Ms. Crankypants Seizes the Season

Ms. Crankypants

For starters, let me introduce myself. I’m Ms. Crankypants, guest contributor for the month. Carolyn is busy with other things – well, to be honest, I sent her what looked like an official email that the blog was taking the month off so she didn’t have to write anything. I don’t even feel that bad about it. A girl has to make her own opportunities after all. So this is my chance to tell you what I think for once.

About the holidays for instance. I’ve had it – year after year with the shopping, the decorating, the wrapping, the baking. Well, I don’t personally actually bake, but searching the stores for the special cookies that come in the cellophane covered boxes that are like the ones my grandmother used to make takes a lot of my time.

I’m not the only one who needs a rest. Look into the eyes of your neighbor, your relatives, the shopper who just cut in line in front of you at TJ Maxx, and you’ll see not peace and good will but panic. How will she – or you- get everything done in time?

So, I’ve decided to start a movement – The Christmas Sabbatical. Here’s the concept: Every few years you get to take a pass on all the holiday preparations and simply float on top of the season without unwanted fuss and no stress. You become exempt from any expectations. You need to do nothing. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought of it yourself. You have, you just haven’t had the, let us say, ova, to carry it out. Or if you have, you’ve kept it awfully quiet. But don’t worry. I’ll be happy to take the credit.

I’m starting small this year, just telling a few people like you, my target group – bright, engaged, creative people who have better things to do than fritter away their time on culturally-mandated busywork. I once saw a Martha Stewart magazine where she expected perfectly functional females to waste a day or two of their lives glue-gunning cranberries to a Styrofoam wreath. I know I’m a little bit excitable, but that one sent me around the bend. How will we ever achieve world peace – and it does look like it’s going to be up to us girls since the men have been making such a hash of it for centuries – wasting our time like that?

Next year will be the big rollout – a New York Times OpEd piece, an interview on The View (Elizabeth the conservative one will sputter in indignation), a book deal – but I get ahead of myself. Just to head off Elizabeth and my other critics, I am not suggesting giving up Christmas and what it stands for (which was what? I’ve forgotten). I just advocate the chance to take a year off from the bustle periodically and see what else shows up to fill the space.

A moment about tone. You want this to be a joyful experience that allows you unprecedented freedom and ease, not a way to bitterly weasel out of your responsibilities. I know to mention this because a certain significant other, call him Mr. Grumpy, I mentioned it to shot back, “Well, don’t do it anymore if you don’t like it.” Which completely misses the point, as usual. Just to be clear: the point is that you may usually love to do all the preparing, gifting, polishing, etc. but after a marathon lifetime of the same, deserve a break once in a while.

And here’s the beauty of it - The Sabbatical is not an all or nothing proposition. Given your personality, your budget and your other circumstances, you design it to fit your particular needs.

I have constructed a matrix, elegant in its simplicity, to lay out your options. It is based on first, whether you want your sabbatical to be complete (for those you who have been overfunctioning for years) or partial (if you just want to dial things back to an achievable level). Second, do you want it to be visible (so you can champion the idea) or invisible (so you can use it as an internal guideline to keep your own expectations in check)? Allow me to explain.

Option 1: Complete and Visible. You just resign from everything you usually do. Boldly declare that you are not participating this year and then duck because there will be a backlash. You will be called an atheist Christmas-denier. Not recommended if you have children in the house. They take everything so personally, and you may scar them for life and I don’t want to be implicated for that. I may be cranky, but I’m not a monster.

Option 2: Complete and Invisible. This requires more finesse. You totally take the year off, but don’t admit it. Always answer a question with a question, like “So where is the Christmas tree?” with “Have you seen the axe?” You might want to come down with the fake flu on Christmas Eve and get over it on the 26th and watch old movies in between.

Option 3: Partial and Visible. Admit what you are doing with pride. Choose your five favorite holiday activities and do them with gusto, then wrap yourself in the flag of nonmaterialistic values if anything else rears its head demanding to be done. Set an example for your family and friends and recruit them to participate in the big rollout next year.

Option 4: Partial and Invisible. Cut back but keep it to yourself. It will be entertaining to see if anyone even notices what you’ve dropped, and if they do, if they have the nerve to mention it. Remember to wear your new relaxation on your sleeve, so as to attract positive energy that helps everyone you come in contact with feel like they can settle down too.

Before I let you go to put this into practice, here’s a consideration of how the sabbatical concept impacts the prevailing notions about what Christmas must be:

There is the annual scolding that we must “put the Christ back in Christmas,” as if it is some sort of religious holiday. This is accompanied by he increasingly confusing squabbles over where people can put menorahs, crèches, Christmas trees, or not. My response: I’ll decide exactly what needs to be put in my own holiday, thanks, and you do the same.

And the language thing – can you say “Merry Christmas” to your atheist friends (you do have atheist friends, you know), or your Jewish neighbor or Muslim co-worker, without being an insensitive jerk? This however, requires that you prescreen any possible greetees for their religious identity so you can place them in the proper category which is potentially rude and unwelcome. My outlook: Let’s just all get over ourselves and just be glad that someone wants to greet someone else rather than blow their head off. Jeez.

Every year the Christmas card list forces you to make an accounting of your friends and associates, sadly removing the ones who are gone and scouring your year to see if you’ve made any new friends at all to add, which is a good thing if you ask me. But the Christmas letter thing, oh brother. Talk about making work for yourself. Now Ms. Crankypants likes a good story as well as the next person, but shouldn’t have to sit through a recitation of each mole that everyone in the family had removed this year. Limit it to one page and you won’t try your patience or anyone else’s. Besides, by next year, we’ll probably all be down to just a Tweet and think of all the time that’ll save.

Finally there is the problem of the proliferation of traditions that demand to be repeated year after year. Just because you flew to Trenton the last ten years on Christmas Eve doesn’t mean you have to repeat that this year. Too much accumulation of have-to’s leads to the very problem we are trying to solve – drowning in unnecessary commitments. It would be like never getting rid of your gramophone when you went to stereo, and keeping your Beta video tapes once VHS came in. Or listening to your Walkman in one ear and your iPod in the other. We’ve got to let the past go to create a manageable present. Mindfulness now, that’s what I say.

Okay, I think that’s it. Don’t tell Carolyn I was here. She tries to keep me under wraps, but she’s pretty easy to outwit. I’ll be back.

Oh yeah, happy holidays.

MCP aka CBH 12/09

Catching On

Carolyn B Healy

I met Lucia at a writing seminar. She was slight, with a lined, hard luck face and unruly dark hair that obscured her small brown eyes. Twelve of us, all strangers, sat in a loose circle in a sunny high-desert retreat house waiting for the first session to begin. Our leader, a successful and engaging author of personal growth books, arrived and immediately handed out water bottles and instructed us to drink and keep drinking to stay ahead of headaches and any other high altitude symptoms. It was a way of telling us we’d be safe here.

Each of us had a book project in mind and came for help in shaping it into a best-seller. He told us what to expect: Each of us would get two hours to lay out our book concept, the group could ask clarifying questions and provide feedback, and he would provide consultation about how to focus the topic to catch the interest of a large audience. But first, we would get to know each other.

He divided us into pairs and told us to interview each other, and be prepared to introduce each other to the group using one amazing fact learned during the conversation. Lucia and I were a pair. I don’t remember the amazing fact, but I do remember that we had remarkable overlap in what our early lives had been like. Both of us grew up only children of widowed mothers living in modest circumstances in a big city; both became therapists; both had two children almost grown; and both had killer book ideas.

As we talked on about our parallel histories, I questioned her about her experience growing up without a father and what she ultimately made of it. My killer book idea was that personal narrative, the story you tell about yourself, has everything to do with how your life turns out and your level of satisfaction with it. And that if you are not satisfied, changing that narrative is the – or at least one – route to transformation.

So how could I not ask? Plus, of late I had been putting an excess of energy into finally sorting out my parental loss and how it figured into my own story, so my curiosity could not be contained, even if it took us beyond the prescribed activity.

Lucia answered, “I remember everyone always saying to my mother, ‘Isn’t it a shame that you have to support Lucia alone?’ ‘It’s such a shame that Joe left you with such a hard life.’ Everything was a “shame.” I took that in, and that’s how I lived my life for years. Ashamed.” She explained that she’d been prone to disconnection and self-pity from girlhood, and had to work hard as an adult to come out of it.

