Woman Washing Her Face by Hashiguchi Goyō, 1920. Image: Wikipedia.
Some of the best advice I ever got was this: If you are feeling sad or lost or stuck in your day, go to the bathroom sink and wash your face. You don’t have to use soap, though doing a full wash is the best case scenario. If you don’t have soap or don’t have time for a full wash, turn on the faucet and splash your face with cool water for a minute or so.
If you’ve been crying, it’s a wonderful technique; it cools hot tear tracks and flushed cheeks. If you’re a woman who wears mascara, the water will also remove any dubiously sexy raccoon eye you’ve got going on after breaking down in whatever small or large way you just broke down.
But you don’t have to be weeping to use the cool-water-on-face fix. In fact, this feel-better method is almost more effective when you aren’t crying; feelings of despondency or anxiety can come and get the best of us, rob our days of better feelings. Splashing water on your face — cup your hands, make it count, you’re not flicking water, you’re doing this — washes away at least a thin layer of all that. Maybe it’s one of those ancient gestures and it just feels natural to do it, thereby returning us to a place and time with no alarming subject lines, no transaction fees, no social media blunders.
When you turn the faucet off and stand back up from being over the sink, the water runs off your chin; you figure it’ll do that. Gravity still matters. Gravity is not alarming. Gravity charges no transaction fee. Grab a towel and bring it to your face. Press. Now remove the towel. Daub your chin. Wipe at your hairline, away from the face. Take a breath. Look at yourself in the mirror.
That table full of books at a public library in Missouri is irresistible! Photo: Wikipedia.
If you want to find me this summer, check the public library. I’m in the stacks!
My friend Sophie has a new rule for books. Let’s call it the Sophie Book Rule. “If there’s a book I’m dying to read,” she says, “I make myself get it at the library first. Once I read it, if I feel that I must own that book, then I go buy it.”
This is a good rule I am now trying to follow. I’m “trying” because I am faced with the desire to buy a book 1.2692 times a day and this is and likely forever will be a thing. But it’s already getting better! Why, just this very afternoon I discovered an intriguing author and what did I do? I clicked over to the Chicago Public Library website and put it on hold instead of clicking over to purchase it at any number of quality online booksellers who also have brick-and-mortar shops. (Checking for local booksellers is Mary’s Book Rule.)
Look, I’ll never stop buying books. Not possible. But this return to the library is deeply satisfying. Being there regularly —and I’ve been every couple days for about a month, now, returning something or checking something out — connects me with a part of myself I forgot about.
I haven’t had this close a relationship with the library in a lot of years. I guess I’ve just sort of drifted from the public library. Was it the internet? Adult distractions? I’ve been reading this whole time, but it’s been text on screens and books purchased at the bookstore or online.
My sisters and I went to the public library in Winterset practically every day growing up. We would wait there for Mom to collect us after school or we were instructed to hang out there until our friends’ parents got home, stuff like that. The Winterset public library moved across town a few years ago; the old library building is the city building, now, but I bet you anything it smells the same and I still know all the rooms.
The summer was the best time to be a kid in love with the library because of Summer Reading. Summer Reading (this may not be a proper noun but I’m going with it) was a program to encourage reading in summer. The details of the program varied from year to year. Some years there were lists, games, stickers, buttons, prizes for numbers of books read; sometimes you just read stuff you found. The incentives I have forgotten completely. All I remember is the joy of a new stack of books with the check-out cards in the front envelopes. I remember the way the new books’ plastic covers were taut and the older books’ covers were loose and curled at the edges. I remember lazing on the couch in July, reading and reading and reading and reading and reading and then going to the pool and then coming home and reading and reading. This was a good way to spend a summer. It still is.
Sophie told me she used to feel possessive about books. I knew what she meant; sometimes you feel like a book was written for you and you alone and it can be hard to realize other people were also written to.
