Something I published in Dunes Review a year or so ago.
Day one ends in plain exhaustion, day two in a frenetic dream. As if having the smell of them all over me isn’t enough, or their crumbs lodged beneath my fingernails, I have to see them in my sleep. Before sleep, even, just by sitting down during a shift break and closing my eyes. Moving relentlessly behind my eyelids like newspapers on a conveyor belt in an old-time movie montage. Hands grabbing at them to put them in boxes and more boxes. Hands nicked with papercuts, and red and chapped from constant washing. The phone rings nonstop for orders we can barely keep up with, the register for purchases, the receipt roll at the shift changeover runs a mile long. At night it takes ages to stop hearing echoes, the voices of customers and my co-workers calling numbers, rattling off flavors. I dream paczki. And each morning I feel as if I’m waking to the eerie silence before a tornado’s touchdown.
Mid-pandemic I took a side job, a clerk in the storefront of a local bakery. It was only part-time but it felt as familiar as something you do all the time. Me and the work went way back to when I was 20 years old and taking cooking classes at a community college, paying every cent of my tuition with my minimum-wage earnings.
Like most essential workers—something nobody thought to designate us retail and bakery grunts back then—I worked weekends and holidays, up with the chickens even on mornings when I’d been out all night. At 20, I still kept hours like that, could handle being on my feet, running back and forth from register to customer, carrying heavy cakes, making it through a shift on just a few minutes’ break or a few winks of sleep.
Right away I discovered food service work was nothing like it was portrayed on shows like Friends, or in a culinary culture increasingly oriented toward the “foodie,” a still-newish word not so liberally appropriated back then. Media chefs seemed to get their pick of days off, got to travel the world, enjoy fame and fortune, rub shoulders with rock stars, were considered rock stars themselves. It was a world away from my community college cooking classes and bakery job. In the real world, food workers are chained to weekends and holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, graduations and First Communions, Mother’s Day sweet tables, June weddings, Memorial Day picnics, all occasions that kept us on the run from fall through spring.
But our busiest time of year was pre-Lent, when the bakery sold paczki. Polish donuts filled with fruit, cream, or mousse, then glazed or dusted with powdered sugar to rich perfection. Where I live, just outside Chicago, people live for the paczki. In the week before Ash Wednesday, they’d tell us as much more than a baker’s dozen times a day. Would even stand in line for hours for them, enduring the wait for something that came around only once a year, whereas we workers never stopped running.
Paczki time was festive as it was frenzied. Something of a party, with the desperate feel of last calls or last chances. As the saying goes, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” One worker would dress up as a giant paczki and pass out samples. We’d wear Mardi Gras beads, hang banners with bright colors and cartoon donuts across the storefront windows. Customers would occasionally break out in cheers when their ticket number was called. A local news crew might show up, the reporter would weave through the crowd, ask each customer their favorite flavor, how long they’d been waiting, and was it worth it? (Strawberries and whip cream, over an hour, and oh yes. Yesiree.)
Nothing about it was meant to be ironic. In the working-class heartland, food is far too complex for irony. Food is fuel, comfort, love. A family bond, through handed-down recipes or inherited eating habits. An occasion for wholesome fun, like Christmas cookie exchanges, or one for heartfelt compassion, like a neighbor’s dish of funeral potatoes. Paczki, invented to use up all the fat and sugar in the cupboard before the religious fasting season begins, bear the additional weight of Catholic guilt and the sinfulness of waste. And for bakery grunts, they bear the weight of labor.
To call something “essential” is to suggest it’s eternal. Trends come and go, technology changes, but our needs and the labor and actions we undertake to satisfy them are universal and constant. Without the essential, time would stop. Life for all would end. Eat, drink, and be merry, for real.
As for essential workers, we know we’re essential, that the world depends on us for sustenance, for healing, for the clothes on our backs, and for our daily bread. But it’s the difference between knowing it and feeling it that essential workers have to reckon with when they punch out, between a new term that gets tossed around in headlines and the day-to-day treatment you’re given on the job.
Back at the bakery, thirty years on, sometimes I felt essential. Needed. Appreciated. But most times I felt like a human treadmill, a mere vehicle for a force beyond my control.
Donning my work apron seemed like old times, and yet so much had changed. An online shop took a load off the madness of phone and in-store orders. The register’s punch buttons were now a computerized touchscreen, with excruciatingly small print for my 50-year-old eyes. The variety of paczki had expanded to a menu of 30-plus flavors, from red velvet to “Elvis” (bananas with maple custard and bacon). Faves were counted by numbers sold and TikTok polls.
The other stuff wasn’t selling as well—bread, coffee cakes, muffins, regular ol’ donuts. Not with offices closed, remote work in full force, and funerals banned or kept to private services with the bare minimum of mourners. We were perpetually short-staffed. No one wants to face crowds during a pandemic. No one wants to wear masks for hours of a shift. No one wants to risk their life for retail—not for under $15 an hour. No one but the grunts, the essential.
The day before Ash Wednesday, the last call for paczki, my state lifted its masks in public mandate. We workers kept ours on at all times, but you could see relief in the eyes and smiles of customers who went maskless as they stood in line for paczki. Still, my fellow grunts noted how strangely quiet the crowd was, almost like a herd of sleeping cows, none of the “laissez les bon temps rouler” of years past, long before the pandemic. Maybe it was that difference between knowing and feeling again. Was the pandemic really over? Could we truly breathe easy again? Would things go back to “normal” or shift to a kinder, fairer society? Which one were we supposed to want? Productivity, after all, is a hard drug to wean yourself from. No matter how happy you are to see the system take a hit, how long you’ve been dreaming to step off the treadmill, to throw a wrench in it yourself.
Many years ago, when the wife of a world-famous rock star died, a story went around about how he nurtured her through her last moments with a whispered memory vision of her favorite things. Her horse. Spring weather. Woods. Bluebells. A blue sky. During the lockdown days of the pandemic, I thought about that story more than once. In a time of daily mass death counts, maybe it simply struck me as the model of a good end.
It didn’t take Covid-19 or a job as an essential worker to learn I don’t want to work myself to death. That I don’t want my life to come down to filling orders, fearing crowds, washing my hands to rawness, running my feet off, worrying myself to sleep, dreaming an assembly line of paczki. Hoping for a better life is instinctual, essential, and that kind of thing originates in the heart and soul long before anyone learns about capitalism, productivity, irony, foodieism, or rock star treatment.
“In life, there is no real safety, except self-belief.” –Madonna
So…another digital mag that I had a piece published in a few years back has gone down. The piece, an essay called “Mixed Messages,” about Madonna for the music memoir mag Memoir Mixtapes, is still available through a direct link but is otherwise not searchable.Memoir Mixtapes’ website is disappeared, though their Medium site, which featured shorter memoir-form song recommendations(including a few of mine)is still accessible.
With the main website going defunct, and with Madonna’s birthday coming up in a few days (August 16), I thought I’d reshare the essay here. The theme for the issue it appeared in was “Back to School.” So I wrote about a boy I had a crush on back when I was 12 or 13, who I once slipped a note to with some questionable Madonna lyrics. Along with unfortunate puberty-fueled crushes, the essay gave me a chance to think about the influence that Madonna–a megastar to Generation X kids and to the world, really–had on me. I was a fan.Of her music–and of her.
