Do I Dare?
Do I dare disturb the universe?
― T. S. Eliot
“My head is boiling,” he said, and that was the beginning.
From there, strange turns of phrase animated every conversation. I hadn’t heard this command of language in the husband I’d loved for sixty years, and as a bashful girl in high school. I’d bop with friends at our Friday night sock hops, and there he’d be, on the sidelines, jocular with the boys and not ever with a girl. “Ask him to dance,” Winnie would whisper, but I never did.
One could point to inevitability, karma, in the way we finally landed together. He’d gone to Drexel, I to Penn, then home again and the first rung of our career ladders. At Winnie’s wedding I was the maid of honor, he the best man. Champagne flowed. We danced and drifted toward a merger.
We wove a tiny universe that expanded with each child’s arrival. I’d smile, feeling fortunate that we all got on so well, among the Schwinn Sting-Rays strewn along the perimeter of our well-tended lawn, bats and paddles, book bags and board games, a popcorn maker all black and shiny, a gift, not something I would buy. And before we could say ‘Jack Robinson,’ they were gone, the boys and their paraphernalia.
Life sometimes seemed as dry as dust, but then a grandchild and we were gay again.
We plied our trades, muddled through early days of retirement, volunteered and dabbled in local politics, waxed ecstatic about our Kindles, learned how to Google and bank online. And stream: on any given evening we were ensconced in matching recliners, rewatching movies we’d loved, or learning the truth about our late heroes in documentaries that featured yapping heads revealing bouts with drink and drugs, glory and redemption.
Until his attention began to wander and the TV remote control became a toy to be poked unto death; my meticulous husband seemed to have been swallowed by a pre-pubescent boy. No. No, no, no, no, no, I told myself. This is not happening to us. I programmed a new remote control and kept it hidden in my sweater pocket and went on watching, plying him with popcorn popped in the old black popper that was not shiny any longer but did the trick.
And then a neighbor called to say he had parked in her carport, and Safeway called to say he was wandering the aisles and couldn’t identify himself. And his sister said, “Spill the beans,” when he couldn’t identify her. “What’s going on with my brother?” I could not bring myself to say.
And here we are. I’m pedaling for two our well-worn tandem. The tires need air. I struggle and breathe heavily. I am Sisyphus.
Last night, as I slept, he figured out how to unlock the ornery contrivance on our door meant to protect him and slipped away. Someone found him crouched in hemlock dripping ice and brought him home to me.
“My head is boiling,” he said, the remaining fragment of his repertoire, though altogether he was cold. I led him to a warm shower and tucked him into our safe bed. But what is safe? Do I hold him here, dreading his next escape? Or do I hand him off to a place where no one will know who he was: jocular yet deeply still, my oldest, dearest friend?
Do I dare disturb our universe? There is no longer time to wonder.
“Do I Dare” appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of Vistas & Byways.
Thanksgiving
I loved it even when I had to sit at the children’s table, squabbling with my cousins with playful glee.
I loved the stuffing and dark meat, pies bursting with apples or pumpkin filling, cream pies oozing bananas.
I loved the warmth of hugs from my elders (but not the pinches), listening to their gossip and watching their complex interactions and my sensitive mother’s reactions.
I loved it all, and eagerly took on the role of hostess when I married and moved to a new city, far from my clan. Under a sparkling chandelier, my dining room table was set for 12 with China we’d hand-carried from England and gleaming silverware. Serving platters were carefully arranged on crisp celadon linen, around a straw cornucopia of autumn fruits and flowers.
Along with appetizers, there’d be a perfunctory tip of the hat to gratitude, then my husband would bring the carved bird from the kitchen, shouting, “Dig in!” and friends, neighbors and visiting relatives would fill their plates, partaking of all that our bountiful lives afforded us.
Over the years, the cast of characters changed. Babies evolved into teens, new faces replaced those lost to divorce, illness and death. Eventually, I sold my house and moved to a large apartment, where my Thanksgiving tradition continued. I invited foreign families of my son’s Washington International School classmates, who contributed new dishes to our sacred ritual.
