When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part.

Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

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In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman.

When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot.

I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

Everything is Politics: The Role of the Essay and the Democratization of Media

By Eitan Miller and Kathleen Grillo Hilton Als, author of The Best American Essays, opens up a conversation about stories from magazines, journals, and websites. In his introduction he says, “But the essays of the future start with questions, generally political in nature, and if you don’t think so, think again” (Als xxviii). The term “political” is a broad one. While obviously some essays discuss overtly political issues, we believe that Als is describing a greater phenomenon. “Politics” shape a person’s life and the questions they ask. Als writes that essays are “generally political,” but beyond that, all essays have some basis in politics.

Apart from the simple partisanship of left vs. right, politics is the basis for life in any society. The way that society is governed and its freedoms or restrictions create individuals’ identity and shape their being. The political background of a given country shapes the writing an individual can create. In her essay From Silence to Words, Min-Zhan Lu describes her complex relationship with writing, language, and identity given her experiences in communist China and learning English. Lu directly analyzes how the politics of her country shaped her writing and thinking. She uses language, a key factor in anyone’s life, to exemplify the split world she lived in. The politics of the world she grew up in directly affected her everyday life as a child and what she wrote as an adult. This revelation affects all of us, not just those who grew up in communist China. American “democracy” shapes our lives in more ways than we could possibly know and creates the foundation on which our writing stands.

Hilton Als’s essay was possible solely because of the politics surrounding his life. As Als grew, he utilized experiences from his childhood when writing books that started a conversation about societal issues such as gender, race, sexuality, and identity. This essentially made his books contact zones where he brought issues to light in order to educate and inform those unaware of their position within those issues. As Pratt defines it, a contact zone is a “social space[ ] where cultures meet, clash, and grapple” (Pratt 34). The politics of Als’ life, defined as the way his mind was formed by the governmental structures and influences he grew up with, shaped what he wrote. As with Lu, who talked about language, a large part of what she thought about language came from the politics of her country. Als was born into a country that shunned him for his race, his sexuality, and his size. And so, the essays Als wrote focused on these issues. All writers, whether they write academically or personally, touch on subjects that matter to them and that they have encountered at some point in their life. Where they grow up, who they grow up with, and what ideals they grow up with shape what writers want to speak about. Famous essayist Joan Didion is known for her narrative memoir-style essays and novels. She wrote about various topics that impacted her life, as all authors do. Her life, as described in Goodbye to All That, includes moving halfway across the world by herself to becoming one of the top journalists in her field. This is undoubtedly linked to the politics of her society. Although implicitly, Didion wrote about feminism as Lu wrote about language and Als wrote about racism. They grew up in different circumstances, different times and places, and this is reflected in their essays. The politics of their life, whatever they may look like, continued to influence their work well into adulthood.

Like the other authors, Noam Chomsky was greatly influenced by the politics of his life. In a biography, Christian Garland describes Chomsky: “Chomsky continues to be an unapologetic critic of both American foreign policy and its ambitions for geopolitical hegemony and the neoliberal turn of global capitalism, which he identifies in terms of class warfare waged from above against the needs and interests of the great majority” (Garland). However, Chomsky’s primary work is as a linguist. Furthermore, his essay Prospects for Survival describes the limited chance that the human race will survive for an extended period of time. On the surface, this is a scientific and logical argument given the history of other species, but Chomsky describes the role of politics in the imminent destruction of the human race. He writes about nuclear war and climate change, both political issues, as shaping the human experience or eventually lack thereof. His experiences, as shaped by US politics and the political linguistic dominance of the English language, shaped his ideas, prompting his various essays.

Clearly, essays, while diverse in content, all ask questions and are based in politics. But, there are many ways that discussion can be staged. A relatively recent development is the “video essay,” a form where the creator can present an amalgamation of pictures and videos with a narrated analysis that is generally targeted towards a YouTube audience. This medium is particularly effective when discussing visual matters such as TV and movies because the viewer can witness the pertinent content. In the TED Talk below, a YouTuber who goes by the alias of “Nerdwriter” describes how video essays impacted the genre of the modern essay. Watch specifically from 5:05 to 7:26, though the entire talk is fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ald6Lc5TSk8

Evan Puschak (Nerdwriter) touches on the fact that video essays, in addition to being a convenient method of intertwining various types of media, are far more democratic than “traditional” forms of the essay. Platforms like YouTube allow users to reward and share good content, making information and analysis accessible to all people with Internet access. This democratization of the essay in its various forms is an important development, arguably the most important development of the modern essay. Even other forms of digitally shared essays share this democratization, taking power away from a “moderator” and putting it in the hands of the people. Accessibility is key to any successful essay because essays are meant to be read.

