having the guts to live

After puberty I became much more introverted and was most comfortable inside my shell. Any way to stand out or be different, I shunned. I am still painfully self-conscious sometimes and wish I could live like I could not give a damn, but I do...

My daughter on the other hand shows me that it can be done. As a toddler she preferred to strip completely in public places and then celebrate (!) while we were chasing her, trying to get at least her diaper back on. At 7 she does not do that any more but she is an exhibitionist of sorts because this summer she has been selling her drawings at the side of the road. Yesterday she sold lemonade and tomorrow it will be blackberries. Every day she goes out there, I'm thinking yeah right and every day she comes back with $4, $5. She also wants to play her violin at the local BART station but since the Orinda BART station is one of the most crime-ridden stations around with actual bike and car thefts, I have said NO: I am not ready for daughter-theft yet. Talk to me again when she's 14.

Anyhow, my mother always shared her fears (real and unreal) with me and watching Caroline I realize I am much too fearful and that that is no way to live. Lynn Ruth, I find you fearless in a great many things and I wish I could emulate that. I am learning though as I am cherishing the entrepreneurial and exhibitionistic spirit of my daughter in the meantime. This is a worthless blog but I have the blahs today. Just did not want the blahs to win.

OPINIONS

One of the hardest things for me to understand is that other people's opinions are valid to them even though they seem ridiculous or out of proportion to me. Their standards of conduct may seem primitive or savage to me but to them they make perfect sense. I have a teen-aged neighbor, Kevin Michael Kavanaugh who has decided to hate me for absolutely no reason that I can tell. He has determined that I am an evil, malicious old woman and not only does my every action inadvertently reinforce that opinion, but the very sight of me escalates his anger. My first thought when this boy verbally attacked me and threw things at me was to defend myself; to retaliate with words as angry as his. But it occrured to me that the source of his anger probably had nothing to do with me. He was looking for a target for his fury at the lousy way his own life is turning out for him. I am it. I am old. I am Jewish. I am not in a position to strike him or hurt him physically. Hitting at me costs him nothing and makes him feel better. I can do absolutely nothing to dilute his hatred of me and you must know that at first, I tried. I spoke to him several times praising him and telling him how much I love his uncles (as I do) but the very tone of my voice, my stature, my demeanor angers him. He needs someone he can hit at that cannot or will not hit back.
I keep harping on Renee Villanueva and Richard Romanski and the judgment against me when I had a contract to prove I was reasonable in my request for money for my car. Again, Richard Romanski (the judge) firmly believes that someone my age and of my ethnic background does not deserve to get the money she asked for because she was being greedy and unfair. He believes this and thought he would do a kind thing by ignoring my evidence even though it had been accepted in a lower court and giving someone LIKE HIM a judgement in her favor despite concrete written proof that I had a right to the 1600 dollars Renee owed me. It has been a year since that judgment was made and I still cannot believe that man was allowed to do something as evil and unfair as violating the established rules of justice.
But what I DO believe is that both he and Rene Villanueva are congratulating themselves on "getting back" at a greedy, old Jewish woman who didn't deserve what she demanded, just as Kevin Kavanaugh congratulates himself on his courage to badger that pest who lives next door because her very presence, her dogs, her lights on late at night, her HAPPINESS offends him.
As the target of these people, I must realize that IN THEIR MINDS they not only feel justified, they feel that they are doing the whole world a service. My job is to let my own anger and sense of injustice go and get on with the positive aspects of my life. If I dwell on their cruelty to me, they have won the battle they are fighting. If I ignore them, I have deprived them of their battlefield.

