morethanenoughtruth

I’ve spent the last sixty years complaining about getting kicked out of Carnegie Institute of Technology.  It was the end of everything.  When my Dad’s business went bankrupt, and he couldn’t pay second semester tuition and fees, it was all over for me.  I convinced the Dean of Students to let me sign on personally to the debt in return for permission to take final exams.  I sat for them, then packed my bags and took off for parts unknown.

In retrospect, losing my place in that very conservative engineering institution may have been the best thing ever to have happened to me.  After recovering my stance as a viable though modest bread-winner, it was time to get back to school.  Opportunities were limited.  The only four-year possibility within Greyhound commuting distance was Salem, a West Virginia teacher’s college tucked into the green Appalachian foothills, between Parkersburg and Clarksburg.  Engineering Physics wasn’t even offered.  The closest thing to my one-time dream was Divisional Science, available to secondary level teachers of Biology, Chemistry and Physics.  I signed on and didn’t look back. 

Salem was a liberal arts college.  That meant, I later discovered, that I would be exposed to a whole gamut of ideas, not just facts.  There were many courses in a lively continuum of scientific subjects, but also with my minor in English, I enjoyed all the richness of our language spread out as a table of linguistic delights.  For fun, there were spiritual electives, wherein I broadened my appreciation of what might be believed, how and why.  French and Art fell by the wayside.  I was sad to see them go, but you can’t learn everything.  As I look back over the way that crazy-quilt of education overlaid the world of work, I see that Salem curriculum as key to becoming an inventor in a way that fulfilled my dream as well as my prayer.  The dream was that I become an engineer my father could be proud of; the prayer was that he might love me even though I was a girl.  One thing led to another, and three years later I packed it in with just one semester remaining, returning to Texas—home.

My work career started at Richardson’s TI in 1964 Dallas—showing up and demanding a job, any job.  With two boys, 7 and 3, I had to get a life.  Enough with an idealized West-Virginia-mountain-mama-home and crawling toward a degree.  My kiddoes needed food and underpants.  At Texas Instruments, Apparatus Division, I had plenty of opportunity to see things uniquely vantaged.  Hired on as a lowly Assistant Assembler B, I soon reached back to the technical drawing learned at CIT and proposed a device to improve my workstation performance.  An after-hours built wiring board design that provided for group measuring, cutting, stripping, and soldering got instant attention, a raise and a promotion.  Then I got to write and illustrate assembly instructions until, repeatedly proposing work saving jigs and fixtures, I was promoted yet again to Tool Designer.  At six weeks I was making thrce what I had at grunt start pay.  TI was responsive.  They didn’t sneer at good ideas.  While there, carrying Badge Number 15695, I designed all the assembly tooling on the F-111 TFX program.  That was exciting since the TFX (terrain following radar) was the program’s claim to fame.  We were in the storm’s eye.  All that was fun, but I had hit the ceiling.  Even though I was assigned to coach every engineering school graduate new-hire how it was that I did what I did, no more money was possible without a college degree, and I was still one semester short of that achievement.

Transferring and crossing the street to TI’s Corporate Research and Engineering Division was a new start.  It was a wonky place where they understood my frustration and let me work while earning a bit more money, even without the sheepskin.  I worked for Dr. Linda Creagh who was doing research on 2-chloro-2-nitroso-butane, a photo reactive chemical, to demonstrate its use in working with a ruby laser as a research tool.  This was chemistry—not physics.  My job was to mix the required reagents to produce our compound, set up a distillation apparatus, and heat the slurry until it began boiling.  As temperature elevated, different fractions evaporated, were condensed and caught.  Each fraction was analyzed by a spectrophotometer to precisely measure its purity.  The 2-chloro-2-nitroso-butane we were after was an azure blue fluid that when very pure could be exposed to laser light demonstrating a wide variety of amazements.  But it wasn’t all that easy.  No matter how much care I took in isolating a fraction, there always remained enough impurity to spoil its use inside the little glass photo cube that waited for us to get our act together. 

