Social Norms

Lost Your Pride

My grandmother had a saying that she used when the piteous “bless her heart,” was too mild a sting. “She’s lost her pride,” indicated a slip down the human food chain to the level of under-rock dweller.

Let me unpack this saying just a bit for those who are unfamiliar with Appalachian people from Eastern Kentucky, which was where I was schooled by my Nanny every summer of my childhood. Pride was all some folks could claim as their own. You might make the wrong assumption, as you whizzed by on Route 25 from Johnson City into the dark hollers of Harlan, that a family with that many broken appliances in the front yard had no pride to begin with. But that was all they had – pride of family legacy, pride in their ability to scrape by, proud of their kids, proud of the little bit they owned, though it may be washed away in the creek in the next flood.

So saying “she’s lost her pride,” was a warning, a prayer for sanity offered silently for a friend or neighbor who was experiencing slippage of dignity. Generally, this option was reserved for older people who were making a spectacle of themselves –women who were using too much makeup or showing too much cleavage. Men who had taken up with a much younger woman, or were drunk in public. Younger women got a pass, somewhat. “Two cats fighting in a bag,” was something I heard Nanny chuckle under her breath as the beautiful girls passed the porch in their cut-offs, long hair rhythmically grazing their butts. Seeing me dazzled by their effortless sexiness she would remind, “Pretty is as pretty does.” Let your inner dignity shine forth. My first yoga guru in some sense – don’t be fooled by the surface, since it is here today and gone tomorrow. Concentrate on the interior, and the hard work knowing who you are.

My initiation into Southern womanhood was conducted as Mom and Nanny canned beans in mid-August, the kitchen windows opened, but no help against the Amazonian humidity created by Ball jars boiling on the stove. As a child, I was spared these working conditions – but I hung out in the kitchen anyway, watching them move from stove to kitchen table for breaks of iced tea and Kent cigarettes. Both wore housecoats with snap buttons up the front, sweetened their tea with Sweet n’ low and traded advice, funny stories, hard feelings, compliments and resentments, recipes and suggestions — the teeming, seething perfumed ecstasy of mother-daughter relationships.

After the morning of work and a hearty lunch, we all bathed and dressed up for a walk to downtown Harlan to the dress store that my grandmother worked in when they were poorer. Horton’s was the best dress store in town. My grandmother, voted the most beautiful woman in Harlan Kentucky in the early 60s, kept up with fashion and beauty, but it was always reflective of her inner decorum — modest, elegant. By the 1970s, when she was in her 50s, fashion for her was polyester pantsuits. As she grew older, her beauty shined through though her beautiful legs were hidden in two ply poly.

Mom and Nanny both died in their mid-sixties, at the height of their older woman beauty, where a lifetime of hard and joyful work and love for family and neighbor burnished their inner dignity to a rare shine. I am now 56. My hair is gray and it is long enough now to wear in pigtails, which I do when I need to wear my bike helmet. I live in yoga pants and now have a YouTube channel. Sometimes I worry I’m making a spectacle of myself. I wonder what they would say about their legacy. Have I lost my pride?

I feel their gaze from the front porch of the hereafter. There they snap their beans from MacDaddy’s garden into the newspaper on their laps, iced tea glasses sweating in the first glimmer of sun that burns off the fog in the holler. They wouldn’t want me getting a big head, so they aren’t going to give me complete blanket assurance, especially on the social media front. And they want me to buy tops that cover up my boobs and that butt of mine. Dangerously close to two cats in a bag.

-o-

Epilogue: This story started out from a place of truth — I could heard Nanny say “you’ve lost your pride” as I was braiding my hair. It made me smile at myself in the mirror. But like all writers of memoir, I’ve found that in the putting words around my experience, the truth gets further away from me. There are empty spaces in memory that we fill up with imagination or we insert short hand place holders, like the still pictures we use on Zoom calls. This has meant that every time I conjure up my grandmother, I experience the same day. It is always August, always bean shelling and canning day, and always ends with the trip to Horton’s Dress Shoppe. I wear terrycloth shorts and white sandals, my long hair in a ponytail, my pre-adolescent belly straining at my sleeveless white cotton blouse. I can smell the garden, feel the heat from the carport and the cool of the coal house as I played Starship Enterprise with Ed, Feller, Kathy and Mac. But the soundtrack is off. I hear the rustle of the newspaper, the pop of the beans, doors opening and closing, the Ball jars clinking the in the pot, the mumbles of adult speech, the heavy footfalls of children running but these sounds are not synched with the action..  

In our backward glances, we lose a bit of present-moment truth, so we embellish, sometimes for ourselves, sometimes to entertain ourselves and others, like I’ve done here. Our lives are stories with beginnings, middles and ends, meant to be told and heard — consumed. Like these quarantine doodles of my Nanny, nothing can quite capture her spirit, her beauty, that time, my family, that love.

More than Curious

365 days ago, I decided that it was hypocritical to teach about how to achieve clarity of mind.  Especially when I had been working hard fogging my mind every night with a glass or two of wine, and on weekends with my best friend the (incredibly dry) Cosmo.

