Blogging A-Z: H Is for Hiatus

I have to take a hiatus. Free-lance work is piling up and the next six weeks will leave me no time to write. Maybe I'll find an hour here and there, but until June, I'm not going to be able to continue the daily post...

Blogging: H Is for Harrisburg

            Jack liked making enigmatic comments, especially when he was drinking. Occasionally, he’d say he was thinking of going on a three-day bat in Harrisburg. Maybe this came from some book he read.

            Some years after he stopped drinking, he started saying, “I’m thinking of doing something irrevocable.” He was feeling bogged down in his life. I can still see him sitting at the other end of the couch, looking slightly desperate. We weren’t have any more difficulties than usual, yet his comment made me very nervous. This may have been when I opened another savings account that I didn’t tell him about. Just in case.

            But the irrevocable thing that happened was his blood-clotting disorder. Not what he had in mind. And I never asked him afterward what he’d been thinking when he made that cryptic statement.  

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.

Blogging A-Z: G Is for Gym

            Jack went to the gym almost every day for the last 30 years of his life.

            He wasn’t particularly athletic when we first met, sometimes joking that the most exercise he got was lifting his glass-holding hand to his lips. But a few years after we moved to New York, we decided to learn to ride bikes. Mostly we biked around Central Park or Riverside Park; this was long before bike lanes, and biking on city streets faced hazards from both moving and stationary vehicles.

            We always walked a lot, well, at least Jack walked a lot. He sometimes told the story about walking to school as a teenager. Because he didn’t have a car, he was embarrassed about walking, and later found out that students admired him for walking. We walked around the neighborhood, but also in Riverside Park, down along the river and back.

            Especially in the summertime, with a cool breeze off the water, this was fun. A few times we walked across the George Washington Bridge and into Palisades Park, once climbing down giant rocks to near the river. Another time we took the ferry to Staten Island and walked eight miles to Richmondtown.

            In the ’70s, Jack took up running. At first he ran along the outside of Riverside Park. Then he discovered the track down in the park near 72nd Street. That was his favorite. I tried running, too, but soon I had to tape my ankles, and after another year or so, I was taping my knees. And since I could never make myself run farther than a mile and a quarter, I went back to the long exercise walk.

            When I started teaching at NYU and got a family membership to the gym, Jack took to it immediately. No longer did the weather stand in the way of getting his endorphin hit. When it looked like I wouldn’t get tenure, he searched around and found the West Side YMCA. He’d taken Christie there for swimming lessons years earlier, and the gym and locker rooms had been considerably refurbished since.

            He loved the Y. He rode the stationary bike long before there were TV screens for distraction, for an hour at least. He had friends there, both men and women. He’d bring home stories, most of which I’ve forgotten. Sometimes he tried the weight machines, but mostly he just wanted to bike. Even after his blood-clotting disorder, he missed a few months, but was back as soon as he could.

            His fall, however, stopped him. He never went back to the gym, and it was never clear whether he was embarrassed about how feeble he had become or simply didn’t want to talk about what happened. He went to physical therapy and kept up his exercises at home. I bought him weights to help. I also kept renewing our family membership, even though I wasn’t going as regularly as I should have. I did tell Zaida, who worked at the “towel-desk” and always asked after him when he died.

            Ever since, I’ve had mixed feelings about the Y. I keep going back, much more regularly now, but there’s hardly anyone left who knew Jack and knew that he and I were together. The Y is one of the most diverse places I spend time, which is important to me. But will I continue to go there, or find another gym or health club? I don’t know. 

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.

Blogging A-Z: F Is for Flying

            I first flew in a plane when I was 19, in 1961. I was going to my second Antioch College co-op job, in Los Angeles. In those days, there was something called “student standby”: if you had a student ID, you could show up at the airport two hours before a scheduled takeoff, and if there was a seat available, you got it for some discount. (This was before deregulation, and flights routinely had empty seats.)

            I was at the airport before 6 a.m. and got on an 8 a.m. flight. Not a particularly adventurous person, I expected to be nervous: inside this metal cannister, tens of thousands of feet in the air. But once inside the plane, buckled into my seat, and staring out the window at puffy clouds and the green and brown earth below, I felt serenely safe. The flight was smooth, and I couldn’t help feeling that my jet was attached by a firm pole to a truck on a highway below. Of course I knew this wasn’t true, but it felt like it could be true. I’ve loved flying ever since, especially that moment when the airplane that’s been lumbering along the runway gracefully lifts off and the ground falls away.

