Swiss hippie days

She sits astride her little moped, white when she bought it, now painted in intricate flower designs. She wears long skirts and flowered tops, and her hair falls straight down to her mid-back, the color of honey.

We arrive in our old green van at someone’s house, out in the country. Rolling hills, wildflowers, a spill of sunshine. A bearded man pulls francs out from behind our ears. We picnic on a white cloth, wicker basket and wine, the taste of strawberries on my tongue. There’s a lake. We swim. My mother is lean and tanned. She smokes with her head back, watching the sky.

We sleep at our friends’ house, in a dim smoky room lit by candles. Someone plays the guitar. His name is Henrich. Ulla, his wife, leans over my father. She has children too. The house is full of people, of tangy smoke, of music.

I don’t understand any of the conversations. I just remember the guitar, the smoke-dimmed candle-light, the people who come and go. Sometimes my dad takes us home. (Is this what I remember, or what is imprinted on my brain from what he told me later?) Sometimes we sleep on the floor, and Dad isn’t there. The music fills the house, singing, laughing, my mother in the centre.

Years later, after she died, my father says, “I couldn’t stand that charade about the medicinal p*t. That’s why I always left the room.” I had always thought he disapproved of her smoking p*t for the chemo nausea. (Prescribed, with a doctor’s note, but illegally gotten because it wasn’t legal to grow it. The doctor sighed, handing it over. “I don’t know where you’ll get it. But it’s legal for you to possess it.” My sister said, “Don’t worry. You live on the beach, after all.”) After he told me that he didn’t disapprove of p*t, though he wasn’t interested in any kind of drugs himself, I realized that his anger was at Mum’s “I’m a junkie now” act. She was no stranger to mood-altering substances. And when I remember back to that time when I was a child, I see her as a hippie, long hair down her back, flowered moped, living half her time in a commune in Switzerland. And everything falls into place.

Her mother had just died — of breast cancer. She went nuts. My father said he spent a lot of time baby-sitting the three (and later four) kids, the two she’d had by another man, and his infant child. My mother got pregnant again, had another child (four in five years). She went to parties at the commune, sometimes stayed there overnight. Sometimes she took us, forming my memories of those smoky rooms. Most of the time she didn’t. Maybe that’s when Dad’s resentment of me began, the child he had met on my mother’s hip as an infant, just before she knew was pregnant with Rachel, when she had just given up trying to work it out with my biological father who, after all, loved ac*d and was freaky crazy.

My father, the steady man, loved her from the instant she showed up at his office door at Vanderbilt, light spilling down over her honey colored hair, me on her hip, asking for a job in his physics lab. She was his lab assistant, and after a while her second daughter was born — my sister Rachel who didn’t meet her father (our father) till she was 17 (Actually it’s more complicated than that, but it’ll have to do).

My mother began seeing my dad, and got pregnant again. Her mother’s cancer got worse. When my father was offered his job in Switzerland, she fled with him to a new country where she didn’t speak the language. She learned French, gave birth to Leah, went home for her mother’s funeral, got pregnant with Ruth May. And in the midst of all of that, she spent half her life with her hippie friends at a place I think of as the commune, while my father babysat us. I see her on her moped, smiling back at us, then sputtering away to the life we didn’t know she had till months after she died.

To be continued…

Three things Oct. 30

Loren’s comments: I’ve been thinking about them. Lots of connections and interconnections, of realizations. I’m thinking of writing about Switzerland and my mother’s intricately painted flower moped.

The shooting star I saw just now, as I was walking the dogs.

Sadie: The only way she’ll take her liver pill is if I wrap it in Kerrygold Irish butter. No other butter (or cheese, or meat, or hot dogs) will do. But she takes it willingly now that I’ve discovered the Secret! And she feels solid again, not a bag of brittle bones, twigs for legs, ribs and knobbly back. That’s all gone. She’s a happy, solid, energetic Jack Russell terrier again, with only the barest hint of yellow left in her skin. When she curls up against my stomach at night, I smile.

