HITTING MY POLITICAL BOTTOM

THEME: CHEAP THRILLS
The only thrill worthwhile is the one that comes from making something out of yourself. ~ William Feather

Hello. My name is Carolyn and I am a recovering political arguer. To qualify as recovering, I had to prepare a searching and fearless inventory of my p.a. past. Let me share the highlights:

At age 8, I canvassed the neighborhood with my mother for the Republican candidate for mayor of Chicago. His name was Bob Merriam. He was an author and reformer, a war veteran with a Bronze Star. The Democratic candidate, slated for the first time, was Richard J. Daley the Original. It is said that Merriam actually had a chance. Imagine what Chicago might be like by now if he had won. That day, people were either polite or not at home, and I got ice cream on the way back. I rather enjoyed it.

In college, I would entertain myself at parties poking at the politics of certain boyfriends of certain friends. But only if they started it. It was funny, mostly, a parlor game. It was a cheap thrill to have the power to get someone else so worked up. I was, of course, right. 

Also in college, early in my budding relationship with my eventual husband, I was invited to dinner at the home of his aunt and his uncle, a WW II Marine. I’m not sure who started it, but by the time he had set me straight, I was in tears over the stroganoff. Lesson learned: politics can hurt.

In early adulthood, I was busy. We were no longer at war, nobody was getting drafted. Who had time to dither over politics?

Then came the Clinton administration, which put me through a lot. By the end of it I was of several minds. I was indignant that Hillary had been so pilloried.  And disgusted with the weasely baseness of Bill’s sexual conduct with a girl close to the age of his own daughter for pity’s sake, and with his refusal to own up. At the same time I was impressed that he managed to dismantle some of the dependence-inducing welfare system without stripping the entire safety net, and that he pulled off a balanced budget on his way out.

To some people he was a disappointment. To others, he was the worst creature to ever walk the earth. It was then I noticed that people were suddenly delivering their opinions at the top of their lungs.

The Bush years only magnified the tension, and that polarizing trend really took off. There were only good guys and bad guys, and you were one or the other. I noticed that I didn’t like the attitude of the people I mainly agreed with any better than the ones I didn’t. Everybody was nasty.

Then the TV pundits came into their own, and built their little kingdoms of the air by attacking anyone who they could catch on tape, whether office-holder, candidate, spouse, minister, hanger-on, whoever. Then the pundits started in on each other, convincing journalists that what they said was news.

By the way, do you know what those pundits make per year from their fear-mongering and hate speech? Why, it’s an…..

No wait. I’m in recovery. I really am.  Hold on. Deep breath….Another…Okay,  I’m better now.

As I was saying, the byproduct of the ascendance of the pundits was that once we had watched them go at it for a time, we started in on each other. But this was no parlor game. This was for blood.

That’s when I began to retreat in earnest. I was sick to death of having to defend my beliefs, as if I’d somehow volunteered for the debate team and every day was a meet.

And now, I have retreated entirely. Because now I see clearly that in this climate, once anybody gets started, they can’t stop. Their positions migrate to the far ends of the spectrum, and the gulf opens even wider. Once the name-calling starts, I want to be in the car, speeding off.

When the political phone calls started up again this week – I got three in one day – to herald the opening of our upcoming 18-month descent into another presidential campaign, I decided to opt out from each one.

“Please take me off your calling list,” I say.

“But why?” they sputter, as if it’s a surprise that one of their targets has had enough. “I’m not going to change my mind,” I answer.

 They hesitate, deciding whether to try to lure me back or move on. Before they can, I wish them well and hang up. It’s very liberating.

But I must be rigorously honest in my recovery, and must admit there is more to it than that. I also don’t want to participate in these exchanges because I don’t have to. We’re supposed to be free to disagree.

Don’t misunderstand. I vote. I care. I’m not shirking my civic responsibilities. I’m just abstaining from the conversation. I have never seen a political argument result in new learning or a changed position anyway. Ever.

I voted this week in a minor local election. Afterwards, I was chased to the parking lot by a middle-aged woman whose accent told me that she’d come here from halfway around the world.

“Can you help me?” she said. “I can’t tell which of the candidates are from which party.”

I told her it was a local school board election, and candidates didn’t run on a party ticket.

By that time, her husband joined us. He declared their party affiliation, and said, “So you see, we don’t want to vote for the enemy.”

Here they’d gone to all the trouble of finding a new country and becoming citizens of it, and they couldn’t vote without suspecting that their enemy was lurking. Did we instill that in them, or was that a vestige of what they’d left behind in their old country?

I kept to my pledge. “There are no parties for this,” I repeated.

“Who did you vote for?” she demanded.

“That’s private,” I said. “Besides, no one is supposed to try to influence someone else’s vote this close to the polling place. It’s a law.”

They backed away, exasperated, looking for someone else to ask. They were disappointed in me. But I wasn’t. I did have a preference in that election, but there’s a reason why voting booths have curtains.

I’m sure I’ll encounter temptation in the next 18 months, but I plan to maintain my silence. One day at a time. 

  

 CBH - 04/11

RUMORS OF ALICE SPRINGS

THEME: RUMORS
Rumors generally grow deformed as they travel. ~ Edward Counsel

We arrived in Alice Springs on a jet plane. The airport was a modest affair with one building and a few luggage carts. We could barely breathe in the heat as we walked from the terminal to our bus. On the way to the hotel, our tour guide Mark lavished praise on us, for being the kind of travelers who would brave the Outback, not just luxuriate in the coastal cities of Australia.

