Monthly Archives: February 2013

I’m Feeling Honky…

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Canada Geese flying over the Atlantic coast, New Jersey, USA. From Wikimedia Commons.

HONK IF YOU LOVE GEESES!

All week, I’ve had that ominous feeling that I need to be somewhere, doing something, achieving, excelling, exceeding, exciting…and I’m not. The rush of the river, the crazy dreams, the ennui for college. BLARGH!!!

The voice in my head (singular!) is telling me that I need to be DOING GREAT THINGS but the voice that comes out of my kid tells me that I need to be finding some oyster crackers for snack and hey this milk smells funny. The voice in my heart shouts “SOAR!” but the voice in my checkbook says, “Get back to work, slack ass!”

Maybe this is what animals feel when it’s time to migrate. Whether it’s the length of the daylight or smells on the wind or the variance of the magnetic fields of the earth, something tells that bird that it’s time to GO. Something also tells that bird to STOP. That they have found a safe place, they will be warm for the winter, there will be enough food for everyone. Stop your honking and RELAX, forcrissakes.

When I get like this, I read Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” out loud to myself until I can hear the world “announcing my place in the family of things.” Read this out loud to yourself today, even if it’s mumbled under your breath behind a cubicle wall.

Wild Geese

~ Mary Oliver ~

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The River at Night

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“A Moonlit Scene with a Winding River” by Samuel Palmer. Watercolor, circa 1827

The river is running high tonight, in such a swirling rush that I can hear it from the deck. When it gets this swollen, after many days of rain, it can jump the bank and come all the way up to my fence. It’s no worry to me, way up on this hill, but when the water comes all the way to the fence, it blocks the path of the coyotes who sneak through our backyards. It blocks the urban deer, too, but they don’t complain. On a few nights like this, I’ve heard the urgent, confused yipping of the coyotes and it shudders my skin. A wild thing that had been invisible and hard to imagine so close to my home–and suddenly, it’s right here and it’s always been here. That’s the kind of thing I think about when the river runs high. The quiet things that reveal themselves, shaken loose by the ominous roar and rush of the river.

I don’t know if you’ve heard about Tripp Halstead but his mother is on my mind tonight. Tripp was hit by a falling tree branch back in October and he’s been fighting his way back to life since then. He’s two. Like Carlos, who’s asleep in his bed with Boop right now. Tonight, his mother, Stacy Halstead, posted about how she can’t turn on the news because all they talk about is the rain and the trees that are falling from loosened roots. She’s been without the internet to distract her while she listens to her only child moan in pain. She mentioned the claustrophobia of passing the day in an 8 x 8 darkened room–and BAM, I was back there, in the end of February 2005.

I spent a lot of days sitting in a darkened room. Richard was suffering incapacitating headaches and any amount of light drove him out of his mind. I honestly can’t remember what was causing them (apart from the cancer); it embarrasses me to admit that I don’t remember that detail, like I wasn’t really doing my best, like I have let down my guard and forgotten something, even something terrible. But it’s OK to forget some things.

After about a week of the headaches, they started giving him radiation to his brain and it helped some. But before that, there was the room. We were staying at the guest house on the campus at Johns Hopkins and I was taking care of him. I hung blankets over our one window and didn’t turn on the bathroom light until I was inside. He wore sunglasses in the dark and tried not to move at all. I couldn’t touch him or sit on the same bed for fear of jarring his brain around. I sat in the dark around the clock. I’ve never felt so helpless and now that I’ve typed that I need to stop and cry for a bit.

Because here’s the other thing that shook loose tonight. My friend, Catie, shared a quote from Jack Kerouac:

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

Those misery-filled days in late February? When I was sitting so still and helpless in that darkened room? I was reading On the Road. I had a tiny book light that I kept pointed down the page and I barely cracked the book open so the light wouldn’t escape to bother Richard. I read it if he slept. Sometimes I read it under a towel. When Richard wasn’t able to sleep but he wanted some oblivion, he would ask me to talk, to keep telling stories to distract him from what was happening. I just kept talking. I told him all about the book and Neal Cassady and the road trip and everything I could remember about the Beats and San Francisco and….anything. I talked about hubcaps and chickens and Irish wolfhounds and sewing. I recalled adventures we had had on our own travels. Anything that popped into my head (except food, no talking about food, and no making him laugh). I was mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of just one impossible thing.