In this day and age, as Madonna has entered definite senior citizen status and a multitude of female pop stars who most definitely drew from her look, style, and sound have risen to fame, it’s become a trend to deride her mercilessly. On social media, dopes leave cruel and gross ageist remarks on her posts, and people call her desperate and irrelevant. I don’t get it. Madonna was unapologetically ambitious, sexually confident, and femme-presentingin a time when many female musical acts and celebrities could still not be all three at once–and definitely not the first two. Seriously, it was her and Grace Jones. She shattered sales records, concert records, chart records–for female music artists and for music artists in general. If that wasn’t enough, she advocated for gay rights and AIDS research at a time when there were literally only two celebrities publicly speaking out. It was her and Liz Taylor. Less remarked upon is her longtime championing of artists from her home state of Michigan–over the years, she’s supported Eminem, Michael Moore, Iggy Pop—as well as Black, female, and LGBTQ artists. A few years ago, she gave a brilliant speech on what it’s been like to be a trailblazing woman in the music industry at a Billboard Music event honoring her. And she rightly continues to NGAF and keep on keeping on no matter all the ageism and sexism lobbed at her by the cluelesscrowd online. Because of course, one day, they’ll find out themselves.(AndI hope I’ll still be around to remind them what jerks they were.)
In my essay, I wrote a bit about what it was like to hear Madonna for the first time and follow her story–this upstart who grew up in a large, lower-middle-class Catholic family in the Midwest with audacious plans to rule the world, as she said on her first appearance on American Bandstand.Madonna’s gay male fanbase is well-known, and still fiercely supportive of her, but I can’t be the only Gen X Midwestern Catholic girl who also adored her, taking subconscious note of how she represented and challenged all the “mixed messages” thrown at girls and women in American culture.And Catholic culture.No music artist challenged the church’s misogyny and hypocrisy so boldly as Madonna–until Sinead O’Connor came along. It’s a pity the two women (supposedly) don’t like each other and never collaborated. They have more in common with each other than not.
This essay is as much about being a girl on the verge of becoming a woman. It’s written more from the viewpoint of that age, but with some interfering adult humor and wisdom–so I guess it has some mixed messages of its own. I’ve included some videos that weren’t in the original issue, which was released with a playlist of all the songs written about all the contributors.I’ve restored a couple instances where edits were made to my essay that I didn’t really agree with. My crush’s name is a pseudonym, both in the original and here, just FYI. I hope you enjoy.
Mixed Messages
The first love poem I ever gave a guy I stole word for word from Madonna. The “poem” was the lyrics to “Burning Up,” an intensely lusty number off her first album, and the guy was a boy at my high school whom I thought looked like Sting.
His name was Craig [not his real name], and like the woman whose song I gave him, he had a reputation.
Back in the 8th grade, when I started crushing on him, he’d been a jock verging on burnout, or maybe a burnout verging on jock. Thirteen is that kind of liminal age when you can easily embody two personas, no matter how contradictory, like a honey-sweet A-side with a dirty-horny B-side spinning away underneath. If you’re a boy, that is. If you’re a girl, still inexperienced and unsure of yourself, yet already developed, already drawing the kind of attention better suited to a woman twice your age, it’s not so easy. People will say you’re giving off mixed messages. They’ll call it “attention seeking” or “showing off.”
Craig was popular and I wasn’t. He was on the football and wrestling teams and I wasn’t on anything. He reportedly hung out in other kids’ basements after school to drink and smoke. After school I went to more school, to CCD, aka Catholic education for kids whose parents couldn’t afford parochial tuitions. Craig had spiked blond hair and acne, was twice the size of most the other boys, and wore a near-daily attire of black concert tees advertising one metal band or another. Metallica, Slayer, Iron Maiden…bands I never listened to or got near in my musical taste. Bands I probably wouldn’t have even known about if it weren’t for their appearance across the muscles of Craig’s chest.
My thing was pop music, like top 40 radio hits and heavy rotation MTV faves. I liked songs you could dance to. Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Prince, and yes, Madonna, whom I took a special interest in for a completely inconsequential and self-centered reason. We share an unusual name. Madonna is my middle name and my mother’s first name, and I had never known anyone else called Madonna, other than the Virgin Mary—which, in an era of classrooms crammed with Jennifer Lynns and Julie Annes, only made the name even more extremely weird and uncool.
Until “Holiday” came along.
I was 11 when I first heard it, on the radio one winter Sunday while listening to Casey Kasem’s countdown. Not listening actually, but dancing. Alone, in the room I shared with my sister A, four years older than me but the closest to me in age of my five siblings. We’d been roomies since I was born, sometimes even sharing a bed in the very full houses we’d grown up in, first on the northwest side of Chicago and then in a suburb known for nothing but a don’t-cough-or-you’ll-miss-it mention in The Blues Brothers.
I remember hearing Casey’s introduction to “Holiday” and thinking I misheard the singer’s name. Once the song started, I fell immediately for its peppy beat and message of celebration and togetherness. I was a misfit kid, a bookish loner who got bullied at school for my weight and glasses and crooked tetracycline-stained teeth, and my outsider experience made me a sucker for any song that pleaded for people to come together despite their differences, even for “just one day out of life.” Dancing, like books and music, was an escape for me, from the crowded physical spaces of home and the perpetual sense of social awkwardness and ugliness I felt at school. Dancing was where I could pretend I was someone else, someone graceful and beautiful and cool. All it took for transformation was a good song.
After the song’s fadeout on the countdown, Casey repeated its title and the singer’s name and where she came from: Detroit, meaning the Midwest. Same as me, I thought. And in the easily impressed way of young misfit girls, that was all it took. I was a fan.
It wasn’t long before I got to see this doppelganger of mine, on American Bandstand, lip syncing and skipping around to that same great song from Casey’s countdown. If I’d been under the notion she and I had much in common, her appearance on Bandstand quickly put an end to that. Her look was streetwise, not suburban schoolgirlish. She wore all black, lots of makeup, and fabulously messy hair. Her skippy-kid dance moves didn’t seem hard, but when I tried them later in my room it proved a challenge keeping up that energy for a whole song. She may not have been impressive vocally (live or on record), but there was something magnetic about her, something almost feral in her facial expressions that jarred with her song’s utopian lyrics but fit perfectly with her disco-punk-gypsy getup.
Then there was the confidence—sexual, professional, just all-around. To this day, I’ll maintain that’s what rubs people about Madonna, what explains the perpetual trashing she’s gotten since 1983—her audacious, undeniable, gender-role-busting self-belief. After her performance, as Dick Clark tried to interview her over the screaming kids in the studio, she couldn’t stop smiling and giggling at her success and sudden popularity. When Dick Clark asks her if she was scared to go out on her own as a performer, she answers, “Not really. I think I’ve always had a lot of confidence in myself.” Then she lays it right out for us. “What are your dreams, what’s left?” Clark asks her. “To rule the world,” she says, capping it off with another giggle.
“Look at this girl,” one of my older siblings (a baby boomer to my Gen X) said dismissively, making disparaging comments about her bared bellybutton and visible bra straps. Like, who did she think she was? Going on TV, enjoying herself, dressing slutty, dancing around, plotting world domination.
I don’t think it’s possible for me to understate the significance of that Bandstand performance, the seed-planting, what it was like as a suburban Midwestern Catholic girl to see this other suburban Midwestern Catholic girl who’d not only escaped to something bigger and better but was demanding more. Without apology.
My sister soon got Madonna’s first album, but I got more use out of it, dancing to it in the basement every week. Madonna may have been too local for A’s taste anyway. She was mostly a Brit-band kind of girl. When she hit her teens, she’d begun covering the walls of our room with Star Hits tear-outs of Duran Duran, Howard Jones, and Culture Club. They took the place of my Muppets poster and her small B&W cut-outs of Matt Dillon from the Chicago newspapers’ weekend movies section. On our closet door hung a huge poster of that blonded-up post-punk trio The Police, A’s favorite. We fought over this space—I wanted it for an MJ poster featuring the King of Pop in white slacks and a yellow cardigan and matching bowtie. When A didn’t relent, I took her stick deodorant and defaced Sting and Co’s faces with it. As it turned out, deodorant scrapes right off poster paper (who knew?) and for years I had to contend with falling asleep under the sexy-intellectual gaze of The Police’s lead singer night after night. Subconsciously, I must have started seeking that same gaze among the boys at my school. Because one night, when I was just turned 13, it struck me while staring back into Sting’s eyes: with that blond spiky ‘do and those cheekbones and muscles, he kinda sorta looked like that one tall guy at school. Metallica guy. Craig.