          All we could see outside the window was red sandy soil and scrub brush, and the occasional scruffy tree. The sky loomed large above us. It was bright blue, speckled with filmy clouds, and vast.

All we could think was the hotel must have air conditioning, right?

          We reached the outskirts of town, expecting a dirt track of a frontier town, a simple crossroads in the Outback. What we saw instead was KFC, McDonalds, Target, T-shirt shops, and two indoor malls with food courts. What? It looked like a mini-U.S.

As we learned in the next few days, what we saw was a far cry from the beginnings of Alice Springs. We heard the tale of the early European settlers who set out expecting to work their civilizing magic on the primitive Outback. In the mid 1800s they planned to string it with telegraph lines and railroad tracks, and shorten the time it took for messages and goods to travel from Melbourne in the south all the way to Darwin in the north, eventually to England, and back. It turns out that they made some unfortunate assumptions, and that the Outback tamed them instead.

          A set of early explorers found an area in the middle of the country surprisingly lush, and fed by an apparent underground spring. It was determined that this would be a fine place to locate the work teams that would build the telegraph line. Too bad that those explorers had visited briefly on the wettest day of all time, and that the spring had not been a spring but a puddle that was long gone by the time the settlers showed up.

I tried to imagine the settlers who finally arrived and found only scrub and red sand and no water, no spring.  They must have looked at the same giant blue sky, felt the searing sun on their skin, and wondered what they’d gotten themselves into. Was it really worth risking your life in this harsh climate so that other people could get their messages around faster? Three weeks, three months, really what’s the difference?

Alice might have said the same. She was the wife of an early stationmaster, and naming the settlement after her was a customary courtesy. Even without a telegraph, she’d apparently heard rumors of the hardship in the bush. She never even came to visit, they say, and may have even found her way back to England where the lifestyle was more to her liking. The name stuck even if she didn’t.

The settlers were planning to impose their ways on the locale, but the task was greater than they imagined. They were invading an ecosystem that had evolved over thousands of years, made up of the hardiest of species. Plants that asked little from their surroundings, an odd assortment of animals, and the short dark-skinned aboriginal people all managed to survive here. Darwin would have had a field day studying how they managed.

In this world, the people didn’t wear clothes. Much of the animal life was hidden under the surface of the ground, like the four-foot long slugs that were a staple of the diet. That dried-out looking vegetation yielded the necessary amount of moisture, if you knew how to get it out. And those people had developed the right skin tone and habits to survive.

The aboriginal people were judged by the colonists, in the habit of colonists everywhere, to be uneducated savages, yet they had language, art, music, social structure, and a belief system that was expressed in intricate and carefully guarded ceremonies. They’d had 50,000 years to develop what they needed to live out here, and it didn’t include telegraphs and trains.

The day we visited the original site of Alice Springs, it was only 110 degrees. Five buildings sat facing each other, each still equipped with enough artifacts to reveal its use. The office looked like the sheriff’s office in every U.S. Western you saw on TV growing up – wooden desk, small window, and the tools of the trade. In the Westerns, it was a couple of jail cells, here a wall of first generation telegraph equipment. A wagon sat in the blinding sun in front of the stable. The stationmaster’s house, plain but for the chintz curtains, looked livable enough.

A framed picture captured the culture clash. The stationmaster stands proudly, shaking hands with a visitor dressed in a jacket and tie. To the side stands an aboriginal man dressed in the starched white uniform of a house servant. He looks absurdly out of context, his eyes fixed past the camera, maybe gazing out the window at the land he belonged on. There isn’t much said about this clash. You have to dig a little to find stories of the Europeans and the aboriginal people massacring each other, since they don’t fit the usual tourist-friendly narrative, but they exist. I’m sure there were also many heart-warming stories of attempts at mutual understanding, but in the end it is clear who came out on top. Masters at adaptability, the aboriginal people seem adept at resisting the influences of the dominant culture to this day.

It wasn’t only the aboriginal people who impeded the progress the colonists had in mind. In addition to the English officials, Australia was mainly settled by European outliers.  Contrary to the dominant myth, the country was not a penal colony peopled by actual hard-nosed criminals. Instead, it received the results of a lower middle class purge that cleared out an unproductive layer of English society. Their crimes were largely petty crimes, not violent ones. Shipped halfway across the world and lacking the funds to return, they settled in and made the best of it. Understandably, they doubted very much that governmental edicts were designed to benefit them.

Therefore, when it was decreed that a national rail system would be built to enhance transportation of goods throughout the country, each of the five regions dug in. They each chose a different gauge for their railway that would extend only to the regional border. When they were done there was a country three-quarters the size of the U.S., crisscrossed with railroad tracks that could not connect with one another.  You can just hear them chuckling under their breath, “Okay Mate, there’s your railroad. Happy now?”

So, the colonists got what they wanted. Aboriginal people wear clothes now, though there is still plenty of space between them and the dominant culture. The telegraph line got completed, and they had their new link to the world.  A national railway was eventually constructed to supplant the five regional ones.

The yearning for connection continues. Internet cafes dot every city. Our great communicator Oprah visited as one of her final acts before her decommissioning, and travel reservations are up 30%.

