THE HERMIT

North of the city of Solothurn Switzerland, in the tranquility of the Verena gorge, lives a hermit. The gorge is luscious with ferns and moss blanketing the majestic boulders ... and in the winter, blanketed in quiet snow.

A mountain stream cuts through the landscape, and a secluded path leads you toward caves and coves that make it possible for you to believe in fairies. Although, this isn’t really a stretch. You have believed in fairies since the age of four—but this magical spot emphasizes your belief like an exclamation point.

You fantasize about becoming a hermit yourself someday. However, this isn’t a stretch either. Ever since you heard the news about Martha Stewart going to prison, you have imagined jail as some sort of dreamy, far-away refuge meant only for the most privileged. In prison, you imagine ... you would have simplicity: One bed. One book. One pen. You would have uninterrupted time to think, and write and dream. You would have hours of solitude. Nobody would expect anything from you, because you would be in prison. Social obligations? No longer an issue—not when you are behind bars. You would be left alone.

However, now that you have seen prison reality shows, you have changed your tune. One show featured a female inmate fashioning a maxi-pad across her eyes like a sleep mask ... “Because they never turn the lights off on the inside,” she said. And Rod Blagojevich’s fifteen-year separation from his family doesn’t exactly seem like the stuff dreams are made of. Plus, now that you know ‘hermit’ is a viable option—all the better.

In order to be a hermit in Solothurn Switzerland, you must first endure a rigorous application process. The potential hermit must have some sort of resume that highlights qualifications for hermitage. You wonder what these requirements are.

“Does not play well with others,” or “Likes to spend long hours prostrate in prayer,” are likely traits.

Certainly a girl who repeatedly got, “She’s a good student but she talks too much," on her report card would be disqualified. Especially since the last Solothurn hermit was chastised by the townspeople for, “Having too many visitors.”

Word has it that the Solothurn hermit must have a skill, craft or trade ... something he or she can do to help pay room and board. This skill must be useful, like candle-making, yet it cannot involve too much human interaction. The town’s current hermit is the first-ever female. You are proud of her ... “GIRL POWER” and all that. She makes soap and sells it at a shop in town. You suppose an online business would be too robust according to the rigid, Swiss townspeople. You also suppose the hermit doesn’t have wireless. Heck. She may not even have electricity. Maybe this hermit thing isn’t so terrific after all.

You know, deep down, that if you were better about clearing the clutter out of your life ... and about setting boundaries ... and about not over-booking, over-planning and over-cramming ... you wouldn’t feel the need for prison, or hermitage or any other sort of enforced solitude. If you reserved more time for yourself to simply think, sit, meditate, dream, write, and create ... you would be freer on the outside, where you belong.

“There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room.”

- Elizabeth Kübler Ross

THE DOODKI

No, this really isn’t a Doodki. This is the poor, abandoned albino sea lion they rescued from under some logs on a Russian beach. I can’t get over how cute he is. I also can’t get over the fact that if you weren’t told what kind of animal this is, you may not know what to call him. For all we know, he might be the Paddle-Footed Flibbity-Flab of Indonesia. Or, the Brown-Crested Sea Cow indigenous to Madagascar. But no, he is simply a sea lion—albeit albino. Undeniably handsome. Unmistakably Seussian. And yet, would a sea lion by any other name still be a sea lion?

For instance, see how closely he resembles this character.

This is Clementine, our miniature dachshund. What she doesn’t have in stature, she makes up for in attitude. But who decided dachshunds should be called dachshunds? Not that dachshund is a bad name for a dog breed. There are worse. The Xoloitzcuintli, for one. The animal I feel sorriest for though is called the Scrod. Talk about having a tough time making a good first impression. “Well hello ladies. I am Scrod.” (Fish scatter.) Scrod trolls the ocean floor in search of love …

But getting back to the Doodki: This is not an animal at all, but instead scarier and fiercer than any animal could ever be—including the Great White Shark, the King Cobra and the Komodo Dragon. The Doodki (or Dhudki, Or Duedki?) was an ominous spanking device my parents kept locked in the kitchen cabinet while my brother, sister and I were growing up. This beast had a long wooden handle with black leather straps riveted to the top. The scariest fact about the Doodki is, my grandpa made it.

Yes. My grandpa. Made it. For my mom and dad. To beat us. Or whip us. Or threaten us—which is mostly what it ended up being—because the mere mention of the word Doodki was all the punishment we ever needed.

Mom would scowl at us and say through gritted teeth, “Do you want me to go get the Doodki?” We’d cower and whimper and run off to our rooms until the danger passed. The question was funny though. “Do you want me to go get the Doodki?!” What did she think we’d say, “Why yes, Mother. Please go get the Doodki … and then go bananas on our behinds, would you?”

I was talking with co-workers recently—really great-natured co-workers—who changed my entire paradigm about this medieval spanking device. We were eating sushi, and laughing so hard at stories about our childhood, our stomachs hurt (not from the sushi, from the laughing). When I mentioned the Doodki, one of the sly ones said, “Wait a minute … that probably wasn’t for you guys at all. Your parents probably just told you it was for spankings after you found it.”

The other clever co-worker asked if the Doodki happened to come with spandex or a mouth gag.

I can’t go there! That is worse than the actual Doodki!

It was for spankings all right. Our spankings. And it was a Doodki made by my grandpa to discipline his grandchildren during the “Spare the rod and spoil the child” era of the 1970s.

Talking about the Doodki as an adult, with other adults, got me wondering. So after lunch, I rushed back to my computer to Google the words: Doodki/Dhudki/Duedki. But nothing came up. Next, I tried to help the Google by adding the word “Spankings,” to my search, and the Google rewarded me by sending me email messages from folks like Bambi and Candy who, “Like it rough.”

EW. There wasn't anything we ever liked about the Doodki. While we were growing up, the Doodki would occasionally make its way out of the cabinet. Mom or dad would snap it in the air, making the leather straps whoosh past us like a bull whip. My sister admitted recently that she would piddle her pants a little at the mere mention of the word. Doodki.