            Jack took his first plane ride, with me, a few years after this. We were on a shuttle flight to Boston before switching to a tiny DC-3 to Montpelier, Vermont. Jack thought he would be nervous, and he was very nervous. He had to have a drink before we boarded, and another as soon as the refreshments were wheeled around. After a few more flights with Jack, his nervousness became contagious; I tried not to be as nervous as he was, but it was hard.

            As the years went by, Jack became somewhat less nervous, but I found it easier to fly without him.

            He did come up with one of his classic teases on a flight to his home in Kansas with our daughter when she was about eight. Looking down at all the lights as we flew over Cleveland, Jack said, “ Look down there. It’s a light-bulb farm.” Christie glanced out the window, gave him a quizzical look, and replied, “That’s just another one of your lies.”

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.

Blogging A-Z: E Is for Editing

            I’ve been a copy editor for decades. When Jack was laid off from his reporter’s job after Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post, one of his drinking buddies was a production editor at McGraw-Hill. She offered him copy editing work on textbooks, so I taught him how to be a copy editor.

            I taught him the way I learned, through the Chicago Manual of Style. Jack was an excellent writer and knew how to turn poor writing into good, but he needed guidance in explaining why he made grammar changes, and he needed to learn to pay attention to formatting (marking

heads, subheads, or sub-subheads, for example), as well as keeping track of proper names and their spellings, among many other details.

            He became good enough at this work that after a few years he was able to get a job on the copy desk at Business Week magazine. And he ended up working there much longer than he worked as a reporter. Not only that, we had frequent discussions verging on arguments on copy editing issues at the dinner table, which our school-age daughter found weird—but she was listening. As a grownup librarian today, she often e-mails me to ask whether a sentence she’s read in a book or a newspaper is grammatically correct.

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.

Blogging A-Z: D Is for D.C.

     Jack and I met in Washington, D.C. I was living in a communal house, what later came to be called a commune but we called a co-op, having dropped out of Antioch College as the quintessential dropout, a second-year humanities student. Jack had left home in Wichita after his father died, to fight for civil rights and revolution, against racism and war, and came to Washington because a high school classmate was a student at George Washington University.
  Jack moved into a rooming house and got a job as a waiter at a lunch place on Capitol Hill. He hung around the university on his free time, and one day, while looking at the apartment listings in the student union, someone told him about this house up near Dupont Circle. He met the resident manager of our building, a grad student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and moved in.
    No one knew the person who had recommended us to Jack, which made some of our more paranoid residents suspicious. "He must be an FBI agent," said W. Why? He's from Kansas. He has blond hair. But he had a job and could pay one-sixth of the rent for our house, and we'd all moved in thinking we'd be one of six, and there'd been only five of us for a few months.
        I wasn't interested in Jack at first. The man I wanted was our resident manager, but he wasn't interested in me. Besides, Jack was cynical and caustic, with a judgment about everyone and everything. 

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.

SOLTuesday: The Blogging A-Z Challenge

            Here’s my April writing challenge. I didn’t know I had to sign up in advance, so I’m not officially in it. But I’m going to post as though I am anyway.

            The idea is to post every day on a subject starting with a letter of the alphabet in order from A to Z. Since each month has more than 26 days, we skip Sunday, but this month we start on a Sunday, since it’s April 1.

            My posts so far, and today I wrote the letter C:

A Is for Aimless

B Is for Bereavement

C Is for Coldwater (that’s the town in Kansas where my husband was born)

My theme is my late husband, our life together, memories. If you’d like, you can follow these daily posts here.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

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Blogging A-Z: C Is for Coldwater

            Jack was born in Coldwater, Kansas, a town of about 1,200 people in the south-central part of the state, a few months after Pearl Harbor. The town is in Comanche County, which borders Oklahoma. Jack’s parents, and 6-year-old brother and 8-year-old sister, lived in their own house on Jack’s grandfather’s ranch. His grandfather bought baby calves, fattened them up, and drove them north to sell.

            Coldwater was what is known as a “sunset” town, i.e., it had a sign at the town limit with

this message: “N*****, don’t let the sun set on your black head in Coldwater.” That sign still existed into the mid-1950s, when Jack came to visit his grandparents on “the farm.” Other towns in the county are Protection and Buttermilk. Coldwater now has a population a bit over 800, Protection about 500, and Buttermilk barely exists any more.

            Jack’s father, Lawrence, worked for his father, but their relationship was strained; one year, Lawrence failed to return home immediately after selling the cattle because he was drinking up much of the money. By 1944, he moved his family up to Wichita, where he’d started working at Boeing, which was churning out warplanes, and the family lived in a war-time housing community called Planeview.  

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.

Blogging A-Z: B Is for Bereavement

            Merriam-Webster defines “bereave” as “to deprive of something,” as “bereavement” as “the state of being bereaved or deprived.” These are rather bloodless definitions for what is often meant by “bereavement,” which is the loss of a loved person to death.