A few years later, when that son, Michael, moved to San Francisco, married and announced a baby on the way, I packed the China and linen, the silverware and cornucopia, and headed for Walnut Creek, California. My sisters had moved to the Bay area in the 70s, as hippies, my older son lived a stone’s throw away in Los Angeles, and suddenly I was awash in family again.
So, on my first California Thanksgiving, though it was a tight fit in my new condo, my table was extended with four leaves and once again graced with my beautiful things, sans chandelier. It was fun to be together after so many years, on my favorite holiday.
But the time came when one guest requested a vegan meal, another gluten-free, and yet another, pescatarian. My limited kitchen skills were tested as I prepared salmon, as well as turkey, and re-heated a multitude of vegetable casseroles. I was frazzled. The thrill of the holiday was gone.
That was the year I bequeathed our Thanksgiving tradition to Michael and my daughter-in-law, Georgianna. They had just restored an old house in Oakland and could easily accommodate family and friends in their massive dining room.
I transitioned well, never looked back with longing to my hostess days. We dined on turkey and Dungeness crab and kvelled over my grandson Philo. Eventually, he tried his hand as chef and regaled us with home-made focaccia and other delectables as he grew.
In my 70s, I found a lovely little home in Rossmoor and downsized for the umpteenth time, planning to bring only necessities, my art and photos, and small keepsakes. But as the movers placed my beloved dining room set and boxes of China near the elevator, to be picked up by a charity, they found me sitting on one of the chairs, crying. I felt so foolish. Crying over mere things, at my age. After a lifetime of real losses. But the guys were kind, accustomed to these events, and brought me a serving bowl and platter that had not yet been packed. “You can keep these, Mrs. Kaulkin. To remember. We’ll find a place for them in your new home.”
And then I really cried.
And life goes on. Covid hit and Thanksgiving went on hiatus. One of my sisters moved to Portland, and Philo went off to college. Now, those of us remaining enjoy the holiday at a restaurant, where they feature prime rib, salmon and abundant vegetables, along with Sir Tom. And a good time is had by all.
“Thanksgiving” appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Vistas & Byways.
The Dance of Love
Philadelphia was teen heaven in the 50s. A music Mecca.
Doo wop on the corner.
Bandstand after school. (Long before it moved to LA and became American Bandstand in living color, it was a Philly staple.)
We had the greatest disc jockeys in the world: Georgie Woods, the man with the goods; Jerry Blavat, the geator with the heater; and my personal favorite, Jock-O — “Oo-poppa-doo, how do you do.”
On Saturdays, radio station 950 held a dance club.
That’s where I met Virgil.
Danny and the Juniors sang “At the Hop” right there, in the studio, and we bopped and screamed.
Then the DJ played a slow one: “All in the Game,” by Tommy Edwards.
A handsome, broad-shouldered boy led me to the dance floor. He held me close. Very close. And whispered the lyrics into my ear.
“Then he’ll kiss your lips
And caress your waiting fingertips
And your hearts will fly away”
I felt warm and all aflutter. No one had ever held me like that. I was frightened. Thrilled. Overcome.
He led me to a table and got us a couple of Cokes. “What’s your name?” “What school do you go to?” He wanted to know everything about me. And I wanted to know everything about him. It was like we were alone, in a room vibrating with kids doing The Slop and The Stroll.
Virgil was named for a Roman poet. He lived above his father’s pizzeria in South Philly. The opposite end of the earth from my neighborhood, where the boys I knew were named for their dead uncles: Izzie. Shlomo. Jake.
He gave me a napkin and a pen. “Write down your name and address. Tomorrow I’ll come over, after church.” I wrote, though I knew he was forbidden fruit. Taboo. Off-limits. But I was smitten.
The DJ was playing another slow one and we danced again:
“For your love
Oh I would do anything
I would do anything
For your love
For your kiss
Oh I would go anywhere”
We were besotted.
*******
Somehow, he found me. Via bus, subway, trolley, he landed on my doorstep and I pushed him toward the street before my parents could see who rang the bell.
We strolled along a nearby strip of shops that were vibrant six days a week, but dead as a door nail on Sunday, in the age of Blue Laws.
