My sister is trying to describe the water that comes out of a lawn. You know, it sprays around and around.

I immediately shift into Noun Quest – a daily struggle to secure the proper thing.

“Sprinklers,” I offer after ransacking my head. She says, “Yes, that’s it: sprinklers.”

She says she can’t think of the right word sometimes – the simple ones – the ones that sit around loafing all day doing nothing, and you can’t seem to get them to get off their asses and pay attention for one solid minute.

“Sprinklers. Yes. That’s what I mean.”

It’s noun trouble. I’ve been writing for years and years. And I still have noun trouble.

I will be talking to my husband, telling a story, and my brain will crank around like an 18-wheeler trying to make a hairpin turn as I try to remember what the hell it’s called when someone is super arrogant about their spiritual beliefs, and I know it sounds like a boat that’s sinking and that makes sense somehow because it’s what I’d like to do to these people, sink their boats, because I just got off a call with someone with this affliction and he says:

“Sanctimonious.”

“Yes! God. Sanctimonious.”

It makes me think of the newsroom and my boss, AKA Chief, and how I would wander into his office on any given day and discuss the week’s stories, existential crap or what happened when I turned a blender on with the top off, or what happened when I opened my Big Fat Mouth when I shouldn’t have.

I wander in and he looks up from his half glasses and his computer screen and his 15 stories he’s editing and the angry caller who can’t believe we tell both sides of a story and is threatening to cancel their subscription even though they don’t have a subscription, and he fixes me with a stare. We’ve known each other for years and years. I can tell in an instant if the look says:

“Scram. I got a call here from my hot wife.”

Or:

“Boy, do I have a juicy story for you. Hold up a second.”

Or:

“Say something funny. For the love of God, say something funny.”

Or:

“That thing you just sent me. That is not really a story. You know that, right?”

I sit down without being invited and I lean back like I’m home or something.

“Did you call the guy about the thing?” he asks.

“Yeah. He is so not going to call me back. He thinks if he doesn’t call me the thing is dead, you know?”

“This thing is not dead.”

“Yeah. But he thinks he can kill the thing if he doesn’t call, ya’ know?”

The smirk.

Other times it’s:
“Did you get the thing?”

“Yeah. But it’s the wrong thing. They sent the wrong thing. And SHE’S not buying the thing. She’s just not buying it.”

“I’m wondering if there’s another thing entirely going on here?”
“Oh. Yeah. That could be a thing, for sure.”

The thing can be any number of things. It can be a situation, a person, a place or idea. The frightening thing is I always know what he’s talking about.

The other frightening thing is that this is happening to both of us. We are wordsmiths. We are word people. And we are noun challenged. It’s not new. We’ve always been this way.

As a hyper-sensitive person, I can become completely tongue tied if the people around me are hostile, or nervous or thinking less than Isn’t-she-Just-a-Peach? kind of thoughts. I was on a Zoom recently where I was picking up on so much angst from the other people on the call that, when I raised my hand to speak, everyone stopped to hear what I had to say and I went completely blank. There was so much tension in that Zoom call I became totally speechless. I’m Celtic, so that’s actually saying something. That was worse than just noun challenged. That was noun and verb challenged.

The silence was deafening as they all watched me and my 18-wheeler not make the hairpin turn. The longer the wait, the more dangerous it got until I was blocking the highway. I broke into a sweat. After about four seconds, I laughed uncomfortably until they moved on. I could read the bubbles above their heads and they weren’t saying  Isn’t-she-Just-a-Peach?

I have stood in Chief’s office doorway playing “what’s-that-noun?” with him.

“Gawd. It’s got claws and it lifts stuff.”

“Salad tongs.”

“No.”

“Did I just say ‘Gawd’?”

“Yes.”

“It’s got claws. You know. It moves earth. It has claws and it moves earth.”

“God?”

Things get really dicey when you have this affliction during an emergency.

“Get the THING! Quick!”

“Get the guy! Get him!”

Sitting quietly at our computers with no audiences judging us or frowning at us or wondering what the hell we’re doing, the words seem to come.

The other phenomena that can attend Noun trouble is inappropriate or non sequitur.

I got so flustered once during one of my telepathic WTFs that this disturbing dialogue ensued at a business convention.

“Hey, Emily.”

“Groovy.”

“What’s that?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“Nice to see you.”

“Yup.”

Groovy? I think it was the one and only time in my life I uttered the word “groovy.” I think it was the one and only time he had ever heard that word spoken. Hey, I’m keeping ancient languages alive, apparently.

The problem isn’t me, it’s my genetics, OK? My mother would make a scissors with her forefinger and middle finger, snipping away.

“I need the snippa-snippas. You know – the snippa-snippas!”

We learned, early on, that the snippa-snippas were not the clippa-clippas. She would become exasperated when you didn’t get it right.

“Not the clippa-clippas! The snippa-snippas!”

Right.

Miming the activity became par for the course. She would mime the scissors, hedge clippers, vacuum, bowl, salt-shaker, knife, dog, husband. We mimed right back.

“You know, the guy, the boy.”

“You know, the shake-a-shake-a.”

“Get the squish-ah-squish-ah!”

Again, the alarming aspect of all this was that we understood. Her children became expert at divination. We also always excelled at charades and talked with our hands. I still can’t ask for a glass of water without miming a glass of water. You know – yay tall and this wide, with water?

“You know, the guy, the thing! You know, the movie about the guy! You know.”

I once hit a person I was gesticulating so wildly with my hands to demonstrate the particular noun.

“It has a thing! And it moves around in a circle and it mashes stuff. You know – the thing!”

“Can I buy a vowel?”

My husband is the complete opposite. He can remember that it’s “sanctimonious,” that we are traveling east, that I’m describing a blender, that we had that fun in 2013. He also knows incredible things like what kind of car he’s driving and the year and what restaurant we’re eating in and the name of the play we’re seeing.

In the end, it reminds me of the thing we all went to and the clippas-clippas and that guy who was so into that stuff you just couldn’t believe it.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright April 25, 2021 E. B. Dravenstadt

The Stick and the Sword

I am sitting across from my grandmother Mona Mullen and I am wielding a sword and slashing her with it.

OK. I’m just telling her the truth, but I might as well be wielding a sword and slashing her with it.

She knows, somehow, and she doesn’t contradict me. That’s the interesting part – and it shows that, deep down, somewhere, she is honest.

The truth is about my mother and the rage and pain that haunts her from her childhood and the mother who never owned up to it, never said: “I screwed up, kid. I love you and I am sorry.”

I’m not sure that would have helped, either.

I’m just a person with a sword and I want to use it.

My mother would kill me if she knew what I was doing, and, later on, she does want to kill me. Because, later on, Gramma becomes sweet with her because Gramma realizes we all know what happened and how wrong it was. And it is like my mother can handle anything from her mother except that sweetness. It cloys onto her like syrup and no amount of scrubbing gets it off.