Our last day in Alice Springs revealed the reason for the downtown concentration of fast food and retail giants. It is whispered that outside of town sits a joint secret defense base – secret only to incurious tourists, I think  – where “scientists” (read “spies”?) monitor activities in the skies. How do you keep 2000 Americans happy in the middle of the Outback? You do the same things the colonists tried to do – provide the comforts of home.  Which these days happily includes air conditioning.

Walking back to our hotel from town, we crossed a broad bridge that spanned a dry riverbed, the red sandy soil dotted with spiny light green bushes and the occasional tree. We heard voices in the dusk and looked to see several groups of 8 or 10 or 12 aboriginal people sitting in a circle.  Dressed in bright colors, some of them wearing U.S. sports jerseys, they sat as if planted in the soil.

Sometimes one group would call to another, conserving the energy it would take to walk all the way in between. They were engaged with one another, and seemed oblivious to the passing tourists. We felt that we were intruding, and that our curiosity put them on display when they were just following their longtime daily habits. But really, how could we look away?

Our guide told us later that evening that seeing such a different and ancient way of life was part of the privilege of visiting the Outback. Just like we couldn’t overlook the urges of the colonists, and of the forced immigrants, we had to consider those of the people who had been there all along. What rumors must have spread among them when the pale visitors with their great plans arrived? And more recently, when the construction of a giant base is begun, or a KFC arrives? We can only guess.

CBH - 03/11

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

THEME: FIGHTS
It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.
~ Mark Twain

As soon as we landed in Christchurch, New Zealand our group of 44 piled into a luxury bus equipped with soft seats in a flashy fabric and a bathroom. We met our driver Malcolm, a strapping blonde gent who over the next week was to narrate our way across his country. You could quickly see that Malcolm was not a chatterbox, but one of those folks who was worth listening to when he spoke.

          It was January 22, 2011. He loaded our bags and we headed out of the airport on the exit lane. As he approached the traffic circle that would lead us to town, there was a loud clunk and we stopped dead. He shifted, and tried and this and that, but there we sat.  His jaw twitched, he traded a couple of quiet comments with Mark, our cheerful guide, and got on the phone.

          In ten minutes, a new bus pulled up and all able-bodied passengers were recruited to shift the bags into our new bus. It was a lovely example of patience by all concerned. We were on our way in about 20 minutes, start to finish. We didn’t think of our breakdown as an omen.

He drove us through the outskirts, neighborhoods of tidy small stone and frame houses divided by brick fences, each shielding a garden bursting with veggies and blooms. It was summer there so we saw the best of the vegetation, we were told. It felt very English.

When we reached the downtown, he pointed out the contrast between old buildings – old to them is the late 1800s – and stark modern structures that look like they snuck into all the spaces between the old ones. Some buildings had tarps over their top floors and were currently not occupied. One lot had a considerable pile of concrete blocks and slabs. We were told that a building had recently been removed from the site. The streets were busy with traffic and pedestrians. This was the central business district, Malcolm he said, in the middle of a workday.

          He explained the damaged buildings and the rubble. On September 4, 2010 a 7.1 earthquake had hit Christchurch. While there had been extensive damage, most buildings were still in place. It had struck on a Sunday morning when the area was not crowded, and there was no loss of life. A 7.1 earthquake and no one was killed? Amazing. They had dodged a bullet there.

          You can’t be in New Zealand for long before you hear about two things – volcanoes and earthquakes. The country sits on top of plates and faults and amid volcanoes, defunct and active. It is why their country is so mountainous and therefore so gorgeous, and why their lakes are the brilliant aqua color that makes the photographs look as if they’ve been doctored, from the volcanic minerals washed down from the mountains with their rains.

          That very morning, Malcolm told us, there had been a 4.1 aftershock from that September earthquake, that shook things up for a few moments. If you live here, he said, you have to get used to the frequent aftershocks. With a tourist’s detachment, I thought, “Darn. I would have liked to see what that was like.” We wondered at the seemingly intact city – how could it survive such a strong quake and look this good?

          We passed by a cathedral and were told that visitors could climb all the way to the top of the tower for a birdseye view of the city. We stopped for a traffic light nearby, in front of a seven-story building with a giant sign that said CTV, the Canterbury TV network. I peered into the windows at people at work inside. We’d barely looked at TV on the trip and it reminded me to tune in to see what it was like.  

On another block, a striking modern house made up of poured concrete and windows was sandwiched in between a gray office building and a church. A dog looked out the window at us. None of the buildings were very tall it seemed. I’d have to ask if that was due to zoning, or earthquake threat, or both.

As we took the turn toward our hotel, we circled a giant stretch of parkland that included a golf course and multiple athletic fields. Banners announced a regional meet for disabled athletes. The signup table was a mob scene.

We passed by the hospital. A series of mismatched additions ringed the original old buildings. Even without the signs, it would be easily recognizable as a hospital. It was late afternoon, and nurses in scrubs hurried by on their way home,  outpatients waited for the bus, an ambulance pulled in.  This was nothing like the quiet orderliness of the suburbs.

At the hotel we checked in at the same time as a group of disabled athletes and watched as they sorted out their various types of wheelchairs, recumbent bikes and other equipment. We stepped back to get our wheeled suitcases out of their way.

