Saved by a Blue Tag Sale

On sunny late August afternoon when I should have been working but wasn’t, when I might have been doing the laundry but wasn’t, when I might have been swimming across Puffer Pond but wasn’t, when a sort of MacBethian gloom was threatening to overtake me and it seemed that life as a divorcee in the twilight of middle age was one frogmarch to the grave, I jumped in my car and drove to Salvation Army.

Many other people must have been similarly afflicted because I could barely find a place to park. Once in the store, I grasped the simpler explanation: It was Family Day, and there were fifty percent off on all items with blue, yellow, or green tags, which is to say that nearly everything was marked down. There were four cashiers, and they couldn’t keep up with the demand: the line snaked past the books, beanie babies, and shoes. There were mothers with shopping carts full of clothes, girls in tiny jeans scoring microwaves, teenage boys looking for that special baseball cap that would up their coolness factor on the first day of school.

I had actually come with a mission. I was in search of a cheese grater and a shower caddy, my ex having ended up with the cheese grater, which I had failed to replace all these months after the divorce due to my poor executive function and housekeeping skills, factors which were one of the many causes of our divorce. I could not blame my lack of a shower caddy on my ex—I had actually never owned one, since I always preferred baths, but my new home (the second in seven months, a long tale that does not improve with the telling) had a shower but no bathtub. After having spent the last several months bemoaning the fact that I was being deprived of the one pleasure that I had always counted on (retreating to the tub when the going got tough), I decided to stop whining, embrace showering, and get a shower caddy.

I had already priced both of these items at Bed Bath & Beyond, and I figured if I could save ten or twenty dollars by getting them used, I would be doing my budget a favor.

There are shelves and shelves of household items at the Salvation Army on Route 9 in Hadley—coffee mugs, teapots, covered casserole dishes. Used dishes are so plentiful that they are displayed in monochromatic color combinations: all white on one shelf, all blue on another, and so on. But among all this cornucopia of cast-off housewifery from the dead, the divorced, and the displaced, there was not one cheese grater. Ditto for the shower caddy. However, I did spot a particularly handsome steel-cased Thermos with a blue plastic lid for $1.57. I didn’t need it, as I had recently purchased a handsome pink-and-silver travel mug from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, but I decided that a little proactivity was not a bad thing. Despite all my best efforts to control my Attention Deficit Disorder (no doubt yet another cause of the divorce), I was not likely to hang onto my pretty Canadian mug for more than a few weeks.

But, Mon Dieu, the line! After deciding that the mug was really worth the wait, I rewarded myself with a handful of peanut M &M’s from the candy dispenser by the exit. You only got four M & M’s for your quarter, and that they were stale, which I thought a bit cheesy but which also reminded me of that great Woody Allen joke about the two old ladies at the resort at the Catskills, one of whom complains that the food is terrible, to which the other answers, and so little of it!

It was almost four o’clock, which meant I would not be getting to my favorite thrift venue in the Pioneer Valley—Hospice Shop of the Fisher Home, where I had, over the past year, scored tea towels, cushions, and curtains as well as, just last week, a beautiful Red Sox cap for my son. But no worries, the Goodwill in Amherst stayed open until seven.

The problem with looking for specific things in thrift shops is that you rarely find them, which is to say there was neither a cheese grater nor shower caddy in the entire store. However, I did spot a box of perfectly good Van Gogh note cards from the Museum of Fine Arts for $2.50. “The House of Auvers” with its swirling blues and greens and white breathy clouds was on the cover. Inside was the radiant blue-and-gold figure of “Postman Joseph Roulin,” as well as “Enclosed Field with Ploughman” with its spectacular waves of blue and gold and the virtually unknown “Ravine,” A very cheery, older woman spotted the cards in my red plastic basket and said, “Look at those cards! You just never know the treasures you’re going to find here!” The young woman working the cash register confided that she had almost bought the cards herself, and then launched into a long narrative about her love affair with Van Gogh and a recent trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York expressly to see “Starry Night.”

“Everything changes,” Ovid observed, long before the advent of thrift stores or the profusion of divorce, “nothing is lost.” When I returned home, without the items I had been searching for, but with a new-to-me cup and nearly new box of cards, I felt changed, saved by a blue tag sale. All posts copyright© 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Blues if You Want (And Can Afford Them)

“For the record, I did not sleep with Bill Matthews. Which is not to say that I didn’t have my chances…”

My two breakfast companions in the Red Mill at the Vermont Studio Center, the famous poet, Stanley Plumly, the less famous novelist and my dear friend, Christine Lehner, erupted into raucous laughter. It was not the sort of thing they expected to hear over bowls of granola from VSC’s Grants and Publicity Manager.

“That would put you in the minority of women he was friends with,” Stan Plumly said, chuckling and smoothing back a strand of snow-white hair. His hair was amazing. Thick as the mane on a Shetland pony, white as bleached bones, it looked as if it had been blow-dried that morning. I considered complimenting him on it, and then thought he might take it the wrong way.