But Gramma has her own story, her own bones, doesn’t she? And when you are quite young and loyal to the bone, you can see things with bolder colors than they deserve. The truth was a much longer sword that stretched back decades upon decades. The truth was a more complicated affair that centered on a woman named Catherine Sullivan.

Their stories intertwine in a spiderweb. If you pull one way on it, the entire web shifts. And the web, of course, is the circumstance that crafted and molded their futures. Not to say that people are simply victims of circumstance. But the Ceausescu orphans of Romania, those forgotten children who desperately needed love and didn’t know what to do with it when they got it, remind me that we are all, whether we want to admit it or not, caught in a web.

Catherine Sullivan was a beautiful woman. I’m not one of those people who likes saying things like that. I think beauty is such a trap, isn’t it? And women are so controlled by it and pushed around. Then we push ourselves around. I don’t care that she was beautiful. But the world did.

It was the late 1800s and Catherine wanted some independence. She lived in upstate Massachusetts. I want to say Blackstone and I want to say a farm, but I’m not entirely sure. We do know that her family was large, and by large I mean maybe 10 kids. Bits and pieces of the truth come through and are verified by my grandmother, her daughter.

Catherine Sullivan, as I said, wanted independence, so she got herself a job at a store. I think she was working as a clerk. It must have come as a terrible shock and disappointment to see her stern father in his stovepipe hat march through the door, seize her by her hand and drag her from the premises.

The story tells us so much about her, her family and the times. Catherine Sullivan was a rebel. To us, her decision to get a job may seem pedestrian. But to her it was an act of rebellion.  

My great-grandfather, the guy who married her, was a different story altogether. James Coyne saw her walking down the street one day. I believe he was standing in front of the fire station chatting with a friend. Catherine Sullivan cut quite a figure, apparently, and Jimmy Coyne declared to his friend that he would marry her.

What he didn’t know was that Catherine had been orphaned. That large family with the taciturn father and the brothers and sisters – all gone. Consumed by disease and dead. She was the only survivor, and she was 20 years old.

Jimmy was clever and funny. He invented things. And, in those days, left the running of the household to my great-grandmother, Catherine Coyne. This is important because she was a rebel, remember.

The tradition in Irish Catholic families at the time dictated that the oldest daughter took care of her brothers and even waited table on them. I should also note that, in many Irish families the oldest son became a priest and the one of the daughters became a nun. My great-grandmother saw the treatment of girls in Irish homes as a grand injustice, so, rather than evening things out between her sons and daughters, she flipped the narrative. My grandmother, at the age of five, was given a stick she applied to her brothers, who had to wait on her hand and foot. As she grew, everything she needed was supplied by her brothers. An escort to the show, someone to hold the sled and carry it up the hill, someone to make the lunch.

I try to imagine my grandmother hitting her five brothers with that stick and I find it hard not to laugh. She carried that stick, metaphorically speaking, for the rest of her life.

Years later I stood in a kitchen in East Greenwich and one of her brothers was present talking about the stick attached to his little sister. I remember him shaking his head over it.

But Catherine Sullivan Coyne (who married James Coyne) couldn’t change the world. Her daughter, my grandmother, was not considered pretty and she told her so. My grandmother (the one with the stick) was so convinced she was hideous that when an ancient man with a grizzled face walked by them on the street, Mona, who was a child at the time, asked her mother if she were as ugly as the man.

And there was more.

Mona excelled at English and did so well in school, particularly with her essays on Charles Dickens, that the teacher urged her to go to college. Just like her own mother, that plan was overruled. Girls didn’t go to college. And I think one of the reasons had to do with marriage. Who would marry an unattractive smart girl?

My great-grandmother wielded her own sword, you see. It was long and sharp and it was forged in the deaths of her entire family and the infant child that died in its crib one night of Sudden Infant Death syndrome – the child she had before becoming pregnant with my grandmother. The story goes that Catherine (Sullivan) Coyne cried for nine months while my grandmother grew inside her.

Mona Catherine Coyne was an interesting product of DNA, geography and environment. She could be kind and even thoughtful, but she had been cheated out of a life she wanted very badly – a college education and what it could bring. Was she dragged by the hand out of that dream as her mother was? Did someone humiliate her? She had an artificial level of control as a child – of power – a power that seems meaningless when you stop and look at it. The power that meant something to her – the thing she really wanted – was denied.

So she controlled what she could, and pit one child against the other, doled out attributes with the economies of cruelty and denied this one this and that one that. My mother got to be smart, her middle sister got to be popular, her youngest sister got to be pretty. The truth was, they were all three of them all of those things, and they could have loved one another growing up a whole lot more if it hadn’t been for my grandmother’s fear of their rebellion – fear that they would join forces and turn on her. You can fall for a trap like that when you’re young, when the person who feeds you and clothes you looks at you and says, “Jane said this about you.” You can believe a thing like that.

How painful it must have been for Mona Mullen to see her eldest child go to college and drive a car – things she would never experience in her life. I remember the entire set of Charles Dickens volumes in her home, green with gold lettering, proudly displayed like a reminder of what she was beyond the spiderweb. She must have felt so duped by her own mother. The stick was no sword.

My own mother figured it out early on – the divide and conquer of her mother’s world – and maybe that was why my grandmother went at her the way she did.

My mother had a sword and she knew it.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright April 15, 2021 E. B. Dravenstadt

The Beginning

If you knew my family you would understand how silence could be a loud and obnoxious thing – a rattling, hissing distraction that meant you couldn’t concentrate. For years, I suppose it moved like anger around my ears, concussing like mortar shells in the air. I wasn’t used to it. I didn’t know what to do with it. That’s how used to something you can get. You can get so used to the cacophony of voices and pans clanging as they’re dragged through other pans onto a burner and Elton John singing about a Mad Man and laughter broken by the sound of pushing and shoving – that soft “cush” of a sound – that you don’t welcome silence anymore.

You don’t know what to do with it.

There was the moving, of course. Our restless and brilliant mother who dodged a concert pianist career for the church and was rescued from the church by my father, whose lie about becoming a priest makes us all shake our heads and smile, resonates today in our own wry comments, our own flirtations with people we meant to catch, to keep somehow, to draw in like a breath and never let go. You stare across a table at someone like that and you find yourself saying things you would never imagine.

Like: “Don’t worry. I’m going to become a priest.”

My mother had warned him, you see. And my father wasn’t the sort of person you could warn away from something.

She was home from college, feeling fat. Her father was a judge. Her mother was a smart woman who had been cheated out of college and she resented her first born. At least that’s what it seemed like when mom told us about her – her thrusting her thumbs down at my mother like a Roman general at the Colosseum – thumbs down in the amphitheater. Thumbs down meant you would die – you’d be that gladiator that didn’t make it. Imagine a mother doing that to a 5-year-old child. My mother would look up at her and watch words come out of my grandmother’s mouth in slow-motion, like someone experiencing a car accident they’re maimed in over and over again in their minds.

“You were born bad.”

