Where the brain is.

[mrissa]

I take great comfort in small domestic competencies: in knowing just the right amount of rosemary to cut for the rosemary buns, in getting a salad made just when it's time to pull a hotdish from the oven, in sweeping the floor quickly and thoroughly while talking on the phone to my mother, in the feel of my great-aunt's old wooden rolling pin in my hands, perfectly weighted. Something in the back of my brain says, "Well, there! So that's something right, then."

Today I broke the last of the mixing bowls a pair of my family friends gave us for a wedding present. They were heavy ceramic and fit our hands nicely, and they had bright pictures of fruit on them. We hadn't asked for them, but they were just the right thing. I thought of Jan and Kay every time I used them. Now I will think of them when I use mixing bowls they didn't give me. My brain is like that.

My bagger was back at Byerly's. I hadn't seen him in about six weeks. I was acquiring a backup bagger -- a teenager this time, a kid who is more or less the poster child for Why Norwegians Look Bad In Dreds, but there was one night when I was in the store late and saw an interaction between him and the manager that made me think that he was a Good Kid, and his behavior since has just reinforced it. He has mastered the difference between protective and presumptuous; people twice his age struggle with that one.

I, apparently, am a Good Kid, too; at least, I get told so about every other time I go to Byerly's. I expect that one of these days I will be a Nice Lady at the grocery store rather than a Good Kid, and I rather look forward to that; but I expect that day won't come as long as Paul is back to bagging my groceries, and I'm all right with that. Paul looks tired. We are concerned for each other, Paul and me. Also we approve of each other. This is good. I can keep my backup bagger (I think he's Sean), but it's nice that Paul is back, even when I worry him and worry for him.

Sometimes I wonder what horrible jerks other people are running into, that they keep telling me what a great person I am (in Good Kid format or whatever) for indicating that someone was ahead of me in line or behavior on that moral level. I don't want a gold star just for the moral equivalent of attendance here. On the other hand, the older I get, the more I think I was really underestimating the value of showing up and giving a damn, when I was a teenager. I used to think it was no big deal, but I'm beginning to see how it can be.

Comments

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

There's a place in A Ring of Endless Light where Vicky Austin says something lilke, "She's not exciting but she's good and solid and dependable. Enough has happened to me in sixteen years that I;ve learned to appreciate that." I wonder if she's have said that if she'd been an actual sixteen year old instead of one written by a person of whatever age L'Engle was at the time. I think she might.

Whether or not, I think it's true.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

PS It might just be looks. Knowing you only online, I don't think of you as a Good Kid, at least not the Kid part of it. I met a 25-year-old this evening at knitting whom I'd definitely class as a kid; at least part of that is that she doesn't realize it. (There was a bit of tolerant eye-catching among the regulars, some of whom are only a few years older.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

lydy and my mom think I look much younger than my actual age, so you may be right.

There are 28-year-olds who are much, much younger than me. On the other hand, sometimes I go into what I describe as "spaniel puppy mode." But never in Byerly's. I only gambol about the feet of people I know and trust.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

It may get into that whole distinction of childlike vs childish. I gambol occasionally too.

I think the reason I see you (or anyone) as adult is partly about your attitude to your responsibilities and maybe a little your attitude toward privacy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, good then!

Err. What is my attitude to my responsibilities?

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

You own up to them and deal with them. That's what adults do.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was doing that when I was 6, mostly.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Maybe I need a better way to describe my definition of adult. One difference may be, when you were 6 how many responsibilities were assigned to you, vs assuming them yourself?

And there's always the factor that some 6-year-olds really are more grown-up than some 50-year-olds.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was more conscious of having my own projects than I think most 6-year-olds are. I was also more conscious of having to take care of people, although the ways in which I thought of taking care of, say, my grandparents were not at all the ways I think of doing that now. Writing and taking care of people as self-imposed responsibilities go back a long way for me. It's just the way I fulfill them that's changed.

