Emptying Our S(h)elves

by ruthpennebaker on August 31, 2010 · 22 comments

I am hoping you had a great weekend, since we did not.

A “stager” visited us earlier in the week — a woman who’s very smart, no-nonsense.  She rummaged through our house and took copious notes on what we needed to do to spiff up the place before we put it on the market.

I could have sworn we were prepared for this, in our own hopelessly disorganized way.  Hadn’t we already painted, refinished the floors, cleaned out our side yard and planted buffalo grass, given away roomfuls to Goodwill, removed family photos from the walls?  Weren’t we already pared down?  Ha.

Our first monumental task was to get rid of many of our books.  Which is what my husband and I did this weekend — both in preparation to put our house on the market and to move into a smaller place.

Books.  We spent our weekend pulling down handfuls, armfuls of books.  It was like seeing a slide show of our interior lives over the past 40 years.  There were the zeitgeist books like My Mother, Myself, Open Marriage.  The feminist collection, including Backlash, Against Her Will.  My husband’s Japanese novel period, my own Russian literature tomes.  Books that haven’t aged well (Tom Robbins’ oeuvre), books that have gotten better with time (anything by Alice Munro).  The college books.  Books I happily discarded since I’d only pretended to like them (most of James Joyce’s novels, Tom Robbins again, Henry James).  My husband, who never liked Dickens or anything by the Bronte sisters, cheerfully pronounced their paperbacks to be too yellowed and dry to keep.

The books spilled onto the floors and every available horizontal surface.  They obscured the hardwood floors.

It was funny what we kept: books we’d loved and would never part with (Confederacy of Dunces, Hunter S. Thompson’s insane, but screamingly funny books, some of Larry McMurtry’s best, Bel Canto, Enemy Women, anything by Alice Munro); some great biographies on Lincoln and Truman; books friends had written; books we’d written ourselves; our own yearbooks, our kids’ yearbooks, my parents’ yearbooks; Texas-themed books.

After our weekly walk on Sunday, I insisted my friend Betsy come over to browse through what we were giving away.  She left with a good 30 or 40 books, being as big a sucker as I am for a good read.

Our son swooped in and deposited a couple of carfuls of books at Goodwill (about 1,500 or so, we estimated).  We’re looking now at more streamlined bookshelves and much we still have to address.

What we’re really addressing, though, whether we say it aloud or not, is that we are at a very different time in our lives.  Once, we were acquisitive and more profligate.  Now, we are training ourselves to lighten our belongings.

Look around at the emptier shelves and you’d swear it’s about books.  But we both know something deeper is happening.  We’re learning to let go.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Check out one of my favorite posts about seeing my good friend one last time

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Be Funny and Die

by ruthpennebaker on August 27, 2010 · 17 comments

About a year ago, I went to a funeral for a dear friend.  It evolved into one of those come-up-and-say-whatever-you-like events.  This can be good and bad — with some lovely, spontaneous stories, some funny remarks, and a few digressions that probably should have remained silent and theoretical.  But that’s what you get at one of those open-mike events.

One of the less-distinguished offerings came from a well-meaning guy who said when he thought of our departed friend, he always thought about “the C word.”  He went on rambling about her for several minutes, with the audience a bit restive and disturbed.  Why?  Because you don’t mention the C word in a eulogy for a woman, leaving the crowd to come up with the obvious, highly offensive choice that begins with that particular letter, for God’s sake.  The guy talked on and on, finally coming to his point that C, when it came to our friend, stood for caring.  Then he ambled away from the mike and the whole congregation came close to passing out after holding our collective breaths for a good 10 minutes.

All of which I mention because I’m terrible about digressing myself, but also because the new show on Showtime now named “The Big C” used to be titled “The C Word.”  Then somebody got smart, but unfortunately not smart enough, and changed the name.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it or heard about it, “The Big C” is about a woman who’s been diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma and given a year to live.  Laura Linney plays the main character — and, as usual, she’s wonderful.