            I’ve been going to a bereavement group for two years, since the death of my husband. We

were together for 52 years, pretty much all of our adult lives. Jack was six weeks older than me, but since June 4, 2016, I will always be older than he will ever be. I am still learning how to be an adult on my own.

            The bereavement group consists of a group of women and men who have all recently lost a spouse, partner, or, in my group, a parent. Even though our circumstances vary, sometimes dramatically, we all share this one experience of loss. It’s an experience you don’t really understand unless or until you find yourself in it.

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.

#AtoZChallenge: F Is for Food

(I haven’t had any Internet connection for the past few days, so I’m filing F, G, H, I, J, and whatever we’re up to, as fast as I can. Gotta keep up.)

            I love food. Jack, my late husband, loved food. I love to eat. Jack loved to eat. I love to cook. Jack liked to cook—I don’t know if he loved to cook. I love to try new dishes; last week I made a vegetarian chili verde for my writers’ group and had no idea how it would turn out until it was almost done and I tasted it. Jack had his specialties—broiled chicken, black bean soup, tuna casserole, spaghetti sauce, brownies—which were always very good. I often thought of writing down his marinade for the broiled chicken, but never did—and now it’s too late. But it wasn’t really a recipe anyway: juice, olive oil, wine, dried herbs or spices, whatever was handy or he felt like.

            I’m a recipe person myself, wrote about this years ago for a tiny magazine, And/Then. Called “Recipes for Life,” it contrasted two ways of approaching cooking: following a recipe, or sensing what went well together and winging it. At that time in my life I followed recipes. I needed to know quantities: how much juice, how much wine, how much oregano and what if I’d run out of oregano? Then, I was hoping to be more adventurous in cooking, and in life as well. Now I use recipes as guidelines, looking at 1, 2, 3, what ingredients do I know I like, what combos taste interesting in my mind.

          That vegetarian chili verde? I had a chili verde a friend had made, but it was full of pork. One of the writers in my group is vegetarian, so I had to improvise. (I used the basic pork version but substituted beans for meat and added bell peppers and about half as much green chilis.)

            I love to cook, but not every day. Even the few years I was a full-time parent, I didn’t cook every day. We ate out a fair amount, and our school-age daughter had her favorite restaurants: Symposium (Greek), 107 West (new American), Japonica (she liked sushi at age 8). When Jack was the full-time parent, he’d go to the farmers market late in the day and buy a quantity of tomatoes and sale price. Then he’d make a quantity of tomato sauce and freeze most of it. We even had a free-standing freezer, which felt very suburban in our New York apartment.

            My mother didn’t teach me to cook, though she was a pretty good cook. She didn’t have enough patience, she said. She’d been a home-ec major in college (a compromise with her immigrant parents; she wanted to major in biology) and relished modern technology: frozen vegetables, TV dinners. We did have a garden for a few years when I was a child, and I learned the luscious taste of sun-warmed tomatoes and crisp peas right out of the pod. I also read my mother’s cookbooks from college and started clipping my own recipes as a teenager. Perhaps the first one was a tuna melt from Seventeen.

            And I wanted my daughter to learn the fun of mixing ingredients into some new concoction that tasted good. So when she was 4, 5, 6 and had to stand on a stool to reach the counter, I’d have her take a turn mixing the cake batter and frosting, rolling out the pizza dough, filling the dumplings. When she was a teenager, she wanted to make her own meals and start experimenting. I suggested she master some recipes first and improvise once she’d learned the basics. Now in her 40s, she still cooks, makes leftovers to take for lunch, and has found a partner who likes to cook as much as she does.

#AtoZChallenge: E Is for Everything

            I don’t believe in astrology, but my birthday is in Gemini, and I do find that everything in my life has its upside and downside, simultaneously. I also have a hard time choosing among the many things I want to do, on any day.

            I would never have been able to be a real academic, because I would not have been able to keep my attention on my sliver of a topic for as long as would have been necessary to write a dissertation, let alone turn that dissertation into a publishable book, as well as all the papers and talks required to get tenure.

            Everything in my field of interests includes reading, writing, watching movies, going for long walks, seeing plays, going to museums, listening to music of all kinds (except polkas and operas), cooking, eating, writing about my reading, knitting, crocheting, having lunch or dinner with friends, e-mailing my friends, reading Facebook, commenting on my friends’ FB posts,

reading the stories my friends post to FB, tweeting my rants about language misuse and grammatical mistakes, traveling to other countries, traveling to other states, playing the piano, organizing my books, organizing my files, oh, I’m getting tired just trying to think of everything I want to do.

