In Olivia Manning’s wonderful Balkan Trilogy set in World War II Bucharest, Guy Pringle, most lovable of extroverts, decides to do an amateur production of Shakespeare. He chooses Troilus and Cressida.  It’s so accessible to the ex-pats and legation folks that I think, well, how hard a play could it be?

So here I am at the beginning of Troilus and Cressida:

In Troy there lies the scene.  From isles of Greece

The princes orgulous, too much arugula in that salad last night their high blood chafed

Have to the port of Athens sent their ships,

Fraught with the ministers and instruments piano needs tuning

Of cruel war. Sixty and nine, that wore

Their crownets regal, Does Gwen have any more of that Crown Royal from th’ Athenian Bay

Put forth toward Phrygia; Phrygian mode, which one is that and their vow is made

To ransack Troy, within whose strong immures immures. immures. immures?

The ravished Helen, Menelaus’ queen,

With wanton Paris sleeps; and that’s the quarrel.

To Tenedos they come, isn’t that a ski resort?

And the deep drawing barks do there disgorge

Their warlike fraughtage. I’ve always liked that word fraught Now on Dardan’s plains does that have something to do with the Dardanelles?

The fresh and yet unbruised Greeks do pitch

Their brave pavilions.  Priam’s six gated city

Dardan and Timbria, Helias, Chetas, Troien,

And Antenonidus — with massy staples need to go to Office Depot before that coupon runs out

And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts, bolts, Frankenstein

Stir up the sons of Troy.

Now expectation, tickling skittish spirits

On one and other side, Trojan and Greek,

Sets all on hazard. Those fires in Colorado sounded horrific And hither am I come,

A prologue armed, but not in confidence

Of author’s pen, or actor’s voice, but suited

In like conditions as our argument,

To tell you (fair beholders) that our play Does Derek Jacobi do this part?

Leaps o’er the vaunt and firstlings of those broils,

Beginning in the middle, starting thence away

To what may be digested in a play.

Like, or find fault; do as your pleasures are.

Now good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war. That’s a cool line ok what was all this about?

And so–this is not Shakespeare anymore, this is the rest of my blog post–I begin, not in confidence, to borrow a phrase.  I have learned something on this, my sixth play of this project.  I have learned to approach the verbiage of Shakespeare the way I do the crowds at the Folk Life festival.  I let the words carry me along while I get used to the feel, the smell, the noise, the rhythm, and the texture until something emerges that piques my interest and pricks my understanding. I read three columns of speeches in Troilus and Cressida before I realized, “Oh, ok. They’re planning to roust Achilles from his pouting by promoting Ajax. Got it.”

I am hazy on The Iliad but that hardly matters because Shakespeare has turned the Greek myth inside out.  Achilles, sulking in his tent with a male lover, is a symptom of the disarray and the low morale of the Greek camp.  Ulysses has a celebrated speech when he details the way life is ordered in the Elizabethan cosmos.  When the hierarchy is upset, apparently one ends up with Achilles lying around with his lover and unwilling to fight. (When I came upon this speech in my Pelican Shakespeare I found margin notes from my days as an English major.  Huh.  I don’t remember reading this.)

Then over in the Troyan (he doesn’t call it Trojan) camp the gang is considering why this blasted war has gone on for seven years.  “Helen is the quarrel,” they conclude.   They agree they really ought to give her back because they are in the wrong, but then amidst a lot of posturing about honor and renown, they decide they won’t.

Enter Thersites, a jester-type character who hasn’t had a wash in several years and whose mouth is as filthy as the rest of him.  He pretty much farts in the general direction of both camps and declares that the war is being fought for “a whore and a cuckold.”  After a while I got used to Thersites as being not only the most disgusting piece of work in the play but also as the only one who tells the truth.  And he has some great insults.

Briefly: Cressida is a Greek woman who is pimped over to Troilus on the Troyan side by her Uncle Pandarus and from his name we get the word pander.  She turns out not to be trusted and Troilus goes from being love-sick to being what we would today call in denial.  By the end of the play, Cressida has been returned and Achilles has his henchmen murder an unarmed Hector, the great hero of the Iliad.  The play ends with the Troyans mourning over the mashed-up body of Hector.  Whereupon Pandarus, distraught, tells us he is going to carry-on his pimp trade in the “hold-door” establishments–the brothels-and his is the disturbing last line of this play about war:

. . . I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,

And at that time bequeath you my diseases.

