Life, Part Two: Where Do We Go From Here?

Life, Part Two: Where Do We Go From Here?

My husband and I bought ourselves a red Ping Pong table last December. We put it in his upstairs office, which is the only place it can fit. Since buying our house, we’d gone back and forth on what kind of sitting area to create in front of his desk but could never decide. When we saw the ping pong table, we knew the problem wasn’t indecision. The problem was we didn’t want to sit.

We play ping pong sometimes in the evenings after dinner, but mainly we play in stolen moments between working and working, like when I walk down the short hallway from my office to his to let the dogs out, or when he calls me in to ask a question about something he’s doing. Dogs let out, question answered, we pick up our paddles and a ferocious volley explodes. We play until we are ready to get back to work, or lose three balls to the staircase, whichever comes first. Usually, it’s not more than about ten minutes. But it does the trick. We return to our work more focused. The dogs return to their happy places under my desk and in the big red chair in the corner of my office. And that’s that until we do it again, maybe in two hours, maybe not until the next day.

It’s no secret that my husband and I struggle with balance. We tend to overwork, though we tell ourselves it’s just because we love what we do. And we do!  But even too much of a good thing can be too much, we remind ourselves. Years ago, my writing mentor, upon hearing that I was laboring all day and then again after dinner on a writing project, exclaimed, “Stop sitting on your manuscript!” She was trying to tell me that projects, like people, need space to breathe. Which reminded me that I also needed to breathe.

To not work all the time, my husband and I have thrown ourselves into other activities in addition to the pop-up ping pong rallies. He plays golf two or three days a week. I play pickleball five mornings a week. I tell myself that while it’s true too much of a good thing can be too much, the rule doesn’t apply to golf or pickleball. I tell myself the fact that my right elbow sizzles with pain and I had to have surgery on my right hand is somehow unrelated to my playing a paddle sport ten hours a week. Admittedly, when my doctor heard the five-days-a-week pickleball statistic, she, like my writing mentor years ago, was aghast.

“Can’t you find something else to do a few mornings a week?” she asked. I could write more, I thought, but then I didn’t want to get back to sitting on my manuscript, so really, the answer was no.

Secretly, I think it’s a positive thing that I like what I do enough to cause myself to need surgery and interventions from alarmed others. Perhaps it’s because I can remember plenty of years that I cried on my way to work every morning because I was so unhappy, and years when I moved my body in healthy ways only in service to losing a staggeringly unhealthy number of pounds. Those days make the imbalance in my current life look a lot like balance.

Recently my husband and I started reading Arthur C. Brook’s book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. It’s all about embracing the inevitable, age-related changes in our abilities and interests while recognizing that the trade-off is deep wisdom, richer connections with others, and detachment from empty rewards. Brooks says it’s important, as we get older, to let go of the illusion that our achievements and accolades can sustain us, because they are ephemeral: they begin to dissipate almost as soon as we get them.  He explains that the path to happiness in later life lies not in continuing to rack up successes (which gets harder and harder, particularly in certain professions), or in attempting to live off the emotional spoils of our legacy. Through seven years of research and interviews, Brooks discovered that happiness in later life comes not in continued striving (which is a strength we enjoy most in our younger years), but in tending to our relationships, and in embracing the “deep wisdom”—a more enduring and rewarding strength–that (if we are lucky) has come with age.

I’m not ready to give up the thrill of seeing a new writing project in print, and a win on the pickleball court still delights. Still, I can see the beginnings of one curtain dropping as another one lifts. I no longer have the drive to make a name for myself, to show up on some lighted billboard for an accolade that is sexy but fleeting. More and more I find myself appreciating not just the challenges of pickleball, but the players, who have become my friends. I think this must be how the march from one strength to another begins: as a kind of ping-ponging back and forth between your current world and a new and potentially more resonant one, until such time as you put down one ball entirely, and step fully and fruitfully into a whole different game.