I once got a spanking for eating cinnamon bread. Living in the woods, we didn’t have many neighbors, so when Lynn Trout asked me to play after school, I begged my mom until she caved.

Lynn Trout was one of those kids who always had a ring of dirt around her neck. She was the only girl in a pack of brothers. Rough brothers. Wild-eyed brothers who were always causing trouble around town … breaking into gas stations … throwing beer cans on the sides of the roads … knocking over mail boxes with baseball bats. We never knew for certain who’d done any of it. But my dad was as sure as he needed to be. “It was those Trout boys,” he’d say, narrowing his eyes.

My play date with Lynn Trout began with a warning from my mom. “Make sure you don’t eat anything over there,” she told me sternly. I nodded, but asked why. “You’ll spoil your dinner,” she added.

“Okay. I promise I won’t eat anything,” I said, taking off on my bike.

But I wasn’t prepared for what I'd find inside the Trout’s home. The second I walked in the door, I was overcome by the glorious smell of fresh baked bread. I’d never smelled anything like that in anyone’s home before, and it was as close to heaven as any Wonderbread-eating-girl could imagine.

Mrs. Trout even wore a gingham apron. I’d never seen a mom who wasn’t on TV wear one of those. She carried the steaming loaf over to the counter where its scent continued to tantalize my nose. “Would you like a piece of fresh baked bread?” she asked, cutting it out of the pan to cool. “No thank you,” I replied.

“Really?” she asked. “I’m fixing Lynn a piece right now.”

My head said no, but my mouth was drooling.

“I’m putting butter and cinnamon on hers. Have you ever had fresh baked bread with butter and cinnamon on it?” she asked?

Tears of restraint streamed out of my eyes. “My mom told me not to eat anything,” I said.

“That’s silly,” replied the ever-so-reasonable Mrs. Trout. “Why would she say that?”

“Because I’ll spoil my dinner?” But my voice had cracked. Mrs. Trout sensed my weakness as she delivered Lynn’s warm bread on a clear, crystal plate. “Are you sure?” she asked again. “One piece wouldn’t hurt!”

Well, she was right. One piece wouldn’t hurt. I was a good eater. I could have a taste of cinnamon bread and then certainly muster up the appetite to wolf down enough dinner to convince my parents that I hadn’t eaten a snack. Plus, I would hurt Mrs. Trout’s feelings if I didn’t just have one taste of the fresh baked bread, and I really wouldn't want to do that.

I took a longing look at the gooey butter, cinnamon and sugar melting into the top of Lynn’s steaming bread and nodded okay.

I devoured that cinnamon bread in gulps and asked for seconds. And then thirds. I licked my fingers after each delirious bite. I’d never tasted anything so miraculous. I couldn’t believe life was this good. There was a real-live kitchen with a real-live mom who made real-live, homemade bread and then encouraged kids to eat it before dinner?

One of Lynn’s wild-eyed brothers walked in and gulped milk right out of the glass jug in the fridge. Mrs. Trout swiped at him with her dishrag. He scooted away from her in a playful way that told me he wasn’t really afraid of her.

Then, I thought about our kitchen, and the Doodki that would certainly be waiting for me there. My mom's words rattled around in my sugar-soaked brain. “Don’t eat anything, or you’ll spoil your dinner.” she had said. The last bite of cinnamon bread got caught in my dry, tight throat.

My ride home felt long and slow. I walked into the door of our house like I had lead in my shoes, only to find my dad waiting in the kitchen with accusing eyes. Mom stood over a boiling pot on the stove. “Did you eat anything at the Trout home?” he asked, his eyes on fire.

“No,” I said, my voice rising to falsetto.

My dad bent down. “Let me smell your breath.” He said, squeezing my cheeks, puffing out my mouth so he could take a sniff.

“You smell like cinnamon,” he said.

“No I don’t.”

“You’re lying. You ate cinnamon when you were there.”

“No I didn’t.”

“There’s nothing I hate worse than a liar,” he said, “And if I find out you’re lying to me, you’ll get a spanking.”

He walked over to the phone. “I’m going to call Mrs. Trout and ask.” He said, picking up the receiver. “And if she tells me you ate something-“

“-Okay. Okay. I ate cinnamon bread.” I said, beginning to sob.

“Why did you lie to me?” he asked.

“She made me do it,” I said, through choking hiccups. “I didn’t want to but she forced me to have some.” I knew this was a lie too, but I figured I could soften the blow by putting some of the blame on Mrs. Trout. She’s the one who lured me in with those wafting smells, after all.

Instead of the Doodki, I got a swift hand across the back of my bare leg from my dad. And when I walked over to get sympathy from my mom, she gave me her usual, “Don’t come crying to me.”

My parents told me later that the reason they didn’t want me to eat anything at the Trout’s house was because they thought the Trouts were weird. They didn’t trust the Trouts to the point where they even suspected they might lace the food with some kind of poison.

But at the age of seven, how was I supposed to understand the nuance of that? My mom said I wasn’t supposed to know … I was just supposed to listen to her. If it were a Hostess Twinkie, Ding-Dong or Ho Ho, I might have listened. Or even apples and cheese, I could have resisted. But to stand up to the siren call of fresh-baked cinnamon bread in a warm, safe kitchen--a kitchen without a Doodki? Impossible.

- Dedicated to Bob and Jenny.
- Sea lion photography by Anatoly Strakhov

GROWING UP MONKEY

Let me start by saying this: My parents were very young when they had me. And, although they didn’t always make the best choices, they did make the best choices they could with what they knew at the time. Let me also say that in 1965, parents didn’t have the information that is available to them today. There was no Internet. There were no online parenting groups or chat rooms. There was only an AM radio and a small, black and white television set. So, when my parents had the idea to go to Wild Kingdom, the exotic animal store in Berwyn Illinois, and purchase a spider monkey—nothing stopped them.

My parents had just gotten married. They were so broke, they only had one piece of furniture—a bright orange, hand-me-down couch. They couldn’t afford food, so they “shopped” in my grandmother’s kitchen … sneaking out cans of tuna and green beans with the stealth of bank robbers in broad daylight. Despite their tough economic times, they were still able to scrape together the one hundred dollars or so it took to buy the monkey. My mom was six months pregnant with me at the time.