So yeah.  Creepy.  But here are some lines I liked:

*Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite,

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey

And last eat up himself. (I, iii)

*The amity that wisdom knits not, folly may easily untie. (II, iii)

*a sleeping giant (II, iii)

*Ajax: An all man were of my mind

Ulysses (aside): Wit would be out of fashion (II, iii)

*Generation of vipers (III, i)

*This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.  (III, ii)

*Pride hath no other glass to show itself but pride.  (III, iii)

*Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves.  (III, iii)

*Lechery, lechery; still wars and lechery. . . (V, iii)

Here are few of Thersites’(tamer) insults:

“Idol of idiot-worshippers.”

“not so much brain as ear-wax.”

“that stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese, Nestor”

This is such a bitter, cynical play that I think what the hey, I’ll do King Lear next!

I was three pages into Harold Bloom’s celebrated masterpiece, Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human, and Twelfth Night sounded like the dullest play ever written. So I did myself a favor: I put Harold Bloom on the shelf for my annual yard sale.  Then I plowed through the text of Twelfth Night once so I could know I had actually read it since this is my project: to read the works of Shakespeare.

I realized right away that Twelfth Night needs to be seen. Reading it for the first time, it was too hard to keep track of a woman disguised as a man but still resembling her twin brother enough that another woman who falls in love with the woman will easily transfer her affections to the man who looks like his sister once the other woman realizes that the woman is a woman.  Marriage equality was not to come about for another 500 years and the now reasonable notion that if a woman was attracted to another woman, maybe she was a lesbian, is not explored here.

Twelfth Night needs to be heard, too, because of all the songs that the fool sings.  His first song, “O Mistress Mine, where are you roaming” I long ago learned from recordings of Janet Baker, my all-time favorite mezzo-soprano. Even when I was in my twenties, I got a lump in my throat hearing her voice declaiming,

Then come kiss me sweet and twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure

In any case, I am so glad I did not let Harold Bloom put me off. I went on an orgy of watching four different productions on DVD. Then I re-watched my two favorites and re-read the play a second time.  That’s eight times through the play and now I know bits of it by heart, I can’t wait to see it at Shakespeare in the Park in Seattle this summer.

A couple of performances on those DVDs made the play alive for me.  Joan Plowright as Viola (1969) was a revelation not just of the character but of the craft of acting.  She pulled into herself and her soul shone through her eyes when she said:

Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house,
Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallow your name to the reverberate hills. . .

Ronnie Stevens as Sir Andrew Aguecheek (1980) made me totter between wet-my- pants laughing and suddenly wanting to sob when he says, “I was adored once, too.”

Twelfth Night is one of those plays full of famous and quotable lines.  Here are some of the ones I wrote down in my notebook:

*What great ones do, the less will prattle of (I, ii)

*Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man has.  But I am a great eater of beef and I believe that does harm to my wit. (I, iii)

*Is it a world to hide virtues in? (I, iii)

*Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage. (I, v)

*Journey’s end in lover’s meeting. . .

What is love? Tis not hereafter;

Present mirth hath present laughter;

What’s to come is still unsure;

In delay there lies no plenty;

Then come kiss me sweet and twenty,

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.   (II, iii)

*Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? (II, iii)

*He does it with better grace, but I do it more natural. (II, iii)

*She never told her love

But let concealment like a worm in the bud,

Feed on her damask cheek.  She pined in thought,

And with a green and yellow melancholy,

She sat like Patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief.  (II, iv)

*He hath been yonder in the sun practicing behavior to his own shadow. (II, v)

*Be not afraid of greatness: Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. (II, v)

*A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit.  How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward.  (III, i)

*Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere. (III, i)

*Out of my lean and low ability, I’ll lend you something. (III, iv)

*If music be the food of love, play on. (First line)

The very first line of Twelfth Night is associated in my mind with my college roommate, formerly The Very Miss Mary-Ellis Lacy, who has not lost her youthful sensibilities.(https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2012/06/the-very-miss-kiss-my-ass-girl/) Mary-Ellis grew up to be a Singer. In one of her celebrated performances she begins a song by Henry Purcell called “If music be the food of love, sing on” while lovingly caressing a box of See’s Candy.

Maybe youth has stuff that can endure.

A few weeks ago I decided I would allow myself only one news story to get upset about.  There isn’t enough time in my day to work myself into as many frenzies as I am capable of.  So I chose to Stand with the Sisters, the nuns who are bearing up with such grace under the bishops’ unseemly prosecution of them.  The bishops are all men who have probably not even spoken to a woman in 50 years.

