Category: life

Alchemy

Back in the late 80’s I had a job as talent co-host on a syndicated radio program called “Sunday Side Up” — a Sunday-morning light jazz/fusion program. The job was a miserable soul-sucking experience, but I liked radio and although jazz wasn’t really my thing, I found some music to enjoy (Real Jazz People are fleeing the blog in droves at this moment, but what can I say? Mileage varies…)

I’ve been listening to Acoustic Alchemy for more than 20 years now because of that show. The song below, “Mr. Chow,” has always reminded me of my time in the Grand Canyon. I can’t explain why, except that the music sounds like sun and dust and rock and water to me. It sounds happy to be all by itself, as if it didn’t need people listening to it at all… and that’s how I’ve always remembered the canyon. Not as stately, not as “grand,” but as a place of light and stillness and the motion of water.

I applied to Clarion in late 1987 because I was dreaming of escape, and when Clarion accepted me I quit that awful job without a quiver or a qualm, even though I had no backup plan. I took Acoustic Alchemy with me to Michigan. And there I met Nicola, and phht, everything changed. The day before Nicola moved to the US, I drove to a lookout over a lake and played this album on the car stereo while I tried to imagine what it would be like to live with someone, to take that leap. It turns out that for the most part, it’s been just like the song. Happy, forward-moving, a little more complicated than it seems at first. Light and water.

Enjoy your day.

Seniority

This is the first time I’ve ever played meme, but I was tagged by Alex and I just couldn’t resist this one.

IN YOUR SENIOR YEAR…

1. Did you date someone from your school? Yes, I dated Scott Elder. I got my first speeding ticket driving his car when he, his friend Harry and I drove from graduation to a party at Stan O’Grady’s summer house in New Jersey. I was doing about 7,000 mph and a cop pulled me over. I was shaking so badly I couldn’t find my driver’s license in my purse, and so rattled that I said “Oh, fuck” out loud and then had to apologize to the policeman. I think he was vastly amused. He let me go with a warning.

I still speed. Clearly, I did not learn my lesson that day.

2. Did you marry someone from your high school? Oh my goodness, no. It’s eyebrow-raising to think how different my life would be right now.

3. Did you carpool to school? No, I went to a prep school in New England, and lived in various dorms for the four years I was there.

4. What kind of car did you have? Checker Taxi was everyone’s car, we weren’t allowed to have cars on campus.

5. What kind of car do you have now? A 1993 Toyota Paseo.

6. Its Friday night…where are you now? At home with my sweetie.

7. It is Friday night…where were you then? In my room doing homework (we had Saturday morning classes), or in the Coffeehouse, the student hangout on campus, smoking cigarettes and drinking Coca-Cola.

8. What kind of job did you have in high school? We weren’t allowed to have paid jobs while we were in school, but there was a rotating system of work. Let’s see. I waited on tables at dinner at least 3 times. We had 4 “seated meals” a week, with an assigned table presided over by a faculty member. Students got a new table assignment every week. If you were a waiter, you did it for an entire term. It sounds hokey, but it was actually a really good system for meeting other kids, other faculty, practicing social skills, and just basically staying engaged with the wider community.

I also washed dishes several nights, raked leaves… I think that’s about it.

During summers, I made some money by working with my dad at the Tri-County Fair in Northhampton, MA. Maybe more about that someday in a post.

9. What kind of job do you do now? I write fiction, essays and screenplays. And I’m the Managing Partner of Humans At Work, LLC.

10. Were you a party animal? In sophomore and junior year, I certainly did my share of partying. But I was elected secretary of the senior class, and class officers were expected to model good behavior, which included not breaking the rules. And so for most of the year, I kept myself out of the parties, which meant that I was far out of the mainstream of weekend social interaction. It was actually really hard. Finally, in late spring, after an undefeated crew season, I said Oh, fuck this and went to the ginormous crew celebration party and drank a lot, and it was great. I wish I’d done it sooner.

11. Were you considered a flirt? Oh, yikes, no. I was very shy and reserved. I wanted to be a flirt but didn’t have any of the body confidence required.

12. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir? Nope.

13. Were you a nerd? No.

14. Did you get suspended or expelled? No. But one of my responsibilities as a class officer was to serve as an advisory member on the school Disciplinary Committee (faculty did all the voting), and people did get suspended/expelled on my watch (although not on my advice — I thought expulsion ought to be reserved for things like assault, not drugs or alcohol).