I didn’t know what to say, not a common occurrence. I realized that there was a sentence that rang through my childhood too, directed to my mother Jessie: “Aren’t you lucky that you have Carolyn?” Or to me, “Your mother is so lucky to have you.” Or overheard around relatives’ tables, “Thank goodness Jessie and Carolyn have each other.” You hear that difference? It was all about luck and good fortune on my side.

I’d long wondered where my disposition toward appreciation and gratitude came from, and originally figured that they must come easy to me because of my early loss. It was no problem for me to tell the difference between an annoyance and a real tragedy that was worth getting worked up about. I didn’t need to make gratitude lists to open my eyes. They were open.

I would hear my friends moan about how hopeless and unfair their parents were, and suffer over not being allowed to go on a Girl Scout overnight because they had a family occasion they shouldn‘t miss. But how do you say something like “count your blessings” without sounding like you’re feeling sorry for yourself? So I kept it to myself. I knew what I knew because of my loss experience, I decided, one they hadn’t had.

As I grew, I discovered that, as usual, life isn’t that simple. And now Lucia further confirmed it. If my original idea had held up, she would have developed the very same practical assessment I had - any day when the roof didn’t fall in was a good day. Instead, she had gone through the same loss, but assigned it a different meaning, the opposite one even, and got a quite different outcome.

In fact, the encounter with Lucia proved my new theory – that it’s not what life throws at you, it’s how you catch it. It fueled my determination to write that book and highlight this route to resilience.

The meaning that Lucia put to her fatherlessness and how I saw mine activated whole different sets of neurons in our developing brains and sent us down entirely different paths. She developed a grim expectation, the opposite of my knee-jerk optimism.

As I look around, what is not to be grateful about? I see others whose attention is drawn to the negative – the latest political scandal or crime statistics or fears about health care or taxes. Happily for me, my attention goes instead toward a dynamite sunset, or a poke in the ribs from a friend, or a good medical report.

Does that make me a Pollyanna, or worse, a self-congratulatory one? Not so. I am lucky, not admirable. I can meet trouble when I see it, but it just can’t trump the rest. Dr. Martin Seligman, a founder of the positive psychology movement, asks if the word in your heart is Yes or No, and provides questions to reveal the answer. He rushes to say that even if it is No, there is plenty you can do to nudge it toward Yes, which brings rewards of pleasure, protection against physical and emotional difficulty, and greater achievement. Ask Lucia who worked hard to move in that direction.

My word is Yes. And I’m grateful for that.

One loose end: What about the personal narrative book? I did write up a nice book proposal and an agent friend shopped it around to several likely editors, but no one bit. I’ll dust it off one of these days, tighten it up, add my new learnings and send it out there again to see if it finds a home. I know which story I’m going to lead with.

CBH 11/09

Friends, Not Enemies

Carolyn B Healy

We flew in from the west over O’Hare, then banked over the Loop, studying first the close-together highrises and then the suburban houses ringed with still-green grass. Our friends sat in the row behind us and we talked about how great the city looked if only those puffy white clouds would get out of the way. We’d had a great week playing golf and seeing the Texas Hill Country but it was time to return to normal. We headed for that lovely moment of touchdown, when you are back home where you belong, but not yet overtaken by daily responsibilities. My calendar for the coming week was full. I’d see my writer friends on Tuesday, my poet friend Wednesday, a counselor friend late in the week. I felt fortunate to have all that to return to.

I’d been afraid that the leaves of precious fall, my favorite season, would all be down by the time I got back, a fear that my friend behind me, a dedicated gardener, echoed. But there they were in gorgeous yellows and oranges and reds, hanging onto the branches for all they were worth until we could get home and witness their departure firsthand.

It grew dark as we rode home in the taxi. Once we turned down our street and saw groups of trick or treaters and their lurking parents, some dressed up themselves, we realized we were in trouble. It was Halloween and if we stayed home candyless, we would have to hide in the basement until late in the evening. We threw our suitcases in the garage, checked for messages, even though there are few these days since email has replaced the telephone as the delivery method of choice for our friendships. We hopped in the car and went to our favorite bar for dinner and refuge.

Back home later, it was a smooth re-entry. We kept the outside lights off against Halloween stragglers and I threw myself into clothes sorting, old movie-watching and email catching-up. I slept like a baby, exhausted by all the relaxation, the eight-hour sleeps and languorous dreams of a vacation.

In the morning I woke up to a thud, and then another, and another. Sunshine streamed in through my tree-high bedroom window. I saw immediately that I had lost leaves after all. Every one of the bright yellow ones that had graced the tree right outside my window had fallen into a sad pool below, leaving small red berries visible against the bright blue sky. I remembered the benefit of this annual loss – you can see so much better once the leaves come down. I discovered a birds’ nest at the crook of two branches that I’d missed in my daily first gaze outside all spring and summer. Had I missed eggs and baby birds too?

Before I even got to the window I figured out the thuds. Dozens of birds swarmed the tree, nipping off berries. Robins, cardinals, finches and sparrows hopped, swooped and kept out of each others’ way, feasting like there was no tomorrow. It was a colorful diversity of birds, each with their own ways but all wanting the same thing – those berries. Some of the birds – drunk on fermenting berries? – lost their way and slammed themselves into my windows. I hoped they’d sober up before starting that migration, so they can tell my window from the open sky.

I grabbed my camera and tried to capture them in all their chaotic glory, but they didn’t cooperate – too much jumping around. So I settled for the better option, actually watching them. Because we like to see nature as human-centric, it was tempting to think of them as friends enjoying the feast together as we would, like bird Thanksgiving. But with brains smaller than jelly beans, they can’t manage that. They don’t have room for mirror neurons and consciousness and the desire to be understood, the fundamentals of friendship. They just chowed down and leapt from one branch to the other, doing their different dances.

I’m pretty interested in sorting out differences. As a therapist, I’ve always had to search through the surface differences among my clients to find the shared core of emotion and motivation and vision that allows for change. And as a writer I am taken with point of view, always imagining how various characters would see the same event so differently. In fact, if I don’t look out, I can get so wrapped up in examining everyone’s unique take that I forget to tell the story, or take so long that everybody including me has lost interest. Focus, I am learning, is a necessary antidote to this overload of empathy.

As a morning birdwatcher, I studied how each species looked different as they got the same job done. Years ago when I first started to learn a bit about brain science, one portion of the brain was credited with the ability to discern small details, like telling one species of bird from another. The next time I tuned in, the same part of the brain was described as the place where face recognition took place, and I heard the sad tale of a man who had lost that ability. As he walked down the street, he had no way to know if he was encountering his best friend or a complete stranger because he couldn’t sort out one face from another. Much embarrassment ensued as he struggled to manage this deficit. He truly couldn’t tell who his friends were, until he heard their voices.

As a friend, I am watchful for differences too. I have friends of many stripes. Differences in politics, religion, life circumstance, ethnic heritage, whatever, do not stop me. Being just like me isn’t nearly as important as being interesting and willing to share. This does not make me a good person, just a curious one.

I know that not everyone sees it this way. A long conversation with a friend last spring revealed that she does not have any friends who disagree with her, and likes it that way. I began to mention that conversation to other friends and found several more who said the same. During the political season I heard a similar tale from many more. They choose a cocoon of commonality and self-affirmation, secure in their beliefs together.

That’s a lot of comfort, but at what cost? In my experience, sad to say, people who stick to their own kind can become a little superior, and smug, and self-righteous if they encounter nothing but agreement. Oops. Have I said too much? Do I sound like a scold? My question is this: How do you grow and change and enlarge your view inside such insulation? What challenges you to rethink and fine-tune what you believe if you never test it against others’ thoughts and feelings?

My argument in favor of cultivating friendships with those who have differing views is this: If you hear an unfamiliar viewpoint from a person you know and trust, chances are you will consider it because you care about what matters to your friend. And you may even deepen your understanding of the issue by seeing it from another vantage point.

It is quite another thing if the only varying views you consider are the top-of-the-lungs rants of media pundits who get rich on the numbers of listeners they can recruit to their side. They trade on fear of The Other, and exaggerate the threat of other ideas, attributing evil motives to those who disagree. Predicting catastrophe is big business out there, and works to increase suspicion and split people apart, the opposite of friendship.

Give me friendship to bridge such divisions. The one ingredient that is present in friendship and absent just about everywhere else these days is respect. If my friend tells me a story of her dilemma years ago as a young coed, knowing that a classmate was about to have an abortion which she felt was “just about the worst thing,” and shares with me the helpful counsel of a nun she consulted, I can understand something new and appreciate how she was tested by that experience.

