Author Archives: carlastockton

Schedule Yourself a Playdate

Until I read Thelma Adams’ Playdate, I thought it was a woman thing. . . .

When I was staying home with my kids — there are a few of them, and they are very closely spaced — people used to ask me pointedly and with no small modicum of condescension, “So, what do you DO all day?”  As though caring for small children, running a home, even just keeping the toilet paper stocked were not taxing enough.  I worked outside on a variety of projects that generated some extra cash, but I didn’t have a “steady job.”  Consequently, I was a nonperson.  Ask Social Security.  They’ll show you just how little I am worth as a result of those years outside the FICA pale.

Adams’ Playdate features a stay-at-home parent, a handsome young beefcake  and former weatherman from Barstow named Lance.  His life is spiced by the honest satisfaction he derives from watching his daughter blossoming into womanhood and healing his belly chakra through the variety of tantric sex positions he studies with yoga instructor, who happens to be the wife of his wife’s business partner.  The book is funny and entertaining, and the characters range from Barbie -and-Ken shallow or slightly loopy to downright and absurdly insane; based on my year of living reluctantly in California and my frequent visits to the La Jolla area where the book is set, they rang true.

But besides being a quick, fun read, the book scratches at a dark veil that shrouds two issues and renders them rarely talked about: human beings are threatened by choices others make, and child rearing is regarded as a part-time endeavor that demeans those who choose to devote their lives to it.

Lance is a “househusband.”  His wife Darlene is a wheeler and dealer, so Lance manages the cookie sales for his daughter Belle’s girl scout troop, drives her to and from her various activities; he spends his days washing, drying and folding the laundry, shopping for, cooking, and baking the food or scrubbing, scouring and polishing the house before he finally manages to catch a break over coffee and some community gossip at the nearby Starbucks before he jumps into his car to retrieve the child.  The men in his circle consider him a loser, and they call his wife a sucker for having married him.  “At my house,” brags the next-door neighbor, “I earn the dough. I’ve never met a woman who makes as much as I do. Never.  Nunca.  If a man earns less than his wife, he must be really low paid.  What kind of freeloader would let this happen?”

The observation is shared at the requisite revelatory party scene, the one where all characters’ secrets are discovered, set as a rather slapstick dinner honoring Robin, the sister of Lance’s playmate, who has written a sociological study called Househusbands and the Women Who Love Them, which has become a runaway best seller.  Darlene and Lance find themselves defending their choice to live as they do, but they also find themselves seriously questioning whether their critics might actually have a point.  Have they chosen wisely?

It’s a funny moment, made funnier by its poignancy, augmented for me by the resonance.  I lived through parties like that one, and my life was then and ever after of questionable esteem.

After thirty-three years of tending my marriage and that crop of delightful children, I left my husband to pursue the writing life I had postponed.  In one of our divorce mediation sessions, my spouse asserted, with absolute conviction, “You really don’t deserve to have half of everything, you know.  Because even when you worked fulltime — and you only did that for the last twenty years — you made less than a third of my salary.”  No one batted an eyelid in consternation, and I was blind-sided, but I should not have been.

In those years, the world had concluded that since women were liberated, they should not be allowed to sit at home and eat bonbons anymore.  In society’s eyes, I had not accomplished anything measurable — except, until I finally got to the gym to work it off, a substantial amount of baby weight.   If I had had, in those days, a good offer to engage in an independent yoga/tantric sex project with a willing man, I might have accepted gratefully.  Truth is, however, where women might find househusbands sexy — “oooh, they have such a prominent feminine side!” — men are not so enticed by housewives whose clothes smell of baby farts and whose bodies lumber from the strain of spending the day as a jungle gym.  Even when men appear to be bottom feeders, they are higher in status than the women toiling next to them.

No kidding.  We should talk about this.  Women and men should have options, and society should reward them for making bold choices.  Instead of criticism, both men and women who stray from the accepted norms should be applauded for having identified what they want, decided what they are willing to do to get what they want and then for going after it. Whatever it is.  It’s what we love about good acting; it’s what we should relish about good living.

And frankly, someone should be minding the kids!

Lake Flower High Dive

Lots of children,

parents calling to them, encouraging,

or begging them to come back.

They laugh and swing out

off the high dive into the

dark water, where

they disappear, then emerge

sputtering, choking on their giggles,

delighted.

I stand at the top of the ladder

Hesitant to walk out onto the board

I am afraid of heights.

Lots of children,

my own siblings and others,

laugh at me and call out

“Dive!  C’mon,” beckoning me into the

dark water, where

I’ll disappear.  Will I emerge,

sputtering, choking on giggles,

delighted?

