What She Left When She Left for College

Yesterday I was sorting out my books (as part of my New Year’s resolution to de-hoard my life) when I came across a very special book that I had completely forgotten about.  It was a fabric-covered journal filled with about 50 hand-written pages composed by daughter Eleni when she was 17 years old—right before she went off to college.  The entries on each page were brief, and often broken up into lines like free verse. The first page read:

This book belongs to Joan,

The most influential woman in my life.

So that when I’m in college,

You can look at a page a day. 

And it will be as if I’m still here

In my peach jumper.

Naturally I sat down and read it through, laughing and crying as I went.  I have a notoriously bad memory, and Eleni has a scarily good one.  She’ll say things like, “Remember three years ago when we were walking on Fifth Avenue and you were wearing your navy pants suit and I was wearing….”

So I read through this little volume of memories, most of which had floated out of my skull, and I thought what a beautiful thing it was for a teenager to write something like this as a farewell to her mother before setting off into life.

And now, two decades later, Eleni is a married lady with a five-month-old daughter. I hope when Amalía grows up and goes off to college that she’ll take the time to write a journal like this one to her mother, to say, “I love you” and “Thanks for the memories.”

Eleni wrote that journal 20 years ago, and even then her writing talent, eye for detail and sense of humor were evident on every page.  Now she’s about to publish her second book and first novel “Other Waters” on Valentine’s Day.  In the journal she gave me, Eleni was recalling golden moments when we travelled, often just the two of us, the ultimate tourists, on annual trips. We had wonderful adventures, many of which would be forgotten if she didn’t write them down.  Below are some of my favorites.

Page 1. Remember before I was born how you wanted a girl? And you only drank out of the girl mug, and Grandma transferred your coffee from the horse mug to the girl mug.  And didn’t laugh…So you went to the hospital Monday night, because your appointment for a Caesarian was on Tuesday, even though Constantinople fell on a Tuesday.

At 8:15 a.m. on Tuesday, October 8^th they wheeled you in and knocked you out.  Ten minutes later you had a baby girl, perfectly unsquished.  And you asked Daddy what she looked like and he said, “Me”, meaning him. And that was the beginning of as beautiful friendship.

Page 2. Remember that day in the early eighties when we went to Child’s World and a strange man stopped you and said, “My God – you’ve got the best-looking pair of legs I’ve ever seen on a woman”  Remember that?  I thought so.

Page 3.  Remember our long drives to Old Sturbridge Village when we’d listen to Les Misérables,  Fun Rock and Janis Joplin, and stop and get gas and I’d have my bonnet on. Just like Thelma and Louise.

Page 7. Remember the man who pulled me out of the audience to folk dance with him in Greece.  All the Japanese folks took pictures and he told me I was beautiful.

Or

Remember the man on Spetses who hoped you’d be his Shirley Valentine?

Page 8.  In fourth grade I did a report on Massasoit and you colored in all the feathers on his headdress for me. Thanks.

Page 9. Remember that night in the apartment in Kolonaki when you and Marina talked to me at 3 a.m. because the state of the world upset me so much.  I got over it.  I always do!

Page 12.  The first time I went to Greece alone with Daddy you were sure the plane would crash and it didn’t.  So relax.  I repeat.  We are NOT having a crisis!

Page 16.            Remember New Orleans:

                            The Jazz Funeral

Marie Laveau

Valentine’s Day

Jackson Square

Beignets – Le Café du Monde

The Fortune Teller

Jambalaya

Gumbo

Pecan Pralines

The Moonwalk

Shalom Y’all

Crawfish

The Farmer’s market

The Beauregard – Keyes house

Cajun cooking with Justin Wilson

Page 17.  Remember Charleston

You driving a rental car as a stranger in a strange land.

The marketplace

Poogan’s porch—one of the several times in our lives I’ve cried at dinner, although I was happy that night.

Tin Pan Alley

The boy in a military school uniform with his suspenders hanging down, feeding doves on the battery with his girlfriend.

Page 23. Remember my sixteenth birthday party?  You made it a highlight of my life.  Thanks.

Page 24. You introduced me to

Fitzgerald

Upstairs Downstairs

Gone with the Wind

Chipped Beef

Soufflés

Appreciating photography

Peking Duck

Flea Markets

People magazine

Page 29. Remember my graduation from kindergarten?  I cried at the rehearsal. [Because she didn’t want to leave.]

Page 31.Together we’ve climbed to Prophet Elias, braved the Dreaded Palomidi, scaled Monemvassia, waterskied and ridden Space Mountain.  We’re unstoppable.

Page 32.  Everyone you come in contact with, from the lady at the bank to Al, loves seeing you because you make them feel important and brighten their day.  You think you don’t have friends, but you have them all over.

Page 33.  How many fifty-one year old women can say they refused Dan Quayle’s invitation to dinner? You can.

.

Page 35.  You gave me my first memory book, fine lingerie and perfume.  What an honour.

