Fashion Statement

I have never really been a risk-taker.  In fact, I have a funny (I think) anecdote about just how cautious I can be:

One night in my early 30s I was asleep in my bed, when suddenly I realized “Hey! I’m dreaming!”  The revelation had come when I noticed that one entire wall in my bedroom was solid brick instead of the floor-to-ceiling windows I knew it actually was.  “That wall shouldn’t be brick,” my sleeping brain thought.  “I must be having one of those lucid dreams I’ve heard people talk about!”  Those people had also said that when you realize you are in the middle of a lucid dream you should take control, do something you’ve always wanted to do but can’t because of the laws of physics, time, space, and reality in general.

I will interject here something else about my dreams up to that point.  You see, despite evidence that flying dreams are quite common, I had never had one.  Whenever the conversation turned to dreams, invariably someone would ask, rhetorically, “Oh, who hasn’t had a flying dream?” and my hand would go up.  The next comment would usually be along the lines of “Oh my God, flying dreams are the best!  I've never felt so free and alive!  You have no idea what you are missing."  That never failed to make me feel happy... for them.

Breathtaking... and scary -- Pt. 1

So back to my dream.

There I was, in the middle of a dream in which I was fully aware I now had the power to change my flightless ways.  And what did I do?  Did I spread my arms, will the brick-wall-that-wasn’t-brick-in-real-life to dissolve and ascend through the clouds toward aerial vistas unimaginable to those shackled by gravity?  Did I break the bonds of Earth and behold the mysteries of the universe up close and personal?  Did I do a third thing, I ask (sticking to the comedy law of three)?

No.  No I did not.  But what I did do was far worse and more telling than simply choosing not to fly.  When I had my big opportunity to soar, what I did instead was gingerly lift my feet off the floor, one at a time, and proceed to hover around my West LA apartment like a seahorse.  “Wheeeee!  Look how different everything looks from six inches higher!”

That is what a coward I can be.  Always playing it safe, even when I'm asleep.  And that’s why, too often, I chicken out of wearing my fringed jacket or my sequined scarf.

And you thought I wasn’t going to bring this around to being about fashion.

Breathtaking... and scary -- Pt. 2

Over My Dead Body... Please

You’ve got to really feel for Mick Jagger.  I mean, for over 50 years he’s been singing “what a drag it is getting old.”  That’s a long time to be bummed.  Although, watching him these days I’m not sure he’s the go-to guy for empathy when it comes to aging.

Beth, as she became, but not as she was.

As for me, I’ve done a pretty good job of living in denial of the inevitable.  But lately that mindset has been seriously undermined.  They say, “what you resist persists,” so I guess that’s why these days it I’m being confronted with reminders of my advancing age at every turn.  It also explains why for a while there I could not for the life of me escape Ed Sheeran’s “The Shape of You.”

I think the first dent in my Peter Pan armor came two years ago at a Hollywood Vampires concert.  (For those of you seriously un-hip fogies, that’s a cover band comprised of Alice Cooper, Joe Perry and Johnny Depp.)  It had been an amazing evening, full of oldies and goldies.  I was feeling pretty proud of myself for being so full of fearless, youthful energy that I had not only attended the concert alone but had driven myself the 20 miles to the venue even though it meant being out past 10pm!  So, when Alice came out for an encore and performed “School’s Out,” I was immediately on my feet, dancing and singing.  Feeling every bit like the 16 year-old I was when the song was released on my last day of eleventh grade.  And I wasn’t alone.  Everyone around me was dancing and singing, too.  My first thought was, “Wow, all those old people sure look silly shouting ‘school’s out!’.”  My second thought was, “Oh, fuck!”

I recovered.  However, lately, the reminders are coming faster and furiouser, and it’s getting harder to ignore.  These days it is television that’s the primary offender.  Is it too much to ask for a 3-hour Hayes/Maddow/O’Donnell block uninterrupted by not-at-all-subtle hints that the day is approaching when I’m going to need to install a door in my bathtub?  (Actually, once upon a time, a six-year old me would have thought that was the coolest thing ever.)  And can we please repeal the law that says a certain amount of ad time has to be sold to local businesses?  I know I live in a city with a large senior population, but for Christ’s sake, you'd think the only local businesses are retirement communities where people less than a decade older than I am seem to be having the time of their lives working out in a “fitness center” while fully dressed in street clothes.

And while I’m on the subject of assisted living facilities, can there possibly be a worse name for a service that helps you find one than “A Place For Mom?”  My mom is gone.  That means when someone on tv starts talking about “mom,” they mean me!  You know what, Joan Lunden?  I’ve got a place I might suggest for you.

