Walterboro, South Carolina

A stop in Walterboro, South Carolina, was one highlight of my trip in July to the Hope Institute of National Communication Association. It was held at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. (You can enlarge any photo by clicking on it.)

I ate the lunch I'd packed at this pleasant rest stop on I-95, just south of the Georgia border. The arches are a nice rendition of the Spanish influence on south Florida architecture. I was fascinated by the clean Zen lines of these water fountain.

I stopped in Walterboro, South Carolina, a charming old town that is little more than some hotels along the highway. I found my way to the old town center and a nice restaurant. A car show was happening on the street outside. The next photos are of the vintage vehicles that have been lovingly restored. The last photo in the group is a Colby Cobra. Unfortunately, there was small sign in the plaza that prevented me from getting a good picture. Behind it was a large modernist waterfall wall that has not photographed well, either.

For car enthusiasts, the green chevy is a 1934.

The Walterboro crafts center had closed by the time I at dusk on the drive north. I made a special stop on my way back home to photograph this blue bottle tree, a modernist interpretation of an old Southern folk art. You can learn more about this uniquely southtern tradition at Bottletree.com. I would have bought this if I could have afforded it. The crafts center brings together the work of numerous South Carolina artists and artisans working in many media -- jewelry, painting, and fiber art among them. Behind the antebellum home are several slaves' cabins. This reminder of the past is never far away in the southern states. One appeared to be in service as artists' studios, and it appeared that others will be remodelled. The first cabin below was just room, with a very small stove and a bare bulb hanging from uncertain wire strung across the ceiling. I couldn't see into the second, but it probably has two rooms.Walterboro is a wonderful place to stop if you making a long trip north or south on I-95. Don't be content with the fast food joints at the on-off ramps. Take the time to drive into town and sample the sights and crafts.

No EXPRESS AT AmEx, Just the World's Worst Service Ever

American EXPRESS -- nah. Try American as slow as the formation of the Grand Canyon and as responsive as rock.

First, the online ordering program for the rewards program wouldn't work. For hours. And hours. I tried from about noon til 4 p.m. When I finally got an order to go through, the screen for the gift address didn't come up. Then I tried to reach someone to correct the error. Big mistake. 45 minutes online, then I got transferred, and no one picked up after 75 minutes.

So I will have to trudge to the Post Office with its long lines and remail the package.

If you want to order online, stick with amazon.com or ebay. They know how its done.

The Christmas Lexus: A Fable for Our Times

The Christmas Lexus ads are as widely loathed as they are effective.

“Not just any Lexus,” as one of my graduate students said with just the right inflection for emphasis, “The Christmas Lexus.” We were performing a semiotic deconstruction of these illlustrations of American excess. But it doesn’t require the theory of Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco to spy and decry the haute bourgeoisie mythification of shopping for the glory of God.

As AdFreak headlines, Lexus is back with the usual Christmas downer. Adjab identifies the campaign as Ads We Hate and it tops the Yuletide peeves at The Daily Ping.

Jeremy W. Peters at the New York Times reports that the Christmas Lexus happens. The surest sign of flattery, other auto makers are airing imitations.

Those spoilsports over at Live and Learn Invest point out that the more likely response is “You did what?” than the happy smiles in the Lexus ads.

I knew a woman whose husband gave her a Mercedes Benz for their wedding anniversary. She’d left him after raising a family together but, like Janis Joplin, discovered freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. He was really glad to have her back. She was furious when he replaced her subcompact for the luxury Mercedes diesel. Ecologically responsible, she liked her peppy little car that handled like a top in traffic. How dare he trade away her car without consulting her, she fumed.

Then there’s this video of the 14-year-old girl who throws a tantrum because she received the gift of a $67,000 Lexus before, instead of during, her party. “My life is ruined,” she sobs. Or this spoiled teen who complains because her gift car is red, not blue.

Halfbakery has the perfect response – the evil gift of a fake Lexus key that sends the recipient into the snow only to discover there’s no luxury auto with a bow on top out there.

My students did a fine job of deconstructing the sign –the Christmas Lexus– into its signifier (the photo of the car) and the signified (a gift that shows you care, a lot). The sign empties of its denotative meaning, as Roland Barthes has it, and fills up with connotation – wealth and prosperity, a surfeit of money so great that a $40,000 to $70,000 car is but a bauble for celebrating the holiday. A perfect home, a perfect family, even a perfect snowy night in at least one of the ads. What could possibly result but perfect happiness?

Those of us who regard a car as a large, utilitarian purchase for which we must budget – that is to say, most of us, the petit bourgeosie hoping for admission into the upper levels of the middle class – are hooked by the emotions depicted in the ad's images. Consumer capitalism is concealed and mythified. If you want really good analyses of these, may I direct your attention to:

• Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957
• Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 1990, about his trip across the USA
• Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness. 1977 and reissued.
• Or All Consuming Images, 1990.

Me, I’m off to buy a phony Lexus key.

For something cheerier, check out this fabulously creative and entertaining award-winning animation by Aaron Erimez. It's the story of a mischievous Christmas tree ornament and its adventures when the household is asleep.

Jung Love Review: Kathrin Asper's Abandoned Child Within Deepens My Interest

Asper, Kathrin. (1993). The Abandoned Child Within: On Losing and Regaining Self-Worth. (Translated by S. E. Rooks.) New York: Fromm International Publishing.

Asper is the real deal -- a Jungian trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich,Switzerland. The book is out of print, so thank goodness for university libraries. When a book makes a deep impression on me, I copy long passages from it. That was the case with this book. I often had to stop to emotionally digest her words and examples. Writing out passages further helped me to make sense of this work.

Asper identifies a disorder she terms narcissistic self-estrangement. The analysand must first heal the wounds of this disorder before embarking on the Jungian journey toward integration of ego and spirit through individuation. According to Asper, this type of person invests a lot of energy in developing a persona that can get along quite well in the world. However, this person is not truly anchored in herself. When something happens externally that is upsetting, such as loss or disappointment, the person responds with rage, resignation, or depression. Even when life is going well, they experience alienation and emotional detachment.

Asper writes, "There are two ways that insufficient mothering is expressed in adult behaviors -- clinging or a false self-sufficiency. People with faulty attachment behavior are extremely sensitive to separation and tend to be anxious about loss and to deal pathologically with grief" (p. 45). The narcissistically wounded person must learn to feel her feelings, instead of denying them or striving to do something about them, and thus remaining cut off from feelings. As in other emotional recovery programs, one must allow oneself to fully feel before one can heal.

Narcissistically wounded people must learn compassion for themselves and to celebrate their victories and joys. Of course, such awareness is good medicine for all spiritual journeys. My interpretation of Asper does not give full credit to the depth of her work.