15. Can you sing the fight song? We did not have one, for which I am grateful.

16. Who was/were your favorite teacher(s)? M. Hurtgen, Mr. Katzenbach, Mr. Davis (as a coach, I never had him as a teacher), Mr. Carlisle, Mr. Lederer, M. Duguay.

17. Where did you sit during lunch? With friends if any of them happened to be in the cafeteria at the same time — we all had individual schedules, it was more like college than like public HS that way. But I always had a book with me and was happy to read over lunch.

18. What was your school’s full name? St. Paul’s School.

19. When did you graduate? 1978.

20. What was your school mascot? None. I think mascots are strange.

21. If you could go back and do it again, would you? If I had to go back and repeat high school, I would absolutely go back and do SPS again. In a heartbeat. Going there is still one of the five best choices I’ve ever made.

22. Did you have fun at Prom? Well, we didn’t really have an official prom. We did throw ourselves a big spring dance, but it was open to the whole school. I went with Scott. He had been drinking, and at one point we were dancing to a disco song (it was the 70’s, we were allowed), and he tried to dip me and dropped me instead.

23. Do you still talk to the person you went to prom with? No, which is too bad. We’ve never attended reunions at the same time. Last I heard, he was married with 3 kids and working in Hong Kong.

Actually, I’d really like to talk to Jordie, my first boyfriend at school. But he won’t respond to my emails. I hurt his feelings badly, and have regretted it for years. I’d also like to talk to John.

24. Are you planning on going to your next reunion? I’d like to, but it’s a long trip. We’ll see. I always have a good time.

25. Do you still talk to people from school? Absolutely. Our class actually has a private email group, and we’re planning a service project in Concord NH (where the school is located) to get together and help build a public-assistance dental clinic (similar to a Habitat for Humanity project). I hope I can be part of that.

26. School colors? Maroon and white.

27. What celebrities came from your high school? Tons. Rich elite New England prep school, after all. Judd Nelson, John Stockwell, Michael Kennedy, John Kerry, Rick Moody, Gary Trudeau, the list goes on.

I’m not tagging people — I’m just no fun that way — but feel free to comment if you want to tell a high school story, or leave a link to your blog if you decide to answer these questions.

Harbingers

I’m sitting at my desk responding to blog comments, and I looked up just now to see about twenty tiny chubby birds scatter past my window like little BBs, drop onto a bush and hop about briskly, chattering to each other and munching up miniscule whatevers from the leaves and branches. And then phht, off again like another shot from a pellet gun.

It’s February, there is frost on the ground, and there shouldn’t be any little fat birds acting as if spring might actually happen someday. But there they were, so maybe…

Surviving

I’m sure you’ll thank me for this later. Even if I am about to send you off on hours of fossicking about on how to survive various forms of apocalypse. The link takes you to the first of eight essays, each of which contains a jillion interesting and useful links to other places and… well, you can see how quickly it could turn into one of those lost-on-the-internet expeditions.

We can start a new club: Future Survivors of Disaster (sort of like 4H or Junior Achievers except with iodine tablets and Geiger counter…)

Nicola and I amuse ourselves sometimes over a glass of wine by playing the Come the apocalypse, what store shall we rush off to loot and what shall we get? game. While everyone is over at Best Buy ripping off the flat screen TVs (because you need those in a crisis!), I’ll be at the pharmacy stuffing a basket with every opiate, antibiotic, and anti-anxiety drug I can get my hands on, thanks very much. Followed by salt, spices, liquor, matches and, well, the list goes on.

We muse on the possible scenarios. Will the social order crumble? Should we get a gun? What will be the critical needs until order is restored? It’s a game, but not completely. We’re not yet ready for the megaquake or the dirty bomb, but we’re not unready either. And it’s probably no coincidence that I take it a little more seriously than I used to: hard times bring closer the lesson that survival isn’t just a game to play in a warm room with dinner on the stove.

What are your plans for survival?

Things feel possible

In November, Nicola and I drank champagne as we watched Barack Obama win the election. Today we drank tea as we watched him become the 44th President of the United States.

I went to the gym early this morning. It’s foggy here today; I felt that I might be the only person for miles, until I saw people standing like shadows at a dark bus stop. I was alone at the gym. I drove home in a still and quiet world.