When I decided to begin reading the entire works of Shakespeare, my preoccupation with the nun story shrunk to pre-Internet, if not bucolic standards.  Then we got the announcement that there would be an announcement about the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act hereafter known as the Obama Cares Act.  I had been dreading the day that the ruling was to come down.  Last Thursday morning I didn’t want to open the computer at all-didn’t even want to get out of bed- but I have a responsibility to my Scrabble partners.

When I got on Facebook to play Scrabble, I saw the post of a friend who shall go unnamed because she guards her FB privacy in ways that I don’t pretend to understand so I’d best take no chances.  The post said, “We can have our broccoli and eat it, too.”

“Oh my god!” I thought. “I don’t believe it!” I raced to the New York Times to read the full story.  I was stunned.  The Supreme Court upheld the A.C.A. pretty much as it was written.

In case you don’t know, the broccoli comment was an allusion to Antonin Scalia’s famously fatuous argument against the individual mandate in the A.C.A, the bit where all Americans are required to have health insurance just like all drivers must have car insurance:

“Can the federal government make you buy broccoli?” he asked.

What is it with these guys and broccoli anyway? George Bush maligned it, and Scalia is afraid he might be forced to have it in his grocery bag, hobnobbing with the lemons he must regularly eat.

In any case, this country has finally taken a step toward doing something about our abysmal health care situation and a lot of us feel relieved.  That relief would have kept me afloat all day on Thursday but there was a comic short to accompany the major feature.  Shortly after the ruling came down, Facebook and Twitter exploded with the outrage of people who were not happy with the ruling.  They were, en masse it seemed, all non-ironically moving to Canada to get away from this stupid, socialist country.  Canada. Which has had publicly funded medical care since 1966.

Now that I’ve gotten all that out of my system, I’ll get to my larger point, something I’ve been thinking about as I’ve listened to people expressing their opinions about the law.  To some folks, it’s signaling the end of the world: Obama is finished. The Dems will never get back the house after this. This law now guarantees a nanny state.  It will bankrupt us.  I don’t want to have to pay for your contraception.  From other perspectives: Finally I can get some decent insurance. The Constitution, the States, and the People won!  Yay for America!

What struck me was how certain we all are of what we think this ruling will mean for us as individuals, for our state, for the country, for our standing in the world.  We are all. so. sure.   Guarantees are what we go looking for when the anxiety is overwhelming.  We’ve never done anything quite like this in our country so it’s uncharted territory. Adam Philips who I like to read when I think the world is coming to an end, says we are all experts when it comes to experiences we haven’t had.

Up until now, with such expensive but lousy insurance as I’ve had, I have known I was screwed. This health care ruling signals an experience I haven’t had.  There’s a long way to go before all the wrinkles are ironed out and the country actually experience any changes, good or bad.  Meantime I am optimistic.  Now excuse me, I’ve got broccoli on the stove.

I’m not sure I even realized that Shakespeare wrote a play called Henry V let alone that I would like it.  Harold Bloom (my stuffy discussant) had very little to say about it other than Falstaff isn’t in it.  He seems to judge every character by Falstaff or Hamlet.  I get it: they’re transcendent characters.  Move on.

Here are a few of this plays’ famous lines:

“Once more into the breach!”

“The game’s a-foot.”

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

“Every subject’s duty is the king’s but every subject’s soul is his own.”   (I don’t know if that’s famous, but I liked it)

At the beginning of Act III, the chorus tells us to “eke out our performance with your mind.”  I read that as a post-modern woman.  I take it as an invitation to free-associate.  And here I go:

For starters, the first lines of Henry V took my breath away:

O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention;

A kingdom for a stage. . .

When a play references the fact that the story is played out on a stage, I used to think, “Well, duh, that’s why I had a ticket.”  But there’s something comforting about thinking of life as an under-rehearsed production.  Community theater with real people flubbing their lines and improvising.

Then I got excited when I realized this play is about the battle of Agincourt which I am happy to announce that I have learned to pronounce correctly after mispronouncing it for years.  It’s “ajin-cor,” not “agin-court.”  As a collector of songs I have known about “The Agincourt Carol,” written in the 15^th century to recount the 1415 battle of Agincourt.  It’s one of the oldest recorded songs in western music.  And by recorded I mean written down on paper, not put on a CD in someone’s basement studio.

