Melanie Gideon

It was winter.  It had been raining for two weeks straight.  I was depressed.

“You are having an existential crisis,” said a friend. “Go to church.”

Now, I hadn’t been to church in a very long time. The last time I can remember going was the day my son was baptized and he cried the entire time so we never went back again.  I’m not sure where I stand on God.  If I had to describe the nature of my faith, it’s based on hope that there’s an afterlife, hope that I see everybody I love who has predeceased me when I get there, and hope that those predeceased loved ones were not watching me as I bumbled through the indignities and humiliations of everyday life. Occasionally, I imagined my sitcom of a life as viewed from up above. A crazed woman worrying about ridiculous things like exactly who in her household has been googling jugs, and praying that the purpose of the googled jugs was not for preteen arousal.  Fifteen minutes later the crazed woman remembers it was she who googled jugs because she was looking for attractive vessels to store lemonade and milk.  But the real reason I liked to go to church was because of the ritual: the incense and hymns and mothball-smelling coats, which never failed to trigger the feeling that I was part of something bigger than myself.

Because I was in need of awakening on a grand scale, I corralled some friends and my family to attend a special choral service at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill. This particular service was supposed to be very popular so we got there an hour early to insure we would get a good seat. The Cathedral did not disappoint. It had indoor and outdoor labyrinths, a Keith Haring triptych altarpiece, and Ghiberti Doors, exact replicas of the bronze doors in the Duomo in Florence.

There were eight of us so I saved half of a twenty-foot long pew, draping it with scarves and coats. We went outside to walk the labyrinth while waiting for the service to begin and when I returned from my walk to check on our seats there was a woman occupying the other half of the pew.  I sat down right next to her, worried I had miscalculated and that there wouldn’t be enough space for my group.

“You’re sitting on my coat,” she hissed at me.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s there for a reason.  I’m saving seats for my family,” she said, pulling the coat out from underneath me and pressing her thigh against mine.

“So am I,” I said. “In fact I’ve been here for an hour saving seats.”

“Well, so have I,” she said.

This was a lie and we both knew it. I was there first.

“Three quarters of an hour,” she qualified, looking at her watch. “I got here right after you.”

The organist began warming up. My family and friends came and piled into the pew. The woman’s family piled into her side of the pew. I was completely squished, as was all hopes for my awakening because I spent the next forty-five minutes engaged in a thigh war with this woman—she, pressing her thigh aggressively against me, and me trying to pretend I didn’t notice this woman pressing her thigh aggressively against mine. Trapped, I glanced around the cathedral. Everybody looked so happy. Nobody but me appeared to be in a battle for space. I prayed my dead loved ones were not looking down at me, witnessing this pathetic little scene, but most likely they were. Cathedrals were probably a big draw—lots of delicious misbehaving.

The time came for us to sing along with the choir.  I loved to sing and I actually sang fairly well.  Usually people who heard me sing said something along the lines of “Why, I never knew you could sing,” which I chose to translate as “What an amazing and original singer you are!”

I stood eagerly.  Finally some breathing room!  The woman next to me stood and much to my dismay and horror, virtually identical soprano voices issued forth from our mouths.  I was stunned. How could this have happened? How could we sound so alike?  We both sang louder, trying to distinguish ourselves, pull away from each other, but our voices were indistinguishable.

Suddenly the truth struck me. We were the same.  Both of us confident that we were the ones being wronged; both of us having come to the cathedral hoping for an awakening that seemed out of reach now that each of us had the very bad luck to be seated next to a woman who had so clearly miscalculated her group’s seating needs.

And if we were indeed the same, I had to begrudgingly ask myself did I have it wrong? Could it be I was the aggressive thigh pusher and not she?

We are living in slippery times. In the past months there has been no shortage of collective, often catastrophic slipperiness in the world: Caribbean tectonic plates slip, the value of the dollar slips, civil rights slip—one year same sex couples can be married, the next year they cannot. Then there is the slippage that hits a little too close to home: a good friend’s marriage dissolves, my husband is laid-off from his job; somebody is drinking a little too much. And yet? It is precisely this slipperiness, be it mundane or heartbreaking, be it of our own making, or something completely out of our control, that has the potential to wake us up and deliver us back into our lives.

In Grace Cathedral, winter light poured through the stained glass windows, orange and lemon-hued. The air smelled of ritual, of incense and mothballs.  Some people sang.  Some people texted. The woman next to me blew her nose with a crumpled up tissue. I found some room in my pew and slid over, and for the last five minutes of the service I was part of the tribe.

Why Mr. Hemlock Thinks Plays Should be Taken Out of the Elementary School Curriculum

Parent 1: Welcome!  Welcome to the play.

Parent 2: I should be Parent 1. I don’t know why I’m not Parent 1. Why am I always Parent 2?

