A Girl Scout

Chickens, when they first begin to get their feathers, are awkward, ugly, oily, vulnerable and more or less useless. They are something like middle-school girls.

If you have a pre-teen or know one, you understand that this is an age of vast confusion and nameless dissatisfaction. Being a middle-schooler is a bit like the view from the window of an airplane at 30,000 feet. All the particulars are lost in a vague wash of neutral color and cloud.

I must have learned something in sixth and seventh grades, but I am at a loss to say what it was. In sixth grade, we tried to get Mrs. Cochran started on the subject of Mexico so that she would forget about arithmetic or English. In seventh, we were all aghast that Mrs. Diggs hadn’t heard of the New Look and wore her skirts too short. Only piano lessons were exempt from criticism. Mrs. Pack was a cool deity and everything she had to say was Received Wisdom.

My poor mother sewed pretty clothes for me, only to have colorful little dresses hang in the closet in favor of whatever was dumpy, gray or brown. She cooked meals which were pushed about on the plate. She took me to hairdressers to try to do something about my looks. Photographs from that time show an unhappy girl with pink glasses and a permanent.

I mostly lived in a dogwood tree in the back yard, even after my father built me a playhouse so I could get out of the rain. I played Tarzan, picked blackberries, hid under the bed and sang to myself. I was not turning out to be the genteel little lady Mother had hoped for.

She signed me up for the Girl Scouts. She sprang for the full uniform, beret, belt, scarf, pin, probably in place of a winter coat for herself. She bought me a Girl Scout knife and put my name on the list for Camp Trefoil. I got my tree finder’s badge and put it in a cigar box with my treasures. Up in the dogwood tree, I whittled kite sticks, bows and arrows with my Girl Scout knife.

When we were moving Mother to the rest home a few years ago, I found the Girl Scout uniform hanging in a closet. The hem had been let out. I had grown taller during my brief tenure with the Troop, but the troop leader had quit and no replacement could be found. The uniform went unworn and unhemmed, but there it was in the closet after all those years.

I liked being a Girl Scout as well as I liked anything in those days, and I was sorry the troop disbanded for lack of a supervising adult. I’m sure it wasn’t much fun trying to interest a bunch of middle-school girls in anything besides finding fault.

Gerasimos and His Lion

Today is the feast day of the Fifth Century monk Gerasimos, who had a lion as companion and servant.

Gerasimos was a desert hermit who, while meditating, encountered a hurt lion near the banks of the Jordan River. After he doctored the lion, the beast refused to leave him. It accompanied the saint back to the monastery and was put to work guarding the community’s donkey, which fetched and carried water for the monks.

Apparently Gerasimos and the lion have been written about extensively (possibly even inspiring George Bernard Shaw’s tale of Andronicus and the Lion), but I first made their acquaintance in this morning’s church bulletin. The story is based on the writing of the Byzantine chronicler Sophronios of Jerusalem, himself observed as a saint by Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

A passing trader stole the donkey while the lion was sleeping. The lion, after searching far and wide, returned alone to the monastery. The monks concluded that the lion had eaten the donkey, so they gave the lion the donkey’s job of carrying the saddle pack with four earthen jars to and from the river.

When later the thieving trader passed by with the stolen donkey and three camels, the lion recognized the donkey and, roaring, frightened the trader away, returning to the monastery with the four beasts. “Knocking with his tail on the door of the saint’s cell, he acted as if to show that he was offering them to the elder as game,” the church bulletin said. Gerasimos then named the lion for the first time: Jordanes.

The lion was freed, but returned once a week to the monastery to visit Gerasimos. When finally the lion returned to find only Gerasimos’ grave, he lay down on the grave and died.

Scripture from earliest days is full of lions, and it is not much of a stretch for a cat-lover to imagine a solitary male attaching itself to a community of monks, making friends with the only other beast in the area, or taking a nap while the donkey grazed.

I don’t know about the part where the lion knocked on the door with his tail. St. Sophronios didn’t write about the lion until the next generation, by which time a wonderful tale probably had become even more wonderful. However, very old paintings show Gerasimos with, not angels, but a lion and camels. There is little doubt that there was a Gerasimos who founded a monastery, Deir Hijla, in 455 A.D. The monastery still stands on the north side of the Dead Sea, and there is statue of a a lion in the yard.

And all of us cat-lovers know about twitching tails.

Talking Bridge

My friend Wylie once said it would be good if we had some sort of report cards or signposts in our lives, such as “Leaving Adolescence, B-plus” or “Approaching Maturity, credit/no credit class.” My friend Marc, handing over the baby he lovingly fostered to its adoptive parents, said “I guess I should give them some kind of owners’ manual.”

What I wanted to be when I grew up was some sort of explainer, a person who might make that sort of sign or give that sort of report card or owners’ manual to myself or anybody who asked. Sort of a Talking Bridge. A kind of interpreter.

Just what form this career might take was not clear to me, but certainly I enjoyed pointing out this or that, so I started writing and playing the piano. It didn’t matter that I was entering a crowded field filled with people more skilled than I. I figured that it was one of those areas where one might find useful work almost anywhere, something like giving a tourist directions to the beach.