This is a serious work of Jungian study, intended for professional analysts. It also is a revealing study that may resonate with many people for whom popular books about the abandoned child within have seemed simplistic.

South Florida Is Home

It doesn’t seem that it should be so difficult for a lifelong writer and diarist to post once a week, which seems the minimum appropriate to have an ongoing blog. Yet, much of what I write is too personal to share, a voyage of self-discovery. Universal truths may be part of that journey, but each of us must discover and apply these for ourselves. That’s why the journey is personal.

I spent the past week in Fairfax, Virginia, and that was a real journey both in time and space and in inner discovery. As I grow older, I contemplate whether Florida is the best place to grow old. I believe it would be better to live in a city with museums and other cultural and intellectual opportunities, as well as with good public transportation. Baltimore is one such city, and it has the familiarity of a place where I spent 10 of the best (and sometimes worst) years of my life. But like many cities, it also has crime.

And, as the trip to Virginia illustrated, I already live in subtropical paradise. I arrived on a sunny, hot day, the end of an Indian summer heat wave. No one calls it Indian summer anymore; now its global warming and a sign of dire things to come rather than a respite from the cold and rain of winter. By the next morning, a cold front had arrived, and the rest of the time was spent with gray skies and rain of varying intensity.

The buildings, once charming to me for their federalist period facades of brick and stone, now seem hopelessly dated and dreary. Where are the clean white stucco exteriors, the sometimes Caribbean Popsicle colors, and the red tile roofs? Where are the palm trees and hibiscus?

I was happy to return to South Florida, to my messy apartment with its leak, my battle with the International Village condo association and the property manager to fix that leak, and the various trials and tribulations of ongoing life that we all experience. It is good to get away and better to come home.

Jung Love Review: Estes' Classic Starts My Journey

Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. (1992). Women Who Run with the Wolves. New York: Ballentine.

For a long time -- since 2004 -- ideas had been burbling around in my head about women, creativity, and building a new identity in later life, in a society that doesn't value post-menopausal females. Reading Estes in February 2007 was part of my probing; I didn't know that it would start me off in a new direction, nor that, come autumn, I would barely have scratched the surface of my hero's journey.


Estes deconstructs old fairytales and folk stories for the wisdom they contain about how social forces dismember women's psyche, creativity, and central soul identity. The points that most impressed me in this book are:

• The wild female nature is creative and connected to spirit. Estes schema is that soul is a universal force that incarnates physically to know itself. Spirit inhabits the body and is the messenger between ego and soul. But ego is limited, afraid, and selfish. It sees the light of soul and entraps spirit, wanting to be close to it.
• Entrapment includes trying to be the good girl/woman, behaving to please others, giving up art for money and things, a marriage and children.
• Eventually, one must connect to the wildness within to be whole.

I recommend this book to any women who wants to know herself better.

Bad Newscasting

A new low for standards for television journalists was reached yesterday when a CNN anchor blithely admitted to a weather reporter, out in hurricane Flossie, that he didn’t know how to pronounce the name of the Hawaiian town from where the report was coming. I can hardly imagine Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Huntley or Brinkley, or any of the venerable newsmen of the past admitting – on camera – that he hadn’t done his homework. I can’t even imagine as a newspaper reporter of far lesser renown having gone out on an assignment without doing my homework.

Another egregious instance was when the Palm Beach Post, in the late 1990s, assigned a reporter to the fashion beat with no background in fashion – a deficiency she joked about in her columns. In a letter to an editor, I complained about how hard it is to teach young journalism students to do research when this is the role model they get. I also pointed out that the Post serves Palm Beach and Wellington, two of the most fashionable locales in the United States. Its readers contribute to a multi-billion-dollar fashion industry. Finally, I asked if the paper would dare send someone with no knowledge of football to report on a game and publish a lame article about how the reporter noticed that there were a bunch of guys tossing a funny-shaped ball around and bumping into each other – and that’s about all he could tell us about it.

The fashion reporter wasn’t on the beat for long, but the lame CNN reporters, with their pretty hair and superficial questions, have been around far too long.

Dan Rather, onetime CBS anchor, rails against the “dumbing down and tarting up of the news.” Pundits have been bemoaning the poor state of network and cable news, but it doesn’t do any good.

Carl Jung, Intrepid Traveler

Inspired by my brand-new Carl Jung action figure, I decided to take out my toy and give it a whirl. Here are the results.



CARL JUNG VISITS THE RIVIERA.














CARL JUNG LIKES FLORIDA. He is overdressed. I suggest that he change into a Hawaiian shirt.










CARL JUNG CELEBRATES A VICTORY AT THE RACES. I wonder if Dr. Jung visited the gambling casino on the same property as the trotters' track in nearby Pompano Beach.























CARL JUNG ENJOYS SOME GARDENING AND LOSES HIS PIPE. The world-famous psychiatrist and reknowned egghead appears to own only one suit.




CARL JUNG RETIRES TO A CRUMBLING CHATEAU IN ZURICH. Being a world jet-setter is hard work. Now it is time for Jung to return to his research. I hope he makes enough money to buy another suit soon.

Jung Love Review: Caroline Myss on Archetypes

Myss, Caroline. (1995). Exploring the Archetypes for Life's Lessons: Victim, Prostitute, Saboteur & Child (Audio Cassette). Great Lakes Training Associates.

This four-cassette audio set presents the four archetypes that Myss believes are part of every individual’s components. She also takes an unusual approach by relating these to a structure similar to the houses of astrology. Co-author C. Norman Sheely doesn’t add much to the exploration of archetypes as tools for understanding life’s journey and goes off on what are to me some wild bio-physiological tangents. One of the devices he recommends sounded a lot like putting a tin foil hat on one’s head to keep out the brainwashing of space aliens.

The notion of archetypes derives from the work of Carl Jung, who is not credited by Myss. They are larger than personality and illustrate grand, cross-cultural themes in human life. I am sure that we have encountered someone whom we have identified as playing the role of victim or perhaps someone who inevitably sabotages him- or herself, or others. The archetype of the prostitute is rife in our material culture. The inner child has become quite celebrated in recent years with books obliging us to honor these innocent, creative impulses or to heal the wounding of our abandoned child within.

My experience was uncanny with Myss’s use of experiential houses or aspects of life into which to place our archetypes. She asks us to pick four numbers out of the air, intuitively. As she described the archetypes, I was able to interpret a work experience I was going through to see how I was evidencing the victim, saboteur, and wounded child and what life-stage was represented. As a result, I was able to choose more mature behaviors and see my folly.

Myss is an engaging storyteller with a good sense of humor who fleshes out her ideas with plenty of human interest examples, including self-deprecating anecdotes from her own life. I recommend this set as a good starting place for an exploration of archetypes or Myss’s work.