I have often been amazed to find that the most innovative breakthroughs happen at the interstices of things.  This was a chemical problem, but the solution I found was a physical one.  We had been successful in producing very pure fractions of our chemical, but the impurities always seemed to be extremely volatile, evaporating at a very low temperature, and carried over into fractions where they didn’t belong.  Remembering Halloweens spent over boiling kettles while wearing witches hats and croaking, ‘When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?’ I picked up a hunk of dry ice at the local ice house and brought it to work disguised as lunch. 

I proposed my idea to Dr. Creagh, who listened with interest.  We put a nearly pure fraction of 2-chloro-2-nitroso-butane into a beaker and dropped into it a small lump of the dry ice—frozen carbon dioxide.  I counted on the dry ice not reacting to our compound, and the doctor agreed.  No chemical interaction was expected.  I was using the CO² as an inert physical broom to brush away all those volatile impurities.  It worked!  The beaker frothed with CO² being sublimed through the fluid—going direct from solid to gas and making a big froth—as the gas escaped, dragging volatile impurities up into the air and away.  The project was saved, and when it was written up for publication, I had earned a footnote mention for my invention of “a method for removing volatile impurities from a fluid.”  This was remarkable in that technicians don’t usually get any credit for anything, and for being one of many instances where innovation reaches across demarcations between specialties and fertilizes the process of invention.

This kind of approach served me well in a variety of situations.  A typical example was working for Varo Inc. where I migrated a year later since that outfit allowed technicians to work flexible hours in order to accommodate illusive degree programs.  I was a technician by day and attended advanced biochemistry classes at night.  I was amazed at how many drums of flux remover that Varo bought and used, and at what great expense.  So, I took some to school and analyzed it in the Chem Lab.  It was mostly dry cleaning fluid, with a dollop of amyl acetate (an ester that makes bananas smell like banana).  Varo started making its own flux remover and saving a bundle.  This wasn’t a healthy or environmentally friendly idea since perchloroethylene  isn’t something that should be continuously inhaled any more than Kester flux remover should be.  But it was a mile-post on my march.  It was also another shoulder rub from physical to chemical invention that earned me an ataboy—girl.

Yet another reach across as Engineer after I had acquired that elusive degree, was at Varo’s Static Power Division.  It was a Sherman Texas facility devoted entirely to manufacture of night vision power supplies.  Powering a night vision unit required a high voltage multiplier.  It was a string of diodes cleverly arrayed to step up to the extremely high voltages needed to see in very low light.  It was necessary to stabilize the component connections to prevent disastrous internal arcing.  An obscenely expensive potting compound was used to achieve this electrical isolation.  I replaced the compound with cheerfully cheap high tech beeswax.  It worked just as well and saved Varo a ton of bucks. It could be melted and drained if necessary, and that was a big advantage.

Sometimes it isn’t even necessary to look for the bright idea light bulb.  It’s just there glaring at you.  My first day at the TI Sherman facility found me stepping over bulging garbage bags, bags on top of bags, bags of spacers spilling onto the floor, swept up by tricky breezes to dance away and hide.  Of course the assembly line was stopped, quiet as death.  The tried-and-true method had turned out to be a bust.  Millions of plastic one-eighth inch diameter tiny plastic donuts stored in plastic bags were static discharge waiting to resolve.  Every attempt to recapture the spacers and present them for automated assembly with their target diodes had failed—miserably.  The charged spacers became a veritable fluid, had minds of their own, and resisted handling as they took flight willy-nilly inspired by their individual electromagnetic imperatives.  My reputation as a wise-ass preceded me, and my first assignment was to “fix this mess.”