“The monkey died a horrible death,” my mom admitted to me recently.

ME: (Jaw agape) “You and dad had another monkey before you had Oliver?” (Yes, I was raised with a monkey.)

MOM: “Oliver was our second monkey. Our first monkey died before you were born, and oh, was it awful!”

ME: (Eyes widening)

MOM: “It bled from its lungs, and I was the one who found it. I cried and cried, and told dad it was a bad omen that meant the baby would die too.”

ME: (The baby didn’t die, I’m happy to report) “But, how did the first monkey die?”

MOM: “It had tuberculosis. Dad had it too. He caught it from the monkey. So he needed to get these really painful shots that were hard on his liver.”

ME: “So … then you got a second monkey?” (Are you beginning to see my point about the choices?)

Oliver Pee was the size and look of a Rhesus Monkey, although mom tells me she was not a Rhesus Monkey, but instead a breed that looked like a Rhesus, although she doesn't remember exactly what type.

When I was four, we moved with Oliver Pee into a log cabin in the woods. Oliver Pee got her name because she peed everywhere. My parents put diapers on her to avoid accidents. They would carry her around the house or let Oliver ride on their shoulders. She would sit on my dad’s chest in the mornings and groom him as she would another monkey in her natural habitat. My mom would cut up fresh fruits and vegetables, and hand-feed Oliver bananas, carrots, apples and grapes. The monkey would sit on the counter, watching my mom cut up her food, and either use her tiny fingers to take the banana from my mom, or open her mouth wide, and squawk to be fed like a baby bird.

Don’t get me wrong, my mom and dad took care of me too. My mom would make me Mickey Mouse shaped pancakes, and my dad would read to me every night before bed. But I still found myself feeling crazy-jealous of their affections for this monkey.

Oliver seemed to have it out for me, too. If I got near my dad or mom during one of Oliver’s grooming or feeding frenzies, she’d open her mouth and yowl at me, or jump toward my face with her claws outstretched, undoubtedly aiming for my eyes.

When I would poke inside her cage to get her attention, she would pull my long braids so hard my head would smash against the bars. I’d scream for help, because what Oliver didn’t have in size, she made up for in strength—and she’d rip my hair so hard, my scalp would bleed.

When my mom heard my calls, instead of racing to my rescue, she would scold me from other room, “Were you teasing the monkey again, Lisa?”

Okay. I WAS teasing the monkey again. But this was bogus. Instead of sharing my home with a flesh-and-blood brother or sister, I had a demented, diaper-wearing beast with super-human strength reeking havoc on my life.

Oliver’s cage was in our basement. My art table was in our basement. Oliver’s cage was six feet high and spanned the length of the picture window that overlooked the lake in our backyard. My art table was relegated to the windowless back corner by the laundry room. I didn’t mind though, because my art table was everything to me. I owned every color of acrylic paint, exotic papers from Japan, inks and expensive brushes. My mom was an artist too, so she spared no expense for art supplies.

I spent hours of my youth down in that basement, quietly painting or drawing at my art table. If my mom was busy upstairs, she’d put Oliver in her cage and tell me to, “Watch her” while I worked.

Oliver would sulk in her cage and fling carrot discs or potato nubs at the back of my head. She’d make threatening noises … e-e-eee’s and o-o-ohhhh’s … with screaching and shrieking mixed in. She was always flashing her sharp teeth at me and shaking her fists in a fury. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one experiencing sibling rivalry.

One night when we were all in bed, and Oliver was allegedly downstairs in her cage “sleeping,” she had instead been busy with something else entirely.

My art table.

In the morning when I stumbled downstairs and discovered what had happened, horror spread throughout every cell of my being. There, in the basement … where my art table used to be, was D-i-s-a-s-t-e-r with a capital “D.”

Tubes of paint were flattened and crushed, after being squirted all over the walls. My papers and drawings were ripped, slashed and chewed to shreds. The inks were smashed on the floor, their glass containers shattered, their dark contents oozing across the tiles like wayward Rorschach tests.

Oliver stood on top of the metal art table she’d overturned, and was squealing triumphantly. Her fists were raised high in the air, Rocky-style. One hand held an empty tube of paint. Blue. My favorite color.

Months passed and I wasn’t exactly sure how I’d retaliate. All I knew was … I would retaliate. But living in the middle of the woods didn’t give me the luxury of many friends. So, as much as I hated Ms-Monkey-Face, she was a companion, my only companion , at the time. We’d run through the sprinkler together in the back yard … climb trees together ... play dolls together. Even settle in front of the black and white television and watch cartoons together. From outward appearances, one might think we got along fine … just a girl and her monkey … not a care in the world. But the memory of what she’d done to my art table was haunting. And even though we fixed up the table, replaced the paint, put cinder blocks and master locks on her cage so she couldn’t escape any more, a deep discontent for all-things-monkey still simmered inside me.

One day after school I was eating a pear in the kitchen. It was a perfect pear, tart and sweet. Firm, not mealy.

“Give Oliver a bite of your pear, Lisa.” My mom directed. Oliver was sitting next to my mom on the counter, “Looking so cute,” and watching me eat. Her little hand was outstretched in anticipation of what I might share, and she held her mouth wide open, waiting for her treat.

“No,” I said, making even more smacking sounds than I had before, mostly to show her how delicious the pear was--the pear she wasn't going to taste.

Oliver raised her eyebrows at my mom and looked painfully wounded.

My mom cooed at her in a soft, baby voice. “Oh … your mean sister isn’t sharing with you, is she?”

Oliver nodded as if she understood all this, and jumped into my mom’s arms for comfort. There, the monkey whimpered while my mom stroked her gently on the head and told her, “We’ll just have a bite of the pear when she’s done then.”

What started as a happy-after-school-snack in my kitchen quickly became a spiteful-snack-of-revenge.

I ate that pear like it was my last meal, sucking down every morsel of pulp and juice. I would leave nothing. Not the core. Not the seeds. Not the stem. That pear was MINE.