Page 37.  Things I got from you:

Blue eyes

A small mouth (no X-rays)

An appreciation of 5 p.m. Sunday afternoon drives, photographs and doors.

A twinkle in my eye.

Page 39.  Remember when I was in 8^th grade, we had a snow day on your birthday and we made a cake and took pictures and God smiled.

Page 41. You are one of the few people who have met the Beatles.  Therefore you will always have a place in Mohan’s heart.  John and Yoko were in their white stage at the time.

Page 42.  Remember our trip to the Dakota with Betsy?  The doorman was from Limerick and feared John was forgotten.  But the next day in Strawberry Fields, a young blonde mother was telling her son:  “There was a man called John Lennon and he was part of a group called the Beatles.  He was killed nine years ago today.  That’s why all these people are here.”  So the legend continues.

Crone of the Week: Hollywood Pioneer Dies at 111

    

University Press of Kentucky

It’s been a long time since I’ve picked a Crone of the Week, but now that it’s awards season,  the honor had to be revived and the statuette dusted off for  silent-era script writer Frederica Sago Maas, who died on Jan 5 at the incredible age of 111. (She was the 44^th oldest verified person in the world.)

                                                                                       San Diego Union Tribune

The New York Times’ obituary for her begins: “She told of Hollywood moguls chasing naked would-be starlets, the women shrieking with laughter.  She recounted how Joan Crawford, new to the movies, relied on her to pick clothes.  Almost obsessively, she complained about how many of her story ideas and scripts were stolen and credited to others.“

In the 1920’s, in Hollywood, Frederica fumed as her writing and ideas were attributed to others. That’s what happened to women writers in those days.  In New York in the 1960’s I often had the same experience.  In fact, when I went to Time-Life headquarters to apply for a job with one of their magazines, armed with my Master’s in Journalism and my Phi Beta Kappa key, the (female) interviewer told me—“if you really want to write, don’t apply here, because women can never become writers at Time-Life, only researchers.” 

But Frederica Sagor Maas found a good way to get back at those people who stole her writing—she outlived them all and recorded her Hollywood stories in a scathing memoir in 1999 when she was 99 years old!  “I can get my payback now,” she told an interviewer. “I’m alive and thriving and, well, you S.O.B.s are all below.”

Frederica Sagor Maas  was born on July 6, 1900 in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants from Russia.  (Her mother supported the family as a midwife.)  She studied journalism at Columbia (as did I), worked as a copy girl for the New York Globe, then became a story editor at Universal Pictures’ New York office.  In 1924, she moved to Hollywood and was signed to a three-year contract with MGM, where she wrote screenplays, including a hit film for Clara Bow.

Frederica married a fellow screenwriter, Ernest Maas, in 1927.  The couple lost $10,000 in the 1929 stock market crash and then found all their screenplays rejected. They were also investigated by the FBI for subscribing to Communist publications.  They struggled to find work as writers’ representatives and then writing for political campaigns. In despair, in 1950, the couple decided to commit suicide and drove to a hilltop where they planned to asphyxiate themselves with carbon dioxide from their car.  But they suddenly changed their minds, clutching each other in tears and turning off the ignition before it was too late.

In her autobiography, “The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood”, Frederica tells stories about early Hollywood stars like Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks.  She is particularly hard on her old studio bosses, whom she portrayed as “amoral debauchers”

Her husband died of Parkinson’s disease in 1986 at 94 years old.  Frederica got a job as a typist in an insurance agency by lying about her age.  Then, in 1999, she wrote her autobiography, which is now a standard reference for early Hollywood history. The couple never had children and Frederica died with no immediate survivors. 

The New York Times obituary ends: “As for movies, Mrs. Maas stopped going.  “I think the product they’re making today,” she said in 1999, “Is even worse than the product we made in the early days.”

Resolution: De-Hoard My Life

This image is from freedomcolours.net

My name is Joan and I am a hoarder.  

Both my parents had what I, a layperson--but an expert on those two--would diagnose as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (although we didn’t call it that in the olden days.)  My mother would stack neatly ironed handkerchiefs in a bureau drawer. My father would choose one every day for his breast pocket, and if I simply opened that drawer and looked in, my father would soon say, “Who opened my handkerchief drawer?”

My mother hated it when my father would eat a banana. She’d insist that he take the peel outside to the garbage pail—even if it was midnight during a blizzard.  God forbid he should put it in the kitchen trash and “smell up the whole house”!  If the garbage man came late to pick up the refuse, my parents would be peering out the curtain, fraught with concern.

I realize that my life-long messiness and hoarding is the flip side of that OCD.

We live in a 300-year-old house in a New England village with a vast basement that looks like a wine cellar with rough stone walls. That cellar used to be filled with trunks and storage boxes from my entire life, and everywhere I went, the guilty knowledge of that cellar was an albatross hanging around my neck.  But then one day the basement flooded—an act of God—and we had to rent a dumpster and throw everything out.  It was agonizing to open a trunk and see the water-soaked portraits of my parents that I drew when I was a teen-ager, not to mention all my high school souvenirs, letters home from camp, term papers that got an A+--but it all had to go and I felt better—lighter—afterwards.  Now the cellar holds only mousetraps, Christmas decorations and a few bottles of stored wine.