That was my grandmother, who simpered and smiled and applied kindness when it occurred to her. She ran over my mother’s foot with a carriage once, and my mother cried out. Still a little child, vulnerable as air someone breathed in and out, and my grandmother didn’t believe her, even when her foot bled. She barked at her and that was that. My grandmother denying things that were real was a thing. It was a daily thing. When my mother suffered asthma attacks – they weren’t real. They were her imagination. She would flee outside in the night and gasp for air as vulnerable as the air my grandmother breathed in and out.

The past, this past, became the shipwreck she visited often. My mother would swim around the ruins, looking for treasure that had long since been pillaged. She would cry forever about the woman who didn’t love her right. I told my mother once that I was there the whole time with her. That she really wasn’t alone.

But that’s another chapter.

Jane – my mother –  didn’t know that her cousin Russell Mullen had had a conversation with someone she was going to marry. She was going to become a nun and she was finishing college at a place called Manhattanville, where some of the Kennedy girls had gone. It was in New York City and Jane loved New York City with a joy that is hard to describe with clunky things like words. Grow up in the shadow of small things that knock the air out of you and find yourself in the shadow of majestic things you can climb that fill you with air and hope and joy – and that was New York City to Jane Mullen. Imagine how you might feel if you’d been in a prison for more than a decade, and you suddenly find yourself in a city so full of possibility it keeps you awake at night. Imagine how you might feel if you’d spent more than a decade in a hostile silence unleashed upon a playground of sound.

My father liked New York City too. And he had other reasons for loving it.

The story goes that my father had a car and Russell Mullen wanted to take a girl out.

Having a car was a big deal. It was after the war, after Hitler, after Dachau, after The Depression and going without food for weeks at a time. My father’s bowlegs told that story, his bolting of food, his boundless gratitude for every tiny moment of generosity the universe bestowed, his laugh that could fill a room, his determination to help you back on your feet if you stumbled. Russell Mullen wanted to take a girl out and he knew a guy named Richard Clark, Dick Clark to his friends, who liked to work on his car. Dick Clark had a car.

“Just take my cousin out,” Russell had said. “Don’t worry. She’s going to be a nun.”

Like my dad, my mother was a help-you-up-if-you-stumble kind of person, which looks like such an understatement on the page, it’s laughable. It would take volumes to describe either one of them – the kind of people they were. My mother had been born sensitive, knowing things. Compassion with her was like fuel – it’s what drove her everywhere. She had massive green eyes and an unusual nose her mother didn’t like at all. Her allergies and asthma made it itch, and when she itched it, my grandmother would tell her that the bump in the middle of her nose was caused by all that rubbing and itching. My grandmother was the sort of person who could blame another person for being sick. My mother was the sort of person who would cure you.

My mother was feeling overweight. She’d been away at college and had gained 10 pounds or so, she said. And I think she had a cold sore – something she’d picked up on a beach towel, or so she figured. It’s probably not important, but mildly interesting, perhaps, that she felt pretty unattractive this evening – this evening of the blind date. And she was going to become a nun and had that nose, remember, so it probably didn’t matter to her.

The story goes that my father and his bowlegs entered that house in East Greenwich, Rhode Island – the judge’s house – fresh out of Brown University, an incredible thing for a man who had nearly starved to death while his own father languished in bed from a debilitating injury. An incredible thing for a boy who grew up with cardboard soles on his shoes and parents and siblings whose love for one another was so palpable and strong, it spread like ink to other people and could sustain you through hunger, days and days and days of it.

He saw my mother. I believe she was coming down a stairway – the stairway to the house. For some reason I always imagine the stairway being sideways to his vision, so he got a really clear look at her. But I know it couldn’t have been. The stairway came straight down toward the door, because I’ve been in that house, emptying it out of my grandparents’ memories and lives, years and years later, sifting through the musty ghost of an attic and finding my great-grandfather’s trademark certificate for the audiometer he invented – too late because his friend stole it. That’s another story too.

Dick Clark saw my mother, with her nose with the bump in the middle, with those massive green eyes that look right through to your soul and see goodness there even if you didn’t believe it, with her full lips and her broad smile that would wield a power in the lives of other people that was unimaginable. And that was that.

He told this part: “I thought: She’s not going to become a nun.” It was love at first sight.

The date happened. My father met my grandfather Judge John E. Mullen, and I believe it was even more clear to him, my dad that is, that he was going to become a lawyer. I believe they hit it off. My grandmother was overjoyed that her eldest daughter would marry the Brown University graduate with his sights on law school. He was a good Irish Catholic boy, and that was what a lot of Irish Catholics wanted – they wanted their kids to marry good Irish Catholics, whether they themselves happened to be good Irish Catholics or not.

The date happened, and the beginning of the story. But, as with any story, there is no beginning. Stories are endless things that go on and on. The universe is a story. The air we breathe is a story. Our DNA, the dirt beneath our feet are so many stories, there is no accounting for them. Dinosaurs beneath our feet, pushing up against our heels, calling out to have their stories told. Their bones like novels they have left behind. “Tell my story,” they say.

My bones say the same thing.

So this is it. My story about the family of the century, about parents who deserve Homer as a chronicler, but have me instead.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright April 13, 2021 E. B. Dravenstadt

Juiced

I am standing in front of a hostile audience and my palms are sweating. A boy approaches me, his long blonde hair shagging over his ears, his mouth screwed into an insolent sneer.

“Can I go to the bathroom?” he asks.

He asks me this exactly the way you might ask someone if they are wearing a toupee. “Is that a toupee?” “Can I go to the bathroom?” Same thing.

I think: I don’t know? Can you go to the bathroom?

I say, “OK.” And hand him a pass. I’d like him to leave. Him leaving is alright by me.

A girl approaches me and has the same question. She asks me this question the exact way you would ask someone if their boobs are real. “Are those real?” “Can I go to the bathroom?” I give her a pass.

Then another boy.

Then two girls.

Before too long, half the class is taking a bathroom break as my stomach rumbles in horror at what I have done to it. The remaining teenagers fidget in their seats and eye me derisively. I stifle the urge to go desk to desk and hand out passes.

“Fine! You want to go the bathroom, buddy? Huh? Do ya’??? Think I don’t know what’s going on? Huh? GO! GO to the bathroom! See what I care? You think I care if you go to the bathroom?”

But I don’t say these things, because, fortunately, a small voice in my head tells me it is not their fault that I think I’m going to throw up, and that I swallowed a gallon of liquid before I appeared before their outraged faces.

I am substitute teaching at a local high school and I don’t belong here for two important reasons.

First: I don’t like high school. I never did. Walking through the door made me break out in a cold sweat. I was one of those teenagers who should have come with a warning label. I wasn’t good at it. And there were witnesses.

Second: I have inadvertently downed an entire quart of juice I had no intention of drinking. It was an accident.

Picture the scene: I woke up late. I forgot to set the alarm. I flung myself into clothing, skidded downstairs, threw open the refrigerator, yanked out a can of juice and charged out the door to my car. As I sped to the high school, I guzzled the entire can of juice before I realized how sweet it was. “GAH! What was that?”