It’s been tarted up with rhythm, meter and hymn texts like “A Hymn of Glory Let Us Sing” by the Venerable Bede. (The Venerable Bede.  I can’t believe we give people titles like this. It’s like conferring a Master of Divinity, as if theologians aren’t arrogant enough.) I always get a little frisson when I hear a hymn sung to this ancient (albeit tarted-up) melody.  It’s a thread back to the past, connecting me with generations of other under-rehearsed productions.

They don’t sing “The Agincourt Carol” in Kenneth Branagh’s exuberant film of Henry V.  Instead, as they are picking up their dead at the end of the battle they sing a contemporary choral piece by Patrick Doyle called “Non Nobis Domine” which was so moving, I played it over and over and just wept.  The OK Chorale is so doing this piece fall quarter.  I’ve already ordered the music.

Picking up their dead.  War is just so damn stupid.  I surprise myself when a movie like Greatheart gets me excited.  I mean throbbing excited.  This play, Henry V, about the muddy, bloody battle of Agincourt which the English won against the superior French forces moved me; and I found that disturbing. Henry’s speech, the St Crispian Day speech, just before the battle is so full of longing, pride, anticipation, and hope that I wanted to punch the air and yell.  I wondered how I could get so excited about a war pep-talk when war is so stupid.  I concluded that war is a displacement of something else, something that’s not stupid at all, something so precious we would kill for it.

In his book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges says, “In the beginning war looks and feels like love.  But unlike love, it gives nothing in return but an ever deepening dependence.”  He also says that we will never find our purpose through war:  “We will never discover who we are.  We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence.”

That war gives some purpose to life is certainly a sobering indictment.  Confronting our capacity for violence and understanding the emptiness we try to fill with war is a script that needs lots more rehearsal time.

Now that everyone is talking pretty freely about vaginas these days, I trust no one will mind if today’s subject is bras.  I hate them.  I have been measured and prodded and fitted for them at least ten times.  In 45 years of wearing bras, there was one that was comfortable once for five minutes in a Nordstrom fitting room as long as I didn’t move.  And one that I bought from a special bra-making factory that was okay until I washed it.

My friend Nina (rhymes with Dinah) has a riff about how if you don’t mind how it looks you can get a halfway comfortable sports bra but then you get this sausage effect across the front of your chest, or the “Una-boob.”  There isn’t an innovative solution for bra discomfort.  It’s not like the girdle which was replaced by garter belts, then pantyhose and finally no hose at all except the little footies we try to hide in certain kinds of shoes or the knee highs we think no one can see when we cross our legs under our long skirts.

Girdles were just stupid.  When I am out and about signing my book which if you’ve been out of the country is called 99 Girdles on the Wall (buy it here: https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/99-girdles/ ), I get into lots of conversations with women who remember girdles.  When I try to explain girdles to younger women, I emphasize that if you could actually wear a girdle with any degree of comfort, you didn’t need one as you had no fat on your body.  If you needed one –like anyone really needed one—which meant you didn’t have the requisite 36-24-36 figure–then you couldn’t wear one. (In those days we didn’t have bodies, we had figures, except that some of us just had bodies.) All a girdle did was squish the fat into the armpits or necks and only one person was fooled.

Some women can go without bras just fine.  But for a lot of us going without amounts to floppiness or pain or both.  So I spend my days adjusting my bra and taking it off the minute I have an hour of alone time.  I hate to think how someone might imitate me in a game of Charades: as someone talking to herself and pulling at her bra.  Nice.

Bra fitters have, I think, a different frame of reference than I do.  For one thing they keep talking about breast tissue. They reach in there, yammering about fitting the breast tissue to the bra cup.  I expect them to run out of the room and push a button as soon as the breast tissue gets settled in the cup. It seems to me that a bra ought to be built to fit the breast and then we could just not talk about it at all.

A bra fitter will not let you out of the store in a bra that you could slide a dime under.  They measure you, and then come back with bras four inches tighter than you would ever consider wearing.  It becomes a war of wills.

“I want something looser,” I said the last time I put myself through this.

“No.  It needs to be snug since you won’t wear the underwires.”

“OK, well I think I won’t buy one today.”

The fitter narrowed her eyes at me. “Wait just a minute.”

She came back before I had time to get dressed, grab my purse and run out of the lingerie section.

“Try this one.”

She showed me a bra with three rows of eyes to hook onto.

“This is the row you’ll hook up most days.  By the end of the day you might hook up this middle row.  On days you’re feeling bloated you use the last row.”