Later that night, I read in the local paper about tussles between local officials and others who felt that bureaucratic delays had stood in the way of the repair of damaged buildings. Local politics, I thought, were the same everywhere, citizens always fighting about something. Tradesmen who had traveled to Christchurch hoping to help with the rebuilding were quoted in the article as being ready to leave in frustration because of the delays. I put away the paper and thought nothing more of it, until I went through a museum exhibit a few days later that included a simulation of an earthquake. Twelve of us entered a replica of a small house and the attendant closed the door behind us. It was set up with all kinds of familiar items, couches, tables, vases, picture frames, a TV set, all anchored down. The floor started to shake, the walls shifted, the floor tipped, and I lost my desire to experience an aftershock.

With 14,000 earthquakes a year, New Zealand has to be equipped for the 10% or so that may result in damage and possibly compromised buildings. After a quake, local engineers peruse each affected building and tag it green (okay), yellow (needs some reinforcement), or red (cannot be used without major structural work). This applied to Christchurch too.

During the whole trip, there was a hint of danger in the air. In the Australian outback we were regaled with stories of how well the Aboriginal people had learned over the centuries to withstand the harsh conditions, while newcomers, from the early Europeans to current travelers, repeatedly underestimated the heat, the dryness, the distances and ended up sprinkling their bones across the land.

And during our visit to the Great Barrier Reef, snorkelers had to wear special suits to fend off painful jellyfish contact.  We learned too that Australia has the greatest number of lethal creatures on earth. And since the Aussies drive on the left, every time you stepped off a curb you had to calculate which direction the speeding cars you might walk out in front of were coming from.

Before we arrived, the Queensland region of Australia had been hit by massive flooding. While we were still on the trip, but had moved on to New Zealand, Yasi, a Katrina-sized cyclone, hit the same area. Towns were severely damaged and the flooding resumed.  

For the rest of the trip, we watched TV in earnest, the news reports bouncing between protests in Egypt and weather in Queensland. Maybe the workers in the Christchurch TV office building were working on those stories. We didn’t think of ourselves, or them, being at risk. The town survived the big one, so what could an aftershock do?

We returned home with pictures to download and stories to tell and jet lag to overcome. Two weeks later, on February 22, 2011, Christchurch was hit with a 6.3 earthquake, midday on a work day. I found out about it on Facebook, from a relative’s post that his son, who was also traveling in New Zealand, was safe. I rushed to CNN and saw that many of the buildings we had seen were in ruins. The cathedral was the backdrop for every news report. Its steeple was down, the roof caved in. Only rescue workers were allowed inside, to see if any worshippers or tourists were trapped.

The priest, the mayor, terrified mothers searching for their children were interviewed. On the next report, the death toll was mounting from the initial 20. Two hundred were missing, then 300. It brought back the memory of September 11 in New York, with hope in the beginning that people would be rescued, saved by a desk, or a doorway. It soon became clear that only a few people would emerge from those ruins alive.

The third report showed a pancaked office building where the bulk of the missing were thought to be. It was the CTV building, that housed not only the network, but a foreign language school and other offices.

Those workers I spied on through my bus window, had they been out for lunch or in there with the flattened building coming down on them? The mother of one of them told a reporter that she kept calling her daughter’s cell phone, hoping that even if she could not answer it, a rescuer might hear it and know where to look for her.

After official analysis, it turned out that the February earthquake was really an aftershock from the September quake – unfinished business from the initial event that hadn’t seemed so bad. And that the buildings that came down this time had stood there damaged and waiting for disaster for months. It could have happened while I was riding by on the bus, while the nurses were walking home, or during a visitor tour of the cathedral. But it waited for lunchtime on a busy work day on what everyone assumed was just another normal day.

Those fights over buildings and repairs and delays weren’t just about politics or bureaucracy. They were about life and death. And unfinished business that was worth fighting about.

I’m haunted by the mother, calling her daughter again and again, not giving up hope until she had to. I wish she knew that another mother halfway across the world remembers her, and her daughter.  


CBH - 02/11

HEARING THE CHANT

THEME: PAYING ATTENTION
I think the one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention. ~ Diane Sawyer

          It was Saturday, February 4, 2011. The Auckland Hop On Hop Off bus was transporting us through our last full day in New Zealand. We had already seen the grass-covered cone of an extinct volcano that sits above the city. I snapped a photo of my daughter peering into the top, while we tried to imagine what it had looked like 60,000 years ago when it was spewing lava. We couldn’t.

          We’d also passed a suburban park with its own sheep, chomping grass within feet of the busy road. There are 4,000,000 people in New Zealand and 45,000,000 sheep. After a few days it seemed normal to see them anywhere.

          We climbed off at the museum which sits above the city in a huge park. We looked down on a cricket match which we couldn’t understand and climbed the steps to the museum which we figured we could. We’d heard about the Maori show there, an authentic depiction of the music and practices of the indigenous people of New Zealand.

          We were ushered into an elaborately carved meeting house, asked to remain silent for a welcoming ceremony, and then guided through a series of songs, games and dances. There was a cast of eight, 4 women and 4 men, dressed in traditional garments of muted patterns and ornamental beads. The men wore elaborate loincloths, the women grass skirts. The men held guitars, the women tucked poi balls at the waist. The oldest and most serious member of the troupe narrated.