When Truth is Off the Menu

When Truth is Off the Menu

Last night at a restaurant some distance from Chattanooga, I did something I regret: I lodged a complaint. Well, not exactly a complaint. It was more like an unwelcome clarification. What happened was that I ordered what the menu called a roasted beet salad appetizer, but what arrived did not actually contain roasted beets. I don’t think I was wrong about this: I’ve made my share of roasted beets, and of my four dining companions, at least one other agreed that what lay sprawled across my plate was roasted beets’ flaccid fraternal twin: beets that had been either canned, or pickled, or both. So I suggested this to the waiter.

It was a clarification he did not take well to. His smile departed. His demeanor hardened. The beets were as described, he said; he knew because he had watched them being prepared. While I had my doubts about the veracity of his account—research studies have proven time and again that eyewitness testimony is fraught with bias—I didn’t want to argue. I liked the salad, I assured him. I just happen to be a stickler for truth in marketing. I did not say this last part. Nevertheless, there would be no more kindness from our waiter, who moments before had seemed so delighted by our presence.

That night I Googled the proper way to lodge a complaint in a restaurant. In a nutshell, you should be polite, mention the problem as soon as you’re aware of it (not after you’ve polished off your meal), and be clear about how you’d like it resolved. I’m happy to say that I was, I think, polite, and I did mention the beets immediately. I didn’t suggest a resolution, however, because aside from the salad being an uninspired lie of an appetizer, it was perfectly fine to eat. My husband and I are decades out from the days when we turned our noses up at the canned, pickled beet slabs that topped every Italian restaurant salad, until the day we actually tried one and liked it, after which we vied for who got the bigger slab. What I’m saying is, I find beets in any form pretty acceptable, but more importantly, those restaurants never pretended their beets were anything they weren’t.

So I was bothered by our waiter’s defensiveness. I’m reminded of the story about my husband’s ex-girlfriend, who sent back a steak so many times the chef himself finally came out to their table, took her by the hand, and said, “Come. Let’s cook this steak together.” That, my friends, is accommodation in action, and that isn’t anything like what I was looking for.

Which makes me wonder what, exactly, I was looking for. Since I wasn’t requesting a replacement salad with actual roasted beets, did I just need to flex my gastronomical muscle? As foodies go, I’m about a four on a scale of one to ten. I’m a respectable cook who has never sickened anyone (there was some suspect turkey once that did cause my husband to vomit, but in my defense, I ate it too, and I was fine). And while I do have a fantasy of opening a soup café one day, I realize that having a repertoire of three good soups does not a café make. But of everything in the world of cooking I do not understand or have patience for—and this includes, apparently, turkey safety, as well as a well thought-out soup philosophy—roasted beets are something I actually do understand. And maybe that’s why I had to say something.

In the end, my husband’s ex-girlfriend did not go to the kitchen to help the chef cook her steak, and I did not go to the kitchen to watch my chef roast beets, so it’s really anyone’s guess whether she could have taught her chef a thing or two, and whether I might have caught ours in a tangled web of alternative beet facts. In thinking about it (at length, it turns out), I believe that all I wanted last night was for the waiter to say, “You’re right.” Maybe he could have explained that they just couldn’t get their hands on fresh beets, or that they sold out of them moments before we arrived, all dressed up and with a yearning for roasted root vegetables. Either of these responses would have made it all ok. Because in my opinion, the raw truth is always more satisfying than a half-baked defense.

 

How to Make the Perfect Child, and Other Lies

How to Make the Perfect Child, and Other Lies

It’s kind of a funny story, really, if you overlook the whole cheating part. When I was in high school, I had to write a term paper on child development. Oh how I railed against this assignment! As I intended to never educate children, give birth to children or raise the children of others, it seemed a waste of time to explore how they were put together. For the record, I also railed against math, geography, history and lunch, but at least I could see the relevance of knowing how to count, knowing that it’s prudent to avoid volcanoes, knowing the world was not dreamed into existence by my birth, and food.

But children? Who cared? Despite my protestations, I still had to do the assignment. This was a semester-long project that required I first conduct exhaustive research on psychologist Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development and write a paper explaining them to a teacher who, I suspected, probably already knew about them. I then had to find a child (a real child, mind you, not a theoretical child or an adult who used to be a child and remembered it like it was yesterday) and, over the course of 10 face-to-face interviews, explore the stage of development they were in and how that stage manifested intellectually and emotionally. My graduate-school experimental psychology class, in which I had to earn a B or better with no more aptitude for theoretical statistics than an infant in the preobject permanence stage of development, caused less angst.