This may be why one of the sentences I heard most often from adults when I was a kid was, "How old are you, forty?"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think L'Engle's characters -- and I don't know whether this is a reflection of L'Engle herself -- have a tendency to think of solidity and dependability as more universal character traits than I do. I mean, yes, some people are just solid clean through, and those people are gems of great worth. But it's like -- it's like trust. Trust is not all or nothing. You can trust that someone will give you honest labor for a job you've hired them for without trusting that they would be there for you in an emergency. You can trust someone with your purse or your baby but be a bit careful of how close to them you were standing when you bent over to get something from the floor. Divers other subtler examples abound in life. Sure, there are boundaries people cross, where if you can't trust them in one thing you don't feel like you can trust them in any; and if someone is solid and dependable on alternate Tuesdays if the moon is in Sagittarius and they woke up between 8:35 and 8:57, that's not much good. But I often think there is more middle ground than her characters seem to be giving credit.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

In that case, though, she's making the case for a particular character being especially dependable, so there are some shades. Granted that's a major theme of the book - for example, Adam being there for her when Zachary Grey is not - but this is a case where she explicitly makes the case for the value of someone who is dependable but not glamorous.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I didn't mean that she undervalued the dependable. Quite the opposite: I think she underestimates the flaky. Sometimes people rise to occasions you would never dream they could handle.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I really enjoy that you have a bagger. (I mean, he's other people's bagger, too, but in this context, he is _your_ bagger.)

I have my person at the pizza place (where I get lunch) who I think thinks of me the same way. (As a Good Kid, that is. This is primarily because of the whole still being in school thing, but nonetheless...)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I really enjoy that I have a bagger, too. This is part of what I mean when I say that I accrete people. I'm not sure I can turn that part of my brain off, but other people can certainly thwart it.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

When I were a young'un I were in the Columbia University Marching Band, and as such organizations do, they had a Tradition. Every time we all piled on a bus to go to a football game, the drum major and the head manager would walk up and down the bus, look each person in the eye, shake their hand, and say, "Thank you for coming."

At the time I viewed showing up as not really a big deal, and so I thought of this Tradition as no more than a clever morale and membership retention measure, just like the Jell-O shots that were passed out immediately afterward. Now I think it was the Right Thing on a deep level, that showing up is in fact a big deal, and it is proper to thank people for doing so. Perhaps this is because now I am older and it's harder to work up the energy to care enough to show up... a sad state which is in some ways CUMB's fault, but that's a story for when we are all drunk.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sometimes the Right Thing to do also affects morale for the better.

Irrelevantly -- what did you play?

[zwol.livejournal.com]

> Irrelevantly -- what did you play?

The umbrella, usually. (CUMB is, or was at the time, not so much a marching band as a comedy troupe with a few musicians along for the ride.)

[redbird]

Given the temptation of sleeping late instead, I can see that. Especially when the bus wasn't just taking you a few miles uptown, but to an away game.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. Also, at the time, there were about 25 members, of whom only about ten could be relied upon to show up for every game, and only about two-thirds of *those* people actually knew how to play an instrument. So it was very important for the organization to encourage people to attend.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Domesticity can be highly satisfying. Feeding your family a healthy and tasty meal. Getting the dishes done and the kitchen cleaned up unusually early. Leaving your child's bedroom, expecting to have to order him back to bed two or three times, only to check back five minutes later and see that he is sound asleep with that angelic expression children get when the are totally relaxed. Having the laundry all folded and put away for once. These are slam dunks for the homemaker.

I don't have anything against anyone who wants to work and have a career outside the home. We can't all stay home and back cookies. But those folks often don't realize what they are missing. :-)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Some people are in very concrete senses making a home as a second job -- just like you are, but working outside that home instead of inside it the way you do. Other people do not make homes even if they don't have outside employment. I think it's partly a time commitment but partly an approach to the work. Even when my mother has had jobs outside the house, she has also in very real senses made it a home.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Yep, and some people are happy keeping the household tasks to a minimum and heating up a frozen burrito or bowl of ramen after they come home from an exciting day fighting forest fires or inventing cures for cancer or something. I want to be careful not to assign any value judgments when saying, "Yeah, I like it, too, when the casserole comes out crusty on top and bubbly and tender in the middle."

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

That would be me. I think I'd be happy living in a house that someone *else* made a home (Mom tried, and did cook most nights, but I think my lack of talent for it is inherited on both sides). I often think this is one of the benefits to families comprising more than two adults: it's (at least theoretically) a bit easier to support someone in making the home-keeping their full-time vocation. I guess that would depend on whether one of the included adults leans that way, though.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I've found that I genuinely enjoy cooking and tidying (my very limited amount of space) and such, but that I don't feel any particular pressure to keep things absolutely tidy if no one's coming over. Which is nice.

I got/get the same sort of satisfaction, though, out of direct animal care jobs. Especially stable work; there was just something so _right_ about making sure all the beasties were tucked up safe and happy at the end of the day.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I am coming to not mind when a gift like that gets broken or lost. There is so much stuff in the world. It's best not to tie the pleasant emotion felt towards those one likes to the gift, I think, since things are impermanent in a way that emotions aren't. And, besides, emotions and stories almost never stay attached to the object.