If my friend tells me that he would love to speak out on human rights abuses in his homeland but can’t afford to place his family in jeopardy, I gain a deeper understanding of what is at stake there and how grateful I should be for what we have here.

If I hear from my friend about a long ago summer when his all-white community turned into a nearly all-black community almost overnight, leaving his parents feeling that they had to upend the family and disrupt their comfortable lives, I am left to appreciate the work he had to do to overcome bitterness and resentment for what they lost.

Sure, there are awkward moments when I bite my tongue, and times when I don’t, and the endless internal debate about when to do each. And, like everyone else, I savor the times I can relax from that stress and hang out with people who largely agree with me.

As a young person I used to think I was 100% right all the time, which surely made me a real pain in the ass to people I disagreed with. Now I don’t think I’m so right. I aspire be right for me today, and I’ll try again tomorrow as I keep being challenged to consider new ideas.
The biggest change I’ve seen with my maturity is that now I’ve become a pain in the ass to the people I basically agree with, peppering them with comments like Wait a minute or Did you think about this or Here’s what my friend told me.

If respect is in place, we can tread that middle ground just fine. If not, if one person seeks to overpower and convert the other, the gulf widens. As I saw from the plane, it’s a beautiful world we live in. And as I observed about all those birds, if we can work around each others harmoniously we can all get what we want. And as I see my friends this week, I’ll find I have a lot to learn.

CBH 10/09

Up Deep Creek

Carolyn B Healy

I stood on the bank and squinted at the two white-clad figures in the middle of Deep Creek’s swirling water. As a nine year-old city girl temporarily plunked down in the Smoky Mountains for a family visit, I was on high alert for things I couldn’t see back at home, and this was going to be a big one.

My cousin Annette, six years older, was on the list of my most admired people. She could cook and sew and win 4H prizes. She had the same name as my favorite Mouseketeer, and I harbored a secret hunch that she was really the famous Annette and the family was keeping it secret. Plus, she was a teenager with teenage friends, some of them boys.

Now she was standing in the middle of the creek in a pretty white dress with lace trim. I bet she made it, I thought in a spurt of pride. I knew from experience what she was up against out there. That water was cold as ice. I knew that because her mother Anna Lou would regularly pile the cousins into her Plymouth and barrel over mountain roads to take us to the swimming hole “up Deep Creek” and then back to her house for popsicles.

Part of my annual immersion into the ways of my relatives was the agonizing entry into that frigid water, a test I had to pass to prove myself. While my cousins dove in and got it over with, I inched in, crunching down to pat the freezing water onto my goose-bumped arms. Once I finally gathered my courage and plunged in, it was a victory. Annette didn’t usually go along, being too busy with more sophisticated endeavors.

I stood on the bank behind Anna Lou and Uncle Commodore, my mother’s brother, and their sons Don and Jim. They seemed to think this was a normal occurrence. I had heard we were going to a baptism but that sounded like a churchy thing, not a swimming hole thing. What were we doing here? And what was a baptism anyway?

Was my petite Grandma there, having clambered down the bank on her tender feet, in her voile dress and Sunday hat with the veil? You know how memory is, focusing in on the main event and leaving the edges blurry. Grandma may have stayed home, since this was a Presbyterian ceremony and the rest of the family, she included, was Baptist. I didn’t know the difference, but they certainly did.

There was a lot of religion in that town. The various Baptist churches, red brick with white steeples in town and the more modest weathered wooden ones up the hollows, seemed to have the strongest foothold. One recent day, I had tagged along on an all-day genealogy outing up into the mountains with my aunts. I snapped pictures of the white clapboard church that a great-grandfather had built, and of the family headstones that surrounded it. It was something. How could a kid from 1111th Street have roots way out here, in a hollow that my aunts could barely find? I was more interesting than I’d thought.

The Presbyterian Church that my cousin was seeking entry to was back in town, painted bright white, right down the hill from her house, a couple of blocks from the almost defunct railroad line, just around the bend from the Baptist one of the rest of the family. But the church that made the biggest impression on me was the one that we had nothing to do with. It announced itself by a gothic-script sign on the highway into town: St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, Masses 8, 9, 10:30 am. It sat on a ridge overlooking the A&P and the Tuckasiegee River, its austere grey stone looking medieval and menacing. I didn’t stop to think that my home church back in Chicago was housed in an odd replica limestone Irish castle that may have looked as misplaced as this one. It also escaped me that my Unitarian church building served as the symbol for the South Side neighborhood that was so heavily Catholic it practically smelled of incense. Nine year-olds aren’t much on irony.

The ceremony was about to start. The other figure, the white-suited preacher, began to stir. He boomed a few words in his God-calling voice, put his arm around my willing cousin and – oh my gosh – dipped her backwards under the water. And held her there. And kept holding her there. Her family stood stock still. Since they were older than I was and better swimmers, I figured that if she needed rescue, they’d be on the job, and I should quell my impulse to splash out there.

The preacher’s incantations continued and to my relief he finally lifted her up, streaming, still breathing, and escorted her to the bank where her mother waited with a white terrycloth towel. We trooped back to the house for the usual pot luck – plates of sliced tomato and cantaloupe still warm from the sun, pyramids of sweet corn picked that morning, fried okra, stacks of cornbread, beef cooked beyond well-done to just this side of charcoalhood, and fried chicken from the poor creature I’d seen my grandfather ax-murder earlier in the day. I might have been the one from the city, but in their way, my relatives were far more conversant with violence than I was, but the necessary violence it takes to run a life close to the land. Dessert was Anna Lou’s coconut cake and watermelon, eaten in the yard so the juice could run down to the elbows.

I never asked Annette what it felt like to be dunked and baptized, being too shy and too young. I didn’t yet know that the result of curiosity could be learning, if only I’d ask. I remember how it felt to me. I’d glimpsed a jaw-dropping event I’d never see again and that my friends back home couldn’t imagine. For a while, the gulf between me and my relatives had widened, with me on the outside peeking in, wondering what would happen next.

But by the end of the meal, while the aunts cleared the table and teased Grandma into sitting on the convertible step-stool while they washed the dishes, and the men rocked on the porch, I played with my cousins out by the lilac bush. We chased fireflies and captured them in Ball jars with perforated lids that stayed on the back porch. Laughter leaked out of the kitchen windows, and the low rumble of the uncles’ voices rolled off the porch. In the process, I was restored. This was my family. I loved their slow speech and Southern story-telling. I loved their food, and how they loved my mother. And I loved Annette who gave me something to shoot for.

I wasn’t required to understand all their ways to belong there. It was a great gift of my childhood to see so early that we could be different yet connected. Annette was the star of that day in my memory but I think I was the lucky one. Later, dishes done, we all gathered in the front room and sat in a giant circle, moths hitting the screens, and the funny stories began. What I would give for a chance to hear those voices again, trying to top each other. Their generation is all gone now except for Commodore who celebrated his 100th birthday this summer. I inhaled all that love and knew I’d have a home here if I ever needed it, and vowed to take all these folks home with me in my memory, where they still reside.

CBH 09/09

Success and Failure - Cuban Style

Carolyn B Healy

Celia got us there with 20 minutes to spare. We collected on the open-air platform and looked around. On the earth road alongside, we witnessed a few centuries’ worth of transportation options whiz by. A horse and cart carried a local man hauling a sack of grain; another cart hauled a tourist couple also rushing to make the train. A bicycle rickshaw scooted by, carrying a local woman dressed for the office, although looking around the very small town, it was hard to see where she might be headed. A series of 1950-era Chevys and DeSotos and a couple of rusty Ford pickups also buzzed by while we waited. A mid-1960’s Soviet Lada, a boxy successor imported once Fidel shut down the supply of the U.S. cars, followed. Cash for Clunkers would be an enormous hit in Cuba if only anyone had any money or the right to buy a new car.

Early that morning, after a sumptuous brunch at the hotel, Celia had urged us onto our luxurious Chinese bus for our trip into the countryside. Maximo sat at the wheel, greeting each rider with nods and a wordless smile. Maximo spoke no English, we were told. We had also been told that Celia, like all guides, would have to watch her words, as you never know who might disapprove and turn her in to the state for unauthorized opinions. That was enough to get us all to keep an eye on Maximo and his motives (How did we really know he speaks no English?), and nervous that our endearing single mother new friend Celia would overstep her boundaries.

