emlocke

Category: In Retrospect

  • I’m Too Busy Checking Myself Out

    One of the things you have to brace yourself for if you’re going to be actively losing weight at an all-women’s college is that people will assume that you are obsessed with it, you have set your eyes on the prize and the prize is having ‘thin’ become the sole basis of your identity and, worst of all, you’ve been motivated into your delusional health and fitness mania by, wait for it, images of women in the media. Not even the Dove billboards could break you from your diet-induced trance because every publicized female figure from the anonymous chick on the cover of your first issue of Seventeen to the girl with the perky pout in the newest Clean and Clear commercial has skewed your perception of the feminine form. Every time you weigh yourself you are propogating the exploitation of slender women in the media. You’ve been brainwashed.

    I would like to offer some evidence to the point that I am not tacking magazine clippings of ladies up around my mirror and flipping through commercials just to rate the spokesmodels on waifishness.

    In elementary school, usually once in the fall and again in the spring, my class took a field trip out into a swamp or down to the Norwalk River or across the street to a farm – anything to expose us to the outdoors for a period at least a little longer than the walk to and from the bus stop. The standard dress-code for these events involved light layers, a wind-breaker tied unflatteringly around the waist, a cap with a flat-brim (if you were me and never wore athletic attire unless it was strapped onto my body by my mother) and tube socks – oh, the humanity – rolled up over the cuffs of our pants. I loathed this fashion injustice so fiercely that I would resist until the moment before we disembarked the bus at our destination and almost broke my own ankles yanking my socks down when we boarded the bus again at the end of the day.

    If I’d been so susceptible to the images of other girls around me, or images in the media, it wouldn’t have bothered me so much to tuck the cuffs of my jeans into my socks. You know, some people could have pulled a fashion statement out of this look. Not me. I knew my pants looked ridiculous. I knew my socks looked ridiculous. I knew I looked ridiculous in my ridiculous pants and my ridiculous socks. Regardless of how ridiculous every other scrunchie-wearing girl in my class looked right alongside me, I was too busy pouting about my own apparel misfortune to notice.

    Something else you have to brace yourself for at an all-women’s college is that people are generally critical when you show signs of self-absorbtion.

  • People Watching

    On Anzac Day, I woke up in a wet sleeping bag in a wet tent, put on my wet hiking boots and hitched out of the local forest park and back into town to catch the train home to Wellington, where there would be just as much rain but far less mud.

    The train ran all day and I wanted to stretch my weekend out as long I could, so I spent most of the day meandering through Upper Hutt, a spot of concrete on the southern plain known for not being known for much of anything. For an hour or so, I sat in a cafe with chalkboards on every wall, The Best American Short Stories of 2005 open beside the mocha on my table, watching the Huttites dwell around me in their natural habitat.

    A man and a woman ordered dessert and each one was served a different kind of cake. The waitress departed their table and immediately the man sloppily scooped away the pointy end of his crumbling slice and scraped it on to his companion’s plate. She split her own piece in half the long way and held a dainty bite up to his lips. While he chewed, she neatly slid one half of her cake off of her plate and on to his. They exchanged flavors, one dark and smooth and one white and fluffy, without so much as a pause in their conversation about a movie or the weather or the holiday weekend or whatever (I’m not an eavesdropper, just a people watcher).

    Tonight, I am sitting in the Haymarket in Northampton. On my right, a man and woman sit with their knees interlocked, not in dining foreplay, but because their table is quite small. They lean into each other, laughing over the wrought-iron garden table, and underneath, they have the same napkin spread across their laps.

    Another pair of women just left the cafe, smiling down at me and wishing me good luck on my homework, which I’ve been half-heartedly glancing over while I surreptitiously observe the people around me, under the guise of the concentrating student. These fellow patrons were so friendly because about forty minutes ago, they laughed hysterically at Kara when she not-so-subtley stole a candle from another table for me to hold over my textbook and not go blind from reading in the dim, ambient light.

    They probably thought that they had observed a simple favor between students, but Kara stole that candle out of love. What would I do without her?  Maybe I’d get more homework done.

  • Mama Bear and Papa Bear

    My mom called last night on her way home from work with some sad news: Stan Berenstain of Bears fame passed away. “What about Jan?” I asked mournfully. Later, I downloaded the NPR clip and listened with a flashback of pages and pages of fur-filled illustrations turned in my mind. Stan and Jan Berenstain met on the first day of art school in 1941 and published more than 200 picture books about the Bear family, Mama, Papa, Sister and Brother (and, much later, Honey Bear) together.