I bought the bra.  I hook one hook onto one eye on the last row of hooks.  You can see it pulling out of line, a hook after my own heart.  I figure that when it comes out completely I have three more to go through before I have to buy another bra.

Hook out of line.

In which I begin to cobble together what literary flotsam I do possess and attempt to read the entire works of William Shakespeare.

It’s summer.  People are talking about their summer reading lists.  Here’s what happened to me: I loved Stephen Greenblatt’s book The Swerve.( https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2012/05/swerving-and-centering/) It  led me to dust off his Will in the World.  Then I took a look at my copy of Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human which had belonged to my father and which I have held back from my annual yard sale for ten years because I thought I might one day read it.  Bloom is a little stuffy, a little too enamored of his opinions; but I’m the same way so I’ll suffer him as a reference.  In any case, somewhere in all this stuffy dusting, I decided I would read the entire Shakespeare canon using an eight-volume Folio edition of the plays with large print and smooth clean pages, another legacy from my father.

I feel like I am announcing the start of a diet and I’ll be embarrassed if I don’t follow through, but here is the plan:  I will read a little every day even if that means only fifteen minutes. I’ve got a notebook to record all the famous bits and all the parts I especially like.  It’s my impression that a Shakespeare play is one long train of well-known phrases.  I hope that these phrases will function like a treasure hunt to get me through the more obfuscating parts.

And so I have commenced.  Commenceth.

I began with The Life and Death of King John I.  Two pages in, I had no idea what I had just read.  I started over and read it out loud.  It’s hard going from David Sedaris and murder mysteries to Shakespearean English.  Even my friend Nancy who can tell me every time I have deconstructed a thought and who teaches English, told me that it takes her a few pages before she sinks into the language.  I wonder if she’s reading one of those editions where the print is so small that a few pages are almost an entire play.

I decided I would skip King John for now and read Richard II because I had studied that play in college.  It was reasonably familiar and there were patches I had memorized.  Then I discovered that if I watched a BBC production of the play with the sub-titles on, that was better than reading it from a book and the visuals helped enormously.

On to Henry IV Parts I and II, which I had seen at Stratford in 1977.  Like that was going to help.  All I remember is where I was sitting in the theatre.  I decided the Folio edition presumed too much about a reader’s ability so I got out my old Pelican edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare crammed into one volume.  Even though the print is miniscule, I need those comforting little footnotes.  I slogged through Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, the result being mostly confusion.  I watched the BBC movie.  The actors’ inflections helped not only with the meaning of the lines but they also pulled me into a rhythm where I started to feel fluent.

It’s beginning to feel fun.  Maybe I’ll get to where I don’t actually need the help of the BBC.

Did you know that these (now famous) expressions come from Henry IV Parts One and Two:

*The better part of valour is discretion

*Sink or swim

*He hath eaten me out of house and home

Here’s some of my literary flotsam:  In Part One, Hotspur has a line “A plague upon it! I have forgot the map.”  Later in the play he says:

O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long,
If life did ride upon a dial’s point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.

The poet, Lisa Fishman has a poem (which I love) called:

“I have forgot the map”—Hotspur

Too quickly the fields unfolded

in the mind at the end of the palm

on the map in the lines of the palm

O gentlemen

if life did ride upon a dial’s point

the name would not be a map

the map could not be refolded

there would be no map to forget

Discuss.

And if you don’t hear any more about my Shakespeare Project, just assume I am reading fifteen minutes a day and I hope to finish before the dial’s point arrives at the hour.

Last week before the lilac fell and Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything, brought her chain saw over to lay waste both to the tree and to any fragments of male chauvinism in this neighborhood of powerful women, I had written a series of politicizing, sermonizing, sarcasmizing blogs posts which prompted my friend Mary-Ellis to complain.  Maybe complain is too strong a word.  She politely inquired, “When are you gonna blog about something funny, or ordinary, or ordinary and funny which you’re so good at?” by which I gather she meant stuff like how much time I waste on Facebook or about finding cat hairs in the cream pitcher or how the cat vomited a hairball on me in the middle of the night.  I could write a post about that but there’s nothing more to say except that the cat vomited a hairball on me in the middle of the night.  In any case, one should be careful about wishes:

When we were at Whitman College my friend acquired the title of “The Very Miss Mary-Ellis Lacy.”  I believe this came about because she had a Junior League demeanor belied by frequent eruptions into the girl-energy of a fifth grader at camp.  I loved this about her.  She projected calm and maturity making the contrast so much starker when she jumped on a table and belted “I ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” in a spot-on Elvis impersonation complete with jousting knees and rotating hips.