Parent 3:  Welcome!  Welcome to the play.

Mr. Hemlock: (in a whisper from stage left): Those are Parent 1’s lines.

Parent 1:  Can I tell you what my son got on the ITBS?  Promise you won’t tell anybody?  Off the charts.  Simply off the charts.  No, he doesn’t have Asperger’s—why do people always think that about super, super intelligent kids?  But honestly, yes, we’re a little worried.  You can understand with those kinds of scores. That the news will get out. And top that off with me being Parent 1—again!  It’s not my fault. Mr. Hemlock keeps picking me.

Parent 2:  See the wee little spider.  In the corner of the barn?  What is she doing there?  Why she’s a very smart spider.  She got in the 98th percentile on the writing mechanics section of the ITBS.  She’s spinning a web.  She’s writing sonnets when the rest of the spiders can’t even speak. Why, what is she writing?  She’s writing screw you, Parent 1.

Parent 1:  You are just making that up!

Parent 2: Mr. Hemlock said we could improvise.

Parent 3:  Welcome!  Welcome to our Play.  This year we are doing “Why Mr. Hemlock Thinks Plays Should Be Taken Out of the Elementary School Curriculum.”

Parent 2:  What happened to Charlotte’s Web?

Wildly Waving Mother Number 1:  Why does Parent 1 have fifty lines and I have none?

Wildly Waving Father Number 2: Why am I a tree?  I have been a tree every year since kindergarten.  Don’t you keep track of these things?  Shouldn’t somebody keep track of these things?

Parent 3: Yes, it hurts.  To be overlooked once again.  I won’t say anything.  Instead I’ll see this for the opportunity it really is—a chance to exercise my underdeveloped disappointment muscle!

Mr. Hemlock:  Now, parents.  The tree is just as important as the Parent 1 role.

Parent 2: Then why doesn’t everybody have the same number of lines?  Neigh.

Parent 1:  Did you just whinny?

Parent 2:  I’m trying to make the most of my role.  I’m a horse.  A parent horse.

Parent 3:  I love horses.  Black Beauty.  National Velvet.  Seabreeze.

Mr. Hemlock:  I think you mean Seabiscuit.

Parent 2:  (starts braying).

Parent 3:  Ow!  You’re hurting my ears.  Please shut up.  Horses are my life.  You’re an insult to the entire horse kingdom.  You are a parent, not a horse.  Stop your whining.  You should be happy you’re Parent 2.  Look at me.  I’m making the best of my role. Do you think this is where I thought I’d end up?  I went to school in New Haven!

Parent 1:  Okay, okay.  I’ll tell you but you can’t tell anybody.  He has an IQ of 165 and he’s 5 feet 2 inches tall.  I know—can you believe it?  He just turned eight!  He’s a giant.  It’s so hard for him.  Everybody always thinking he’s older than he is.  People are height-ist you know.  Sometimes he’s discriminated against.  Except for when he’s being drafted for Pee Wee Lacrosse and Football and Basketball and Chess.  Only then is his height an advantage.  Your son is so darling.  So adorable.  How can you stand it?  I just want to scoop him up.  Mm.  Mm.  Mm.  Would it embarrass him if I kissed him right now at this very moment on his cutest little plumpest cheek?  Oh, he’s still got his baby fat.  My son won’t let me kiss him anymore.  Lift up your shirt, darling.  Show Parent 2 your six-pack.  I know, I know.  Can you believe it?  An eight-year-old with a six-pack?

Wildly Waving Woman Number 1:  Yoo-hoo! Mr. Hemlock!  Over here.  Am I waving right?  Admit it.  I am one of your favorites.  That’s why you couldn’t give me the Parent 1 role.  Your favoritism would have been too obvious, so refreshing it is that I am not one of those hovering, intrusive, I have such a special, special child kind of parents, but instead my-kid’s-perfectly-average-but-very-happy-and-I-could-give-a-shit kind of parents? The kind of parent who raised you?

Parent 1: Is that code for my daughter did horribly on the ITBS?  You know you shouldn’t feel badly about that.  Some kids just test poorly.  I’m sure she’s very bright.

Mr. Hemlock: I want you to know I gave this play very little thought.  I wrote it in five minutes.

Parent 2:  Neigh.

Parent 3: How I miss New Haven.

Wildly Waving Woman Number 1: You went to Yale?  My husband went to Yale.

Wildly Waving Father Number 3:  Whoosh.  Whoosh (Waving his arms like branches.  Falls to the ground.  Gags.  Pretends he’s dead from the effects of global warming).

Parent 1: Goodbye.  Goodbye from our play.

Parent 2: Some play.