I read to him from the book. This man, this fearless man who had taught me how to step out into the world and follow my own star. I sat across from him as he was dying and read On the Road.

These are the things I remember when the river runs high.

Spiro, Hugh and Old Phi Mu

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“Hey, girl…I want to throw eggs at you.”

Our cable and internet went out last night–AT THE SAME TIME, Y’ALL. I had to fill the time somehow, so I talked to my children. I played video games. I thought about exercising. I thought about cleaning the house. I read a book. I went to bed at 9pm. My body just isn’t used to getting that much sleep and that led to some strange STRANGE dreams:

Dream #1

I was a camp counselor at a summer camp in the Berkshires sometime in the 1950s. My nemesis among the boy counselors was Spiro Agnew. How do I know this? Because the only snippet from the dream that I remembered was me shaking my fist at him from the window of the camp bus as I shouted, “Spiro Agnew, suck my left tit!” What had he done to deserve this kind of abuse? I can’t even begin to imagine. I woke up long enough to hear the rain on the roof, check the clock (2am) and go right back to sleep.

Dream #2

Hugh Laurie and I went on a madcap, cross-country road trip that ended with us throwing raw eggs at each other in the rain and LOVING IT. He’s a charmer. You just have to get to know him. I also remember some bowling. I don’t think this dream even woke me up because we were having so much fun!

Dream #3

I was going to ABAC to visit my friend, Marie Davis, for lunch. I arrived really early (like 3am), so I went to the alumni house to hang out. Am I an alumna of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College? No. Have I ever been there? No more than I have been to summer camp with Spiro. I fixed myself a mug of hot water (???) and dozed on the couch. I watched the Today show. Other people started coming downstairs and I began to suspect that I was not in the alumni house–I hadn’t even known there were people sleeping upstairs. They all put on white culottes with bib overall tops and went out in the backyard for some group calisthenics, Chairman Mao style. I checked out the photo collages on the wall and discovered that I was hanging out in the Phi Mu house, not the alumni house. I woke up. Five minutes before my alarm.

This is why we have the internet, kids. To save us from our dreams.

The Day After the Weekend

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Going Home

This was a good weekend.

Big things happened. Small things happened. We had glitter and balloons and cupcakes and tooth fairies and horses and pirates and knights and a cat who lives in a library. Superhero capes made out of pink sleeping bags. Fresh blackberries as big as my thumb. Sneaking cups of wine in a dorm room with women who have been my friends for more than half my life. A quiet blue heron sailing over a heart-shaped lake. Teaching my girls to hold their hands flat when offering fresh spring grass to the velvety lips of a horse.

I took my girls back to Wesleyan College for a mother/daughter weekend. Taking your children back to a place where you learned to be an adult is a strange rabbit hole of a time warp. Having to yell, “Don’t forget to wipe, flush and wash your hands!” down the same dorm hallway where I had to yell “Man on the HAAAALLLLLLL!” in 1988 is disconcerting.

Wesleyan is the place where I made an intentional decision to call myself a “woman” instead of a “girl” in the fall of 1989. Actually, the term was forced upon me. I had taken a position as an RA in the freshman dorm–3rd floor Persons, where we ALL KNEW they put the wild girls. We RAs came to campus a week early to learn the ropes of being part of the student life team. Our boss informed us that we were to refer to our residents as women, not girls, as a way of helping them make the transition from thinking of themselves as children to thinking of themselves as responsible adults. Okaaaaaaaay.