As the pear disappeared, the monkey’s eyes widened in horror. My mom tsk-tsked me and told me I was a selfish.

This only made me eat more gleefully. And, after choking down the woody core, I smiled, belched and rubbed my belly. “That was delicious,” I said, before my mom sent me upstairs to my room to, "Think about what I’d done."

I knew what I’d done. I’d been selfish and gluttonous. Stubborn and defiant. Mean and unyielding—and I was glad for it.

The next day when I came home from school, I found my mom standing at the sink, crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, frightened. I’d never really seen either of my parents cry before and I knew something must be very wrong for this to be happening. “Where’s Oliver?” I asked, suddenly noticing the lack of my mom’s menacing, little shadow.

“In her cage,” she answered, sobbing louder.

I walked over to Oliver’s portable cage—the one my mom used to take her outside so she could get fresh air and sunshine.

“Why isn’t she moving?” I asked, staring at the stiff monkey body lying at the bottom of the cage. “Is Oliver sleeping?”

“She’s dead!” wailed my mom in a cry so mournful she sounded like she was being tortured.

Dead fluttered the sails of my small mind. “What’s dead?”

“Dead is … dead is …” Each time my mom tried to explain, she broke down even more. There were no words she could gather at the apex of her grief to make my five-year-old-brain understand the concept of death.

I poked my finger inside Oliver's cage. "Wake up,” I said. “I'll give you a pear.” If only I could make that monkey move, my mom would stop crying. "Wake up," I said, rattling her cage, hoping to stir her out of her sleep.

“She’s gone,” my mom said, blowing her nose into a tissue.

“As in not coming back?”

My mom nodded and sunk to the floor.

The news of gone shifted my sails. Dead means gone, I finally put together, and I hugged my mom, wishing I were a better kid.

I think about that day a lot. I wonder if I had trouble concealing the utter joy I felt booming inside my chest at the news of our dead monkey.

I often worried that Oliver died because I hadn’t shared my pear. Although, my mom told me later that she’d been stung by a bee in our yard. I guess she didn't have the immunities she needed to fight off that sting.

Today, I realize how painful it must have been for my parents to lose Oliver Pee. I’ve since lost my own share of people I’ve loved, and animals I've loved more than people. But to lose an animal so eerily similar to a human baby, must have been devastating. Especially since now I know my mom struggled to have children for years. Especially since now I know how deeply a creature--regardless of its moments of undesirable behavior--can burrow inside your heart and make it feel like home.

CALM

So, I started seeing a chiropractor/acupuncturist after a mean fiddle accident. I know. Sounds weird. But I was playing fiddle one Saturday without a care in the world, and suddenly something snapped from my neck down my shoulder, and cascaded with blinding pain into my arm and across back. After MRIs and CAT scans, I learned I have degenerative disc disease, which, at 40+ is a sad thing to deal with—however, on the sadness scale—there are certainly much more tragic maladies, so I still consider myself lucky.

Dr. C practices in Wilmette, a rarified town that feels like stepping back in time and space. The town still has a family-owned jewelry store—the old fashioned kind that once appeared in many towns across America, until monstrous bargain stores and online shopping venues rendered them useless. The chiropractic storefront is next to a Belgium chocolate shop. When I walk to my appointment, the clouds seem to part, and the birds seem to sing louder and more melodiously.

I’m the picture of calm, wearing sweat pants and flip flops on my day off work venturing outside of the gritty, hard-edged city. That is, until, Dr. C gets out the needles.

The first needle he pierces into my right shoulder sends shooting pains down into my legs in a way I didn’t know was possible. I avoid screaming so Dr. C doesn’t think me a wimp, but I do eek out “Ouch,” in a timid voice that leads him to say, “It may hurt, but it doesn’t mean it’s hurting you. It’s good for you,” he adds. I ponder this for a moment until my right leg stops twitching. “But I feel it down into my feet,” I protest, wondering if this is “normal” for anyone else who’s ever had acupuncture.

“That’s just your Chi,” he says, calmly.

I know Chi is the Chinese word for vital life force, but as he inserts the rest of the needles and then connects them to something electric called, “Stim,” I begin to panic. The electric stimulation makes my calves contract. My legs twitch up into the air and I yell out, “Make it stop!”

“It’s only set on three,” he says, smoothly.

“I don’t care,” I tell him. “I hate it.”

“It goes up to 60,” he says, smugly. He’s not mean about this, exactly. Just calm and amused. Like he’s conducting an experiment and getting a kick out of the fact that his subject (me) is responding—violently—to the placebo effect.

Once the needles are removed and the panic dies down, he massages my shoulders in a way that makes me drool. I drift into a dreamy sleep that feels deeper and more relaxed than I ever feel in my own bed—and this 25 minutes of bliss is what makes me return. Again. And again. And again.

On the third visit, I have learned to withstand the initial impact of the needles. The only one that really hurts is the needle he stabs between my thumb and pointer finger. Dr. C calls this, "A powerful meridian point." He says it hurts worse than the other points because I’m most blocked here. We’ve mutually agreed to not use any more electrical stimulation, and I feel glad for this. If not slightly defeated, like, “If I were tougher and stronger, I could have handled the stim … but because I’m as Jello-y as a Sea Cucumber, stim is too much for me.

It’s okay with me though. At the end of needle time, I still get my 25 minute massage, and I’ve discovered that the Belgium Chocolate store has the best Champaign Truffles I’ve ever tasted—which has become my weekly post-puncture treat. Life is balance, I rationalize. And perhaps my Chi is hungry.

One day, Dr. C. proposes I start a magnesium supplement called CALM. He says it helps your muscles relax. He tells me to mix it with hot water and take it before bedtime. He’d like me to start with a ½ teaspoon and work my way up to 2 teaspoons a day.


I try the supplement and like it. I notice that I DO sleep calmer and feel more relaxed. My muscles don’t tense up so much in the middle of the night and I wake up feeling more refreshed. This goes smoothly until I up my dose to one teaspoon.