Changing the dream two

Continued from here:

None of this, of course, is a complaint against my mother. She simply did what everyone did back then, made an association between maths and Latin and getting into vet school. It’s false, at least in this country, at least now. But back then, if you wanted to get into vet school in Ireland, you got high grades in everything, including (especially) maths and Latin. She was saving me grief, saving me from a dream I could never have realized.

But her not believing in me, and my dad’s view of me as not too bright, colored everything. When I told Mum I won the English prize, she told me not to lie. It was impossible, in her world, for someone to get C’s in both the exams (composition and literature), and win the English prize. She only believed me when the picture came out in the Irish Times, me holding the certificate and the check, with two of my friends flanking me. Why didn’t I show her the certificate? Because by the time I had evidence, she had denounced me as a liar. It didn’t seem worth it.

But it’s not that bad, really. A few years later, when I was in college in America and made effortless As in every class I took except English 101 (hah! What irony…), I realized that she was just operating under perfectly reasonable assumptions. No one in the U.S. who got C’s in a class would win an award for that class. C’s aren’t very good grades. A B is OK. A’s, well, even those are often barely deserved. So it made all the sense in the world for her to assume that I couldn’t possibly, ever, under any circumstances, win an award when I’d received C’s in my exams. And when I realized that fact, everything else fell into place too. No wonder I was never good enough. My perfectly reasonable Irish grades looked like failures to her. And because I couldn’t please her, I gave up.

Dad, on the other hand, knew better. Why did he never say anything to convince her differently? I suppose because he went to Trinity and Oxford and worked at CERN and found maths and science easy, because he truly believed “Anyone can do English. It’s a soft option.” Because he was scathing of what I loved. In the end, I gave up trying for him, too. Early on, oh so early on, I simply gave up dreaming.

It’s easy, looking back, to realize how own’s right-meaning and perfectly loving parents (and they were), were simply shaped by what they understood of the world. In Dad’s world, everyone knew that English was a soft option that any moron could do. There was no point being proud of getting a good grade on an English essay, of winning the prize for English. Anyone can do that. Splitting the atom. Probing the mystery of the nutrino. Those are worthy goals.

In Mum’s world, grades of C were tantamount to failure. It’s just the way things were. A “B” elicited, “Is that all?” She didn’t mean to be discouraging. It’s just what she knew of the world, in the same way that she knew me going to a little regional university for my MA in English was a waste of time because it wouldn’t “mean anything.” She had high expectations because she came from a world in which everyone overachieved. Just being normal wasn’t good enough. It didn’t mean she didn’t love me. In fact it was a mark of her love.

It’s easy to say, “Just change the dream.” It’s not easy to do it. Others have changed my dream for me all my life. When I did leave home at 17, and eventually came to the States and went to college, I pursued my own dream, such as it was. Now, in many ways, I have realized what is a perfectly reasonable dream. I have a job I like, my own place, a loving daughter. The dream I can’t change is my family. I love them. It’s true I want to be able to smash the walls down, to assert myself, to say, “Things will be different now.” Some days I make progress towards that vision. But some days I don’t. I can’t beat myself up for not changing the dream because part of the problem is that I’ve always beaten myself up for it. I just have to accept what happened, whatever failure I brought upon myself — once again — and try to move forward.

So I failed, on my birthday, to connect to dad. Norman is right. I’m sure he was thinking “Happy birthday.” He probably mumbled it. Even if he didn’t, we did celebrate my birthday the night before. He made me a chocolate cake using “Mum’s special recipe.” These things mean everything. It’s my own hopeless paralysis that kills me, time after time. But I shake free of it. I take another step. I commit to trying again. That’s what I’ve always done.

A’s in the U.S. don’t mean much to those raised in Ireland. But they mean a lot to me, because they got me here, to graduate school and beyond, to a tenure track job. OK, it’s “only” a community college, a real disappointment for my mother whose father was dean of the medical school at Vanderbilt, for my father who worked at CERN. But I love teaching community college students. I understand my students’ struggles, because they mirror mine — in some slantwise way.