In his book The Best American Essays, Als writes, “Of course [the essays will] be made up of many things including questions, images, and gestures” (Als xxviii). The essay itself is hard to define. From the point of view of a high schooler taking AP courses, the essay consists of five straightforward paragraphs. However, the essay has many different forms. Academic essays written by the authors of this piece include How the Korean Wave Is Crashing Over America by Kathleen Grillo to Alternative Oppression: A Look at the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict by Eitan Miller. These works look at a variety of social and political issues such as race and religion through the lens of media, and are very clearly “political.” On the other hand, essays like those styled after the works of Joan Didion and the authors of this piece have a more narrative style. It may appear that these “essays” are contrary to the definition provided by Als. Didion, as well as our essays styled after her, is not outrightly political. However, they both still find a basis in politics. Didion’s works bring in issues of feminism and the effects a particular geographic location has on a person. Issues of equality and how society is constructed are based in the politics behind the author's life. Would Didion’s essays be the same if she grew up in a communist country? The essays we wrote in her style, though independent, both describe the transition from high school to college. For each of us, we find ourselves thriving in college more  than high school. And although not directly stated in either essay, it asks the questions: Why are colleges, especially high tuition institutions, better for individual growth than high school? What is the effect of education on a person’s life? How do money and the government play into the education a person receives?

Clearly, politics shape society, society shapes the self, and the self expresses ideas through writing. Logically, essays have to be based in politics. Authors are raised with implicit biases that come from the people that surround them, including the politics of the world they grow up in. And when authors write, they carry those biases within their writing. Even if they’re not choosing a side overtly, what they choose to write about is a bias in itself. Als used the stereotypes and prejudices he faced growing up in his writing. Lu struggled with a family life and country that was split, and reflected her struggles through language. Didion discussed the challenges she met as a woman moving from home and back. All authors were born into a certain political circumstance. And, while politics is most commonly viewed in direct relation to the government of a country, the power of politics is so broad that it seeps into everything. Even our most basic thoughts are founded with a certain political ideology. Because of this, it is impossible to say that essays are not based in politics. So what is written, no matter who writes it, when they write it, or where they write it, all comes down to politics.

Works Cited

Als, Hilton. The Best American Essays 2018. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

Brockes, Emma. “Hilton Als: 'I Had This Terrible Need to Confess, and I Still Do It. It's a Bid to Be Loved'.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 2 Feb. 2018,

Chomsky, Noam.  “Prospects for Survival.”  The Massachusetts Review, 2017, pp. 621-634. www.massreview.org/sites/default/files/06_58.4Chomsky.pdf.

Didion, Joan. Slouching towards Bethlehem: Essays. Picador Modern Classics, 2017.

Garland, Christian. “Noam Chomsky.” The Decline of the Democratic Ideal, chomsky.info/2009____-2/.

Grillo, Kathleen. How the Korean Wave Is Crashing Over America, Intro to College Writing WR-101-13, Emerson College, 21 Nov. 2018.

Lu, Min-Zhan. "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle." 1987. College English 49(4): 437-448.

Miller, Eitan. Alternative Oppression: A Look at the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Intro to CollegeWriting WR-101-13, Emerson College, 21 Nov. 2018.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 1991. New York: Modern Language Association P, 1991: 33-40.

Puschak, Evan. “How YouTube Changed the Essay.” TEDxTalks, uploaded 9 Jun. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ald6Lc5TSk8.

I made a comment in a post on my OUAT blog a few days ago about the fact that women helped to build the film industry, and then the industry regressed and now the involvement of women behind the camera is fractional, and I got a few people who were basically like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" in my inbox, so I thought a little film history lesson would be fun today.