It was awkward at first. As a Southerner, I was used to three ages of womanhood: girl, lady, little old lady. It seemed like calling someone a “woman” was too abrupt or rude, robbing them of the ladyhood honorific. Like I was acknowledging only their age, not their manners, social standing, comportment….oh. It’s as if we were supposed to acknowledge these gi–women purely removed from all assessment of their ladylike behavior. Huh. Go figure. It felt like I was putting on a mask when I called myself a woman. About as convincing as when I put a towel on my head and called myself Cher. But it WORKED. Over the course of that senior year, I started thinking of myself as a woman because I called myself a woman. It’s like the difference between being alone and being on my own.

I can still be a lady, or a girl or a little old lady while I am being a woman. Just this weekend, I have been the tooth fairy, a mom, an alumna, a friend, a mentor, an official, a darling dear, a booster, a donor–all parts of being a woman.

It was the kind of weekend that will take me at least until Wednesday at lunch to sort out, but here I am on Monday. I feel like I am walking around with my head floating just above my shoulders, like a balloon losing its helium. My head will catch up and settle itself down into the rest of me. But it might be Wednesday before that happens.

Sometimes, You Just Gotta Say, “What the Huck!”

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“In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.”–W. H. Auden

Oh, Huck. Huckleberry. Huck L. Berry, Esquire. Huckabuckabucka. Hucklebeezer. Beezypeezy. Beezer. Chuckleberry. Huckleberry Finn. M’Boy.

Dear readers, if you are asking yourself what breed of dog this fine specimen is, he is a Greater Pike Hound. That’s because he’s from Pike County, Georgia and he’s kind of big (as compared to the Lesser Pike Hound). We made that up.

I adopted him from my dad’s vet clinic. The staff pounced on me while I was in a weakened state–just having held my dachshund Katie while she got “the pink shot.” Katie had been foisted on me three years earlier when Daddy called and said, “I’ve got this dachshund that some people abandoned because they didn’t want to pay the bill. She’s got all kinds of heart problems, probably won’t live more than six weeks.” I took her in as a hospice dog. That dog lived for THREE fart-filled silly years. One night, she was up under the covers in my bed (with the other two dachsies) and I said, “Dang it Katie, if I had wanted all this farting and snoring, I would have stayed married!” Katie lived a long full life and on her last day, Daddy’s assistant comes up to me and says, “Ohhhhh….you should go look at that dog we have in the kennel. Cute puppy.”

The kennel was ahowl with dogs and I made my way slowly down the row, saying hello to each guest and calling them by the names written on their kennel cards. In the next to the last run, I find a beautifully groomed collie, sitting calmly on her pallet with a welcoming expression in her golden eyes. Her card read “Free to a Good Home.” I should have stopped there and yelled, “SOLD!” but I made the mistake of looking in the last run. There sat a wiggly whitish dog, covered in red mange, skinned up nose pressed into the chain link, otter tail thumping on the concrete. His card says, “Free to a Good Home. TOWEL CHEWER.” Aw, maaaaaan.

I have a soft spot for the unadoptable ones. The hard luck cases. The scabbier, the better. I had had a good streak of dachshunds, but it was time for a big dog with a bit more bark and maybe some bite. My husband had died a year earlier and I thought I would feel safer if I had a big barking dog. My dachsies were plenty fierce, but they weren’t exactly intimidating. Daddy called them “Death from the ankles down.” So the towel chewer found a home.

It took me a while to name him. He was almost Cletus (after the Roman emperor and the guy on The Simpsons). He was almost Buster (but I decided to save that for a smaller dog, maybe a three-legged one). I wanted a literary allusion–what better choice than Huckleberry Finn, the orphan with a heart of gold and NO manners.

What day did I get him? April Fool’s Day. Of course.

After about a month, my brother-in-law said, “Huck’s starting to look like a real dog. No, what I mean is, Huck’s starting to look like somebody’s dog.” The mange was gone. He had filled out and his brittle coat was growing in thick thanks to a better diet. That was the day my nephew said, “I think Chuck likes me!” while patting him on the head and Huckleberry got his first nickname.