It was an A-ha moment, as Oprah would say. And if only that were the end of my story. But no.  You see, there’s our attic, filled with household account books going back to the 1970’s and clothes that I couldn’t bear to throw away and all my daughters’ dance recital costumes.

Plus, I have way, way too many books shelved in three different rooms—art and photography books in the studio, hardback books and family photo albums in the library, and paperback books on shelves in my son’s room. (On a trip back he expressed concern that the tall bookcase holding the old New Yorkers and paperbacks was sagging and might fall over and kill him in his sleep.)

In our own bedroom is a low table made of a glass-topped display case that holds some of my daguerreotypes and ambrotypes – part of just one of my collections. (Don’t ask how many “collections” I have!)  Coming back from a trip to Mexico some years ago, I put my Mexican photographs and a pristine new photo album on top of the table, thinking I could put the photos in the album one day while watching television.  Now, of course, you can’t even see the daguerreotypes in the case underneath all the un-organized travel photos.

I realize that there is a whole spate of reality shows about hoarders on TV these days, no doubt with useful advice for people with my problem, and some helpful therapy thrown in--but I would never watch one.  It’s too terrifying to think about those pitiful people huddled among piles of newspapers and trash until they’re crushed to death by their belongings and no one notices until the neighbors complain about an unpleasant odor in the hall. And it's even more terrifying to think that I am one of them! Besides, I'm less interested in the why of hoarding--what makes us do it--than I am in the what now--how do I undo it?

Over the holidays, I announced that my New Year’s resolution was to de-hoard my life. When I stated my resolution at our New Year’s day dinner, my daughter, Marina, was thrilled. “Write it down!” she cried. “Make a list of what you’ll do every day. I just wish I could quit my job and come home and help you do it.”

 (Marina is incredibly neat and clean and organized.  Once when she moved into a house in Los Angeles with four other people, she said to me over the phone “I’m having the best day.  I’ve spent the whole weekend cleaning the bathroom, which has never been cleaned before.”  On another weekend, when everyone was out, she spent the day cleaning the kitchen and alphabetizing the spices. I can hear my parents laughing in the Great Beyond.)

 I’m sorry that Marina’s not around to help me with my resolution.  It’s going a little slower than I thought, one step forward, two steps back.  I’ve finished the pile of papers and files next to the computer, but in doing so discovered a whole cache of staples, ink cassettes and people’s business cards that need to be alphabetized into a Rolodex.  Next project is my vanity and the nearby wicker stand filled with a lifetime of half-used cosmetics, lipsticks and creams. 

(In my defense—when you’re almost 71 years old, you’ve had a lot of opportunity to “collect” such things, and daughter Eleni used to be a magazine beauty editor—which means free cosmetics.)

After the cache of makeup by the vanity I’ll move on to the travel photos on the bedside table.  Not to put them into albums, but to stash them into those decorative shoe-box-sized boxes with room for labels like “Veracruz—2008”. And I am going to take a box of books every week and donate them to the local library, which sells them at book sales several times a year.

By spring I may have moved well into the Studio, with all its paintings, prints and art supplies.  And by New Year’s Eve next year, if all goes well, I hope to have lost…not those persistent ten pounds around my middle, but two tons of junk.

God grant me the serenity to reorganize the things I need, the courage to toss the things I don't, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Wish me luck!

Amalía and the Jumper Chair

Amalía went to Nicaragua for Christmas.    Everybody in Nicaragua loved and adored her and picked her up and carried her.  Nobody put her down for two weeks. Amalía smiled at everybody, even the Santa Claus in the department store.

 She went to a beauty salon where her bangs were cut.  Her Abuela Carmen held her in the barber’s chair so she wouldn’t wiggle.

 Amalía loved her haircut.

 After all the excitement and attention in Nicaragua, Amalía came home to Miami Beach.  There she found a new jumper chair.  It had as many bells and whistles as a three-ring circus, but when her Mommy put her in it, she was not happy.  Amalía wasn’t interested in all the toys and rattles. 

 She sat in her new jumper chair and gave her Mommy a plaintive, pitiful look that said, “Why am I stuck here like a prisoner in solitary confinement?  I want somebody to PICK ME UP.”

 In the end, Amalía’s Mommy picked her up and put her in her red stroller.  Amalía was happy again, because she knew she was going outside for a walk on Lincoln Road.  Soon she’d be surrounded by all her fans making a big fuss over her—the waiters in the Italian restaurant, the ladies in the supermarket, the policemen, the boys on their skateboards.   Amalía likes being a super star.

Happy New Year...You’ve been Hacked!

On Wednesday, at 7:00 a.m., a  phone call from my niece woke me up.  “Are you planning a trip to Scotland?” she asked. 

