Learn Something

A weird thing, fear: it’s what we knew as children, alone in our beds, terrified that the monster beneath would jump out and eat us up. It’s what we courted as older kids, on roller coasters and in speeding cars, or at scary or violent movies.  Even as adults, fear made us feel more fully ‘alive’ in a way we didn't often feel in our safe American lives.We love this manufactured fear, the way it keeps real fear at bay, but tell ya what: It does nothing for sadness, in whose dark kingdom we seem to have been dwelling for this whole last decade.There’s a great passage in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, a coming-of-age story of the legendary King Arthur, once an ordinary boy called Wart. That Wart is the rightful heir to the throne of England nobody knows, except the wise old wizard Merlin, who appears one day, with his pointy hat and his moon-and-stars cloak, to walk him toward adulthood.Later in the story, he comes upon his young charge in a state of sadness and tells him this:

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then: to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting… 

Me I’d like to learn  Italian, like my friend Bobbie is doing. Or Physics, since I somehow missed Physics in high school.  Or maybe embroidery which I haven’t done since I tried stitching my 5^th grade teacher’s initials onto a pretty handkerchief for her and ended up sewing them tightly to the lap of my skirt. But I love the idea that learning focuses you outward – not inward toward your own small self, but outward, toward the intricate beauty of this world, and all those other worlds beyond it.How many were there did Carl Sagan used to say?  “Billions?” We made fun of him but he was a cool guy who died too young and Cosmos was a really wonderful show. Remember it?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLkC7ralR30]

Girls' Night Out

Last night I went out with Robin and Janet, both some seven or eight years younger than me and two of  my dearest friends in this town. We had free tickets to see a medium contact dead people and we figured Hey a meal out, a couple of drinks, and fun in the car driving up and back – why not?

Janet is five-two with hips smaller than a seventh-grade boy. “Bitch!” a lesser woman would say to herself walking behind her. She can and does play bridge, manage the investment portfolios of stranger, bowl a higher score than 99% of the male population and speak truth to power.

Robin is like Janet in that she takes no prisoners. She’s five nine and has the longest legs in the greater Boston area, a waist as tiny as Janet’s waist and hips that flare out from that waist in such a way as to make grown men weak in the knees. Mostly though, Robin is blunt.

She had a filmy V-neck blouse on that she said kept gapping open to reveal a slight imperfection in her left breast. This imperfection grieves her.

“I can’t even see it!” exclaimed Janet, looking. “You will!” said Robin.  “I’ll be flashing six seven times tonight.”

She and Janet had cosmopolitans at dinner.  “What IS a cosmopolitan anyway?” I asked,” “Girly martini,” Robin said, lifting her glass to my lips.  Then we made fun of men for a while, finished our dinners, and set out to walk the quarter mile to the theatre where the medium would be doing her stuff.

At the biggest intersection in this fair-sized city we waited at a light that seemed designed to NEVER let a pedestrians cross. We stood and stood with a handful of other theatre-bound women just behind us until Janet showed leadership, stepping into the thoroughfare just as the light turned green for the opposing team so to speak.

I nodded apologetically and scuttled across. It was the wrong thing, the nod,  and I knew it as soon as I did it, Because suddenly a horn was blaring and a young guy in the car barreling through yelled “Way to cross a street you old biddies!” It was my entire fault for the apologetic head bob.

Janet frosted the guy by walking on in queenly fashion.  But Robin yelled “Whaaat?” wheeled around, and said “Let’s run the fool down and pound on his hood!”

We didn’t though. We went like meek lambs to our show. Afterward Robin said “Let’s have a couple of cocktails and shoot the breeze some more.” She was kidding I guess. Because less than 40 minutes later we were dropping her off at her back door behind which her husband was probably still at his desk and her kids were doing homework and her dog Blue was listening listening listening for her footsteps.