Interestingly, I enjoyed researching the stages of development. Through my copious (some would say obsessive) reading and note-taking, there blossomed what can only be described as a love affair with psychological theory that would entrance me the rest of my life.

But there was still that uncomfortable sticking point: I had to find a real child (and again, this could not be something like a child manikin from Gap Kids, or a really short person) to talk to, interview at length, test, collect drawings from and come to Piaget-inspired conclusions about.

One day I was walking the mile between my house and my horse’s stable when I saw a little girl named Stacey who lived with her family in a rancher set back off the road in what I remember as a dense forest but was really just a few trees and a lot of pine needles. Stacey liked to ride her bike up and down her long driveway, and I had actually spoken to her a few times in the past (though she was so young — probably 8 or 9 — that I had no idea whether she was actually capable of language or if she was just faking it). But her age did not matter; she had a pulse, therefore, she could be my research subject.

I no longer recall how I got permission from her mother to use Stacey for my science project, but I did. At our first meeting, I learned she was 6 years old, not 8 or 9, which put her firmly within the preoperational stage of cognitive development (in case you’re interested, this is the stage when, according to Piaget, kids develop memory and imagination, can understand things symbolically and understand the concept of past and future. In case you aren’t interested, never mind.)

I also found out, at that first meeting, where Stacey went to school, what grade she was in and what she liked to do besides ride her bike to the end of her driveway. (I can only imagine the expression on my face as I dug for these and other gripping personal details.)

This concluded the first interview. I walked home, tossed my notebook onto my bed and made myself a promise. I would do a killer job on this project. My research would be airtight, my interviews with Stacey would be clear and to the point, and Stacey’s drawings and assessment results would be not just evidence of, but a tribute to, the preoperational stage.

But I would not, under any circumstances, ever see Stacey again.

I’m pleased to say my project was, in fact, killer. It was thoroughly researched and beautifully written. It clearly articulated the four stages of development, paying particular attention to the one Stacey was in. Through interviews, tests of ability, conversation and original artwork — all of which I had fabricated, right down to the clumsy figure drawings, which I drew with my left hand — the reader could clearly see the preoperational stage at work in Stacey. I got an A+. Instead of feeling bad for cheating, I congratulated myself for my ingenuity.

Years later, I ran into my old teacher in a grocery store and confessed what I had done. Stacey was real, I told her, but nothing else about the paper was. The teacher nodded her head.

“I thought as much,” she said. And with that I put the whole episode to bed and didn’t think about it again until two weeks ago when I received a message to connect on Facebook.

“Hi,” said the person whose name I did not recognize. “We were neighbors growing up.” She mentioned a mutual friend, then told me her old address. It was the house in the forest. She was the girl on the bike. It was Stacey the real girl, who I had abandoned only to invent.

I wrote her back immediately. I told her I remembered her and her house and her family. I said how happy I was to hear from her. I used many exclamation points. But in the end, she did not write me back. Which is fitting, I think. It’s how we’ve always related.

Dana Shavin is the author of a memoir, “The Body Tourist.” Email her at [email protected], see more of her writing at danashavin.com and follow her on Facebook at Dana Shavin Writes.

The Body Tourist in 34 Lines

photo-6My memoir, The Body Tourist, was published in November, 2014 by Little Feather Books, a small, independent publishing house in NYC. Soon afterward, my good friends Frank and Carol White had a congratulations party for me, complete with a feather centerpiece (get it? Little Feather Books? Feather centerpiece?), basil-infused gin and tonics,  and a chocolate cake with images–printed in sugar–of  me holding the signed contract, and the book cover (see picture, left). It was truly one of the most creative and amazing and thoughtful things anyone has ever done for me. Thirty-five of my closest friends were there, and while they all knew I’ve been working on the book for many years, and knew basically what it’s about (the 6 years following my so-called recovery from anorexia), I wanted to give them a bit more about the book without giving a formal reading, and I wanted it to be quick so as not to disrupt the party’s energy. So before the party I went through the manuscript and picked one line from each of the 34 chapters of the book. Saturday night, just before we dove into the cake and basil-infused gin & tonics, I read the lines aloud in quick succession. If you weren’t there and you’d like a flavor of The Body Tourist without the time commitment, here it is:

The Body Tourist In 34 Lines

Chapter 1

“We’ve been robbed,” my mother says.

