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

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.

Here’s the setting: The temperature, even at dusk, is a zillion degrees.  My husband and I are driving around in his Prius.  Even though it hurts his mpg stats, he’s turned on the air-conditioner.

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.

So much for premonitions.  The minute I saw the swanky place, I fell in love.  The marble baths!  The enormous closets!  (At this point in my life, I’d sell the shabby remnants of my soul for a good walk-in closet.)  The roomy balcony, the granite kitchen!  It swept over me all of a sudden: I wanted to move in and be taken care of for the rest of my life.  Taken care of by a staff, the salesman had assured us, who was more like a family than employees.

Sure, the family was expensive, but don’t quibble.  I was in love.

But here we are, driving around, and I’m feeling dreamy, imagining my new, luxurious, probably unaffordable life.  Then my husband spoils the mood.

“I want to ask you about something,” he says.  “After we sell our house, why don’t we think about renting?”

Oh, my God.  Where am I?  Somebody has just set off a bomb in my head.

Okay, so we all have our foibles, our tender spots.  This “innocent” question, for me, is akin to being a patient in the dentist’s chair.  The fucker with a scalpel just touched an exposed root.  I’ll need to be peeled off the ceiling soon.

“What are you talking about — renting?” I snap.  “Why do you want to rent?  It’s not like we’re in our twenties.”

“I just want to find out,” he continues, “the core of your not wanting to rent.  You know, what lies beneath it.”

“There’s nothing beneath it.  It’s all core.  I refuse to rent.”

“But, why?”

“This is not about logic,” I say, quite calmly for somebody who is totally flipping out and may need medical attention very, very soon.  “This is all emotion.  I don’t want to live month-to-month, temporarily — ”

“We wouldn’t live month-to-month.  We could stay as long as we liked — ”

” — surrounded by transients.  Subject to eviction — ”

“What are you talking about?  Nobody’s going to evict us — ”

“Living in the constant shadow of eviction!  In my golden years!”

“I just wanted to explore this idea,” my husband says, with his irritatingly logical, hyper-male air.

“You’ve explored it.  I’m not renting.  I refuse.  I’m also not going to eat catfood when I’m old.”

My husband points out that we’ll probably be able to afford expensive catfood in our dotage, but believe me, I am now tuning him out.  I know I’m emotional, possibly illogical when it comes to renting and owning real estate; I know it probably stems from being reared by Depression-era parents whose greatest dream was to live in a dwelling that was paid for.

I know, too, that I’m chasing an illusion of permanence and stability on a crowded, overheated, polluted, weary planet where we will all die sooner or later.  In fact, I’m at an age when I’ve been stripped of so many illusions that it’s remarkable I can still sit up.

But guess what?  That just means I’m clinging all the more frantically to the few I still possess.  I’ll eat catfood before I rent.  That’s not an opinion; it’s a manifesto.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my very favorite posts on my shameless addiction to the real estate section

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.

Now, we’ve been back in Texas for a couple of months.  It’s home and I love it — even if the politics drives me crazy.  We’ve answered the questions over and over: Yes, we loved it, had a wonderful time.  Yes, we went to the theater all the time; want to see my stack of playbills?; no, I didn’t think so.  Yeah, we ate out two meals a day for ten months; good thing we don’t eat breakfast.

Do we miss it?  Speaking for myself, I have to say no.  But then, I think about how wonderful it was to be able to walk everywhere and take mass transit — and I really miss that.  I find I resent the time I have to spend driving here.  It’s such a waste of time and energy.  That’s one reason we’re going to be putting our house on the market and moving to a downtown condo.  We like to walk.

But there’s something deeper here, more than where we live and how we get around.  It’s taken me awhile to understand it, but I think I get it now.  What made our sojourn in New York so wonderful was that it was always temporary.  We arrived there with a few suitcases; we rented an apartment.  We had no past there — and our present was limited.  We were always passing through.  We had a few close friends there, but mostly, it was the two of us.

For ten months, we were able to do what I try — and fail to do — when I go to yoga and as I live my life.  Since we were more or less cut off from our old lives and lasting connections, we lived  in the present.  A time like this is what I think makes travel so valuable, too: You’re somewhere else, it’s temporary, you’d better pay attention.  Everything else falls away.  You stop focusing on next week, next month, next year.

