No Aha! Moment

Sometimes during my two-mile walk, I find that certain troublesome moments in my life come to mind.  I say to myself, “Oh, it’s that story again,” run it through, and then return to the August morning, noticing the haze of a forest fire somewhere north and hearing the distant yip of a coyote.  One such fragment is simply a question,  “What was I supposed to know?”  He’s dead now, so it’s not like I could call him and ask.

He was my therapist during and after an unwanted pregnancy, being deserted by my young—and crazy—husband, and choosing to give up the baby for adoption.  I was barely twenty-three and I needed  help.  By the way, this took place in Reno, Nevada in 1964 and 1965.

 It’s like remembering an anxiety dream:  if I could crack the code; if I could  have  one revelatory moment, no matter how awful it might be, I would say,  “Aha!  That’s why I did those things. That’s where everything I don’t like about myself comes from.   At least that’s the way I remember our last few sessions.

   

I relied on him.  Told him everything.  Learned how difficult that is—telling everything--especially talking about sex.  Now, when this moment comes up on my walk, I am angry with him, a slightly balding, forty-year old married man who chewed a single piece of Dentyne gum.  

At our last session, he asked me if I wanted to go for a drive on Saturday, maybe up Mt. Rose Highway.  Just to talk.  I said "Sure," but I never showed up.  I never saw him again.  I was dating a young geologist.  He wore plaid shirts and had a slide rule on his belt, loved hiking in the mountains, seemed to be in love with me.

What was the therapist trying to get me to understand?  Something about  my father?  My mother?  Why I had gotten myself into the mess I was getting myself out of?  Maybe nothing.  Nothing at all. 

Bambi, Anna Karenina, and Dramatic Irony

Bambi, Anna Karenina and Dramatic Irony 

When I was five years old, so the family story goes, my mother took me to see Walt Disney’s Bambi.  She must have read the Little Golden Book to me enough times that I knew the plot by heart.  The tension mounts.  Bambi’s  mother is killed by hunters.   The animals of the forest flee from the raging conflagration.   At that point in the movie, my mother recounts, I left my seat, walked down the aisle toward the flicker and crackle of the animated fire, saying, “Don’t worry, Bambi, your father will save you.”

I remember the story, not the experience, but something similar happened to me on my second reading of Anna Karenina.  While re-reading chapters XXI-XXVI and the intense sequence of scenes, I wanted to leave the safety of my armchair, step into the novel and warn Anna, “Don’t!” 

In a second reading, seated at the right hand of the omniscient author, I know what the scenes mean:  in the garden, when Vronsky watches radiant and pregnant Anna, I know the love child will not be loved;  during the steeplechase, when Anna watches Vronsky  take  the reins, causing the  mare to stumble and break her back, I know his  desire for control will  destroy what he loves most;  when overwrought Anna rides in  the carriage with her mechanical husband, I witness her reveal her deepest truth, “I hate you.  I love him,” and I know no good will come of it. Damn Tolstoy!  On a second reading I see he creates a world where I, at least, have to agree with Anna’s inevitable choice in chapter XXXI—throw yourself before an oncoming train.  

It’s human nature to want to know what the gods won’t tell us.  In a second reading, literature gives us what life does not.  My emotional experience is deepened precisely because I know how the novel  will “turn out.”

Lately, I find I am worrying too much about how things are going to “turn out.”  I suppose it’s my age. The worry has not translated into a “seize the day” attitude as much as an incipient fatalism, a belief that the script has been written.  I’m close to the end of the book, no matter what I do, or don’t do.

I (Heart) Fernet

I (Heart) Fernet

I asked the bartender, “What’s the name of that aperitif made from artichokes?”

 My husband and I had walked down past the Pikes Street market, along the Seattle waterfront,  enjoying the summer evening after a pleasant but early dinner at a restaurant five or six blocks away.  When my husband   suggested a nightcap, I said “Sure.”

The bartender must have sensed that I really didn’t want anything to drink. He was busy, in no mood to play guessing games, and clearly pleased with my husband, who knew what he wanted.    When he came back with my husband’s draft beer in one hand and a liquor bottle in the other, he said,  “Is this what you’re talking about?”

I liked the look of the label, cream-colored and dense with black print.  I studied the bottle.  “Fernet… I think that’s it.”  I wasn’t at all sure, but the bartender was giving me a “drink it or wear it look,” so I quickly said,  “Yes.  That’s the one.”

“Ugh!” he said.  “You want that on the rocks?”

“Of course,” I replied, as if everyone knows that’s how one drinks Fernet.

My drink, dark as molasses, tasted the way horse liniment smells and a little minty.  Someone on Wikipedia  describes the taste of Fernet as   “black licorice and Listerine.”

