Princes and Princesses

So I've been reading Jung. I admit it. It sounds kinda highbrow, but hear me out: my therapist and my 'groups' keep offering me all these readings with easy-peasy titles like "He Loves You, He Loves You Not". Seemingly facile ideology from the pop-culture phenom craze of my parents' generation. Truth is: a lot of these tomes are actually steeped in good, literate, intelligent psychology and not so psycho-babble spirituality, drawing from Jung and The Upanishads and Buddhism and Yoga and Melodie Beattie and AA and loads of philosophy. So there's worth in the paperbacks I'm given. But this morning, as I sat in my sanctuary (cause a girl's gotta create a sanctuary and mine is my porch with chimes and hanging plants and comfy 1/2 price off Target club chair deck furniture from off-season, and my $50 vintage find of an antique plant rack with my herbs and begonias and violets and petunias, an old fake-persian rug where my dog June will lay spread in front of me, facing Fatherland, with my greeneries of Cardinals and Robins, songbirds and crows...) reading, meditating, journalling, I decided to read some Carl Jung and went directly to the back of the collected works, to "Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" and was schooled, maybe a bit too early, the coffee hadn't settled in. But it got me to thinking about Princes and Princesses and taffeta gown and trumpets. And soul mates.

I remember the last big 'Royal Wedding'. I'd been grounded severely. My whole family had gone off on vacation somewhere. A beach, probably. Who knows. But I was grounded. Probably for insubordination. That's what it always was with me. I fought the law. The law always won. But I kept fighting. Usually I was talking back ("sassing" they called it) to some moronic elder with a playground sense of justice. I'd call out the injustice. I'd get cut down by "you shouldn't talk back to adults" and I'd counter with "if the adult had something to Say..." and of course, I'd get punished. Truth be told: nine times out of ten I was right. But who likes a smart-ass 8 year old? So I'd get the punishment. This time: I was sent to my cousin's house. My mother's cousin. My godmother Mary Ellen. Now, Mary Ellen's house was no punishment. Mary Ellen and her husband John were the coolest. Washington insiders, they were intellects, and later I'd find out that, at least John, was the sole liberal (amongst myself) in my extended family. So I could talk to them. And in their house: Reason ruled. So there was debate about Right and Wrong. And I loved my cousins, Mary Ellen was like my Aunt, but my favorite Aunt. My Mom's childhood best friend. And her husband John was smart as shit and funny as Robin Williams and really really liked me. Made me feel like I belonged and cared. He was like the coolest Uncle ever. He was like a college professor, smoked a pipe, drank scotch, wore suede padded tweed jackets. Knew the President. And their kids, my 3rd cousins, were awesome. All Irish red and freckles.

So on that weekend, I was grounded, I remember being woken up at like 5am or something, coffee being served and we all parked ourselves in front of the television (no cable at this point in the 80's, just rabbit ears). And I remember the dress: the pooofy sleeves, the red of the carpet. She was ordinary. I loved it. I had her haircut. Bangs and short hair. Brown in a really dirty water way. She was nothing special and that's what made her gorgeous to me. An ordinary girl. Like me. And she was a princess. He was nothing special. Who really cared anyway about Prince Charles. It was Diana we all wanted to be. To be like. To be.

My sister got married in 1997 and the after party of the wedding was at our hometown's Sheraton bar and I was sitting in the booth with one of the red-haired freckled cousins, my brothers and my soon-to-be-husband and the news came on that Princess Diana had died in a car accident. The shag carpeting of my Virginia cousins' house where I watched her wedding came back and I felt sad for time passing and sad for a life, a waste really of time and so much, gone in a tunnel chase. I missed that girl with the brown hair and the bangs. I'd stopped caring once she became a glamour queen.

So to tomorrow's wedding. I won't wake early. If I had a daughter, I'd probably not wake her. Fairy tales are nice, but they can screw you up. Jung wrote his essay, which reads like empirical truth, on the wake of a late life affair with a younger woman. Of course he wanted to break apart the 'myth' of the Soul Mate. Its best to read the Greats with knowledge of where they were coming from in their personal lives. Sometimes Great Insight is really just the rantings of a pissed off lover dumped.