          When the women danced, there was a hula-like sway; when the men did there was a fierceness, emphasized by their protruding eyes and extended tongues. Like all indigenous people, they’d had plenty of visitors that they wanted to scare off.

Midway through the program, the narrator introduced a series of chants.  In the absence of a written language, she told us, such chants had allowed the people to remember and carry on their traditional ceremonies.  The first one was peppy and harmonious, something that might have found its’ way into South Pacific. The second one was slow, sad and haunting. And long.

          The show moved to games done with hoops and sticks that were tossed back and forth with increasing speed while drums set the pace. This was for fun, she explained, but also to build the warriors’ speed and coordination so they would be ready for battle.

At the end of the program, she invited the audience members to approach any of the cast members with questions or comments. Most filed out with a nod and a thank you. I had to ask about that song. And I had to ask her, the serious one.

          “It sounded so sad,” I said, “who would sing it and when?”

          She looked up, maybe grateful that someone had heard.

          “It is a lament,” she said, “to be sung during the mourning ritual.”

          I knew it. I know grief when I hear it.

          “What is that like,” I wanted to know.

          “There is a gathering of all the people affected, that lasts for three days,” she explained.

          “And what happens?”

          “Crying. Crying by everyone. And singing of laments.”

          “And then?”

          “On the fourth day, there is no more crying. There is laughter, and stories, remembering the person’s ways.”

          “That must be quite a day.”

          She looked up and caught my eye. “Today is a very sad day. We lost an important person today, early this morning.”

          She told about a well-known Maori woman who had pioneered a movement in the arts community to preserve the traditional arts and ceremonies. There were two purposes, she said. One, to bring the old ways to the next generations, the other to teach Kiwis and visitors about the Maori culture. If we don’t, they would be lost, she said.

          This woman was so well-known, she explained, and so revered that, “for her, it will take a week,” since so many people were affected by her passing.

          “You will miss her,” I said.

          “Many will miss her,” she replied.

          We parted with a smile and a thank you, and she turned to see if she had other questioners. She did not. They had all filed out to discover the rest of the museum, or take in the sunshine outside. Summer was ending, and it was time to go back to school. Families hurried on to the next thing on their schedule, on a waning Saturday afternoon. We had to go catch the bus so that we didn’t miss the transportation museum where we could see a replica Auckland street from the early 1900s. And then on to the shopping street where we could grab one last gelato.

          I liked what I’d learned. Gather, cry, sing, then remember and appreciate. Worth remembering.

CBH - 01/11      

MY TV HALL OF FAME

ENDINGS 

 If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

~ Orson Wells

I have friends who claim that they do not watch TV. They are too high-minded to engage with the sludge of popular media. “I never turn it on,” they declare, patting themselves on the back. Liars. Lure them into a conversation and they turn out to be surprisingly well-informed about the latest plot twists in Brothers and Sisters or The Good Wife.

Me, I make no such claims. I’m still making up for lost time because I spent several of my formative years with no TV. In fact, I have created a personal TV Show Hall of Fame. Let me tell you about my top ten.

First off, in the days before the big RCA console conked out, every Saturday morning found me searching frantically for a green-tinged plastic sheet. It was supposed to be in the lamp table drawer, but sometimes migrated to the living room closet or the desk. I was in such a hurry because Windy Dink was starting, and how could I connect dots or decode messages without my magic drawing screen to slap on the TV screen? It was the birth of interactive media and I was there.

I left Winky Dink before it was cancelled, as I grew beyond such kiddie games. But it left me with a life lesson. I resolved not to reenact those harried searches anymore. Now I pretty much know where everything is at all times. Though some things still migrate.

Overlapping with the end of Winky Dink came my second entry, The Uncle Johnny Coons Show which I watched daily over my tomato soup and grilled cheese when I came home from school for lunch. My favorite part – the Crusader Rabbit cartoons. I even sent in for a decal of Johnny’s head that we ironed onto a dish towel, which made him an even bigger presence. I don’t remember it, but I’m told that he ended his relationship with all of us young viewers one day when he signed off as usual. Thinking that the mic was off, he then said, “Well, that ought to hold the little bastards.” It was a less open-minded age then, and he was through. Nowadays, he would get 10 million hits on YouTube and his own reality show.

My mother, trending toward adult pursuits, substituted As the World Turns which soon led to the addition of General Hospital. I count them #3, because all those lunches with all those people with all those endlessly repeating problems fascinated me. Early job training for my life as a therapist? Possibly.

Then came the dry spell. The RCA fizzled out. It could not be fixed and was carted off to TV heaven leaving a giant void in the living room and in my life. I was sidelined, and while TV advanced, all I had was bits and pieces I’d hear from my friends or glimpses I’d snatch at their houses.

My favorite night of the month was church committee meeting night when Mom would drop me off at the permissive household of the Summerhill family where I could watch 77 Sunset Strip and Johnny Carson. A dream come true, but they didn’t make my Hall of Fame due to my limited access.

My mother was steadfast and uninterested in restoring my TV life. She bought me an encyclopedia instead. In early adolescence I finally wheedled her into buying a flashy little red portable and I plugged back in, but I was forever behind.