As for my own cosmic report card, I gave myself an A in Childhood, but a D-minus in my awkward and unkind adolescence and purblind twenties.

I went back to school and constructed a thematic major titled “Music As a Therapeutic and Tutorial Tool,” something San Francisco State would allow Liberal Studies majors to do in those days. We chose our own classes and defended the curriculum before a committee.

And I tried to be a good Talking Bridge, passing along information and observations which seemed useful to me under the umbrella of writing and teaching.

Sometimes the report cards come from outside. After I published The Phoenician Sailor, a book of poetry, in the sixties, a woman got my address from the printer and walked a mile to my house to thank me. That was an A, even if the woman was my only reader. My piano teacher said sometimes I belonged to the Mr. Magoo School of Piano Playing. Grope and hope. D-minus. But he added that I had so many technical problems, he thought I might be a helpful teacher to people with the same problems. B-plus.

When I retired from teaching piano at Skyline College, a woman only a little younger than I, weeping, said “How can we go on without you? You cared about us.” I took that as an A. And when the boys said “The dads came and went, but Mom was always there,” that was a definite A-plus. One I needed badly.

We have these landmarks in our lives, whether they come from inside or outside. When I turned fifty, I hand-copied all 81verses of the Tao Te Ching, which certainly took less time than hand-copying the New Testament or the Koran. At sixty, I went back to Greece with my mother and sister and sought an oracle at Delphi. Which I found: “Get the trash off the mountain.” At seventy, it was back to Greece again and to Delphi again, and it was a humbling lesson about the dangers of romanticizing anything.

Now I am at an age where we begin to lose our spare parts (starting with the gall bladder in two weeks). I suppose the signpost should quote Itzhak Perlman: “Do the best you can with what you’ve got left.”

Bilious

They want to remove my gall bladder.

The specialists who have made this decision have not actually examined me. They have looked at the reports of an extravagant number of imaging procedures and have given their advice from a distance of four feet in a period of five minutes or less.

Everything else having to do with this advice is delegated to receptionists and physicians’ assistants, paramedical personnel whose duty apparently is to be pleasant.

“I’m a sick man...a mean man,” Dostoyevsky writes in Notes From Underground. “There’s nothing attractive about me. I think there’s something wrong with my liver.”

The gall bladder, as you may know, is where the liver stores bile, something which assists digestion. Apparently my gall bladder is full of stones which cause a great deal of discomfort and, according to literary wisdom, a bad disposition.

I could almost diagnose myself with Webster’s synonyms for the word bilious: Peevish, bearish, ill-tempered, cantankerous, disagreeable, dyspeptic, ill-humored, ill-natured, ornery, surly, petulant, cranky, cross, grumpy, huffy, irascible, peevish, testy and waspy.

Not true, you say? You believe I am cheerful and nice?

It’s an act. Webster has me pegged.

What I wonder is whether this bad nature will change if and when my gall bladder is gone. There are lots of synonyms for the word bilious, but not too many antonyms: amiable, good-humored, good-natured, good-tempered.

Hm.

Vanity

I am vain; there’s no denying it.

I only post flattering pictures (mostly old ones) on Facebook. My business card photo is probably 15 years old, and it took three rolls of film—yes, film—to get one glamorous shot. I used to wear jeans so tight I had to lie down and use pliers to get them zipped. I wore eyeliner to the operating room when I went for cataract surgery. I dye my hair.

This confessional came up because recently I used the word “slip” to a woman twenty-something years younger than I and she didn’t know what I meant. “Petticoat” was no help either.

Discussing the extinction of petticoats with Nicodemus this morning, I told him about Spanx. Probably I am the last person in the world to learn about Spanx, a kind of super-corset which squashes female flesh. They make Spanx “body-sculpting” underwear in all sorts of forms to fit parts from shoulder to toes. God knows what the things do to your insides.

Before I learned about Spanx, I was curious to notice, looking at pictures of a lovely chubby tango dancer (nobody we know) in a strapless dress, that she had a pleat in the skin between her bare shoulder blades. What could cause such a thing, I wondered. Did she know her skin was pleated?

Now I am wondering if these garments have to be removed with scissors. Can you bend from the waist? Has there ever been a Spanx explosion where the flesh comes tumbling out of the constriction? And is it really worth it to suffer for the sake of looking thinner than you are? (Or younger. With thick eyelashes.)

In the interest of research, I took a look at advertisements for Spanx. No, I am not going to buy any. And, searching for the etymological root of the word Vanity, I looked at the Greek version of Romans 8:20: “For the creation was made subject to vanity...” The word is also translated as frailty or weakness.

You might think vanity would be opting for appearance over reality, or the capitulation to some sort of cultural imperative regarding ideal beauty. But maybe it could also represent an effort to get one’s outsides to look more like one’s inner sense of self. How many people do you know who like photographs of themselves? How many do you know who catch a fleeting glance in a mirror and think “Who the heck is that?”

(Narcissus, from John William Waterhouse painting, Echo and Narcissus, 1903.)