Huck is a big galoot of a dog and he doesn’t always fit in with the dainty pack of Yorkies, Italian Greyhounds, Schnoodles, and whippets in the rest of the family. He was like the big white eye of a hurricane of boiling dogs when I took him to my dad and stepmother’s house. He thundered through the boxwood hedges and thwacked his tail against the antiques. He was goofy, but welcome….until the day Huck killed Oprah.

It was the day before Thanksgiving and I needed to get to Atlanta for my first half-marathon. I didn’t have a key to the clinic so I went by Daddy’s house. They weren’t home, so I turned Huck out in the backyard and locked the gate. They’d be home soon and all would be fine. I didn’t know that Oprah, my stepmother’s favorite little hen, was free-ranging it that day. The next day at Thanksgiving dinner, my stepmother came up and whispered, “Huck killed Oprah.” Wahuh??? Oh. Ohhhhhhh. Errrrr. I felt so bad for poor Oprah and for my stepmother. I made a donation to Heifer International in Oprah’s memory. It was enough to buy a flock of chickens for a family in need. Huck’s never been back.

See that little white diamond on his head? That’s Huck’s lucky star.

He’s a sweet boy, really, he is. He has watched over both of my babies and would give G and me the stink eye if we let them fuss for too long. He hasn’t eaten a dog bed in years. He barks whenever a car pulls up then hushes. But he’s still a dog. Given the opportunity, he will sneak food off the kitchen counter. Like Tuesday, he ate half of a homemade red velvet cake and only a small part of the cardboard box it was in. And I guess he hasn’t learned from the Oprah incident because last weekend at the park he dove into the lake and started swimming after the geese. It was the first time in seven years I’ve seen him touch the water voluntarily. When it gets rainy, he digs holes under the fence and roams the neighborhood looking for other dogs. He’s made a new friend up the street and last week he dug a hole INTO their backyard.

Life with Huck can be frustrating. Especially yesterday. We all woke up 40 minutes late because the baby had turned down the volume on my clock radio. Vivi refused to get dressed and was hiding under the coffee table. I looked around and NO HUCK in the den. No Huck on the deck. No Huck in the yard. WHAT THE HUCK. I jumped in the car, rolled the windows down and drove slowly up and down our street screaming, “HUUUUUUCK! HUCK! HUCKHUCKHUCK!!! HUUUUUUUUUCK!” It’s cathartic. But I was careful to enunciate. Very careful.

My friend’s dog is named Axel. Gotta be careful yelling that one, too.

Five Security Blankets I Keep In My Wallet

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Two blue green winkle shells from St Simons Island because they are pretty and only cost 50 cents. They remind me of a place I hold dear. I’ve had them for a year.
My kindergarten school picture. That was a great year in Mrs. Lemmon’s class…I learned to read, my right from left and how to tie my shoes! It reminds me of a time that I treasure. It’s 39 years old.
The deposit slip for my divorce settlement from Fartbuster. It was so hard to ask for that money as a token reimbursement for the three years I supported him during school. I spent most of it on travel and there were times I wanted to send him a postcard! It reminds me to insist on and fight for what I deserve. It’s been in there for 11 years.
Alphabet letters from a keychain that broke. My very wise friend goes by the initials HRCFS. Many of us rely on her counsel so when she left for a while we made keychains that said “WWHRCFSD?” to invoke her good advice. They make me feel a little smarter. I’ve carried these beads for a year.
A piece of my nephew’s security blanket, Poppy. This boy loved his Poppy with a devotion that most of us cannot fathom. To the rest of the world, Poppy was just an old rubberized sheet. But to my nephew, Poppy was the safest thing in the world. He held it to his cheek and sucked his thumb to fall asleep when he was a toddler. His parents lived in fear that Poppy might be lost, so Poppy was divided into sub-Poppies for school, car, washing, etc. One summer, we were at the beach together and the grownups had stayed up wayyyyy too late talking to Mr. John Liquor. The next morning, we went out blueberry picking in the stifling heat. We were all on edge and grumpy. Someone snapped at someone else and the car got tense. I turned to my nephew riding in the carseat next to me and said, “Don’t worry about it. The grownups are not feeling very well today.” A few seconds later, I feel his little hand tapping on my wrist. He held up a thin strip of Poppy to me that he had torn off his blanket. What a kindness! What generosity! I have carried Poppy in my wallet ever since and that kid is almost a teenager now. It reminds me that I am loved.

