Gardening, listening, creating quiet monuments of narrative experience

Aunt Lydia (from Hulu's Handmaid's Tale), haunts my garden

During the pandemic I've been gardening--a lot. There's really nowhere else to go but my backyard anyway so I might as well be growing salad vegetables and getting rid of the weeds.

After I bought two pairs of overalls to work in, I discovered that I could put my phone in the front breast pocket and listen to podcasts and audiobooks from the library. (Before I had struggled to listen with wireless earbuds or a bluetooth speaker I lugged around the yard). I didn't realize how much time I was spending in the yard until I listened to all of The Golem and the Jinni (500+ pages), followed by Becoming by Michelle Obama, and The Testaments by Margaret Atwood--all in a couple of months time. And that was between listening to different podcasts.

An unexpected consequence is that I now associate certain areas of my yard with specific characters or stories. My strawberry patch is now the Aunt Lydia strawberry patch (I think of her and her perhaps justifiable cruelty when I am in there weeding or picking berries). The new patch of grass that, it turns out, happens to be the dimension of two side-by-side cemetery plots now brings to mind Chang and Eng (from listening to Mo Rocca's Mobituary on the original Siamese twins, while I sowed it). And the stone and brick sidewalk I've been putting in reminds me both of the Southside of Chicago and NYC at the turn of the century...

These are quiet tributes created not as statues or anything permanent, and which only I can see. It makes me realize that anywhere we are, wherever we walk, there is probably one of these silent monuments of experience, whether lived in actuality or through words. There may be multiple monuments, multiple experiences, all on the same patch of land or in the same place. Aunt Lydia's monuments may be found on bus seats or city sidewalks or bedside tables. A stairwell, a flower, a patch of earth, may evoke Michelle Obama's voice because that's where you or I were when she told us about her life.

My garden is filled with plants and with memories of places to which I've journeyed through the sound of voices coming out of the bib of my overalls. It may look like I am growing only lettuce and parsley and tomatoes, but I am also growing memories. Small miracles, freely given, voices emitted from a phone that seldom rings.

Window Shopping

I took over 2,000 photos during my three-week vacation in Europe this summer--not so many that I hope I didn't miss the experience, and not so few that I hope I didn't miss recording at least one picture of each place we visited. It's easy to take a lot of pics when you're not paying for film and film development, and you have a phone in your pocket ready to do the job and quickly.

One thing I documented, occasionally, was interesting shop windows. I could have spent each day walking around the streets of Reykjavik, London, or Paris taking pics just of shop windows, but l didn't since I was usually walking on to something else. And I didn't want to see everything just through my phone screen.

When I got back to the U.S., it struck me how few storefronts have displays anymore--especially out in suburbia, where I live. The stores here are just brick and glass, with plastic signs to distinguish one from the next.

Even in D.C., there are few big store shop windows now that stores like Woodward and Lothrop are gone. The best places to spot creative shop windows are in the small and funky shops that have sprung up in the city.

Old W and L shop window from 1928

Probably the most creative shop window we saw was at Selfridge's in London. They had a whole series of windows dedicated to Shakespearean plays. Here is the window for Hamlet:

It's too bad I couldn't afford anything at Selfridge's--skirts were $800, etc.

Dressing shop windows used to be a potential job for creative (fictional) people, from Agnes, who worked her way up from shop girl to window dresser on Mr. Selfridge, to Rhoda Morgenstern on Mary Tyler Moore.

Probably I need to end this with some kind of statement/summary about the lack of beauty in our everyday lives in America, especially for those living away from the centers of culture. Or I just need to end this. Apparently, I could go on and on about shop windows, which is ironic since I don't like to shop (i.e., spending money on clothing) all that much.

Out here, instead of walking by artisan shops and beautifully decorated windows, I drive by stores that resemble rows of warehouses. Everything has been built the cheapest possible way, without any thought given to providing solace for the eyes and heart. This is America. The icky-sweet gelato in the freezer section of the supermarket tastes nothing like the gorgeous, creamy frozen ecstasy available on almost street corner in Italian towns.

And yet it's what we know, it's what we're used to, it's all we've come to expect. It's good to travel, to see such differences. The challenge becomes learning not to be bitter about the comparison and not to yearn for what we probably will never have.

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The top photo is a compilation of some of my shop window pics from this summer. Click on it to see it larger.

The scrutiny of celebrity

I try to imagine what it would be like if I were to write a blog post and then, a few minutes later, walk out to get the mail and find myself surrounded by paparazzi, documenting my every move.