Recently I bought my son a copy of The Dangerous Book For Boys. Okay, I know, I’m a little late to the game here. I read the book that night from cover to cover and saw just how we had failed him.  All the knots we hadn’t taught him to tie.  All the rabbits we hadn’t shown him how to skin.  All the constellations we hadn’t pointed out to him in the night sky.

There was knowledge out there, ESSENTIAL INFORMATION that somebody should have told him about.  

I began to wish I had a book.  A dangerous book.  A Dangerous Book for a Forty-Something Woman.  In my dangerous book would be entries on:

How to remember the name of the movie (book, restaurant, TV show) you just saw, read, ate at or TIVO-d.

How to avoid  being exposed as somebody who doesn’t remember the name of the movie, book, restaurant or TV show you just saw, read, ate at or TIVO-d.

The One Thing Every Forty-Something Woman Should Never Say at a Party:

1.  Oh  my god,  I can’t wait to tell you. I just saw, read, ate or Tivo’d the most amazing . . . the most amazing . . .you know, that thing, were you with me?  Wait, it was something really good.  Didn’t we do it together?  Wasn’t that you?  We were eating.  We were watching.  I gave you a copy.  Did you ever give it back to me?  Wasn’t it amazing?   I felt so good afterwards.  Didn’t you?  Not too full.  But full enough.  You know the eat until you’re only 80% full kind of full.

How to Skin A Rabbit

Buy your kid The Dangerous Book for Boys and a swiss army knife and make him do it for you.

If there’s one song for me that evokes a New England summer in all its glory–its heartbreak, humidity, brevity, longing and hope, its clamcakes, Levi’s, docks and lakes and rivers, its yellow cellophaned packages of Swedish Fish, it’s Listen To What the Man Said, by Paul McCartney.

It was the summer of 1974.  The camp was the Episcopal Conference Center in Pascoag, RI.  The cabin was “Carlson”.  It was the last night of camp and all of us eleven year old girls were sobbing, bereft at the thought of leaving, when just a week ago many of us were bereft at the thought of being shipped off to camp–but there you have it–exactly what it means to be eleven.  In between. Neither this nor that.  No longer girl.  Not yet teenager.  But one of us was crying more than the others, our counselor, Leslie, because unlike the rest of us who merely dreamed of being loved, she was loved by a guitar playing boy named Billy and that night Billy was leaving to join the army.  All of us, sheltered, innocent, Rhode Island girls from the suburbs could not imagine anything more romantic or dangerous or unthinkable and we wanted to be a part of it.

And then in that way that sometimes the perfect soundtrack shows up to illuminate and intensify a moment, marking it so you’ll never forget it for the rest of your life, Listen to What the Man Said came streaming out of the radio.  It was a call. We climbed out of our beds and gathered around Leslie’s bed to console her, standing in our short nightgowns in our bare feet on the dusty floor.

Any time, any day
You can hear the people say
That love is blind
Well, I don’t know but I say love is kind

Soldier boy kisses girl
Leaves behind a tragic world
But he won’t mind
He’s in love and he says love is fine

It’s summer.  Thirty-four years later.  I’m back in New England and Listen To What the Man Says is playing on the radio.

Every so often I become obsessed with a particular kind of candy.  Candy other than Twizzlers, that is.  And Butterfingers.  Sweet Revolution Maple Honey Caramels.   I can’t stop thinking about them.  I bought a little box at Miette on Chestnut Street in San Francisco to give to my husband for father’s day.   I bought them on a Wednesday.  Father’s Day was on Sunday.  We ate them Wednesday afternoon.  I can’t believe they even made it over the Bay Bridge to Oakland.  Here are the ingredients:  maple syrup, cream, honey, butter, sea salt.  It’s the salt that puts them over the edge.  

Rapture.

Isn’t that an amazing title? I wish I had thought of it. I’m reading Matthew Zapruder’s book of poetry The Pajamaist and it’s brilliant. I’m so inspired that I have been practicing being a pajamaist. What is a pajamaist, you may ask. I’ve come to realize that’s a very personal question and I can only answer for myself. A pajamaist is somebody who sits around in their pajamas (problem number 1–I have no pajamas, just an odd assortment of mismatched ancient t-shirts and sweat pants) who thinks pajama thoughts (think I’d like some popcorn, think I’d like some chocolate milk, what’s wrong with me why don’t I have a decent pair of pajamas I keep going to the store, to the pajama department and I say to myself, now is the time to buy some pajamas but I never do and now my procrastination has led to my inability to be a pajamaist and I have only myself to blame.).

“You’re driving me to school in that?” my son sometimes asks in the morning.
“These are not pajamas,” I tell him.
“You wore them to bed,” he says.
“Yes, but they’re not matched. Pajamas are matched.”
“Please don’t get out of the car,” he says.
“Fine,” I say.

The point is. The Pajamaist. Read it.