Did you have a security blanket when you were little? Do you still carry something that grounds you or reminds you that you are loved? That you are strong? That you deserve your fair share? That you are bright and full of promise? I hope so.

The Sugar Dish

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tal·is·man /ˈtalismən/

Noun. An object, typically an inscribed ring or stone, thought to have magic powers and to bring good luck. Synonyms: charm, amulet, mascot, phylactery*

This is the first talisman that I can remember identifying for myself: a yellow Tupperware creamer that my family used as a sugar dispenser. My mother noticed this one sitting on my kitchen counter last weekend and asked if it was the one from her house. “No, I found that one on eBay ” I explained. I didn’t explain WHY I was on eBay looking for an old Tupperware creamer, now did I?

When I was about 7 or 8, I was already old enough to know that money wasn’t an easy thing for our family. There were times when there wasn’t enough and that was just the way it was. One night while my parents were watching the evening news, I heard the anchorman foretelling some shock to the global economy that would send sugar prices sky-rocketing. SUGAR? I was old enough to understand that and know its value! I sidled into the kitchen and opened up the cabinet above the coffee maker. I took down the sugar dish and checked to make sure that it was full. It was. And that meant that we were OK. To this day, I can remember the weight of that full sugar dish in my small hand and the feeling of safety that crept through me. If sugar was expensive and we had plenty, we were OK.

I can’t remember what knocked that memory of the comforting sugar dish back into place. When eBay first took off, I took advantage of the opportunity to reclaim lost things from my childhood. I found an old aluminum cookie cutter shaped like a horse and another shaped like a bunny. I found a yellow sugar dish all my own. One Christmas, Fartbuster won me a 1946 edition of The Littlest Angel exactly like the version our Grandmother Eunice read to us when we spent the night with her. I bought a blue glass slipper like the one she used to hold her bobby pins.

I surrounded myself with things that made me feel safe and loved. That’s all a talisman is. There’s not magic inherent in it, only the magic you entrust to it.

What makes you feel safe? Shake the memory loose then go and find it again.

* A phylactery is the small leather box containing Hebrew texts on vellum, worn by Jewish men at morning prayer as a reminder to keep the law. I learned a new word today, how about you?

And In the Other Pocket…

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pocket coins While I am thinking about amulets, charms, and talismans this week, let me share the contents of my left coat pocket–22 Euro cents. I use these coins like worry stones; as I walk along, I rub them between my fingers, passing them one over the other and back again in a circle. The feel of them in my hand is relaxing and never fails to make me smile. If I were Greek, I might carry worry beads to calm myself into a meditative state with rhythmic clicking. If I were Hindu, I might wear a mala on my wrist to count prayers. Cultures and religions across the globe use prayer beads in one form or another to mark the rhythm of letting go, turning over or sinking in. We all need something to fiddle with.

Twenty two cents. That’s what I had left at the end of my last trip to Europe, the week in Paris on my own. Richard and I used to play a game at the end of a trip. We’d try to spend our cash down to the last penny so we weren’t left with any foreign money to take home as souvenirs or god forbid, exchange at Thomas Cook. I have a thimble from Munich, a bookmark from Prague, a postcard from Amsterdam. I once spent my last money on a breakfast banana in Berlin then forgot all about it until I was busted by the USDA beagle sniffer dog once we landed in Atlanta! I’m standing there minding my own business when I look down and the beagle has gone into a sit on the floor next to me and placed her delicate paw right on top of my trusty backpack! ACK!! I guess I’ve seen one too many episodes of “Locked Up Abroad.” I mean, let’s just say…that backpack had done a good bit of living…not “Midnight Express” or anything but y’know. A very serious customs agent escorted me to a plexiglass cubicle where I was directed to open my luggage and keep my hands in view. There sat the contraband banana, cleverly concealed on top of everything. I breathed a sigh of relief and asked, “Does the dog get to keep the banana?” (The answer is no.)