We sometimes called her “Mellis” for short.  There was one friend, Kurt, who, impervious to how much she disliked it, called her “Smell.”   But Kurt put a cow pie in my crock-pot.  I found it when I set out to make split pea soup one fall.  That was Kurt.  You couldn’t control him.

When I stayed with Mary-Ellis at her childhood home in southern California the year we graduated, I found the progenitor of that junior league demeanor.  We rolled out of bed and in our pajamas with our hair sticking to our heads, encountered The Mater, Mary-Paul, at the breakfast table.  She presided impeccably over the formal coffee service and counseled us about our plans for each day.

“Mary-Paul’s titillating tours,” Mary-Ellis murmured on our way out the door our first morning.

We were so young, just the word titillating made us snicker.

On that particular visit, we headed out to Palm desert, bought date shakes at Hadleys, and found Elvis Presley’s house.  And you guessed it, we roared past bellowing “You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound-dog.”

That was a fun trip.  I drove to California from Walla Walla with two other classmates, Gail and a guy we called Mr. Perfect.  Mr. Perfect told us that the center crack in the pavement of I-5 was the San Andreas fault.  We were so young, we believed him.  We dropped Mr. Perfect off in the Bay area and continued to southern California for Hadleys date shakes and Mary-Paul’s titillating tours.

Mary-Ellis moved to San Francisco the next year for a job at the St Francis hotel. She and I explored San Francisco by bus during my many visits to her.  Off the top of my head: the Sutro baths, Haight-Ashbury, Golden Gate Park, Golden Gate bridge,the Castro district, Ghiradelli Square, Fisherman’s Wharf, Union Square, North Beach, Lombard St, Chinatown, the Presidio, Telegraph Hill, Barbary Lane, Gumps.  We were so young we went into Gumps primarily to snicker at the name of the store.  We could afford to buy anything. Mary-Ellis took me to an exotic coffee shop near Union Square called the Caravansery.  In those days, coffee shops were not at all common and I thought my friend was the most adventurous person I had ever known.

Mary-Ellis lived in an apartment building owned and managed by two elderly ladies who were clearly suffering from dementia.  They would leave the building, get confused and lost, and show up hours later in a taxi, uncertain of what had happened.  More than once Mary-Ellis bailed them out of some scrape, made phone calls to their families, paid off taxis.  We called them the Minkies.  We were so young we could shriek with laughter at the situation.

Mary-Ellis had an Aunt Maudie who I met on one visit.  She told me a story about a little girl in the family, maybe three years old, who was observed one day sitting at the piano in her little pink dress, playing piano keys with her fat little fingers and warbling away in free-association about something, making up the song as she went along.  When Maudie got close enough to hear the lyrics, she heard, “kiss my ass, kiss my ass.”

Mary-Ellis swears the story wasn’t about her. Fair enough. But that little Junior League Wanna Be in her pink dress was the muse and the spirit of my friend, the Very Miss Mary Ellis Lacy.

It started out to be a quiet Monday morning with sunshine, a bright blue sky, and the promise of 70 degrees.  I was up early, reading in my sun room, stopping occasionally to look at the downed lilac tree that had keeled over from its roots during a wind storm a few days ago. I happened to witness its dramatic fall.  When I went out to inspect, the cats followed.  They marked the tree and proprietorially stationed themselves around it. It had indeed taken its curtain call. But a group of lilacs was still standing, disoriented without their senior member.  One tree in particular seemed to be attempting to breed with the mock orange to the east.  Several others looked like they were about to hop the twig.

I live across the alley from celebrity gardeners, John and Cass Turnbull.  (http://www.plantamnesty.org/ABOUT/about.aspx) That evening I asked John to take a squint at the tree.

“That’s what lilacs do,” he said. “It’s an old tree.  What are you going to do with it?”

“Gwen wants to come over with her chain saw.”

That would be Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything.

John grinned.  Everyone in these parts knows Gwen.

“Well if she needs some help, let me know.”

Gwen was in my yard the next morning inspecting (but not marking) the tree when John was preparing his gardening truck to leave for points east.  He leaned against the fence.

“I’ll cut it up for you this afternoon,” he told us expansively.  “It’s Man’s work.”  I guess you could say that, in a sense, he marked it.

