the agonized family of the guy who fell without an awning? No doubt, many would just fall back on the familiar escape clause, "Everything happens for a reason," then go home.

Did September 11 happen for a reason? If it was a lesson, and most Americans are incensed at the very idea, then what was it? For it provoked the same old human reaction that has kept us in chains for millennia: REVENGE.

I have dreams. Yes, I have them, and I've been told from the very beginning that I have potential, but here is a confession. I never fulfilled that potential, because struggle as I might, I just can't do it. There are obstacles in my path that no one told me about because they were too busy saying I could do/be anything I wanted to be if I only tried hard enough.

I have been put somewhere, and don't get me wrong, it's the best place in the world because it is the bosom of my family. But why can't I do other things besides that, why can't I fulfill my dreams without some sort of blood sacrifice?  I see other women doing both. They're not trying to steal it from their families, or from other writers. They just have it, they do it. They sign contracts, they don't sit in the starting gate slowly dissolving from the acid of unfulfilled promise.

This is probably the most personal thing I have ever written here, and I know I take a risk in making myself look like an impotent loser who never got beyond being a housewife. I swear to you, I don't know what I have done or not done to miss  the magic that seems to happen to other writers, the sort of magic that creates "buzz" before their book even leaves the starting gate.

I have reviewed hundreds of books, literally hundreds, many of them wildly successful, but when does it get to be my turn? Am I wearing some sort of invisible pink chiffon bridesmaid dress, now tattered from a few decades of use?

It's fashionable to ignore me, in spite of the sometimes-rapturous reviews I received for both my novels. "Well then, dear, just be happy with that," the sweet little Betty Crocker voice tells me. "East, west, Home is best."

Then take it out of me, God, take it, rip out of my chest the desire and uproot it forever. "What I need I don't have/What I have I don't own/What I own I don't want/What I want, Lord, I don't know/No, no, no, I don't know."

Except that I do know. The "reason" for everything, that mysterious force that orders the universe and every person in it, has somehow or other never happened to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og59KBIu6D0

Tony Perkins: do I really need a reason?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u7ynH1Jw_0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ita6MlbSH8I&feature=related

It's a small (if expensive) world

Part II of Caitlin and Ryan in Disneyland. (We weren't there, but my daughter/photographer's pictures were the next best thing.)

It's a small world

I never went to Disneyland, and my kids never went to Disneyland (somehow or other it was like going to the moon), but my grandkids went a few weeks ago. Caitlin seems to have arrived in the Promised Land.

Big teddies, big Minnies. . .

. . . Caitlin wins her first Oscar (but it won't be her last). . .

. . . and Ryan finds his dream car!

There is none so blind

Tonight while I was half-watching the news and half-eating my dinner, I half-heard one of the more annoying and ubiquitous abuses of grammar that seems to pop up in every newscast.

It was about an abandoned border collie, blind since birth, that had been taken in by a good Samaritan and trained to work with disabled children.

"Born without eyes, her owners left her by the side of the road," the announcer told us.

People just seem to assume that the collie is the subject of that sentence, if they think of such things at all. But here is what the sentence actually means:

"Her owners, born without eyes, left her by the side of the road."

There is none so blind, you say? Or ignorant. I don't know why I'm not totally inured to this sort of abuse, because it comes at me from every side, every day.

I won't get into the grotesque distortions of spelling and grammar that are permanently deforming the language via Twitters and Tweets. (And by the way, could there have been a more air-headed, DUMB name for this new five-second form of networking?) I won't because I can't without bursting into tears, and I'm already sniffling over that poor abandoned collie and its eye-less owners.

I keep running into this weird inversion, but nobody ever says anything about it. That's because attention deficit disorder, like obesity and Type II diabetes, is now standard, and paying more than two seconds of attention to anything at all is a social sickness.  I don't expect us to go back to the ancient days of parsing sentences (though I had to do it, along with conjugating Latin verbs). I admit to using vernacular expressions, informal English, and loose grammar when it seems appropriate.

