Remember the Ladies Indeed!

I found this cartoon in a satirical book about old-time etiquette. I'll hunt down my copy and put the link up here as soon as I can put my hand on it again.In case you can't quite read the text here, it says "No lady should stand or linger in the halls of a hotel, but pass through them quietly, never stopping alone for a moment."What it’s suggesting is that a woman who does choose to sit or stand as she waits in the hotel lobby is soliciting; is, in other words, ready and eager to offer herself to any man with the cash.Do you get that that's what the advice is suggesting, you young women lucky enough to inhabit a far different world? Or, wait, is our modern world so different really? "Remember the ladies" Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John when he had left their working farm in Braintree to help build the new American government at the Continental Congress. Maybe America’s problem all this time has been that we remembered the ladies too much. Remembered them as 'the fairer sex', 'the sacred vessels', the delicate creatures with finer sensibilities that suited them. Some might say that even now in many corners of the American landscape women are still seen as inhabiting a category. Rather than being regarded as a freestanding human being with her own plans and goals, a woman can still be seen as a prop, a cardboard cut-out, a life-size breathing "bracelet" on the arm of some... man.The summer I was 20 in my work at the Massachusetts State House, I was introduced to man in his 60s who promptly asked me to lunch to talk about a two-week work opportunity.  Baby lamb that I was, I went to the lunch, at Anthony’s Pier 4, a landmark eatery looking out on Boston harbor. He was a heavyset Tweedle-Dum kind of a guy with a cigar and a waddle, somebody's kindly grandfather as I saw him, a good man eager to empower the young. The day of the lunch I wore flats and a sleeveless boat-necked, knee-length linen dress in an effort to look like Jacqueline Kennedy though in truth, as old photos now show g me, I looked more like a highly unworldly version of  Anna Nicole Smith, only without the makeup.  Because I didn’t really know what makeup was. My body looked like her body is what I’m saying, though it never occurred to me that that’s why, when we walked into the restaurant a number of equally old Tweedle-Dees, also with cigars, hooted their hellos to my host.He walked me over and introduced me to them all before we sat down to the lunch, during which he offered me this wonderful opportunity: to be his companion at a two-week-long conference at the Cape. He told me what my salary would be. So much money! I could get a real jump on repaying those student loans I was racking up!That night I told the boy I had just become engaged about my great opportunity. "Are you out of your mind?" he said on hearing and I believe this was the first time he asked me this question, though five decades into our life together I can tell you it was far from the last.The point is, he saw what this old guy with the cigar was really proposing. The guy was assuming he could get me at the very least to stand by his side and act as if we were together. Me, the former Terry Sheehy who was mere months past believing that kissing for more than five minutes was a mortal sin that would land you in Hell.I have smartened up since those days of course. I have learned all about the guys who even when you’re over 50 will follow you out of the Post Office or the coffee shop or the supermarket because they say they could tell by your smile that you’re really into them and why didn’t we go someplace where we could talk.Really into them, jeesh. Where do these guys get the nails to say a thing like that?What I am really into is hotel lobbies. In fact, I love them. In a hotel lobby you’re out in the stream of humanity and yet you are safe. Your little bed is an elevator ride away and the man behind the desk might as well be Hector Elizondo for how nice he is to you.So rush through a lobby or fail to smile because of the construction some guy might put on those things? Fat chance I say, fat the hell chance. :-)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNYalWdtPSA  

A Day for Quick Tears

I spent the last six hours of the July Fourth holiday in ambivalent enjoyment of the peace in this house, all 10 houseguests having now left, and in watching the HBO marathon showing of John Adams with Paul Giamatti as the second American President and the wonderful Laura Linney as his wife Abigail.The day I graduated from high school I won the novelized tale of the Adams' long marriage as the English Prize but never had the sense to actually read it. I see that I must go back and do so now if I can possibly find it. (I should be able to. We never throw anything out around here. I certainly still have the explosion of brocade and chiffon that I wore to the Holly Hop in December of that year.)Anyway. I felt hot tears leaping to my eyes more than once as I watched. There is the scene where their grown daughter Nabby has a breast removed while tied to a bed in the family home with only a shot of liquor to dull the pain. (This is Nabby on the left as portrayed by Sarah Polley.) According to the website BreastReconstruction.org the facts were even worse: "Treatment was once so untenable that women neglected their disease if a lump was discovered. Their breasts became disfigured as their tumors took over their bodies. But the alternative was worse than the disease: Nabby Adams, the daughter of John and Abigail Adams, suffered through a mastectomy in which she was tied to a chair while, without anesthesia, her breast was removed. She survived the surgery only to die from the disease. This was common practice in the 18th century.”It's hard to say which brought me closer to tears, that scene, or the scene where Abigail herself dies of typhoid just after looking at the wondrous blue hydrangea bouquet that her husband has brought in to their bedroom. “Oh John!” she sighs at the sight of them, or the scene in which after Abigail’s death, the former President reads a letter from his old nemesis Thomas Jefferson, soon to be faithful correspondent. It goes like this:

The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding.. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medi cine. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement,our sorrows and suffering bodies and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.

We wave to our children as they leave so certain that one day soon we will see them again and their children too as more such children come along and maybe someday their children's children as well but who knows really? Who ever knows? We can only hope that in the end there wil kindness, and an absence of pain and perhaps a view of flowers.