I was in Europe the very day the Euro became the official currency of the Eurozone. Shopkeepers grumbled at having to reprice everything and print new signs and they hated seeing us coming with our super-strong dollars (that was way back when!). The day the currency switched, we were traveling by train to Bruges in Belgium from Delft in the Netherlands, so I kept guilders in my front left pocket, francs in the right, euros in my jacket. It was New Years Day, so the restaurants and shops where we could have used a debit card were closed. It’s pretty frustrating to get crisp new euros out of an ATM only to find that the vending machines all still take the old coin. That explains why we had to make a meal in Ghent of leftover Christmas Hershey bars and two hot Cokes. Ugly Americans…bringing Hersheys to Belgium! It was a last resort. We had mussels and black beer for dinner to atone for the sin.

You can tell by the smooth edges of these coins that they’ve taken away many a worry for me. They’re both from France (the RF mark indicates that) and minted in 2005. I have one phrase that describes that time in my life and I stole it from a New Year’s shop window display in Paris: “Love 2006, F*ck 2005.”

But that’s just my two cents!

A Pocket Full of Luck

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It was cold enough to wear a coat today for my short walk from the parking lot to my office. When I pulled my right hand out of the pocket to press the crossing signal, a scrap of paper fluttered to the ground. Luckily, I saw it fall. As I snatched it up from the sidewalk (saying a little thank you that there was no wind), I felt my whole body tighten with panic at the idea that I might have lost my talisman that’s been in that pocket since January 2, 2006.

boarding pass

It’s just a boarding pass stub from an Air France flight from Charles de Gaulle to Atlanta. Economy class, seat 44G.

I’ve been other places since then and I’ve even shoved other boarding passes into the pocket of that coat. This one is special because it’s from the trip I took to Paris on my own to cap off the hardest year of my life. I keep it in my coat pocket to remind myself of who I can be–the woman who will not be defeated by sadness. The woman who will insist on adventure.

I really do believe that we make our own good luck, so most of my lucky charms are reminders to myself of great days or hard-won victories. When I decided to spend a week in Paris between Christmas and New Year’s of 2005, I heard a lot of “You’re going to Paris by yourself?” Yes. But I made a conscious effort to create the right energy around this trip by saying “I’m going to Paris on my own.” I hear “abandoned, bereft, left” when I think of “alone.” I hear “in charge of deciding what to do next” when I say “on my own.” I had had enough of being alone and was ready to try being on my own.

Richard and I had a tradition of taking a big adventure trip between Christmas and the New Year. The first year, we went to Amsterdam and Bruges. The next year, Salzburg and skiing in Innsbruck then on to Munich. The next year, the pink sands of Bermuda and snorkeling along coral reefs. The next year…the hospital. The next year, I was on my own. When the fall of 2005 rolled around, I was so full of resentment that I wouldn’t get to go on an adventure that year (or ever again, in the back of my mind). But eventually it dawned on me that I could go–I would just need to go in a different way so that I would feel safe and could enjoy myself. I wanted to reclaim ADVENTURE.

I chose Paris because I had been there before right after college and I spoke enough French to get by. It was also one of the few places in the world that Richard had NOT wanted to go, so I didn’t feel guilty that I was getting to do something and he was missing out. Instead of staying in the budget hotels that we usually chose, I reserved a room in a nicer hotel, with a concierge who spoke English and a Metro stop a block away. I thought my way through every point of the planning and I got a little bit excited. Even if I panicked once I got there and stayed in my hotel room, by god, it was a Parisian hotel!