It was too bad Craig was all wrong for me. As in cool, popular, and rebellious where I was shy, self-conscious, and unknown. We had no classes together, nothing in common socially, and I was sure he didn’t know I was alive. He said as much when someone squealed my crush on him. “I don’t know who she is,” he said, according to the girls who told him. Later, presumably after someone pointed me out to him, he told our one mutual friend, “She’s too nice.” And I couldn’t decide which was worse—being invisible or being innocent.
Something had to change and that something had to be me. I wanted so badly for it to be me.
The truth was my life had become overwhelmed by changes. After turning 13, I got my first period, having already developed physically—breasts, hips, height, the works—beginning around 10 or 11. My older siblings started getting married off. And most life-changing of all, my grandmother had had a stroke and had come to live with us. She was given the room I shared with A, and all our music mag pics were taken down and replaced with pictures and statues of the Holy Family and various Catholic saints—Madonna for madonnas, you might say. A moved into a room formerly occupied by one of our brothers, and I moved into a tiny tandem room off hers, about the size of a large walk-in closet. After school, I had to be home to help look after my grandmother with my siblings, as our parents worked full-time.
There comes a time in every young girl’s life when she senses things aren’t under her control, that there are rules she’s supposed to abide by that she didn’t make and expectations she has to live up to that she can’t possibly meet and taboos she shouldn’t break that she suspects wouldn’t even be on the radar if she were a boy. Most girls react to this realization head-on, and many by trying to take control over the one thing that all these rules and expectations and taboos seem to apply to—her body. I was no different. If I couldn’t stop change from overwhelming my life and overtaking the space I’d tried to carve out for myself, I could at least try and make it work for me.
So I lost weight. A lot. I did it my way and the textbook teen girl way—dancing for hours to records in the basement after school and eating as little as a scoop of cottage cheese for dinner and a milk carton for lunch every day. It was only the beginning.
After graduating junior high, I spent the summer getting ready for high school reflecting on possibilities, on the dream of having a completely different look, a completely different social life—really, any social life. Meanwhile, A was going away to college, giving me her room and everything in it she left behind. Her last couple years of high school, she’d begun replacing her music mags with fashion rags, bookmarking spreads of stylish women whose looks she wanted to copy and elegant rooms whose décor she wanted to surround herself in. She’d always had a fashionable touch that I lacked. Studying her leftover, well-thumbed through copies of Vogue and Mademoiselle, I knew such transformation was hopeless for me, even newly skinny as I was. I was too hungry for high fashion—hungry to be noticed, to be loved, to stop being so invisible and innocent.
Who else could I turn for a role model but to Madonna, by now the queen of everything, not just a pop star but a cultural tornado-exploding-supernova. I didn’t know if Craig liked her. I mean, looking back, reminiscing on all his death metal tees, probably not. But I don’t think it even occurred to me. The point is I liked her.
So freshman year of high school saw a new me—dressed in extra-small tank tops I converted into ultra-short miniskirts (I’d pull the neck part over my hips and tuck the straps in at the sides) and visible bra straps and, yes, even rosaries worn as necklaces. Did Craig notice? Because I know my grandmother did. She complained about it to my mother, who was either too distracted by her new role as caretaker to her mother to notice her youngest child’s increasingly provocative attire or had raised enough kids by now to know a phase when she saw one. The only thing my mother objected to was the rosaries. “Those aren’t jewelry,” she informed me one morning as I was heading out of the house for the bus. And like the good Catholic girl I still was underneath, I obeyed and put the rosaries back on my grandmother’s bedstand where I’d borrowed them.
If Craig wasn’t impressed by my new look, maybe a good old-fashioned note would do the trick. But what to say to a pot-smoking, Slayer-loving, teenage Sting look-alike on the football team who I’d been obsessing about for a year now? I didn’t trust my own words, didn’t think I could put my schoolgirl feelings and hormonal yearnings into anything eloquent enough to convince him of the urgency of my love and lust for him. That was where music saved the day. I mean, he liked music. I liked music. What could go wrong?
After hitting on my epiphany, I spent a couple afternoons poring over all the songs in my record collection, reading all the lyrics on the liner sleeves, trying to determine the perfect song to snare Craig’s attention and devotion. At some point, I don’t know when—but I wish I did, to better determine just what I was thinking—I settled on “Burning Up.” It was from Madonna’s first album, same as “Holiday,” already an oldie in the wake of two more albums she’d released. Unlike “Holiday,” it hadn’t been a hit, but in some ways it had solidified Madonna’s hypersexual reputation more than any other song from her early career. The most notorious of the lyrics went:
Do you wanna see me down on my knees? Or bending over backwards, now would you be pleased? Unlike the others I’d do anything I’m not the same, I have no shame I’m on fire!
Over time, serious music critics would suggest that the song’s love interest was really a metaphor for fame or power. The video seems to back this up, showing Madonna writhing around as if in sexual agony on a street intercut with some dude driving her way—until the last shot sees Madonna behind the wheel of the car, sans dude and smiling.
Metaphor or no, I took the lyrics literal af (especially the line “But you don’t even know I’m alive”), and diligently copied down the lyrics (where Madonna pants in the song, I remember I wrote “heavy breathing”), and got a friend to pass off this surefire love tactic to Craig in the hall one day. “This is from René,” I told her to say. “Cool, thanks,” Craig reportedly said, shoving the note in his pocket.
I don’t know what I was expecting in return. A request for a date? A note with some favorite lyrics of his own? To be taken seriously? I mean, really? It got back to me eventually that Craig told our one mutual friend he started laughing when he read my note—to his credit, he also told our friend not to tell me that. She did anyway, because she thought I should know.
Regardless of whether Craig noticed me, others definitely had. I’d been frequently teased by boys, but now girls were talking about me too, making fun of me, even the nice girls and other misfit girls. And even before I’d lost weight, even before the new clothing choices, around the time I’d begun gaining inches in height and curves, I’d started to get a certain kind of attention. One boy at school would lift up my skirt as I walked down the hallways. At the library I’d been followed into the stacks and groped by a man. These were just a couple incidents I’d experienced. I didn’t know what to do when these things happened, other than run away and then blame myself for “leading guys on” or tell myself maybe I should be flattered.
Looking back, I refuse to say I was confused. That I didn’t know what I was doing, like why I’d picked an embarrassingly horny song to give to a boy and why I started dressing like a girl in a music video, why I’d veered so far (so it seemed) from the innocent girl who just wanted to dance her cares away in her bedroom on a Sunday morning. On the one hand, I tell myself I compromised my true self for a boy’s attention, a ploy that didn’t even work. On the other hand, I know I was trying to take control and ownership of the changes overwhelming my life and the expectations and rules overwhelming any girl. I was trying to take a cue from my name doppelganger—Madonna, the Michigan girl with an uncanny ability for taking every rumor, criticism, or slut-shaming insult thrown her way and wielding it to her advantage, to power.
Within another year or two, life would throw more changes my way. By 15, my father had been hospitalized with a heart problem, my grandmother died, and I became an aunt for the first time. As for Craig, I finally had a class with him and picked up on some crude remarks he made, and some rumors that he’d hurt someone after school one day. I forgot him. I started to put weight back on and dressing in loose, dark layers. Began reading poetry and Irish and French history and listening to The Cure and New Order. I made pen pals with a boy on the south side of Chicago who sent me rap lyrics and detailed his graffiti-writing exploits to me. We started spending all night talking on the phone together, when everyone else in our houses was asleep. I was depressed and curious and artistic and still unconfident, but cared less whether people noticed, whether it was my job to endlessly please the world as a girl was supposed to do.