It seemed so obvious.  The plastic spacers were formed in an injection molding machine inside a mold that formed twenty-four identical donuts, all tied together by the plastic caught in the molten plastic feed channels, called the sprue.  The spacers already had the perfect holding fixture, needing only the foresight to use it.  The sprue itself was every spacer’s perfect holder.  The invention invented itself.  I had only to design a tool that clamped the sprue with its twenty-four precisely located still-attached spacers while a human inserted twenty-four diodes into their yawning apertures, and only then pressed a button to automatically separate the twenty-four diode/spacer assemblies from the now superfluous sprue.  It worked.  The work-area was so tight that a single bar blade couldn’t access the washer/sprue attachment points, but twenty-four narrow gauge pointy tipped X-acto Knife Blades, cunningly mounted, did the trick.  A solenoid provided the requisite actuation.  An inclined plane allowed the blades to slide up and slice at just the right angle.  Big red push-switches initiated first “clamp” and then “cut.”  Making the switches dual-actuated kept fingers safely out-of-the-way.  A single switch pressed did nothing; only when both right and left buttons were depressed would anything happen.

Years later at TRW while working on military aerospace proposals, it was often when experts in different specialties met and knocked heads that the creative work got done.  My most satisfying personal contributions to those efforts seemed often rooted in that Salem College ambrosia of science as art.  It was then that I decided getting booted out of Carnegie Tech was not all that bad.  I’m told that this is one of the blessed truths of Kabballah: It’s where the wounds of life open you up that the light gets in and creates your beauty.

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When I moved to Oakley and decided it was time to get old, senescence ensued in a hurry.  Suddenly I couldn’t walk very far, and when I did walk it was a shuffle.  With legs stiff and unbending, feet advanced apologetically.  They hurt.  Feet always hurt, whether used or miss-used, but should that make walking a dilemma?  Surely not.  Why foot misery when I was spending most of my time watching TV?  Good question.

I sought out a physical therapist.  With professional assistance this situation could surely be remedied.  She prescribed new shoes from a place called Fleet Feet.  This store serviced elite runners, so putting feet into Fleet Feet shoes would surely achieve the wished for gait. However I learned that Fleet Feet shoes can slog along as miserably as those from a discount store.  I enjoyed the high-tech laser measurement of my very own stockinged appendages, but the resulting fit seemed no better than other less scientifically ascertained equivalents.

As I visited a variety of medics, voicing a range of somatic complaints, this became an ugly pattern.  After dropping in on my orthopedic surgeon, sure that his ten-year-old spinal stenosis surgery had gone wrong and needed revisiting, he assured me that his handiwork was holding firm due to good bones and Citrical, not to mention his expert surgical skill. “Then why does my back hurt?” I whined. He pulled a sad face—a try at empathy— but at least he didn’t shrug his shoulders.

I dragged home and succumbed to the call of my recliner, always there to console and to comfort, just waiting for me to fit my ageing body into its compassionate embrace.  Lazy Boy and I were surely an item.  No matter where I went or what I did to make my back misbehave, he remained faithful and true to form.  When I returned, lowered aching bones onto his padding and leaned back, he surrounded and consoled my entirety. The pain went away until I got up and gave perambulation another try.

This worked well until one day I realized that when I arose, putting feet to floor, I proceeded to move around while vertebrae maintained the curve set by my chair.  A sideways glance at the hallway mirror showed me shuffling about my domicile shaped like my furniture—a moveable hairy question-mark.  Next time I arose, I stopped and straightened closer to runway posture—an improvement, reminiscent of what every intelligent dog achieves on arising.  He puts front paws together, pulls a big stretch, and only then proceeds to trot across the floor.  If humans are supposed to be so smart, how come every dog knows this and I don’t?

After that I began arching my back into a big stretch every time I left my chair.  It helped.  That made me curious about how people move all their many parts, especially as they morph into being codgers.  I have long held a suspicion that we become whatever our inner vision decrees.  These problems started back when I decided to get old.  The Devil made me do it.