    A bookshop owner spoke about the continuing success of the early works in the series, in spite of the fact that, as consumer demand increased, the couple leaned into a pattern of stories that fit into the same mold and usually had an educational message. The shop owner reasoned that stories like The Berenstain Bears and the Truth and The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food were “less entertaining and more of a lesson.”

    But Stan and Jan were a pair of artists who based their series on bears because they are fun to draw, and the illustrations always entertained me. When All Things Considered played an audio clip from The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers, the first thing I remembered was the images of Brother and Sister’s perception of strangers: a man with a crooked cane and a snarling lip, a woman in a tattered dress with dead flowers in her hat. A few pages later, after Mama bear has gently pointed out that not all strangers lurk in shadows and hand out poisoned apples, the cubs envision the same characters. This time, the man winks, the flowers in the old woman’s hat have perked up.

    In pre-school, I thumbed through those books again and again to follow the pictures, memorizing the story until I thought I could read just because I knew the books so well that I always knew what happened on the next page. I even went through a phase when I called my parents Mama and Papa. Only, my dad never wore a ten gallon hat like Papa Q. Bear.

  • Rosa Lee

    My aunt e-mailed to tell me that Rosa Parks died yesterday at 92. She said that she remembered that I did a project on her life and times when I was younger. If my presentation on Rosa Parks (there were several, in fact, one in which I dressed up to play her role) made an impact on my aunt, who lived on the other coast when I was in elementary school, it was only because Rosa Parks left such an impression on me.

    She was 42 on the day that she sat on her bus and politely gave the driver permission to call the police and have her arrested because, on that day, she would not give up her seat. She was charged with disorderly conduct because she sat quietly, primly, and said, “you may do that,” rather than stand up and herd to the back of a bus with the others who were asked to move. She said, “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old…no, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” Tired enough to wake up and say something, do something. To stand up for the first time, by sitting down.

  • Secret Society of Rainy Saturday Afternoon Movies

    The original, archetypal, 1961, Hayley Mills version of The Parent Trap was on the Hallmark Channel this afternoon. My favorite part is at the end when Mitch decides to get seriously “washed up” and turns on the hi-fi and manages to charm knots into Maggie’s apron so she is forced to ask for help undoing it.

    My mom showed me this movie when I was a kid, about 13, the twins’ age in the movie. I felt like she was letting me in on a secret society of really, really good movies to watch on rainy Saturday afternoons.

  • Boundless Dreams of Humble Beginnings

    When I was a kid, I was always going places. I collected firewood, whittled ambitiously large branches and ground up the damp green core inside acorn shells to ‘eat’ in my ‘log cabin’ in the backyard. I scrambled over the neighbor’s stone wall with an invisible St. Bernard to rescue friends pretending to be stranded. At low-tide on Long Beach Island, I collected sea water and shells and crossed rivulets in the sand with my bucket to return to my coastal village beneath our beach umbrellas. I was a Victorian nursemaid to my doll, taking letters to her grandmother and dressing her for tea. My bed became a covered wagon and I lulled myself to sleep each night by imagining that the nightlight was the sun setting on a prairie horizon. I didn’t have imaginary friends; I became imaginary characters and traveled back in time.

    The roles I chose were never lavish, but I was rarely practical. Chelsea moved in to my log house during one playdate and suggested we bring in some “homey things”. She went for pots and pans and I collected my favorite books and a few keepsakes. The whittling was a priority in my backyard village the way leaping across streamlets with appropriate grace was most important in my coastal one. My covered wagon may have been without food and it never seemed to get any closer to its destination, but the historical accuracy of the blue and yellow quilt that I wrapped around myself more than compensated. These details gave sensation and emotion to my daydreams, the most trivial elements brought them to life.

  • Going to Class – or – Not Skipping

    In her senior yearbook, my mom is represented by a one-liner quote: “Wanna skip?” I wish I had known that when I got caught skipping class in high school. I hid out in the library when I just couldn’t stand the thought of sitting through another double lab. The library. I cut class in the library.