You know that feeling when you’re in public and you’re suddenly stricken with the immediate urge to defecate, yet there are no bathrooms in sight? Well, apparently, CALM relaxes the sphincter muscles in a way that Dr. C neglected to mention, and I find myself in the Jewel grocery store bathroom stall, after making it there by the skin of my white pants … hunched over and letting loose … praying to any god that will listen.

Outside the door, a hobbit of a woman peers into my stall through a wide gap on the hinge side. “I need the toilet,” she insists.

“Use the one next to me,” I say, glaring at her with all my might in hopes she’ll look away.

“I tried that one. It’s too tall for me,” she complains, without averting her eyes.

CALM? I think. There is nothing calm about this … having a stranger stare you down while you are taking a frantic crap … all while remembering how Dr. C waxed on about how this supplement was so phenomenal, he recommended it to Iraq soldiers.

I imagine a slew of soiled camouflage pants and cringe. If this is calm, I’ll keep my chaos, thank you very much. At least I know my pants will be clean and I can trust my Chi to lead to the best chocolates and jewelry around.

A REAL GIRL

When D was six years old, we took her to see Disney’s Pocahontas. As we filed out of the cavernous theater and into the crowded lobby, we noticed that D was crying. John and I were holding her hands—one on each side—in an effort to cushion her against the tide of people swarming in to see the next round of shows. D’s lip quivered and tears poured down her cheeks as we gently pulled her to the side, knelt down beside her and asked what was wrong.

“I’ll never be as pretty as Pocahontas,” she said.

What? My mouth dropped.

“Pocahontas is so beautiful,” she continued. “I’ll never look like her.”

Her proportions are not anatomically correct! She is hyper-sexualized for marketing purposes, I wanted to scream. But D is only a small girl. She wouldn’t understand that.

“She’s a cartoon,” I told her. “She’s not real.”

D continued to sob.

“You’re real. And you’re beautiful,” I insisted.

But it was too late. D had already set her beauty bar impossibly high. She would aim for a look that only a cartoon character could achieve … a look that would require surgical alteration or the absence of a rib cage for a normal, human girl.

As I picked up D, held her in my arms and told her how much we loved HER … how she would always be more beautiful to us than anyone else in the world …the primal animal that paces inside my heart was howling, “WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OUR GIRLS?” And, more importantly, albeit in a whisper because the animal is exhausted and panting from her own fight against this machine, “How do we stop it?”

As I sit inside Victoria’s Secret with D while she picks out bras—in the same mall where we’d seen Pocahontas years earlier—I feel like I’ve entered a foreign land. This is a world I’ve avoided my entire adult life. Pounding dance music pulses in my ears. Candy-colored bras line the walls … floor-to-ceiling billboards of half-dressed women gaze down at me sexily. The thing I find most shocking is not how much skin they are exposing, but instead how confidently they are raising their arms and revealing their arm pits.

This part under my arms is my greatest shame. Instead of hollows that cave in like a normal woman, I have arm mounds that poof out in a monstrous way … a John Merrick, I-am-not-an-animal way.

I’ve been told, by the first doctor who examined me … after he gasped and then laughed … and then brought in his colleagues to observe … that I have two extra breasts, one under each arm pit … “You’re lucky you don’t have nipples, too.” He told me.

“Nipples?!”

“Yes, nipples,” the breast expert at Northwestern Memorial Hospital continued. Some women even have rows of breasts, with nipples, up and down their chests like animals. I think about the nursing kittens, pigs and puppies I've seen in my life and cringe. No, I don’t want that. Who would? “But what can I do about this?” I asked, trying to restrain the panic in my voice.

“Well, I could remove them,” he said, but chances are I’d upset nerves and surrounding tissue in the process. If so, you’d have numbness and tingling down your arms and into your fingers. Troubles with swelling could occur, too. This could last for years. I consider my options. Surgical alteration. Maybe they can take out a few ribs while they’re at it.

I think about the first time a co-worker had seen one of my arm mountains. It happened by accident. I’d been wearing a shirt with short sleeves. I’ve always been hyper-conscious about this … never wearing sleeveless or strapless anything. … always making sure the material on my shirt hangs down low enough to cover the whole top of my arm. I always keep my arms down, too. I don’t ever point at something overhead. But on this sunny day, I’d lost myself. We were standing outside on break when a small plane flew overhead. Behind it was a banner … “Becky, will you marry me?” I’d pointed up in the sky to show my friend. But instead of looking up, he looked down into my sleeve. He was starring at my arm mound inside my shirt sleeve. I heard him gasp, and then watched him point at it. “What is that?” he asked, before I could lower my arm. He acted like the very words of the question repulsed his tongue.

I explained about the breasts under my arms and watched him cringe. “Ick,” he said. Yes, “Ick,” I agreed. Ick indeed.

The sales woman at Victoria’s Secret makes me move. I’m blocking the drawers of bras she’d like to show a customer. I notice this customer is twice my size, and she’s patiently listening to the sales woman about cup size verses inches. “And here are our matching thongs,” says the sales woman, opening a drawer to reveal rows of strappy ridiculousness. The customer smiles. I shake my head to shut off my brain, because I’ve simultaneously pictured the customer in a thong, the sales woman in a thong and me in a thong. Gross! Gross! Gross! The self-loathing-warning alarm sounds in my head. But why doesn’t the customer see it this way? Why is she seriously considering the thong and holding up the thready nonsense like it is a pot of gold?

D comes out of the fitting room with two bras she loves. An electric pink lacy number with underwire and soft padding, and an animal print with black, satin accents. Both are beautiful. I hold them up to D’s skin and can tell they will each look lovely on her.

D has grown up to have proportions even Pocahontas might kill for. She is curvy and narrow in all the right places. Her arms and legs are solid and shapely from obsessive work outs. There isn’t one odd, out of place, awkward or ugly body part on her. Unfortunately, D doesn’t see it this way.