It seemed a useful thing to simply pay attention.  After a month and more doing a doggie stretch every time I stood up, it got to be easier and felt more natural.  One day when low back was particularly painful, I stood up and did a monster stretch.  Then I called on my entire body to help.  That meant subtly flexing arms, legs, shoulders and butt, all at once, sort of declaring an all-around connection.  Then I felt the angle of my pelvis subtly tilt, and the pain evaporate.  Slowly, tentatively, I walked across the room.  Anguish was left lolling in the chair, an old thing that nobody really wanted anyway.

That day’s learning suggested that maybe it would be a good thing to spend less time lounging in my Lazy-Boy.  I had given up taking walks last year since shuffling along the sidewalk had seemed a non-starter.  After having memorized all the cracks in my local sidewalks, as well as the various weeds that grew therefrom, it seemed a boring proposition to undertake that same walk yet again.  So last month I moved to new digs where I can walk to dozens of interesting destinations.  For me Heaven is being able to walk to the library.  Now living at the center of Blue Ash, Ohio, I can stroll to the public library.  This morning I pocketed phone and credit card, tied on my sunbonnet, and took off for the local Starbucks.  Could I make it?

Slouching along the sidewalk seemed a sad reminder of being an old person resigned to somehow keeping fit.  But engaging arms and shoulders worked just like it did in my living room, leaving my pain rollling along with dry leaves dancing in the gutter.  I envisioned being at Starbucks, ordering a tall decaf cappuccino, and my step quickened.  It was reminiscent of my dad telling me to keep my eyes on the horizon when driving, so as to see everything there was to see, not just focusing on the rear end of the car directly ahead. Such short sight causes a jittery correction of aim and can be seen as weaving along the roadway.  Eyes hooked on the far horizon smooth the process of steering as the vehicle is guided toward a sure destination.  It works with walking as well as with driving.  Thinking about where I’m headed makes me stop obsessing about aches and pains in favor of coffee and company.

My last time to stop for morning brew at Starbucks was pre-Covid, and things had changed.  No raw sugar and Half-‘n-Half at-the-ready.  They had to be requested from a barista. Prices had taken advantage of the crisis.  Who could have assumed otherwise? But in every respect it was doable, even for a superannuated hiker.  I had walked all the way to Starbucks!

Heading back after enjoying my cup of Joe at a table secured by legal tender, and time spent using my IPhone to spin flitting thoughts into coherent prose, I wondered if I would have enough energy to get back home.  My PT had agreed with my arms-moving-along-with-gait thesis citing the fact that Parkinson’s patients can’t swing their arms.  Also people who must move their hands in order to speak illustrate this idea, Nancy Pelosi being a case in point. It must be a neuron thing. 

As I zapped my various elder parts with power of mind, they united around a sense of energized purpose, arms swinging, matching stride with pumping legs, collecting my whole self into a dynamo of getting-there.  When arms move with verve, body responds with vigor.  I made it back home with oomph to spare, looking forward to tomorrow’s hike to the Sleepy Bee Café where who knows what may turn up and commence buzzing?  Enough with getting old!  There’s too much to do to waste time with anticipatory anxiety.  Anticipatory glee is better. 

Next week—the library.  Walk on!

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Returning from town to my cabin in the woods, I surprised Espresso, my trusty black pussycat, holding court on a tree stump by the cabin door.  I killed the engine and watched.  He appeared to be communing with a fox lounging in the grass, just two or three fox leaps away.

I had slowed the car, stopped, set the brake, and slipped out, determined to reconnoiter the duo.  They waited and watched, sharing a quiet interest in my arrival.  Espresso typically would have come running, tail aloft, meowing a plaintive hello, but today he just drew himself up like some Egyptian cat god and watched, first me, then the fox.  Back and forth his round-eyed gaze panned with only an intermittent whisker twitch.