It took me a while to digest this question, but I soon learned that my niece—and evidently a large number of contacts from my Yahoo mail account, had received the following e-mail from “me”, sent  at 4:06 in the morning.  (I received it too. So did my doctors’ offices and my Pilates instructors.) The subject line read: “It’s Urgent, Please Respond”.

The text read:

 It's me, Joan. I really don't mean to inconvenience you right now, I made a trip to Scotland and I misplaced my passport and credit cards. I know this may sound odd, but it all happened very fast. I've been to the embassy, they're willing to help, but I'm short of funds to pay for my passport fees and other miscellaneous expenses. Please can you lend me $900? I'll pay back, as soon as I get home.

Please respond as soon as you get this message, so I can forward you my details to send funds to me. I don't have a phone to speak with you right now.

I await your response

Joan Gage

When I opened my computer, I saw that many friends and e-mail acquaintances –especially those who lived in Europe—had already e-mailed me with subject lines like: “You’ve been hacked”.  I got more phone calls and a whole lot of e-mails from U.S-situated acquaintances as the country woke up.

In the past I had received very similar e-mails when some friends were hacked—but I think it used to say that they were stranded in London and needed $900.  (Is there even a U.S. Embassy in Scotland? I wondered. )

So I, and most of my contacts, knew immediately that this was a hacker pretending to be me.  And most of my friends (and I) realized that the return address he was writing from was identical to my e-mail address except for one letter missing  (His e-mail address  read “Joan Gag” instead of “Joan Gage.”)

I immediately did what Yahoo Help advised—changed the password to my account.   I also managed to find under “Yahoo Help” a place where I could detail my problem to “Yahoo Customer Care”.  I was given an “incident number” and told that Yahoo would get back to me within 24 hours.

But it’s been over 48 hours now and I still haven’t heard from them.

Since I am, as my blog says, a Crone—over seventy last time I looked—the mind and idiosyncrasies of a computer are a foreign language to me.  Whenever I have a tech problem I look for a member of a younger generation. 

First I called a friend who had been hacked with the same message (but allegedly stranded in London, although I knew she hadn’t left Massachusetts.)

She told me she immediately changed her password, but soon realized this wasn’t enough.  Eventually she had to close down her Yahoo account completely, switching to G-Mail.

A college-age relative, who seemed very computer-savvy, told me that I’d have to immediately change every password I had and probably have to lose the Yahoo account as well.

My daughter Marina, who was visiting for the holidays, exclaimed in horror when she saw that my Yahoo account had over 8,000 stored e-mails. “Don’t you ever delete them?” she asked.

Well I do, but these e-mails—going back to 2008—allow me to contact, say, a fellow vintage-photographs collector in Europe whom I long ago communicated with –thanks to the Yahoo Search Mail function-- by simply typing “daguerreotype” into the search box.  Yahoo knows the e-mail addresses for all my friends, if I just type in their first name—so of course I’d never written all those e-mail addresses down.   While gathering biographies from my Minnesota classmates for the 50-year High School Reunion book in 2009, I relied completely on my Yahoo account’s ability to store e-mail addresses.  Now I had to say good-bye to all this information.   Would I ever get those addresses back?

My daughter and I tried to find a list of my contacts on my Yahoo account before closing it down, but Yahoo listed only 15 contacts for me.  One of my European correspondents suggested that the hacker must have  “wiped out” most of my contacts.

I wonder why my hacker went to all this trouble.  Does he ever find people naïve enough to think they must immediately send him $900 to save me from my plight in Scotland?

I suspect that the door used to get into my Yahoo  account may have been my Facebook account.  My computer teacher, artist Andy Fish, closed down his Facebook account long ago, saying that it brought him so much spam.  But I don’t want to lose my Facebook account as well as my Yahoo account—it’s the only way I can stay in touch with far-flung friends and my kids’ generation.

Another friend thinks my Linked-in account may be the vulnerable spot.

When I think of how many times I’ve given my Yahoo address as the way for a new acquaintance to reach me, I shudder.  I’ll have to get new business cards printed.  I’ll have to inform the various airlines, the credit card companies, every organization I belong to—the mind boggles.

And the same day I was hacked, I received that startling e-mail from the New York Times saying that my home-delivery subscription was being cancelled.  Like over 8 million other people, I tried to call the Times or reach them through their web site to say, “Don’t cancel my subscription!”  But when all lines were tied up and the Times site was unavailable, I began to realize it was all a huge computer glitch.  I guess Mercury was retrograde on Wednesday.

Oh well, here’s to a New Year, a new e-mail account and new ways of  being tortured by my malevolent Mac Power Book.   I think I can hear Steve Jobs, from somewhere in internet heaven, laughing.


Joan Gage --    A Rolling Crone

(P.S. --To my friends and contacts--I haven't closed my Yahoo account yet -- will let you know my G-Mail address when I do.  To tech-savvy readers--I really would appreciate your advice on what I should do next.)

Worst-Taste Christmas Decoration Ever?