Okay, look.  I don’t have a solution to this really, really annoying fact of life.  Acceptance is sporadic and not always easily achieved.  But I guess I’ll get there.  I never want to be a burden to my kids and will do everything I can to spare them any painful decisions, like whether to install a roller coaster on my stairway (again, Beth-At-Six loves that idea), or, you know, sending me off to Granny Acres.  I could launch into a discussion here about taking matters into my own hands when the time comes, but that’s a topic for a different and hilarious post.  But for now, I am going to live my life one day at a time and pray that when the day comes that my children need to consult each other about the best place to put mom, the options will either be on the bookshelf or on the mantle… next to dad.

23 and WHO?

We are living in a time of scientific wonders.  Advancements our forefathers couldn’t dream of are commonplace.  Taken for granted, even.  Computers that respond to our voice, a device that pumps a gas into your wine bottle so you don’t have to uncork it to drink it, the Silpat baking sheet.  But the newest craze of the modern age is the one that takes us back in time.  I’m talking about the DNA home test kit.  And nobody appreciates a future filled with exploring the past more than I do.

Dutta, Me, My Mom, and Ma

As a young child I used to spend weekends at my maternal grandmother's house, where she lived with her mother, my great-grandmother.  I never knew my maternal grandfather.  He had died shortly before I was born.  I suppose his absence from the household may have been a factor in my overwhelming identification with all things Norwegian.  You see, my grandmother was born in Norway.  And her mother, as one can rightly infer from her having been present at the birth, also called Norway home.  And I’m not talking Oslo.  No big city, cosmopolitan, cultural melting pot in my background.  No, my grandparents migrated to America from a small island called Grindøya, which is situated in the middle of a fjord, which is located in Tromsø, which is inside the Arctic Circle.  One Arctic Circle and two 'o's with a slash through them.  That’s how Norwegian they were!

Norwegian Beth

Thanks to my grandmother, I grew up eating something called lefse (a kind of Norwegian flatbread), with gjetost (a kind of Norwegian cheese).  Every Christmas we put out the julenissen dolls (Norwegian elves) and made fattigmann (a traditional Norwegian cookie.)  One Halloween my costume was actually “Norwegian Girl.” A platter on my grandmother’s kitchen wall beckoned visitors to “be so good as to drink and eat,” in Norwegian.  And although I never learned the language – beyond being able to say “be so good as to drink and eat,” that is – I heard plenty of it because when Ma and Dutta (our nicknames for them) didn’t want me to understand what they were saying, they would say it in Norwegian.  Having arrived in the United States at the age of eight, Ma spoke English perfectly, without the slightest trace of an accent.  Meanwhile, Dutta spoke in broken English and struggled her whole life to be able to pronounce the letter ‘J’.  She was never successful.

I am told my maternal grandfather came from Ohio.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that my sense of self is deeply anchored in my Norwegian heritage.  My connection to that country is a source of pride for me.  For chrissake, I named my first daughter Freya, after the Norse god.  I bought her the Norwegian Barbie doll when it came out.  (Yes, I bought it for her… the one I bought for myself is still MIB.)  I even own my own fattigmann cutter!

So this Christmas, when my husband bought a DNA kit for each member of our family, I was eager to jump on the bandwagon.  As we all gathered around a table in a corner of our local Starbucks and discreetly spit into our respective tiny glass tubes, I was already growing impatient for the results.  Soon, I would have scientific evidence that the blood of Vikings coursed through my veins…

Raise your hand if you know where this is going.

But first, a word about my husband’s results.

My teutonic husband at "16 going on 17."

My husband’s ancestors, as far as we knew, were German.  He can make a pretty good case in support of this by mentioning any number of castles in Germany that bear the surname Falkenstein.  Also, just by showing his face.  When he was younger, if he had walked into a casting session for a production of The Sound of Music, all other aspiring Rolf Grubers would have known to throw in the towel – even before hearing him sing.  In fact, the only hesitation the family had in claiming 100% Western European heritage was due to the fact that one grandparent was the product of… an adoption. (What did you think I was going to say?)

So how is it, I ask you, that when our DNA results finally came back, not only was it determined that my husband was more than twice as Scandinavian as I was (18% to my 6%), but so were both of my daughters?  I confess, I felt a little dizzy at the revelation.  I felt a little like that Polaroid picture Marty McFly keeps consulting in Back to the Future.  I was disappearing, becoming see-through.  If I wasn’t mostly Norwegian, did I even exist anymore?  And don’t talk to me about Polaroid pictures not having feelings.  The imagery is apt!

