Buying The Dress

This week my niece came from Washington for one night to visit my sister and me. We were so happy to see her! My late brother’s oldest daughter is professionally known as A. B. Stoddard. She is a political columnist for the top political website and newspaper called The Hill. She is seen often on television talk shows; Alexandra is smart, politically astute and very pretty.

She arrived from La Guardia in a small, bright blue, rented car, grinning and waving madly out of the window as she made the turn into Southport Woods and spotted me.

Plans for the afternoon were two fold: one, we would tour the area, stopping to look at every house her family: grandparents and great grandparents and great aunts and uncles, lived in in this small town. All Alexandra’s paternal roots are here. Her mother was born here as well.

Then we would go to Westport to shop. I needed a dress—something I rarely wear. “Terrific,” Alexandra says. So, after drifting down memory lane for a while, we headed for Talbots in Westport.

Looking at dresses makes my mind go numb. They are too short, or the neck is too low or they are too young, or too splashy for me to feel comfortable. Alexandra chooses a few things for herself and then captures me in a dress I am about to discard due to all of the above-named defects and she declares, “That’s it!  But you definitely need a size two.”

“I don’t wear a two!”

“At Talbots, you wear a two.” This is not up for discussion as she hands me the dress in a two and I put it on.  It fits—well mostly. I kind of feel like I can’t move and certainly I cannot sit down.

It’s perfect,” Alexandra says. “It’s fresh, great looking, really fits you and a little sweater or a scarf . . . you are set.” She proceeds to dazzle me with a vision of myself that she projects toward me with her earnest and natural intensity.

The next thing I know I am catching the vision, laughing and buying the dress.

The short, dark haired, sixty something woman wearing pink framed glasses who is taking my credit card, looks at Alexandra and asks, “are you A.B. Stoddard?” Alexandra smiles, blushes slightly and acknowledges that she is.

“I love listening to you on TV,” the woman says. “You are always so well informed and polite, not pushy like so many of them.” The woman catches my eye and gives me a nod. Alexandra thanks her.

We turn to leave.

“Great!” Alexandra says. “Now all you need is a pair of Spanx”

“What are Spanx?” My sister and I ask, practically simultaneously.

“Remember girdles?”

Anne and I laugh. Who could forget? We were so tightly bound by panty girdles during our late adolescence that we could never take a deep breath. The creation of panty hose we regarded as a benign act of God.

“You don’t know about Spanx?” Everyone wears Spanx,” Alexandra tells us. “In fact, the woman who created Spanx is the first woman billionaire in America. Very comfortable, tightens you up and smoothes you right out.”

I mutter something about being beyond smoothing, but Alexandra will have none of it. Besides, Anne and I are curious, so off we go in search of Spanx.

Later that evening as Alexandra and I are chatting before bed, I say, a bit wistfully, “I’ve never bought a dress in which I was not completely comfortable.”

Alexandra laughs and says, “You will look fabulous. I declare it illegal for you to return that dress. Don’t you dare!”

I nod my head and hug her.

And so, on the evening when I attend this function, wearing that bright, flower-printed cotton dress, however I feel, however I look won’t really matter. As Alexandra’s vision of me, I will walk into the room and, like a kite tossed into the sky, we’ll just see how it flies!

***

 My thanks to those of you who read my blog this week in: Bangladesh, United Kingdom, India, Russia, Ukraine, Canada, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Ireland and, of course, the USA. I am so very grateful for your interest.

***

Not Sure How to COMMENT?

To comment on this article:

1. Click on the article title. 

2. Scroll all the way down the page

3.  See “Post A Comment”, click on the box to begin typing your comment.

4.  Click on dropdown arrow to “Select A Profile”

5.  Choose “Name / URL”

6. Enter Your Name and click Publish

7. You may be asked to enter a verification code to complete this (so they know you’re not a robot!)

A Plan For My Future

I am taking bridge lessons. I cannot believe I am doing this. It has been thirty-five years. I played in college—much more than I studied. And then as a married person, I played in a women’s group and in a large group of married couples.

But, now? To be doing this now? I am riddled with ambivalence.

My son asks, “Why, Mom?”

 I respond, “As an investment in my old age.”

“But you are already old.”

 A bit unkind, but true. 

At the same time that playing bridge feels like some kind of weak-kneed concession to the traditional, single, senior citizen model, I have been envious of the bridge bonding that is apparent around me. When winter blizzards blast in our direction and we, at Southport Woods, are trapped by icy, unplowed roads, bridge games go on, the players pooling food resources and huddling together around card tables.

 Introverted as I am, I’d like that company, too. Introverts tend to write, read, walk and stare out of windows and introverts tend to isolate. Living alone, at a “certain age,” that is just not good.