My daddy drove me to the airport on Christmas night. Now that I have children of my own, I have some empathy for how he must have felt, dropping his widowed baby girl off at the airport to fly off by herself. On her own. He didn’t say a negative word. I got to my seat, took the last Valium I had been saving up, set my iPod to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (the version by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole) and went to sleep.

I woke up in Paris. On my own. Holy shit. My heart was pounding and that place behind my eyes was very twinkly. Under my breath, I chanted the mantra my college professor, Dr. Darlene Mettler had told me about travel: Be Deliberate. “Just get your bag. Get your bag. OK, now find a cab. Find a cab. Find a cab. Write out the address so you don’t have to pronounce all those vowels….Boulevard Hausmann.” I got a cab, settled into the backseat. The driver typed the address into his GPS (which spoke with a very sexy French accent) then turned on the radio. Guess what was playing? “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Yep. Where bluebirds fly.

I’ll tell the other stories some other day. I can’t say enough about how important it is for women to travel on their own. It was a great week. It wasn’t always a happy week, but it was a great week.

One day, I went to the Rue des Rosiers in the old Jewish Quarter to buy my friend a menorah as a gift. I had heard about a little Judaica shop called Diasporama. The name was too clever to pass up, so I ducked inside…hoping that I wouldn’t make a shiksa blunder. I tried out my French–“Je voudrais un ‘menorah’ pour un cadeux…” The bustling maternal shopkeeper tutted at me while looking over her reading glasses. Her daughter came to my aid. She helped me select an elegant, modernist menorah in stainless steel and took it to the counter to wrap it up. While I was waiting, the grandmother seated behind the counter gave me a smile. I said (in French!) that something she was cooking smelled delicious. And in the way of grandmothers across the globe, she offered me a bowl of cabbage soup! I declined and explained that I had just had Moroccan food around the corner. She waved away the very idea but patted me on the hand. That simple touch–the first time I had been touched in a week–made my breath stop and I felt myself beginning to cry. The three of them, there together, being kind to me when I had been so worried about doing or saying something wrong. I looked for something to distract myself. A small straw basket of talismans sat by the cash register. I picked one up and turned it over in my palm. The Hand of Miriam.

"Hand of Miriam" or Hamsa (Arabic) used to ward off the evil eye.

“Hand of Miriam” or Hamsa used to ward off the evil eye.

It’s a good luck charm. I learned that if the fingers are spread apart, it is to deflect the evil eye. If the fingers are depicted together, they catch good luck. At three euros, I added it to the purchase and bought myself a little extra traveling luck.

When I’m traveling on my own and people ask me if I am alone, I say that my husband is meeting me just around the corner at the hotel or a restaurant or a shop. During that week, I had said it a couple of times and the lie had left me feeling sometimes bereft and sometimes gleeful because in Paris I didn’t have to stick with my sad story. But I told these women that I was on my own in Paris. They welcomed me and congratulated me. I left that place feeling safer than I had all week. I had been offered food, a touch, help in choosing a gift and a little good luck.

I love the Hamsa, but it feels like a prop, something I am putting on. I can’t read the Hebrew inscription and I don’t really worry about the evil eye on your average Monday. It ended up in my suitcase and I only see it when I am packing for trips. It reminds me of Paris and the woman I let myself be that afternoon in the Rue des Rosiers.

The boarding pass became my everyday good luck charm. I run it through my fingers as I walk from the parking lot to work to remind myself of the woman who went to Paris on her own. It’s growing silky and soft with age. It’s corners are worn smooth.

A Morning With My Favorite Chickadee

Baddest Mother Ever

Gratitude. Grief. Growth.

Monthly Archives: February 2013

I’m Feeling Honky…

The River at Night

Spiro, Hugh and Old Phi Mu

The Day After the Weekend

Sometimes, You Just Gotta Say, “What the Huck!”

Five Security Blankets I Keep In My Wallet

The Sugar Dish

tal·is·man /ˈtalismən/

And In the Other Pocket…

A Pocket Full of Luck

A Morning With My Favorite Chickadee

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tal·is·man /ˈtalismən/

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