Apparently, my experience is not unique as evidenced by the very detailed explanation of this conundrom that AncestryDNA.com felt was necessary to include in their FAQ section.  Put in easy-to-understand non-technical terms for the science-challenged-over-hyphenated-weekend-geneologist: our genes are like beads on a necklace, with each parent randomly passing on half of their beads to their children.  In other words, I inherited my maternal grandfather’s jewelry.  (By the way, I believe they make lovely jewelry in Ohio.)

It’s a little less simple to understand how my children scored higher than me on the “So You Think You’re Norwegian” scale.  It’s not like I could chalk it up to my husband cheating on me.  Turning back to the jewelry metaphor, I guess I gave them my only pair of Nordic stud earrings, which my “German” husband promptly augmented with a matching choker, bracelet, ring and brooch.

Okay, whatever, I’m not bitter.  I mean, I get that my cultural heritage can be different from my biological heritage.  And I’ve made peace with what this means for me.  My identity is what I say it is, and I identify as Norwegian.  My pronouns are hun, henne and hennes.  It’s not like people I meet are going to say, “Bullshit, you’re 48% European Jew.  It’s written all over your blood.”  (Note to Mattel: Consider releasing a European Jew Barbie.)  Besides, just because some of my ancestors were Russian, or Polish, or English, or Welsh doesn’t mean some weren’t fucking Vikings…

… It just means they didn’t fuck enough Vikings.

I Want a New Drug

I want to become a pot-smoker.

I know this may be a laugh line for anyone who knew me in high school or college, because they probably think I already was.  But I wasn’t.  I only bought the stuff once in my life (from my dad! – but that’s another story), and if you totaled up every time I got stoned back then, the number probably wouldn’t hit triple digits.  In fact, I think the last time I took a hit off a joint was 1980.  I was either with my brother and Christie McVie in a recording studio at the Record Plant in LA, or it was just REALLY strong weed.

Also, let it be known that I’m not looking to go all Cheech, Chong, or Spicoli.  I’m just trying to keep up with the times.  Find a new way to take the edge off… with less sugar.

From everything I’m reading about the benefits of cannabis, it’s the way to go vis a vis mood and pain management.  Not that the few aches I have these days are a problem, but I can tell you that ever since completing the change-of-life-I-never-asked-for-but-had-to-go-through-anyway, my moods have been in the crapper.  My optimism and sense of wonder have taken a powder, along with a large chunk of my libido.  Granted, a certain politician I like to call Cadet Bone Spurs (© 2018 Tammy Duckworth) has had a lot to do with my attitude these days, but so does getting older and the paucity of estrogen coursing through my glands.

And by the way, if I’m concerned about my sugar intake, you can imagine how I feel about estrogen supplements – so let’s not even go there.

Here’s the problem: unlike what seemed like 99% of every other human on the planet, I didn’t calm down when I lit up.  I didn’t sleep, I cleaned my apartment.  I didn’t get mellow, I got manic.  For every flash of insight I had about the relationship between music and color, or the representation of rape in William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” I had twelve about how my fat thighs were proof I didn’t deserve love and that the key to happiness was a neatly written to-do list.

In short, I’m afraid of how I will react.  Especially since at 61 there is soooo much more to worry about than there was at 16.  Global warming.  Terrorism.  Failing schools.  The fact that every moderate Democrat is really what we used to call a Republican.  Or, if I want to obsess on a micro level there are these gems lurking:  If my hearing loss gets any worse, I won’t wake up when a killer breaks into my house in the middle of the night.  As a parent I rank somewhere between Joan Crawford and Tonya Harding’s mother.  Or how about, I’m an empty-nester in search of new meaning in her life, which is more than half over!

Re-reading that last paragraph, it’s a miracle I’m not an alcoholic.  All the more reason to turn to THC.

“But now we know how to separate the strains,” says the salesman at my local Weed ‘N’ Things. (God bless Oregon, where neighbors now bring each other baggies from their private grows like they used to bring zucchinis).  Apparently, it was the effects of Sativa that caused me to bum out, and I need to give Indica a shot.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.  But what if it’s me and not the weed that’s the problem?  Then I’ll be stuck for hours in the private hell that is my obsessive brain.  And not only that, I am told that pot today compared to pot back in the day is like the difference between Bill Bixby’s Hulk and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk (apologies to Lou Ferrigno and Edward Norton).

But as the saying goes: a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.  I guess for me that noble step looks a lot like sitting on my couch with a pipe in one hand and a match in the other.  Wish me luck; or, at the very least, a nice trip.