At the classes, I play with very nice women who, like me, have a modicum of experience, and who are struggling to get back into the game. We listen carefully to our instructor, who clearly knows his stuff, and we play the hands he gives us with the dedicated concentration of a summit on world peace. And like those same summits, we make mistakes-- with less dire consequences, of course.

When I have to play a hand I am convinced that, as I struggle to remember what cards have been played, how many trump cards are still out, etc, the rusty, grind of the wheels in my brain must be  audible. I can literally feel the sluggish spin of my own mind as I try to re learn this game.

And the game has changed. I am, in bridge, as I am in any number of things these days, seriously out of date.

 I keep asking myself why I am doing this. To be a welcome newcomer in some assisted living facility one day? I guess so. To attempt to fit in—not something I’ve given a lot of thought to in my life thus far--but, yes. To make more friends who will “see me out,” as the expression goes? Yes, again. I don’t mean to sound bleak, but we are talking reality here!

Meanwhile, some blithe, ever hopeful, ridiculously youthful and optimistic part of myself that prefers to dwell only in the bright possibilities of life, has no wish to spend three hours—or more-- a week at a bridge table. This youthful me laughs at the idea of planning for a future surrounded by nice women who play bridge. Don’t be silly, it tells me; you will find something creative, something new and totally absorbing to do . . . by yourself.

I‘m glad I still have that voice inside me, and who knows? Maybe that is true, but right now, like acquiring long-term health insurance, I am learning to play bridge.

Various New York Times articles have asserted that playing bridge will  keep my mind alert and awake, may even stave off Alzheimer’s and dementia. I encourage myself by imagining the multitudinous new neuropathways being forged in my head as I try to remember what cards have been played.

When our two-hour class is finished my brain feels as if I have shoveled out new neurotrenches.

Nonetheless I persevere, looking forward to the pleasure of opening the bidding with a happy confidence. I do remember bridge being fun to play—in the old days when it didn’t make my hair hurt. 

Whatever my quirky resistance, my plan to learn this game is going forward. Five more weeks to go in this class and then maybe some more classes in the future. My investment in my old age: plowing steadily through the daunting fact that my old age is already here.
 

Super Stars Wanting More?

Why would Super Bowl star quarterback Tom Brady have to cheat? And then lie about it? The media, as you probably know, is referring to the incident as “deflategate.” (I find myself wondering when—please sometime—the media will move on to some other, perhaps more original, words to describe these debacles.)

“I have no knowledge of any wrong doing,” Brady told reporters. But then he refused to reveal his emails and, unfortunately for him, the guys in the locker room who were pumping the footballs—or not--shared theirs. According to sports reporter, Bob Costas, Brady “knowingly broke an established rule.”

I’m not a football fan and even I know who Tom Brady is. Even I know what an amazing quarterback the Patriots have.

Not for the first time, I am staggered by the question of how much is enough?  How much fame, how much money, and how much adulation are enough for any human being?

Look at my favorite newscaster, Brian Williams. What happened to him; what internal shifting occurred to provoke him into enlarging the dramas of his stories? I wish we could say it was some concussion he sustained when he was playing high school football, anything but what appears to be a stunning unconscious need for more.

It’s difficult to sympathize with the rich and famous. It’s so hard for us to imagine the power of addiction to fame and fortune. We don’t live in those realms.

 I have been trying all day to feel into their experience, to find something in myself akin to what conceivably drives that kind of behavior besides the normal attention deficit that accompanies most of us into adulthood.  

I know this: that as I watch the stats which tell me the number of readers of this blog, for example, I am cheered by accelerating numbers and sorry when a blog I write doesn’t “hit”. And, by the way, I never know which will appeal and which will not. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern that I can discern.

So I am asking myself: how many readers are enough for you, Cecily? How much attention do you wish for?  At the same time that I am exceedingly grateful for all of you who do read it, the truth is, I’d love a million people to want to read what I write. I know that isn’t going to happen, but the wish is there. To that miniscule extent I can understand Brady and Williams wanting more: The force of wanting becoming a separate thing from the pleasure of already having.

 Having said that, I still can’t help wondering: so much more and lying for it? And yet, how many of us expand a story we are telling friends in order to wring the maximum drama and attention out of it. We don’t call that lying exactly, do we? We call it exaggerating. I know a couple of people for whom exaggerating in order to gain attention is a chronic condition. I bet you do, too.