She kept us moving all morning, afraid we would miss our connection. Today our tour was to show us the remnants of the greatest of the Cuban crops, sugar, and of the lifestyle it provided for those involved. Into her microphone, as we sped along the National Highway, she described Cuba’s relationship with sugar over the years as the lynchpin of the economy to the near collapse of the industry with the end of slavery, its transfer to the hands of U.S. companies in the years before Fidel showed up and nationalized the companies. It limped into the 1980’s, but once the Soviets collapsed themselves and could no longer be any help with fuel or machinery, it faded further.

We waited on the platform, guiltily snapping photos of modest residents’ daily lives as if we were viewing an ancient culture sprung to life. They want us here, we comforted ourselves; they want us to see how they live and take home evidence so others will know. Or at least they’d like to get a good look at some Americans, the folks they are forbidden to mix with, except on the four hours of nightly U.S. television shows. I can’t figure out the motivation of the regime to welcome Brothers and Sisters and Two and a Half Men into the struggling lives of the Cuban people. Was it to highlight the decadent empty materialistic lives of the capitalist pigs? Or to provide the barest hint of freedom, a nightly secret pleasure to keep the masses reassured that they are not so isolated after all? Even with a nightly drip of American media, how much does the average Cuban know of life outside the island? Deprived of CNN, Internet access and travel, yet taunted by fictional lives set in Malibu and Ohai, CA, what must they imagine?

But Cubans are accustomed to fiction, being raised on a steady diet of claims about the success of the Revolution despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. They receive lectures about agrarian reform while tractors rust in untended fields. They hear about the glories of the generous food rationing system while they dash out the back door to their black market suppliers to gather enough for the family to eat. They are told about the fine highways that crisscross the countryside while they congregate in intersections waiting for hours for trucks to provide stand-up rides to cities outside Havana, because no one making the monthly wage of under $20 can possibly afford a $17 bus ride to a mid-island city.

Cuba has a history of occupation and domination by outside powers. There was always someone coming along to overpower and exploit the Cuban people and strip their resources - a parade of Spaniards, English, French, and yes, Americans.

When the first wave, the Spaniards, showed up in search of gold, they managed to wipe out the indigenous population in a quick 30 years, with European diseases, overwork and mass suicide. This created an opening and a business opportunity for the African slave trade to begin, which continued to the tune of 400,000 individuals before it was done. That was the constant, while the nationality of the colonists rotated, along with the crops they worked – tobacco, sugar, whatever. There was always wealth to be had, but it seemed to slip through the fingers of ordinary Cubans and land right in the pockets of the already rich and favored families of whichever world power was in charge at the time.

When the train arrived, the locomotive chugging and belching steam, we climbed into its open-air cars and settled into polished wooden seats. Celia wrangled the last few of us who had wandered off to get just one more picture of the dusty town.

The train inched out of the station and began its slow climb up the valley that had once been the center of the world’s sugar production. As we began to build up speed, a man dressed in a striped shirt, gripping a guitar, appeared from one of the lanes. He sprinted hard after the train and leapt onto its back platform, grabbing the bar just in time. He strode up the aisle and joined his musical partner waiting with trumpet in hand, and they struck up the Afro-Cuban rhythm we could hear in our sleep.

In the back of the car, another passenger, a young Cuban woman dressed in a white blouse and flowing skirt danced in the aisle with her young friend. He soon tired and an older man stepped up, eager to match her swiveling hips to his. Minutes later, they fell into their seats, satisfied, while the musicians played on. The tourists applauded.

The music never stops in Cuba. At every venue a group pounded out the rhythm and sang until we were out of sight. From our hotels we could hear the pulse of the clubs far into the night. Sometimes there were horns, always guitars and drums, and the voices. Even if we couldn’t understand the words, we knew what they sang about - longing and heat and sex. We could tell that much.

As we proceeded up the valley we passed the occasional house surrounded by tidy garden plots. Mostly we saw expanses of untended fields with remnant sugar cane plants sprouting from dry and cracked soil. When we saw workers, they held machetes or followed oxen pulling a plow. It looked like Fidel’s grand plan for agrarian reform hadn’t quite taken hold.

It was all pretty in a sad way, crisp clouds against a bright blue sky, the hilly landscape still green but raggedy. It was easy to imagine the best years, the growers and their families traveling from their grand Havana homes to the opulent country houses, chugging up the valley to watch the harvest of their wealth.

It got even easier to imagine once we climbed off the train and walked up a slope to one of those country houses, restored to Victorian grandeur with crystal chandeliers and shaded porches. Outside, a market was set up to lure the tourists, full of embroidered clothing and linens and eager vendors chasing down tourists to view their wares. It was one of the few displays of crass commercialism we witnessed.

To escape their pleas, I wandered beyond the stalls. A tower rose from the dusty earth. Architecturally interesting, its stacks of winding staircases and arches invited picture-taking. After snappng a series of artsy shots featuring rolling fields framed by the tower’s arches, I looked up. What was this thing for anyway? Oh. Of course. A slave tower, built so that the overseers could keep track of who was working hard enough and who was not. It focused my attention on the other side of the commercial equation, and interfered with my appreciation of the wealth and luxury that had flowed from the sugar trade.

The slaves arrived from many African tribes over 300-plus years to do the work, at one point accounting for 45% of the population. About a third of them were headed for the plantations, the rest for house slave spots. Over the years, a series of rebellions broke out, the first in 1513, but the system chugged on unabated until outlawed in 1886.

Cuban slavery had some particular features that sound good: a slave could take three days off to try to find a better owner, where he could negotiate his own price and the price of his eventual freedom. Yes, the slave had a potential out, if he could raise enough money to buy his freedom. Some did, and became middle class slave-owners themselves, a spectacular failure of imagination in my book.

Before we start handing out human rights awards, the other facts scream of what we normally associate with slavery. Slaves rarely were allowed to marry, families who arrived together were torn apart, babies born to strong healthy young women were taken to be nursed by other slaves bred for the purpose.

All the success, the riches, the opulence came from a failure of humanity that allowed this systematic exploitation, a violation of decency and fairness. Did all the flaunting of wealth and competitive spending we’d seen throughout Cuba, from the marble burial vaults to the elegant carriages and fancy houses, help answer some of our questions about Fidel’s success here, and the Cubans’ apparent reluctance to oppose him? Did the long history of exploitation begin to explain Fidel’s ascendance as the hero of everybody gets the same and nobody better try to outdo their neighbors?

We climbed back on the train for the return trip, heads full of the competing agendas of the colonists, industrialists, slaves and revolutionaries. Cuba shut down the sugar mills five years ago, giving up the fantasy of reviving the glory days. It seems just as well.

CBH 08/09

Enough Already

Carolyn B. Healy

I turned on the Today Show this morning for the first time in weeks, and they’re just lucky I was prepared to give them a second chance. I had to put them on probation back on the second day of the Michael Jackson death marathon. If they were going to act like the entire world screeched to a halt just because one exceedingly troubled entertainer died, then they’d have to do it without me. I am not without compassion for M. Jackson, as he was clearly victimized first and repeatedly before he turned his attentions to young boys. I just sought some balance and the slightest recognition that he became a predator himself.

Soon after, I left on a lengthy trip where my morning viewing switched to the cruise director’s daily closed circuit TV show, for which he donned a turban and received a lovely facial from the spa staff, and talked on and on about shopping. I didn’t miss Today at all.

Once back, I needed a week to overcome jet lag, and was finally ready to resume my usual habits. Certainly Today was over the pop star immersion by now and back to actual news. I switched it on. What filled the screen but the entire Duggar family, the reality show crew who unapologetically shows off their incredible flair for reproduction, a 21 person mass seated somehow - they must have bleachers in the living room - around the parents.

“The Duggars are here. And they have an announcement,” the off-screen voiced teased. “We’ll be right back.”

Let’s see…this is the Duggars. Whatever could it be? A cure for a deadly disease? Peace in the Middle East? You got it. They are having another frigging baby. Nothing against the baby, who is blameless in all this, but hardly could be considered fortunate, to show up on the doorstep as child # 19? That poor kid will be working for scraps until the cows come home. They are going to have to assign someone to remember his name.

Mrs. D announced it in her strangely childlike voice, the rest of the family stared vacantly, and Mr. D, a John Edwards lookalike, hitched up his belt and tried to look modest. “We are so excited,“ she warbled, “waiting for our 19th child.” Then they chatted with the eldest son’s new wife, pregnant of course, about their upcoming birth, and the segment was over.