Over the years, I’ve made my working life into my own dream, changed my parents’ dream to my own. It’s a start. Other dreams will follow, do follow, slow though the progress is.

Changing dreams

“I’ve figured it out,” I told Mum that day 27 or so years ago. “I want to be a vet.”

I was the one who looked after the goats and the donkeys, who took the cats to the vet, nurtured the puppies, nursed the geese when they were sick. The vet knew me well. I’d show up with dying birds and sick abandoned dogs, and he would fix them or put them down or whatever he needed to do. Once I found a rabbit with myxomatosis when I was out riding my pony. I saw a piece of tattered fluff deep in a tussock of grass, then saw the ragged ears, the swollen face with puss-seeping blind eyes. I slid off my pony, looped his reins over my arm, and looked for a rock, a big one. I found it and stood over the rabbit, who lay so deep in his suffering that he didn’t realize I was there, or didn’t care. I swung the rock down hard, fast, and pulled out at the last minute. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t bear the crackling of the skull breaking, the blood, my own role in violent killing, even though I knew the rabbit was dying, and worse, suffering terribly in the process. In the end I wrapped him in my sweater and rode three miles to the vet, as fast as I could, where the vet slipped in the needle and the rabbit’s life slid away without a sound.

One day, a donkey was hit on the road outside our house. I sat with his head on my lap while someone called the vet. When he came, I held the donkey as the vet did his thing. Once again, the life force slipped quietly away, leaving behind the dead weight of a lifeless head in my lap.

Eventually, I began hanging out at the vet office, not to participate in bringing about death, but to give shots (lift the scruff and make a little tent, push in the needle quickly, no hesitation, and then it’s over, vaccinations given, illness averted). I helped at surgeries, held equipment, caressed the foreheads of deeply sleeping dogs as they lay with tongues out on the stainless steel table. I wasn’t afraid of blood. When my friend’s horse needed twice-daily penicillin shots, I rode my bike to her house and jabbed. You rub the area with rubbing alcohol, thump three times hard with your fist, then drive in the needle. Pull back to make sure you haven’t hit a vein. If there’s no blood, you push it in slowly and steadily. It’s thick stuff, a big needle. Horses are usually pretty good if you don’t hesitate, if you are matter-of-fact about it, and you talk to them. You change sides, places, every time, and after a while you don’t think about it. You just do it.

So the vet asked if I wanted to be a vet, and I said yes, and then I told my mother. She said, “You can’t be a vet. You’re no good at maths and Latin.”

That was it. Dream over. I guess it was just a little, hard idea in my brain, something self-contained, a cancer that hadn’t gone invasive. It wasn’t spread through the fibres of my being, hadn’t metasticized till excizing it would mean killing me. She cut my dream out neatly with her words, left nothing behind, barely a scar. I just gave up.

Loren suggested I change my dream after I wrote about my visit to my dad. It’s something I’ve been mulling over, something that has haunted me for years. In a sense, every day, every moment, is an attempt to change the dream. Most of the time I succeed….

To be continued…

Paralysis

My birthday was today. 43. Adds up to seven, my favorite number. Maybe it’ll be a lucky year.

I went to my dad’s yesterday. There was a mixup. Ruth May thought I was arriving later than I was, so Dad was out when I arrived in town. Ruth May suggested we meet at a favorite restaurant, so we did. Talked for a while till Liam got restless. He’s 3 months old, sweet red-head.

I called Dad, told him we’d be down after Ruth May fed Liam, and drove back to Ruth May’s house where the dogs were waiting. She fed. We chatted. I thought of Dad alone at home. I wanted to leave, but Ruth May kept talking. “I’ll just….” There was always one more thing, and it always took her three times as long as it would the average person. She’s always been slow that way, dreamy. Smart, yes. But paralyzed.