I stare at the can, incredulous. The juice was sticky sweet and it went down like motor oil. I feel queasy as I mount the steps and head to my class, unaware of what has just happened.

By the time I reach first period, which turns out to be a diabolical group of people intent on harming me, I realize I am feeling sick. And thirsty. Really thirsty.

I step outside to the water bubbler and guzzle as much water as I can in 30 seconds. Because I know it will only take 30 seconds for me to lose whatever shred of control I have over this class. I look at the lesson plan the teacher left and it swims before my eyes. I tell these devils what they’re supposed to do and they groan and glower at me. I groan and glower back. This is a hostile take-over and they know it. That’s when they start demanding the hall passes to the bathroom.

Meanwhile, my stomach is churning with water and the juice.

Every period it’s the same thing. The glowering. I am unaware that my deplorable attitude is contributing to my misery. But, in my defense, it’s the juice. It’s the quart of juice in my belly.

Because now I am so thirsty I can’t stop drinking. I hit the water bubbler and I drink glass after glass of water. I have had four full glasses of it before I realize that I may actually vomit.

By the time I hit fourth period where the special education kids await my flimsy direction, I am green. An adorable girl in the front row looks at me in sympathy and says: “Miss, what’s the matter? Are you OK?”

I am tempted to come clean.

“NO! I am not OK, OK? I am a bloated whale! I drank a gallon of juice and I want to leave. I want to go home and start over. A complete start over. I am getting hives walking through the halls of high school. I never liked high school and I still don’t like it!”

Later, I realize that sometimes the moral of the story isn’t profound. It isn’t: My unresolved issues from high school and my need to resolve them was the reason I never stepped foot in a high school again, or maybe a deep-seated memory plagued my addled consciousness.

Sometimes the moral of the story is just simple: Do not give an unlimited number of teenagers hall passes to the bathroom.

And do not mistake a can of concentrated juice for regular juice and guzzle four glasses of water.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright April 9, 2021 E. B. Dravenstadt

Fear of flying

I am sweating in the gangway of a jet with a line of travelers behind me and I feel like I might actually be having a heart attack. Two flight attendants flank the doorway – this tiny doorway with flimsy-looking plastic fittings and walls with little shelves to hold stuff, and I want to swirl my index fingers around in an encompassing circle and bark:

“Seriously? Plastic thingies holding things and such on a plane that is going to carry us 30,000 feet into the sky? Safe? I think not!!!”

Instead I pause and I tell the flight attendant I am frightened of flying.

I hear groans behind me.

I ask to speak to the pilot.

I hear more groans behind me, a gasp, someone say, “Oh, for God’s sake!” One of the flight attendants – a young guy with mischief in his eyes overrules his fellow crew member who is shaking her head at me. He asks the pilots if they want to speak to me. He gives me a plug, claiming I’m cute. I don’t feel cute at all. I think I’m having a heart attack. That’s not cute. That’s an emergency. An ugly emergency. But I feel grateful to this flight attendant, and I want to give him money.

Incredibly, these little metal doors open and there they are, the two pilots with a long sheet of paper unfurled around them like Santa’s list of good girls and boys. I am appalled that there isn’t a hallway separating them from the passengers, that there is no fanfare, that there is just this doorway right near the gangway I have walked through and there is the nose of the plane – BAM! Right there. I want to swirl my fingers in a circle encompassing this situation and announce in a chastising voice:
“Little metal doors between us and the pilots who are sitting in a tiny space that comes to a point with tiny windows. Seriously, people? SAFE? I think not!”

But the two pilots turn toward me from their seats, identical looks of annoyance on their faces. And they are young, 30ish, and that does not help me one little bit. Now I want to swirl my fingers in an encompassing circle and say:

“Children flying this plane!? Seriously, people? SAFE? I think not!”

Instead, I quaver and murmur:

“Is this a safe thing we’re doing?”

It is an incredible question and I know it. I have gotten straight the point. No one does that. I know this too.

Now the line behind me is murmuring. I can feel the shift to outrage in their mood. I realize the danger for me flying may actually have nothing to do with mechanics, but with my fellow passengers accidentally on purpose killing me while I reach for the barf bag.

“Did you fly to the airport?” the pilots ask me. They ask me this at the same time. I am immediately suspicious.

“Yes,” I say.

“That was infinitely more dangerous than flying in this plane.” The door closes and I am ushered to my seat.

Statistically, I know the pilots are correct. But people who suffer from fear of flying could give diddly squat about statistics. We are afraid of things like suffocation as our hearts hammer in our chests and we sweat and we feel like we’re either going to pass out or leap up and warn everyone in a stentorian voice:
“LOOKIT! We should all get off now because, otherwise, we are all going to die!”

The air on a plane as you sit down is stuffy at first. That adds to the claustrophobic feeling, that feeling that you might just suffocate before liftoff. I blast that little nozzle with the air toward my head and put headphones in.

But this flight was my first in a long while and I was headed to California for the first time as well. And I was doing it for work and covering a big story. And the guy sitting next to me was the cameraman for the business I was covering, and I would not stop talking to him.

I had researched how to get over fear of flying and someone said asking to talk to the pilot, talking to fellow passengers and not standing up and shrieking:
“LOOKIT! We should all get off now because, otherwise, we are all going to die!” were helpful measures to take.

I followed them to the letter.

But it was the Xanax my doctor gave me to quell the fear that really got me through it. I still thought we were all going to die, but I didn’t care as much. I was kind of like: “Oh, well. We’re going to die. But I’ll have the chicken.”

Neurosis is humorous after the fact. I had a friend who was equally neurotic, who, years ago, had demanded they turn the plane around. They did.

Today, I think they would have dragged her away in handcuffs. I also think asking to talk to the pilot might prompt a similar response.

And the irony, of course, is that I would do anything to fly again after a year cooped up inside training a puppy who is pushing me around.

I’ve been to a number of countries since that one flight to California, and it’s become easier for me. I take my anti-panic meds and carry on. Every now and then I get complacent and disoriented by the sights sounds and sensation of dropping – that wonderful feeling like your stomach is floating above your head. I ordered coffee during one of these complacent moments and proceeded to spiral into terror mode just 40 minutes into a 7-hour flight.

Hyperventilating can make you feel like you’re suffocating, like you can’t breathe because the balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen gets thrown off in your system. There I was hyperventilating while a line of passengers headed to the restrooms behind us.

My husband was snoozing peacefully beside me, hands crossed on his chest in his characteristic pose while I reached for the barf bag and began breathing into it. The bag crunched in as I inhaled and popped out as I exhaled. It was noticeable – me sitting there breathing into the barf bag.

You know you’re really a mental case when people spot you doing something like this and quickly look away. Everyone in that line did that. One after another. They spotted me, registered what was happening in an instant, and looked away. My husband cracked open an eye at me and did the same thing.

I find my neuroses enormously humorous after the fact, of course. But I have discovered that anxieties like this can really prevent people from flying at all. You hear about all these famous artists and celebrities who were or are terrified of flying and I get it. As an artist I can attest to the wild imagination – and wild imaginations can turn on you when you least expect it. Mine has an arsenal of weapons.