Sometimes, when we’ve traveled, I’ve thought it doesn’t necessarily matter where we go.  Paris is always wonderful, sure — but so was our crazy driving trip through the desolate stretches of West Texas a couple of summers ago, when we stumbled across the Prada art installation in the middle of nowhere.

Back home, we have a wonderful house that needs care, plans that have to be made, responsibilities, friends who are sick.  These things are what tie us here and enrich our lives and I can’t imagine living without them.  But it was wonderful, too, to slip away and live moment-to-moment.  You can do that and love it all the more since you always know you’re coming back.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite early posts from New York on the lessons of the streets

It’s funny.  Sometimes, I wish I had talents that would open me up to other, more valued and lucrative professions; applicable to being a brain surgeon, for instance, instead of a writer.  But, after my father died in May and I spent several days on the computer writing about the experience, I felt fortunate to do what I do.

Here, in another venue, is the continuing story of the House of Death.

Watch a game, follow a news story, election or political crisis, and you see the same nuttiness play out:  Identical facts are twisted and interpreted to bolster the latest story line.

So, for example, we have Barack Obama.  He’s the guy who’s so cool and measured and low-key that this country elected him president in 2008.  Coolness and reason under pressure — that’s what we wanted!  Enough of the hotheads and follow-your-gut, kneejerk reactors!

Oh, and remember Argentina in the World Cup?  They were so great and loose, improvising and having a great time while they creamed all those boring, disciplined teams and showed them the reckless joy of futbol.  Who wants to be a loser who doesn’t even know how to have fun?  We all love that wild man, Diego Maradona!

Oh, but wait!  Oil gets spilled in the Gulf of Mexico, and Obama’s a big disappointment since he’s not frothing at the mouth with emotion and indignation.  He’s too … cool.  Cool, it turns out, is not good.  In fact, it’s bad.  Obama may be too cool to be a good leader.  Rewrite!

And Argentina?  Well, speaking of boring, disciplined teams, the Germans waxed them 4-0, and all of a sudden, the police have to cordon off the Buenos Aires airport so the Argentines can get back safely and slink into town.  What was that loose, undisciplined team and that borderline moron coach Maradona thinking, showing up at the World Cup so unprepared?  They had no defense.

More recently, we have the noteworthy example of the runaway JetBlue flight attendant, Steven Slater.  A hero, a renegade who wouldn’t take it from The Man or The Passenger!  We loved him, we wanted to be like him, he spoke for us.

I, of course, jumped on that particular bandwagon, since who can resist a story that good?   Why hadn’t I taken that emergency chute when I was working for that hairy little tyrant in Florida?  Why wasn’t I capable of the grand gesture, the memorable exit?

Well, hold on, cowboys and cowgirls!  Calm down those horses.  Slater, it seems, might not have been who we needed him to be.  In fact, a slew of other passengers report that he turned up drunk and surly from the beginning of the flight.  He already had that cut on his head.  He was rude and insulting to everybody.  Disband that fan club!

In fact, the more I gaze at Slater’s photo (the carefree grin has now become the insolent sneer), I realize he looks familiar.  Hasn’t he been on one of my flights before?  (Never mind that I’ve never taken JetBlue; technicalities like that just ruin a good story.)  Yes, definitely, maybe!  He might have been that little snot in first-class during my debacle of an outing to Chile a few years ago.

“People in coach are trying to crowd into first-class space,” he hissed, eyeing me while I did a yoga stretch in the aisle.  Then, he closed the curtains in my face just when I was locating my third eye or something, glaring at me like I was Madame Defarge storming the gates.

Yes, now I remember him!  Somebody should have pushed him off the plane without the emergency chute and dumped those beers on his head.  I hope JetBlue fires him and all his Facebook fans desert him — unless, of course, that explanation is wrong, too.

What a conundrum, these facts, pronouncements and narratives.  You have to be flexible if you’re going to put together a coherent narrative.  In the meantime, is it too much to ask that our heroes have a simple story we can enjoy and worship accordingly?

Please, no subtexts, no codas, no misinterpretations — just a nice, clean story that gives us someone to look up to.  Like Sully, the heroic pilot of last year.  He didn’t have to walk on water; all he had to do was land a plane on it.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about parents desperately seeking babysitters

Ever since that Jet Blue flight attendant screamed at a passenger, grabbed a beer and flew out the emergency chute, I’ve been in a state of decline.  I realize that — even though I’ve held a variety of jobs, ranging from the tedious to the exciting, from the enjoyable to the deeply miserable — I have never once quit a job in a dramatic or memorable way.  No, not me.  Over and over, I’ve calmly given two weeks’ notice, smiled cheerfully, exited quietly.