During the first show, I felt intrigued by the premise of a comedy about a dread disease — which is a pretty gutsy, unusual call right off the bat.  Also, Linney’s character, Cathy, chooses not to undergo treatment, which is something else you don’t find discussed very often.  I found both these approaches to be fascinating and thought the show would be worth tuning into again.

Then, I read my friend Cancer Bitch’s blog.  CB is smart and funny and a native Texan, and we seem to agree on most things from a dislike of peppy self-affirmations and perkiness to an admiration of Nora Ephron’s early works.  However, CB took a much more hostile stand on “The Big C” than I did.  At the risk of putting it too gently, I might as well say she tore the show a new one: it was shallow and deeply offensive; it made cancer upper-middle class and pretty; it implicitly blamed the victim in its theme of Cathy’s former repression; it was ludicrous when it came to her chummy relationship with her doctor.

I think that was about it.  I felt disappointed after I read the blog, since I clearly hadn’t hated the show enough.  As the week wore on, though, it occurred to me I still gave “The Big C” credit for trying something so in-your-face different when it came to the holy scripture of the approved cancer narrative.

And, more than anything, I liked the Big C’s capture of the moments of crazy exhilaration some people experience when they’re diagnosed with the disease.  For some of us, there was at least a temporary sense of freedom from the ordinary cares and worries of our lives.  Life was urgent and vivid, and the only thing you needed to fear was the lurking danger in your own body; the rest of the formerly scary world looked benign, in contrast.  A great wind had swept through and scattered the insignificant pieces of life.

So, I watched The Big C again this week, trying to be open-minded.  After two shows, however, I have to say the series is beginning to piss me off.

You see Cathy’s craziness, her freedom from the constraints of her normal life.  But nothing else accompanies her wildness — no thoughtfulness or insights about life and death.  What bothers me even more, though, is that I found being diagnosed with a possibly fatal illness made me closer to my family and friends.  We had deep, intense, wide-ranging conversations.  We held nothing back.  We talked about how we loved each other and why.  It’s remarkable what you can say when the shackles of everyday life have gotten whacked off and you know your time may be limited.

But The Big C not only doesn’t do that — it does exactly the opposite.  By keeping her illness a secret, Cathy keeps her family and friends at an impossible and growing distance.  She’s free, all right, but she exercises her freedom to do the shallow, meaningless, vain and unimportant, all by herself.

Except for, of course, her doctor, who’s in on the secret.  And, with that relationship, I’m beginning to see Cancer Bitch’s point.  Cathy flashes her body at her doctor, asks him what he thinks and he says she has a great rack?  She sunbathes naked when she has melanoma, for Christ’s sake?  And, clothes on or off, she treats her bumbling husband like dirt and tracks her extremely obnoxious teenage son like a stalker.

Okay, so it’s only two shows out of 13.  There’s time to grow, time to deepen, time to do all kinds of worthy things.  But at the rate The Big C is going, I may start skipping the show and just tune into Cancer Bitch’s denunciations of it.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Please read one of my favorite earlier rants in which I go seriously ape-shit about Save the Tatas here
and here.

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Shut Up, She Explained

August 23, 2010

We are looking at prospective condo buildings. There’s one just south of the river and three closer in, all in downtown Austin. He and I each have our favorites. I am actively ashamed of mine. Too swanky, I’d opined in advance, too formal. Not for us, the casual semi-bohemians. We needed something a bit more avant-garde and off-center.

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Loosening the Surly Bonds

August 20, 2010

It was almost exactly a year ago that my husband and I landed in New York City. We lived there for ten months and had the time of our lives. Instead of being homesick, as I’d expected, I kept feeling that we’d run away from home and were having a great adventure. Hell, how often do you get to have a great adventure when you’re our age? Not often enough.

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Remember the House of Death?

August 17, 2010

This is a story about death. Then it gets worse.

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