And there are always the stories of someone who just couldn’t come clean about this phobia. I read a tragic story about a businessman who was so afraid to fly he committed suicide when his company assigned him to a trip and it involved an airplane. He could not fess up that it was too much for him. Men have a terrible time admitting to things like this sometimes since many are trained not to talk about their feelings or admit to things like fear.

I get not wanting to admit to fear – in many cases it can program you for it. But I also think coming clean about phobias and panic is so important, because you’re helping yourself and likely many others handle the fear as well.

When things are limited to words, you realize it’s not so bad. You’re afraid to fly. So what? And when you share something like that with someone else, I find 99 percent of the time, people want to help you deal with it. I am eternally grateful to those annoyed pilots and especially to that flight attendant who took the time to help me through it. My dear friend who recommended I take something for the terrifying week build-up so that I could get on the plane, the doctor who prescribed it and to the many online courses.

I’m still afraid to fly – REALLY afraid to fly – and I’ve been to California many times, to Vancouver, England, Denmark, Spain, France, Sweden etc. If I can do it with a bona fide panic disorder, I know anyone can.

When I landed that first time, I was giddy with relief. It took incredible self-control for me not to belt out:
“OH, MY GOD!!! WE MADE IT! WE’RE ALIVE!!! IT’S INCREDIBLE! IT’S A MIRACLE!!”

While it’s not remarkable at all that I survived these flights, as flying is still the safest form of transport, it does strike me as somewhat remarkable that I survived that flight with all those people in line behind me plotting to kill me.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright March 21, 2021 E. B. Dravenstadt

10 Million Months

I am writing a note to a friend  in Spain and I am trying to say something positive. So I write something about the pandemic likely going to take a year or so to work its way out. Or ten months. It could be ten months or so.

I am not clairvoyant, nor do I have inside information here. I am like you, flailing about wildly. No idea really what is going to happen, cycling through feelings of utter despair and wondering if I should try out that Whoopie pie recipe.

Don’t ask me why I would think “it’s going to be about a year” is an encouraging statement. When you’re young, ten months is like ten years. You get older and you think: Ten months? Yeah, that’s a good amount of time, but there’s always that 11^th month, which means it’s over.

Only I didn’t really say that in my note to her. This is what I wanted to say: “We just have to be super cautious for about one more year, or 10 months, really.” This is what I said: “We just have to be super cautious for about one more year or 10 million months, really.”

10 million months? Is this autocorrect up to his mischievous tricks again? Is this my subconscious mind at play? Did I actually type this?

10 million months is not a long time, it is an epoch, like the Pleistocene Epoch. Dinosaurs roam around in things like 10 million months. T-Rex’s (am I spelling that right?) devour prey that they later morph into in 10 million months. A lot can happen in an hour. But a shitload can happen in 10 million months.

Apparently, I believe in my heart, in my subconscious that this pandemic is going to last about 10 million months. And, equally interesting, perhaps, is that, subconsciously, I find this encouraging. So encouraging, in fact, that I am sharing this good news with a friend from Spain. There is a certain silence that attends a remark like this. People don’t want to judge, but there it is. Someone is looking forward to the next 10 million months. It’s the sort of thing that can pay a psychiatrist’s child’s way through law school, because you know that doctor is going to latch on to this thing, nudge those half-glasses down her nose and declare you a case study.

But that’s hyperbole, isn’t it? No one is going to declare you a case study because you are looking forward to the next 10 million months. You have stiff competition for case study, my friend. There are people guzzling hand sanitizer. There are people who think the government is going to, somehow, insert a tracing mechanism into a vaccine so government officials can track you everywhere.

A compelling idea, certainly. But, pick up your freaking phone. No one needs to insert a tracking device into anyone. Your smart phone is already doing this, and you carry it everywhere you go without any government official tapping you on the shoulder and suggesting you do this. It’s even by your head when you sleep at night. I always feel like I should go somewhere really interesting or say something really wild so that the people listening in on me at least have something entertaining to hear. I feel sorry for these people. I would be willing to be bet that they, too, are looking forward to the next 10 million months.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright September 2, 2020 E. B. Dravenstadt

I Can’t be THAT ugly

I’ve done enough shouting to know that no one listens when you do it. Sometimes the other person sees it as an opportunity to shout back and, suddenly, it’s a contest to see who is louder. The words are gone – swallowed by the storm.

When we are that angry, we can be as stunned by the force of our own emotion as the other guy. And then there is that quiet afterward, that time of introspection when we ponder what has been said, how it was said, the body language. If someone taped us and held up the video for us to see we would probably balk at the image.

“That can’t be me. I can’t be THAT ugly.”

I’ve done enough silent frustration to know that it might as well be an argument, I might as well be shouting. You can’t fool people. You’re not free of any blame just because you’re quiet. Quiet can be as aggressive as a slap. It can be that damaging. Sometimes people draw you out and then judge what comes out of you because you make the mistake of telling them what’s in your head. I kick myself, wishing I hadn’t been so candid, vowing to never do that again. But I’m courageous like that, and part of me doesn’t care. Part of me believes the only way out is through – the only way out is the truth.

So, what do we do with all of our worry today, as we sit in our homes, banging away at computers and wondering and wondering where we are headed? We are in a storm of our own creation – a storm that is yelling at us, and we are having trouble hearing one another at times above the roar of the heavy winds. We want to escape the storm. But we are the storm.  

It makes me think of Dick and Jane Clark, whose vast comprehension of the vicissitudes of life was like a force to be reckoned with. I think about my age and how old I was when they were this age and what was happening. I think about the past now with such nostalgia and pain. When we were all under one roof – the lot of us. I think about the shouts of joy and the rare silences when we grappled with sticky glue to make Christmas Tree ornaments out of construction paper – those accordion legs on the Santas and elves. Somehow the past is calling to me, and I find myself crying, missing them all. What would Mom and Dad say today, living in this time – this era?

I struggle with this idea that we could save each other, stop hurting animals, take care of Mother Earth. I struggle with this idea that, while none of us can throw a security blanket over the planet, we can embrace one another, we can tell the truth and admit that what we really want is to be loved. Then, maybe, we could admit that that’s what everyone wants. That’s what the elephant wants. That’s what the people in Angola want, what the rhinoceros in Africa want, what the dogs and monkeys in the experimental labs being injected with poison want. I struggle with this idea that, maybe, one day, whatever has brought us here will make us look in the mirror and see what is actually there. That, one day, we’ll say, “I can’t be THAT ugly.”

And maybe on that day we will change.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright August 15, 2020 E. B. Dravenstadt

Bittersweet

I am pulling at the Bittersweet. It is spying its way through branches disguised as the honeysuckle bush/tree, as friend not foe. My stomach hurts from crying, and the sparkling May day offers a prayer of stillness for my grief, my confusion, my inner chaos.