Tiny snail

This tiny snail was in some laundry, curtains that I took off the patio to wash. I thougt it was a pretty little spiral shell that had come loose from an arrangement of airplants on driftwood. Imagine my surprise when it poked out its wee antlers and started oozing along the inside of my plastic laundry basket. It is so small, perhaps an half-inch long, with a beautifully patterned cone-shaped shell.

When I went to France in 1972, I was avid to eat snails in a cafe, a dish of which I'd only heard. In Spain, however, there were many snails stuck to the glass doors on the patio. They only came out of their shells when it rained. Then, their transparent bodies would slide gracefully along the window, tiny antlers twitching in the moisture. I've never been able to enjoy eating snails after that; it's too much like eating pets.

I thought snails came with round shells. I did not know that they also came with shells shaped like ice-cream cones. I returned this tiny fellow to the porch and hope he finds a place to survive.

Obsolescence Foils Frugal Shopper

Planned obsolescence has been on the social critics’ agenda since Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders was published in 1957. Yet, 50 years later, our society is a card house of credit debt and endless shopping.

Recently, my frugality has run plumb into planned obsolescence. I needed to reconfigure some wall shelves, including the purchase of new boards. Even though the shelving is less than two years old, RubberMaid has stopped making the honey pine veneer. A Home Depot representative reassured me that the new color, natural, is the same. It is not.

I priced custom-made shelves, but that was too expensive. A home decorator suggested that I create a belly line of shelves in the center, or perhaps a top and bottom accent line of shelves in a different color. He saved the day.

I visited every Home Depot from North Miami to South Palm Beach. I sorted through board after board, finally managing to round up three honey pine shelves. That was enough to make a belly line in walnut possible. The darker color coordinates with some darker wood furniture. Blond wood is all wrong for my room, so the natural veneer was impossible.

My new quest is for a small hot pot to boil water for morning tea and, more importantly, to take with me when I travel to use in motel rooms. The nice metal one I’ve had for many a year has burnt out. New models are plastic. I even saw one with a plastic plug. I am not sticking little plastic feet into the wall.

I've also been on an endless quest for a special kind of hinge that folds flat in both directions to build a folding screen. "Like Mae West used to stand behind if a man was in the room and she was changing clothes," said a nice man named Bill at Grove Hardware -- a store I highly recommend. He called suppliers, including one that was importing the hinges from China. Apparently these hinges aren't being made any more. So what do manufacturers use for folding screens sold retail?

I'm doomed to these quests for products that are discontinued and nonexistent as long as planned obsolescence is the motor that keeps the economy running. So is everyone else who wants shopping to be simple and for good products to stay the same.

Handy Baskets Organize, Add Texture

Baskets are an inexpensive way to add texture to a room, as well as providing storage. Often, they can be found for a buck or two at a thrift store, rather than buying them new.

I use baskets on my wall unit of shelves.

These two baskets are larger than they look. The wicker basket, right, is a lunch box with a lid with clever handles that lock shut -- perfect for a quiet lunch alone in a park. A subtle diamond pattern woven into the front of it is too subtle to capture on camera. It holds computer program CDs and instruction booklets for computer electronics, such as this camera.

The red one hides an entire Leggoes box that I use for a classroom demonstration activity. There is a close-up below.







The next basket on the wall shelves holds music CDs. Lighter and darker reeds are interwoven to create an interesting pattern.


These three baskets, below, are grouped against a small wall for the time being.
The very large picnic hamper holds my sewing supplies. I've placed a tray on top of it -- you can see the blond wood rim -- to create a flat surface, so the other baskets don't sit askew. The square basket and pale reed basket with a graceful kidney-shaped top edge are being re-purposed as I reorganize my living space.




This use of a basket as a lampshade, below right, never worked out; it always sits lopsidedly. It currently resides in a corner behind my recliner that is a holding pen as I decide what to put where in my clean-up. I'd forgotten about the large round basket until I noticed it in the background. As you can see, it is a trash basket. It is not usually overfilled and serves more discreetly as my circular file. It is roughly brushed with white paint in a shabby-cottage effect.





I also forgot about this nifty harlequin basket, below, until I wrote about the other trash basket. I keep dashing off to take more photos as I write. This jaunty harlequin serves as a petite trash container in the jungle room half-bath. It cost a buck at the dollar store and is one of the few that I purchased new.










The little rope basket, below, holds extra hand towels in the jungle room. The two sides with their scallops resemble seashells. The spokes and handle are wicker.






The next two photos show my file-tray basket. In a one-bedroom apartment, I hide my printer behind a lamp in a dark corner of the room. Even the "end table" on which it sits serves a storage purpose; it is my cedar chest for woolens that we so rarely wear here in Florida.





















Baskets are great for stashing paper -- bills, receipts, and mail offers about which I'm undecided. Two are shown below and in close-ups. I like the way rattan has been twisted to form a rope that was woven to create the round basket.



Notice how a rough brown twine has been woven into the center section of the long, thin basket, below.


























This rustic basket is a refugee from Christmases past. It is woven of a flat bark or reed about an inch wide to form a diamond weave. These have been faintly brushed with red and green that does not show unless you are very close. It is a brittle wood, so I can understand why the maker didn't get the bottom quite flat. It must have been hard to work with this material. It holds everything I need next to my recliner -- eyeglasses, nail kit and hand cream, calculator, bookmarks, you name it.




Spray-painted gold years ago, this basket belongs in storage until the winter holidays. I threw a modular kusudama in for the picture, but the pink and yellow paper is too light to photograph well. Notice how the graceful rounded bottom is centered with a flat coaster-like circle that is woven right into the work so that it will sit right. How clever and practical!



This little basket is the right size to hide a small plastic flower pot. It has a large handle (extends out of the photo), and once hung from a wire plant hook on my patio, until the plant died. Plain rough brown twine forms the X pattern on the body and gold twine accents the top and bottom rims.


This wide variety of baskets adds (I hope) texture yet unity to my main living area. Wait, we're not quite done. There are still the scullery maids in the kitchen.

Once upon a time this lime-green basket accented a tiny bathroom trimmed in that color. Now it holds vitamin pills in the kitchen. Perhaps it's time to repaint it.

Last, these hanging copper wire baskets cost a few dollars at Wal-Mart. Every kitchen should have some, don't you think?


I almost forgot this pair, below. Set on an angle to each other, they contain bathroom clutter in a minuscule space with no storage. Less than four inches wide and 13 inches long, they are a tough rope fiber on wire frames.














In conclusion, you can see that I love baskets. They help keep my clutter in control. I like the way they look, and the price is right.

Biking to the Caribbean

Biking to the Caribbean may seem impossible. Because of the rich cultural diversity of Broward County, the Caribbean is almost as close as my doorstep. Want to join me on a bike trip to the Post Office?