When my husband signaled to the bartender that he was ready to pay the tab, the guy said, “I’m not charging her for that,” glancing at my empty glass.  He didn’t say  “…that vile concoction” but I could read his look.

I laughed, leaned toward him, looked him in the eye and said, “I’m going to tell you a secret.  I really liked it.”

I did.   I  like Fernet.  Of course, I had confused Fernet with Cynar, made of artichokes and with a picture of an artichoke on the label.  Both are referred to as a“digestif” not an “apartif.”  Fernet is made with everything but artichokes and the kitchen sink.  Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

           Fernet is made from a number of herbs and spices which vary according to the brand, but usually              
           include myrrh, rhubarb, chamomile, cardamom, aloe, and especially saffron,[1] with a base of              
           grape distilled spirits, and coloured with caramel colouring. Ingredients rumored to be in fernet i          

           include codeine, mushrooms, fermented beets, coca leaf, gentian, rhubarb, wormwood, zedoary,          

           cinchona, bay leaves, absinthe, orange peel, calumba, echinacea, quinine, ginseng, St. John's  

           wort, sage, and peppermint oil.[1]

 Who likes Fernet, besides me? Well, pretty much everyone in Argentina, where they mix it with Coca Cola.  It’s popular in San Francisco  and is considered to have  medicinal value, “treating menstrual and gastrointestinal discomfort, hangovers, baby colic, and (formerly) cholera.”

Who do I hope likes Fernet?  I would be pleased if Sting, Helen Mirren, and Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth shared my newly-discovered taste, but I’m skeptical.  I brought up the subject last night at a dinner party and one of the guests said, “Oh, _____________ loves Fernet.  Or used to love Fernet.”    He’s a recovering alcoholic and, I have to say, a very disagreeable person.

Tuscarora Sunrise: June 21, 2011

Tuscarora Sunrise

June 21, 2011

The phone rang.  "Go look out your window."  I recognized Linda's voice.

"What time is it?" I said, fumbling with the curtain, then opening the french door onto the deck.

"Is the sun up yet?"

"Well, it's pretty bright out.  I'm going to have to go out in the yard to get a good look."  I knew what she was talking about.  I kicked on some shoes, hurried out the door into the yard, and saw the sun entirely up and over the Independence Mountains, over Milt's trailer.  "Damn!" I told her.  "It's completely up."

"Not here.  Not yet," she said.  Linda lives four miles away, down on the valley floor.  "I'm going outside to take a picture.  Goodbye."

"Hey, thanks for calling," I said as I heard the phone click.  So, thanks to my childhood friend, there I was at 5:30, standing in the yard in my pajamas, surrounded by a glorious morning.   The lilacs, the sagebrush, the noxious whitetop in full bloom, all glazed by golden light and the promise of summer.

Hallelujah!

Crossing Over, Looking Down

Crossing Over,  Looking Down

"In me thou seest the twilight of such day/ As after sunset fadeth in the west"

Wm. Shakespeare Sonnet 73 

Every time we drive across Big River Bridge my ninety-five year old mother looks out the window, down at the beach, glances seaward, and says, "I'm always surprised how small people look."  She pauses and then continues, "It really puts things in perspective."  She smiles at me, acknowledging the double entendre.

Usually, I nod and say, "Yes it does."  If I'm tired and cranky, I say, "You've already told me that."  It doesn't faze her.  Whether we're coming back from errands in Fort Bragg or lunch in Mendocino, she makes the same remarks.  She is trying to tell me something about old age and  death.  I haven't been listening.

It is the diminishment of her self that she sees in the tiny figures walking on the sand.  Old age is doing that to her, making her feel small.  When she alludes to perspective, to a human being set against sea and sky, she is telling me she knows she is close to the vanishing point and that it is okay.

Phyrric Victory

Pyrrhic Victory

I won.  My mother  tired of fighting with me. That July afternoon I saw her coming down the dirt road towards the stables at the fairgrounds in our  black three-holed Buick. “I’m in for it,” I said to my best friend, Karen.    We were in seventh grade, skeptical of boys and crazy about horses.  My mother didn’t yell or scold.  She told me to leave my bike and get in the car, it was time for my piano lesson, and no, I couldn’t  go home to change clothes.  Not until I was seated at the grand piano next to Mrs. Watts did I feel the dust on my shirt and smell the horse sweat on my jeans. 

It’s curious that after more than half a century I remember the name, “Madame Schumann-Heink,” and that my piano teacher, Mrs. Watts, had been her accompanist.  I recently googled Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936).  According to Wikipedia, she had quite a career: operatic debut in Dresden as Azucena in Il trovatore and final performance at the Met in 1931, belting out Wagner at age seventy-one.  Wiki notes, “In the movies of the 1930’s, many a buxom opera singer/instructor/matron was modeled on her.”