The Bittersweet is an expert at covert operations. It spirals around the trunk of the great white pine, embedding its essence in the bark, wearing a groove into the surface as I unwind it, cut the heavy limb of it with my shears and yank it, stuttering, away. I gaze up with wonder at the snaking vines, disconnected now from their mother, unreachable in the branches above my head, twisting and threading their way like lies. They’ll die without a source, by they will die there, reminding me of their power, reminding me that I had to investigate. I had to research, find a knife, scope them out and cut off their supply chain.

The Bittersweet fools me time and again. It could almost be the branch of the honeysuckle, its leaves a soft shade of green. I must look closer at it. And I do, slowly spotting where my eye had been deceived. It is not the honeysuckle’s way to spiral and twist the way the Bittersweet does. The honeysuckle is a straight shooter. It doesn’t jump from limb to limb the way the Bittersweet does. It doesn’t snake surreptitiously through the air, sliding and clasping onto a host and squeezing the life out of it. I am familiar with its power. The vine is not a tree. Its jealousy is almost palpable, its clawing, grasping hands that would take down what it cannot ever be.

The Bittersweet is under my feet somewhere, an intricate network of spies, branching into unthinkable regions, unknowable depths. It’s in the earth below me.

But I cut it anyway, with my shears, freeing the branches of the honeysuckle, pulling the torked fingers of the vine down in long sheets, yanking hard as they claw against my weight. The tree shakes free, stands solid, the vines in a heap at my feet, twisted into corkscrew shapes from their rapturous strangle hold, now empty with nothing to strangle.

Humans are so easily fooled. We mistake fame for happiness, power for meaning, anger for power. We’re fooled by leaders with money, appearance for love. We can be so fooled we can throw diamonds into the sea, smash to pieces what we feel is not enough. We are fooled by vines in a tree. We think the vines are the tree. If we don’t look more closely, we don’t see that the vine is a parasite. That the vine is killing the tree.

Grief is like a trap, like the vine. There is sadness, and then there is you, at the center of something. You and what you preferred.

The thing about grief is you cry for so many things. You cry for yourself, of course. That’s the hardest part. Admitting that the tears are selfish in some way – because you don’t know how you are going to carry on without that person – that light in your life. You cry for the person you were with that person, the person who is always younger than you are today, always more full of hope, always more vibrant and happy. Subtraction is a gut clencher because you are now crying for something else – the knowledge that, somehow, life is like the honeysuckle and the Bittersweet. That you have to be on the alert for the things that aren’t true, snaking around you, or be brought down by them, or be brought down by the spies. You have to look more closely. You have to see where your thinking got off track, sent you into the darkness of your Self – that void where the road signs disappear, where you can wander for days without water or food. Your Self can slowly work its way around your ankles, spiral up your calves without your knowing it. Your Self can ground you to a spot, embed its way into your torso, spin around your limbs and your hands and your neck, until your essence is encased in it, immobilized, helpless, waiting for a friend with a pair of shears and a sharp eye.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright May 25, 2020 E. B. Dravenstadt

(Author’s note: My apologies. The original version of this referenced Japanese Knotweed. The vine is actually referred to as Oriental Bittersweet.)

The Mirror

What happened to her salt? I want to ask her that.

The fire in her eyes all but extinguished as we sip coffees, straining to see what is behind the web of lies we tell each other.

I imagine all sorts of things that are probably not true and she stares at me with the same probing look. The truth is in there somewhere, we think. So we sip our coffees and put on this pretense. There were words that described things back when words mattered. But we sense the same shift in the atmosphere like lightning. We will have to communicate with more than that now. We will need dreams and intentions and gestures and poetry. Words are the car, not the fuel.

I know that now as I sink into this probing silence, this scrutiny of sound that buffets me with its presence. Its lack of substance as conspicuous as the color red, the touch of fire. We will need to stop now, to stop running. And there is a part of me, deep inside, that is breathing a sigh of relief. Breathing finally, in and out, full breaths, because the chase was exhausting and none of us really felt we could keep up. But we lied. We sipped coffee, stared across at one another, and we lied.

The simple essence of us was lost somewhere in a crowd, jammed into expectations hammered into us by the well intentioned. I have waited for departures as I have waited for arrivals, wondering at this expectation that none of us can meet. Expansion must stop at some point. At some point, the thing that is expanding must contract.

And how did this happen? How did she lose her salt? That spice inside her? It comes back to her now as I sit across from her, watching her return in the mirror. Why did we go so very fast, why did we lie so many times to one another?

Admitting that we wanted peace, after all, would mean that we had allowed ourselves to be duped by others, duped into chasing after things that did not exist, after lies, because we did not consider the alternative. 

If we can’t admit that, perhaps we can admit that we wanted this on some level, some part of this we wanted.

We wanted to stop.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright April 24, 2020 E. B. Dravenstadt

Moe, Curly and Me

My brother Greg is telling me I’m crazy for probably the millionth time. We are trapped inside our houses during a coronavirus social distancing thing, and I am making a plea over the phone. He is in Connecticut and I am in Massachusetts. There are two years between us and we could not be more different.

I argue that I am not crazy, and I realize that shouting “I am NOT crazy!” is actually how people determine that you may in fact be crazy.

I also realize he is like the man who knew too much. He has the goods on me.

Remember the time when you…?
I am back in Albany and it is 1970. We live in a three-story, green house across from the fire station. I think there are evil people at the fire station because one of the fire trucks is grey, not red. I am 5 and the grey truck scares me. I also think islands float, that I will suffocate and be unable to exhale if I stand in the wind and that The Three Stooges are smart and reliable.

Greg has smeary freckles, is tall and can whistle with his fingers, so I think Greg is a genius.

There are seven of us. My parents’ names are Dick and Jane, and they have gone and had seven children. Later, I will wonder at this. I will say to myself: “Good God, what were they thinking? We must have driven them insane.” There is compelling evidence that we did just that.

We are “a bunch of wild hooligans” according to my Dad when he comes home and finds us hanging on door frames, fighting in corners, making shakes out of Clorox and Ajax and generally screaming. And, since I have nothing to weigh that against, I decide that being a wild hooligan is a good thing.

I am mistaken.

But I digress. Before I share this, I would like to point out that The Three Stooges started this whole thing.

Greg and I are watching The Three Stooges together, and I watch as Moe puts the hose down Curly’s pants and they balloon out, as they fill with water. Greg laughs, and I laugh because Greg is laughing.

The next day I am at school, and I am going to School 16, which I hated with every fiber of my being.

School 16 was what could happen if you weren’t careful, if you wandered off in the department store or you ate something off the floor. School 16 loomed like a tower, its lugubrious hallways barely lit by a smoky bulb encased in smoky glass, the doors creaking suspiciously, the outside transparent and aloof, withholding its joys to those hapless enough to venture inside the brick walls.

We line up outside the classroom and my teacher counts heads as we head to the bathrooms. I am 5 and I do not know at this point that I have inherited a good swath of my father’s stubbornness and temper. This is important. Because there is a major problem with bathroom time at School 16.