This is the road just beyond the gate of International Village. I stay on the narrow sidewalk. Inverrary Drive is a two-lane road with lots of speed bumps, so I am pretty safe here. You can see a faux English Tudor structure on the left. The cinderblock apartment buildings are identical, except for the Disneyfication of the exteriors to vaguely resemble various European architectural styles – Marseilles, Bordeaux, Inverness and so on. A lot of these details blew off when hurricane Wilma came through in 2005, but the exterior repairs go on and on.

The ride gets dicier at the intersection where Inverrary Drive meets Inverrary Boulevard. When we find a name we like, we go for it around here. It’s kind of like Atlanta, where at least half-dozen streets seem to be named Peachtree.

Inverrary Boulevard is a four-lane thoroughfare with a grassy median. Cars mostly ignore the 30-mile-speed limit. There is a bike lane, but knocking down bikers is good sport in Florida. Our state took high honors for greatest number of bicyclists killed by cars in 2005, 124 out of 784 nationwide, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics reported in the November 21, 2006 South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Three bicycle riders were killed during a three-week period at the time of that report.

The bike lane ends, but a sidewalk lies just beyond this entrance to another Inverrary subdivision of small homes with garages. Residents can have dogs there, which I would like to do.






This water feature, pictured below, with its rocks and flowering plants add a note of serenity to the ride. It’s a popular spot for newlyweds to have their wedding photos taken. The clever landscaping hides a major intersection just a hundred feet or so away.












Oakland Park Boulevard, left, is a six-lane divided highway with right-and-left turning lanes, thus eight lanes in most places. Run for your life! I mean it. Drivers are so mean that the traffic lights are calibrated to show you how many seconds are left to get across the road, like an electric-chair countdown. I walk my bicycle across intersections, my parents’ voices ringing across the decades.

I have to cross one intersection from the north to south sides of the road, and this one from the east to west side. See that little piece of white cement at the other side of the road? Look closely. Yep, there it is. It’s a sidewalk. Despite the heavy traffic on Oakland Park Boulevard, I will be able to finish the trip on this sidewalk and relatively safe access roads. I do not have a death wish. But maybe I should wear a helmet. There are maniacs out there on these roads.

Here is the strip mall that houses our little local post office. Not Caribbean enough for you? What about the Creole Diner and Juice Bar? The little store that specialize in island music? The ten-buck nail salon? Or how about the seafood restaurant where the men cook blackened fish on grills made from oil drums?

I stop at the So Loved Market before heading home to buy a bottle of water. Click on photo to enlarge to see sign. Amazingly, I see someone I know at the laundermat. Last summer, in brutal heat, I gave an elderly woman at the supermarket a drive to her apartment because she is nearly blind. She is such a sweetie pie, and I haven’t seen her since. She peers into my face but remembers me quite well. Her vision may be going, but she is still sharp as a tack.

There are two waterfalls and a small pond at this entrance to the subdivision, directly across Inverrary Boulevard from the pond I shot earlier. It is another great favorite of brides and grooms for their photos.

I am almost home. Once I turn on Inverrary Drive, a head wind combined with the slight incline is too much for me. I walk the bike for a while, until the ground levels. My packages are mailed, I’ve gotten some exercise, enjoyed my trip to the Bahamas, and had a nice chat. Mission accomplished.

Culture of Fear

I remember when thunder storms came, and people got out of the rain. Now, thunder storms are a national emergency, with warnings from the National Weather Service streaming across the television screen. People state that the weather is worse now than it used to be, but I expect that’s not the case.

Not so many years ago, an Associated Press wire report about eight people dead in a tornado in Alabama would have been buried on a back page of the New York Times in a few paragraphs. Many local newspapers wouldn’t have had space to run such a report. Now the 24/7 news cycle places cameras at the scene within minutes.

Yesterday, eight children died in a school in Enterprise, AL, in just such a weather event. But it’s not Armageddon, and we don’t need to cling to our radios in desperate fear of the weather. Scared populations trade freedom for the illusion of security.

Authoritarian leaders have no need to impose dictatorship on the U.S. people. All they have to do is give them Ipods and plasma televisions and keep them hypnotized by streaming disaster news and amused by escapist programs with lots of whoo-hoo screaming. Then, the sheep gladly trade liberty for the prison of safety.

Mark Bowden: Bravo for Success Earned the Old-Fashioned Way

Mark Bowden, author of the best-selling Black Hawk Down, was interviewed by Chris Matthews on Crossfire on Feb. 15, 2007. I worked with Bowden many many moons ago, when we were young.

I felt proud to have known him. Bowden pursued, without much support from his newspaper, the story of a Black Hawk helicopter that went down in Somalia during the Clinton administration’s foray, U.S. airmen dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The book also became a popular film, and Bowden has his pick of assignments these days.

He answered Matthews’ questions without the emotional histrionics to which TV news personalities are so prone – no shouting, no talking over the other person, but quietly telling his truth, refusing to be backed into corners or to allow what he had to say to be twisted and turned, exploited or misrepresented. He looked rather handsome (men age so much better than women), quietly confident, a man comfortable in his own skin.

Bowden’s view is that the Islamic terrorism threat has been overestimated and exploited by the administration. He was unphased by Matthews’ aggressive journalistic style designed to catch guests in the “crossfire,” as he styles it.

Bowden stayed in newspaper over decades when newspapers have continued to go out of business until finally, now, their existence is in question. Newspapers may not even survive the age of the internet. But Bowden survived the News American, where we once worked together, a newspaper that celebrated its 200-year run before being crowded out of the Baltimore market by the Sun. He went on to pursue his craft at the Philadelphia Inquirer. It can’t have been easy raising a family on a newsman’s salary. But he did, building his reputation word by word, lead by lead, story by story, mastering his craft the old-fashioned way. It is so gratifying to see a hard-working man achieve fame and fortune, and that it can come relatively late in life, after it has truly been earned. Success doesn’t seem to have turned Bowden’s head and that, too, makes me proud to have known him back in the day.

Galleria Go 'Round

After living in Fort Lauderdale for two years, I had not visited its best-known mall, the upscale Galleria on Sunrise Boulevard. I decided to talk a 30-minute mall walk there today. The reports of its attractions have been greatly exaggerated.

What can I say? It is a collection of national chains in one location, a round-up of the usual corporate retailing suspects, from Bebe to Victoria’s Secrets. The absence of J.C. Penney’s and presence of Neiman Marcus and Saks identify it as a mall for the moneyed.

I understood my wisdom in not visiting before now. I have been living on a tight budget. I find no pleasure in competing for parking places in order to ogle the perquisites of the rich that I cannot afford.

The mall was not as crowded as I thought it might be on a cloudy day after Christmas. Nonetheless, it was challenging to keep up a brisk walking pace in the best traveled corridors. Malls are for dawdling and spending.