She looks at herself in the mirror with the same über-judgemental eyes that I’ve used all my life. The same eyes that caused me to grab my stomach and call myself fat as a size 4. The same eyes that many of us girls use that never allow us to see a skinny girl, a pretty girl no matter what is standing before us in the mirror. These eyes focus on the flaws: the pimples, the wrinkles, the flabby overhangs, the hips, the butts and the arm pits to show us what we aren’t.

For some reason, I think of Pinocchio, the Disney movie I saw as a kid. “I want to be a real boy,” says the wooden puppet to Gepetto. I think about his desire, and realize my own desire to feel like, “A real girl.” I think about how I don’t wear bras, but instead wrap myself up in tight sports tanks, like girls in movies who try to pose as boys. I think about D who complains about her thighs; my mom who comments every time she eats something sweet that it is going to her hips; a friend who claims she has, “Man hands,” and another friend who won’t wear open-toed shoes because she has convinced herself that she has ugly feet. I think about the Victoria's Secret model looming over my head, mocking me with her impossible, air-brushed perfection. Inside, she might be feeling like a monster … but outside, she’s showing the entire world what it’s like to be a “real girl.”

EVERYTHING AND NOTHING

D came home from college steeped in atheism. Although this didn’t entirely surprise me, her conviction, and the way she seemed to hold fast to her dis-belief, rattled me to my core. When we’ve talked to D about religion in the past … when we’ve tried to delve into what she thinks or believes, she has admitted that she is likely agnostic (not quite sure what she believes) rather than atheist (a total conviction that there is no God).

Atheism fills me with a sadness I can’t quite explain. John tells me, “Don’t worry about it. I was an atheist in college, too. Most everyone I know was. When you start studying other religions and philosophy and psychology, you can’t help but be an atheist.”

“I wasn’t,” I balk. And I think back to my cloistered college days when I actually DID believe … back to when I went to church every Sunday without question. We had this campus priest we called Father B. He was of the Jesuit faith and therefore (or perhaps, in spite of) a jovial man who warmly welcomed students of any religion. Father B preached acceptance. He talked about how hard it was to be a college student and how he knew about the many challenges we faced. He didn’t mention hell or damnation. He was a loving guide, a confidant. He was one of us.

I was raised Catholic. And Catholicism, outside of my blissful college years, has mostly terrified me. As a kid in Catholic classes (CCD), there was a mean girl named Cathy Sullivan who threatened to beat me up every time she saw me. My mom would drop me off in front of the church hall and I’d stand there in the dark with a God-sized pit in my stomach, willing my feet to move me inside. Cathy Sullivan seemed larger than God. She was perpetually surrounded by a gang of other bullies who lived in Winfield and hated girls from West Chicago. Since I was the only girl there from West Chicago, I was a wimp, a nerd, a geek, a creep and their sole target. My anxiety about CCD grew so great that my mom finally agreed to allow me to finish my classes privately with a priest.

This brought on a whole other set of horrors. No, he didn’t molest me. He was simply a menacing presence I dreaded with the force of a thousand suns. Father Menace would sit behind his huge mahogany desk staring at me through thick glasses that made his eyes look like globes. His sparse hair was combed over his enormous head and plastered down with some sort of greasy gel. The office smelled of mildewed books, and we were surrounded by sculptures of Jesus dying on the cross: Blood seeping down Jesus’ agonized face. Nails plunged through his feet and hands. This was back in the time of “mortal sin” … a sin that could never be forgiven. These were sins of rape and murder. Sins that would warrant an eternity filled with hell-flames, gnashing of teeth and torture by demons.

When I did my first guided meditation with a healer named Susan, I saw an entity inside me named Henry. When I met him, I began to weep, uncontrollably, because I realized that Henry was the part of me who’d carried all my guilt and shame. He was heavy, soggy and swollen like a drowned body found at the bottom of a river. As Susan and I worked to release the shame and guilt that filled Henry like sludge, I realized that these two emotions are the densest, darkest things you can carry. Together, Susan and I pulled Henry from the trenches. We thanked him for the duty he served and told him he could now be released. He’d done his job, and a good one at that. We opened him up and spilled out all the dark energy into the earth. Susan told me that the earth could handle this for us. She would help hold the weight of all our pain and suffering. Earth would purify and transmute the energy with the help of whomever we called upon—angels, spirit guides, God, mother God and more. As we emptied Henry of his bulky remorse, we started to fill him with light. And, I immediately felt the light and love enter my being, too. It felt like a miracle to release this burden I didn’t even know I had. It felt like the confession Catholics are always talking about … only, I didn’t need a priest to forgive me of my sins. Instead, I was forgiving myself.

When I began to study other religions in college, instead of believing in nothing, I began to believe in EVERYTHING. I learned about Taoism, and believed … Buddhism, and believed. I traveled to China and couldn’t believe that Christianity could be the only valid choice. There were millions upon millions of people in Asia who had never heard of Christianity, let alone would believe in it. Would a Christian/Catholic God really leave these people behind? Ban them for their lack of belief just because they hadn’t been exposed to Christianity?

I briefly had a rabidly Christian friend who argued with me about this. He staunchly believed that all those people were going to hell unless they converted. He reminded me of the short time in high school when I belonged to a Christian group called SALT Company. This group was lead by students at Wheaton College—a place known for its rigid, born-again mentality. The college leaders taught us that it was our duty to convert everyone we met. They were on an actual crusade for conversion—and they acted like it was life or death if we didn’t, “Share our faith with every soul who crossed our path.” They claimed that knowing about Christianity and not sharing it was one of the biggest sins around. This proselytizing approach made me feel anxious. Jittery. Each week, they would call to check in … to see “How many souls I’d converted … how many lives I’d saved.” I avoided their calls like the plague and soon dropped out of the group, trying to ignore their threats that this choice would somehow mar my soul forever.