There’s a temptation now to disown the girl I was at 13, to say “I don’t know her.” I’d do as much with Madonna in the years to come, pretending I no longer liked her or her music, denying to myself the leaps her best songs made my heart do and the moves her beats once made my body do. But some things are just undeniable, like the person you were when you were on your way to learning how to be yourself, or a girl’s desire to prove she’s the one in control of her life, or an infectious song beckoning everyone to forget about the bad times and put their troubles down, for just one day out of life. To this day, nothing does it for me, nothing connects me to the better moments of my girlhood, like “Holiday.”
When I was in my 30s, I ran into Craig again, in a bar in Chicago. I was attending a book swap event, and he was a bouncer, checking IDs as all us bookish grown-up former misfit types entered the bar. We recognized each other right away, though he had to read my ID to remember my name. He didn’t look like Sting so much anymore. And I didn’t even recall the note I’d given him, or the girl I’d been, until thinking about my run-in with my old crush later that night. Once the memory surfaced, the lusty lyrics to “Burning Up” churning through my brain, I was mortified. And then I laughed, liked Craig himself did, like Madonna after promising she was going to the rule the world on American Bandstand.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock or in a hard-core Luddite community a million miles from the grasp of the internet (bliss!), you’ve probably heard about the kidney story. I won’t rehash it all here, but long story short: The New York Times ran an article recently about a dispute between two up-and-coming writers, one of whom plagiarized from the other’s Facebook posts to write a fictionalized “takedown” of the plagiarized writer’s experience as an altruistic kidney donor.
The Times article received lots of attention, with follow-up think pieces and heated Twitter convos galore about what counts as plagiarism, what personal stories an author has the right to mine from someone else’s life, classism and gatekeeping in the writing world, literary mean girls (and guys), and ableism and health privilege. The last issue may have produced the most revealing and necessary conversations. A lot of people became newly aware of the kind of marketing and networking asked of organ donors and recipients alike to save people’s lives. The promotional posting and sharing done by the plagiarized writer/kidney donor only seemed “cringe” or “narcissistic” to those lucky enough to be so ignorant of the urgent realities of organ donorship.Also, a lot of big-time writers really showed their ass.
I probably don’t need to say I’m Team Dawn on this. Also Team Anyone Who Helps Out Someone In Need of an Organ. I have family members and friends whose lived were saved by receiving an organ transplant, family who suffered terribly through years and years of dialysis, and family who risked their own health to donatean organ.They all can talk and share and post about it all they want wherever and whenever.Serious health issues will teach you there’s far worse in life than coming across as “cringe”to the cool/mean kids.
Reading about “the kidney story,” including the contested story in question (“The Kindest”), reminded me of an organ transplant story of my own, “The Guide to Good Apple Self-Care.” I wrote it in 2014 or so and got it accepted at Drunk Monkeys in 2015. It’s written from a sense of heightened, metaphorical reality (it’s about a woman who receives an apple transplant in place of a heart and her ensuing recovery). I honestly don’t remember what inspired it, but I went back to look at it to see if I approached the issue of organ transplant with any more or less respect than “The Kindest.” I thought I’d share it here on my site for anyone who follows my posts here to judge. I’d really welcome the feedback. I don’t write stories like this so much anymore–I’ve moved away a bit from metaphorical, magical stuff–so I can’t say I’d write something like this today.
The Guide to Good Apple Self-Care
The day after my heart crashed, the doctors told me they’d have to take it out and replace it with an apple. “Don’t ask why,” the head doctor told me. “You’ll never understand.” The head nurse was nicer. She patted my hand, gave me a pamphlet to read later with tips for good apple self-care. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “An apple works just as well as a heart.” The doctors concurred. “In the future we’ll all have apple transplants!” they joked, as I breathed in the anesthetic. Just before the blackness took me, I thought I heard the head doctor mutter, “Apples…or alarm clocks.”
I woke 5 hours later, with my apple installed. That was nearly two years ago—since then it’s been nothing like I thought it would be. For one I thought it would make me sweeter, having an apple for a heart. With a crisper personality, whatever that might be (I figured I’d find out). But that’s not how an apple for a heart works.
There are advantages, that’s for sure. I can take a knife to my apple and cut away the bruises, whereas with my heart I had to suffer its accumulated injuries all times and forever. I’ve a little door on my chest now, like a small square flap with a latch that I can open, so I can view my apple every day and check out the shape it’s in. And the skin I can peel away, if the blush on my apple ever gets too deep, too bold, and threatens to spread to my face and give my feelings away. Because my feelings are still centered there, in that spot beneath my left breast, more than ever I think. You see, before a heart was just the word I used to mean the emotions generated from my mind—that and the thing that crashed on me. But now it’s become more complicated. My heart is an apple. My apple has become my mind. My mind is in my chest, beneath a small flap-door…I know I’m not explaining it well.
This is what I never expected, what the experts forgot to mention in the guide to good apple self-care—the way this would mess with what I used to call “speaking from the heart.” After my transplant I wanted to be honest, and I wanted to be accurate. I wanted to know how to juggle staying true to my experience with talking about it to the curious and concerned. So I went to a therapist. “I can help you,” he said. “But it will take at least 10 sessions, at $80 a session, to get to the heart of the matter.” I found a new therapist. I found I was the problem. “Take heart!” the new therapist would say. I’d set my jaw. “Recovery is not for the faint-hearted.” It would go on like this—sometimes I’d swear I was being set up. I’d swivel my head around, look for the hidden camera. Instead the therapist’s alarm clock would go off. “Time’s up! See you next week?” I walked out after the third session without giving a yes or no, went back to my car, and sat for a while carefully cutting away my bruises.
I have had some luck, though, in the love department. I met a woman while at a St. Patrick’s Day parade who’d had a few. So I felt I could talk to her, open up about my apple. She said: “I’ve got a friend, a big cider drinker. I’d say he’d fancy you.” I laughed, thinking it was a jest at my situation, and a rare good one at that. But she was serious, and she was meeting up with him that night, so she invited me along. Well, I knew him from across the bar. He reeked of apples (I’ve developed a high sensitivity to the smell of my stand-in heart). And his face was as red as one too. You may laugh, but a connection is a connection. It was like someone had opened up the door to my apple and held a mirror up to it. I looked at him and I saw everything I’d been through since the transplant. I saw a man who’d understand.
We went out for a while, for a few months, until the leaves began to change colors on the trees. It’s funny because I was feeling such a fullness in my apple around the time it ended. The days were growing shorter, the leaves were dying on the trees and rustling to the earth, and there was a coolness coming in the wind—but I was under the impression the world was really blooming. Our love was growing, ripening, ready…I was sure my cider man felt it too. But he ended it and moved on immediately to another girl. She came from Michigan, right over the border. Her father owned an orchard. We’d gone there only a few weeks before the break-up, for our 6-month anniversary, when the McIntosh crop had just come in. It was there I told him I loved him, and where he stripped the leaves off a branch of Red Delicious and wove them into two crowns, one big, one small. “For your russet hair and your apple heart.” He met her as we were leaving, while he was paying for our bushels. I had gone ahead to the car to open the door on my chest and fit my apple with its crown. I never saw it coming. Last I heard they’d gotten hitched and were growing an orchard of their own. I don’t like it, but I get it. Why settle for one of what you love when you can have it in bushels?
In time I got over him. I cut away my bruises, peeled away my shame, and put a lock on the latch to my apple until a new skin grew and a new year began. I kept myself busy, took on anything to ward off those feelings that I’d been eaten up and spat out, discarded like something rotten, misunderstood once again. I learned to cook, I learned to bake, I learned to garden, I learned computers. I even talked to the head nurse at the hospital where I’d got my transplant and asked if I could write a new and improved guide to good apple self-care. I found I was fit for all kinds of things—all kinds of activities, all kinds of plans and dreams.