It’s enough to make you look kindly on the Chinese ban on multiple children. And makes you wonder just who is raising whom around the Duggar household. I don’t care if both parents permanently gave up sleeping for the next 15 years, there is no way two people can adequately parent 18, now 19, children.

While Mr and Mrs. D are happily reproducing like rabbits, they conscript their existing children to raise the new ones. It’s like a Ponzi scheme for parenting - invest your sperm and egg in this new opportunity, but skim off the resources of other people to make good on it. And act like everything is fine and dandy.

Back in the day when my husband and I formed our notions about family size there was a concept called Zero Population Growth, an early expression of consciousness about how we use the earth. It was based on the ethic that no one family gets to hog more than their fair share of the resources. ZPG guided us down a logical path - just replace yourself and then do a bang-up job of raising your replacements. Lucky for us, it worked out that we had a son and almost three years later, a daughter, so we could carry out that plan.

It wasn’t that I was so enraptured with the ecological part of the idea, but as an only child who longed hard for a sibling, two children seemed an embarrassment of riches, and I set out to give them scads of attention and intention.

I gradually noticed that while most of our friends planned their families as we did, some other folks out there still cranked out kids like they needed to raise their own field hands. This ZPG thing had a pull, but not for everyone. Of course, many powerful forces were at work - religion, family tradition, culture, competitiveness, repeated tries for a child of the other sex, fertility, medical issues.

I understand that everyone has to chart their own course, and I have absolutely no patience with those in the anti-choice faction who are ready to make everyone else’s reproductive decisions for them. I certainly don‘t want to join their ranks. But I do have some thoughts.

The more I see these giant families like the Duggars lionized, the more I wonder why. The Duggars can‘t stop themselves, and parade their lives on TV, looking back at us with smug smiles. I wonder, when they started all of this way back in the 1980’s, did they have this planned or did they just sit back and let it happen?

In 1997, the McCaughey Family from Iowa produced septuplets on top of their one existing child. In religiously-loaded interviews, they credited themselves with refusing the selective reduction of the number of fetuses that doctors recommended, and credited their prayers for the survival of all the children. Luckily for them, only two of the children have cerebral palsy. Their self-congratulation aside, what does this say about the prayers of other parents whose babies were stillborn, or died days after birth; or the prayers of infertile couples who would give anything to be pregnant with one measly fetus? Were those prayers less valid, less fervent, less worthy?

And just last year, Octomom ,who already had six children, two with special needs, added her eight new babies to the mix. The reaction to her news suggests that we may finally have had enough. As she looked coyly at the camera denying that she was angling for a reality show, the celebrity machinery went wild. While journalists and others climbed all over the lawn and seduced her parents into on-air interviews, ethicists were finally asked to examine the issues involved also.

All these families grant themselves permission that most of us would responsibly deny. Is all of this self-congratulation and self-promotion the final and most tragic expression of our acquisitiveness? The one who dies with the most children wins?
Or is this just a freak show that serves to entertain the rest of us who would never dream of turning out two baseball teams under our very own roofs – a cautionary tale about what happens when excess overtakes reason? If so, we have circled back to M. Jackson and his sadly overblown and XXX life?

Here comes the really touchy part. Internationally, we see reports of countries nearly paralyzed by poverty and disease and scarcity of resources. Yet their average family sizes would put them in the running for a TV show on cable. From here, it looks pretty easy to solve. Apply ZPG and you turn an unmanageable situation into a workable one. Sounds logical to me.

But that brings a minefield of potentially explosive issues. Dare to speak of limiting population and you risk charges of colonialism, racism, classism. But reality is clear - producing too many people makes life harder, and in those extreme situations, even impossible to sustain.

At out house, we did what seemed right and it worked out fine. There is the occasional twinge, wondering what it would have been like to throw ZPG to the winds and be surrounded now by many more children. Just like there is the occasional twinge for others who wonder what it would have been like to mount a huge career, or set aside material comforts and go out to save the world. That is what we get to do as life moves along, review our lives and sort out the hard-won wisdom from the regrets.

All other things being equal, like love and plenty to eat, surely there are riches to be had in enormous families that I will never know. And surely there is a quality of connection in small families that the Duggars will never know.

Now, I have to decide what to do about my relationship with the Today Show. I’m pretty sure I know what I’ll do – I’ll tune back in. I have a curiosity problem. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

CBH 07/09

Mammogram 2009

Carolyn B Healy

4:23 am

Fear penetrates my dream – trapped in a warehouse with endless stairs and no door. I awake with sweaty palms and dread. Dream fades. Whew. Reality invades. Shit. Mammogram Day.

6:00 am

Shower, no deodorant.

6:25am

Check email. Do not make To Do list for day, just in case.

6:45 am

Take two Extra-Strength Tylenol. Ha! Outwit the flesh-squeezing bastards.

7:00 am

Remove envelope of old films from closet shelf, safer at my house ever since the year they misplaced (and eventually found) them, making it all worse. Do not look at them.

7:05 am

Drive. Park.

7:10 am

Take elevator to 4th floor. Enter office. Go to bathroom. Complete paperwork. Pretend to watch Good Morning America present the various tragedies that occurred overnight while I thought only of myself. Go to bathroom again.

7:25 am

Follow receptionist to changing room. Choose locker # 11. Strip to waist, don enormous pink-flowered flannel gown with many strings. Wrap tight. Sit in waiting room. More Good Morning America. Maintain cocktail party-style chit chat with other patients. Do not mention that we are all in the Diagnostic Mammogram wing for some good reason, not downstairs in Routine Mammogram.

7:35 am

Experience strange calm, proving once again that reality in the moment is easier to handle than the anticipation of it.

7:40 am

Follow smiling harmless-looking tech into her chamber. Small, blonde, young, dressed in green print lab wear; efficient, informative, apologetic, low key, all you could ask for.

7:45 am

Begin on right side. Take arm out of sleeve. Step forward. Stare through blinds as a woman closes her car door, walks away, approaches building, turns around, returns to car for a forgotten bag, repeats.

7:53 am

Follow directions. Stand here. Lean in. Hold this bar. Relax the shoulder. Sorry. Hold breath. Switch to left side.

8:04 am

Almost done. Just the magnified ones of the incision site to go.

8:08 am

Return to waiting room. Wait. Wait longer. Fight off growing conviction that something is wrong.

8:18 am

Large woman enters, comments to no one in particular that she hasn’t had one of these things in years. Say something encouraging. Look away. Read magazine.

8:20 am

Watch interview with Bernie Madoff’s longtime assistant who had no idea anything was wrong. Believed him. Needed job.

8:23 am

Imagine B. Madoff’s male parts compressed between the clear plastic paddles of the mammogram equipment. Would that be torture? Would that be a problem?

8:25 am

Tech returns at last, asks me to follow her into changing room. Oh no – why can’t she tell me out here?

Tech: It was fine.
Me: What a relief. Now, why didn’t I just say Good? Why reveal my private torment?
Tech: Here’s your paperwork. We’ll see you next year.
Me: Yes. Good. Recall that in previous years they’d given out a carnation to commemorate a good outcome. Budget cuts no doubt. The year it wasn’t okay I can’t remember much, which is just as well. There was no flower, that’s for sure.
Tech: Do you want to wait for your films?
Me: Yes. Thanks.

8:30 am

Dress, return key. Smile. Exhale. Sit in waiting room away from TV. Study other patients. Wonder about percentages: How many get bad news: One in three? Ten? Two hundred?

8:32 am

Check Blackberry. Read notice of Elizabeth Edwards on book tour. Think about timing: mine early, Stage 0; hers late, too late. Think of her children, so young.

8:35 am

Make list for the day: Breakfast out, Drop off donations to resale shop, Clean patio furniture, Buy plants. Appreciate.

8:45 am

Descend in elevator, films in hand. Escape. Dial the important people. Celebrate another whole beautiful year.

CBH 06/09

Mother of the Year

Carolyn B Healy

Elizabeth Edwards slogs forward on her book tour, pundits lob shame-bombs at her, and I cultivate a growing resentment about the whole scenario. My friend Kathy and I even had a spat about her the other night. Kathy thinks she should just stop talking and toss her husband to the curb. Kathy thinks she’s pathetic. I think she’s anything but.