The first time I drove by the decorations on the roof of this house in Shrewsbury, MA, I thought--"Nahh!  That's not what I thought it is."  The next time I drove by, I took a good look and realized it WAS!  Santa peeing a lighted stream across the roof into a puddle of lights.

I went back in the daytime to make sure--but without the lights, I'll bet no one noticed anything odd about this Santa standing next to a chimney.

I just read last week that a homeowner in nearby Westborough MA., who got carried away with filling his front yard with lights, was receiving warning letters from an anonymous neighbor who threatened to tear down the display if he didn't winnow it out to make it more "tasteful."  But at least the guy in Westborough didn't have Santa peeing on his front lawn!

Meanwhile, daughter Eleni, who's spending Christmas with her husband Emilio in his native Nicaragua, says that touring the  Christmas displays in Managua means going from one creche scene to another.  She's got photos of the Nacimientos on her latest blog post "Away, In A Manger."  Every home has a Nativity scene, I gather, and in public spaces the figures are life-sized.  But the Christ Child, which is the centerpiece of the scene, cannot be placed in the manger until Christmas day, when he is born.  Before he's placed in the manger, the children touch the Christ Child for a blessing.

Here in Worcester, MA and its suburbs, there are a lot of giant inflatable Santas and Snowmen in front yards, but there is nary a Christ Child or manger scene around.  I think I read that it is now illegal to have a representation of the Nativity in a public place.

But I'll bet there are no laws on the books in Massachusetts against having a peeing Santa on your roof.

The Christmas Card Crunch

My pals at the North Grafton post office received me with hoots of derision when I walked in on Tuesday holding 150 Christmas cards all stamped and ready to go.  “Not already—you’re early this year!” They remember well the several past years when I’ve sent out my cards AFTER Christmas, referring to them hopefully as “New Year’s cards”.

The following day I came back with another 60 cards, and declared myself finished. This year I designed the cards, plus a newsletter with text on one side and, on the other, a collage of small photos illustrating the highlights of the year.

The highlight of 2011 for us, of course, was the arrival in August of Amalía, our first grandchild, so we included a lot of shots of her, despite the suggestion of one acquaintance: “Go easy on the baby photos.  We’ve all seen enough by now.”

Not a chance!  I just cut the critic off my list.

Why do I spend a big chunk of my precious pre-holiday time designing cards and newsletter and photo collage, addressing 200 cards, stamping them and sending them off?  Well, for one thing, I love getting cards with news of all those friends I haven’t heard from in a year.  Because we lived in Greece for five years and Manhattan for 14, because I grew up in Minnesota, went to college in Wisconsin and Berkeley, we have friends spread around the world.  About 35 percent of our cards need overseas stamps. 

I love opening holiday cards and reading them, especially if there are photos.  One couple always sends a poem, to be sung to music—usually Gilbert and Sullivan.  Two couples always feature a painting by one of them. One couple  photoshops themselves and their dog into cartoon-ish situations.  A gutsy female friend manages to stalk a celebrity every year and get her photo taken along with said celebrity.  Last year it was James Gandolfini who played Tony Soprano.  The text of the card said:  “Hanukah, Xmas, Kwanzaa…Fuggedaboutit!  From Bada-Bing and Lotsa Bling.”

(Some of my more tech-savvy friends send animated E-cards—even ones they’ve animated themselves, but it isn’t the same.  You can’t store them in a closet in a shoebox to revisit next year.)

Since childhood, daughter Eleni has reveled in the cards we receive, sitting by the tree, studying them all.  This is the first year she sent out her own family card (featuring, of course Amalia—it served as a birth announcement as well.)

Eleni wrote a blog post on “The Liminal Stage” about holiday cards, called “The Ghosts of Christmas Cards Past”  and included some rules for senders of newsletters. (I know that people like Miss Manners think family newsletters are tacky, but  even so, I adore getting them and sending them.  It’s the only time of year I actually “correspond” instead of e-mailing.)

Eleni’s rules for Christmas-card writers can mostly be summed up as “Don’t embarrass your children”

Eleni wrote:  I’ve read cards bragging about stellar SAT scores (a delight for proud parents, a nightmare for shy kids). But the worst text I’ve ever seen described a seventh-grade boy’s multiple accomplishments and then added, “and yes, he has discovered girls.”

          Which leads me to the first rule of holiday card and newsletter writing, which I’d like to offer as a public service: Puberty has no place in your holiday newsletter. If you have a pre-teen, it is already all over your photos. Please, do your sensitive child a favor and ignore any references to a social life and/or physical developments. This will not only save your relationship with your child, it will spare me, the reader, from flashbacks to my own awkward years.

         In a similar vein, vacation shots on holiday cards are great. Bikini photos, not so much. I say this as a person who finally had to tell her mother I didn’t want to see my breasts on any more holiday card newsletters...