Then I turned on the radio and heard millions of voices in the other Washington. And you know, here we go… I imagined that someday I might meet President Obama and shake his hand, and I began to cry in the car for the wonder of it all, and the fierce hope I feel that maybe things will be better. Not just for me and Nicola, but for all of us, everyone in the world.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true.
 
— President Barack Obama, from his inauguration speech, January 20, 2009

When one is a new president sending one’s first official greeting to one’s people and the world, the words one chooses are important. Honesty, hard work, courage, fair play, tolerance, curiosity (what a marvelous word to include!), loyalty, patriotism — these are good words. Today is a good day. Things feel possible. Things feel new.

I pick champagne

When I was in high school, I was for one brief shining moment a New England Debate Champion.

I am not generally competitive. There’s nothing wrong with competition: I just don’t like the stress. I suck at sports, and even in the most casual situations I’ve never been a fan of any dynamic that was all about winning.

The thing is, I like to win — I am just not always willing to pay the price, which is for me a weird combination of trying to exercise power over others (I’m going to win win win!) and feeling powerless myself (oh no they’re winning I feel bad bad bad!). I am willing to make myself vulnerable to the world in lots of different ways, but competing is not such an easy one for me. Maybe it comes down to the difference between being good/not good at something myself (does someone buy my novel/short story/screenplay, or not?) and being better/worse at something than someone else. Maybe I just don’t like being shown my place in line. I dunno.

At any rate, signing up for the debate team in high school still remains one of the great mysterious choices of that part of my life. And I only lasted one term (semester, quarter… we called them terms). But in that term, my debate partner Jon Sweet and I kicked some serious smart-kid ass up and down New England.

We found a good division of labor: Jon did as much of the extemporaneous talking as possible, and I wrote as many of the prepared words as possible. I was great at putting the arguments into coherent and occasionally passionate terms: and Jon was great at doing the thing that scared the bejeezus-most out of me, which was fielding oral debate on the fly — answering the challenges calmly, with the facts and figures, and a particular easy-going charm that just made him seem so much more convincing than everyone else.

And so one Sunday we went off to one of the other schools (Exeter, maybe? Not too far away…) and represented St. Paul’s as a Novice Team. Our topic was, I believe: “Resolved: the United States should unilaterally cease production of nuclear weapons.” (Or something like that — Jon, if you ever come visiting here, do you remember if this is right?) I remember nothing of the experience except the statistic that (at the time) the US had the existing nuclear capacity to destroy the entire world dozens of times over (I can no longer remember the exact number, but it was impressive). So when it was my turn to stand up and field the challenges, I just kept finding creative ways to make the response be about We can kill everyone a lot with the stuff we have now, why do we need more?

And at the end of the day, after doing this three or four times, we got named the winning novice team and they gave us little silver bowls, and then we all climbed in the van and went back to school.

I must say that winning was one of the biggest surprises I’d had in a long time. It felt… really weird to win at something that I was pretty sure I actually wasn’t that intrinsically good at. Hey, you know, maybe that experience is part of where my attraction to team-building (and ultimately Humans At Work) came from — I’m certain that neither Jon or I would have won on our own, but we made a great team. Huh. I’ve never thought about it in those terms before, but that’s really what the dynamic was. And it was one of my first direct experiences of the power of teamwork when people are playing to their strengths.

Anyway, Jon and I were friendly but we weren’t active friends outside of debating. I was always a little bowled over by his confidence and charm (waves to Jon through the internet), and I was shy, and…. And so you may imagine my surprise to wake up in the middle of the night sometime the next week to find Jon shaking my shoulder. It was the first time a boy ever snuck into my room.

Hey, Kel, this is for you, he said, and put something in my hand, and phtt, he was gone into the magic invisible wormhole that boys go when they sneak out of your room…

And there I was, holding my first bottle of champagne.

It was just great. Really an amazing moment.

So I did what any kid with no real experience of fizzy alcohol or radiator heating would have done: I hid the bottle behind the radiator.

For several days.

In winter.

The following Saturday night, my friend Margo and I settled down after dinner to savor the experience. I had craftily set up the furniture in my room so that I could block the door from being opened (we didn’t have locks, those were simpler times…). We opened the window and lit cigarettes. I put on music (probably Traffic). I produced the bottle. I peeled the foil. I took off the little wire hat.

I didn’t even have to touch the cork. It exploded out of the bottle all by itself and champagne went everywhere. All over us. All over the bedspread. All over the india-print wall hanging. All over the ceiling (drip drip drip).