It was summer, the first time I didn’t come home for the summer break from college. My roommates and I lived over a laundromat in campustown. We rushed home from our classes to gather in front of our little TV to watch Dark Shadows, my #4, the tale of vampire Barnaby Collins and his lady loves. It was thrilling, romantic, and very creepy. The end of summer brought that to a close, and it was time for me to prepare for adult life.

It was perfect timing. That Girl Ann Marie showed up in the person of Marlo Thomas to give me a glimpse of how a nice girl-career girl survives in New York City. It became my 5th entry. She had a good-humored boyfriend named Donald Hollister, and an easily-alarmed father looking out for her. My friends and I met in the housemother’s living room every week to watch and imagine our budding lives. Maybe we could have it all like Ann Marie – career, love, adventure.

The next transition was easy, to my #5, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, with Mary throwing her hat into the air in excitement. While her TV producer dreams came true, her romantic ones lagged behind. Her work life was a lot more complicated than Ann Marie’s, and she counted heavily on her friends to get her through. By the final episode when the whole news team sidled across the floor in a group hug to get a Kleenex, I knew what was in store for me. They pointed out what I’d already figured out, that life can change in a flash, so you’d better be ready.

Before I knew it I was a grownup with my own husband, in search of a show we could both agree on. I know for a fact that nobody but us remembers Petrocelli, because I’ve asked around, but it makes my #6. Barry Newman played a young lawyer who lived in a trailer out in the desert where he planned to build his dream house. It only lasted two seasons and he never got around to that house. Hmmm. Dreams imagined but not realized. Duly noted.

By then Lou Grant had come back to life in his own series as a newspaperman with two young assistants (Linda Kelsey as Billie and Robert Warden as Joe) who he ran all over town searching for the real story. I named them #7 because I so wanted to be on that team. And I could have used a mentor like Lou to toughen me up.

Once the kids showed up, we needed a family show. My kids tell me that they wanted to watch Golden Girls, but I said it was too risqué, but that doesn’t sound like me at all. I am very broad-minded and oppose censorship. Instead, we settled on Quantum Leap, which became #8. Dr. Sam Beckett, played by Scott Bakula, was trying to get back home from a time travel experiment gone wrong. Every week he would pop up in a new place, a new time and a new identity, always with a mission to set something right. At the end, he would leap and land is his new locale with an “Oh Boy!” Wow, what would it be like not to recognize yourself, or know anything about the people around you or what is expected of you? Good training for picking up cues and figuring things out on the fly maybe, but boy, would you want to get home.

Then we moved into the glory years of the Chicago Bulls and our family’s attention moved to their games. By the time we looked up, the kids were growing and leaving, and family TV night was history.

David and I tried to keep it up in the first year of empty nesthood with The Education of Max Bickford on Sunday nights, another show that no one else remembers. College professor Richard Dreyfuss was raising a teen daughter and young son alone while being tempted by a prickly former student/former lover now professor Marcia Gay Harden. Great portrayal of kids, great cast, good enough to qualify as #9. One season.

“Wait,” I thought, “you create this whole world and invite me in to empathize with your characters, and now you slam the door in my face?” No fair.

Julia Keller of the Tribune knows my pain. She recently wrote about abandoned viewers like me, “We’re supposed to love again. But that’s like asking a widow for a date on the way home from the cemetery.” One thing I like about Julia – she’s smart as they come, yet admits that she watches TV.

After so many goodbyes, my expectations dwindled. I turned to Law and Order reruns, and had a one-season affair a couple of years ago with a new series called Cupid before it was gone. David retreated into sports and more sports, and animal shows. These days we do manage the occasional House episode. He likes the bad attitude; I like the medical mystery.

I know I am supposed to just DVR everything now like my friends do, and gleefully fast forward through the commercials, but I enjoy the serendipity of what I happen to stumble across. I see new shows but I’m reluctant to give myself over to them. I have more important things to do, don’t I? Wait, am I turning into one of them, the superior ones who scorn TV, or just protecting myself from further pain? I think it’s the latter.

I make them work to attract me now. If a new show can draw me in, they still have an opportunity to make the list. Currently, Castle is vying with The Good Wife for the #10 slot.

I guess my TV life has been a fair representation of the rest of life. Something/one is a perfect fit, for a while. Then things change. One of you moves on and you must regroup. Your companions change, your interests too. There is always an ending around the corner.

What ends leaves something behind, though. It can be a dish towel, or an ambition, or knowledge about times and places you’ll never see, or a memory of who you were when it was part of your life. That’s good enough for me.

CBH 12-10

THE SPOT YOU STAND ON

BOUNCING BACK - A hard fall means a high bounce... if you're made of the right material.  ~Unknown

I sat in my fourth grade art class, flummoxed. I stared at the large piece of art paper, my 48 crayons standing ready. The assignment: Draw a picture of your dad for Fathers’ Day.

It was 1956 and I was the only kid in the class who had a problem with this. I approached the teacher, careful to keep my voice low.

“Mrs. Albright,” I said, “My father died.”

“Oh, well then,” she replied, “An uncle? Your grandfather?”

I shook my head.

“Do you want to just do a picture of your mother instead?”

Good. Clarity. Permission to do the only logical thing. I turned out a very nice giant head of my mother in her pearl earrings which she rarely wore, but which gave a bit of glamour to my picture. As I glanced at my classmates’ pictures, I had that familiar outsider feeling, my nose pressed to the glass of their normal families.