         While we’re on the topic of body image, you should know that if I receive a photo of just your children, not you and your children, I’m going to assume it’s because you don’t want me to see how much weight you’ve put on. (That’s harsh, and not in the spirit of Christian charity and lovingkindness, but I’m telling it like it is.) Your kids are adorable, but you’re the one I went to college with; I want to see your smiling face, too! Of course, this year, our own Christmas card features just the delightful baby Amalía, but that’s because it’s doubling as a birth announcement. And because I don’t want you to see how much weight I’ve put on.

         But the biggest faux pas you can make holiday cardwise, as far as I’m concerned, is not sending one at all.

Here are some rules of my own from the viewpoint and wisdom of a senior citizen:

Omit any mention at all of any significant others in your child’s love life—until they’re officially engaged.    Lines like “Susie and Oscar Vanderbilt seem to be getting serious” can look awfully embarrassing in a year, after Oscar has come out of the closet and married Rodney Thistlewaite and Susie is back on the dating market.

No matter how fascinating your year has been, even if your last name is Obama, you don’t get more than one page to tell about it.  Okay, this year I had to take my Arial 12 point font down to 11 point, but I sternly adhere to the one-page rule.

This is a biggie for senior citizens—whatever grim medical procedure you’ve undergone, do NOT go into detail.  No one wants to know.  Just sum it up in a cheery matter: “Despite having a knee replacement, Cedric will soon be back on the golf links.”

Of course if Cedric passed away in the past year, you owe it to your friends who may not have read the obituary to tell them.  In fact, I suspect the entire newsletter would be Cedric’s obituary, with a line or two from you, the widow, thanking everyone for their support and condolences.

(One more thing—if your pet passed away, please make it clear that it was a PET.  Otherwise we get sentences like, “We are still grieving the loss of our beloved Lancelot”—which leads to scrambling through old Christmas cards to try to remember the names of your children.  Better you should say, “our beloved Golden Retriever Lancelot” )

I second Eleni’s remarks about photos—we don’t just want to see photos of your adorable grandchildren, we also want to see YOU in photos, so we can judge how well that last facelift is holding up.

That’s all the rules I can think of as I recover from this year’s Christmas card crunch and await what the next few days will bring into the mail box. The only final rule I have is:

Send that holiday card.  I want to know about your kids and grandkids and the hip replacement and the 50^th high school reunion.  And if you don’t send me a card this year, you're off my list next December.

R.I.P. George Whitman—We’ll Always Have Paris

Photo by Simon Nofolk for The Telegraph

Today’s New York Times carried the obituary for George Whitman, who died yesterday, Dec. 14, in Paris in his apartment above his bookstore “Shakespeare and Company” at the age of 98. There was even a small photo of him on the Times’ front page saying “Heir to a Paris Legacy—George Whitman, owner and operator of the postwar Shakespeare & Company bookstore and a beacon, mentor and provider to generations of young writers.  Page B 17.”

I was immediately transported back to 1969, when, as a single “career girl” in my 20’s, I took two years off, quit my magazine job in New York and traveled, visiting friends from Vienna to Paris to Morocco to Rome and then settled into an editing job in London.

Like every writer of my generation (including Woody Allen) I harbored fantasies of being part of the Paris writers of the twenties, hanging out with the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways.  I knew all about Sylvia Beach and her famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and I had heard it was now owned by a New England eccentric who was continuing Sylvia’s legacy and would offer food, board and books to anyone who wandered in off the street.

I was eager to write an article about him, but the first day I walked into the store, he refused to be interviewed.  When he finally did grudgingly agree to answer some questions, he mixed fantasy with fact, because he liked enhancing his legend.  He told me he was the “illegitimate grandson of Walt Whitman”, but the twinkle in his eye hinted that we both knew how unlikely it was that the poet left any progeny.

Looking today on Google for photos of George and his famous  bookstore on the Left Bank’s Rue de la Bucherie, facing Notre Dame, I discovered that dozens, maybe hundred of writers of my generation visited Shakespeare and Company and had experiences similar to mine and are now reminiscing on their blogs about the man who devoted nearly a century to carrying on Sylvia Beach’s store and her encouragement of writers.  (It's not the same physical store, but Sylvia  late in life gave George the right to use the name.) 

My article on George Whitman was eventually published in the April 1970 issue of the late, lamented Holiday Magazine. As I wrote in the lead, “Between the two world wars, a minister’s brown-eyed daughter named Sylvia Beach owned a famous bookstore called Shakespeare and Company on Paris’ Left Bank. She provided encouragement criticism and occasional handouts to struggling American writers …She published Joyce’s revolutionary Ulysses when no one in New York or London was willing to take the risk…Ernest Hemingway, in "A Moveable Feast", wrote about her:  ‘She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested and loved to make jokes and gossip.  No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.’”

In the 1970 piece I chronicled the troubles Whitman had been having with the French Government, which had closed down the second floor of the store because he was using it as a free hostel for young people who wanted to crash there.  I quoted the sign in the window on the day I first entered the store:  “To Those Who Cherish Freedom, Practice Equality and Seek Justice –WELCOME.  We wish our guests to enter with the feeling they have inherited a book-lined apartment on the Seine which is all the more delightful because they share it with others.”