But on a news broadcast?

Speaking of twists and turns of grammar, every once in a while somebody jumps up and complains about O Canada, because of the following line:

True patriot love in all thy sons command.

SONS? Why not sonsanddaughters? Oops, doesn't seem to fit somehow. But we can't seem to leave this alone. One major newspaper even started an informal write-in contest for an alternate line that wasn't sexist (and still scanned).

My favorite was from a fellow who said, you're all just being ridiculous. It's so easy to fix this problem! Just change it to:

True patriot love, in all of thy command.

Let me tell you what is wrong with this sentence and why it DOES NOT WORK, not to mention WHY it offends me and makes me feel sick to my stomach. It demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of basic sentence structure and the way in which it intertwines with meaning.

For one thing, there's no comma after "love". Why does this matter? Because a comma isn't necessary, and would in fact distort the correct meaning of the line.

"In all of thy command" seems to be implying that true patriot love is "in everyone's command": command being a noun, of course. "Thy" assumes that the original "sons" is possessive: in all thy SONS' command (or maybe "son's"? Why not simplify this and boil all those sons down into one?)

So this true patriot love, apparently, should be in the command of the sons. How gauche to leave out the daughters.

This tricky and oft-contested line is in an inverted form we don't use often, unless maybe we're describing blind dogs by the side of the road. "Command" is what used to be called an imperative, before everyone forgot what an imperative was.

It's saying, hey, do this! DO IT. It's a verb, you know. A verb! Have you heard of them?

So the line properly reads, "Command true patriot love in all thy sons." It's a command, see - a command to command. We're telling big ol' Canada what it should be doing.

So "in all of thy command" starts to fall apart and make less and less sense.

Somebody did suggest the almost-acceptable "in all of us command", which would at least make better sense. But nobody's rushing to adopt it, maybe because it just sounds "wrong".

OK then. Today I found the most howling (speaking of dogs) example of sentence-torture I've ever seen: and it was written by a publicist for a major book company. Because I might be beheaded for pointing out a mistake, I can't say the name, and I can't say the book, and I can't say the author, but I will pass along the clanger that rattled my teeth down to their silver fillings.

The book is one of those epics in which an ancient matriarch reflects back on her tumultuous life, her loves, her hates, her etc. etc. You get the idea. The usual page of bumph that comes with advance review copies attempts to boil down the elaborate plot into a few paragraphs: "Her rich and tragic life takes her from Chicago, where her fiancee is brutally murdered, and then to Cleveland, where she marries and finds happiness even as she survives the Great Depression and World War II."

Here it comes:

"Joyfully pregnant at forty-three, her husband, Joe Kinderman, mysteriously disappears and (xxx) moves to Washington, DC where she finds work as a cook for one of the most prominent families in the country."

This is during World War II, mind! It's long before transsexuals became so popular, before men turned themselves into women, or women into men who then became women, or at least had babies somehow. So this fellow Joe, even though he's about to disappear forever, says sayonara to his readers by becoming "joyfully pregnant".

But when you think about it, it's no stranger than dog owners who don't have any eyes.

Harold Lloyd: got a light?

This has to qualify as the strangest Harold Lloyd movie I've ever seen (and believe me, after spending more than three years writing about his life, I've seen plenty). It's only a minute and a half long, has no sound track (truly a silent film) and no plot to speak of. It's just him n' the chimp.

I don't know why this little gem was made - it looks almost like a screen test for the ape. It's unusual for several reasons: Harold still has an intact right hand (a horrible accident blew half his hand away in 1919), he's shown smoking a cigarette which he never did in real life (explaining his relative awkwardness), and he's in tighter closeup than usual.