Mr. Fox appeared robust, sleek and healthy.  He had a full brush, tipped with white cream, and a thick, rich, coppery coat.  He displayed no fear, only a regal curiosity, but seemed to appreciate that I, in some strange two-footed way, belonged to the cat. 

When Espresso finally jumped down and meandered toward me, the fox rose, yawned, stretched, and began his own measured approach.  That did it!  Composure be damned!  Aplomb sacrificed to the suspense of these slow speed machinations, I snatched up the cat and tossed him into the car.  The door’s slam broke the spell.  Mr. Fox glared at me, disappointed that I had questioned his intentions or had deprived him of lunch—I’m not sure which.  I apologized and assured him that I knew him to be a fine fox but was nevertheless committed to my pussycat.  He paused to taste the air in several directions and finally moved on, slowly picking his way through the low brush and weeds, several over-the-shoulder appraisals punctuating a dignified retreat into a pine thicket.  I was sad to see him leave.  He was beautiful, and his trust rare—a benediction.

One of the many wonders of my sojourn in the Appalachian woodlands has been the willingness of the wildlife to accept me.  The deer, rabbits, snakes, birds and squirrels seem to understand that I have no interest in them excepting the wonder of our sharing this natural aesthetic.  One afternoon, my mind otherwise occupied, I stepped out the cabin door straight into the muscled black loops of a snake sunning himself on the deck.  A quick apperception assessed no danger since his coloring and head shape contraindicated the local poisonous varieties.  So I waited, one foot still in the cabin, one planted on the deck, while the snake, warm and equable, uncoiled his smooth scaly length from about my ankle and glided peaceably across the warm boards.  He chose a likely gap between the planks and slid headfirst into the abyss.  It would have been a simple exodus, excepting a small bulge, probably a recent rodent snack, which brought his progress to an embarrassing halt.

Back out and find another route?  No way!  He demonstrated his confidence in choice of exit strategies by elevating the entire following half of his person and doing an upside down hula dance until the rest of him finally slipped through.  There was no hurry.  We had agreed that he was an appreciated reptile and would be given all the time and space necessary to do his thing, however curious.  For many months Mr. Snake and I shared our quiet forest clearing as the best of friends.  Later as snowflakes fell and wood-smoke rising curled away, we kept the silent peace.

The cabin I had rented for a year of writing belonged to a Feminist Land Trust called Susan B. Anthony Memorial Unrest Home.  I had thought to enjoy a time away from the ever-puzzling testosterone dilemma—can’t live with ‘em; can’t live without ‘em.  It turned out, however, to be annoying to abide with the strict no-man enforcement.  Moving into the cabin took more than the one evening of unloading, so it seemed reasonable to let the two careful, quick, and kind Beacon-men-equivalents curl up in the loft until morning.  They were hot and sweaty, but not wanting to offer them the run of my private ladies room, I sent them to the pond, which I found out later was for nude woman bathing only.  It’s a good thing the femme Nazis never found out about that indiscretion since they would have renamed it a desecration. 

So ardent was Subamuh enforcement that I began to take glee in inviting my manly sons to drop by with loads of split firewood and stay awhile for a meal at Mom’s table.  Imagine the delight I took in stopping for a Silver Fox neighbor in tight jeans and tank top, overloaded with fresh picked and packed blackberries and headed into town to peddle his wares.  It was a good decision to offer him a ride.  For the remainder of my time in Ohio’s eastern woodlands, I enjoyed his company as yet another of the indigenous friendly fauna.  The resident man-haters were fauna as well, but not nearly such good neighbors.

Clambering about on the trails of Subamuh put me into a gentle space of introspection.  The leased cabin was a refuge for writing but it was not a cage.  As a legitimate renter, those many acres were available to me to explore, but putting one foot before the other doesn’t occupy a lively mind, and it was left to cavort at will.  The hiking became a walking meditation inspiring new insights.  Inhabiting a cabin at a Lesbian enclave made even the most hetero of personalities begin to self-analyze, snooping down any number of shady corridors.  I am no different, my three husbands being an exercise in brand identification, but not necessarily consummated self-knowledge.