In the article I compared Whitman to “a modern Don Quixote.  He is the image of the knight of the woeful countenance—tall and painfully thin, with watery blue eyes in a doleful, hollow-cheeked face, unkempt red hair streaked with gray and a gray Van Dyke beard that juts out at the world like a defiant Brillo pad.”  (And that was 42 years ago, people, when I was very young and he was already an old man. Twelve years after I visited him the first time, George Whitman produced his only heir, a lovely blonde woman named Sylvia Beach Whitman, who has taken over the running of the store.)

 I found this photo of Whitman, posing with  his daughter Sylvia and  Bill Clinton on a blog  with the unlikely name of Palavrasqueoventoleva 

In “The Paris Magazine”, Whitman’s  attempt at a “poor man’s Paris Review” he wrote, “Why do people always come in and ask me is this your bookstore?  I consider it as much yours as mine ...Go ahead and kick off your shoes and lie in a bed and read…”

Here’s how I described my first meeting with him:   I was peering into the window when a bleary-eyed, bearded figure unlocked the door and, squinting at the sun, asked me what time it was. “Noon,” I replied.  “Come in and I’ll make us some coffee,” he said.

Soon I was drinking coffee at a table outside the door of the shop, gazing at what must be one of the most lovely views in Paris, while my host opened his mail.  I felt I should explain myself, but when I began he snapped, “No interrogations at this  time of the morning,” and went back to his mail.

Some  customers wandered in and he motioned me aside “I have some good news for you, dear.  I’m going to let you run the store while I take a shower.”  He handed me the cash box, warned me not to sell any books that didn’t have the price written on them and nailed up a “Black Power-White Power” poster on an outside wall.  Then he scrabbled around the messy desk looking for his soap, towel and a candle.  “To cut my hair.”  He lit the candle, ignited his hair, then beat out the flames with his hands, muttering,” Better than a haircut.”  Finally he donned a red-plaid sports jacket, leaped onto his bicycle and rode out the door to the public showers, leaving me with 25,000 second-hand books and the odor of burned hair.

 He never asked me my name and I never got a chance to ask his.

During the next seven hours, Whitman returned two times—just long enough to unload piles of books from the baskets of his bicycle. To my protests that I had to go, he’d mumble, “Lots of important errands to do, lots of people to see. Haven’t paid the tax on my bicycle.” And off he’d ride, red coat flapping behind him.  Meanwhile I sold about $150 worth of books in five languages and refused to sell what were worth about $100 more because they weren’t marked.  The most popular books that day were Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, L’Anarchisme and anything by Ezra Pound.

By the time the sun was going down, I had been joined by two mini-skirted English girls who had run out of money, a starving French boy who wanted to sell his art books, a young American couple who couldn’t find the friends they were supposed to stay with, a fiery Frenchman with a broken leg who wanted to talk to Whitman about publishing his poetry, and Gerard, a soft-spoken American who had been on the road for seven years and was currently sweeping up the store in exchange for food.  Whitman himself popped in for a minute to say he was going to make potato salad—we must all stay for dinner—and he was just going to the grocery store. Much later, when he hadn’t returned, we raided the refrigerator, ate bread, sausages, cheese and yogurt on the table outside and watched shadows cover Notre Dame while the good bourgeoisie of the neighborhood looked at us with curiosity.  I handed the cash box to Gerard and set out on my Métro trip back to the Right Bank.”

Eventually, of course, I came back and eventually I got the chance to interview George.  One thing he said that I quoted in the article: “My favorite customers are seventeen-year-old girls.  I can’t think of anything more wonderful than  being seventeen and in Paris.  If a girl comes in on her seventeenth birthday, she can pick out any book she wants, free.”

That interview took place in 1969 when I was 28 years old, not seventeen.  When I turned 60 in 2001, I returned to Paris with my two daughters (both of them over 17 by then) and dropped by Shakespeare and Company to find it being tended by a young British schoolteacher.  She assured us that George was in fine health, reigning over his small kingdom as usual.  He just wasn’t in at the moment.

Now George is gone, but I suspect his ghost will still be sitting in the shadows of his dusty, overcrowded store which, according to the Times he called, paraphrasing Yeats,  “my little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.”

George Whitman lived a remarkable life.  I’m just sorry I never got a chance to thank him for one of my favorite Paris experiences.

Her Lost Saints

I have mentioned before daughter Eleni’s blog, which she began this year, called “The Liminal Stage.”  Having studied Folklore and Mythology in college, Eleni writes about traditions, rituals, and liminal stages—the  “psychological thresholds, times of transition when we stand ‘betwixt and between’ one state and another. The biggies are birth, marriage, death”.

The blog post she wrote yesterday, inspired by the fact that it was St. Anna’s day, just blew me away.  She makes it look so easy.   Her writing is always funny, conversational, yet full of wisdom. (A proud  mother’s plug: her second book, first novel “Other Waters” is being published in February by St. Martin’s Press).   By the end of yesterday’s essay, I had a lump in my throat.  So I asked Eleni’s permission to reprint the post here, because I think it deserves the widest possible audience.