Living without alcohol this year has been surprisingly easy. Yet, when I see this picture, taken of me at an Airbnb in Genoa, Italy, I am suckerpunched with nostalgia. We were there in April — Rose’ season.  We would have a bottle at lunch or dinner after a day of touring. The food was a revelation, made holy with the taste of wine. There was an Aperol Spritz for people-watching at sunset …an espresso and grappa after dinner. I look at this photo now and know that on April 21, 2019 I made a choice that has taken me away from this  place, hopefully forever. I didn’t know it then, and now the knowing brings about the suffering of the return, which is the etymology of “nostalgia.”

Nostaligia is a lie we tell ourselves about the past. It is rose (or in this case Rose’) colored glasses.

I didn’t make any big pronouncements when I left.  I said I’d be gone just a little while.  I wrote about my curiosity about sobriety and that I wanted clarity — that was the truth I shared here. But if I could have been honest with myself, I also wanted to step out of the putrid light of shame. Not only the shame of not exactly remembering what I said after the second or third Cosmo, but also the shame of wasting the time I’d been given to paddle furiously towards truth, freedom, compassion.

About four weeks after I stopped drinking, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I am thankful for this turn of events. It would have been hard to navigate that experience in a fog, blinded by the cold comfort of Tito’s. Just another way that I know that the universe has my back.

Lots of stuff has come up in social media — some funny, some sad — about how alcohol is essential to what we are experiencing now. Here’s my experience that might resonate with you: Pain experienced in clarity has the ability to bring peace, even joy, as you find that you already have all the resources you need to move through challenging times. Celebration is all the more celebratory when you can really live into the moment, really be with people you love, rather than wondering if there is just one more glass of champagne left in the bottle.

This picture was taken by my love on our trip to Costa Rica in February, to celebrate our 32nd anniversary. Compared to the photo above, this pic is decidedly less glamorous.  It might be that my drink, a mango smoothie, matches my dress perfectly. I had one every night we were there in February, each one tasting like the sunset. Glamor-schmamor — it was experienced in the now, where everything is an elixir.

So this is a day for a mango smoothie! There will be other milestones on this journey, I know it. Many thanks to intrepid people who have inspired me on this path and who support me every step of the way — you know who you are.

Conforming to the Box

Outside the BoxSometimes an inspiration or motivation for a creative piece morphs and moves so much that I feel as though it has its own life-force.

As I had just taken a job with First Book, a non-profit social enterprise that gets new, high quality books to kids in need, I had been thinking about some of my favorite books as a child.  Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh, came immediately to mind.  As a girl, I loved Harriet.  She was everything I wanted to be:  completely her very own person, an adventurer, confident in her abilities and yet totally tuned into the world around her as an observer and a critic of sorts.  She knows no fear and gets through one of the most devastating things that can happen to an adolescent — a social shunning by peers.

I particularly loved the illustrations of Louise Fitzhugh, and one that jumped immediately to mind was of Harriet in the dumbwaiter, spying on the Manhattan socialite.  I decided to look up the novel online and was drawn into a beautiful journey learning more about Louise Fitzhugh.  She herself was a social renegade and a bit of an outcast because of her rejection of her family, her community and her sexual orientation.  When Harriet the Spy was published 1964,  the book received as much condemnation for a character that defied social norms as it did praise for the creative genius that Fitzhugh demonstrated with her character and the story.  I thought of my mother and how she most likely introduced me to Harriet, just as she had introduced me to other work for children that encouraged individuality and non-conformity, like Free to Be You and Me or Where the Wild Things Are. Mom wanted her children to be able to create their own stories — to question what society dictated for them.

Outside the BoxOutside the Box started from this thinking.  Sometimes who we are makes us very small to the world around us.  We might be seen as inconsequential because we are young, or we are women, or gay or have different religious beliefs.  But the weirdest thing is that when you feel inconsequential, it actually feels as though you are being squeezed into a very tight little box, kind of like Harriet in that dark dumbwaiter. The paintings on the sides of this form come from this place.

But as I meditatively worked painting and plastering this form, I found a much more redemptive place in my thinking.  Yes, we can feel constricted by social norms and they can be an evil force in life.  We can see ourselves as inconsequential.  But we can have the courage to challenge these norms as illusion.  In the eight-limbed practice of yoga, we are disciplined to focus inward, to quiet mind fluctuations, to find the end of duality because it sets up a falsehood that draws us deeper into the illusion.  What we work towards is freedom to understand that we are connected, we are part of the great universal consciousness.  While we remain unenlightened, we are actually just living in the shelter of a one-dimensional house.  Discovery involves some fearless climbing out of and scaling up the illusion of  a place that separates us from ourselves and the other.

A story Pema Chodron uses to illustrate how we gravitate to the security of this box — this illusion:Outside the Box

The truth, said an ancient Chinese master, is neither like this or like that.  It is like a dog yearning over a bowl of burning oil.  He can’t leave it, because it is too desirable and he can’t lick it, because it is too hot….We need encouragement and try [to leave our security].  It’s quite daring, and maybe we feel we aren’t up to it.  But that’s the point.  Right there in that inadequate, restless feeling is our wisdom mind. We can simply experiment.  There’s absolutely nothing to lose.    (From the Shambhala Sun website: http://www.shambhalasun.com)

So to think outside of your box, where must you climb?