James Joyce. The sense of helpless paralysis I feel, so familiar. I want to leave and go to Dad, talk to him, question him. But I don’t want to leave Ruth May and Liam as though they are unimportant. There’s a party tonight on the beach, Ruth May tells me. Dad wants to go. Do I? I don’t. “Oh,” she says. “Well, it’s your birthday celeberation. I was just thinking we could run down there for 10 minutes so I could introduce Liam to people.”

“OK,” I say.

“I’ll just change Liam,” she says. But she’s cooing at him on the bed, singing to him, moving as though underwater. I think of Dad waiting. “I’ll just go ahead,” I say. “Maybe help Dad with supper.”

I leave, feeling bad. She says she’ll follow. At the house on the beach, Dad is sitting in darkness, watching the BCC news. He doesn’t have much to say, other than “Where’s Ruth May?” He’s agitating about the party, about whether we should make my birthday dinner first, or go to the party, or wait for Ruth May. Her phone, as usual, is turned off. We wait in darkness for an hour for her to come. I try to ask him the questions I planned to ask him, but the darkness balls itself up and rolls down my throat. Even movement is constrained. The old paralysis deepens, holds tight. Eveline, I think. Afraid to leave. Irish through and through. I can’t climb on the boat, leave familiar ground, strike out into the unfamiliar territory of questions and answers, of dialogue.

Finally Ruth May arrives. We go to the party. Dad meets a woman who seems interested in asking him about Ireland. Liam gets fussy and Ruth May and I leave with him and walk home down the boardwalk, leaving Dad at the party. At the house, I clean the kitchen, talk tiredly with Ruth May. In the end Dad will come home, make dinner, and we’ll eat it and chat and go to bed. In the end, we’ll say nothing that matters.

In the morning, Dad won’t say happy birthday, even though today is really the day. He wants me to paint my sister’s office, but I can’t because of my asthma, and anyway it’ll take too long to get going because my sister is involved, and everything takes her a long time. Because she has a baby. Because she’s Ruth May and time runs through the hour glass differently for her. Because we’re all paralyzed in our own way.

On the way home I think of the dozen red roses Nada’s mother bought me for my birthday. Her wish for me, not Nada’s. He took the credit, though.

Paralyzed. All of us. Living dreams meant for others.

Getting close

“We’re getting quite close these days,” I said, about my father, to a friend. I would never have predicted that possibility, and it’s happening, as these things always do, at the end, when so little time is left. He tells me about growing up in English boarding schools, always surrounded by boys, about going to Dartmouth Naval Academy at the age of 13, about being in the English Navy. “Maybe,” he says, “That’s why I’ve always found women hard to talk to.”

I type his stories up on my computer, making up his biography so that when he’s gone, we won’t have to rely on silence and fuzzy remembrance of hints dropped in other conversations. I brainstorm questions to ask him. “What’s your favorite book?” “What’s your best memory of Mum?” “What was your worst moment?”

It seems imperative that I do so now, not later. His sister has Alzheimer’s. His memory is going. Something slides away into darkness every time he loses a memory. I want to tell his story. I want to say that he worked in CERN in the late 60s and early 70s, exciting times for physics, that he left there with a glory about him because of the research in which he’d been involved. I want to tell my memories of going down into the depths of CERN, where the underground atom splitters are, and have him fill my memories in with descriptions of what exactly did go on there, in that vast purgatory. I remember an underground room filled with a computer the size of a boat; I remember reams of tractor paper spitting out calculations. I remember puddles of harsh light, and shadows. But perhaps it was all just my own projection, the mystery of what was happening encased in my fear of it. Why be afraid? I want to find out.

“Does anyone know what this picture is?” he asked one day a few months ago. “I’ve asked the others and nobody knows.” He had been scanning old pictures into the computer. I knew immediately. “It’s the rock outside the canteen at CERN,” I said. “We used to climb on it after we’d eaten there.” (I remember sometimes we got little sausages there, and I hated the texture, hard little bits of gristle embedded in the meat. CERN was my first impulse towards vegetarianism.)

His face lit up. “Of course,” he said. “That’s right.”

I am top of the rock, looking out at the building that houses the canteen. Has it changed, I wonder? The old blue Volvo 144 is in the parking lot. The sun shines. In the basement, the computer spits ot its calculations. My father’s  memory wavers.