When the film industry was first getting started, it was kind of the wild west of industries. Nobody really knew what to make of it, nobody was really sure what it was going to be. As such, there were many years while filmmakers were trying to figure that out where there wasn't much interest in the industry as far as it being a potential money making venture. And even once it started to coalesce into being mostly an entertainment medium, it was considered to be very low-class, a much lesser form of entertainment than anything else. Because of these things, it would be awhile before wealthy men came in took over the industry and started using their wealth and privilege to take over. At the time it was really only Edison as far was rich privilege men trying to control the industry goes, and the influence he was able to exert was very much limited by the legal battles he was tied up in.

In those early years, big studios and film companies weren't a thing. By the 1920s the industry would be run almost completely by a few major studios, with smaller studios being pretty much shut out of the system. But at the beginning there were a lot of small companies that experimented with what filmmaking could do, and films were released for the public to view in a few different ways, so there wasn't really any sort of situation of one company being considerably more powerful than another company.

Because there weren't any wealthy men controlling the industry, and because the industry was already seen as very much less respected than most industries, there wasn't really anyone to stop women from coming into the industry and experiementing with the medium, starting their own companies and making their own films. For the most part, women truly did have the power to do whatever they wanted in the industry, whether they wanted to produce, direct, act, write, design sets and costumes, run the camera, etc. And some women did more than one of those things.

Based on what we know today, the first person to ever use film to tell a fictional story was Alice Guy Blache, who also arguably directed the first epic, La vie du Christ, in 1906, which was 30 minutes long and featured multiple lavish sets and tons of extras. She then went on to start her own company. Lois Weber, who worked for Blache, became one of the most successful directors in American film, even through the 1910s when men were starting to take over the industry and major studios were popping up. Weber made some of the first social issue films, which became the most popular films of the early 1900s.

The first movie star was a woman, and no, it actually wasn't Mary Pickford. As mentioned a few paragraphs above, film was seen as a far lesser form of entertainment than anything else, especially theater, so actually appearing as an actor in a film was considered a shameful thing that could be harmful to ones career and reputation. As such, people who appeared in films weren't credited. If a person liked a movie and an actor's performance, there really wasn't any way they could figure out who that actor was and if there were any other movies they were in. As film became more popular, people running film companies realized that they could make more money if people could know that an actor from a movie they liked was going to be in another movie, so they started to give their more popular stars nicknames, like "The Biograph Girl".

The Biograph Girl was Florence Lawerence, who was a wildly popular anonymous star until producer Carl Laemmle capitalized on her popularity and ran a wild publicity compaign that culminated in the revelation of her actual name. She became the first movie star and the first film actor whose name was well-known.

By the mid-to-late 1910s, America had risen as the most important country in filmmaking due to the war in Europe setting back the filmmaking industry in countries like France and Italy. This success meant that those wealthy man who initially weren't interested in film now saw how lucrative it could be and started to take over. But in just a few decades women had become so ingrained in the industry that they couldn't be pushed out right away. Throughout the 1920s, women were still able to have a considerable amount of power. Mary Pickford was possibly the most powerful person in Hollywood, as she was the most popular actor of the time and oversaw the production of all of her movies, even joining DW Griffith, Charles Chaplin, and her husband Douglas Fairbanks to start their own studios, United Artists. Some powerful actresses, like Norma Talmadge, started their own production companies so they could make the kinds of pictures they wanted to make.

But the damage to women as directors happened really fast. Before the major studios became a thing, most film companies were relatively small, and responsibilities often overlapped, with people doing more than one thing, and there wasn't really any single responsibility that was seen as more important than the others. But with these major, large studios coming in and producing a higher number of pictures, and therefor having a far more complex production process, it was no longer possible for lots of people to do multiple jobs, and responsibilities became isolated. Wheras before you might have the same person doing the writing, directing, and editing, or running the camera and dressing the set, now all of those jobs were individual things, and soon some jobs were seen as more important than others, based on how essential that job was to the final product or how much work that job required. The director became the most respected job because that was the person who oversaw all of the shooting and made all of the creative decisions during shooting.

With wealthy men running the studios and making the decisions of who did what job, the more the role of director was seen as the most respected and important job in the industry, the less those wealthy men allowed women to take on that role. By the mid-1920s it was rare to see a film directed by a woman.

But, like I said earlier, women were far too ingrained in the industry to just do away with them completely, at least right away, and women were still incredibly present in the jobs that were less respected than director throughout the 1920s. More than half of the films during this era were written by women. It was the women writers that were the hardest for Hollywood to shake. Even after the silent era women were still incredibly prominent as writers. Frances Marion became the first person to win back to back Oscars in the early 1930s, for The Big House and The Champ, both films that very much appealed to a male audience. It wasn't until around the 1950s that women were completely pushed out of the writing part of filmmaking.