I’d like to talk about Elizabeth without wasting too much time on husband John. Kathy and I agree on him. Let’s just stipulate that he’s the guy you hope your daughter won’t meet. Too good-looking to have been required to develop character, although well-trained in creating and cultivating appearances. An overgrown adolescent. If you don’t agree on the last point, watch clips of his coy flirtation with the videographer he took up with. A middle-schooler lusting after the new social studies teacher wouldn’t display such leering desire. Narcissistic, arrogant. The good-guy imposter genus of the liar-cheater species of the human male. Yeah, yeah. He’s also done good works. He should have stuck with those.

Elizabeth is everywhere these days, promoting her book Resilience, and risking media saturation . So are her critics, who dump truckloads of directives at her feet about how she should feel, talk, and act. I’d like a word with those critics.

I’m a therapist, so listening to people in tough spots is nothing new to me. When I hear Elizabeth refuse to use the other woman’s name or decline to contemplate the paternity of her child, or express more vitriol for the other woman than for her husband, I don’t hear what the critics do – that she is willfully hiding from the truth, deluding herself, letting him off the hook so that she can stay in the spotlight.

Instead, I hear her stating emphatically: I’m at capacity. One more thing and I’ll crack.

Of course she’s in denial. Any healthy person would be. In fact, I believe fervently in denial. It gets a bad rap in the pop culture rush to erase all negative emotion and usher sufferers into closure, whatever that is. It’s portrayed as a thing to get out of. But not so fast. Denial gets us through what is unbearable, as well it should, and it lasts as long as it lasts, until we don’t need it anymore.

To me, the popular bromide that God never gives you more than you can handle is a dangerous lie. Tell it to the many clients I have seen swamped by tragedy yet criticized by onlookers for not responding as they would like. We are only human. We need a temporary trauma regulator, a valve that protects us from overload. Denial is that fail-safe device, part of the hard-wired security system that automatically kicks in when we are overrun by life’s torments. Take that away from Elizabeth and where is she?

Think of what she has lost. Her son Wade many years ago, and all she hoped his life would include. Her health. The loving marriage she thought she had. Her children’s security. Her future. This is about grief and only about grief.

Here’s how it works. Each new loss reactivates the ones before, and we drag all of them along with us for a time, until we can begin to reassemble a life that makes sense.

Why does Elizabeth get the rest of us so stirred up? Certainly her honesty about her medical condition unsettles us, and her blind spots about her cheating husband infuriate us. Her choice to stay married to him disappoints us, but we don’t get to prescribe how another carries out her grief.

She is living out our worst nightmares, but if we turn on her for the way she is doing it, we do none of us justice. And, speaking of arrogance, to imagine that the rest of us know what we’d do in her awful circumstance is at least naïve, and more likely evidence that we’re in denial ourselves.

Here is the elephant in the room that Elizabeth sees and her critics can’t: She is going to die and her children will have the shock of their lives – the kind of shock that will change them forever – their brains, their trajectories, security, expectations, worldview. Her death will cost them in a thousand ways. Grief will climb on board and accompany each of them through the rest of their lives.

While the opinion snipers accuse her of complicity, passive-aggressiveness and the rest, Elizabeth stays put, preserving stability for her children, cushioning them from additional upheavals. She knows that they will end up with their father, and is saving them a side trip into divorce and further trauma. She has a higher mission than pleasing her critics. It’s not that John is worthy of her loyalty, but her children are.

She is colluding – with the notion that they are a family and that John is the person she entrusts with their future. If she has to turn away from full-reality living for a time to accomplish that, to allow herself to direct her attention to the parts of her life that she can still control, so be it.

Her disease has taken away her chance to see her life unfold the way she’d hoped. So did her son’s death. So did her husband’s actions. The rest of us shouldn’t take away her opportunity to complete the things she can control as she sees fit.

There’s one more thing I hear her saying: I may not have much time. But I have something to say, and it wouldn’t kill you to listen. I’ve been places you haven’t and know things that you don’t.

The rest of us might learn something if we’d settle down and listen to her. We’ll know to thank our lucky stars that for most of us, our particular burdens right now pale in comparison to hers. We’ll know to hug our kids, smile at our partners, and locate our compassion.

CBH 05/09

Paddling Toward Today

Carolyn B Healy

I know two people who have been on the Today Show, for very different reasons. The first is Wendy Goldman Rohm, a Chicago area writer and teacher who wrote books on Bill Gates and on Rupert Murdoch and rode her book tour right in there to appear with Katie and Matt.

A book tour sounds glamorous to me who has never been on one. I imagine I’d love the attention and all the stimulating questions, but Wendy says a book tour is a pain. Apparently answering the same questions all day for weeks gets a little grating. On the plus side, they can never take the Today Show away from her.

On a trip to New York several years ago I spent an hour on the plaza at Rockefeller Center watching the show unfold. I watched Katie, Matt and Al out on the plaza chatting. I could look right through the window and see right where the couch is where the interviews take place. I can just picture Wendy – or me – there. This knowledge has proved most useful in my subsequent viewing.

Celebrities must count on that couch, the makeup, the bright lights to make them look their best. They always look so pleased to be perched there awaiting their segment. Last year I saw a real Today Show celebrity shocker however. All morning they had been teasing an upcoming interview with Kevin Spacey, and when they came back from commercial, there he was on the plaza with them out in the elements, as if he was a visiting weatherman. Kevin Spacey is a Big Star and should have been on that couch. He seemed to agree and made a sad crack about being kept outside. I bet he won’t be back at Today very soon.

My second Today Show personality, Emily Kohl, would curl the hair of any parent, which is probably why her story made such a splash. She would remember me only as a basketball mom. I remember her as the scrappy little guard who year after year watched every other girl grow taller and then taller yet. In response, she grew scrappier and scrappier. And that would be where my awareness of Emily would end if not for one post-college venture.

Two years out of college, six years after she had last seen Emily, my daughter received an email. Emily was raising money so that she and a friend could buy a rowboat to take them across the Atlantic Ocean. This is a super fortified industrial strength rowboat that costs upwards of $50,000 if I remember right, a bit over the budget of a couple of post-college young women.

It turns out that there are enough people driven to cross the Atlantic in a rowboat to fill up an entire race, complete with radar, communications equipment and people on shore to monitor progress. Remember when we used to fear that we were raising little girls to be timid weaklings? Cross that one off the list.

They raised the money, launched the boat, and were making decent time 46 days into the race when they were swamped by a 20 foot rogue wave. The boat turned over, water rose inside the cabin and Emily’s foot got entangled. She managed to free herself and pull out two life jackets and a sleeping bag. Despite all their grit and confidence, they couldn’t right it and had to withstand the elements and hold on for dear life.

That’s when the people on shore proved their mettle, summoning a nearby ship filled with young students in a classroom-at-sea project who sped over and picked them up – seventeen hours later.

The fact that these plucky young women had drifted all night, perched on their upside down boat in 10 foot swells and 30 knot winds, wondering when (or if) help would arrive appealed to the morning news cycle. The fact that the rescue ship shot video of their predicament and their relief at being rescued didn’t hurt. There was even a subplot: What did the family go through waiting for news? As a matter of luck or grace, Emily’s parents had been traveling and heard nothing of her peril until it was over.

So there was Emily and her rescue on the Today Show while Katie Couric, a mother herself, shook her head in alarm. Some days later, when they could make it to New York, both girls sat on that couch, getting far more attention than Kevin Spacey.
In case you breathed a sigh of relief as I did and figured that such a bullet-dodger of an experience would be a once in a lifetime thing, I need to tell you that a couple of years later they did it again and completed the race without a hitch, for which they received much less notice.

I get a boost from Emily’s story, something about embracing the thrill of riding the waves instead of huddling in fear on the shore like the rest of us. If I hear that she is trying it again, I’ll probably send another check, shake my head and hope that it comes out okay, and that her parents have another trip they can go on. And hope that my own daughter sticks with kayaking.

CBH 04/09

Freefall

Carolyn B Healy

I was the only kid in Chicago who had never been to Riverview. It wasn’t for lack of interest, as I’d been to Kiddieland over and over and was a real fan. It was a matter of logistics. In that era before expressways, when we’d set out for the occasional visit to the relatives in Oak Park, it took forever. And forever in a 1949 Ford, with no air conditioning of course, was no picnic. And Riverview was all the way on the North Side. For all I knew that would take more than forever.

Finally, early in high school came my big chance. My best friend Leslie and I got to go. I remember that. Whether it was it a school trip, or a YMCA outing, or somebody’s brave mom who drove us there and then disappeared for a few hours I can’t tell you.