Still I waited for some sign that I’d fully recovered. Every day I looked in on my apple, and I’d think about that time in the fall, when I felt such a fullness, such a ripening, and I wondered if I’d ever know such happiness again. The weeks went by, and I ticked off the days on my calendar seven at a time. The week of St. Patrick’s Day, I marked off the day of the parade with ink as red as the skin of a Red Delicious apple.
Then in April the head nurse left me a message. “Your guides have come in from the printer. Come in to have a look at them…and schedule your next check-up.”
I went in the next morning. The head nurse had stacked my guides on the counter where the patients sign in. She came out and placed another stack in my hand. The doctors came out too, and the staff in the waiting room and even the patients all crowded around. “Looks good!” said the head nurse, using the same tone as after she’s checked my vitals. Everyone congratulated me and took a copy, and an old man asked me to autograph his. The head doctor leaned in to me as the old man was called in by a nurse. “He’s scheduled for a transplant next week,” he said, placing a hand over his heart for a moment, before miming the act of biting into a Jonagold. I brushed off his thoughtless gesture and left with my stack of guides.
I sat in the car with them, flipped through the stack, read a copy front to back, admired the smell and visuals, and placed them all square in my lap. I stared down at them, thinking about all my effort and what I’d made. I wondered if they’d really be a help to anyone, to other apple transplant people like me. I’d never helped anyone before, never been regarded as an expert at anything in my life.
I clutched the stack to my chest and looked out my car window. I noticed a few buds on the trees and robins singing in the little park beside the health center. It was late in the afternoon but the sun was still strong and bright. The days were getting longer and spring was on its way. But it all seemed so strange to me. Because my apple was suddenly acting like it was autumn, like it was once again becoming full after so many months of waning, throbbing in the way my heart had before it crashed. I clutched my guides tighter, right against my apple. I didn’t need to open the little flap-door to see what was happening. My apple was growing. It was ripening to the red of an October sunset, shining like a skin that had never been bruised, blooming like an orchard full of brand new apple hearts.
Bald baby me with Mom and my sister Arla, picking apples in the ’70s.
Hi! I have a new project that I’m trying to get the word out about. It’s a newsletter at the new publishing platform Substack called Island in the City.
To semi-quote myself in the About page of the newsletter, I started it for fun and community to cope with the continued social isolation. The newsletter will dive into topics that have preoccupied my mind during the long days and nights of the pandemic. Stuff like creativity & productivity, loneliness, favorite artists, places & people, aging & ageism, class & classism, storytelling, and the life and geography of big cities & tiny islands.
I already have my first post up, about the Chicago outsider artist Henry Darger. Please check it out. This is also a two-parter post–you can expect the second part to go up next week.
What makes this different from my website and the occasional posts here?
A few things. The newsletter will be bi-monthly at the most, monthly at the least. That’s much more frequent than my posting here on my personal site.
You can also subscribe to the newsletter and get an email whenever a new post goes up. There are links to subscribe in the newsletter at Substack, and you can also do it here.
You’ll notice there’s a payment option. For now, my posts will be free. Maybe they always will–this is brand new journey and I haven’t a clue what’s around the corner with this. For all I know, there are no corners. Anyway, Substack was created as a self-publishing platform like Medium, WordPress, and Blogger, but with more of an ability to earn income for your writing. If you’ve been paying attention to changes in media and publishing over the last 10-15 years, and certainly if you’ve worked in media, you’ll know how changes have set so many media professionals adrift, especially many of a certain generation (cough, Gen X, cough). Layoffs and scale staffs, newspaper foldings, media conglomeration, the rise of blogging, the glut of blogs, free media, social media, unpaid internships, the decline of print–all of this has turned publishing, journalism, and media careers upside down and affected many writers’ income. Substack, like Patreon and other “content monetization platforms” (ugh, what a phrase–but it is what it is), allow for writers to charge for their newsletters to give some of the power back to creators.
I’m under no illusion that anyone wants to pay for my ramblings. But since the option is there, if you’d like to show your support by paying, I’d of course feel grateful and encouraged. The subscription cost is $5 a month or $50 a year. Should I ever start charging for the newsletter, it will most likely be the model most other writers are using: some free posts that all subscribers and visitors to the site will get, mixed with some locked ones for paying subscribers only. There is also an option for me to “grandfather in” my original free subscribers so they continue to get the newsletter for free even if I start charging–a gift for the support of loyalty.
What can subscribers expect to read about?
Here are some topics that I plan on writing about beyond my first posts about Henry Darger:
Chicago outsider artists Vivian Maier and Lee Godie
the Chicago Riverwalk, its bridgehouses, and the Technicolor Man of downtown Chicago,
Jean-Baptiste DuSable, city segregation, and the sundown towns of Illinois
Tim Robinson and the Aran Islands
the islands of Chicago (Goose, Northerly, Stony, Blue)
learning a minority language (Irish) in America
the sand dunes of Indiana, the boy who fell inside one, and the Girl X case that broke Chicago’s heart
the Green Mill and Michael Mann’s/James Caan’s great film, Thief
the Pigeon Man of Lincoln Square
informal economies and the vanishing Chicago hot dog vendor
maybe more (Chicago graffiti art, Ronnie Woo-Woo, Jazz Record Mart (RIP), other Irish islands I have known, who knows?
How to subscribe and connect
To subscribe just go toIsland in the City, click the Subscribe button, and add your email. If you like a post, please share. And if you like the newsletter in general, please tell all your like-minded friends.
As a gift for reading this, here’s a deer pic for your enjoyment. And there’s more where that came from. 😉
The Dangerous Divide (Library Philosophy and Practice): This is an academic paper I published about how libraries are closing the gap in the digital divide for older adults, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic when lack of access to the internet has had deadly consequences for this population. This was a final project for an MLIS course taught by Bill Crowley at Dominican University.
Tales of Old: A digital resource and annotated bibliography of representations of older women in folk and fairy tales. This was created for an MLIS course taught by Janice Del Negro at Dominican University.
Played the role of Marcy, the art school prof, in TV pilot The Artists
Several years ago I published this poem at Eunoia Review. It’s about my maternal grandfather, who died from cancer when I was about 7 or 8 years old. He was raised on a farm in Iowa and came to Illinois, first to Rockford, then to Chicago, after marrying a girl from a neighboring farm. He and my grandmother stayed in the city about three decades before moving back to Iowa.
I thought I’d share it now, at the tail end of November, the month in the Catholic Church when we remember the dead (Granddaddy Collins was a devout Irish Catholic). And I thought I’d share it in memory of all the grandfathers and grandmothers we’ve lost this year due to COVID-19 and our culture’s disgraceful disregard for the elderly and vulnerable.
I’m sorry for anyone who’s lost an elder this year. I live in perpetual worry and fear now about my own mother (87) and father (92). I believe in ancestors more than I believe in anything else.I hope this pandemic is gone soon, and I hope in 2021 all those in our government responsible for letting it rage unchecked throughout the country feel the wrath of the people their negligence took from us. (Both my grandfathers were staunch Democrats too.)I hope our ancestors watch over the rest of us, especially the ones working to rescue the world from this horrible plague and those of us trying so hard to shelter our elders.
Here’s the poem.
Transference (Middle West)
Where I live the corn and the wheat are made of steel. Their stalks stand a foot for every week my grandfather the farmer’s son has been in the grave. I’d like to lie down at the bottom of the corn in the spaces between the stalks to get close to grandfather and watch the stars watching right back at me but the soil here is too stiff. It’s unyielding to a body tamped to death as yesterday’s minutes gray and comfortless as an ocean without a shore.
Though there is an ocean here that’s not an ocean and shores that are comforting shores and there are burning bushes here and burning trees that do not burn. The flames of these wear black masks and cherry robes and holy names. They mate and molt and sing a song like rain bouncing backward off the solid gaps in a liminal wilderness or between the growing grasses of a vanished prairie.