Who am I wearing?
Croft and Barrow

What is my hairstyle?
Combed

Being a successful performer in the United States means a level of visibility that I cannot fathom. I cannot think of any other art form that requires this of its most successful participants. Even Stephen King could probably walk down most streets in America without anyone bothering him.

If I could only sit down and write when I was at my most gorgeous, I'm afraid I would hardly write at all. I am grateful to have chosen an art form that can be accomplished in sweatpants.

I've been thinking about this since watching the Oscars the other night. It is that incessant scrutiny, I'm sure, that led several of the older actresses to try to smooth away the aging on their faces. The result was too much like the Ecce Homo fresco in Spain that an elderly woman tried to restore but instead turned into a muddy ruin. Alas, I didn't recognize Kim Novak. (I don't mean to add to the snarkiness by saying this, and I'll say no more about how she looked,  but would instead point the reader to an excellent and respectful piece about Ms. Novak from the Self-Styled Siren blog).

The criticism really should be aimed at the doctors who engineered these pumped-up, swollen faces, claiming them as more youthful and vibrant. And also to those who make it their job to tell us who passes and who doesn't—the self-proclaimed experts at celebrity magazines and shows like TMZ. Or maybe it should be directed at all of us, sitting in movie theatres or on our sofas in front of the TV, deciding who is beautiful or not, feeling somehow superior by making such judgements when we ourselves probably wouldn't be able to survive under such scrutiny for more than a couple of minutes.

Is beauty really all that?

Like many other women, I, too, loved the Dove "Real Beauty Sketches" video on first viewing. My eyes even moistened as I watched the women describe themselves to a forensic artist  in harsh, negative terms. (Is it self-hatred or a culturally inflicted modesty?)

And then the fallout on the Internet began. It was pointed out (on friends' Facebook pages and in online essays) that:

• Unilever, which manufactures Dove also makes Axe, which (you probably already know) offers a stringent ideal of female beauty in its television ads (visualize Tom Wolfe's description in A Man in Full of the female ideal as "boys with breasts").

• That the video is racist because all of the women who talk about the results in the end are white and blonde; the black women shown being drawn early on don't speak about the results.

• That it's sexist because the artist is a man, and their appearance is drawn through a male filter.

• That some women look like the "before" drawings—so how should they feel about themselves? 

At the conclusion of the video, a woman with long blonde hair, who has looked at her before and after portraits, concludes that natural beauty "impacts the choices we make, the jobs we apply for, how we treat our children—it couldn't be more critical to our happiness."

Self-esteem is, of course, important. But the phrasing is ambiguous. Is she saying that not being beautiful can limit our choices in life? This is where I personally must take issue.

I think my horizons widened and my life became more interesting because I was told, sometimes vulgarly, that I was not beautiful when I was a teenager. It became abundantly clear, by the continued harassment/advice offered to me, that I was not meeting the criteria of beauty in the South at the time, which was voluptuous, clear-skinned and submissive (or for those that naturally lacked those attributes, required a daily drag-queen-like artistry I was unwilling to attempt).

Instead I fled a place that seemed to have no place for me, heading to California. I embraced experience. I could walk, mostly unnoticed, through city streets without the burden of "beauty," without being constantly noticed and assessed. I was able to carry myself with an ongoing feeling of liking myself that was not tied to my physical appearance.

Where did I get this feeling of liking myself? It had nothing to do with the soap I washed my face with or the lip gloss I sometimes remembered to wear. I think it came from books, from creativity itself. When I was submerged in a book, or a creative project, I had no awareness of appearance. The important thing was the work, the connection with ideas. I was walking around in my thoughts as much as in a female body, certainly not a female body I was constantly aware of being put on display.

There was still the occasional derisive advice on the West Coast that I'd been met with in the South, but it became more and more inconsequential to me. I realized I really didn't care about the opinion of men who were so focused on superficial appearances and who were mean or stupid enough to share it. I got to the point where I would talk back to them, not in anger, but to ask why they had said what they did. And then I walked on, unflustered, feeling a certain victory in my step.

There is a wonderful beauty in that kind of clear-eyed perseverance. It is the beauty I wish for all young women and girls. God help them—the definition of what is physically beautiful for young females has gotten more restrictive since I was young, and the Internet has amplified what used to be only shout-outs on the street or rude remarks in the school hallway. A campaign for real beauty might work to educate men and women on how ugly/unworthy someone is who engages in such behavior (in an attempt to change them, as well), rather than ultimately just working to sell more beauty products.