The bathrooms are the adult variety. And I am not an adult. So, the boys split off and use the bathroom on the left and the girls split off and use the one on the right. The hallways are dark and lugubrious. I think I said that. But I may need to underscore that. Or capitalize it. DARK AND LUGUBRIOUS. I am convinced that, were I to wander unescorted down one of these dimly lit hallways, that I will be kidnapped. Being kidnapped was the all-time worst thing that could happen to you.

So, I go to the bathroom and have to climb up on the adult toilet and, lo and behold, I look down and see two eyes staring up at me.

Yes. A boy has skittered across the hall, entered the girls bathroom and is now watching me pee. He is on all fours with his head dropped low so that it fits in the gap between the stall wall and the floor.

I know that no one is supposed to see you go to the bathroom. But I don’t tell the teacher, because this would make me like Maylene the Tattletale. And I hate Maylene.

I don’t sleep well that night. I’m angry at that boy and I am determined to outthink him.

The next day I’m back at school and bathroom time is called. We all line up to go the bathroom. But this time, I decide not to go because I don’t want the boy to watch me pee.

However, this is a problem because I have to pee and I’m getting anxious because I am holding it in. We are back in the classroom now and Maylene is practicing her numbers.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!” she announces.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, TEN!” she continues, faster.

“OnetwothreefourfivesixseveneightNINE TEN!!” she shouts.

I tell Maylene to shut up and stick my tongue out at her. I want her to shut up because her obsession with numbers is really riding me. I have to go the bathroom and it’s getting worse with every passing second.

Maylene tells on me to Mrs. Grosvenor, who doesn’t believe her because Mrs. Grosvenor likes me and cannot imagine me with my tongue hanging out.

I drum my hands on the table and blow my cheeks out.

I try to focus on something else.

Slabs of sunlight on the floor from wall length windows, the chalk board, our small round tables where we sit doing numbers, the letters of the alphabet in blocks above the chalkboard, Maylene’s running nose, her green velvet pinafore, the frilly socks and loafers. Mrs. Grosvenor’s beautiful dress with its bold, bright flowers in reds and yellows and greens. Two boys at a table drawing monsters instead of doing numbers. Mrs. Grosvenor drinking from a glass of water.

And then I realize that I can do something after all. Since my mother always makes us wear shorts under our dresses, all I really have to do is pee in my pants and they will balloon out just the way Curly’s did when Moe stuck the hose down them. Then I can just empty my shorts out when I get home. 

Problem solved.

So, I sat there at that round table next to Maylene the Tattle Tale and peed in my pants.

Only it wasn’t going as I had planned.

I felt hot, wet liquid fill my shorts and looked down. The pee had not been contained in my shorts at all as I had hoped, as I had expected. And, speaking of contained, I could not contain my surprise. My mouth dropped open in apoplectic shock as I watched the wet, stinky liquid pool below my chair.  Maylene in her prim velvet eyed me with malevolence and pointed.

“She peed!”

The accusation hit a high note, like a razor sharp “ping!” and all eyes turned.  

I believe I began to cry at this point, so great was my disappointment in The Three Stooges, so sweeping was my sense of betrayal. And to be called out by Maylene. It was too much to bear.

And then the unthinkable happened. Well, the unthinkable had already happened. But Mrs. Grosvenor did something the Adult Me would shake my head at in appreciation. This 30-something woman with her pretty face and her colorful dress picked me up and put 5-year-old me on her lap as I sobbed, heedless of the mess, of what I could do to that dress, and consoled me. My mother may have been called. It was a blur after that.  

What is not a blur was Gregory’s laughter. He laughed so hard when he found out what I had done that I thought he was going to choke to death. He wheezed and coughed and his face turned beet red.

“You thought your pants would balloon out?” he wanted to know, incredulous.

With nothing left in my arsenal but calling him by his full name in a high-pitched voice for a week, I retreated to my stuffed animals and decided that The Three Stooges were fat-faced, lying, sucker heads.

Or maybe I was just crazy.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright March 18, 2020 E. B. Dravenstadt

The Shadow

I think I know who SHE is, so when we are introduced for the first time I don’t take note, and this is a mistake. SHE hovers over me like a plasma representation, wide as she is tall, and I wonder at HER, but I am moving on to something else, and the meeting is forgotten.

Because I think I know who SHE is.

Later, when people start disappearing, I realize SHE is involved. SHE is there again, hovering over me, clenching her fists, and I stare up at her, frightened this time by her size, the sheer force of her throbbing pulse. HER eyes are like fires I have started unbeknownst to me, and she gets bigger every day.

I learn that expectation is a trap, and that looking for trouble prevents my falls from becoming catastrophic. But wise people shake their heads at this approach and warn that expectations shouldn’t be too low – that I am, somehow, bringing on trouble, by setting the table for it.

So, I try not to expect, and then I try to flatten what I experience.

But I learn that expectation is hidden in the vaults of my being, like a thousand little knives, it appears, always flanked by HER. SHE hovers over me and I cower because I realize, finally, that I do not, in fact, know who SHE is. But I now know SHE is carrying a knife of expectation.

I learn about the injustices, one by one, and the others don’t seem to mind as much as I do. The trusts that have been earned only to rear up the way SHE does and surprise me, the little knife slicing me as I run as fast as I can.

It seems I have always been running, but then I realize that others are too.

We are at the Court House and the psychologist is grilling her. This is the process. We sit here and the psychologist asks questions my friend can’t answer because she is sick and knows she must prove that she is sick, or they will not help her. She is curled inward, her chin sideways, her head down, eyes wary, her shoulders hunched against the blows he inflicts with his questions, each one carefully modulated, aimed with precision at her narrow, fragile frame. Her wrists, like mine, so thin. My path has diverged because a calamity that I skirted the edges of hit her full frontal. I know this suddenly the way I know she must answer the questions correctly. You must phrase it the right way, or help will not come. She will be sent to the wrong place and then the other SHE, the one I don’t know, will hover over me and I will cower.

I cannot answer for her, but this next question shudders in the air. She is forced to explain herself like a million days being explained in a minute, like her aspect, her hunched shoulders, the sciatic pain that skates and burns up her back, shifting her in her seat weren’t enough proof, the scent of alcohol in the room was not enough proof. It is too big a task and I am appalled, staring at him. A million days of sorrow in one minute. She recounts the first death, the second and chokes on her words. Her light blue eyes turn to me, helpless with silence. Tears appear and they are not the tears I have seen before – the ones that answered a door and let sadness in. These tears are like the SHE that hovers over me, the one I run from. These tears are from the one that doesn’t knock, the one who appears and dominates with shadow. I try to fill in the gap – the minute gap for the million days. And SHE appears, hovering over us, staring at me.  

They say you can overcome the shadow that looms above you by sitting with it – that the only way to run from the shadow is not to run at all, but to sit with it and allow its expectation knives to penetrate every part of you, until you are groaning and gasping for air. That after you withstand this fire, you will emerge like a phoenix from the ashes.