The air at dusk here fills with lightning that is not lightning with delicate and black electric bolts the size of front teeth. They glow a green very unlike the green of young corn and a yellow very unlike the yellow of ripe corn.
My grandfather knew them these lights. He caught them in his farmer’s son’s hands very alike my city girl’s hands long ago and last summer. This was before his eyes caught the lights that crown the steel stalks and needle the stars here where I live before he left Iowa its true corn its cut and dried fields and cut and dried past for this concrete prairie, this thresholder’s town this farmer’s granddaughter’s birthplace Chicago.
He handed me down a beginning. I’ve inherited the transformation.
Sharing this poemfor Labor Day. I published this a few years ago in a journal called Thank You For Swallowing. The journal was started by Cat Conway in response to a poem by a male poet that began with those same words as the name of the journal. It featured protest poems by mostly women writers and poets. I wrote this ekphrastic poem about Edward Hopper’spainting New York Movie, 1939. It’s also inspired by my first job, as a movie theater usherette, when I was 17. I wore a uniform actually very similar to the girl in Hopper’s painting.
Periphery
She’s been told she belongs in pictures twice already tonight. It averages three, four times a shift. It’s a line, but no lie…just look at her. Yellow Harlow hair, formidable Crawford shoulders, long legs dressed Hepburn style in slim straight trousers, and high heels like the kind Ginger Rogers danced in backwards all through the Depression days. On slow nights, like tonight, she thinks Ginger’s not the only one who can do her job backwards. This one, in her sleep even. She minds the attention from male moviegoers a little less than her manager’s come-ons. The moment the picture starts the customers forget she’s there and she can be left alone awhile at the periphery, beneath the three lamps beside the red curtain and sworled blue stairs separating the dark plush dreams of this movie palace from reality and all the rest: World War talk and World’s Fair frenzy, dull dates, heartaches, mother’s meddlings, the manager’s pinches and leers. He puts her on the late shift on purpose, keeps offering her a lift home after midnight. She’s taken to telling him she’s meeting someone, somewhere down the street and no she doesn’t need a lift there either. But tonight it’s no lie, not just a safety line. Standing at the periphery in the wall-lamp glow she counts the minutes to the closing credits. Marlene Dietrich is dying in Jimmy Stewart’s arms. Maybe this new guy will stick around longer, make her laugh tonight or take her dancing, backwards or forwards, any direction so long as it’s away from here. If not, there’s always the pictures…she belongs in them so she keeps getting told. And she thinks some night she may prove her admirers right: wait for the closing credits, turn up the lights, wake the audience from their dreams, usher them out, close the red curtain, then climb through the big screen. She figures if they insist on looking and leering, she’s gonna direct the angle they see her from, at least. What she wants is to rewrite the script, change the ending. She doesn’t want Dietrich to die. Forget what the men in the seats want to see. Let the heroines live. Make the pictures belong to the girls for a change. She has ideas…not just dreams.
All the glow a woman basks in when no one’s looking. All the good ideas to be got from the periphery.
So here’s a short story I wrote a few years ago and got published at Hobart, which was a tremendous honor. To top it off, the editors paired it with some terrific art by Barrelhouse artist Killian Czuba. This piece is fiction and the narrator and her family, etc., aren’t me and mine. I’ve never even watched a boxing or MMA match. I wrote it as a kinda/sorta tongue-in-cheek yet loving take on Irish-American identity. I’m sharing it again now because it’s also a “worker’s story” and this is Labor Day weekend. Whoever reads it, if you’re suffering through a similar situation as the narrator, hang in there and don’t give up: There’s going to be a clear road.
I’ve always been the one you wouldn’t want to back in a match of wills. I work in an office. I’m a woman, a little overweight, unmarried. I live with my dad. He looks after me and I look after him.
My boss is a man, more than fifteen years younger than me, and his boss is a woman the same age as him.
Recently, for my yearly review, my boss noted how much my confidence had increased in composing emails. He said he noticed this increased confidence in the tone of quite a few of my messages, all of which I’m required to cc him on, and he wanted me to know how much he appreciated my efforts and recognized my growth. I did not tell him I’d been writing emails since well before he joined the workforce or that I sent my first one before he was even born. And when he suggested I continue my growth and skill variation in the year ahead by taking a social media for beginners course, I did not remind him I had taken it already at his and his boss’ suggestion after my previous review.
He forgets things often: assignments, deadlines, approval of my overtime pay. “I forgot,” he says, while giving me a project on Wednesday that had to be done Tuesday and came to him for assigning at least a week ago. “Sorry,” he doesn’t say. Instead: “You need to have this done before lunch today, no later than 1:00. You can work through lunch if you need to. Don’t worry if you have to go over your hours and stay late to finish the rest of your work. I’m okay with that.”
The other men at work treat me with respect or just ignore me, which I’ve been told for women like me means almost the same thing. Except one, who’s begun to make a particular noise whenever he sees me coming to make the guys in the cubicles around him laugh. He’s a temp, I’m told, when I speak to my boss’ boss about it. Or a consultant. It’s hard to know which, since my boss’ boss changes her mind on his title, on everything, hourly. In any case: “He won’t be here much longer…maybe. Don’t worry about it.”
My dad is a widower and retired. He worked a machine in a plastics factory for his life’s occupation. These days he watches sports and politics, bitches about the Republicans, reads the newspaper every day (he still gets it delivered) and every book he can find about the wild west and the American Indians. He admires their spirit, he says, their defiance. Dad always did respect a fighter. His favorite sport is boxing. On his left forearm, he has a faded tattoo of an Irish flag, the colors long blurred by patches of wiry old man’s hair and the purple, brown, and deep blue spots of age. Dad prides his Irish heritage. His “Irish blood” as he says, though there are several kinds of blood coursing through him. Irish, Welsh, German, possibly a little Czech. But Dad favors the Irish strand over all. The Irish, Dad says, have been in a state of active resistance for over 800 years. Unconquerable, he calls them. “Them” including him, me, and most of all Mom – “the full Irish breakfast” as Dad used to call her, teasingly but with respect bordering on adulation. She was the real deal after all, her parents Belfast born and bred.
She was not a naturally pretty woman. I took after her in that regard. She had a broad back and shoulders and pale eyelashes that made her look like a rabbit when they were bare, which wasn’t often. Mom always wore makeup. And dresses or skirts, never slacks – though dungarees, as she called them, were an occasional self-treat. Thick high heels, even while waitressing at the diner all day. And scads of jewelry, even though her employer threatened to fire her for it day after day. She favored quirky, dangly earrings and unique, colorful brooches – and of course, her wedding ring, an uncharacteristically simple, slim-band item that Dad wears now, on a chain around his neck under his shirt.
Mom’s most prominent feature was one I gratefully missed out on, a strong jutting jaw, like an old-time boxer or one of those tough street kids in the black-and-white Bogart movies. Mom was a toughie herself. If I got bullied at school, she’d come up with the nastiest insults you ever heard to trade back with my bullies. She would’ve gone and said them straight to the mean kids’ faces, and to their parents, my teachers, the school principal, the whole world within her aim and earshot if Dad hadn’t time and again stopped her. Mom was the kind who always needed to be moving, working, acting on something, whether a cause or an impulse, or a real or imagined slight or barely healed pain. She wouldn’t have lasted long at my workplace. The sitting in a cube all day would’ve driven her nuts. And my boss and his boss, and the “consultant”? I’d give anything to bring Mom back just to see how they’d fare against the likes of her.
Though she passed away nearly fifteen years ago, Dad talks about her, champions her every deed and accomplishment as if she’s still here – alive, well, and above all, willful. “Your mother was quite a woman,” he’s always telling me, as if it needs reminding, as if I or anyone could ever forget her or compare.