“But the library fixes that,” Sophie said. “Because when you check out a book from the library, you feel in the pages as you turn them all the people who read the book just like you’re reading it now, and it’s such a wonderful feeling. You’re together with them, you’re all in the book together at the same time. I love that.”
A summer rainstorm in Manchester because Wikipedia didn’t have any good Chicago rainstorm pictures. Photo: Good ol’ Wikipedia.
The most hilarious thing happened about an hour ago.
The radio people said there would be severe thunderstorms tonight, even flash floods. I only half-listen to weather reports, though; I’m close to the lake and weather around the lake differs slightly from the rest of the city. But why risk it? I decided to go absolutely nowhere and work on projects.
I was stitching at my machine, watching Project Runway on my laptop when I heard the storm start. I went to the window and gaped. Sheets of rain were coming down. I could make out a few people running around on the street far below me, the poor things soaked to the bone. Ooh, I just love summer storms. I felt happy that it’s summertime, that it was storming, and that I was not outside. I went back to my work.
A few minutes later there was a bolt of lightning so big and close it lit up my house for several seconds like there was a fireworks display in my living room. We all know what follows lightning, right? The crack of thunder that came after that lightning strike was about as loud as I’ve ever heard. It crept along, hissed for a moment, then whammed. It was like, “Khhhhhssshhhh….krrrrrrrr…kak-kak-kak..KERRRRRRRAAAAAACK!!!!!”
I jumped about six feet. Then I laughed and shook my head. Thunder is incredible. That sound can make a grown woman clutch her pearls and gasp. Thunder: Mother Nature’s tympani drum. My marveling was short-lived, though: that thunder was so loud, it set off car alarms for blocks. I ran to the window again and saw cars on the street and a whole parking lot full of them with hazards blinking to this hellish chorus of car alarms. It was hilarious because it didn’t last too long; people blipped them off pretty soon, surely because they didn’t want to hear all that, either.
When I was a kid, I watched thunderstorms roll in on the plains of Iowa. I would sit with my sisters on the porch swing and watch the sky get dark, the wind pick up. We probably had cats on our knees. We probably had a quilt. We had never heard a car alarm or heard of such a thing at all.
I’ll be thirty-seven on August 6th. I wish I knew how many summer thunderstorms I’ve seen so far.
A young Dorothy Parker looking visionary and thirsty, as usual. Image: Wikipedia.
Since deciding to stay in my condo, all I see are possibilities for home improvement and refreshment. Gazing into my bedroom over the weekend, I considered my bed. It’s a Mission style — not “missionary style” which is what I thought it was and then thought I’d better look up, which turned out to be wise — with an upholstered headboard and footboard. It occurred to me I could reupholster this bed. It would be like a new bed. But this might cost a fortune. A large or small fortune, I had no idea. I remembered that my friend Craig used to do upholstery for a living, so I emailed him.
It’s been years since I talked to Craig. He wrote back right away and said it would cost probably $1k. Craig was happy to learn I’ve returned to Chicago. He read some time ago that I had fallen in love and moved away; he referred to this blog post. The instant I read the title, “Fons In Love,” this Dorothy Parker poem sprang to my head:
“Into love and out again/Thus I went and thus I go/Spare your voice and save your pen/Well and bitterly I know/All the songs were ever sung/All the words were ever said/Could it be when I was young/Someone dropped me on my head?”
That post Craig read is two and a half years old. Good grief, I thought. Things have changed and changed and changed again since then and yes, into love and out again is a big part of the story.
A student of mine at the U of C came to class late, missed one entirely, and told me several times, breathless, “I’m a mess, I’m sorry. I’m a total mess these days, I’m just a completedisaster.” I told her in a grave tone that she shouldn’t tell that story about herself. I told her, “You’re not a mess. You’re human. Don’t say that stuff; you’ll start to believe it.” This is a strong conviction of mine.