As I wrote my first children’s book about fairies, and experienced the miracle of how this book seemed to come through me, and not from me … how, during this time, I started to write music to accompany the book, even though I didn’t know how to read notes. I truly felt like I was channeling some powerful force outside of myself in order to capture the essence of the story and make it come to life. During this time, I started to believe in fairies, too. Why couldn’t they exist? Why wouldn’t they be like smaller versions of angels? I started reading books outside the boundaries of religion. Instead, they were books of spirit. They spoke of love and past lives. God and angels. Miracles and karma. I read Doreen Virtue, a PhD who considers herself an expert on angels and fairies. I read Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s books on death and dying, and learned you can ask to meet your spirit guide. I did. I read books that were told through channeling … where humans acted as portals for divine masters to come through. Why couldn’t I believe this? I had “channeled” a book myself.

One of my dearest (and aptly-named friends) Grace believes we must move away from our dualistic structures of judging things as, “right and wrong/bad and good.” She feels we are all ONE, and this includes being one with the earth. It is more important than ever to pray for the earth … to thank her for all she’s done … to pray for people in power to make the highest possible choices … to pray for us all to move away from darkness and to accept and hold within us more light. I believe this more than I ever believed the Catholics I heard sitting around the dinner table, surrounded by Madonna heads, preaching about how they hated gays and blacks. Hearing that as a child made me feel heavy and sick-hearted. It was the absence of love and light. It was the farthest away from ONE that you could be.

U2 frontman Bono describes ONE as,
One love
One blood
One life
You got to do what you should
One life
With each other
Sisters
Brothers
One life
But we're not the same
We get to
Carry each other
Carry each other

Attending a U2 concert is a spiritual awakening unlike any I’ve ever experienced in a church or temple. Therefore, along with fairies and spirit guides, I also believe in the spirit of music … and any other spirit-filled creative act along the way.

And in my journey to believe in everything, I’ve somehow lost D to nothing. I wonder how I could have failed her this much.

John asks me what I’m worried about, and I say, “Well, I think it’s just that her heart won’t be open to light.”

He says, “But she has a good heart. She loves animals and us. She is considerate and thoughtful. She may not know what to call it, but isn’t that enough?”

I think about how my desire to make D see things my way … to get her to “believe” in something, anything … is just as irrational as my own parents believing that my soul will be condemned because I’m not a practicing Catholic. It’s also as crazy as the SALT Company fanatics who tried to “convert” everyone, or the Catholics who claimed piety yet espoused hatred.

I may not know exactly who or what God is … I may believe in too many things instead of holding fast to one, solid belief … but when it comes down to it, I know this …

There’s so much beauty in a peony flower, that its head can hardly hold it.

When a starch-shirted Jehovah’s Witness shows up at my front door, I cringe and hide.

My blind, deaf dog Abbie opens my heart in a million different ways.

When oil spills into the Gulf, I grieve for the way we have murdered our sea life.

When D laughs, my entire world fills with joy.

For me, God is in all of this. In the lovers and the haters … in Father B and the hypocrites. Even in Cathy Sullivan. Perhaps, especially in Cathy Sullivan.

Maybe when we open our hearts and look for God, He/She will be there waiting for us. Whether we call God Buddha or the Tao or Catholic or Jewish is beside the point. Perhaps we simply call God Love.

The Piñata Story

All right. In honor of Cinco de Mayo, I’ll tell the piñata story. I have to warn you. It isn’t pretty. There was bloodshed. There was lost hair. There were even tears. Some of them were mine.

It all started innocently enough. My white, sheltered, idealist self decided to celebrate Cinco de Mayo with the middle-grade students in my after-school theatre class by bringing a piñata.

It was a colorful animal of indeterminate origin. It looked like a donkey or maybe a giraffe, but it had a horn or two sticking up out of its head like a unicorn or a bull. Made out of paper mache and jewel-toned tissue paper, it had all the makings of festivity and celebration.

I’d taken the time to fill the beast with candies of all shapes and sizes. Not the cheap stuff you get at the dollar store either. No. I was going all out for Hershey’s kisses, mini Butter Finger bars and foil-wrapped Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. In case there were non-chocolate eaters (or nut allergy sufferers) in the crowd, I also bought a supply of Laffy Taffy, Sweet Tarts, Nerds and Smarties, so when the candy spilled out onto the church basement floor, and all the children were aflutter with delight, there would be a little something in there for everyone.

As further preparation, I took the time to research Cinco de Mayo. I made handouts with definitions, and included information about historical origins and cultural photographs I’d found online; so the children would have an educational opportunity in addition to sweet, sugary goodness. I’d lord the promise of the piñata over their heads, using it as shameless bribery. “If you sit still and pay attention, later we’ll do the piñata,” I told them.

As I blathered on about the celebration of Mexican heritage and pride, the other teacher hoisted the animal up over a rafter and secured it with rope.

Within minutes, the room started to unravel. My carefully designed handouts quickly became paper airplanes and then spit balls. To say that the kids were antsy and restless was an understatement. Hours had passed since school let out. They’d done their time of lectures and learning. They were ravenous. Tired. Edgy.

You may have already guessed the “bad-idea” portion of this story. Hm. Let’s see. Perhaps taking a room full of squirrelly middle-schoolers who live in an underprivileged neighborhood and telling them they can have candy … but first they have to listen to a boring lecture in a hot room about some culture they know nothing about … and then they are going to be given a blindfold and a baseball bat so they can take turns beating a colorful, paper animal until it bursts open and spills out delicious candy. This has BAD IDEA written all over it.

What you don’t know is, I was full of bad ideas for these kids. The trouble was, no matter how hard I tried, my limited, white-lady brain could never, ever-EVER anticipate the problems that would arise in my class.

For instance, one week I brought in costumes that consisted of various articles of vintage clothing—hats, coats, gloves, scarves, etc. There was a mink coat in the mix—something my mother-in-law had given me. It was white and size 4 or zero or something so ridiculous it would barely fit a Barbie doll. One of the smaller boys beelined for the coat. Before I knew it, he was sporting a fedora, and strutting arm-in-arm with one of the younger girls. When I asked him what he was pretending to be, he replied, “A pimp.”

There was also the time I brought in a Scrabble game so the kids could practice spelling. We were having a grand old time until a 9-year-old girl spelled out “Courvoisier.” Hey, that’s 28 points. Good job.