In my cubicle at work I keep a small picture of her. It’s the only personal item I keep. I used to have colorful calendars, inspirational quotes, even a little plant back in my first few years at the company, but I took it all down in the past couple years, a few months after my current boss came on. I keep Mom’s photo propped up by my mouse, close at hand. Easy to take on the day it comes to that.
It’s true I do a lot of overtime, more than I should be willing to, but it’s not out of any loyalty or dedication to my work. I use my overtime pay on Dad, always keeping my ears perked up for him to mention something he would love to have or do. Like this year for his birthday, I gave Dad the gift of a fight. The Mayweather vs. McGregor match on pay-per-view. Dad couldn’t stop talking about it for weeks. It was Mayweather this and McGregor that. Who was he rooting for, I asked, thinking that was a no-brainer. Dad has always been something of a purist when it comes to boxing – he used to say boxing was for athletes, mixed martial arts was for animals. And besides, did anyone really believe McGregor, even with his mountain’s worth of confidence, could hold his own at boxing with, as Dad called Mayweather, the greatest pound-for-pound fighter to wear a pair of gloves since Ali?
By way of answering me, Dad reached into the back pocket of his trousers, pulled out his wallet, and fished out the few bills inside. “That’s on Mayweather,” he said. “What about your kinsman?” I said, teasing. “What about your fighting Irish pride?” Dad placed his hand on his heart. He took a moment to rub at something on his chest, and I knew it was the ridge of Mom’s wedding ring protruding through his undershirt. Then he lightly thumped his chest, his heart, the ring, all of it, as if for luck, and said, “This is on McGregor.”
The day of the match Dad got a barbershop haircut and shave, put on a clean old dress shirt of his, and suggested we order Chinese for dinner and eat it on proper plates with Mom’s silverware. “Some people got the Superbowl, I got the fights,” he said when I took note of his newfound dapperness. Maybe a secret memo had gone out. Just before the fight a picture went viral of McGregor getting his hands wrapped while wearing a three-piece designer suit and shades. I showed the picture to Dad on my phone. “Look at him,” I said. “Full-time flamboyance this guy has.” Dad corrected me: “No, Jean. Fighting form. Battle gear.”
Once the fight started, Dad burrowed into a respectful silence. It’s something I’ve always appreciated about him, that he doesn’t act out fights vicariously like so many other male fans. No shouting at the screen, no balling his hands into fists and jerking his shoulders as if shadowboxing his diminishing potency in his Lazy Boy. Dad watches a fight as if it was a mass, an almost mystical occasion whose noisy embellishments and flashy sideshows are only included for the benefit of those who don’t understand the stakes and significance of a fight the way he does. Which isn’t a conceit. Dad’s a Depression baby, a war draftee, a factory lifer. And yeah, Irish – 800 years of resistance, fighting form, and all.
But McGregor lost, after all that hype and hope. Dad applauded anyway when the match ended and got out a bottle of discount brandy for a birthday toast. He poured a glass for me and we both stood in the kitchen drinking. “Did you enjoy the fight, Jean? It was a good one, wasn’t it?” he said. “But our guy lost,” I said. I downed the brandy in one gulp, feeling thirstier and edgier than I could remember. Dad laughed and passed me the brandy bottle. “He lasted 10 rounds, Jean. Against Mayweather. That’s the important thing.” He put his empty glass in the sink. “There’s winning and losing, and then there’s fighting. The first two are just outcomes. The third is something else altogether. A way of life. A fighter doesn’t always need to win or lose to justify himself or prove his worth, Jean. He just needs to put up a good fight. Make a good stand.” He moved to the doorway of the kitchen. “This is just the beginning for our man McGregor. You watch.” He winked and thanked me for his birthday gift, then went off to bed. But I stayed up.
I am not like my parents. Not on the inside. Like I’ve never been comfortable with confrontation. Though there’s beauty in a fight that even I can recognize, I’m never at the ready with a withering comeback like Mom always was and I don’t have the ease with handling confrontation, the philosophical attitude about it that Dad does. That night, after the fight, I stayed up in the kitchen wondering where it all went wrong with me. Perhaps the Irish in me is too watered down, too commingled, beyond Dad’s even, beyond the brink of any inborn courage and inherited resistance. Perhaps the fighter’s gene, if there is one, skips a generation.
Dad always says Mom worshipped me, her only child. Whenever I’m feeling low about my job, he says she would be proud to know I escaped working class life, that I have a “nice clean job” in an office instead of working on my feet or at a dangerous machine all day like they did. Something stable too. He may think that and I get it, I really do, but I don’t feel it. Certainly not when I walk past the consultant’s desk and hear his juvenile joking and his cubicle neighbors’ cowardly giggles, and all I do is walk on red in the face without a word in defense of myself. And not when I put away my resignation letter for yet another day or get denied a raise for “budget reasons” for yet another year or see the boss and his boss going out with the consultant for lunch more and more often, my boss’ boss laughing and blushing as the consultant opens the door for her, and all of them acting sweet as Halloween candy swiped out of some scaredy-cat kid’s bag.
Long after the match, I kept the picture of Conor McGregor getting his hands wrapped on my phone. I looked at it every day, sneaking peeks in my cubicle, in the ladies room at work, during lunch. Studying it, studying him. His pose, his style, the way he held out his hands to his trainers – casually, but with undeniable power radiating from his hands, from the picture, from some mysterious realm I’ve never been able to find the door to, where self-assurance is as second nature as brushing your hair or buttoning your shirt, as easy to carry around and show off as a flashy new watch or necklace or tattoo, or a family trait. Imagine if McGregor were a woman, I’d wonder throughout the day, as I sifted through the barrage of emails from my boss, all his reminders to cc him the next time I sent this or that, the notifications that he’d be leaving early again as I stayed late. Imagine McGregor in an office. Imagine him…or her, aged a bit past her prime. How would she prep for a fight? What would it be like to be a woman like her?
More often I forget McGregor and the all the cubicle walls around me, and I picture clear roads. Just that, plain and simple. I close my eyes and imagine a twister-wrecked field, a traffic-jammed crossroads, the faces in my office crowded together into an ugly clump of eyes and nostrils and teeth, then say to myself in quietude: “There’s going be a clear road. It’s inevitable.” And there, in my mind and heart, it appears.
For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, I can feel something coming up in me, something stirring in my blood. Like I might be my father’s daughter after all. My mother’s too.
There’s one more way I take after her. I may spend a lot of my overtime pay on Dad, but for myself I splurge on makeup. Unlike Mom, I can take or leave a nice outfit, designer clothes, accessories, bling and all that. But like her, like a warrior without a shield, like a knight without armor, without makeup I feel naked. Defenseless even, like someone without a name or history or kin. I wear it every day, even when I have nowhere to go. What I’ve always loved best is a dramatic look – dark eyes, carved cheekbones, a strong mouth in a bold color. But it’s too much for the everyday, for the office, so I keep that look just for practice, just for myself.
But lately, as I get ready for work every morning, I’ve been playing up the drama, piling on the boldness, keeping a few images in mind. As I trace the shape of my eye with liner and gloss my lips, I think of the consultant and the cubicle gigglers. I’ve begun to notice, they all dress alike, eat alike, laugh alike, as if on cue or autopilot. They make a drab little blot in the center of the office, their laughter and very breath a feeble, fading heartbeat, the mewings of a nest of mice in a python’s chokehold. Their time’s up. They’re done. I apply color to my cheeks and I pick something rosy – against drabness, I say.
As I blacken my lashes, I think of my boss in a meeting room going over my annual review, clicking his pen and reading from a sheet the goals he’s decided on for me for the year ahead. The social media course. The emails. My boss’ boss interrupting me, correcting my just fine English and exchanging my just fine words for ones that make no better difference. This is the best they can do, and it isn’t much. It’s over for them too. It’s inevitable. I say it again: There’s going to be a clear road.