I realize that the interview with the psychologist is just that for her – that the running and the running and the running from the shadow has wound us up here. And in his simple question audaciously demanding one to represent one million, she has stopped running. She is face to face with the shadow, which is passing through her even as I sit with her, holding her shoulder as if my weight, my fragile love will be enough.

Is the shadow anger, I wonder? Is anger just grief? Or is SHE something more? Just pain, Justice with HER scales, eyes wide, appalled at the wide world? Is SHE sadness?

Or is SHE our purpose, the deep abiding stare of love so strong that we must be transformed by it.

And that is why we run.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright March 7, 2020 E. B. Dravenstadt

Epiphany in Harlem

I am 6-years-old. My mother is 41 and she has taken me in the family’s Volkwagen Beetle into New York City, and I am sitting on the seat beside her, gazing up the fathomless skyscrapers and the roar of the traffic around us and she is staring intently at the road.

I can see her profile, her colorful clothing. It is 1971 and she has given me a day off from school and I have no idea why. I am just going to enjoy a trip to my favorite museum, the one she introduced me to months ago – the one with the wooly mammoth I fell in love with, its fur and its gorgeous stature hovering high above my head. The eyes I did not know were glass – and even in those glass eyes I could see the love, the pulse of a being so expansive in its breadth and ability to give. And I am remembering the marble toy she bought me afterward in the cool quiet expanse of the museum, with the soft echoes and the hushed voices, with the marble and stone and the people who walked slowly and looked at things quietly like they were in church praying. I remember the toy – the one of the elephant – and how, even then, I knew that elephants were special – that elephants didn’t forget a kindness and they cried and they moved gently, deliberately like the people in the museum.

But we aren’t going to the museum this time, and I am in the car and my mother is silent. She is driving somewhere I have never been before in New York and, later, I learn that she went to school here at a college called Manhattanville when there was a college called Manhattanville. She turns off at a ramp scrawled with graffiti, words that scream at me, and I am suddenly apprehensive, unsure why. She is driving through neighborhoods where dark brown people stand on street corners talking, wearing bright colors – the colors I love most. Tattered awnings line the street, ragged advertisements with bold lettering covered in graffiti scrawls that mark the pavement, the buildings, the telephone posts. And then there are more dark brown and lighter brown people and I remember my friend Karen Avery from kindergarten and how she was that color – like mahogany – and I think how lucky these people are to have dark skin and eyes because I am so pale.

But we are out of the car now, and we are walking, and it is 1971, and the people aren’t smiling at us. My mother holds my hand and we walk through throng after throng of dark people, with beautiful dark eyes and I see the patterns of blues and reds and yellows on their clothes. There are old people with red-stained eyes and walkers. There are younger people clustered together with patchwork jeans and silky tops with riotous patterns. The weather is warm, and they are all talking energetically at one another and they stop talking the moment my mother approaches. Their bright white smiles vanish suddenly, and they look at her carefully, questioning, but it is a different type of quiet than the one in the museum, that permeates my being with stillness.

This silence makes my insides swirl. I feel overwhelmed by my small size, and I am worried now that these people do not like us, do not want us here. And they are all so much taller than me. And they are so many of them compared to the two of us. But my mother doesn’t say a word. She walks us through crowd after crowd and I realize we are in a place called Harlem, and I remember her saying something about this being a haunt of hers when she went to school at Manhattanville.

She is shepherding me through the door of a diner on a corner, and we stand inside waiting for a table. My mother and I sit at the counter on round stools that spin. The stools are bone white and the walls of the diner are white and the clock on the wall has a white background with black hands that tell the time, and the woman serving us at the counter is blue-black, her deep brown eyes probing my mother and her smile and me with suspicion. No one but my mother is smiling and my mother stops smiling in deference to the others in the diner who aren’t smiling, the men having coffee and food at the counter, the woman and the man eating at the little table by the door. My mother asks what I would like, and I don’t want anything. I don’t feel welcome and I want to leave because I think these people don’t want us here. But I don’t say these things because I’m 6 and I don’t know how to say these things. So I ask for milk and the wary waitress slides a small glass of milk at me with that same narrow look, and I see a glimmer of something in her eye I cannot identify, but it stirs my insides the way her silence does. I sip the milk I don’t want. My mother drinks coffee and says nothing.

And then, my mother is walking us out and home, and we are stepping through throngs of dark people again.

The people around us are still and their silence feels like electric shocks in the air, like they are charging the air around us, and my mother is not walking as fast as I think she should. She is taking calm, slow steps and I can’t see the face she is presenting to them because I am standing beside her and her face is too far away. But I want to see her face. I want to understand what’s happening with her.

And we are, just as suddenly, back in the VW bug and she is driving with that quiet determination of hers away from Harlem, that haunt where she used to pass out civil rights pamphlets, where her friend Josephine Armstrong and she bonded before Josephine Armstrong went off to become a doctor and couldn’t be invited to my mother’s wedding because “Rhode Island wasn’t ready for that” because Josephine Armstrong had dark skin  and my mother’s father was white and was a judge. And my mother wanted Josephine at her wedding, but my mother’s parents said “no” because white people weren’t ready for people with beautiful dark skin to be at a wedding. And my mother never forgot that, and she talked about it later with anger in her voice.

And then I remember the silence. We are home now, in Greenwich, Connecticut and I am still 6 and I remember that my mother never said another word about our trip to Harlem, or why it wasn’t a trip to the Museum of Natural History, and why she had taken me out of school that day. She never said a word. There was a silence around that trip – a silence like a prayer, that breathed with something beyond questions and answers, with something that beat like a drum inside of me, quietly and calmly the way my mother walked with such determination through Harlem, as if my soul had been permanently altered. I never asked her about the walk either. She never told me what to think of it. But later, when people told me about their pain, I remembered the waitress’ eyes and I realized what I saw in them.

She was afraid of me.

From Fun with Dick & Jane, copyright February 29, 2020 E. B. Dravenstadt

SPOILER ALERT: If you saw the movie, read on.

On the movie Parasite – This is an innovative and daring approach to story which I found to be incredible in its scope. Biting social commentary embeds like URL code in every scene.

We have the wealthy couple juxtaposed with the destitute and desperate family, putting as much effort and talent into posing and acting as the young man attending university is applying himself to his studies. Is the horror that attends really all that surprising given the hopelessness of these characters’ lives? Or is it simply a response to the horror of this existence, foisted upon them through no real fault of their own? Born in the wrong part of town in the cockroach-ridden confines of underground hovels plagued by floods. While the theme isn’t a new one, the take on it is, as we follow the narratives of two sets of people who shout their realities at one another across such a chasm, such a yawning divide, the heart sinks. The only thin thread of recognition is the one the father utters to the other father: “So, you love her then?”

And who is the parasite here? Which family? That is up to you to decide.

At first I wondered at the Academy Award it received, and now it makes perfect sense. This is an important movie – something that causes self-examination. It makes you uncomfortable; it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable. What are your thoughts?