We couldn’t think of much to say. I was cold; he was thirsty. Then the clatter of a trolley sealed our fate. He hopped on and threw me a kiss.
“Bye, Donna.”
“Bye, Virgil.”
We never saw each other again. I was sad for a long time and finally told my Mother why.
“Don’t worry, honey,” she said. “You’ll know when the right one comes along.”
***
Fast forward.
It’s the 60s.
I’m doing the bossa nova at a club in Atlantic City with a blind date.
A tall, very tall, guy cuts in.
I crane my neck to smile up at his pretty face.
He’s a great dancer, whirling me around the room with supreme confidence.
The next day he drives me back to Philly in his red Catalina convertible.
The top is down; my hair is blowing in the breeze.
“Where’d you get that pretty name, Donna Brookman?”
“I’m named for my father’s mother, Dora; he calls me Dvoyala. And you?”
“I’m named for my father’s brother, my Uncle Moishe.”
Click.
I invite him in to meet my parents.
I marry him.
Blame it on the bossa nova. The dance of love.
“The Dance of Love” appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Vistas & Byways.
About that article on Perimenopause
My comment on an article in The Washington Post (11/12/24)
Thirty years on, I’m reminded of the shock and secrecy of the now ballyhooed phenomenon of perimenopause. My children, young men, had just left home and I thought I was experiencing acute empty nest syndrome when suddenly my body was drenched in sweat and tears would not stop.
The moment passed and I recalled the words of a friend whose previously sweet mother had “gone off the deep end.” She was going through “the change,” a commonly used term to explain mercurial behavior in mid-life women. Aha! My turn.
Things only got worse. I never slept. I fell often, with resulting serious injuries that required surgery and hospitalization. My magnificent career faltered.
Because my mother had died young, I had no frame of reference for what was happening to me. I phoned her sister to ask for advice, describing my new behaviors, the changes in my body, and was met with silence. “What should I do?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “We didn’t have that.”
A slap in the face was how I experienced that lie. Her generation did not discuss such things, bodily functions, even if her knowledge would help the daughter of her beloved sister.
I looked for women who were unafraid to talk about the crisis we were in and one steered me to an endocrinologist who had helped her. He presented the facts: You fall because you don’t sleep. Your equilibrium is kaput, a hormonal imbalance that is as natural as night and day, and thus it has always been.
He prescribed estrogen and soon I was sleeping through the night, enjoying the company of friends and the challenges of my work. My sense of humor returned.
When estrogen supplements once again were found to increase the risk of cancer, I stopped taking them and have slept fitfully since. Now, at 81, my body and brain have bigger fish to fry than hot flashes or temper tantrums, but I would never demean the experience of perimenopause. It stinks. It has to be gotten through. Like much in life.
The Used Violin
The son of impoverished refugees was given a used violin for his tenth birthday which he neither asked for nor wanted. 
After months of attempting to master the instrument, he came to believe that screeching discord would forever be the fruit of his labor. He could not make it resonate with beauty. His heart would never dance when he eyed the thing in its ragged case or plucked its weary strings. And, though always a gentle boy, in a fit of frustration one day he smashed the violin and hid the pieces in his closet.
“Where are you going?” his mother called, as he attempted a nonchalant exit from their little backyard, where she was hanging laundry. “You have to practice.”
Suddenly overcome with remorse, he couldn’t look at her, knowing that she had saved pennies from her tailor’s wages to finally purchase the object he had just destroyed, an object that had been lovingly handled by scores of boys before him.
He never played an instrument again, but he loved his mother dutifully evermore and upon the birth of his first child he purchased a piano as an homage to her. His children became musicians and at each recital, each concert he felt her presence, her pride and her forgiveness.
We, the “Elderly”
Sent by a friend, without attribution:
- We grew up in the 40s-50s-60.
- We studied in the 50s-60s-70s.
- We dated in the 50s-60s-70s.
- We got married and discovered the world in the 60s-70s-80s.
- We ventured into the 70s-80s.
- We stabilized in the 90s.
- We got wiser in the 2000s.
- And went firmly through the 2010s.