Second to last, I think of Conor McGregor getting his hands wrapped in a three-piece suit. Dad’s faded Irish flag tattoo and special occasion dress shirt. Mom’s picture beside my mousepad, waiting, ready.
I accentuate the angle of my brows, my cheekbones, and work my way down to my jawline, playing up the feature I’ve always tried to hide. My mother’s boxer’s jaw, jutting out from her face, from 800 years of resistance, from my long-awaiting destiny, like a fist.
This is the last editor’s note/essay I wrote for Tiny Donkey. As I wrote in a previous post, Tiny Donkey was a digital journal devoted to short nonfiction about fairy tales and folkore and associated with Fairy Tale Review. It was shut down in 2017, and its site was recently taken down from the internet completely. I’ve been rescuing all the essays and interviews I contributed here. This one was my favorite of all.
My mother’s kitchen cupboards are stocked with ancestral memories; crammed with what may look like ordinary jars and cans, boxes and bottles—but I know better. These are her hunger ghosts, I think to myself every time I open the cupboards, doppelgangers of old wounds and inherited hurts.
The same goes for the freezer and fridge, the fruit bowl, even the jar for cat treats. My mother hoards food. She consistently buys too much, as if she’s still cooking for a household of eight or preparing for a food shortage or a spell of famine. She overcooks too, long used to making large casseroles that needed to stretch into a couple days’ worth of leftovers. My father and I have tried talking to her, telling her to scale back, that we cannot possibly eat everything before it spoils and it’s a sin to waste food.
But I think she really is preparing for a famine, or reckoning with the haunting of one. My mother descends from the Famine Irish, the generation that left Ireland in the mid-19th century for their lives, escaping starvation and fever, mass death, and the devastation of centuries of British colonialism. Hunger is the reason she’s here, in America, and half the reason I’m here too, along with my brothers, sisters, and all my maternal cousins.
In Irish folk belief there’s a type of grass called an féar gortach, the hungry grass. Some say it’s a different shade than the green that famously carpets Ireland, more silver in color, or patchy and withered. Others say it looks like any other grass, and you only know you’ve stepped on it too late, when a great hunger suddenly comes upon you and nothing can cure it save a bite of some bread tucked away in your pockets (if you had the forethought) or a bit of your own shoelace (if you’re really stuck). It’s said hungry grass grows wherever a corpse has been laid down or someone has died. The belief predates An Gorta Mór of the 1840s, the Great Hunger. But an féar gortach took on a new, ghastly meaning then, in an era when famine victims were found in fields and on roadsides, a ring of green around their open, lifeless mouths after a last, desperate meal of grass.
As Ireland’s potato crop failed and its people starved, its other crops were harvested and exported by the shipload to serve on British dinner tables and fill British bellies. At least a million Irish died during the Famine, their bodies buried in mass graves wherever their lives gave out. In a sense, all Ireland’s green countryside turned to hungry grass, a landscape of want and loss, of lasting trauma and emptied beauty. At least another million emigrated, became refugees, exiles, Irish-Americans, Irish-Canadians, Irish-Australians, hyphenated people, diasporic, hungry.
Growing up, Mom spoke often of her family’s history, sang and played us Irish folk songs, explained to us the Famine, dressed us in green on St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe it seems a stretch to suggest my mother’s food compulsions have anything to do with an event in another country her ancestors left fadó fadó. But some events are simply too large, too traumatic not to eat into the blood, the DNA, the collective cultural memory of a people.
Mother’s ancestral memories transferred to all her children, but might have absorbed most deeply into me, her last-born child and the only one to go live in Ireland years later. I am the child who’s never married, never had children. Who’s struggled with her weight, eats when she’s not hungry, and bakes when she’s sad or simply bored. Who collects cats, books, and passport stamps like they’ll fill up some loss, some second-hand but deep-rooted want and need. The famished one, always looking for some patch of grass where the hunger finally makes sense.
As mentioned in a previous post, a digital literary journal that I contributed to and served as volunteer editor for a few years ago went the way of the dinosaurs recently. Tiny Donkey was an offshoot of the Fairy Tale Review and was dedicated to short non-fiction pieces about folklore and fairy tales. The journal shut down in 2017, but was still available to read online up until recently. With its site being gone, I’ve been sharing a few of my own pieces here.
This one is the third and last editor’s note I wrote for Tiny Donkey, about Hans Christian Andersen’s folk tale The Ugly Duckling. I loved the tale as a child, and I admit I identified with the poor créatur. I didn’t fit in as a child. At all. And adulthood has felt like a full-on flail as well. I suppose most people feel that way, more of us than each of us realize. In any case, I worried about appearing too emo or po-faced in this piece. Still, I hope anyone who reads it likes it, and I hope it did Andersen’s touching tale justice. And yes, I stole the title from a Prince song.You can’t tell me the guy who played The Kid in Purple Rain wouldn’t have related to The Ugly Duckling as well.
Growing up, you were shy. Or maybe you were short, you were fat, you had bad teeth. You had frizzy hair, you wet the bed, you spoke with a stammer. You slept with a stuffed toy ‘til you were twelve, or ‘til you were twenty, or ‘til your monthly blood ran out and you began soaking the bed with night sweats and hot flashes and Mississippi-wide rivers of regrets. You’re almost an old woman now. Love and transcendence have passed you by. Those fairy tales you were fed by Hollywood and MTV and Hans Christian Andersen as a child, and the ones you fed yourself to get by, through the loneliness of the school playground, through the long tick-tocking overthinking of the night, through the daily treacheries of life – they all lied.
Which fairy tale was it you always went back to, the one you believed in most? The one with the song saying someday your prince would come? Or the one where the funny-looking little duckling (you don’t like to say “ugly” – it’s a word that’s been used against you so many times) turns into a stunner of a swan? Did you think that might be you one day? Did you really? All along, you should have paid more attention to the crone, the ogre, the unredeemed outcasts, the ones haunting the margins, or worse yet, the ordinary ones, the unmagical, the unnamed and underappreciated. Because these were your destiny – not the beautiful ones, not the princess and the swan.
Or maybe the fairy tales didn’t lie. You just saw in them what you wanted, took what you needed. Beauty, hope, promises of happily ever after, some danger to make things interesting, some fear to cut through the dull of the everyday. You simply ignored the despair. Even though all fairy tales, and all life, is rife with it. Like that moment in Andersen’s tale about the duckling, when the bullied little bird welcomes the beauty of spring and a bevy of swans with pure, piercing heartache:
“I will fly to those royal birds,” he exclaimed, “and they will kill me, because I am so ugly, and dare to approach them; but it does not matter…”
Then he flew to the water, and swam towards the beautiful swans. The moment they espied the stranger, they rushed to meet him with outstretched wings.
“Kill me,” said the poor bird; and he bent his head down to the surface of the water, and awaited death.
In the next moment the duckling sees his reflection in the water, sees a swan looking back – his transformed self, his true tribe, his happily ever after. I wonder though, if the duckling had seen no change, no beauty, no swan staring back at him in the water, could he still have survived? Would he still have come to know happiness, belonging, self-love?
I need to know, same as every once and for-all-time misfit. Is there magic after all in despair? Can there be beauty in forsaken hope, transcendence without transformation, belonging when you’re the only one around to hear your own questions, a happy ending when the fairy tale, or life, or maybe yourself, is found so wanting?
Think back on the ones you paid too little attention to, while you were paying as little attention to the beauty in your worst and best self. The crone, the ogre, the marginal, the ordinary. The untransformed duckling. The resilient, the persisting, the interesting and astute, the ultimately self-accepting and wise. Lucky you – these were your destiny. The unbeautiful ones, who know how to make magic out of the most disappointing circumstances, to potion up an unbreakable spell of endurance out of yesterday’s cold pot of despair. Let them teach you to love whatever reflection stares back at you, to see the beauty in even a fantastically imperfect you.
René Ostberg 