I have no idea how  Marie Watts, her accompanist, ended up in our cow town  in the l950’s, married to Mr. Watts, a building contractor.  Their house, modern for the time and for Elko, Nevada, was built on a hillside, a  series of three flat roofs.   The piano studio rested on the bottom floor, cool and dark in the summer.

Mrs. Watts started me with two instruction books, one of scales, boring and intimidating.  The other, “First Lessons in Bach,” might as well have been “First Lessons in Greek.”   My  encounter with  an exceptional pianist lasted six months and I never advanced more than halfway through the beginner’s book.  I was in one recital, playing a piece called, “The Bells,” which seemed to be pressing with feeling on the g key with the fourth finger of my right hand.   What little practicing I did was fear-based.  I hated the thought of sitting at the piano bench, refined and patient Mrs. Watts by my side, and me, a terrible student.  My mother was not one to threaten or cajole me into practicing.  She bought a metronome and sometimes I didn’t mind sitting at the piano with that steady tock, tock as I played scales.  I think that my mother let me quit because she was tired of dragging a truculent, dusty young girl to a piano lesson.

Other girls my age started taking piano lessons about the same time, but they went to Mrs. Clark, a flamboyant little lady who taught girls  to play sentimental popular tunes on sheet music and watered-down classics.  By high school, my friend Gail, who stayed with Mrs. Clark, could play the “Moonlight Sonata,” at a high school  assembly. The boys were impressed by her athletic prowess, stretched fingers pounding chords up and down the keyboard, crossing the left hand over the right and back.  Another friend, oldest daughter of the town’s favorite doctor, could play Bach or Beethoven on the violin, an incredible social liability.  The brazen boys would put their fingers in their ears and make pained faces.

I know there is no point in dwelling on missed opportunities., but I wish I hadn’t won.  I remember a quote from a character in The American by Henry James:  “I have the instincts—have them deeply—if I haven’t the forms of a high old civilization.”   I did, eventually, want to become a cultured person, well-read, educated, and familiar with the arts. 

In a few months I will be seventy years old.  Lately, I have been listening to a cd  of Wanda Landowska playing Bach on the harpsichord, “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One.”  On the internet I found the name of my  piano book with the ochre cover and serious lettering:  “Beginning Bach,” from Schirmer’s Library of Musical Classics, listed as a “collectible” on Amazon.com.

 I’m having trouble figuring out what to do with the rest of my life.  Thinking about Madame Schumann-Heink and Mrs. Watts and twelve-year-old me, I have had a strong urge to buy a digital piano.  I would order “Beginning Bach,” books one and two.  I would practice every day.  I could find a piano teacher at the local community college.  By  the time I’m eighty, I could be quite accomplished.  Is it too late?

Second Runner-Up

Second Runner-Up

When I tell about being second runner up to the Wells Rodeo queen the summer of 1958, I  make sure the listener knows the population of Wells, Nevada—about a thousand—and that there were only eighty-four kids in the high school.  I frame the story to make fun of myself—wearing my mother’s hand-me-downs, and she was no cowgirl.   I remember her felt cowboy hat, a telescope crown with a wide, rolled brim and chin straps; her red suede jacket with its matronly cut, my own five button levis,  her brown cowboy  boots.

“I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy,” the old song goes.  It holds true for cowgirls, too.  I’m sure the girl who won wore a cowboy hat with a tall crown, a white cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons, tight levis that emphasized her big butt and well-developed quads,  a leather belt with her name tooled on the back, probably from Capriola’s in Elko; and her own boots.

My loyal boyfriend was angry with the outcome, me being second runner up.  He said   I should have  won.  “I was the best looking,” he asserted and then muttered some comparison between the queen and a mud fence. High school love is blind.  The first runner-up was a lovely, dark-haired girl  who was raised on a small ranch in Starr Valley but looked uncomfortable on a horse.   “You sure as heck had the best horse,” my boyfriend said. 

   Although I appreciated his  indignation, I knew  the judges were right.  The girl who won should have won.  She was the real deal.  I was part town girl, part ranch girl.  She came from a family that had ranched in the area for at least fifty years.  I had been in the area since September. .  The previous fall, after my sophomore year in Elko,  our family had moved  to the Marble Ranch headquarters at Deeth, halfway between Elko and Wells.  This was to make life easier for my dad, who was managing the whole operation: seven ranches with about sixty-five thousand deeded acres and about sixty-five hundred mother cows.  Dad was the real deal, no doubt about that.

I did have the best horse, a thorobred cross lent to me by the cow boss,  Jim Dorrance.  I remember practicing in the corral at the ranch, loping in graceful figure eights on this beautifully trained sorrel gelding at least  fourteen  hands high;  galloping to the far end of the corral, reining to a dramatic halt, then backing up.  I’m not sure I practiced getting on and off.  I should have.