We entered the gate and trailed from ride to ride, from The Bobs to Aladdin’s Castle, doing whatever we wanted. I felt liberated, grown up, finally part of the larger world. It was delicious.

My traumatic memory begins in the line for the parachute ride, Pair-o-Chutes. Sticky from cotton candy, head spinning from the rides and the lack of supervision, I looked up. Far far above me loomed the top of the giant tower with two billowing parachutes flapping in the wind. A metal cage dangled and swung from side to side. It was filled with children. They were probably wide-eyed but they were way too far away for me to see.

The machinery clanged, the cage fell and the parachute filled with air. I couldn’t see those children’s eyes, but suddenly I sure could hear their voices – their terrified screams pierced my ears and opened my brain to the fact that I was waiting in line to do the very same thing. What was I doing here?

You could not call me a brave child, but I had been trying to change that. Every day of elementary school I’d had to pass a yard ruled by a giant gray and black barking dog, one of those muscular mountain types, who would growl at me over the fence. Luckily, the fence was made of just as giant boulders and I believed that he probably couldn’t get to me. In eighth grade, I decided that things had to change. Instead of cowering in fear and scurrying by, I would stride by, head held high and show that beast that I wasn’t scared of him. Not at all. At the same time I felt that the owners should be ashamed of themselves, terrorizing young children just trying to get to school.

Also, even though I was beside myself with panic whenever I had to go to the dentist, I kept quiet and worked on developing a steely determination to get through it with dignity. Thank God it was only twice a year. If I had a cavity and had to come back sooner, I was wracked with guilt, shame and self-recrimination over this dental failure, not to mention beset by the familiar panic. But I made it through every time and forgot about dentistry until about a week before the next checkup.

So here I was – at Riverview, in line, marching toward certain death, feeling just terrible that my mother would have to face life without me. In my final moments, how would I handle this situation, given my commitment not to chicken out of things? I would have to be brave. I could do it.

On the other hand, how had I let this happen? Part of keeping yourself safe is preventing unnecessary danger, and I’d walked right into this one. My fear told me that this is the kind of thing other people can do but you can’t.

In fact, other people even want to do this. I eyed Leslie to look for signs of weakness. She looked up too at the screaming children. And laughed. She would be no help. And since I couldn’t bear to out myself as a coward in front of her, no one else could help me either.

The line inched forward and carried me slowly to my fate. I remember laboring to keep up lighthearted chatter while my heart was beating wildly out of my chest like in a cartoon.
Maybe I’d be struck with a sudden illness. Maybe I could excuse myself to go to the bathroom and dawdle my way back and, oh well, miss the whole thing. But Leslie was too good a friend. She would loyally step out of line and wait for me. Doggone her anyway.

Or maybe there’d be a power outage, a lightning strike, or…or…. I ran out of ideas. It was going to happen. We reached the front of the line. The apparatus stopped and the gate flew open. The last occupants, faces glowing with excitement from their fall, were unstrapped and ran toward the exit stairs chattering excitedly.

We climbed in the soon-to-be-dangling basket and were secured in our seats by the bored attendant, who gave the signal with a big wave. We started up.

My terror suddenly broke apart. It was still there, but so was the entrancing and unfamiliar view, the shrinking waves from the crowd below, the silence broken only by the grinding gears. There was a bird. And white clouds against the bluest sky. And the tower which seemed to still be standing.

I looked up to watch our progress. We were almost to the top. Leslie wasn’t saying much either. Maybe she was just a little scared? I couldn’t ask.

We hit the top and the terror kicked in full force. The bottom dropped out and we were in freefall, hurtling toward the sidewalk. What if we didn’t stop?

But we did. The parachute filled with air, the gears caught, and I was …disappointed? At the end, it was not so scary, like going down in an open-air elevator. We hit bottom and clanged into place. It was over. I had lived. Despite the anticlimactic end, I nearly melted into a puddle once my feet hit blessed earth.

The rewards were rich. My thrill came not from the adrenaline rush while falling, but from the post-landing reconfiguration of my identity. I was a person who could do a thing like that after all. I could be terrified, cope with it, and live. I was a survivor. I was brave even. My fear was present and I overcame it. Again. How about that?

But then came the real kicker. It soon hit me that, to be the person I wanted to be, I would need to do this again and again. In the years since I have reenacted my parachute ride repeatedly. Each time, from parasailing off the Florida coast, to the times I’ve stuck my neck out professionally, to the day my three-year-old had heart surgery, I have found that the measure of my initial fear and dread is about equivalent to the pride and relief after completion.

Good thing I got to Riverview that day. It closed soon after and I might have been left to cower and avoid my way through life. I might have learned this lesson in another way, who knows, but certainly not so quickly or so well. What you learn in freefall sticks with you like nothing else.

CBH 03/09

A Chill in Cuba

Carolyn B Healy

The scene -
Hotel lobby, Havana

• A polished wooden bar ringed with rattan stools, bathed in soft light

• Polished mosaic tables arranged at the base of a spectacular marble staircase; a wide balcony overlooks the entire lobby

• Potted tropical plants sit everywhere

• A guitar player roams from table to table

The main characters -
Five American travelers:

• My husband David and me who can best be described as touristy looking Midwesterners

• Our two new trip friends, Sue, a gentle 70 year-old former bank CFO who looks about 45 and her wisecracking friend Linda, who could also pass for 10 or 20 years younger than she is

• Matt, late 20’s, the baby of our humanitarian tour group, as all the other travelers are 30 to 50 years his senior. His gelled hair and dark blue eyes make him stand out from the other young people in the lobby, as does his formal Southern gentleman manner.

The supporting cast:

• An amiable bartender who shows off a bit in the production of his drinks and engages customers in pleasant banter, just like your local bartender at home

• A cranky expressionless waitress upon whom it seems lost that she has one of the best jobs in Cuba, in that she works in a ritzy spot where she can receive tips in CUC’s, the dollar-like currency usually reserved for foreigners

• A fluid assortment of other patrons, all Europeans and Canadians, sampling cigars and local drinks

Tipoff that you are in Havana:

• Solemn business-suited guards stand at various stations on the balcony, surveying the scene. Every half hour they rotate.

• At first we figure that they are watching us. We eventually learn that we are of little interest. They really watch their fellow Cubans, with good reason. With the black market about the only part of the economy that’s thriving, just about every commodity, from toilet paper to bathrobes to eggs, apparently tries to walk out the back door.

• That, and the housekeeping staff being dressed in French maid outfits. They don’t even have those in France anymore from what I’ve seen. Although this hotel started out as a joint venture with the Dutch, and they may know better than I. Actually, it was that until the Dutch bailed out, one year in, finding the flow of items out the back door untenable when it came to making a profit, kind of an unfamiliar concept in Cuba. So Cuba’s former colonial oppressor Spain came through to take over for the Dutch, suggesting that they either have greater risk tolerance or a tougher protocol to keep an eye on the goods.

Opening scene:

David and I enter the lobby, back from an evening stroll through Parque Central, a large tree-lined square across the street. Sue and Linda wave us over to their table where they enjoy Mulatas, Cuban specialty drinks personally prepared by our featured bartender. They launch into stories about the friend of a friend who they spent the afternoon with, an American woman married to a Cuban musician. We try to get the attention of the surly waitress who stares at a boisterous group of German tourists.

Lurching past the table comes young Matt, apparently overserved again as he had been at the opening night welcome party. He slows, raises a hand in greeting and lands in our empty chair. It is unclear whether that was his intention or the result of impaired balance.
“Would you like to join us?” Sue asks, a little late.

He looks from right to left, as fast as his depressed central nervous system can manage, and finds no way out. “Sure, I’ll have a drink with you. What’re ya having?” he asked, eyeing the Mulatas.

He snaps his fingers in the air and the snappish waitress appears at his elbow. “We’ll have a round of…these,” he said lifting Sue’s drink as an example, “Honey.” Eager to see how she would show her displeasure, we all turn in time to see her smile warmly at him.

Matt, incapable of multitasking at the moment, pauses in order to concentrate on her departing rump. We watch him watch her until she reaches the bar.

The story unfolds:

“So Matt,” Linda says, “How is it that you are here? Are those people we saw you with your parents?

In the next 20 minutes we learn that

• He was not related to the couple. “We are not traveling together. We are just on the same trip.” What?