I venture out onto the plank

to look down, wondering what lies below

and if it matters.

Lots of voices now

“Do it!  Do it!”

I jump, and for the moment

I stop thinking . . .

just enjoy the

F

A

L

L

Daddy

My most salient memory is of his knuckles.

Suspended above my head, poised to strike me, they belied the generations of Yankee prosperity, the privilege of his youth.  They were the joints of a laboring man, gnarled, swollen, yellowed with age, frostbite and continual paper cuts.  The hands were enormous, muscular, striated with bulging veins.  Ominous.

“Do you dare say that again?”  he thundered.

Knowing full well that my words were a declaration of war, I replied, “I am never going to church again.”

His hand did not change position.  It trembled, aching to complete its mission, but it remained in midair, creating a comical, cartoonish image of frustration.

I didn’t laugh.

“Daddy. . . ” My voice broke.  How could I make him understand? I hoped he’d drop his arm to embrace me, to encourage my preteen independence.  “I-I just don’t believe in it anymore.  It stopped making sense.”

He dropped his arm and clenched his fist, pushing the veins to greater prominence,  and bit down hard on his back jaw. His rain watery eyes clouded over.  The concept was beyond his ken.  Never in his fifty years, despite his self-imposed life of hardship, had he ever considered the absence of “sense” in his religion.  How could this child, this female child, question his truth?  He shook his head.  The light from the rising sun streaming in through the picture window caught his baldness and cast a halo over him.

I gasped.

“This is not an issue to be discussed,” he barked.  “You have no choice.  I say you will get dressed, and you will come with us to church as you always have.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.  I tell you what to do, not vice-versa.”

“I should be allowed to choose.  You cannot legislate belief, Daddy.  I don’t believe.”

“Nonsense. Of course you believe.  What is not to believe? The Lord our God is omnipotent, and He is Everywhere.  He is love.  God is Love.  Someday you will see him, and all will be proven.  You believe because it is true.”

I knew argument was pointless.  Half a century before, his grandfather had whispered Dutch Reformed rhetoric into his ear at birth, and his infant brain had embraced the dogma.

God had presented Himself to my father first in his twelfth year, making His presence known by robbing him of his father.  Daddy knew he deserved this show of divine wrath because he had taken the Lord’s name in vain the day before.

Then again, at seventeen, when he had prayed that his eighteen-year-old wife be spared to care for the infant daughter he had bred out of wedlock, he had accepted unquestioningly God’s decision to take the young woman into Heaven along with the son she was attempting to bear him.  Not long after, as a medical student in New York, he again trusted God’s wisdom in punishing him for performing an abortion on his partner’s girlfriend; he was dismissed from Columbia without appeal. He had willingly attached himself to the wheel of retribution and had paid for his sins ever after by refusing to allow himself to experience any joy.

His arm, still fisted and poised to strike, must have tired because he stretched and reached over his head, resting the hand on the bony top of his head, forming, with his huge mitt, a skullcap of sorts.  So priestly did he look that I averted my eyes.  I knew I should feel shame, but I hated his joyless God, and I wanted to prove to him that his was not the only righteousness.

“Daddy, I don’t understand why you care.  Why does it matter to you if I go to church?”

“You will do as I say.”

“I will not.”  I said it quietly, hoping that the hush in my voice would still the turmoil in his soul.

“How dare you defy me?  Go get dressed.  We leave in twenty minutes.”

The veins in his hands pulsed in rhythm with the pounding of my heart.

“No.” I whispered.

“What?” he screamed.

“I won’t,” I answered.  I was calm now.  Nothing would move me.  I was not willing to carry his cross anymore, to seek the salvation he was so sure he had thrown away.

His whole body quaked now as he held himself back.  I think he wanted to kill me.  I was the incarnation of all his failures.  His failure to fulfill his father’s dream of a medical career, his failure to appease his mother’s disappointment at his wrong-side-of-the-tracks, shotgun teenage marriage, his failure to be a real father to my half-sister, his failure to impose his fundamentalism on my mother.  I saw my weapon then, and I grabbed for it.  At any moment he might lunge at me, attempt to crush me with his hands.  I had to defend myself.

“Daddy, you know Mommy doesn’t believe in it.  You can make her go to church, but you can’t make her believe what you believe.”

“Nonsense.  Your mother shares my beliefs.”

“She does not.”

“Charlotte!”  He screeched toward the kitchen where she was hiding behind breakfast preparation.  “How dare you confuse this child?”

“Leave her out of this, Daddy.  She didn’t do anything.”

“She is poisoning your mind with doubt.”