I learned a smattering of feminist theory while eavesdropping at the back of Subamuh gatherings, one of their favorite topics being the butch-femme dynamic:  A butch woman has affirmed her power.  That’s what’s so compelling about her.  She demands and gets respect.  A femme woman worships that power and, like the moon, reflects its beauty.  A butch can see her own radiance only in the eyes of her lover.  It’s probably the most profound of loves, envied by the breeders, attracting their disdain and resentment.  The butch employee is typically better paid since the assertive personality attracts a richer share of the world’s commerce.  Everybody admires a strong confident demeanor and work style. 

Such overheard quandaries meandered through my mind as boots parted grass, still wet from the last night’s dewfall.  It’s fortunate they are prepared for their job with the serious boot wax I scored at Tractor Supply Store.  I didn’t want to appear sissified to all those rough-hewn ladies.  But then, why would I worry about such things?  They were, after all, my boots.  I wanted them to last, impervious to soggy aggress.  Also, why did I care what a convocation of lesbians thought?

Memories of resisting assault took me back to my first Subamuh confrontation.  Crissa, the ultra-femmie office manager, confused me.  Was she a lesbo or what?  She must have been a femme—a strong one.  A strong femme is greedy; she wants it all.  If she is acting out a lesbian paradox, she wants to have the butch and be her as well.  I shook my head.  Too complicated!  I have always dithered over choosing between family and career, but this is more complex.  I had questioned Crissa about sharing part of the creative work at Subamuh, offering to write for the newsletter.  I recoiled at her freak-out.  She stands there in memory, summoning a scowl from me all these years later. 

She explains why the job is, and will remain, all hers.  In her youthful exuberance, she gets carried away with herself, coyly bragging about how much fun it is making out with Molly, her sweetie.  That kind of crass ostentation offends everyone enduring singlehood, not just me, but it’s not my job to express community outrage.  I’m just a renter.  Time and group dynamic are sure to sort the thing out.  Her attitudes and behavior are not related to me personally.  I can relax and just smirk at Crissa’s narcissistic posturing, no worse than my own.  When I feel inadequate, it’s so easy to erect a safe intellectualism and dare an intruder to assault my tower.  Ravish me, God!  Open me, Holy Spirit!  Sweet Jesus, let truth be your rapier.  Fascinating, isn’t it, how such flights of mythic enthusiasm morph inexorably into sexual and religious fervor?  This train of thought isn’t only something I read.  It’s what I have long meditated about, bubbling up from murky mire.  It’s interesting how, if insights are scripted, mythical references float up.  Each of us is on a hero’s quest, a sojourner in our own epic.  I wonder if this concept is a distillation of Joseph Campbell and all the myth and psychobabble I’ve waded through, their facts stored as meta data in a tangle of neurons? 

Climbing to the property’s highest point is a treat for the eyes.  I admire the view as I focus far away and remember earlier days.  As a child, one of my earliest insights was that I can’t learn everything.  Memory can only accommodate so much and must be conserved.  I saw no purpose in memorizing arithmetic facts and rejected that task a priori.  My third child, Kurt the artist/philosopher, did the same but never gave in to store a bunch of left brain twaddle like I finally did as remedy to my lack.  It is only in this informed millennium that we can verify the reality of cognitive self-limitation.  At five Kurt, determined to be a race car driver, swore off arithmetic.  Good for him.  He got to actually become an artist.

But for me, the corollary to cognitive limitation followed swiftly, informed by culture.  I learned that females simply cannot learn certain things: “Girls are poor at arithmetic.”  It follows that I, a girl, must be maladroit concerning numbers.  Mommy said so.  She said I was just like Daddy and smart like him, but being a girl I could never do his kind of work.  When presented with a task in sums or differences, I would squander my first magical milliseconds mulling about how I can’t do this.  Then, so disarmed, I would attempt to solve the problem—unsuccessfully.  Maybe I really was number challenged? 