This human need for more attention, success, admiration, fame, fortune—whatever floats your boat---belongs to all of us in differing degrees and in different areas of our lives. Mostly we try to be discreet about it. Facebook is a common and socially acceptable attention grabber. Otherwise we hide our need; cover it with some costume, like humility or manipulation. Better to come right out with whatever success/admiration we seek and own it, at least to ourselves. That way it won’t sneak up on us and catch us unprepared for what can be its destructive power.

It’s just so unfathomable, so much larger than ordinary life when hugely successful and talented Tom Brady or Brian Williams are caught wanting more. Their failure of self-control stands out and we get to point the fingers of self-righteousness at them while ignoring our own, albeit less conspicuous, self-seeking.

Instead of serving our outrage, who could these two men be for us? We could regard them with, in Buddhist writer, Pema Chodron’s, words, “friendly curiosity.” We could view their actions as lessons in life: no more, no less.  

Cleaning Straight Into My Past

A friend is coming to stay and suddenly I am seeing my condo through her eyes: the stacks of books, the bits of half-lists strewn about, the khaki pants folded on top of the small cupboard in the bedroom which have been waiting over a week to go to the sewing lady. There are splotches of milk on the top fridge shelf that have been there since the last gallon container I bought had a leak in the bottom of it.

And once I start seeing, I can’t stop. I’m essentially neat, not a terrible housekeeper, but not great, either. Not with the fine points like refrigerator shelves or cupboard drawers. Accumulation creeps up on me like pounds in winter and I fail to notice.

“The practice of paying attention really does take time,” Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her book, Altar In The World. “Most of us move so quickly that our surroundings become no more than blurred scenery we fly past on our way to somewhere else”

I would add to this that our homes, which we are either leaving in a hurry or in which we are hastily preparing food or crashing in exhaustion, tend also to receive the same blurred sweep of attention as the trees we pass on our way to the store.

Seeing does takes time and anticipating the arrival of my guest, I have begun really seeing my apartment. It moves me to action.

Books would inhabit my space entirely if it weren’t for the available bins at Pequot library. I remove stacks of books I have read from the bookcase shelf and take off, carrying weighty bags  toward their next incarnation.

My cleaning person does a good job except for the pictures hanging on the walls. And there are lots: watercolors—my brother’s and my daughter’s work--and others: oils and acrylics from another life of mine, and framed family photos, which I walk by constantly and do not see.

My brother's work: Brandon Stoddard

Armed with a feather duster for the oils and some “green” form of Windex plus a roll of paper towels, I begin. As I clear and shine surfaces the pictures beneath come alive and I am seeing them, remembering when each was taken: my two sons laughing and hugging each other at my youngest son’s wedding, my mother’s engagement picture; so pretty, she was. I wipe the glass with the dampened paper towel, watching as her face becomes more defined. Who were you, then, Mom? What were your dreams? I wonder.

A photograph of me taken by my brother, sitting on the front steps of our farm with my sons behind me, hangs in the hallway. I am laughing wildly because the boys with their long legs have squeezed me between their knees and are wickedly pressing against my torso. The shower at the farm that weekend had been a bit dodgy so I had not washed my hair. It looks really dreadful. But my brother  had framed the picture and sent it and because it was such a funny moment, bad hair notwithstanding, I have kept it all these years. As I shine the covering glass I start to laugh again, remembering.

On it goes, every picture awakening as I clean a glass surface or brush bumpy paint with the duster. Each one, paintings as well as photographs, has a place in a particular time in my life. Two grandsons playing in a sandbox who now have jobs and support themselves  in apartments in New York. An Aboriginal painting I brought home from Australia, the Native American pots brought home from Aspen in the ‘70s; the pictures now on these walls that have come to America recently from my cottage in Cornwall, England, that I sold last summer. I move slowly over them seeing with my mind’s eye where they were in the cottage and feeling grateful for the memories they inspire.

“Reverence requires a certain pace,” Barbara Brown Taylor tells us. And I know exactly what she means. As I continue the work, I  move slowly through different stages and places and times in my life, cleaning, shining and honoring them. I find myself filled with the mystery of my years, the places I have been and lived and the people I have loved and continue to love.

 I am on a roll now. There is no stopping this odyssey into my past. By the time I have wiped clean all the objects from the shelves of the hutch in the living room: Mom’s painted Victorian china clock and candle sticks, her porcelain compote with the delicate flowers and plump cherubs adorning it, the McCoy vases I bought myself on an adventure into Ebay, and the masterfully carved wooden birds from the Cornwall house, I am in “the zone:” a gentle and blissful meditative state of oneness and completeness with the wholeness of my life.

That evening, as I sit to watch TV, I smile at the sparkling family pictures in their gleaming frames. I have connected with each one and carefully replaced them on the long shelves of the bookcase.

 I am happy.