Saks has the strangest design approach of any of the major retailers, at least at the Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale locations. The goal seems to be to create simultaneously grandeur and intimacy, and the two elements clash. Everything is beige marble, soaring ceilings, angular lines, and brilliantly shined glass showcases. The displays are minimalist. These elements suggest grandeur and modernity. On the other hand, various products are tucked away in nooks reminiscent of the small shops that once existed on every town’s main street. I find this juxtaposition of the grand and the intimate jarring and uncomfortable. I wonder if it appeals to Saks’ demographic.

In conclusion, a mall is a mall is a mall. You can dress it up in marble or dress it down in cement tile, but the same old retailers hawk the same wares. The food court may have the name of an Italian piazza and be decked in fancy letters, but the kiosks are still Italian pizza, salads and wraps, and Asian. Malls are predictable and fundamentally boring.

Downsize Christmas

Christmas is in need of serious downsizing. Political comic commentator Lewis Black asks, "When did Christmas become about shopping?"

Then there is the silliness: the war against Christmas by stores who asked employees to say "Happy holidays" instead of Merry Christmas, so not to Jews and other non-Christians. An airport took down its Christmas trees when a rabbi asked that a menorah be added. Then the airport put them back up when the rabbi backed down from a lawsuit.

Downsize the whole holiday. Take down the tacky Christmas trees. End the holiday shopping binge, the high expectations for perfect family gatherings in our dysfunctional families, and restore a quiet focus on religion, family, and community.

Christmas needs some serious downsizing.

Birds at dusk

Birds swoop and call
Caw and chatter and screen
Sweeping in kaleidescope patterns
Black wings against the cloudy gray dusk.

A busy intersection full of Christmas traffic
Irritated commuters and hurried shoppers
The birds above clatter and rise up from the trees and power lines in clouds of darkness. Big and small, round heads and crested, beaked and graceful.

I am glad that I am alive to see this.

More Nuggets of Wisdom: Life Lessons 6-10

Please see August 12, 2006 for Life Lessons 1-5.

LIFE LESSON #6

If you remember when a fashion wasn’t retro, don’t wear it.

What looks fabulously cutting edge on someone who didn’t see the style the first time around merely looks sadly out-of-date on YOU. Don’t try to relive your youth. For gawd’s sake, find something new to do.

LIFE LESSON #7

A guy who cheats on his wife will cheat on you.

There is absolutely no excuse for a woman over the age of 40 to believe a man’s lies. Don’t cry to your friends when he won’t leave his wife or, after leaving her, up and leaves you. If he says his wife doesn't understand him, laugh in his face. You don't really believe that, do you? At your age? Grow up.

LIFE LESSON #8

Don’t marry a back-door man.

Pussy hounds are not marriage material. If you want a life of great sex, betrayal and tears, go for it. If you don’t, find for someone nice and learn to appreciate him. He will mow the lawn, take out the garbage, balance the checkbook, and love you even when you look your worst. He deserves a good woman. Give him one – you.

LIFE LESSON #9

Always buy title insurance.

Title insurance is a policy offered at the time you close on any real estate sale. Even though you had a title search, sometimes a problem arises. For example, a former owner’s ex-husband who was missing dries out, returns, and announces he never signed off on the sale and, thus, has a right to an interest in your property.

In some states, including Florida, title insurance is required. In Florida, it’s customary for the seller to pay for it but not required. In Georgia, title insurance was completely optional was not required. As it turned out, the county appraiser’s office had wrongly recorded a power company easement as 50 feet when it was 100 feet. The only thing a person could do with the land was mow it; planting or building was not allowed. It cut the land I thought I’d purchased in half. I dried the tears of my disappointment with a check from the title insurance company when I discovered the error. My neighbors, who did not have title insurance, were so irritated they sold their home and left the neighborhood.


LIFE LESSON #10

No one can teach you how to write, but a good writing coach may help you to write better, and a good MFA writing program may help you make contacts that lead to publication.

I found it interesting to see a number of books to help writers generate ideas on the remainder tables at two large chain bookstores I visited today. I confess that I’ve used several of these books to generate fiction writing exercises for myself, especially early in the morning. But, I’m a lousy fiction writer.

As a journalist and essayist, I have more ideas than I’m ever going to need. If you need a book to generate ideas, perhaps writing is not the mode of self-expression that’s right for you. I recommend silly crafts projects as an alternative. (See my hand-crafted bricolage thank-you bookmark card with my Life Lessons post of Aug. 12, 2006.)

Katie Couric: Must all news be fun?

Waiting for a prescription at the drugstore, I flipped through the latest copy of Good Housekeeping, where there was a story about ABC’s new anchor, Katie Couric, erstwhile of NBC’s morning smorgasboard of features articles. Couric says one of her job demands was that the job had to be fun. Couric was mocked on The Daily Show when host Jon Stewart ran on clip of her saying that her favorite story from the recent, heated elections was about one Congressman missing three fingers from an accident.

Ye gods and little kittens, as a favorite femme coworker used to say back in my youth. Is this the fruit of the women’s movement? A woman attains one of the three coveted news anchor spots in the U.S., and she turns it into gossip? Fun, my dear, is on MTV, HGTV, Food and Travel Channel. Cheerleaders,rock stars, and Paris Hilton make fun the bottom line.

Fun is diversion. Passion is intense feeling. Joy may well up from passion; it is a feeling of oneness, flow, completion. Happiness, on the other hand, is like fun – dependent on happenstance and diversion, fleeting, and without internal ballast.

I want my news anchors to be thoughtful, insightful, well read, immensely knowledgeable about world and national affairs. I want them to see past surfaces (such as missing fingers) to what’s missing from the facts, from the inner guts of the story or the person. This requires passion for the work, not a desire to slip away into the empty diversions of fun.

When I was a young reporter, I used to tell colleagues who grumbled, “They call it work because it isn’t play. If it was fun, they wouldn’t have to pay us to do it.” I had and still have a passion for good reporting and good writing. I am passionate about being an effective teacher of communication now. Sometimes, I have fun, but I do not seek it as what I’m looking for in life. Passion and joy come from fulfilling one’s inner purpose, not seeking after mindless diversions.

Lately, I often look at news anchors and think that Ken and Barbie are bringing me the news with mindless happy talk, chronic substitution of the word irony for circumstances that are coincidence, misuse of plural pronouns for singular referents, and a general dumbing down of information. Katie Couric appears to be a nice gal who was excellent at the providing light features for the morning program. As a new anchor, she embodies the Barbie image of the news anchor, at least for me.

Do you like your doctors?

I don’t think much of doctors anymore. I’m pretty sure that each one will suggest doing things to me that I don’t want to do.