Every week I checked out the 6-book limit at my elementary school library and enjoyed hauling them home, consoled by their mass, feeling surrounded by words, learning early-on the satisfaction of cohabitating with a library.  I was no different from early cultures that scribed their understandings and used them for companionship.  Alexander and I were surely soulmates.  Consider the Torah treasured in its ark.  How could God not have been understood as word?

Even before word, God was before all else number.  Mathematicians acknowledge that any and all civilizations, throughout each and every universe, must hold in common the understandings of number science.  That reality existed long before primitive humans began to numerate fingers and toes.  My child brain quickly correlated integers with things Daddy could do, things Daddy could know, things Daddy could be, over and against things possible to Dotty.  It was all because I was made to be a flawed version of Daddy.  In all things visible I was like Daddy save at the fork where all important things converge and contend.  Daddy had a special tool for peeing that was superior in function to my own, which allowed fluid to dribble stupidly down legs and fill shoes.  No matter how smart I might become, everyone would know my squishy secret: Daddy was better.  Even as an adult bringing the principles of design to invention, I am haunted by how evolution left women holding the short end of the proverbial prick.  Gynecology is so patterned like a simple cell employing a contractile vacuole to facilitate removal of metabolic detritus.  Our only superiority over the male model seems to be having evolved beyond utilizing a plenum to evacuate urine and cum.  But then—there are the babies.  Even Daddy couldn’t make a child without a woman as co-conspirator.

I didn’t realize how poignantly held was such painful mis-belief until my daughter was born.  Her genitals were angry and red from having been bathed in my own rich endocrine brew.  My first vision of her opened diaper reminded me of my own tragic wound.  It filled me with love and pity for her and for what she could not become.  While hot tears of rage and compassion coursed down my cheeks, I blessed the small swollen mound—a mother’s kiss.

How sick is such belief?  How universal may it be—this lie?  Do I have this in common with other sensitive analytical women?  Is this why I obsess over much?  In high school I was called the nose since I appeared to be trying way-too-hard to please teachers.  Classmates didn’t understand that it was the lie that must be pleased.  I was the consummate overachiever that delighted teachers, but their praises were immaterial.  Those kids were so, so wrong.  It was my idea of Daddy that I was trying to please, not even the man himself.  Teachers were not a function of my equation.  I never spoke in defense of my behavior since I didn’t understand it myself, fearing only that I must embody some evil truth, hidden even from myself.  Mommy had constantly chided my behavior, telling me “Be nice, Dottie.  Be nice.”  That was the last thing I wanted.  Nice girls were stupid cows.  I didn’t want to be nice. 

It was good to return to the cabin, greet my trusty pussycat, and shed the boots, heavy with muck and mire.  It feels like I have shed more than foot-coverings returning from these lonely rambles.  I didn’t hesitate taking a writer’s cabin.  It was the right move at the right time.  My year of introspection completed, I realized that I had stayed long enough in the presence of the unspeakable. 

It was time to rejoin my tribe.  I had forgotten how afraid we are of standing in the presence, most especially our own.  I had expected the long silence to demolish my lie, but was amazed at how thoroughly it fell away.  As I swished through wet grass and weeds along the trail, no thought was worth speaking to the quiet air but absolute Truth.  I had learned long ago how dangerous that can be.  Truth is a double-edged sword meant for good but capable of bad.  Even so, who can argue with my Truth?  Whatever it is, it is mine. 