As I catch up with a friend from the past and detail my love life since he saw me, it’s important for me not to paint my own portrait as the hapless single woman and/or an embittered Dorothy Parker because I’ve been in relationships that “didn’t work out.” I don’t feel hapless and I’m not bitter about it — not yet. I don’t believe I’m a commitment-phobe. I don’t think I have “bad luck” with men. I never say, sarcastically, to girlfriends or sisters, “I sure know how to pick ’em!” and then roll my eyes and slap my forehead. The portrait of me as flake, as “crazy” or useless at relationships is not one I want to draw, even in jest, because those sentiments can very well create a picture of a person to herself and to everyone else.
The men I have chosen to spend serious time and life with have all been exceptional. For one reason or another these relationships have not become marriages (well, except for the one) or decades-long partnerships and that’s okay. It’ll happen — or not. All I know is that when I fall for someone, it’s real. I can’t turn it off and why on Earth would I want to? Later, if there’s trouble that truly rots and stinks, or if I start to lose my identity, or either of us starts to compromise core values, (or someone moves far away) then the relationship closes that particular chapter. Does this make me hapless? Unlucky in love? Selfish? It’s hard to be single, sometimes, not because I don’t like being alone — I do — but because when you’re single and closer to 40 than 20, you start to be the subject of conjecture. She must be a nightmare to live with. She must be obsessed with her career. She might be repressing some aspect of her sexuality. She must be impossible to please. None of these things are true about me, but I found myself getting very self-conscious telling Craig that no, I was no longer in love, and the love affair he mentioned was a whole love affair ago.
Who knows. Give me ten more years of “into love and out again” and maybe I’ll eat my hat, erase this post, and drink vodka all day like Dorothy Parker did and make cutting remarks about men and their faults. But today, I don’t want to feel hard toward love or my choices in love. I don’t want to feel impoverished or insane as I tell an old friend about my heart’s thrashing around. I just want my bed reupholstered for under $1k because that is not happening right now.
Dottie, bring us home:
“Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song/A medley of extemporanea/And love is a thing that can never go wrong/And I am Marie of Romania.”
Maternal bliss in The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1941. Image: Wikipedia.
There’s a baby on the way! Not mine, silly.
My dear friend Heather has been pregnant for about 8.5 months, which means that she is verypregnantright now. Kin-Kin (I like to call her Kin-Kin) always looks great with her curly red hair and flawless complexion, but she looks amazing pregnant. In fact, Kin-Kin looks so amazing pregnant, she should be pregnant all the time. I can hear every woman who has ever been pregnant, including Kin-Kin, laughing hysterically right now. I’m betting my sweet friend will look even more beautiful when she has that sweet little baby in her arms though, so I can accept if she rejects the suggestion of being pregnant for the rest of her life and goes for just having the kid.
And speaking of having the kid: Kin-Kin asked me if I would be willing to be second in command, if you will, when she goes into labor. My eyes got big and I said yes, yes, absolutely; I was honored she asked me. I signed a paper! On the wee baby’s birth day, I will be serving as the person in the room other than Sam, at the ready for absolutely anything she (or Sam) might need. I like to think of it as I’m Chief of Staff on Baby Day.
Me and Kin-Kin are pretty tight, but I’m also just a great candidate for this job. I’m single, for one thing, so I can take off in the dead of night and head to the hospital if need be — heck, sometimes I do just that for reasons that do not involve babies! But that hospital piece is actually hugely relevant: I have a ton of experience with Northwestern Hospital. I know how the elevators work (not all cars go to all floors), I know the food court, and I have a special way with nurses, which is to say nurses are angels and I treat them as such. What I’m saying is, if you’re going to have a baby in the Chicago Loop, you should probably give me a call. I’m like a midwife, but without any of the medical knowledge whatsoever. I can’t help you push, really, but I can get you a bagel and I can call your mother. I only ask that you name your baby “Mary” if it’s a girl and “Pendennis” if it’s a boy. Not a lot to ask. Do you want poppyseed or plain?
Heather, I’m so happy to help in any way I can when the day comes. Everything is gonna go great. I love you!!
