There are times in a person’s life when everything is tinted gray and the future looks too dark to step into. Then in one single shift of the universe, something happens—we turn left, instead of right; we answer the phone, smile at a stranger, or meet an old lover. Something moves. And the light reappears.

Usually, these encounters add color and drama to our lives. But the effect is transitory and life goes on. But if the stars have joined in perfect alignment and strike that chord buried beneath layers of protections and angers and all the other psychic sediments we’ve collected over a lifetime, we understand that we’ve been moving toward these points on the space-time continuum all our lives. Something opens, and for one sacred moment we are seen; we are whole. And all that has gone before and all that comes after takes on new meaning.

When I last checked in with reality, I assumed those moments—the ones when fireworks flash and thrills trigger new life—were gone forever.

And yet in the secret corner of my dreams, my mantra was, “Once more before I die. One more grand passion, one more glory moment, before I die.”

I didn’t ask for its form. I didn’t name specifics. Getting there was the hard part. Because between youth and age, life happened.

With Cinderella as my guide, I bought the fairy tale . . . swallowed that sucker faster than a robin jumps on a June bug. Someday the prince will ride into my life on his white steed to sweep me off my feet and all that crap. In fact, my prince did come, cantered into my life atop his white charger. How was I to know he just rented the stallion for special occasions . . . and that the remaining hurdles and challenges I faced would have to be overcome by me?

The truth is, love comes in many guises, from parents and siblings, from children and grandchildren—and from friends who stand by our sides through our darkest moments and celebrate with us in our most memorable ones.

But that glory moment—the one with the fireworks and bliss? It took me a lifetime to understand that love is a jester, and that perfection, when it occurs, arrives in small and fleeting packages.

By now, the effects of drinking the Kool-Aid have mercifully faded. I know that life is a crazy quilt of moments that sometimes illuminate and sometimes shatter my heart into burnt and blackened pieces.

I also know that in the dark, we are all young and beautiful.

 

ENTER THE STEED

I’m sitting alone on a bench in Washington Square watching my sons frolic on the asphalt hills built as part of a play area. I am exhausted, de-sexed and depressed. My life is a pit of misery so deep I do not know how to climb out of it.

“Hi, Nancy.”

I look up at Joe, a young man—18 years old—a freshman at NYU and doing odd jobs for our friends Vera and Chip as a way to pay for college. We see each other often, since we all socialize together and he sometimes takes care of our three boys.

“How’s it going?” I ask, aware of how frazzled and weary I must look.

He steps closer as I keep my eyes on my sons to make sure they’re safe.

“I’m in love with you,” Joe says.

‘Scuse me? Who are you talking to?

I look up at him, too stunned to respond to this handsome young man with broad shoulders, flashing eyes and a sharp wit.

“Do you understand me? I’m in love with you.”

I come to my senses just enough to utter, “Are you out of your mind?”

“No. I’m just telling you what I feel . . .”

Too stunned to be flattered, I take a deep breath and exhale.

“Joe . . . look at me. I’m old . . . tired . . . 37 years old. Those are my two sons over there. I’m married, dried out and used up, and you can’t possibly be in love with me.”

“But I am. And I want to see you.” He skips a beat. “Alone.”

 

PRUNING

There are lots of reasons to prune a plant.

To encourage bushier growth.

To revitalize overgrown plants.

To thin a plant.

To shape a plant.

To remove dead blossoms.

To remove damaged or dead wood.

One of the most important things to remember is that you shouldn’t use pruning to change the basic shape or size of a plant. If you’re doing that, you’ve chosen the wrong plant for the site. You’ll forever be fighting against the plant’s natural inclination, never allowing it to reach its full potential.

Prune your plants in late winter or early spring before new growth has begun. The exception to this rule is that you prune azaleas, camellias and other spring-blooming plants right after they bloom. It’s best to err on the side of caution. You can always go back and prune more or make more drastic cuts the following year. But you can’t rectify serious mistakes.

When pruning roses, cut the stems at a 45° angle so that the bottom of the cut is level with the bud union. This angle prevents rain from soaking into the stem. Excess moisture seeping into the cut can rot the branch and eventually kill the entire plant. When larger canes are pruned, a thin application of white glue spread over the raw area can seal the cane and keep it safe from rot.

There are occasions in all our lives when it’s critical to prune—sometimes by choice and sometimes by necessity. For years I maintained exhausted relationships out of a kind of perverse loyalty to the idea of friendship, rather than the actual nature of the relationship.

It’s easy to make peace with the concept that if a relationship is destructive or demeaning—or even quietly antagonistic—it’s better to cut it off than to maintain it. What’s harder for me to reconcile is what to do when an ongoing relationship makes me merely uncomfortable, when the unease is vague and can’t be named.

As children we were closer to our feelings than we are now. When we grow up, we learn to favor opinions and rationality over intuition. Yet emotion and intuition are the very qualities that save us from ourselves. It’s taken me a lifetime to trust my intuition, to respect my feelings enough to do the right thing for me. I’ve finally learned to cut off the offending branch before any serious damage is done. The problem is, I haven’t yet learned how to seal the wound so I don’t feel the pain. I’m still working on that one.

 

IN THE BEGINNING

My writing career began early when I won the poetry contest in third grade at Putnam Heights Elementary School in Oklahoma City:

I have a little bird and he won’t say a word,
But he’s happy in his little gilded cage.
He sings a pretty song and hops right along
Just like an actor on the stage.