I had a doctor in Baltimore that I liked quite a bit. He dressed like Marcus Welby, a popular TV physician of the time, with wool jackets with patches on his sleeves. He was tall and good-looking like Robert Young, the actor who morphed from the reassuring dad on Father Knows Best into the reassuring dispenser of health. Dr. Feelgood wasn’t much good at diagnosing my back pain, but he was generous with the Librium scrips.

Today's television doctor du jour is House -- brilliant, unorthodox, arrogant, cranky, unshaven, and popping pills with the abandon of a hippie on the Haight. What does that say about the social condition of doctors today?

I took to spending increasing amount of time in bed due to excruciating back pain. One day my husband tossed a slip of paper across the quilt. “You’re not the same woman I married. This is my mother’s orthopedist. Call him.” My X did not think as much of Marcus Welby as I did. The orthopedist turned out to be a pretty good guy and hooked me up with an excellent surgeon.

I’m turning into my mother when it comes to doctors. I’ve laughed off my GP who is continually suggesting that he perform a breast exam, even though I have assured him that I consult a gynecologist once a year. She is female, she understands how the equipment works, and she is the first GYN I’ve had who can take a pap smear without turning it into small torture.

My GP suggested I have a nebulizer to disperse medicine like a vaporizer during a recent lengthy bout with bronchitis, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Maybe I wouldn’t have an ear infection now if I had taken his advice.

I spent a year seeing various doctor mengeles to find out that I might have lupus. Then again, I might not, according to a rheumatologist in New Orleans who said he’d run some more sophisticated blood tests. No one has been able to get those records since hurricane Katrina flooded that city.

I don’t want radioactive dyes shot through my body and to be plunged through a CatScan on a cold slab of steel. I don’t want ultrasounds, x-rays, blood tests, and I definitely don’t want to have my ear drained, one of the most painful procedures I have ever undergone. Ear docs tell you that it will pinch a little, but they are lying.

Occasionally my students want me to verify that they are really sick. One even asked me if I would tell her employer that she was ill on a certain day because she had not come to class. But I tell them I’m not that kind of doctor.

So, how's your experience with doctors?

Perfect Mornings, Thoroughbreds, and Students

It is a perfect winter morning in south Florida, with sky as blue as turquoise, the deep green fronds palm trees fluttering in balmy breezes. It is the kind of morning that makes one say – I will endure the heat of summer that makes me feel like my head is going to explode; I will endure hurricane season, the crowded highways, the high taxes and home insurance; I will put up with all of this so that I do not have to face the freezing cold and gray skies of winter.

It made me think of other perfect mornings, reporting to Pimlico Race Course on perfect spring days in Baltimore, Maryland, skies and breezes and temperatures much like these. Noted handicapper Clem Florio once said – you’d have to be crazy not to love this life. As I drove into the race course gate, thoroughbreds would race past the fences on their morning work outs. In some ways, I suppose, the students are like the young thoroughbreds – athletically and sexually frisky, ready to run into a bright future of endless victories – how could it not be a bright future of achievements? This is a good life, too.

Prez Gets the People's Message

President George Bush the younger led the Republican Party to defeat in yesterday’s midterm elections, as he led the country to defeat in Iraq. Citizens, apparently in trauma since the terrorists’ toppling of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and fueled by the continual fear-mongering of this administration, at last emerged from political catatonia to vote in a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and maybe even in the Senate.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, one of the neo-Conservative architects of the pre-emptive military strike on Iraq that has turned into a bloody mess over the last three years, resigned. Or he was booted, but at any rate, the Prez announced Rumsfeld’s departure at a news conference this morning.

It’s not as if happy times are here, but at least we can look forward to getting our young people out of Iraq and a lessening of the constant fear-mongering that has been in play for the past five years

Rain like steam

A big truck laden with lumber
Spewing clouds of misty rain
Like an old-fashioned
Steam engine.

It is dark since the time change
When I leave campus
A long day
Busy bee Mondays.

Home I have two hours or so
To eat, shower, watch TV.
Then back to do it all again
Tomorrow.

Karmic Symmetry

Karmic Symmetry

So here I am, fretting about how I miss Miss M., who stopped responding to phone calls, emails, cards, and even flowers. She represents a part of my youth, and that’s a lot of water under the bridge.

And while I am fretting, Miss N. sends me a note, through my mother, even though I cut off contact with her two years ago. Now I have to decide – what does one say when one has outgrown a relationship? Perhaps I am still angry. Stating my authentic reasons for not wanting to renew old lang syne does not seem helpful; it will only perpetuate a cycle I prefer to end. Not acknowledging the note seems the kind of passive-aggressive behavior of Miss M. So I have written a note thanking her for thinking of me and philosophizing that all things have a season, including relationships.

I recently heard a radio interview with Joanna Carson, who was a great friend of Truman Capote. She was asked if Capote has an eccentric way of being very enthusiastic about a new friend for a while, then creating a scene and ending it. Carson said that wasn’t true. She observed that some friendships last a while and then pass from our lives. They don’t all last forever. Perhaps the 30-year curve with M and the 20-year curve with N are all they were meant to last. Even long-lived trees and tortoises eventually die.

In Love with Lexus

The Lexus 330 looks like a sports car on steroids. Aerodynamic and glittering with chrome, the inside offers leather luxury. Best yet, there’s a Toyota engine. It has looks and muscle, and I want one.

Is the plural of Lexus Lexi?

Letting Her Go

Have you ever lost a friend and not known why? Or, have you ever left a relationship without telling the other person why? Please share your thoughts.


Back in August, I wrote Tribute to a Friend to because I miss the Divine Miss M. I've known her 30 years. After many attempts to find out what's going on, and reassurance I will be here for her if she changes her mind, I am coming to the conclusion that I must stop even occasional "thinking of you" messages.

Yesterday, I read an article in the current issue of Yoga Journal about forgiving ourselves when another person will not forgive us and then moving on. The situation was a little different: the writer knew why the old friend has ended the friendship, but attempts to make amends were roundly rejected. In this case, I don't know what I did that offended, while indicating my willingness to set things straight.

On Sunday, in an NPR interview with Joanna Carson about her great friend Truman Capote, she was asked if he had a penchant for having an intense friendship with someone, then ticking them off or writing them off, in an eccentric pattern of terminal friendships. Carson didn't see it that way. In the course of a lifetime, she observed, friendships come in and out of our lives. They do not have to last forever.

I am very sorry that this friendship apparently is at an end. I believe information such as this comes into our lives for our growth, and my conclusion -- at least for right now -- is that I have to develop new friendships and move on.

Polyester Morphs to Microfiber

Do you have trouble finding age-appropriate women's clothing in your price range? I'd love to hear from you.

It is increasingly clear that there is an endless supply of polyester in the world, so much that my hypothesis is that the world is, in fact, made of polyester.