“To say we were friends would be pushing it,” I said. “I met him at Breadloaf in the eighties. Bill was a Visiting Writer, very much the big man on campus, dispensing wisdom and ministering to a gaggle of female groupies. He read an essay about Bellagio, not the resort in Vegas but the artist’s retreat funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, which, in the first century, A.D., was inhabited by Pliny the Younger.

I approached Matthews afterward and told him how much I admired his essay, explained how my first husband, Leonard Feldstein, had applied to Bellagio and been turned down, how the rejection was hard, because Len adored Lake Como and would have thrilled to the princely routines—elegant meals, scintillating conversation, walks along ancient cobbled paths—that Matthews so winningly described.

“I was younger and prettier then,” I continued, to which Plumly interjected something sweetly complimentary to the effect that I hadn’t lost my charm, “and Bill and I ended up hanging out together. He got me into Treman Cottage, that house on the Breadloaf campus that you cannot enter unless you are a fellow or above…something I didn’t know until I arrived, which appalled me, though not enough to boycott it, which I should have done if I had had any integrity…”

“O.K., O.K., spare us the lecture,” Christine said, “and cut to the chase. How did you almost end up in Bill Matthews’ bed?”

“Well, we had spent most of the night drinking martinis in front of the fireplace at Treman, and Bill offered to walk me back to my dorm, which was just down the dirt road. It was a warm, moonlit night and you could see the Big and Little Dipper and Orion and a bunch of other constellations that he could name and I couldn’t. We started talking about our lives; he was between wives and I was between husbands, and next thing I know we were going at it in the hallway outside my room and he was murmuring into my hair, 'We could really get this thing right this time…'

“It was the sort of line he must have used dozens of times with other women, but I remember thinking, This famous poet wants ME!”

“And then,” Christine interjected. "Que Pasa?”

“I don’t know, I guess my guardian angel was looking out for me because, after kissing him back, and I will say this for him, drunk as he was, he was a good kisser. Anyway, sirens went off in my brain and something screamed, ‘Stop! This guy is gonna break your heart.'”

“So that’s it?” Christine asked.

“Not exactly. We kept in touch over the next few months. He moved to a tiny place on the Upper West Side that he later wrote about in BLUES IF YOU WANT. I moved from Illinois to D.C. to go to graduate school.

“He was a great letter writer—this was well before e-mail. He always wrote back within a few days and his sentences were eloquent and polished. I remember he once said that a writer is someone who loves sentences, and you could see that that was true for him, that he loved sentences.

“We met again here at Vermont Studio Center in the fall of 1993. We had lunch at a little restaurant in a nearly village that backed onto a river. It was mid-November and we were the only people in the restaurant and Bill was turning on his usual wit and charm, flirting with the waitress, with the owner, with me. I don’t know how many times he had been married and divorced; how many affairs he’d had, but I was still dazzled by him…

“Four years later, I was scanning the obits in The New York Times and read that he’d dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 55.”

“Getting ready to go to the opera,” Plumly said, shaking his head. Plumly explained that Matthews had begun, at his doctor’s urging, to cut back on his drinking and smoking, but it was too little too late.

We were quiet for a while, sifting through our raisins and sunflower seeds, each lost in our reveries on why we were here instead of not here, musing wordlessly upon the strange bedfellows of art and death. I thought of Bill’s eloquence, the lines that I remembered either from his poems or from his conversation—one that has always haunted me about how “the work of the body becomes the body of work.’

Years later, I was walking to my mailbox in front of the ramshackle Victorian house that I’d just moved into after my divorce from my second husband, and came upon a letter from Bill’s son, Sebastian, on Vermont Studio Center stationary, asking me to donate money for a room in the new Maverick Writers' Studios building that was to be named in honor of Bill. It was a long and heartfelt plea, a writer son’s eloquent tribute to his eloquent dad.

Had I but world enough and funds, I mused, had I been as famous as Bill—president of the Poetry Society, tenured professor at CUNY, a regular at Breadloaf and Bellagio, I would have been delighted to dig deep into my checkbook, but I had not reached even a modicum of his acclaim. I was poor and underemployed, with little disposable cash. Across my mind, like a plane of light in an Italian quattrocentro painting, fell a line from one of Bill’s poems from TIME AND MONEY about "how the rich are marrying each other.”

I wasn’t rich, and yet I was rich in remembrance of Bill. Sebastian asked me to give what I could, and so I did, and here it is, my gift to the tall, long-limbed seducer who loved sentences.
All posts copyright© 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author

Blue Laws

Until some three years ago, I spent nearly every night of my one, precious life in either a mildly or not-so-mildly inebriated state. It was as if the glass of wine, always at my side as I made dinner, shucking corn or slicing tomatoes, were a sort of lover, ever ready to overlook my flaws—how I left too many gossamer hairs upon the shorn cobs, how I never made Apple Brown Betty, how I failed in ways large and small as a wife and mother. The five, ten, or fifteen ounces of Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay (I rarely drank red, even though it was meant to be healthier) was always ready to whisper endearments in my ears, to tell me I was merveilleuse, extraordinaire, magnifique, to fill up my silences with sweet-talk.