Turns out we’ve lived through NINE different decades…
TWO different centuries…
TWO different millennia…
- We have gone from the telephone with an operator for long-distance calls to video calls to anywhere in the world, we have gone from slides to YouTube, from vinyl records to online music, from handwritten letters to email and WhatsApp…
- From live matches on the radio, to black and white TV, and then to HDTV…
- We went to Blockbuster and now we watch Netflix…
- We got to know the first computers, punch cards, diskettes and now we have gigabytes and megabytes in hand on our cell phones or iPads…
- We wore shorts throughout our childhood and then long pants, oxfords, Bermuda shorts, etc.
- We dodged infantile paralysis, meningitis, H1N1 flu and now COVID-19…
- We rode skates, tricycles, invented cars, bicycles, mopeds, gasoline or diesel cars and now we ride hybrids or 100% electric…
Yes, we’ve been through a lot but what a great life we’ve had!
They could describe us as “exennials” people who were born in that world of the fifties, who had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood.
We’re kind of Ya-seen-it-all.
Our generation has literally lived through and witnessed more than any other in every dimension of life.
It is our generation that has literally adapted to “CHANGE”.
A big round of applause to all the members of a very special generation, which are UNIQUE. Here’s a precious and very true message that I received from a friend:
TIME DOES NOT STOP
Life is a task that we do ourselves every day.
- When you look… it’s already six in the afternoon; when you look… it’s already Friday; when one looks… the month is over; when one looks… the year is over; when one looks… 50, 60, 70 and 80 years have passed!
- When you look… we no longer know where our friends are.
- When you look… we lost the love of our life and now, it’s too late to go back.
Do not stop doing something you like due to lack of time.
Do not stop having someone by your side, because your children will soon not be yours, and you will have to do something with that remaining time, where the only thing that we are going to miss will be the space that can only be enjoyed with the usual friends. This time that, unfortunately, never returns…
The day is today!
WE ARE NO LONGER AT AN AGE TO POSTPONE ANYTHING.
Pass it on to your best friends. Don’t leave it for later
Let’s Face It
That’s this pretty girl, second from right, at 17.
A pretty girl grows accustomed to being the center of attention. She is on the A-list, selected for teams and sleepovers, to star in school plays, and to go to ritzy beach houses on summer weekends and on ski trips in winter.
A pretty girl grows accustomed to being sought after by A-list boys, and longed for by boys on society’s fringe. If charm accompanies that pretty face, she often is teacher’s pet, with latitude granted for missed homework and poor quiz scores.
When I was in school in the 50s, a pretty girl believed it wise to compete with girls for boys, and not to compete with boys. Collecting varsity pins of stars who vied for her attention trumped any desire she may have had to pursue academic excellence.
A pretty girl who attended college in the early 60s, often on a quest for an M.R.S. degree, received high grades for work that might be mediocre, from professors (they were mostly men then) who primped as she entered the room, hoping to gain her admiration. Accustomed to “getting by on her looks,” a pretty girl sometimes felt bewildered by changing expectations of the era, but found that a pretty face serves as hard currency in any world.
A pretty girl is accustomed to being noticed as she enters a room. The waters part for her. She is fawned over by plain girls wanting to share the glow of her aura, and men are courtly. In the office or lab, she is offered raises and promotions (to a point), foreign travel and prime assignments. In marriage, her failings are happily forgiven by her besotted husband.
Woe to this pretty girl as she ages. We all know her story. Often her position at home or at work is usurped by a younger woman. She doesn’t quite get why her status has changed, because disappointment is a strange bedfellow. And when she looks in the mirror, she still sees a pretty face. She feels pretty. Her Gestalt is “pretty.”
Over time, this self-image wanes. The faces of her friends become lined and she may muse, “Is that how I look?” Then, one morning the face that greets her in her mirror is not the pretty girl.
I was a lucky pretty girl, in that I had it both ways. I never fully incorporated a pretty-girl persona because by the time my swan emerged, in late adolescence, I was used to being ignored by boys and had developed other interests.
But in the end, I am that woman looking in the mirror wondering where the pretty girl went. Because my pretty mother died young, I no longer see her face in mine. I see my Aunt Clara, who lived a long life.