So I may not watch the wedding and certainly my belief in fairy kingdoms and castles is long gone. As is my belief in the 'soul mate'. That was a sad one to let go, and I don't mind admitting that. We all make our choices and we find ourselves in lives we didn't expect or anticipate or plan for, but here we are nonetheless, and there's no use in building sand castles. All kingdoms crumble. Its for the best and doesn't have to be a nihilistic argument for not caring and not trying. But if we know that really, under the poof and taffetta, there's just two people who survived a few breakups and getting back together, two ordinary people with some money who will do their best. And that's enough right? We do our best, knowing our own flaws, our own misguided beliefs in false fairytales, but also, knowing the wanting those myths to be true guides our poetry.

Oh hell. I'll put the coffee on early...

Ally and Amy

A seriously bad obsession with Ally McBeal is in full swing and I admit it. I didn't watch this show when it first came around. I was younger. Oh man. Way younger. And it didn't speak to me. All these white, whiny lawyers, hot and rich, anorexic and quirky, lusting and looking for love. I was busy with my Life. Finding my Life. Finding the things that, well, they were all trying to find. But I was on the ground running. I was the Elaine, the legal secretary (albeit one with a little ivy degree) running in between acting gigs and music gigs and directing gigs and Lainie Kazan gigs. And dating men who were not my soul mates, but oh constantly wondering 'is this HIM? Should I stick with it? Is there something here I'm missing? What if I miss it?" Oh. I thought I was so outside the Ally realm.

Here I am. 43 years old. In my mid-life and wondering if this is part of the proverbial crisis. But I now finally, oh man, am I about to write this? RELATE to this skinny, whiny, exhausting, big-lipped bitch. I do. I admit it. Looking for love. Wondering if she found it and let it go. Or if she found it and it wasn't available to her and she should, well, wait till it is, exhausting her friends with the angst of all that. I admit it. Here I am. In the age where most women my age have kids going off to college or at least to high school. And I'm single. No kids. With a dog who just had surgery who's banging around my rented house in my new town in a plastic collar. Wondering what the meaning of life is. My best friends range from 19 to 65. Most women who are my closest friends are single without children. And searching but still somewhat content with where they are. Most are middle class. Some are poor. A few are rich. One is a CEO.

I looked in the mirror while Chelsea was doing my hair today and wondered about that crease, that thick crease between my brows. And the lines around my mouth. I wondered if its all starting to show. Finally. I feel like I've been cheating age. Looking younger than I am. And I wonder if its catching up finally.

And here I am, watching a 29 year old whine about the love of her life, who's just bleached his hair, divorced his wife, sleeping with his secretary... And yeah yeah I know, Billy's about to get a brain tumor and die and its gonna make me weepy. I tend to find sitcoms and these kinds of shows 15 years after they are off the air. I'm behind the times. Happily. Because if I was with the times, I'd be glued to "Jersey Shore" and some cooking show.

But yeah. 29. 43. Aren't we all just looking for the same thing?

Battened Hatches

When I was a kid, I was a big crier. I cried as a baby. I cried when Mary Beth Mulligan seemed to prefer playing with my little sister over me, even though Mary Beth was my age and should have been my friend. I cried when my sister didn't share her toys. I cried in public: in 4th grade Mr. Tembrull (Mr. T we'd call him in our 1970's public-yet-posing-as-a-hip-boho-private-Montessori-like-grade-school-with-raised-carpeted-platforms-and-bean-bag-chairs-and-teachers-we'd-call-Mr. T-or Miss B-giving-us-the-false-impression-it-was-all-free-to-be-you-and-me elementary school) had us do multiplication tests on the chalkboard. He'd pit two of us against each other for time. I was a) not great at math b) very slow at math and c) a crier. So you can imagine. It was akin to wetting your pants in the playground. Completely uncool and completely humiliating. My mother would say "there are people worse off than you" in order to give me perspective and stop the tears, but still, they'd fall and I'd cry. Let me assure you, reader, at this point. I was a fairly healthy kid both physically and mentally in a stable family with the requisite amount of normal disfunction. Which is to say, nobody was beating me and there were no really big dramas that would be some underlying cause of the crying jags. I was just a blubbering kid. I was far from cool. I think the public crying stopped by the time I hit 7th grade. By that time I'd discovered bras and boys and was equally concerned with popularity, getting straight As and Nick Caringi.