CREATIVE SOLUTIONS

Lynn Ruth Miller
441 Brighton Road
Pacifica, CA 94044
THE BLAHS


I hate the blahs. I like to feel happy, sad, hysterical, excited…but I cannot stand being blah. It is so …so nothing. It isn’t strong enough to be grief. It isn’t positive enough to be anger. It is ennui at its worst. The moment I sense that my life is going nowhere and every day is a repeat of the day before, I take strong, positive and colorful steps to remedy the situation. People less creative than I, go to a bar and buy a drink to lift their spirits. They call a friend. They buy a new outfit. They go to bed with someone kinky. None of those things do the trick for me. I need to paint my life in vivid, shocking colors and get rid of all that negative black and white. That is how I roll.
When I lived in a western suburb of Oklahoma City I awoke to the smell of cow manure each morning because the stockyards are in the center of the city and the wind was always due west. The aroma ruined my breakfast. Try inhaling the heady aroma of your morning coffee diluted with the fumes of fresh dung and you will understand how depressing it was. Even with the windows shut, I felt submerged in a gray cloud that smothered me well into the evening. What a tragedy!
At the time, I was well over forty and I refused to spend such a large unending chunk of the second half of my life inhaling cattle refuse. It was a waste..in every sense of the word
The stench of my life was far more than olfactory. It spread like an inkblot into my occupation and colored my response to the tasks I did daily to pay my way in the world. I had just started a job with a local newspaper called THE DOWNTOWNER and I worked for a questionable human being named Eldegaard. Now it is my opinion that if you are publishing a newspaper in Oklahoma City your name should be something appropriate like Hannah, or Bridgett. Eldegaard just doesn’t cut it.
So it was that once I managed to survive the unpleasant perfume of the morning I had to enter an office run by a misfit who had not the faintest notion how to communicate with her readers. If you think evil smells are depressing, try thickening them with the horrifying aroma of a sickening job. I was caught in an unescapable downhill spiral. I could not breathe; I could not create; and I could not move forward into what was supposed to be the beginning of my life. (In the seventies people believed that life began at forty…instead of when menopause was over and you could love without fear…. it was a different world back then).
There I was at what was supposed to be the brink of new happiness and personal fulfillment holding my nose and writing trash. Something had to change. I am not one to rely on prayer or other people. I take responsibility for the negative factors in my life and I get out there and DO something about them.
The trouble is that what I DO tends to be a trifle extreme.
There are many solutions sensible people would have taken for this negative situation. I could have moved to the East side of town. I could have changed jobs. I could have purchased nose plugs. None of these answers occurred to me because I am an original thinker. I use my imagination. I would never stoop to common sense. It is far too plebian.
I had just finished reading John Steinbeck's interesting little book, TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY and I found it fascinating. Here was a man (and I knew I could do anything a MAN could do better and more efficiently in high heels and a girdle…I did it all the time) who took ONE poodle in a camper around the United States recording the people and events he experienced into a small, easy to carry little book. He got the book published and was actually MAKING MONEY from those experiences.
Well! I had TWO dogs, a cat and ennui. IT was time to show the guys in this world I could do better. It did not occur to me that John Steinbeck had several successful novels to his credit, or that his dog was well behaved and flexible OR that he knew how to drive a truck. I had published nothing but feature articles in The Toledo Blade and some nonsense in a Volkswagen Magazine. My dogs were spoiled prima donnas who expected plush cushions, forced air heating and meals served with some imagination. My cat…well you KNOW about cats…her name was Eileen and she ignored me. That is how SHE rolled.
I spent the next six months testing out campers and deciding on the type I wanted to buy. This was a challenging situation since I had no money other than the salary Eldegaard provided ONLY if I wrote the garbage she insisted I write. I refused to be reduced to her brand of verbiage and lost the job within two months of acquiring it. After all I have standards. I went to Stanford. (Even had I gone to Berkeley, I would not have written the tripe she demanded)
By that time I was so involved in launching this brand new adventure of mine I didn’t notice that I had no cash to purchase my own groceries or the type of dog food my two had grown to expect. Eileen made it very clear that no matter what my situation had become she was entitled to her Meow Mix not to mention some fresh fish now and again, moistened with Tasty Treats.
After consulting with several strong chauvinistic men who sold cars, roped cattle and believed in a good cigar and some Jack Daniels with a beer chase, I was convinced that if I traded in my Pontiac Station Wagon for a fifth wheel trailer and sold all my furniture I could manage to buy a decent used truck and get a little mobile home that would give me comfort, movability and a new lease on my boring, aromatic life.
Every morning I practiced driving the fifth wheel around town, backing it up, parking it, making u turns, trying to fill its gas tank and check the oil which it seemed to absorb like a thirsty blotter. This turned out to be one of my biggest challenges. I am five feet tall. The GMC truck I found stood taller than I and when I lifted its hood I had to jump on the bumper to see inside. I pulled out the dipstick, wiped it with a towel and then…..and then….I couldn’t see where I was supposed to replace it. Filling the truck with gasoline wasn’t easy either since the rig had an auxiliary tank resting under the engine. I had to crawl on my belly between the front wheels to unscrew the cap. Figuring out how to insert the gas pump was tricky as well and I was thankful that I had become adept at inserting tampax in awkward situations and keys in rusty locks. I never realized the skills those projects prepared me for in my life after forty.
I took the rig out camping several times to learn how to fill the holding tank, how to live economically on a quart of water and a flickering flame from the propane heater. This was called “roughing it” and took so much energy and creative thought I had no time for blahs In fact at night after I had maneuvered the fifth wheel into a camping area that was the size of a bicycle stall, had managed to cook a delectable meal for the two dogs and the cat, snacked on peanut butter and jelly and tried to bathe in a glass of water, scrubbing down with a paper towel, I would have traded the whole adventure for a comfy little blah to remind me of why I started this whole fiasco in the first place.
No matter. I was off on my greatest adventure. I managed to back out of the driveway one bright October morning with several men helping me shouting directions and encouragement. I pulled forward and broke all the brake cables but I refused to let that little glitch stop me. I was a liberated woman after all and I could do this…with the help of a few macho cowboys who just who fed their masculinity by rescuing. Little Women. I pulled forward and looked at the dangling cables. “Did I hurt anything?” I asked. “No, no,” said one of my rescuers. “You just nicked that little tree over there and ruined Mrs. Farley’s out house. Trouble is you busted them cables and you won’t be able to get out of any tight spots. Just remember no matter what you do DON’T BACK UP.”
‘I won’t!” I said. “I planned this thing so I could move forward …didn’t I?“
So it was that I set out for California home of fruits, nuts and creative people just like me. I waved goodbye to the blahs and my old life.
The good news is that neither ever returned.