 Chapter 2

I sit down and hand him my resume which suggests, by omission, that I attended not three colleges but only the one that conferred my degree, and which lovingly details a six-month internship at the state hospital but says nothing about my collection of lost jobs.

Chapter 3

Rage in all its forms–impotent, seething, weepy, diabolical–was her only recourse.

 Chapter 4

To the observer I look like any new employee taking in the information about her duties—but behind the scenes, my heart is acting out a tragic drama in articulate palpitations.

 Chapter 5

Linda’s bifurcated world of puking and fucking is already beginning to wear on me, and I’ve known her for less than an hour.

Chapter 6

“It smells like a train station in here.”

 Chapter 7

He winks.

 Chapter 8

My peers’ outward accoutrements of sophistication paled in the face of my American boy and our king-size box of condoms.

 Chapter 9

It’s a proven fact that everything that happens to an addict is someone else’s fault.

 Chapter 10

I was in love—not with freckled, butterfly-loving, ten year-old Richie, but with the troubled boy-man with the mysterious, brooding core, the Richie undone by his own father, the bewildered, betrayed Richie who, in the moment before he died, might have looked up from the hole in his chest with a mix of apology and incomprehension.

 Chapter 11

“Do not fuck him.

 Chapter 12

I am vaguely aware of being angry now at my own anger, and doubly angry with my father for making me have to be mad at myself.

 Chapter 13

At the heart of my predicament is the relationship I have developed with my illness: the love affair I have with feeling in exquisite control of my appetite, and the reprieve I feel in focusing on food instead of the real issues—my loneliness for example, my many fears, and now, my father’s illness.

 Chapter 14

A lifetime of sickness and management, an incalculable madness that began as a benign thrumming in his chest and translated to the malignant rattle of pills in his pocket, ceases, with a profusion of tumors in his bladder, to exist.

 Chapter 15

We groped.

 Chapter 16

‘Up and coming’ is a euphemism for ‘down and out,’ my mother says.

 Chapter 17

Something in me is fumbling toward a larger realization that has to do with my mother and my mother’s mother, with the kinds of loss that pull us up and away, out of the warm lake of childhood and into the dry, cool lap of a world we won’t fully understand until we are older.

 Chapter 18

Patti holds the baby out to me and I do not reach for it.

Chapter 19

“You might not make friends easily, but I do.”

“Chapter 20

“It’s a long story,” I say, although it really isn’t any longer than “sex.”

 Chapter 21

The fact is, unless I am a social worker or a probation officer, I have no business being in this North Augusta neighborhood, and so I move in.

 Chapter 22

The area that presently concerns me is the narrow strip of terrain between my navel and my crotch, the gentle female swell whose existence I have always believed I must nullify in order to be found praiseworthy and desirable.

Chapter 23

“I don’t want to be happier!” I yell.

 Chapter 24

I have only to do this simple thing—decline Austin’s hand in marriage—to set myself free.

 Chapter 25

Wouldn’t it be funny if I fell from a balcony onto a freeway?

 Chapter 26

Blind certainty believes, utterly and wholly, in itself.

 Chapter 27

Beside me in the passenger seat my paycheck lies open and smoothed flat, and every few seconds I look over at it admiringly like it is a new baby.

Chapter 28

It certainly does not occur to me to consider that Fisher, unable to dress properly or cook for himself, might, like the house itself, have good bones but cavernous deficiencies.

 Chapter 29

“I just know how sneaky Jesus can be,” I say.

 Chapter 30

On the test, I claimed that my father was a good man and that I had never stolen from my workplace.

 Chapter 31

And then I remember: my father had an alias.

Chapter 32

His face, while handsome, lacks the deeply etched crease I so loved in Fisher’s, evidence (I believed) of profound thought, which left its mark on especially reflective men.

 Chapter 33

Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha‑olam, bo’re p’ri ha‑gafen.

 Chapter 34

I have a recurring dream about a house.

 THE END