Since the 1970s when the polyester leisure suit was derided as apparel of the hopelessly square and outdated, polyester has become the predominant fabric for all clothing for the worker class and has even morphed into microfiber. Did you think that stuff that is supposed to magically “wick” sweat from your body was a natural substance? Think again. Wrinkle-free, travel-ready microfiber is the latest marketing ploy to push polyester.

My first requirement when looking for a business suit is to check the inside tag for fabric. Usually I can tell just by looking at a garment whether it is polyester; if I can’t tell at a glance, a brief fingering of a sleeve tells me whether it is polyester, rayon, silk, linen or wool. This is the legacy of a mother trained in fashion design, hours spent in fabric stores with her, and taste that exceeds my budget. Occasionally, a fabric fools me or the suit is so tempting, I take a quick peek at the inside tags.

The selection of suits from which to pick is slim pickings these days. In fact, in my last few outings, I could find a single garment in the $200 range that had any natural fabric content. We have lapsed, apparently, into an era when only folks who can afford designer clothing get to wear natural fabric business suits.

Ups and Downs

How do you deal with the a build-up of aggravations? I'd love to hear from you.


The 3-grand for the car repairs puts so many things in a new light. I thought I was making financial progress. I thought I would be able to whittle away the bills I racked up during the year I was sick and out of my mind after my life came crashing down and I was hardly employed for two years. I even dared to think I might be able to save money toward retirement.

I dreamed of having a few nice things. Might I be able to afford to have the moldy, outdated, 25-year-old bathroom redone? Was it possible I might be able to afford to travel in retirement or even before?

We are a materialistic society, and I confess my dreams were material in nature. Perhaps I could save money and have a really nice car, a car that wasn’t a compromise with what I can afford.

Now, reality has set in. I scrape by, like most Americans. Dreams crash up against the cold hard shape of a budget – one that is constantly squeezed by unexpected expenses. I know that this is not what gives life meaning and purpose, but I am feeling down about it.

Sweating the Small Stuff

Mercury must be retrograde, or Mars in my planetary house of doom and small aggravations, or whatever. Rob Brezny predicts aggravation for the coming week, but it’s already happening.

First, there was the $2700 bill to fix the tranny, wheel drums, and a bunch of other stuff on the Toyota, a car I thought I’d been taking good care of. Okay, that’s not such small stuff, at least not to me. Not only was I just docked more than a grand for not infecting our students with my bronchitis, now I’ve got a huge payload just to keep my job. I commute 44 miles every day, and there is no public transportation that wouldn’t add a couple of hours, minimum, onto the trip each way. I’d have to take three buses to get to PalmTran, ride the commuter train, then take another bus to campus. I might as well set up a cot in my office and just live here. Of course, the a/c is out again, and there are no windows in my gray cubicle, so that’s a less than ideal plan, too.

Second, yesterday I got a $25 parking ticket because some moron misread the temporary parking hangar on the rearview mirror of the rental I’m driving. The parking permit clearly says “NOT VALID FOR MORE THAN 5 DAYS PAST THIS DATE: 10-10-06.” The ticket-writer apparently cannot read because the ticket was issued for “temporary parking expired 10-10-06.”

This is small stuff. But it is annoying. I’ve been embroiled for more than 2 weeks trying to get one stinking day’s pay for the online course I continued to tend during the five days I was out sick with bronchitis. You would think I was asking to refinance the war in Iraq for the red tape I had to go through. I’d like to spend some time teaching, for goodness sake.

I’ve also been trying to hook up with the representative for the retirement plan – and I’ve been trying to do that since early September. I’ve called both Valic and TIAA-CREF. It might be easier to negotiate a nuclear arms conference with North Korea, which upset world politics this week by what it claims was an underground bomb test.

Last, this morning, I come to my office to find a new sign: Dr. Eric Sxxxxxxx. It’s Enid. C’mon, y’all, we’re the intelligentsia, right? We can spell. I know Enid is a hard name. All my life, I’ve been called Edna and Edith because people can’t hear -- E – N – I – D – even when I spell it out letter by letter. I’ve also been called Ena and Nina. But Eric? That’s not even the right gender.

Why am I bothered by all this? Probably because of the money troubles. It intensifies everything else. Having a temporary 9-month contract does not help. I don’t like financial insecurity. I want to be toddling toward retirement, saving money, spending my summers blissfully in Taos or a small camper – a Scamp or Casita – seeing the country. Or I think I do, even though I’ve never, ever been camping and have considered myself a room-service kinda gal up til now.

But I digress. In the end, I went off to class. When calling roll, my students each gave one good thing in their lives recently, and that turned things around. They are delightful.

Eternal Sale Time of the Witless Mind

Like prithee and thou, the words simple elegance seem to have vanished from American English. Excess is our credo. Spangles and glitter, breasts pumped too full of saline, belly shirts with necklines that are barely there, song lyrics that shock, bloated houses, sky-high debt – whatever we do, Americans do to excess.

I feel sorry for the young women of today. Who are their role models? Is it Pamela Anderson with breasts like a porn star and an online sex tape of her and ex-husband tattooed rocker Tommy Lee? Is it equally bosom Anna Nicole Smith, who wed a man old enough to be her great-grandfather and appears zonked out on her own reality show? Is it billion-heiress Paris Hilton, famous for being blond, rich, young, famous and raucous, showing her bare breasts on the cover of Vanity Fair?

My idol is Audrey Hepburn. She was always elegantly turned out in designer clothes. In her later years, she worked on behalf on UNICEF and the world’s children. Like Jackie Kennedy, she tried not ever to be photographed with a cigarette; it wasn’t ladylike. She fought a valiant death against cancer and died quietly in Switzerland with her husband, sons, and dogs.

Sophia Loren is a close runner-up. Like Audrey Hepburn, she does not appear in public in ripped jeans and sans-makeup. In a recent photograph in a hair-do magazine, she was elegantly suited and seated. In her seventies, she has gams to die for. I recall an interview in which she said she avoids appearing like an old woman by carrying herself erect and not making old-woman sounds.

The late Natalie Wood, who died too young in boating accident, was another graduate of the so-called Hollywood star system. She, too, never went to the supermarket without putting on make-up; she felt she owned it to her fans.

Now my lovely female students wear tops that make me wonder where to put my eyes when they come into my office cubicle. How must young men, with their raging hormones, manage the situation? They complained to me in my interpersonal communication class last year that young women get breast augmentation as a high school graduate present, wear plunging necklines, then give young men who stare dirty looks and ask snottily, “What are you looking at?” Neither do I enjoy the endless parade of women with beer guts and belly shirts who populate gas stations and supermarkets. Gals, this is not sexy.

Simple elegance is graceful, tasteful, esthetically pleasing, and respects the rights of others not to be confronted with one’s sexual allure when they’d rather not be. There’s a lot to be said for simple elegance, and I wish someone was saying it.