Good grief.  Am I completely lacking in flair?

Once — just once — I contemplated a dramatic exit.  I was working as a legal secretary in St. Petersburg, Florida, for a small law firm.  The managing partner was short, combative, aggressive, over-weeningly self-assured.  A trial lawyer, in other words; a sexist little prick.  Let’s call him Mr. Earle, since that was his name.  Mr. Earle had one trait in common with bad bosses everywhere: When he was frustrated (which was often), he always found someone to blame.

So, there I was, with my recent college degree in comparative literature, bored out of my mind, a little slipshod, borderline resentful, working at a job I could do so quickly I ended up devoting my spare time to reading the great Russian novelists.  I never said I was perfect, but I was usually awake when I wasn’t engrossed in The Brothers Karamazov. And I usually showed up.

I worked directly for another lawyer in the firm, Mr. Rose.  Mr. Rose was charming and disorganized, the kind of guy who left a wake of flying debris behind him.  In choosing a secretary, he would have done well to select someone who made up for his imperfections — a disciplined, Teutonic, highly organized type who lived to file, follow directions and create order out of chaos.  Not me, a 23-year-old, creator of her own chaos, her mind on anything but a bunch of middle-aged bozos with J.D.’s on their walls and preening self-importance.

One day, Mr. Rose had left town, throwing some case or another in Mr. Earle’s direction.  Mr. Earle barreled out of his office, red-faced and screaming.  A highly important letter was missing from the file!  Where was it?  He had to have it immediately!

I laid my novel down, careful to mark the page.  (Oblomov!  What a great book!)   Then I followed the screeching little pygmy into Mr. Rose’s office, where he flew through stacks of papers and piles of books, gyrating from one side of the room to the other, growing more and more incoherent and furious.  Where was that letter?

Hell if I knew.  But I looked around, too, vaguely scratching here and there, trying to look concerned, shaking my head, getting screamed at for being responsible for the whole damned mess.  I had no idea why I’d gone to college in the first place, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t to get yelled at by some out-of-control hothead who was barely five feet tall.  Also, I had very little experience being screamed at; in my family, we sulked, we moped, we implied, we buried insults like land mines, but we did not yell.

Standing there, towering over Mr. Earle, I had suddenly had enough.  One more insult in my direction and I was going to drop the pile of papers in my hands and walk out of the office and quit.  I had made up my mind and I could hardly wait.

I paused, but Mr. Earle didn’t cooperate.  He strode out of the office silently, clearly fuming, but not yelling.  I stood there, with the papers in my hands, flummoxed.  Now what?

I went back to my desk, listening to Mr. Earle screaming on the phone to somebody.  I felt oddly deflated.  I think I intuitively knew I had missed the last time in my life when I could make a dramatic workplace exit that wouldn’t cost me much.  Just like that — the opportunity was gone and it was never coming back.

I look back on this story, 38 years later, and I don’t see it in the same light I did when I was 23.  I wasn’t the pure, helpless victim I thought I was then; the situation was a little more complicated than that.  I was lazy and entitled, I now realize.  But even lazy, entitled people can learn.  I had all kinds of faults — but, since that year as a secretary, I never bullied or berated a secretary, waiter or any other person who worked under me.

I like the departing flight attendant’s panache, but some of us just aren’t made for that.  We return to our desks, finish our Russian novels, and quit a few months later after our usual two weeks’ notice.  If we’re thinking, Sayonara, suckers!, we just keep it to ourselves.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Please! Read one of my favorite posts about the worst job I ever had in my life

All right, so I’ve already carried on about my credit  and debit card woes.  Debit card hacked by Finns!  Credit card compromised and destroyed; fresh, new, unblemished credit card sent — which I tried to activate over the phone.

No luck.  My new card was as pure as Tiger Woods, having already been used in Brazil.  (Brazil and Finland!  That seemed massively unfair, since I’d never been to either country, where I appear to be rather well-known, already.)

“Destroy the card,” the Citibank voice at the other end of the line said.  “We’ll send you another one.”