My emotional reaction to this blog post was not unique.  A dear friend who lives in Israel wrote her yesterday:  “Each blog post is more – better – awesome – terrific….My grandmother (who died in Auschwitz) was named Anna.  One of the few photos I have of her is sitting outside on a stone or something very low and reading. And here we have Anna teaching Mary how to read.  My mother’s name had a bit of Mary in it, as did many females in Hungary at the time.  See—your blog make my memory electrons move rapidly.

You touch my heart.”  

My Lost Saints

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Saint Anne teaching the Virgin Mary to read from the church of San Giuseppe alla Lungara in Rome

Today is Saint Anna’s day. You may know her as Jesus’s grandma, as Anna and Joachim were the parents of Mary. Anna is not a flashy saint. She’s no Mary Magdalene (hubba hubba!) or John the Baptist. But for people named Anna, she’s a patron saint. And there may be others who choose her as their patron as well, because they feel a special fondness for her, or were saved from a tragedy on her nameday (it’s sort of like a spiritual Big Brothers/Big Sisters mentoring kind of thing). She’s not my absolute favorite (that’s the Virign Mary), but I do have a soft spot for Anna, partly because of a wooden santos from Puerto Rico I was given by a dear friend, which depicts Anna reading to a child Mary. I love this image of her; a mom like any other, reading to a child, a commonplace event made exceptional  because of the people involved and the tenderness of the moment.

Tuesday, December 6th, was St. Nicholas’s day. Now that’s a saint who’s a headliner, having been turned into Santa Claus because of his generosity. A fourth-century bishop in what is now Turkey, he was the original perpetrator of random acts of kindness, known for giving secret gifts to people, including throwing gold coins down the chimney (or through the window) of a poor man who had three dowryless daughters who would otherwise have had to follow the career path often ascribed to Mary Magdalene. (In the chimney version, the youngest daughter has hung her stockings in the fireplace to dry and the cash dropped right in, ka-ching! Thus stocking stuffers were born to the delight of retailers everywhere.)

  St. Nicholas is known as the patron saint of single women (there was a particular icon of him at Holy Trinity in New York I often venerated in the days before he sent me my beshert), thieves (not sure why, maybe it has to do with all the sneaking around chimneys), and fishermen (he’s often depicted saving sailors from shipwrecks and is sort of conflated with Poseidon in Greek folklore, maybe because of the beard, but that’s my own little theory). He was also the patron saint of an uncle-figure of mine, Themis, whose life was saved twice on St. Nicholas Day.

The first time, Themis was a 17–year-old policeman in Athens when the Nazis occupied the city and rounded up the entire police force in the station. Nature called and he excused himself. While in the bathroom, wondering what the Germans had in mind for the policemen, and sensing it wasn’t anything good, he noticed an open window. A skinny teenager, he climbed out the window, pulled himself up onto the rooftop and jumped from roof to roof of the neoclassical buildings in the Plaka neighborhood until he reached his own home, where he hid under the bed. The Nazis proceeded to march the policement to a nearby hill, shoot them, and leave their bodies in a ravine.

The second time, he was driving on a winding mountain road on St. Nicholas’ Day when he rode off the edge. The car flipped, but he was able to walk out of the twisted wreckage unscathed, leaving the car’s remains on the mountainside. Whenever I see a mangled auto carcass on the side of a mountain road in Greece (which is surprisingly often) I think of St Nicholas.

I know some would argue that these are tales of luck, and the date is coincidence; why would St. Nicholas choose Themis instead of all of the other policement or mountain drivers? But that’s the nature of patron saint relationship; they’re mystical and faith-based, they’re about feeling and belief not demonstrable knowledge. And above all, they’re personal, a connection between saint and supplicant and no one else.

I once wrote a paper for a nonfiction class that investigated an icon of the Saint Irenein Queens that was said to be crying (a not-unheard-of phenomenon among icons of female saints; some icons of male saints have been observed to emit a sweet myrrh-like scent, but there arren’t any cases of crying St. Nicks or his brethren, at least none of which I, and the priest I iterviewed for the paper, are aware). The priest I spoke with told me that he fears the furor over miracle-working saints or crying icons could detract from a worshipper’s belief in Christ Himself, which is the main event of Christianity. (Perhaps the multiplicity of saints feels too familiar to polytheism for this particular priest’s comfort.)

I see his point, but I sort of like the idea of having a personal relationship with a saint who looks out for you, one to whom you can confide your smaller problems when you don’t want to break out the big guns. Just like I like the idea of a saint who once read to her baby daughter before she grew up and became the Virgin Mary. I’m all for awe and wonder, the splendor of a cathedral. But I like my religion to have room for coziness too, the intimacy of a small chapel.

That’s what I think Elizabeth Barrett Browning was referring to when she wrote that she loved Robert with “a love I seemed to lose/With my lost saints,” a love that mixes simple fondness with profound faith that someone is watching out for you.