One of the major reasons that so many women-behind-the-camera positions were able to survive the wealthy male takeover of the industry, but not survive the silent era, was because of the way "morality" was imposed on the industry, by both the Christian groups around the country and by the men now running the industry. The rise and endorsement of the Production Code coincided with the dawn of talkies (for various reasons), and one of the groups that suffered most from the Production Code and the general imposition of those morals was women. Not only were the prohibitions of the Code very sexist in tone, but the entire idea of "Hollywood needs to be more moral" that surrounded the whole situation of the studios "self policing" meant that studio heads wanted to limit the control women had over films, which meant pushing them out of positions behind the camera. It's no surprise that many of the women who didn't survive the silent era to become hugely popular stars in the sound era were actresses like Gloria Swanson and Mary Pickford who weilded a considerable amount of production based, behind-the-camera power.

The pushing out of women with any control over filmmaking has continued to this day and, like I said, the amount of women who work in roles of power behind the camera is fractional.

It's not just the filmmaking itself where women basically built the industry. The industry exists because women WATCHED films. Once film companies figured out that the most profitable way to put out films was to do so in a theater setting, they were were marketing films almost ENTIRELY toward women. At the time, most products were marketed toward women because the general family structure was that the man went to work during the day and made the money, and the women had control of that money as far as decisions of how it was spent for the family, and they had the time during the day to spend it. So when theaters were making and advertising movies, they were doing so almost entirely with the idea of what would appeal to women in mind.

And women's tastes were incredibly varied. They huge range of genres that films covered exists because women wanted to watch everything. Social issues films, comedies, epics, adventures, romances, dramas, gangster films. They were interested in everything, and they talked to their friends about the movies and provided word of mouth advertising.

Women's interest, and studios marketing specifically to them, in early film was the beginning of many things. It was the beginning of cross-platform advertising in media, with studios establishing product tie-ins so companies that had nothing to do with the film industry would promote their films. It started film advertising in magazines. It also had a huge impact in the media-driven activism that had an enormous impact on the social issues of the time. Women would see these social issue films and then go out into their communities and find ways to spread the word about these issues and actually find ways to help.

Perhaps the most important impact women had on the film industry in this regard is that of the movie theater. Movie theaters as we know them today exist because of women, because women were the people studios was trying to get to come to their movies. They created theaters as a social place for women, with lobby areas where they could have discussions before and after the film, food, comforts. Modern theaters exist because studios started building theaters as a social experience for women.

Women remained the primary audience throughout the 1920s and 1930s, but the Great Depression changed the way family dynamics worked as far as who controlled the money (and who had money in general), with more men having time to see films and more people, both men and women, turning to film as a means of entertainment and escape. As such, more films started to be made to appeal to mean, or to appeal to a more general audience. And as time went on and family dynamics shifted in the 1940s and 1950s into the perception of the man having control over everything, the industry shifted away from prioritizing women, even though women generally generally always made up more of the filmgoing audience than men have.

Don't let anyone tell you that more women don't work in powerful positions behind the camera because they're not good at it, or because they don't want to, or because they don't make movies anyone would want to see. And don't let anyone tell you that there aren't more movies aimed at women because they wouldn't do well. Women built this industry, it exists because of us, because of the women who saw the potential of film and decided to explore it, because of the women who watched those films in the early decades and the way they interacted with media.  If film is important to you at all, you owe a huge debt of gratitude to women, because film would not exist as it is today were it not for them.

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

Final approval of your loan is in progress…You have conditional approval on your loan application. We’re currently reviewing the remaining documentation required for final approval.

In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

Final approval of your loan is in progress…You have conditional approval on your loan application. We’re currently reviewing the remaining documentation required for final approval.

In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

Final approval of your loan is in progress…You have conditional approval on your loan application. We’re currently reviewing the remaining documentation required for final approval.

In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

Final approval of your loan is in progress…You have conditional approval on your loan application. We’re currently reviewing the remaining documentation required for final approval.

In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

Final approval of your loan is in progress…You have conditional approval on your loan application. We’re currently reviewing the remaining documentation required for final approval.

In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

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In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.