I never got the shakes when I went without a drink, but I did experience a kind of silent-screaming panic. I remember going down to visit my ninety-something father-in-law in Richmond, Virginia, who had long since stopped any regular imbibing of alcohol, as it seriously messed with his head, to say nothing of his sense of balance, and panicking because he didn’t have a corkscrew. There were silver-and-nickel-plated knives and forks, plastic spoons, crumpled napkins, multiple packets of Sweet N’ Low…but not one corkscrew in all the wax-paper-lined kitchen drawers that I ransacked.

Going door-to-door in his suburban neighborhood, I rang bells, rapped on windows, like some mad-dog Jehovah’s Witness. I didn’t want to chat about the holidays, didn’t want to talk about whether my father-in-law was still driving or going to the Y. All I wanted was the silver gizmo that might unleash the firewater from its bottle and deliver me, at least for the next hour, of self-loathing and despair.

“Everything in moderation,” advised the Roman philosopher Petronius, “including moderation.” But we Americans, unlike our older, wiser European counterparts, despise moderation. We are all sinners in the hands of an angry god, in need of thundering preachers to keep us from drinking ourselves into a stupor every day of the week, which is what our illustrious ancestors loved to do, from the folks who stepped off the Mayflower right up through Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Our founding fathers began their drinking in the morning with hard cider and continued right on through the day with beer, wine, and spirits. The early colonists were forced to institute “blue laws” which put all kinds of restrictions on the consumption of alcohol, banning the purchasing of beer or wine before noon on Sunday, something that remains on the books in most states today, which always shocks me when I try to purchase a bottle of white before noon at my local Whole Foods.

Why blue laws are called blue laws is shrouded in mystery. One theory goes that it was because of the color of the books in which the laws were first printed; another that it was the chosen shade of the stockings of those pesky ladies who tried to better mankind by lobbying for repressive laws.

What we do know is that blue laws didn’t succeed in curbing the early American’s passion for drink, a passion that his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren took up with equal ardour until an entire temperance movement sprung up, which finally succeeded in 1919 in writing an amendment to the constitution to ban the sale of alcohol in every state in the union, as well as in parts of Canada. And of course even this most ultimate of blue laws didn’t do much to stop drinking, which continued in speakeasies all over the country and which was trucked across Canada and into the United States, entire fortunes including Joseph P. Kennedy’s being made on the illegal profits of bootlegging.

My first cousin, Lisa, died at 45 of acute alcohol poisoning, unable to face a single day, let alone the rest of her life, without the rivers of vodka that she poured down her throat. Her funeral, held on a sunny April morning in a gray granite church in Penetanguishene, Ontario, Canada, overlooking the agate waters of Georgian Bay, where she had passed many a drunken afternoon lounging on the decks of friends’ boats, was one of the saddest events I have ever witnessed. Her eighty-three-year-old mother, wheeled in on a stretcher from the local nursing home, wept with a copious and terrible abandon. Afterward, the mourners gathered in the dark smoke-filled Canadian Legion. Her friends cried, smoked cigarettes and knocked back shots of tequila.

It was enough to turn me into a teetotaler. But like Edwin Arlington Robinson’s legendary malcontent Miniver Cheevy, I had simply accumulated one more story to despair about, one more reason to have another drink.

Lao Tzu says that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And so it was with my drinking: I made one small and subtle change in my alcohol consumption, which, though I could not have predicted it, changed my behavior conclusively. Three years ago, I joined a writing group in Northampton, which met every Wednesday night from 6-9:30 p.m. A hearty dinner of pasta and oven-baked squash was served at 6; drinks were strictly of the seltzer and juice variety; coffee pots were always full.

But this wasn’t a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, though several members were recovering alcoholics. After dinner, we had a moment of silence, then retreated to various parts of the house to spend an hour with our laptops, returning after an hour to read and receive comments.

Even if you were Miniver Cheevy himself “sighing for what was not, and dreaming of Thebes and Camelot,” you were not allowed to say: “That was nothing like Euripides.” Instead, you had to be positive; you had to find the firewater phrase, perhaps even just the single word that bootlegged your consciousness, that lit up your heart.

The adventure did something to you, made you feel full and unaccountably happy. All these strangers scribbling down the bones of their lives, speaking of divorce, loneliness, heart disease, alcoholism and Alzheimer’s, and you had nothing to do but listen, you wanted to listen, and for the first time in many decades, you didn’t think about how you couldn’t get through a night without a drink, you thought only about stories and similes and how amazing that people could spend an hour drinking deep of themselves and coming up with such treasures.

When you returned home well before midnight, you were too loaded with words to do anything but climb into bed. And so it was that you passed one night without alcohol and you slept a deep, dream-drunk sleep and when you woke, you thought, “piece of cake to go without a drink,” and if you could pass one alcohol-free day, surely you could pass another and another, and before you knew it, you had had five, ten, fifteen alcohol-free days, which you tracked with blue stars on your calendar. After a year, you counted up 150 days of stars.

And so it was that you learned to pass your own blue laws, learned to drink occasionally and moderately…and even though the shadows of a winter afternoon approaching five o’clock still make you yearn for the deliverance that only a glass of maple-colored wine brings, you know you can go without.

All posts copyright© 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or distributed without attribution and/or permission of the author