“No.  Mommy would never contradict you, she’d never admit you’re wrong in front of me.  These are my feelings, my thoughts, my doubts.”

His face was bluish as the veins in his temples struggled to carry the oxygen to his brain.  I feared — and hoped — he’d drop dead right there, right then, a victim of his apoplectic obsession with a God I detested.  He rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead, and the veins glistened with the moisture they collected.

“I just know my mother,” I continued.  “And she could not possibly embrace your idiocy. She is, always has been, always will be a Jew.”

There.  I had said it.  I waited for him to fall, to convulse with pain and then to disintegrate into a crumbled heap.  Surely this knowledge, my giving words to the unspeakable truth, should be as terrible and as swift as the sword of Christianity he held dangerously over my head.

We had never admitted to one another that our life in the church was a lie.  That those late Sunday arrivals, our oversized family marching in to fill a pew at the center of the nave, were mere display.  My mother, the beloved of his life these past sixteen years, the mother of his seven recent progeny, was a Jewess.  Marrying this man in 1945 must have been a comfortable safety from her nightmare-ridden childhood, from the terrifying memory of the friends and family would could not, as she had, escape the cry of Juden Heraus.  Her children were safe from the freight train, but she could not deny her self.  She would accompany him to his church, sing songs of praise to his Jesus and sacrifice her children to his fanaticism, but she would not convert.  No holy water would ever wash away the receded passion for her heritage.

I watched his hands as my words penetrated the wall of his illusions, and I was sure their invasive nature would strike him dead . . . or that his tense and throbbing hands would execute me.  Either way, I expected justice would be served.

Instead, a great calm descended on him.  The sun was higher now and bathed him in its full light.  He unclenched his fists and closed his eyes in a moment of silent prayer Then he opened them, smiled beatifically and said simply, “Breakfast is probably waiting.  You know how much your mother hates that.  We should go eat.”

Dog Days

A few years ago, my colleagues Daniel Fine, Dana Keeton, Ed Ludvigsen and I collaborated on a little film that poked fun at animal owners.  That was before Madhu entered my life.  Now I have a more  personally seasoned and emotionally tuned view of pet parenting, and I’d like to share both our silly little film and my story of Madhu.

Please note that the chihuahua in the video is NO RELATION to Madhu, who is pictured in the piece!

MADHU

Two years ago, my daughter, who was living in Taiwan at the time, asked if I would house her Chihuahua for a couple months.  She was about to do some traveling and did not want the little guy to undergo recurring bouts of quarantine; she sought to place him with someone she could trust would recognize that he was her baby.  Who better to ask than Grandma?  How could I not comply?

Mommy went to great expense and trouble to ensure the pup would fly safely.  She bought him an indestructible but well-breathing enclosure, chose calming toys into which she rubbed her scent; she equipped the crate with plenty of drinking water and trusted he’d be protected by the gentle handlers who accompanied him to the plane.   Then she held him close to her heart until the very last minute when he would have missed his flight had she not closed him inside and said a tearful goodbye.

As I drove to the airport to fetch my new charge on that crisp March morning, I got a text from my son: my daughter-in-law was in the hospital, and the birth of my first granddaughter was imminent.  There is something powerfully karmic about the fact that I became a grandmother twice that day.  Minutes after I brought my daughter’s bundle home, I was at the hospital holding my son’s miracle in my arms.

That was three years ago.  Mahdu — his name is Hindi for Sweet, Honey — never returned to Asia.  My daughter moved around, and she wound up in Thailand, where he would have had to be detained for weeks in quarantine should he join her there; she relinquished his company rather than put him through that pain, and he has turned out to be a kind of miracle in his own right.

Fetching him from animal control at JFK was not easy or uncomplicated.  It took an exceedingly long time, making me worry that this little dog — whose breed is not known for its patience or its calm — would be wound up and agitated by the time I reached him.  Luckily for me, and I suppose for him as well, he was nothing of the sort.  There he sat in his enclosure, his large, deeply brown eyes bulging out of his face, taking everything in, calmly accepting that he was where he should be until such time as he was released, and he was fine with that.  He was happy to see me, but he wasn’t hyper-active; he allowed himself to be picked up, stroked, reassured, and then he nestled his nose into my winter coat and drifted off to sleep.

I have another daughter, who has adopted Mahdu and with whom he has formed a new attachment, and Mahdu has been her salvation. There is something incredibly zen about this animal.  He never barks, he never cries, he simply trusts that all will be well.  He loves to cuddle, prefers to sleep buried in the warm curvature of flesh between his human’s face and clavicle, and he greets strangers with joy and exuberance that encourages even the brawniest of men to crave his merest affection.