  • I’m Allowed to Laugh at Myself, You Are Not

    My mind wandered while I fixed lunch today and for absolutely no reason at all, I remembered one of the ever numerous faux pas I committed as a younger girl attempting to win the affections of her crush-of-the-minute. As I arranged baby spinach inside my whole grain wrap, I giggled to myself with that wryly amused sort of laugh that consists of one backward gasp (exhaled, not inhaled) through the nose. I proceeded to grin for approximately eleven seconds before the usual former-crush-cringe poked a chilly finger right between my shoulder blades. That’s eleven seconds longer than I have ever chuckled at such a recollection before.

    Proud of my immense growth of character, I immediately began waving my proverbial “I’m Blogging This” flag. But by the time I reached this “Create Post” window, all courage was gone. Today I learned that the day when you can finally remember the social mortifications of early teendom and begin to laugh at yourself is not the same day you can hop online and describe the well-intentioned romantic advances of your youth on the internet, no matter how many people read or do not read your blog.

    Still, it is progress that those memories are becoming more amusing and less melodramatic. I wonder how much time will have to come between me and the shameless attempts at flirtation before I will no longer avoid the grocery store on Saturday afternoons (I never fail to run into the mother of some poor unsuspecting boy of whom I was terrifically fond when we were in school together). It seems to me that it will be a milestone similar to the day when I am finally grown and mature enough not to be embarrassed if I try to walk in the ‘out’ door or push when it clearly states ‘pull.’ I just hope it doesn’t take quite that long.

  • I Brake For Animals

    Before my days as a licensed driver, there were those babysitting jobs where [usually] the dad would pick me up at a pre-designated time, scheduled to allow [usually] the mom a few extra minutes to beautify for the rare evening out. At the end of the night, I’d get back in the car and ride home to be deposited at my doorstep. Sometimes I wondered if it didn’t kill the mood of a busy parents’ once in a blue moon dating opportunity to have to drive the babysitter home after dinner or a movie.

    Once, I decided there might not be so much mood to kill between a certain couple.

    At the end of the evening, Mr. Dad pulled up fast on a pair of deer crossing the road on the way back to my house. He jerked to a halt and the deer leapt a stone wall into the woods, but as he eased back on to the gas and continued down the dark road he muttered, “Sometimes I just want to hit ’em,” which didn’t seem like the kind of thought that crosses one’s mind after a romantic evening.

    I had dinner at a jet-lagged Jess’ house tonight and Jon offered to let me follow him home, since I made two wrong turns just getting there and I didn’t want to overestimate my ability to find my way home (Ridgebury is a foreign ground to me even when I haven’t been out of the country for five months). I followed his tail lights, glad for the constant reminder about which lane we use in this country, and slowed down when I saw brake lights on his jeep. A deer was crossing 116 and he slowed down to let it pass. Nice to know there are some good guys on the road.

    Quote of the day: “She’s a cat of a creature, she don’t care, she’s velvety” – Frank Black and the Catholics

  • Country Clubbing

    Yesterday, I had lunch with my grandmother and my aunt at the country club, where I remember swimming lessons in the pool and easter egg hunts on the putting green when I was little. They’ve renovated the whole thing now, but they used to have open air cabanas, and I remember my mom wrapping me up in a towel when I got out of the pool, probably comforting me after a traumatic swimming lesson.  I would sit backward in her lap while she combed the chlorine from my hair.  I remember hugging her and looking over her freckled shoulder up at the summer sky.

    Grandmom, Amy and I sat in the sun and the breeze on the patio and I felt like we’d wandered right into the 1920’s just in time for a garden tea party. I am counting my chicken quesadilla among the top five meals of my life, right up there with fish and chips on the terrace at Epcot Center Rose and Crown and pizza on the volcanic beach in Chile.

    Will’s CIT session at Camp ended yesterday, so my mom and I went to pick him up. It was so beautiful in the Berkshires last night – my favorite time of day of my favorite part of the season at camp, when there’s a refreshingly crisp twinge in the air. It reminded me of the nights when we would all put on sweatpants and fleece and lie around watching for shooting stars, and how my bare feet would always get cold because I never remembered or bothered to wear socks, but how I felt warm enough anyway.

    Will is awesome in his (my) staff shirt. The first thing he said was, “there are so many people who want me to tell them when you get here,” and let me give him a hug.

    Quote of the day: “So turn up the corners of your lips, part them and feel my finger tips, trace the moment, fall forever” – Dashboard Confessional