K. [being a collector affords ample opportunity to know this deeply]

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I agree with Mris that the emotions tied to things are transferable. For example, dishrags. We wash dishes with dishrags knitted by my husband's grandmother. (She makes them while riding in the car.) She won't be making them forever, but now I can knit them, and whenever I use one I'll think of her, even if I made it myself.

I have a good friend whose mother, also a knitter of dishrags, has Alzheimer's. The friend commented one day that she's reluctant to use the drawerful she has now because someday they'll be used up and she'll know her mother won't ever give her any more. So I made her a set to eke them out, on the theory that she'll still think of her mom even when using the ones from me.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I don't know that it works that way for me. I don't actually want emotions connected to things, and transferring the emotion leaves that connection in place.

I think your making dishcloths for your friend was quite sweet, though.

K.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I think people's brains are just wired a variety of ways in regards to objects. My aunt Kathy gave me a toilet brush as a wedding shower present, and we are three toilet brushes later and I still think of her and smile every time I scrub the john. Really. Every single time, and it's been seven years now. Of course, partly it's because it was so much fun to write a thank-you note that said, "Dear Aunt Kathy, Thank you for the lovely toilet brush. I shall think of you every time I scrub the john." And the other part was that she was so darn keen on the initial toilet brush, which was, to my way of thinking, a nice but not in any way outstanding toilet brush. But she thought it was the Platonic form of toilet brushes, and that I must not wait even a minute longer to own it. So.

I'm not sure if that's the object or the action, actually. But it started with the object and became transferrable for me. I don't argue that anyone else's brain necessarily works that way.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Brain wiring? My theory has been that being more or less attached to things as representations of people is in part a social contract learned as a child, and secondly that most people become overwhelmed with their possessions once they perceive that they have too many of them, and that this happens in middle age or older. Once the sense of overwhlemedness kicks in, disassociating emotions and objects begins (if it has not already) to seem like a logical course, and indeed the only way out.

For one in this situation, transferring affection to a non-original object offers no relief.

I have some mixing bowls that came with the stand mixer I bought at the estate sale of a woman who lived down the block from us when my children were small. We didn't know her, and her family took what they wanted of her possessions and sold everything else. The mixer itself stopped working, and I threw it away, but the bowls are the nice white glass ones and I kept them. There are at least 40 mixing bowls of various sizes in my kitchen, so I use these rarely, but when I do, I remember that I got them at Margaret's estate sale, and that I was glad to have her old stand mixer, because I hadn't had one up until then. I don't think that's brain wiring. It's just memory. And I don't have any especial extra affect for my current stand mixer because Margaret's ushered me into the ranks of owners of stand mixers. I wouldn't even if my own dear grandmother had owned the original, or had chosen it for me.

I am reminded, too, of the long article gerisullivan wrote after helping a friend to settle his father's estate and deal with a houseful of possessions. She wrote about the problems and perils of Stuff, and how it overwhelms. This is probably what convinced me that reactions to stuff, and emotional attachments to it and to the circumstances of it, change with time and age. And I have seen this in myself as well.

K.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

the poster child for Why Norwegians Look Bad In Dreds

Hee!

I'm a "Nice Lady" now, mostly. I get called a "Good Kid" sometimes, but it's less and less.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But you know what I mean about the dreds, right? You've lived in Mpls long enough to have said, "Oh, honey. There is a reason this hairstyle did not originate with your ancestors," at least five times?

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Ho. We are Swedish and Norwegian on my mother's side and my sister is very fair and blond, and she had dreds for a while.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And does she have the "braid as thick as my bicep at waist length" style Scando hair where it almost worked, or the more common "ummm...just wash it out and get it trimmed, dear" look?

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, very fine, wispy hair. I was agreeing with you so much that I didn't bother to say "it was terrible." Also, she was doing it in a very fourteen-year-old "screw you and what you think of my appearance style" so it seemed like "terrible" might be a success for her. It was exactly what you were talking about, but who was I to complain?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, not my head, not my call -- directly to the person. Doesn't mean I won't make fun of the type in general, just means that I recognize that my approval is not the key factor in other people's sartorial choices. Even when I have better taste than they do.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

At least 25. Cultural misappropriation aside, it emphasizes pale, pale scalps and further washes out already very light blue eyes. NOT a good look on our Scandahoovian bruthas.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

Or sistahs, or sistahs.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. The "I am a bunny who was used for cosmetics testing, and it all went very wrong" look is just not the hot look for the fall season.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

I've never written "LOL" on a post before, but I do think you should know this made me laugh out loud.