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            I wasn’t sure what my E was going to be. Here were some of the possibilities: empty, erasure, enabled, elevated, elegant, effluvial, effort, early, eucalyptus, effect, elephant, easy, ephemeral, ergot, evil, ever, eternal, enter, entire, epic, ears. Maybe I’ll write about each of them at some other time.

#AtoZChallenge: D Is for Death

            Yes, that death. That thing that comes at the end of life. That thing that causes a person to stop breathing, to stop being alive, to end up buried in the ground or turned into ashes. That thing that modern Americans, at least, barely talk about, let alone think about.

            If you’re religious, maybe doesn’t feel quite so final. If you believe your dead loved one is in heaven, still thinking about you and caring for you, in some ethereal way, and that you will see each other again once you die yourself, perhaps death doesn’t feel so final. So like a thick wall banging down between you and the person you loved and lived with for 50+ years.

            My husband, Jack, died last year, on January 5. He had recently been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. He’d been in the hospital for a month, disabled for the previous two years after a fall, in moderately ill health for the 16 years before that from a clotting disorder and multiple complications. For years, he continued to say, “I can live with this.” On the last day of 2015, he said, “I can’t live with this.” Hospice, then death.

            Those are the facts. But what do they mean? How do they feel? How do I accept the finality of Jack’s being gone, forever? I have no religion, I don’t believe there’s some nonmaterial existence where he might still be. I can only hold onto the Jewish belief that dead people live on in the memories of those still alive. But my memory is weak where my memories of Jack are.

            I feel like I wasn’t paying enough attention. It feels like I need his physical presence to remember. I miss his body, his differentness, his unique thoughts and feelings. I don’t miss the fights we had over my saving things – or maybe I do miss them. In one of my few dreams about him, I was showing off the bookcases I’d emptied, and he laughed because I’d waited until after he died to do that.

            Why haven’t I dreamed of him more? Why is he dying out of my dreams as well as my life? As he lay dying, I told him, “From now on, your story will be my story. Is that okay?” And he nodded. But it’s not okay.

#AtoZChallenge: Address Books

            Have you ever found an old address book and looked through it, trying to remember who all those people are who you bothered to keep their addresses and phone numbers? I found one today, back at least 40 years. The A pages are missing, and only two names on the B page, which since it has no B tab means there’s a B page missing too. But I know who those two people are.

            Dr. L. (Lucille?) R. Burns was an ophthalmologist who worked with the eye doctor I normally saw. I think I saw her for some eye problem related to my contact lenses, but no longer remember what it was. She was extremely conservative, and when I found a new eye doctor and asked her for my medical records, she said they were her property and she wouldn’t give them to me. This seemed weird, but I didn’t know what the law was so didn’t fight it. I think it was sometime in the mid-’70s.

            The other B name is Connie Bacher, Connie Callanan Bacher to be exact. She was in my freshman hall at Antioch College, and then roommate in the summer of 1961. At the time of the address book, she was married to a tax lawyer named Don Bacher, and they were living in Guildhall, Vermont; later they moved across the river to Littleton, New Hampshire, where Don became a liberal gadfly, suing the town for putting up an enormous cross on a hillside overlooking his and Connie’s house. We are still in touch; she divorced Don and moved to India to live in a community with a swami. My daughter and her younger daughter went to the same camp one summer, and now both are librarians.

            In the Cs is Ann Constable, who I knew from women’s liberation, most likely New York Media Women, since she worked at Time. But then there’s Norma Clark Budetti, in Wichita, Kansas. This must be someone from Jack’s life, but as he’s no longer here to answer my question, she remains forever unknown. Also a “Cat-lady” ("Marilyn’s friend"; but who’s Marilyn?).

            In the ’70s there was Dial-a-Demonstration (disconnected in 1970, or 1976? can’t read my handwriting), Dial-a-Radical, and Dial-a-Recipe (in 1972). Did I ever call one of those numbers? Dr. Leo Dienstag was our primary doctor until 1992, when he retired. Norm Danzig was a young man in my therapy group in the early 1970s. Catherine De Angelis was one of Christie’s pediatricians; we went through a series of them. One was too far away in the Village, another thought fruit was like lollipops for toddlers, and shouldn’t be fed to them. Dr. Marvin Eiger was one of them, and he also had what seemed like peculiar ideas: fresh squeezed orange juice, not orange juice from the grocery store, and don’t take your baby on the subway.

            I’m not going to go all the way through the alphabet of the address book here, but I am going to see how many others from that period of my life I still remember.

            I just learned about this writing challenge, to write on my blog every day in April on a topic derived from letters of the alphabet, in order. Here's my first one.