Blackout

Nonda and Ed: This morning’s New York Times reproduced its front page from Nov. 9, 1965, about the huge blackout which happened when we were living on Riverside Drive in New York City. I thought I’d send you a copy of the front page and remind you about what happened that evening.

I was still at work at the United Nations delegation on the lower east side of the city when the lights went out. It was almost closing time for the office on the seventh floor of the Harcourt Brace building and when the power went out, we were completely in the dark. The elevators were not working, of course, so we decided to walk down the steps by the light of various people’s matches and lighters.

Once we were outside, there was pandemonium in the streets. All the subways were stopped under ground, the traffic lights were not working, and every time a bus would come by, people would rush in a crowd to get on any bus going uptown. The office was on about 54^th Street and our apartment was on 168^th. Caught in the noisy, pushing crowd, I shouted out “What are we all here? Animals?” People were so shocked by this outburst that they actually stepped back and let me on the bus, which was bound for Harlem. I got on the packed bus, terribly worried about you kids, and rode as far as the bus went, to about 145^th Street.

Then I got out and walked some thirty blocks through some of the roughest neighborhoods in New York. The only light we had was a little moonlight and the headlights from cars and buses. Pedestrians and cars were going everywhere in a kind of mad tangle, but though everybody seemed to be out on the street, nobody bothered me, I was not robbed, mugged or maimed, and finally I got to 168^th and Broadway and crossed the street in the dark, heading down to Riverside Drive.

When I reached our building, I saw a little light on in the superintendent’s apartment at street level, but of course the rest of the building was dark. I knocked at the door and was greeted by the mother of Junior Collazo, Nonda’s little friend and the super’s son. When I looked in, I saw Junior and you two about to chow down on some delicious-looking tamales wrapped in corn husks. Your baby-sitter, Kay, had left you two with the Collazo family and had gone home to the Bronx. By then it must have been about 7:30 or 8 P.M.

I don’t remember what happened after that. I just remember how scared and worried I had been, and what a peaceful scene it was, you two sitting happily at the table, about to eat a delicious dinner by lamplight.

Love from Mom

The Yellow Cello: A Mystery

The yellow cello is a big-bottomed narrow-waisted lady with an elegant hand-carved maple scroll. It was probably made in the mid-nineteenth century, during the lifetime of Johannes Brahms, in Germany. It has a spruce table, a maple back and ribs. Its fingerboard and purfling, the thin strand which outlines the top, are made of ebony. June, the woman settling the estate, did not know what to do with the cello, which had belonged to her friend and neighbor, Norma.

Certainly the instrument wasn’t much to look at, with deep cracks all along the belly, a patch on the front, a deep gouge made by the bow, a badly warped bridge and rusty strings. Through the slightest of contacts—the aunt of a fellow cellist learned about the cello when she struck up a conversation with a perfect stranger in her old neighborhood-- Nicodemus heard about the orphan instrument and went to look at it.

June, herself a lively and alert woman in her nineties, said she had often carried the cello to jobs for her friend, who had died, unmarried and childless, at the age of 94. “I guess that part of my life is over,” she said sadly.

Although the instrument hadn’t been played in ten years, “it was the light of her life,” June said. The yellow lady had been left to Norma by her own cello teacher.

Instrument makers and lovers joke about the Strad in the attic. Such is the mystery of stringed instruments that innocents cannot avoid hoping the violin, viola or cello they have found is worth a fortune. In this case, despite a paper stating the modest replacement value of the cello for insurance purposes, the obvious damage made it seem unlikely that the instrument had any value...

Until Nicodemus played it. And fell in love. And gave June a thousand dollars on the spot and brought the cello home.

Even with the rusty strings and the dreadful cracks (they had been patched from the inside and someone had sprayed lacquer on the face to try to make them blend into the wood) the cello had such a big, warm voice that Nicodemus could hardly bear to stop playing. He played and tweaked, tuned and peered, changed a string and played some more.

He took the cello to Carlos, the fine instrument maker in San Francisco. Carlos took in the condition of the cello at a glance, unscrewed the end pin and looked inside. “Not too bad,” he said, though the accumulation of dust showed how long it had been since the top of the instrument had been removed for what Nicodemus called brutal repairs. Carlos played the cello a little. “Beautiful,” he said.

Sleuthing out the history of a musical instrument is usually difficult if not impossible unless the instrument is famous. In this case, June said her friend had played the cello as principal cellist of the Peninsula Symphony, but even the old-timers at the orchestra had not heard of Norma. The cello teacher who willed the instrument to Norma supposedly was principal of the Oakland orchestra, but the orchestra’s archives do not go back very far. The only other clue to the instrument’s history was the figured maple bridge, stamped with the name Salchow, a New York firm.

June believed the cello had been played in Mexico at one point. She said Norma had sold a different cello to someone in the San Francisco Symphony and that she had given another cello to a student. The yellow lady was the one she kept until the end.

Why was the cello’s label removed? Where has it traveled since 1850? All we really know about it is that at least two cellists loved it and played it all their lives, and that despite its age and trauma, it still sings with a beautiful voice.