This weekend, I will ask him. It will be my birthday present to myself.

Tapping the phone

In Ireland in the 70s and early 80s you could “tap” public phones if you knew how. I became an expert because I never seemed to have the 2p I needed to call home. (Tuppence. Was that all it was? Maybe by then it was 10p. Whatever it was, I never had it.)

The phones at my school in Dublin were in the lobby, two heavy rotary dial monstrosities on the wall. I’d tap out the eight, the six, the three, and the five of our phone number on the off-hook button, and then dial the 9 and the 1. If you kept the rhythm steady, with just the right time in between each tap of the off-hook button, you could dial any number free. Nines and ones rang through without having to be tapped, for some reason. I seem to remember 0s did too. I guess they’d have to, because it would be hard to tap a number that couldn’t be signified physically on the off-hook button. Since my phone number had a nine and a one at the end, I only had to tap four numbers, and getting through was fairly easy.

I remember tapping the phone the day I called my (step) dad by his given name for the first time. I called him just so that I could say, “Hello, Nathan. This is Adah.” I wanted to imagine his face, the hesitation in his response as he recognized the significance of my refusal to call him Dad. As I lifted the receiver and began tapping, my heart pounded so hard that I messed up the first tap and had to redo it. When he finally answered the phone and I said my piece, he didn’t hesitate. “Yes?” he said expectantly, waiting for me to explain to him why I had rung. I hadn’t thought through what I was going to say next, so I muttered something about a field trip and hung up.

I was 16 that day. I called him Nathan, his given name, for four or so years, until the night I got pallatic drunk the evening before I was supposed to fly back to the U.S. I’d been staying there for six months, having met my biological father, an American who was charming and cruel in equal measure. When I came back to Ireland for Christmas six months later, I didn’t want to go back to the U.S. I had to, though. Three months earlier, with the impetuousness of youth, and still enamored of the biological father who hadn’t at that time unleashed his venom, I had insisted that my mother ship my Jack Russell terrier dog, Betsy, to the U.S. I couldn’t bring her back to Ireland without a six-month quarantine, and I couldn’t force such a fate on her.

On my last night in Ireland, I got drunk unwittingly, desperate not to return to the States, helpless with the knowledge that I had to go because I couldn’t abandon my dog. That night, my dad came into my room, sat on my bed, told me about the first time he got drunk, and then said, with his usual reserve, “You always have a home here. If you don’t want to be there, you can always come back here.”

Somehow he knew the real reason why I’d drunk so much too much. I hadn’t said a word, but he knew.

I did go back to the States. I did stay, desperately homesick for years, but sustained by my little Jack Russel. And from that day on, I called my dad “Daddy” again. If I’d known how to tap American phones, I would have called home just to tell him that I loved him. Since I didn’t, I never did tell him. Maybe he knew anyway, just because I called him Dad.

Canyon heron

Continued from here

Today I took Sadie and Bridji (of the Shakespearean spelling, if you hadn’t noticed — long story) to a walk in the canyon, fulfilling a promise I made to Sadie when she was in the hospital. She could hardly wait to get out of the car, and bounded about the parking lot and the first few hundred yards of the trail with great enthusiasm before she lost energy and calmed down. She’s not 100%, not the dog who could gallop for miles, burst out of the bushes and spin in a blur of white in a 180 degree turn after a bird, and then jump from the ground into my arms after two hours in the hot sun, but she’s getting there. She played for five minutes with her “squirrel tail” toy today, a piece of faux fur attached to a tennis ball that she flings about the house and rolls on obsessively. She bounded into the house and out and onto the bed and off, and into the car and out instead of stepping gingerly. And she’s beginning to eat with enthusiasm again, even to beg for table food (Who said she’s not spoilt!).

Best of all, as we were heading back, she stopped suddenly, staring into the sky. Almost overhead, not 20 feet above us, I saw a great blue heron fly past, miles from the river where herons usually nest. Bridji sniffed in the bushes as Sadie stood transfixed till the heron was gone.