The night before the contest it rained hard and the rodeo grounds were thick with a sticky mud.  Part of the procedure after showing my horse,  was to dismount, go to the announcer’s stand, say a few words, remount, and gallop out of the arena.   The cinch was a little loose after working the horse and I can still feel the  tight grip of my left hand on reins and mane and my fear that the saddle would slip.   I still wince, thinking of me in that frumpy getup with mud-caked boots  hoisting myself back on that tall horse and getting the hell out of there.

What was I thinking?  What was sixteen year old Nancy Harris thinking when she agreed to run for  Wells Rodeo queen?   I was flattered to be asked.  I can’t remember who sponsored me.  For all I know, it was some local business that wanted to ingratiate themselves with the Marble Ranches. 

At the time, I thought, “Me?  Someone sees me as a  rodeo queen?”  No way I would say no.  And it was fun.    I remember that we girls were driven to Twin Falls and  interviewed on television.  Television!

If Jim Dorrance lent me a horse for the competition, Jack Walther, gave me a joke for my  tv debut.  A shy bachelor with a gentle sense of humor, Jack also worked for the Marble outfit.   Now well in his eighties, Jack  is much loved at Cowboy Poetry in Elko for his comic verse.   With a twinkle in his eye,  young Jack prompted  me to have the interviewer ask me the name of my horse.  I was to answer, “Mignon.  Because she’s a little fee lay.”  Yep.  I really said that on tv in Twin Falls, Idaho in 1958.  Which was pretty darn sophisticated, since I didn’t know a filet from a rib eye.  A steak was a steak.  It was cooked well done.   However, I felt  no qualms about changing the sex of  Jim Dorrance’s  gelding to “fee-lay” for the sake of a joke.      

Besides being on tv in Twin Falls,  we rode our horses in the parade right down the main street of Wells, which also happened to be Highway 40.  I did know how to sit tall in a saddle. I was riding a fine horse.  The band played.  We waved to our friends on the sidewalk.  Of course, it was fun.

I do remember who  sponsored me to run for Miss Elko County the summer after my freshman year in college.  The Standard station on Idaho Street.  The best gas station in Elko, mind you.   Again, it was a matter of being asked.  If the  guys at the Standard station saw me as Miss Elko County material, I wasn’t going to argue.

 “Wince” goes to “ cringe” of thinking of that experience.   I didn’t come close to fitting the  beauty queen image and I did not win, place, or show.   Furthermore, it was not fun.   A couple of weeks before the contest, we did a photo shoot crammed in a boat in some duck pond east of Elko.  The girl next to me in the aluminum  rowboat seemed a sure bet to win. Going into her a senior year at Elko High, the  beautiful Italian girl  was in a sullen mood that morning, and the photographer from the Elko Daily Free Press standing on the bank  kept yelling at her to smile.  A week later   she dropped out of the contest,  dropped out of high school, and married the acne-faced boy who had knocked her up.

 I don’t remember much of the contest except how much I hated walking across the stage in a bathing suit and high heels. My loyal college boyfriend, who had driven to Elko to show his support,  left the high school auditorium halfway through the event and waited in his Nash Rambler, probably reading Kierkegard.  He later explained that he couldn’t understand why I was putting myself through such a meaningless ritual.   He was minoring in  anthropology.

   The girl who won should have won.  Her name was Nanci  spelled with an ‘i.”  She   had a bosom and a narrow waist.  I remember how cute she looked in a circle skirt with a cinch belt, let alone a bathing suit.

What was I thinking?  Why did  Nancy with a “y” Harris  run for Miss Elko County? Because I was asked.    Remember?  In those days, we waited to be asked.  Maybe I thought that competing would make a woman out of me, or I would be recognized as a woman. Beauty pageant as boot camp.

I understand that the beauty pageant industry has been exposed many times over since those days, and right now many young mothers are concerned with this whole princess madness marketed by the Disney corporation.  But I have to confess that Miss Congeniality is one of my favorite movies, where Sandra Bullock goes from klutz to gorgeous plus action heroine, deposing the mean ex-queen, saving all the other girls—and getting a second look from  Benjamin Bratt, a prince of a guy.  We yearn for transformation and recognition.

A number of years ago, I was  visiting my folks at their small ranch on Thorpe Creek in Lamoille.  I was probably in my early thirties, married with two kids.  I had saddled up one of their horses and gone for a long ride on a beautiful summer day.  Afterward, my dad came out to the barn to help me unsaddle and put the horse away and he said with an admiration that was a little unusual, given  his reserved manner, “You could be a cover girl.”  I beamed.   He continued,  “for one of those catalogs like L.L. Bean.”    I laughed.  LL Bean was not Silver Screen but we take what we can get.  Even if it’s second runner up.