Later, during a Christmas celebration, this same girl had begged me for a baby doll. The teachers in the program had each selected one child for whom they would purchase a modest gift. I signed up for Little Miss Courvoisier, knowing I would splurge and buy the girl the baby doll she wanted. Miss Courvoisier had specified that she wanted a black baby with “real” hair, and she wanted one that pooped and peed. I scoured Target and Toys R Us until I found a suitable, real-enough-looking baby doll who was wearing a diaper. It would be easier to pretend about the poop and pee if the baby had a diaper, I’d reasoned.

As Ms. Courvoisier unwrapped her gift, I watched in anticipation. She would love it. She would hold it, feed it and hug it. She would change its diapers and carry it around in a blanket, and—

At the sight of the baby doll, Ms. Courvoisier squealed with delight. Apparently, it was exactly what she had wanted. I was thrilled as I watched the other girls crowd around her. MC ripped open the packaging and tore that baby out of its plastic wrap faster than I could blink. Before I knew it, MC had the baby’s diaper down, and she was beating it hard, saying, “I’m gonna give you a whopping.” The violence didn’t stop there. Each girl took a quick turn with the baby doll, beating and scolding it for imaginary crimes. I watched in awe, unable to process the Lord of the Flies scene that was unfolding before me. This was more than mere punishment, it was retribution. And there was going to be plenty of it.

As I coaxed the baby doll away from the girls, and held it gently in my arms, rocking it and talking softly to it, I mistakenly thought I could teach the girls by example. Here, I would teach them how to nurture, how to protect, how to be gentle. They only raised their clever eyebrows in unison. “Stupid white lady,” their faces said.

On some level, I knew the source of their pain. I knew the reality of their world. I’d seen it and heard about it and sometimes even witnessed it. But this was a world I could walk away from at my whim. I could dip my toe into their reality if I felt like it, and then go home to my organic vegetables with a balsamic reduction sauce and my 800 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets.

What they were facing on a day-to-day basis … what they saw and what they experienced was unfathomable to me. I’d recently gone through a shock when I learned that one of the boys in my program—Michael, a quiet, creative 12-year-old—had been walking to school with his best friend Darone. When a gangster car drove by and shot Darone, Michael ran to get help. He knocked on neighbors’ doors but nobody answered, or, when they did, they saw he was only a young kid so they didn’t pay any attention. Defeated, Michael returned to Darone, who was bleeding out onto the side walk, and all he could do was kneel down and hold Darone in his arms while the boy slowly died.

Michael had come to class that week. He had stood in the back, hiding inside his hoodie, refusing to participate in the theatrical games I’d planned for the day. I remember being angry at him … I remember thinking he had a bad attitude … I remember having the nasty thought, “Why am I putting all this time and energy into planning lessons for the kids when they don’t even care or appreciate it?” This was all before I found out the truth of what he’d suffered. And when I did find out, I couldn’t believe he’d actually come to class. But what else was he going to do? See his non-existent grief counselor? Play outside? This was a safe place for him to land. It wasn’t his fault I was entirely ill-equipped to handle it.

So this is the magnitude of what these kids were dealing with. They weren’t sad because their parents wouldn’t buy them the latest Game Boy or PS3. No, they were dodging bullets on their way to school and watching their friends die in their arms.

And now, the piñata.

I gave up on my crummy hand-outs and silly beliefs that I could teach these kids anything about anything. I wanted them to have the candy. They deserved it.

Tyquanne took the bat. Mary, the other teacher fastened the red bandana around his face. “Can you see?” we asked him. “No,” he replied. “Good,” we said.

He walked up in front of the line and took a swing. Whiff. The bat passed through the air, missing the piñata entirely. After a few more swings, the kids behind him wanted in on the action. We let a girl named Diamond up to bat. She tried a few times, and nothing. Now the kids were chanting. They wanted candy, and they wanted it now. A boy named Anthony was up next. He was taller than the others, and looked stronger. I knew this boy would get the job done. He swung once and strike. The piñata suffered a brutal blow. The kids cheered. But the donkey-giraffe-bull-devil only swung in the air, wounded, refusing to give up its loot.

Anthony whipped off the blindfold and got down to business. Swing after angry swing, the piñata lost a head, then a foot, and then its body had a gash in it, yet still no candy had emerged. Anthony tossed aside the bat and rushed toward the wounded animal, tackling it, with all of the other kids piling on top of him. He tore it asunder with both hands, shredding the piñata into miniscule pieces.

“There’s no candy,” howled the kids. But there was. There had to be. I’d filled the stupid thing myself the night before.

Then it happened. Diamond had hold of a leg. She had it tucked under her arm like a football and was running across the church basement floor in a panic. One of the kids hollered, “The candy’s in the leg!” The crowd shifted gears and tore after Diamond like a herd of wild animals. They pounced on her, crushing her with their collective weight. There was hair-pulling, tearing of clothing, scratching, beating, and weeping. It was a feeding frenzy of epic proportion. Kids were clawing at each other to get to the sweets, gouging at each other’s eyes and biting bare skin to get one kid or another to surrender the candy.

Once all of the candy was shoved and jammed into various pockets, backpacks and book bags, only then did the dust settle so I could survey the aftermath.

Some girls were hunched on the floor, holding each other and sobbing. A few boys asked if they could go to the drinking fountain to wash off the blood that was trickling down their faces and necks. One girl was limping. Another’s shirt was torn open. Hiroshima had nothing on us.

This was the exact moment I decided I could no longer continue my program. This was the exact moment I realized that no matter how hard I tried or prepared or dreamed I would never, ever, ever know enough or be enough to offer anything of use to these children. I’d tried. I’d failed. End of story.

This isn’t about me though. It wasn’t about what I tried to do but couldn’t. I know enough to realize, I must have made some positive impact during the five years I’d run the program. I’d started it in October, 2001—just weeks after 9/11. This was a time when the whole world needed hope—not only these underserved kids. I’m sure there was a small ripple of good that happened somewhere along the line as a result of my theatre program … some whisper of positivity among the blood, chaos, candy wrappers and shredded piñata. Sometimes, this is all we can do. Sometimes, it's the best we can hope for.