I’m still smiling.

Continued here.

Recycling

We never had to recycle in Ireland. We lived a life of relatively little waste. Our four acres supported a huge garden of potatoes and tomatoes, beans and peas, squash and vegetable spaghetti, raspberries, strawberries, brussel sprouts and courgettes, bushes bursting with gooseberries, blackcurrants and redcurrants, and trees filled with apples and plums. My mother canned and froze produce, and our hens lay eggs which I gathered daily. For several years we got milk from a cow down the road. I’d carry a bucket down to the farm, and my friends would milk Polly straight into the bucket. My mum made butter and cheese and ice cream from the cream that she skimmed from the top of the bucket. We’d dip ladles into the fragrant white liquid in the bucket and drink it at dinner. The “milk” I buy here in the U.S. has never come close to tasting like Polly’s milk, which was subtly flavored with the sweetness of buttercups and clover, or sometimes the taste of wild garlic.

Even after Polly was gone, our milk generated little waste, only the tiny foil caps that topped the glass milk bottles the milkman brought daily. If we didn’t get them inside right away, the birds would peck through them and drink the cream at the top. Mum always poured the cream off and collected it for ice cream and my dad’s coffee. I remember now that Zeke has never seen the way milk and cream separate naturally, the way the cream rises to the top, a creamy yellow, while the milk below is white.

We got meat from the butcher, chopped right there on the block before us off the hanging carcasses of the animals. He wrapped the cuts in butcher paper. No styrofoam and plastic packaging for us. Afterwards we burned the bloodied paper, along with the cereal boxes and other paper products our lives created.

It’s different in Ireland now, of course. Individually packed packages of fruit, “homemade” soup in plastic containers, meat from the supermarket and milk in cartons. The difference is that food is not over-packaged there, and that you pay for every kilo of garbage the garbage truck hauls away. Paying by the kilo for one’s garbage is an incentive to reduce waste, to recycle, as is the fundamental world view that seems to be lacking in general over here, that the earth is precious and that we must protect it. In Ireland, if you were to step into a grocery store without your own sack, you’d be laughed out of it — or at least looked at as if you’d stepped off another planet. And you’d be charged for every flimsy plastic bag needed to pack home your groceries.

Here in my town, recycling is difficult and limited. I haul much of my recyclable waste to my father’s house in the big city three hours away.  My hallway is cluttered with boxes of it, aesthetically hideous, but better than tossing it.

I write this because today is Blog Action Day, and I want to contribute. Maybe, in the not-so-distant future, I won’t feel like an alien when I walk into the grocery store with my canvas bags. Maybe the real objects of disdain will be those who expect free plastic bags with their groceries, with never a thought for landfills filling up and filling up, spreading their poisons into the earth and the water, destroying what we and multiple other species need for life.

Maybe.

Three things

1. Yesterday Zeke went to Homecoming with a friend. He looked handsome and she looked elegant as they posed for pictures. Later she told me that he was happy he went with her because she likes to dance. They spent most of the evening dancing together, instead of standing around. (“I hate standing around,” he said.) Today he told her he was gay. “I know,” she told him. His sexual disinterest in her is one of the best parts of their friendship for her. They can dance and have a good time and she doesn’t have to worry that he “likes” her. He was relieved, and now they’re making plans for Harvest. I love her friends.
2. Today Sadie played. She grabbed a sock from Zeke’s room and threw it around the room,pouncing on it, then tossing it in the air. She flung herself at me: “Come on, come on, let’s run!” She didn’t look like she was trying to forget that she felt sick. And she ate a new and different kind of dog food, along with the liver I still cook her, and her milkbones. Every little step is a triumph. Oh, and she climbed into the neighbor’s yard and terrorized their old black Lab, something she’s never done before. Maybe she thinks she can get away with anything now that I have her home!
3. It’s a beautiful fall: crisp mornings, warm days filled with color, and mellow evenings touched with the first hint of frosty dusk.