Tonight I'm going to confess something. I was not nice to a stranger. I wasn't a bitch. But I was short and snippy, I was tired, and I could have been nicer. I would take it all back if I could. The late night hotel clerk. I'd requested a non smoking room. I lugged my heavy luggage and guitar up to the 3rd floor to find a smoking hall and a disgustingly smoky room. Lugged everything back down. Told her. She said the hotel was sold out. I said, 'is there anything you can do? I have asthma (true)' She found another room, gave me the key. I went to the room. It was freezing and the heater/air conditioner was stuck and wouldn't work. Went back. Now, it was 1:30am, I'd driven 5 hours, done a gig, did a radio show, and gotten to the hotel. As well, yesterday I'd driven 5 hours, had a horrible conversation on the phone that left me grieving and exhausted by the side of the road with about 10 minutes to get myself together before I was to be live on air for a radio show, done the radio show, still numb from the personal earthquake, survived a tornado (I'm serious), done a show, cried myself to sleep. So. It was a bad few days, or, rather, a challenging few days. And the third room the hotel clerk gave me seemed fine, so I unpacked, got into my sweats and then the high pitched short beep of the carbon monoxide detector started in and I realized the device was broken. I called the clerk. She mispronounced my name "Mrs. Speechy". And I just asked her (perhaps I was cranky, its possible) to either move me to another room (again) or come up and help me tear this stupid device off the wall if it wasn't going to stop beeping.

The knock on the door came fairly soon thereafter and the clerk, a large woman who could have been anywhere from late 20's to late 30's came into the room, stood on one of the beds to reach the alarm, and fiddled with it for 20 minutes. All I could think about was my last few days and I was barely holding it together, emotions threatened to spill uncontrollably out of my pores that weren't appropriate nor were they wanted, but there they were, knocking on my chest and behind my eyes and in my gut and I thought I was going to lose it. And then....she fixed it. And I softened. And as she came down off the bed, and I was profusely thanking her, and even apologizing for my tone, giving all sorts of excuses, she turned to me very graciously to say 'thank you' and I saw that tears were backing up in her large, sad eyes. And I said, 'are you ok?' and she had her hands together in a clasped wringing, the "I'm barely keeping it together" gesture that I know very well. She shook her head and nodded--both no and yes at the same time -- and smiled that kind of "If I say anything I might just cry so hard I won't ever stop" apologetic smile of the broken-hearted. I tried to stammer something of comfort and she said, 'God will provide. He always has. I am praying for strength and I believe I will have it' and I thought how brave of this woman to just tell me this, and I had a thought of my own pain, and that whatever hers was was larger, more enveloping, and then I had that feeling that we are all in the same boat. The same damn, sad, lonely, jubilant, sometimes blissfull, sometimes heartbreaking, thank-God-we're-all-together boat. And I wanted to hug her but my legs wouldn't move and she let a tear or two fall and then nodded to me, as if to say "I see the same in you and we'll be fine" and I thanked her for coming to help and she went out the door and back to her desk, wiping her eyes.

My own sadness was just wiped away by this woman, who came into the room to fix the alarm of some bitchy, tired, stranger.

Life lessons come in strange wrappings. I wish this woman a week of peace. A month of serenity and ease. I think she'll make it through. She has that kind of grounding, I could see it.

Candlesticks and battened hatches

Deck of cards and waterproof matches

We'll stay warm through the storm

Come what may

We've got all we need, no reason to complain

When the world's been raining, raining, raining

Cats and dogs

When the world's been flooded, flooded

All the dry land is gone

All we've got left

Is each other and this boat we're on

(Chuck E. Costa, 'Battened Hatches')