If you would have asked me then about my life story, it would have been all about differences. I was an only child on the Irish Catholic South Side of Chicago; the second tallest girl in the class, and absolutely no good at high jump. I couldn’t ride a bike. I’d had one briefly, but it got lifted from the storage room at my building. I would blush if anyone so much as glanced at me, which provided a direct window into my insecurities, a source of torture for me. And I was afraid of dogs.

For balance, I was a good student, also a very polite girl and a good friend. I had the nicest mother, and plenty of great relatives even if they were in two different states and I only saw them once a year.

By high school, I would have told you that I was coming out of the shrinking violet stage – I was editorial editor on the school paper, had some dates, and could see a big future for myself. But I still felt encapsulated by the idea that everyone else knew more than I did about how families, and life, really worked.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I stopped minding my differences. Some of them fell away, others became unimportant, and others became points of pride. I took up Pilates instead of high jump. I rarely blush these days, and can pretty much talk to anyone about anything. My father may have died early, but my mother hung on until she was almost 89.

I have greatly revised my life story with time. I bounced back from my original outsider status. And I know now that my strengths came out of those early challenges. I had to grow a backbone to take care of myself in the world. All that watching other people’s lives developed empathy that I turned into my career as a therapist. I don’t need to make out Gratitude Lists; I have a built-in appreciation for the gifts of life, which I know are all the more precious because they may not last.

As a result I tell myself what I tell my clients: No one else on the planet has seen what you have seen; has encountered what you have, both good and bad. No one else has your combination of gifts and insights, or will ever occupy the spot you stand on. So, forget fitting in. The world would be incomplete without you just as you are, like a quilt missing its most vivid piece.

Note: A shorter version of this piece may be posted by now at www.thisibelieve.org, a reincarnation of the classic Edward R. Murrow radio series from the 1950s. Go to read hundreds of pieces from current contributors and from the original series.

CBH 11-10

UP IN SMOKE

OUT OF THE ASHES - It's best to have failure happen early in life. It wakes up the Phoenix bird in you so you rise from the ashes. ~ Anne Baxter

It was a sunny Saturday morning. I trailed my friends around a lovely suburban garden center on a sunny Saturday morning. More enthusiastic gardeners than I, they examined odd varieties of ferns and rusty garden sculptures while I daydreamed. Old college friends, we gather every once in a while to talk for hours and tour around spots of interest while our husbands go off to regress into their long-ago frat boy selves, to everyone’s entertainment, especially theirs.

My cell phone rang and my heart sank when I saw it was a counselor who worked with me in my practice. Sigh. This must be a client crisis bad enough that she had to notify me.

“Maraline,” I said, “What’s up?”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Um, Elburn, or St. Charles, not sure. For the weekend,” I said.

“You don’t know what happened to the office then,” she said.

“No.”

“There was a fire. Last night,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, relieved that we weren’t dealing with a suicidal client or a child abuse report.

“No one was in the building. They think it started around 11 o’clock,” she told me.

“Well, that’s good. I’ll be back Sunday night. I can deal with it Monday.”

“You don‘t understand. It burned down. To the ground. There is no office anymore,” she said.

Unimaginable. I loved that office. In a shared suite building, its two counseling rooms, small administration space, and a large group room we reserved a couple of nights a week for groups provided just what we needed and nothing more. And we had a private storeroom in the basement where twenty years worth of counseling files were secured. I had downsized into that building and it fit perfectly.

I had friends and friendly acquaintances in that building, other counselors and massage therapists, an investment guy, an outplacement consultant, a dentist, an accountant, a couple of lawyers, all held together by the personable front desk secretary who always said yes and never made a face when you asked something of her.

“You need to come now. To see if you can salvage anything,” she said.

Salvage anything? What? Goodbye garden center. Goodbye carefree weekend.

“Thanks, Maraline, for calling,” I said, “I guess,” attempting humor.

“I just left there,” she said, about to deliver the line I needed to hear to get me into action. “Some of our stuff is strewn in the parking lot. I picked up what I could.” she asked.

Yikes. Client files in the parking lot? Nooooo.

“Okay, I’m on my way.”

“Can I meet you there?” she offered.

“Um, no. I’ll call you if I need to.” I had no idea what I was saying.

I rallied my friends, who also offered to help, and got them to take me back to pick up my car at the house where we were staying. No, thanks, I’d go myself; I could handle this. Why ruin their much-anticipated day? I arranged to meet them later for dinner at a restaurant in a nearby town.

I had accomplished step one of my usual crisis management protocol: Refuse help.

In the car I was strangely calm, yet disoriented. Where was the map? Which expressway am I looking for? How could this have happened? That’s when I had my first good idea of the day. I called my daughter, recently returned from college for the summer.

“Kate, I’m coming to pick you up. My office burned down. “

“Whoa, okay,” she said.

“Get out the crow bars and some bags. And a hammer. I’ll be there in 30 minutes. And those file boxes in the basement. And wear crummy clothes.” I was starting to function, moving into my second step: Do something, anything, because everything is fixable.

I picked up Katy and took my usual 40 minute route to the office. As we rounded the final corner, I saw a pile of debris, unrecognizable as the two-story office building of a certain age, well beyond its peak but still quite serviceable. It had been light brick with tan and brown trim. The pile looked gray, with boards jutting toward the sky, and occasional accent colors – a green filing cabinet, a red table top, a yellow sign.