This is startling, because it reveals why women loved him so much: the guy was simply gorgeous, with a clean handsome jawline, vigorous head of black hair and slightly bedroomy blue eyes. There was a boyish sweetness about him which never slid into Harry Langdon-esque creepy infantilism. Under the mild exterior he was a tough little scrapper, with a volatile temper that came directly out of his own hot-and-cold personality.

I love this man. I wrote a novel about him called The Glass Character, and I cannot tell you how I ache to see this get into the hands of readers. I want them to know, to feel, to see him as he was, and is. I made a total fool of myself in writing this, and though I think it's the best thing I've ever done, I do wonder if there is something star-crossed about my life, something that just short-circuits success and snatches it out of my hands just as I am about to grab it. If I could figure out why, maybe I could do something about it.

Whenever I discover something new about Harold Lloyd, some odd little thing like this minute-and-a-half-long mini-picture, it's as if I am given a tiny glimpse through an aperture or a magic portal. While I was writing The Glass Character, there were days when I felt as if I had stepped right through it. I did not want to come back. I don't know what is going to happen with my novel, and I know I shouldn't care this much, I'm just putting my heart out on the railroad tracks. But there's just something about him. He inspires that sort of feeling. It's spooky, because I realize that he doesn't try for it.

I can't define charisma, any more than I can define charm, but I know when I am in its presence. In this case, mere dying did not end it. It's still there, lightning in a bottle. If you think you know silent comedy, if you've seen Chaplin and Keaton and maybe Harry Langdon or Chester Conklin, you don't know this: there was a man, an extraordinary actor who never planned to be a comedian, who was able to make the most ordinary, hapless guy so compelling that you couldn't stop watching him.

Harold, Harold! I don' t know how I got in so deep. And I am not sure if I want to be saved or not.

The Further Adventures of Ooka and Eeka (a grandma's tale)

   The Further Adventures of. . .

OOKA AND EEKA!

                                                                  Ooka

                                                                  Eeka

Ooka and Eeka were two sisters who looked alike. Well, almost. One fine day in the spring, they decided to go for a walk together.

Since Ooka was 17 feet tall and Eeka was one inch tall, it was very hard for Eeka to keep up with Ooka.

“Wait for me, Ooka!”

Ooka was enjoying the walk so much that she didn’t notice that Eeka wasn’t beside her any more.

“Oh no!” said Ooka. “Did I step on her again?”

Ooka looked on the bottom of her shoes, but Eeka wasn’t there. What a relief!

But then she thought: no Eeka? She must be lost!

Ooka was very worried. She looked everywhere, under every tree, rock and mushroom. But Eeka was nowhere to be found.

Ooka was very sad and discouraged. Would she ever find Eeka?

Then all at once she met a friendly elephant.

“Hello, friendly elephant,” she said.

“Phhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhht!”

“Mr. Elephant, do you have a cold?’

“No. But I can’t smell the flowers any more.”

“How come?”

“I was smelling this daisy here, and something went up my nose.”

That gave Ooka an idea!

She grabbed the elephant’s trunk and yelled into it.

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!”

Then she held his trunk to her ear. At first she didn’t hear anything, but then she heard a teeny tiny voice saying,

                         “Oooooooooooooooo-kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Save me!”

The elephant was very upset by now. “I have a girl up my nose,” he said.

Then Ooka had another idea!

“Eeka, tickle the inside of the elephant’s trunk.”

“OK!”

So she tickled the inside of his trunk. Then the elephant went:

“Ah – ah – ah – ah – ah – CHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Eeka flew out of his trunk and sailed through the air all the way to the other side of the country.

“Ooooooo-kaaaaaaa,” she cried. “Come get me. I’m in Newfoundland.”

Ooka had to take a very long walk to find her, but fortunately her legs were very long so it only took her half an hour.

She found Eeka sitting inside a flower, looking very happy.

“Eeka!” said Ooka. “No more sitting in flowers.”

“Why not? I love flowers.”

“Because an elephant might suck you into his trunk again.”

“OK, I won’t.”

And Eeka never did it again.

THE END

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look