My mom is on the left, Aunt Clara on the right.
I am sharing these thoughts because my friend wondered if the novel I’m writing addresses metaphorically my preoccupation with aging and the loss of physical beauty. My protagonist, Brenda Corrigan, is attacked and undergoes facial reconstruction. As she tries to cope with the reality that her pretty, though aging, face has been usurped by one misshapen and scarred, she is determined to rely on other strengths, noting that the blind hear everything, the deaf see all. Wit remains her mainstay: When a group of women enter a posh Beverly Hills restaurant, Brenda observes their plastic surgery results. “Were those faces all cut from the same stencil?” she asks her daughter. “They all look like gaping fish.”
Aging indeed is a theme of this novel. We all confront the loss of physical beauty and learn to rely on other strengths, if we are lucky.
Slaughterhouses
This is an excerpt from my novel, Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown:
As a child, I visited slaughterhouses. They lined a street so wide it could have been a boulevard. The asphalt shone with bloody puddles of sunlight. Trucks and cars backed into the curb for easy loading. Drivers loped determinedly in and out of doors, arms full, faces closed.
I always waited in my father’s car. He dealt lunches to factory workers from the deck of his station wagon, then we’d go to market to buy next day’s supplies. Sometimes I’d bring a book to read, so as not to see the blood. Sometimes I’d close my eyes, lean back against the seat, and dream. That the animals sang, that they played and danced in a happy zoo and these men who paced in blood were, like me, merely visitors.
But I always knew that the animals longed to be free. Their singing wounded my heart and I wished that they would one day trample the bloody aprons and dash onto the wide, free street. Oh what a fairy tale this would make!
Of course, they never strayed. They huddled in grand choirs, scraping the senses of all who still heard.
I learned to chant: “Chop! the chicken head. Ping! the pig is dead.”
Brenda’s 9/11 Dream
This is one of my favorite passages in my novel, Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown — a dream of 9/11 in Washington, DC:
Awash in the news, her former neighbors would converge on the lawn in front of their building, consultants wandering off to Café Deluxe to nurse a cappuccino; retired foreign service officers entrenched, waiting for official word of what to do next. The Romanov heir would twist his rings and murmur memories of his Paris boyhood. The General from the Shah’s army would pierce the air with his foul cigarettes, his wife silent at his side. Nannies would comfort toddlers alarmed by the sudden roar of an F16 . . .
All true and exactly how it happened in real life, when I was a Washingtonian.
What Is Your Book About?
I’ve read umpteen articles about “The Pitch,” but when it comes to answering that five-word query—What is your book about?—my expertise on pitching vanishes. I stutter and stammer and gaze at the ceiling, while trying to compress the story of a captivating woman into a few scintillating sentences.
For I am a writer, after all, and not a pitchman.
I started out in advertising, but that was long ago, in the Mad Men era, and I turned to editing because that better suited my personality—not exactly shy and retiring, but tending to prefer solitary quiet pondering and paring, while leaving team efforts to the unruly.
As a magazine editor in a huge publishing company, I was classified as a “creative,” meaning I was paid less than execs who sold advertising. But I hobnobbed with the latter long enough to learn by osmosis how to pitch.
So why is that knowledge failing me now? Why does it not enter stage front when I am faced with those five little words (not facing, exactly—more aptly, evading), at book sales, when guests take me aside and ask what Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown is about:
315 pages, I joke, then get serious,
a woman coping with a catastrophic event,
the men she’s loved,
her experiences in a career that took her around the world,
her loyal friends and children
Now I’m cooking. Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown is about faith and the lack thereof, what kills faith, what restores faith. It proposes a dilemma: What would you do, dear reader, in similar circumstances? It is about the joys of friendship and children and grandchildren, about love and failed love and failure to love, about loss and death.
“But is he really dead?” I am asked at book groups. “I wanted him to rescue her, marry her, carry her off on his muscular white steed to a land where they will live happily ever after.”
“That is a different book,” I suggest.
“A sequel!” someone shouts. A scattering of applause, big smiles.
“Perhaps,” I grant. “Perhaps I will call it, Brenda Corrigan Came Home.”
Perhaps that will be easier to pitch.