• They did have a connection.”We are both pilots.” Pause for effect. “He is my friend.” The man in question was a handsome fast-moving fellow who didn’t say much, but seemed like a solid citizen. Matt acknowledged that he and his wife had taken him under their wing, leaving us to wonder why he needed that protection.

• Every night he trolled Cuban night spots until 4am. “It makes it a bitch to make the bus,” which left every morning at 8 to transport us to the day’s activities.

• He was reluctant to say how he made his living except that it involved his plane and the Caribbean. “Well, this and that. I couldn’t go to a job in a suit. I’d have to shoot myself.” He did look spiffy in a crisp Hawaiian shirt and pleated khakis straight out of wardrobe for Miami Vice.

• His parents had disappointed him in a major way. “Well, my mom. Let’s just say she’s out of my life. And my dad. They went to New York. I’m an orphan.” That sent my writer’s imagination flipping through death, divorce, suicide, abuse – wait, I think that’s my therapist’s imagination. He waved off further questions.

• He was enraptured with the Cuban people, the ones he was meeting in his nightly forays. “You meet such fabulous people out there. You have to get out of here to do it. They don’t let them in here you know.” We did know that Raul, having taken over from Fidel some months before, had quickly changed the policy that allowed no Cubans in hotels unless they worked there. Fidel’s reasoning: Why let people limping along on ration cards see how other people live, unless they work there and benefit from it; not to mention the prostitution thing. Raul’s: What the heck? Let them live a little. Besides, they can’t afford it. The Cuban pesos they get paid in don’t spend there.

His popularity with the Cubans he was meeting – was it his personality, looks, CUC’s? Was he being courted for what he would be willing to do? He invited David to accompany him that night. He declined, partly because it was past his bedtime, partly out of good radar for trouble.

Matt made every effort to turn on the charm, but the attempt fell flat except for his effect on the waitress. He employed the disorienting lack of eye contact that makes you look over your shoulder to see what he’s really looking at – and find that there’s nothing there. Again, this raised the question of whether this was intentional or a temporary alcohol-induced inability to focus.

The conversation stayed all about him, with our complicity, each of us throwing in leading questions to keep him going, hoping we’d hit a vein of authenticity if we dug hard enough.
I began to develop a chill, the same chill I’ve felt when I’ve met people over the years, clients and others, who consider harm to others or themselves an acceptable risk if it allows them to get what they want – thrills, revenge, financial gain, whatever. That chill comes from being in the presence of a person who might do anything because he is missing a part or two.

What was he up to? Gun-running, drugs, unauthorized immigration, whatever he was told? Or was it just posing, an attempt to inflate an underdeveloped self?

He rose, attempting gallantry, “It’s been a pleasure…”

We let him go and resumed our talk about what Sue and Linda had learned in their afternoon trip to real Havana.

A few minutes later, we noticed him back at the bar, a new drink and giant cigar in hand, leaning over two blonde tourists, a hand on each of their shoulders.

“Bond,” I said, “James Bond.” We called him James Junior after that, or Junior for short. We shared our speculations about his actual business and motives, and concluded that we were just glad he wasn’t our kid, drifting untethered in a sea of potential trouble.

As Matt stooped lower to talk more intimately into the girls’ faces, David said, “I’ll tell you this – he’s not going to be able to consummate whatever he starts tonight. Guaranteed.” Our pals whooped, a little scandalized, and we retreated back into discussion of the packages of clothespins their friend had requested and how she planned to barter them for other rarities like eggs and milk. With one of the front desk receptionists she had befriended among others.
We broke up after a nightcap and retreated to our luxurious rooms with marble and bathrobes and a view of the slums, and continued to try to make sense of Cuba, where people seemed so like us and the world they lived in so different. And wondered about Matt’s world, where with any luck, we would never have to visit again.

CBH 02/09

You Can't Always Get What You Want

Carolyn B Healy

My high school was one of the best in the Chicago Public School system – academically superior, racially stable, with a host of after-school activities. A substantial percentage of students went on to college and success. It had the customary social divisions for the time: the cool kids, the hoody kids and the nerds, even though that word was not in use yet. Everyone pretty much knew where they belonged, but our school had a particularly vivid way of drawing the distinctions, at least for the white kids.

The black kids must have had their own stratification, but in our self-involvement, we got only a glimpse. Within our honors classes, there was a bit of a range from the ultrastudious twins, to the hardworking activity jock who ran the yearbook, to the glamorous girl who belted out the theme from Goldfinger at the talent show. We were school-friends, but never met outside of school, and never wondered why.

My drama played out on the border between the cool kids and everyone else. There were three sororities that exercised considerable power over the social structure not to mention our own fragile self-definitions. The first was for the upper crust girls. Prosperous, attractive, socially adept, they occupied the top rung of the social ladder, and no surprise, included the cheerleaders, the true elite. We’ll call them Group A, though they had a fancy three-Greek-letter name.

Group B was at the other extreme, the girls who were tougher, more likely to come from blue collar families, less concerned with the social niceties, less active in school activities or currying favor with teachers. The hoody girls.

Group C was in the middle, the regular girls, nice, often smart, busy with activities. I aspired to Group C.

On one level I knew better. I objected in principle to the concept of excluding girls based on some secret and specious measurement of their adequacy. But I was so entranced by the prospect of converting my outsider status (no father, no siblings) to become one who belonged, I abandoned my principles and went through rush, along with nearly all my friends.
The separation began right there. The nice plain girl with the white blouse and circle pin didn’t even try. And the quiet and socially awkward girl who sat near me in class stayed home too. I barely noticed. It was almost my birthday and I knew what I wanted this year. My new life was about to begin.

I remember nothing about the rush parties, but I think they involved punch and cookies and favors. But I remember bid night perfectly. From my second floor apartment, sitting at my desk overlooking the intersection of 111th Street and Hoyne, I watched with excitement for the Group C car to pull up and bring me my invitation to join. The minutes ticked by.

When I saw the car approach, and then go whizzing on by, I realized that my big chance had vanished in their dust. I think I got on the phone with my best friend who was also awaiting her fate, but I couldn’t swear to it. I might have been mute with shame.

By the end of the night, it was clear that she was without a bid too. It seemed less tragic that way and we soon rose to the occasion, declaring ourselves GDIs – God Damned Independents. I think we even made up GDI sweatshirts. It was only spring of sophomore year after all, and we had to construct some sort of social identity that would see us through the coming three years.
All our friends pledged Group C and were soon wearing pledge ribbons, attending meetings and receiving orders to bake chocolate chip cookies and deliver them to the house of this or that “active.” With the cookies and other demands, it started to dawn on me that I might not have been very well suited to pledgehood anyway. I had better things to do than bake other people cookies, didn’t I?

The only friend who deviated joined Group B, the one her sister belonged to. She and I always walked to school together, so I saw her toting her cookie orders and watched her sister’s friend ordering her around. She didn’t seem to be having that much fun.

Two weeks later another friend, a successful Group C pledge, invited me over for Saturday night. She said that she invited some other girls too. Just what I needed, I thought, a respite from the social anguish of the past days. I got dropped off, walked into her living room, and was engulfed by 12 girls yelling Happy Birthday. They gave me a huge homemade card and a cake. And the most therapeutic surprise I’ve ever had.

We had such fun that we decided to meet again and again for what we came to call hen parties. We named ourselves The Crew and drank Diet Rite, ate shortbread cookies and had more fun than anyone.

The months went by, and rush season came around again. I put my hat in the ring again, generously providing Group C the opportunity to correct their mistake. Once again, they declined.

I did get visits that bid night from the other two. I sensed that Group A was quite certain that I would gratefully take them up on it. And that Group B was motivated by respect for my walking-to-school friend who must have urged them to include me. It must have been that, because we all knew that I was a goody-two-shoes who couldn’t begin to keep up with the hoody girls.

What did I do? The most contrary thing I could. I turned down Group A, explaining that I didn’t feel I would fit in, silently enjoying their disbelief. I accepted Group B in thanks to my friend and their willingness to accept an unusual candidate. I dropped out within a week, on the eve of my first cookie order. She understood.

By then, half of my Crew friends had grown weary of the indignities they’d suffered as pledges, and the painful process of rush. One dropped out of Group C, others barely attended their meetings, and one ended up president. We each found our own way.

In the gifts where you least expect them department, The Crew has lived on to be a sustaining force in my life ever since that 15th year birthday party. We’re meeting at Lake Tahoe this summer, and will continue until we conk out for good. I sure didn’t get what I wanted, but ended up with so much more than I imagined.

CBH 01/09