And at the door: knock knock.

It was the faculty member on our hallway, Miss Moroney. She opened the door and it banged against the drawer. I beetled over and peered out. My heart was pounding a zillion beats a minute. Behind me, Margo was desperately fanning fumes out the window. I was sure we were going to be in Big Trouble — alcohol was the kind of thing that could get you suspended or expelled.

“Kelley,” Miss Moroney said, “I have to know… are you smoking in there?”

I have never been so happy to be caught doing something wrong in my whole life.

“Yes, I am,” I said, in my best George-Washington-cherry-tree voice. “I’m sorry, it’s just that it’s so cold outside and I just, well, I’m really sorry, I won’t ever do it again, I’m really sorry, I really am.” And I’m sure I looked terrified. At any rate, she took total pity on me and told me that if it ever happened again, she’d have to report it. I groveled earnestly. I thanked her. Then I closed the door, and Margo and I damn near laughed ourselves sick (very quietly!) as we drank the remaining bit of the champagne.

I didn’t sign up for debating again in the spring. I think I hurt the teacher’s feelings who ran the group, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I’d been lucky to be with the right person, but I didn’t really have the fire for winning that one needs to be a top-notch debater. Because debating isn’t about persuading, or having an actual conversation. It’s about positions, points, arguments, and sometimes it’s just about volume and who bangs hardest on the table.

I’m just not very good at it. I would much rather have champagne.

Even if you can only be a little nice

I’m guessing no one here is surprised to find that family behavior is key to health of gay youth (many thanks to P for the link).

But please, if you read the article, don’t roll your eyes at the first few paragraphs, send a mental d’oh to the writer, and bolt away — it gets more specific as it goes on, and some of the conclusions are, I think, very helpful. In particular, the idea that “acceptance” is not an all-or-nothing event, and that even in an environment of general disapproval, any small steps toward acceptance can have a solid positive effect. When you consider that the negative effects include suicide, depression, and drug abuse, then any nudge in a different direction is a good thing.

It astonishes me that this is the first study to ever “establish a link between health problems in gay youths and their home environments.” It’s not that no one could prove it before: it’s that no one ever bothered. That, as much as anything else, points to how much impact intolerance has in the world. And of course, the lessons of this study go beyond being a queer kid. We’re all different. We could all use whatever little bit of nice each other can spare.

Dreamcatcher City

My 2008 ended with a day of loud music and creative rage followed by a night of champagne, spaghetti bolognese and conversation with Nicola about the gifts and the bruises of the old year, and our fears and hopes for the new. And, especially, what we want. Because, as Nicola said last night, talent and hard work and good ideas and luck are not enough without the wanting. And of course in wanting out loud, we make ourselves most vulnerable to bruises and gifts.

My 2009 begins with a gift. Karina has made a vid for my essay Surrender. How lucky I feel, in the gift and the friendship of the giver.

I hope 2009 brings you gifts that make you feel lucky, that make you proud of your choices and hard work, that make you glad you stuck it out for this thing and were brave enough to walk away from that one. I hope that you get your chance to walk out on the high wire and that no matter what happens, you have the fierce joy of finding yourself what you have always wanted to be.

What we want is what we are. What we do is who we are. I hope that in 2009 the wanting and the doing will be brilliant for you.

Images of 2008 (part 3)

Here’s the last of Boston.com’s 3-part series.

I’m particularly in love with this one:
The Tower of David in Jerusalem

It’s the Tower of David in Jerusalem with images of books on shelves projected on the exterior walls — if you look in the top left of the photo, you’ll see part of the actual tower. How cool is this? A building made of books.

I used to think I would live a life made of books. That’s not so true these days — at least it’s not working out that way right this moment — but this photo has given me a whole new way to think about it. A life made of books. A building made of books. A city…

Images of 2008 (part 2)

Here’s part 2 of the Boston.com 2008 in photographs online exhibit.

And since today is my holiday (well, there’s not much Christ in our Christmas, but Mas just sounds religious too, so there you go), it’s my turn to wish you all well for whatever your holiday(s) may be in this season of endings and beginnings. My day will be full of cooking and serving and making a special day for Nicola and our neighbors (*blows a kiss through the internet to mother who is snowed in and can’t get here… we’ll do it another time, Mum). Whatever you’re doing, whether today is special or ordinary to you, I wish that it will be a happy day for us all.