I took out my scissors and cut up the card.  Dutiful, as always.  Grateful, too, that Citibank was protecting my interests — even before the card was activated.

Dutiful, grateful — no, let’s make that naive and premature.  Yesterday, I was paying bills.  We try to go paperless — good for the earth!  The right thing to do!  But, also, hard to read!

So I was squinting at my online Citibank bill, thinking it seemed a bit high.  By pressing my nose against the computer screen, I could make out an extra thousand-plus in charges.  “Moved from previous credit card,” it said in the margin.

Having, by this time, possessed more credit cards than Imelda Marcos, I was a little curious about which card it had been transferred from.  So, I called Citibank and got a perfectly nice woman on the phone who investigated for me.

The extra thousand-plus bucks?  Oh, yes, transferred from the earlier, never-activated, always compromised credit card.  Just a nice little charge run up by my friends (amigos?  I know no Portuguese) in Brazil.

Well, the agreeable Citiwoman said, I needed to file a protest and the amount would be temporarily deducted from my balance — then investigated.

“Any other problems?” she asked.

“Nope.  No credit-card fraud yet this month,” I said.

“Well, you certainly have a good attitude about this,” she said.

“Actually,” I said, “I don’t.  I’m wondering why — when it was clear this amount was fraudulent from the beginning, it ended up on my bill.  I could have overlooked it so easily.”

“Yes,” she said, fervently agreeing, “that’s what they count on.”

They!  Oh, yes, the ambiguous, antecedent-free they.  The source of all problems, the purveyors of nothing good.  They!  The Brazilians!

I hung up because I don’t, on the whole, enjoy chatting with corporations, no matter how mellifluous their mouthpieces and empathic their manner.

All I could think was: When your own credit-card company appears so happy and eager to scalp any exposed body part — who in the hell needs a Brazilian?

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite posts about the Prius with the McCain bumper sticker

Check out my review of former First Lady Laura Bush’s memoir, Spoken From the Heart, here.

Well, so, the world’s going straight to hell, according to all the news accounts out of Afghanistan Iran, Iraq, the Gulf, Venezuela, the Indian-Chinese border, the lunatic anti-immigration goon squad in Arizona.  You name it, it’s bad and probably destined to get a lot worse.

But that’s all the more reason to take notice and celebrate when something good happens.  Like the federal district court decision from California that overturned Proposition 8′s banishment of gay marriage.  And yeah, I know it will be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and yes, I have zero faith in the Roberts court’s judgment, given the alliance of Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas — and, probably Kennedy.

But, what the hell.  Yesterday, you could see happy unisex couples celebrating in the streets and I could think about at least two wonderful, deeply committed couples I know — Robert and Michael, Lisa and Laura — and know how thrilled they were.  And I could wonder, once again, why their love and dedication to each other would be a problem for anybody.  I mean, don’t we have enough blight and poverty and violence in the world that demands our attention?  Do we really need to attack people who want to lead solid, productive lives and support each other?

I should say I’ve never gotten the arguments of people like former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and his ilk who see gay marriage as a threat to their own heterosexual unions.  Good lord.  There are all kinds of real threats to marriage (let me name two: dirty socks all over the floor and excessive snoring); who needs to invent more problems?  And who cares what goes on in somebody else’s bedroom?  Don’t Santorum et al. have enough going on in their lives that they don’t have to spend their time obsessing about people who are a little different?

(In fact, for my movie theater admission money, gay marriage gave us the best romantic comedy about marriage I’ve seen in ages in The Kids Are All Right.   At long last: a subtle comedy that didn’t make me spend two hours cringing and unamused; I thought they’d stopped making movies like that.)

Yesterday also brought the news of quite a few billionaires giving away half their fortunes and — I can’t help it — I was touched by that, too.  Maybe there’s hope for us, after all.

My daughter and others of her generation think gay rights will be the civil rights movement of their time, and I think they’re right.  Problems this vast and pervasive don’t get solved easily or quickly, of course (see the women’s and civil rights movements, for starters), but maybe we’ve made a start and maybe there are change and growing tolerance in the air.

In fact — and sue me for being premature –  I feel as uplifted as I did when healthcare reform passed.  Time to pop open the prosecco, darlin’.  I want to celebrate tonight.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my all-time favorite posts about Just for Today, I am Pat Robertson