Last summer my Asian-dwelling daughter was here for a visit.  Mahdu became transfixed the moment he beheld her, burrowed into the space between her arm and her chest and refused to move until he needed to emerge to lick her face again and again.  He didn’t cry when she left him to visit others, and he didn’t flag in his affection for his surrogate mother. But it was clear that he had missed her, would miss her again, that his love for her is boundless.

A person could do worse than have a Taiwanese Chihuahua for a grandson.

Times Square Apassionata

The other day, I heard a tour guide telling a walking tour, “Back in the days before Disney came to New York, Times Square was not so family friendly, but nowadays it’s been cleaned up, more like an urban amusement park.”  I sighed.  Remembering.

When I was 18, I had a job on 44th Street and 12th Avenue.  I lived in Queens, so to get to work, I took a bus to Main Street Flushing and then jumped on a still new-looking 7 Train, which took me to 42nd Street and 7th Avenue, from whence I walked west to the river.   My report time was 7:30; so, even in the summer, darkness lingered over most of my journey, and when I emerged from the tunnel into Times Square, the gray steam of early morning still dripped from the building overhangs.

The first time I made that journey, I entered the world hesitantly.  Times Square in the crepuscular minutes just before the sun rose was peopled by potentially terrifying characters.  I grew up in the granite-guarded isolation of the Adirondack Mountains, after all, and the only place I had encountered people like these was in the books and comics I read, the movies I went to see.  City of Night, Manchild in the Promised Land, Batman, Midnight Cowboy. Luckily, they were characters with whom I had an intimacy that promoted a modicum of understanding I did not have for myself. I didn’t know what they might think of me.

There was a small group of prostitutes who congregated together in front of the Lyric Theater, where the Hilton Theater is today, having coffee from a nearby greasy spoon, smoking and talking and giggling, perhaps too wired to go home to sleep or maybe waiting for someone to pick them up; I never knew.  I felt like I was in Junior High, having to pass the cool girls, hoping they wouldn’t make fun of me.

They didn’t. “Good morning, Sweetie,” a very large, older woman called to me; the others chimed in, warning me to be alert, to watch out for vagrants hiding in the shadows.  By the third or fourth day, they had coffee for me — I couldn’t drink it because I hated the “white Coffee” (extra cream) they drank, but I didn’t want to insult them, so I fake-sipped it as I headed west, thanking them profusely.  I lasted in the job (a story unto itself) for eight months, and every day in every kind of weather, the bevy was always there, expecting me when I emerged from the subway.

I finished work at 4, and the streets could be already pretty dark when I made my return trip.  I walked briskly East on 42nd Street from the river, one of many, mostly other members of the work force wrapping up their day.  I moved in sync with gal Fridays, clerks and typists in too much make-up, too-high spiked heels, too-tight mini-skirts, with office managers in dowdy, cheap suits, sensible flats, hats and gloves.  Construction workers stopped packing up their wares to shout their version of compliments at us as we walked or to jeer at the drag queens slinking along the edges of the buildings.  Well-dressed family men pulled their hats down over their eyes as they were sucked in by the blaring, undulating light of one of the many peepshow or porn  flick theaters that staved off the deepening darkness.

Cleaned up?  Times Square may be overrun with families now, but it’s far more tawdry, far less wholesome than the Times Square of my youth.

The Naked Cowboy and his imitators strut around in tightie whities, miming molestation of people’s adolescent daughters while parents laugh and snap photos.  A ridiculous-looking middle-aged man, wearing a headdress right out of a ’50’s western, parades his insignificant jewels in a skinny pair of black or white briefs as he drums a come-hither on a child’s tom-tom.  A massively wrinkled drag queen in a green bikini, her face and torso too red from an overdose of tanning rays, adjusts the Ms. Liberty crown perched on her head and collects tips in the sagging bottom of the over-packed bathing suit.  A vanful of migrant workers, bussed in from Queens and handed costumes in a lobby near the Discovery Museum, walk about as the dramatis personnae from best-known Disney films and television series, encouraging the kids to hug and fondle them.   In the center of it all, every Friday, a group of hate-spouting Black men spew ill-disguised racism and anti-semitism while tourists from around the world grab photos to send home on their iphones.

Who would call this wholesome?

I saw Batman talking to the Naked Cowboy the other day, and for a moment, it looked like Batman might ensnare the offending creep and carry him off in the Batmobile.  Wishful thinking.

Oh, well, even if he did, there’d be another to take his place.  It’s simple economics.  Just like they did in the late 60’s of my youth, people gotta make a living.  Come to think of it, the tour guide was right.  Times Square really is just an amusement park, and the revenues are where it’s at.