“Whoa,” Katy said again, capturing it perfectly. Wisps of smoke arose from the middle of the pile. One fire truck remained, and a firefighter trained water on the smoking debris.

We started walking the perimeter, trying to get our bearings. Our office must have been about there in the middle. The top floor had collapsed into the basement, but why couldn’t I spot a thing that was ours? Everything seemed displaced, upside down.

Several of my co-tenants climbed around the edges, gathering stray bits of their professional lives. Everyone looked as dazed as I felt, and as our eyes met, we shook our heads.

“Are you finding anything?” I asked.

“Not much,” they said.

I saw the accountant from across the hall. “I think I saw some of your paperwork over there,” she said, pointing toward the back corner of the lot.

How did it get all the way over there, thirty feet beyond the outer walls?

“Thanks,” I said, “Did you find yours?” She must have had years’ worth of client financial information in her computer.

“I came over as soon as I heard about it last night, and one of the firefighters retrieved my computer for me.”

Uh oh. I was seriously behind. We chased down the paperwork she had spotted, and spent the next seven hours gathering up any evidence of Healy & Associates that had escaped the inferno. Katy and her crowbar broke into bent file cabinets that had been hauled up from the storage room and dumped at the far corner of the parking lot by heavy machinery. The files that were water-logged we placed in boxes to take to the shredding company. The rest reeked of smoke, and we placed them in bags to go home with me, until we ran out.

My in-laws showed up, eager to find out what they could do to help, and we sent them to Dominick’s for plastic bags. They returned with so many that we could bag everything we came up with over the next days, and then use the remainder at home for the next five years.

When we got too hot, we walked across the street to Arby’s to get lemonade and snacks. When we got too tired, we would stop and talk with co-tenants. We repeated this for the next four days, until the equipment came to haul the pile away. With every day, we grew bolder, venturing into the debris further and further trying to decode the logic of the pile. We walked tightrope style on wobbly boards, searching for our relics.

We finally located the epicenter of our operation and found the roll of “20 years of excellence” stickers I had ordered in a fit of self-congratulation, the seal embosser we used on official documents, and the Mickey Mouse mouse pad, also a melted calculator, and the CONFIDENTIAL stamp we put on all records. I even found a section of our plaid couch and cut some fabric from it just because I‘d never see it again.

We eventually found the computer under two feet of someone else’s stuff. Even though the case was bashed in and the components melted, I later took it to an expert to insure that the data was gone.

Once I had it, and took the recovered files home to air out on my garage floor, I started to relax. At least no one could wander into the site and invade my clients’ privacy. By then, I had begun step three of my crisis process: Compare this mess with how much worse it could have been, and be glad.

With the building gone, I embarked on my next step: Trudge ahead. I talked turkey with the counselor who was my mainstay, and she agreed to continue with me despite the upheaval. A dear old friend offered me the use of his counseling space until we could relocate. I dealt with the intricacies of insurance documentation. And I spent hours of my life which I will never get back on the phone with the phone company, hearing, believing, and then no longer believing strings of unkept promises about when our phone number would be functioning again. While I never cried about the fire, Ameritech had me in tears more than once.

By the time I went out to shop for new office space, I was getting my spirit back. It was fun to imagine a new look, in a new space, closer to the Interstate, closer to my house, in a newer building with an elevator. I furnished it quickly but with enthusiasm. I picked out some art work, and the building put down new carpet. Within a month, we opened. It looked great.

At home, much later, I carried out my next step: Create a balance sheet of what I’d gained and lost. I preserved some of my hard-won artifacts in a shadow box I still keep in my current office, next to the picture of the disaster site – including melted pens, the charred office items, twisted doorknob, office keys.

I tallied what we never found – the gate leg table my husband and I refinished as our first dining table, the painting of a rainy street I’d bought while I was in college, notes from dozens of seminars I’d attended, and much more that either went up in smoke or was buried forever under the charred ruins, now scraped away to a landfill somewhere.

I had lost the company of my co-tenants, the built-in clerical support I counted on, and my comfortable routine. But I also lost the burden of maintaining all that stuff. The files that had filled up a storeroom now fit in two filing cabinets.

On the what-I-gained side, I made several additional entries, starting with a new insight that when someone offers help, you probably should accept it. I also gained a renewed conviction that what my practice did was worthwhile and important to continue. By that time managed care had already taken a bite out of the bottom line, but the other rewards were still rich. Combine that with my innate determination not to buckle under to disaster, and I formed a picture of myself as one of those blow-up clowns that gets punched and pops back up. I was reminded that all I really needed to continue was a room and two chairs. The rest was window dressing. So ultimately I ended up with a new start, lighter on my feet and clear about my purpose.

That first night though when I arrived at dinner late, all cleaned up and in a dress, I was unsure how it would all turn out. I’d called to tell them to go ahead and order, but being the friends they are, they snacked and drank and waited until I got there. If I remember right, I got a standing ovation when I walked in, or at least a toast. We ordered steaks, and I told a few stories from the day, but mostly relaxed into the normalcy of their company. In the morning, I’d have to return to disaster mode, but at the table my final step of the day kicked in: Loss helps you appreciate what you still have.

CBH 10-10