Shirley

The concrete wall gave us both fits, back when we were building . T he mason made a mess of it and Paulson had to slap on an extra layer of cement. His batches didn’t match, so the wall stil l look ed s ick. Plus our too-sludgy mortar, when we laid the tiles for the hearth, caused a great gnashing of teeth. The trauma passed, though. Also no one has stumbled and fractured their noggin. So far, anyhow.  

While we’re at it— stealing things from Time magazine —here’s this. Bessel Van Der Kolk’s 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score , about the emotional injury trauma inflicts on victims, the advances in medical treatments, and the imperative for further progress, met with a vastly appreciative audience, including clinicians. But even though he’s still a sought-after speaker, fewer universities and hospitals are clamoring for his time. The unconventional remedies he advocates get people bristling. Understandable. But it’s one thing to be bristled at and another to have one’s research-based evidence rejected. For all Van Der Kolk’s efforts, persistent emotional injury in childhood has still not been assigned a trauma diagnosis by the DSM. PTSD is the sole trauma listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—which means insurers can refuse to reimburse for therapies for emotional damage not related to war. Oof. Other issues here, too, catch the attention. 1. The fire...

In the run-up to Jonathan and Hannah’s wedding, the fear rose that people might not get up and share during the open mic. So we were asked to plan a few words. We scrabbled around making cardboard signs, plus I printed out some famous sayings and arranged them in glitzy frames, and when the day and hour came we carried our paraphernalia up front. (It was mid pandemic. That was the other thing. We had to bundle up like Cossacks. At least, in the freezing-cold barn—party lights, hay bales, pots of soup—the spiky germs could float safely upwards and into the ether.) We began on a confident note— Paulson: You two, congratulations! Great happiness! What a match! You’re each other’s biggest comfort. Shirley: Of course, you’re in for some jolts. Already you’ve had a few. Everybody has issues. Paulson: There will come days when you can’t stand each other. The qualities you especially admired in your mate when you fell in love will now seem intolerable. You might even feel ...

His glasses give me fits. They’re the drugstore kind—he parks them low, crookedly. They’re in the way. They cloud up with stuff like pollen and chicken dust and maybe even the drips from the heat of his brow. UG. How would he like it, I wonder, if I wore mine southward, snugged against the fat of my cheeks? Went around looking like Hag Lady? But here’s the thing. Hag Lady is right. It fits. It’s very discouraging. The list of my own quirks, were I to begin one—oh, never mind. Let’s not go there.  

As for that pair in the pea pod— I heard, years ago, about a wedding where the meditation consisted of a relative getting up and reciting a poem of her choice—Edward Lear’s, featuring our very owl and cat and a piggy-wig with a ring at the end of his nose. Bizarre, I thought. Usually, at weddings, the lordly preacher read 1 Corinthians 13. But now I can see some meaning. Honey and money. Mince and quince and a runcible spoon. True, love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres, never fails. Only, that’s love with a capital L, the ideal. The imperfect kind is all I know. Bong-Tree land vs. Love land where patience, kindness, trust, and smashed egos rule? Which sounds more like a fairy tale? Someone here might be an owl, forever peering through the tube of his microscope at chlorophyll cells or some still-wriggling creek sample, or gawking at me down the ramp of his nose, askance, like I’m doing something wrong, but I’m no pussycat.

Framed-art tour, exhibit 8 I didn’t know what to do about our stairs landing. I’d taken down the scrappy-patch wall hanging, put it instead in the bathroom. Ah, cozier. But how to counter the landing’s ghastly catacombs feel, now? A chintzy lamp—red shade, with long hairy fringes—didn’t help. The braided rug (one I don’t like but can’t seem to get rid of), nope. Its blunt checkerboard colors, ug. Nothing worked. Ug, ug. Hang a picture to take up the space, maybe. It would have to be massive. How could I ever find something massive but not overwhelming? Non pretentious? And cheap? My solution for now is to prop my Owl and Pussycat print on the floor, Joan Didion style, and let the nightlight cast its spell. P.S. I bought it, frame and all, at Gift & Thrift after our move. Ten dollars. For a while, then, it lived on some grandchildren’s bathroom wall. I’d not scraped the price tag off, thinking it added to the charm, and nobody seemed to mind—the glass still bore the tiny ...

Dispatch from a Dry and Thirsty Land Not so many days ago, en route to town, we ran into heavy, drumming rain. The sky gushed water. The drops bounced on the macadam, joyous, and ran in rivers. The wipers thumped. “Between this and Kamala Harris,” I said. “What about Kamala Harris?” asked my husband, over the din. “Between this and Kamala Harris,” I said. “It’s wonderful.”

Also, sometimes a finagled scrap of glass serves just fine. I take a piece too big for the picture frame to Rocking R—they have this fabulous guillotine-type cutting machine—and ask them to lop off the unwanted inches. It might break wrong, the beefy man says, because it’s my glass he’s holding, not the store’s, and I say, Oh, no problem. It never cracks freakishly or shatters. No charge, the beefy man might even say, happy to be saving the world from sloth and consumerism. And off I go, weaving past the other customers, ginger about the clear and present danger in my hands, trying not to pierce someone in the kidneys or slice my own skin.

The crappiness isn’t fully apparent, but the trim around Noemi’s flowers was Paulson’s contribution to the cause. He does this for me sometimes—rips apart a thrift-store frame, saws off the excess, squirts glue, and wraps, tightly, around the reduced frame’s perimeter, a length of ratty string from his collection, which hopefully won’t pop off before the glue has dried and cause his construction to collapse like Samson’s temple. This latest effort, once the gunk hardened, I picked up the frame and peered. Uh-oh. I yelled out the door to Paulson in the berry patch. The one corner, I could see daylight where the angled ends were supposed to meet. He yelled back, “We could probably break the glue and start again.” No. What I held in my hands was enough. Better than good, coming from his, toughened by the years and the sun, and faithful. When devotion is made manifest—whether it’s a small act or large—maybe not much else matters. (Art credit: Vittorio Maria Bigari, Bologna, 1692-177...