Simple Elegance

Like prithee and thou, the words simple elegance seem to have vanished from American English. Excess is our credo. Spangles and glitter, breasts pumped too full of saline, belly shirts with necklines that are barely there, song lyrics that shock, bloated houses, sky-high debt – whatever we do, Americans do to excess.

I feel sorry for the young women of today. Who are their role models? Is it Pamela Anderson with breasts like a porn star and an online sex tape of her and ex-husband tattooed rocker Tommy Lee? Is it equally bosom Anna Nicole Smith, who wed a man old enough to be her great-grandfather and appears zonked out on her own reality show? Is it billion-heiress Paris Hilton, famous for being blond, rich, young, famous and raucous, showing her bare breasts on the cover of Vanity Fair?

My idol is Audrey Hepburn. She was always elegantly turned out in designer clothes. In her later years, she worked on behalf on UNICEF and the world’s children. Like Jackie Kennedy, she tried not ever to be photographed with a cigarette; it wasn’t ladylike. She fought a valiant death against cancer and died quietly in Switzerland with her husband, sons, and dogs.

Sophia Loren is a close runner-up. Like Audrey Hepburn, she does not appear in public in ripped jeans and sans-makeup. In a recent photograph in a hair-do magazine, she was elegantly suited and seated. In her seventies, she has gams to die for. I recall an interview in which she said she avoids appearing like an old woman by carrying herself erect and not making old-woman sounds.

The late Natalie Wood, who died too young in boating accident, was another graduate of the so-called Hollywood star system. She, too, never went to the supermarket without putting on make-up; she felt she owned it to her fans.

Now my lovely female students wear tops that make me wonder where to put my eyes when they come into my office cubicle. How must young men, with their raging hormones, manage the situation? They complained to me in my interpersonal communication class last year that young women get breast augmentation as a high school graduate present, wear plunging necklines, then give young men who stare dirty looks and ask snottily, “What are you looking at?” Neither do I enjoy the endless parade of women with beer guts and belly shirts who populate gas stations and supermarkets. Gals, this is not sexy.

Simple elegance is graceful, tasteful, esthetically pleasing, and respects the rights of others not to be confronted with one’s sexual allure when they’d rather not be. There’s a lot to be said for simple elegance, and I wish someone was saying it.

Propositioning Pages-- Ho-Hum

I was thinking about the flashy Wilbur Mills drunk-with-a-stripper incident of 1974 and how dreary and Puritan the Mark Foley naughty-messages-to-pages scandal seems by comparison, when I found Wonkette’s comments. The level of media outrage is inversely proportional to the level of entertainment I feel.

Naughty emails? Good grief. Young women have forever been fending off naughty overtures of males in the workplace. It was a coming-of-age ritual. Sexual harassment laws have squeeze the juice out of raging workplace hormones, but it’s time that equal opportunity offered young males a chance to deal with ogling oldsters.

My first encounter with inappropriate advances was the New York University professor who singled out mini-skirted me to collect my work at a local bar, rather than after class with everyone else. An older girl in the dorm, larger than I and from the Midwest, dressed me in one of her old, shapeless winter coats, boots that were too large for me, and a dowdy babushka on my head. “What should I say?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about having to say anything,” she said. “He’ll get the picture.” Indeed, he took one look, handed me the essay, made no pretence of asking me to stay for a drink and that was that.

I frequently shunted aside naughty male comments with a laughing admonishment, “What would your wife say if she heard you talking like that?” An artless reminder from a young woman negotiating a workplace unregulated by harassment legislation, in hindsight it seems a prudent comeback, steeped in guilt with a mild edge of threat.

Men often tried, “I liked to get into those pants.” Such genius, such wit. My favorite retort: “They’re not your size, and I don’t think you’d look good in them.” I heard many a teehee from the sidelines.

On one occasion, a longtime married racetrack gambler offered me two tickets to the Preakness Stakes. I turned them down. He muttered, “So you don’t play the game.” I had no idea what he meant. Another gambler and friend explained, “The tickets are worth hundreds of dollars, He was propositioning you for sex without offering money. That’s the game.” Oh.

Asking me to plug in the copier and other equipment by crawling under a table was, however, a bit too much. The business owner’s mistress was never subjected to this indignity, and an unseemly audience of males who insisted on this uncomfortable ritual. Why the hell was the equipment always unplugged anyway? When I was fired for taking a sick day for cramps, a nice African-American case reviewer called it harassement, and I collected unemployment. By that time, the sexual harassment laws were newly in place.



The points made by Justin Zarkoff at Wonkette are well taken; there is no point in cloaking the Wilbur Mills era in fuzzy haze of reminiscence. It was a time when boys were men, and women were put upon. Still, it’s futile to try to choke sexuality out of human existence. It’s there, folks. Men and women are attracted to beautiful youth. Sexual innuendos and passes are made. I will probably be shot for being politically incorrect by saying, it’s fun to be young and sexy and desired. It’s good for young people to learn how to handle themselves in these situations. The Washington pages were not little girls, like the poor Amish children murdered in Pennsylvania. These were older male teenagers in the Big Bad City amongst legislators, as corrupt a group as ever gathered in a single location. American political history is shot through with scandal. I expect the public response is partly homophilia, partly outrage at Foley’s hypocrisy in shilling for legislation against sexual predators.

When I meet women my own age who were little Roman Catholic girls in the 50s and 60s, I find our mothers had a single response to any V-neckline that even remotely threatened to show cleavage. Out came two tiny gold safety pins and a ladies’ handkerchief that was pinned across the opening, to our humiliation. Today’s teens grow up in a media circus of salacious titillations. It’s time for parents to equip them with the moral equivalent of gold safety pins and handkerchiefs. After that, they have to find some an older wiser friends and mentors to coach them through the negotiations of sex and power. It isn’t as naughty as the media are making it out to be. Grow up.

Lugubrious Religion

After the cold-blooded shooting of six little girls at a one-room Amish school in Pennsylvania, I wonder anew what the self-denial and lugubriousness of religion achieves. Jews have just observed 24 hours of fasting for a high holiday. Muslims are in the midst of a 40-day sun-up to sundown fast, during which hours no food or drink, including toothpaste, may pass their lips. Roman Catholics give up pleasures and fast for Lent in the spring. Amish forego all modern conveniences for a life of denial of most pleasures.

What good does all this do? A stranger to their community enters an isolated, rural schoolhouse and slaughters little girls no older than 12 in gory execution style shootings, lining them up against a wall. I often think that the Dionysians and Sapphics are the only ones who got in right. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

Yet, I take comfort in praying. It eases my guilt when I inadvertently do wrong or hurt someone. It lightens the burdens of being human. It soothes anxiety and brings a peaceful moment or two. So, why not?