The air around Gwen began to displace in waves.  I could sense it although there was nothing in her Welsh face or Wisconsin demeanor to foreshadow the fury of the next hour.  I went into the house to rescue a whistling teakettle.  Five minutes later I heard snapping and whisking and cursing.  Actually I didn’t hear the cursing.  Curse words were understood to be trapped in the waves of indignation around Gwen.  I looked out the window while wrapping an ace bandage around my foot since I seemed to have pulled something near the toe.  There was Gwen with a pruning saw and a long-handled pruner.  She was energetically loping off branches and pulling them through the weave of the lilac and the mock orange.

I crammed the sprained foot into a shoe and hopped out the sun room door. “Gwen, you’re cutting the mock orange,” I said.

“Can’t be helped. It’s in the way.”

I have to say I was little shocked at her tone.  I looked around the yard.  Branches and bunches were growing in heaps.

“What can I do?” I asked.  I didn’t want to do anything.  I had this broken foot, you see.

“This is the first branch that needs to go.” She patted one.  “They all look to be dying but this is the most unstable. Here why don’t you start sawing? NO! Not that side!  It’ll come loose and snap you right in the head.”  (She didn’t add, “you big fool.”)

“Can’t we just . . .”

“No. Here, give me that. Now pull it this way while I saw. Fulcrum and pivots, fulcrum and pivots.  Make your life easier.” I swear that is exactly what she said because as soon as we got that branch down I hopped into the house and wrote it down.  Then later in the day I looked up the word fulcrum.

“Girls have to think,” she said. “Boys muscle.”

“Can I take pictures of this?”

“No,” she said. “No photos.”  Again: tone.

“Can I blog about it?”  Like I have ever asked her permission before and how many of you have heard me mention my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything?

“Yes you can blog about your neighbor who will not be photographed.”

We worked at the unstable trees branch by branch.  Gwen analyzed their positions and size, and barked out orders while I whined about my foot, the heat, and how I had to be someplace at noon.

I left for my Yoga for Over 50’s class.  I would have skipped it altogether but I missed it last week because Putzer the attorney was in town and I thought it was more important to take her to Archee McPhees.  I got back from class to find Gwen hauling a jaw horse through my front gate.

“If you will just move those branches off the tree on the ground, I can start cutting,” she said.  “I’ll need an electric cord.”

For the next hour she cut up the old spent lilac, figuring out the best ways to prop up each hunk of wood so as to cut it safely.  I approximated a continuation of all the forward bends I had done in yoga and picked up the pieces of wood.

“John really got under your skin, didn’t he?”  I asked when I handed her a double Jameson in the cool of the house.

“He probably wasn’t going to do it anyway,” she said.  “He was posturing.”

Here was one of the definitions for fulcrum: “one that supplies capability for action.” That would be Gwen.  Makes my life easier.

“I have no interest in being constantly catered to or forcing my beliefs on others,” confesses a former conservative. Recently I found my way to his web site via a blog post called “Things I Can’t Do Anymore.” http://formerconservative.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/things-i-cant-do-anymore/

One of the things this particular individual can’t do anymore is feel a sense of entitlement.  That’s not something I hear very often.  When I track the battles of the Entitlement Factions in this country I think of the exhausting, high-maintenance people who show up at family holidays or who highjack other people’s parties. https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/10/the-harp-that-hijacked-a-party/

It was the word catered in the above quote that caught me, having, as it does, an association with food. It took me back to childhood meals when my mother was the center of attention.  She controlled the conversation even when the rest of us sat in the dining room and she was in the kitchen rescuing her Parker House rolls from the oven.  She carried on a (full voiced) monologue of her own without reference to the conversation in the dining room.

Back at the table she interrupted whoever was speaking in order to introduce her rolls which were a bit brown around the edges but most of them turned out all right there’s butter and jam —Elena what did you do with the raspberry jam?–oh here it is now where were we?  Everyone dutifully took a Parker House roll, passed the basket to his neighbor and waited for my mother to introduce her next topic.

The lull pushed her into a supervisory position: “Elena aren’t you eating any peas? Mrs.Snodgrass can I pass you the gravy oh you don’t?  Dad here’s the potatoes why is no one eating the salad did I forget the dressing?”

No. Mom. The reason no one is eating the salad is because currently no one wants to.  People are eating what they want to eat.  It’s not about you.

That’s what I want to say to groups of people who privilege their own entitlements and prescribe the country’s beliefs and activities: It’s not about you. You can want what you want for yourselves, but that’s it. You don’t get to force feed the rest of us your salad and dressing.  There’s nothing more exhausting than to be around someone who can only get what she wants by making everyone else do what she wants.