Perhaps it’s time to start being nice.  In 2021 Cincinnati, I am in the presence of people too smart and strong to believe lies.  I don’t have to defend any secret.  Others can affirm my path for me even though they may have chosen a different one for themselves.  I keep begging for rules and approved vocabulary, wanting to be given the keys to the kingdom, not understanding that I am the key as well as the kingdom.  It will take a long time, perhaps forever, to forget the machismo suffered in Daddy’s world—tech types gathering, comparing resumes, boasting prior accomplishments, utilizing jargon to flush out the uninitiated, and only then getting down to the real business of ego defense.  In 1957 at CIT, freshmen compared slide rule lengths.  I was the only one with enough gumption to spin a round rule, twice as fast but not the least bit phallic.  How beautifully the metaphor holds: the one woman plying a round rule, vanquishing an army of long stiff sliders.  In my cedar keepsake chest I have nestled my round rule beside my father’s straight one, a family paradox.  They both speak and compute God’s truth.  My Truth is mine to calculate.

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Calling a complete stranger and striking up a conversation is a scary thing to do, but that’s exactly what I must do if I am to stay on the good side of Elisa, my physical therapist at the JCC (Jewish Community Center).  Working out kinks in the musculature of my ageing body leads to a superb level of understanding.  Elisa and I have a meeting of minds.  There is mutuality, but I suspect the depth of wisdom is mostly on her side of the discussion.  She has decided that I am surely a dear friend of her mother-in-law, Nancy Travis, who lives with her husband of many years in New York City and who simply adores opera.

It was at New York’s Metropolitan that I saw my first opera, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.  It was the beginning of a love affair that was to last a lifetime and bring joy to an otherwise tangled web of motherhood, livelihood, marriage, and religion.  As a sixteen-year-old wannabe coloratura doing housework to pay for voice lessons, opera represented the epitome of a life of singing that began as a toddler occupying the various laps of my mother’s Glad Girl’s Glee Club.

As soon as I could stand on a stage, Mother had me soloing for whosoever would listen, typically her Baptist Sunday School.  Year after year choral singing was as natural as breathing, and it lead to classical vocal repertoire and eventually to opera.  Opera is a spectacle for the well-heeled, and I was typically on my own to afford—or not to afford— enjoyment of such beauty.  The result is that I am not really an expert.  I just like to sing opera, and typically request that Alexa play Italian Opera, such as Verdi, or Puccini to keep me company in my little-old-lady Senior apartment.  Classical Baroque is a nice change, but I always return to first loves.  Like Vivian hearing Violetta’s Aria for the first time in Pretty Woman, it never fails to make me cry.

Given this kind of love for drama set to music, Elisa is surely right about Nancy Travis and Dorothy Martin having things worth discussing, but picking up the phone is another story.  What if we can’t think of anything to say?  I always ask myself that question.  Blabbing on the phone has never come naturally to me.  Even as a farm wife on an isolated West Virginia farmstead, where getting chores done so as to enjoy party-line palaver with other isolated wives was what energized the day’s work, I just couldn’t pick up that phone.  Mostly the talk was about weather or kid’s problems, or how was the garden growing, or what was for dinner, and what would go well with those new green beans.   Even if I could join in, there was the surety that up and down the line, other people were tuned in.  That’s what folks did before there was TV and Days of Our Lives.  We had to generate our own soap operas.

My life tended toward drama, and I had no need to enjoy others vicariously.  But that was then.  This is now.  Most of what I wanted to do is done.  It’s mostly over, but that’s OK.  At eighty-two, I don’t need a day filled with challenge.  I just would like to visit peacefully with age mates about things that pique mutual interests.  My rooms are quiet, a welcome change, but not lonely.  It would be nice to have some company, but a cat must be fed, medications administered, litterbox attended.  There is much to be paid for the benefit of a purring compatriot that greets arrivals with meows and body-swipes against legs in anticipation of the grinding crank of one more can being opened. 

There is always the possibility of yet another husband, but they snore.  They might hold forth on interesting subjects, but will they listen?  Not likely.  The household income might benefit, but the ratio of person to person power might become irrevocably imbalanced.  Would I have any say at all?  Elisa has a good idea.  What could possibly be more delightful than chatting up an old lady who likes opera?

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