I once spend two interminable weeks with a family whose main entertainment was parsing what and wasn’t sin and how to make something that seemed like sin be something that technically wasn’t so they could commit it with impunity.  The woman was reading a book that was going to tell her, me, and everyone else in the world if it was a sin for Christians to drink alcohol.

In those days I didn’t say things like, “Go ahead and commit the sin and go to hell.  It couldn’t be any worse than what you’ve got going on here.”

We’ve got people whining they can’t have their crèches in public places. Meanwhile someone else complains that the people in her office are all talking about what they are giving up for lent and they aren’t even Christians.  Lent doesn’t mean anything to them.  Evangelicals say they are discriminated against in college classrooms.  Everyone is someone’s victim.

These are worthless preoccupations and alienating pronouncements.  But I expect people have always been this way. It’s just that in the past it was confined to the dining room and one could ultimately get away from it by going to college (a private liberal arts one like Whitman College in Walla Walla). Human beings are never going to feel, think, or behave in a unity of spirit. No one is going to get everything she wants.  Kindness matters.  And not sucking the life out of holidays.

“I am sorry– the middle of my sentence interrupted the beginning of yours.” A quote from my friend Jim.

Conversation with friends is near the top of my list of life’s pleasures.  Even when topics get heated, there’s humor and a reasonable confidence that I am still loved. And since I live in the Scandinavia occupied Pacific Northwest, there’s the distanced politeness that east coast transplants complain about. So I am taken aback when I read ungrammatical, badly punctuated and vituperative if not downright obscene comments on web sites.

Nothing gets people screaming at each other faster than religion.  I can only speak for myself when I speculate why this is.  I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home that was powered by fear and craziness (if you’re new here, you can read all about it in: 99 Girdles on the Wall, which, thanks to my witty friend Susan, has been newly copy-edited to within an inch of its life. https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/99-girdles/ ) It took nearly 25 years to soften a simplistic code of Right and Wrong into a brain wired to cope with the nuance and ambivalence in life.

Recently Marilyn, a new enough friend that for now she can be Marilyn, the untagged, courageously examined some reasons that, as she put it, she doesn’t “want people to speak while I’m interrupting.” http://communicatingacrossboundariesblog.com/2012/05/17/dont-speak-while-im-interrupting-thoughts-on-faith-dialogue/.

I found some of her reasons poignant: “Fear that my faith, this faith that is the foundation of my life, will be found wanting.”

I don’t know much about my new friend’s world, but in any case, I can only respond from mine.  As a music teacher I sometimes get parents who ask me, “Is she practicing enough?”

My response is, “For whom?”

Is she practicing enough for me, the teacher?  Answer: Irrelevant.

Is she practicing enough for you, the parent?  This begs more questions: Is this about feeling like a good enough parent? Is this about getting your money’s worth out of your daughter’s lessons?  Are you comparing your child’s progress to someone else’s? Answer to all: Not my area of expertise.

Is she practicing enough for herself? Answer:  If she is playing the piano enough that she enjoys the process of learning, isn’t worried about doing it wrong, is curious about music and can anticipate pleasure and challenge in making music in the future, then she’s practicing enough.  Let that be the foundation of her music training.

So to Marilyn’s question, I could ask, “Wanting for whom?”  This isn’t about what anyone else thinks, feels or wants.  It isn’t about what’s right or wrong for anyone but you.

This poses a problem for fundamentalist thinking—and we all do it–and brings in another reason my friend gave for why she doesn’t want people to speak while she’s interrupting: “fear that I will not have a defense.”  A lot of us feel this way when we get outside our thought communities.  But why should anyone have to defend their faith any more than why they suck the chocolate off peanut M and M’s and spit out the peanut?  Not that anyone I know does that.

To allow that someone else has different idiosyncrasies, conceptualizations, experiences, and emphases is to recognize her subjectivity.  If one believes that “God” is the Life that permeates the universe then every different being, thought, and thing is a part of the whole.  To disallow the logic of another person’s mind is to suggest that one can fathom all of life including the whole of the unseen, the ineffable, the numinous.

Humility is one of the least understood and least practiced qualities in society. Cultivating a sense of another person’s subjectivity can transport one into the peace of humility: Here is another human being who has his own compendium of experiences, memories, desire, fears, goodness, rage, sadness, and humor with a life that has cultivated and made meaning of those qualities and energies.

This person is not me.

Namaste.