And when I was in sixth grade, I got an article published in Children’s Activities, called “How to Make a Sandstone Wagon.”

Throughout my school years from seventh grade through college, I thrived on writing. But it never occurred to me that I could make a living at it until I met my husband, Alex.

Even then, my dream of writing was out of my ballpark because my husband had published several books. We were hanging out with famous authors and I was an indentured wife and a nobody.

Then, one day out of the need to express on paper what I could not utter out loud, I began my first novel:

“Small bed warm with loving. Wet with loving. Two bodies laced in contentment, in passion passed. There would be more, there would be better. But then, warm and tangled, damp and quiet, it was enough. Touching.”

Since the story was about a married woman and her young lover, I didn’t dare show the opening pages to my husband.

• He might have surmised the possibility the story was autobiographical.
• As he constantly informed me, my only job was to be a wife and a mother.

With the option of getting Alex’s opinion eliminated, I turned to my neighbor, David Markson—beet-red embarrassed as I showed him the pages. David not only taught writing at Columbia, he was a published author whose eventual experimental novels scored him the literature award from the uber-prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters—the elite of the elite creative organizations.

But then, terrified to show my writing to anyone, I held my breath as David read my opening. It was only three pages long. And when he finished, he set the pages down and looked me in the eyes.

“Nancy, you’re a writer.”

Huh?

“Do you really mean it?”

“Yes I do. Tell your story. You’ve got the gift.”

Backed by David’s encouragement, I began to write the novel that eventually became Gentlemen Callers. In spite of Alex’s disdain, I wrote every moment my boys were in school and I wasn’t preparing six meals a day because my husband didn’t like the boys’ dining-time preferences.

One or two pages a day were an accomplishment. Five were a miracle. But no matter how many impediments stood in my way, I refused to give up.

Midway through my novel, Alex announced we were moving to California because he wanted to live closer to his aging father and launch a career as a screenwriter—as if . . .

I freaked. I had friends in New York. Close friends . . . many trapped in bad marriages, some blessed with good ones. Our kids played together. We supported each other. Celebrated with each other. And were there when we needed shoulders to cry on. A “support group” before that idea became common.

Needless to say, Alex declared my friends a bad influence on me. And when the women’s movement burst on the scene and we all read Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and their feminist ilk, our worlds exploded, catapulting us into new and unexplored territory. I read the books in secret when Alex wouldn’t discover I was reading seditious material that would eventually change my life.

No discussion, no argument. The women’s movement influenced us in unimaginable ways, all of which enraged my husband to the point of accusations of betrayal and deceit. This was, of course, yet another reason to move me 3000 miles away from the perfidious influence of my friends.

Believing I had no choice but to move because Alex was still “supporting” us, we packed everything into meticulously labeled and listed boxes and moved to Venice, California. Crips and Bloods. Graffiti everywhere. This was gang territory and we could rent something cheap.

Throughout all this chaos, I continued to write. My “desk” was at the back of the house where neighborhood children ran in and out all day. But every distraction, every “duty,” every chore and obligation merely hardened my determination until the day I wrote “The End.”

 

THE SUPER COMPUTER AND UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

My computer is almost as essential to my writing life as my imagination. I began with an Apple II, graduated to the IIE, Macintosh LCIII and then the G3. Compared to totally rewriting my first novel six times on a typewriter—and partially re-writing by (literal) cutting and pasting countless other times—the computer has been a professional lifesaver.

The other night I awakened in tears from a dreadful dream. Having lost out in the marketplace to its more powerful rival, Macintosh Computers had shut down, taking with it all my back-up and support. I was unusually distressed by the dream. In my experience, dreams that powerful are rarely insignificant. I knew instinctively that the shut-down nightmare was a metaphor for something else. But it wasn’t until a friend suggested that perhaps I was dreaming about my mother that the pieces fell into place.

Of course, I thought. That’s what it’s all about. After considering it a while, I realized that back-up and support aren’t the only things my computer offers me. It is also the keeper of memory. They didn’t call the hard disk a mother board for nothing.

These days, when I think of my invalid mother, I’m overwhelmed by a sharp sense of impending loss. In spite of the fact I am a woman with grown children of her own, I’m aware that when my mother dies, I’ll be an orphan. And with mortality waiting patiently at my door to take my measurements, I’ll be next in line for the final exit.

Although I’m not trapped in a net of continual Mother thoughts, the anxiety about her death percolates just beneath the surface of my consciousness. In a sad but real way, my mother died when she had her stroke. In her place is an astonishing facsimile, one I still talk to and write to and love . . . but one who is only a shadow of the woman she used to be.

Bed-ridden, Mother confuses me with other friends or members of the family, imagining I’m my niece or the woman who cares for her. In spite of her mental meanderings, I live with the firm conviction that my history is still buried in her wounded brain, and that when my mother dies, a significant portion of my past dies with her. She’s the one who remembers my Easter outfits, my best friend Felice in second grade, and the boy who took me to the spring dance in junior high school. She’s the one who remembers the first time I fell off a horse and the last time I played with dolls; the one who allowed me to draw and paint on my bedroom walls until I was seven years old . . . at which point she asked if I was finished decorating my walls and if I’d like to have my room wallpapered. (Yes, I said.) She’s also the one who, throughout my life, offered me the greatest gift a parent can give a child: unconditional love.

I once told a friend of mine that unconditional love was the gift from my parents I treasured most—a gift I made every effort to pass on to my own children, even when the effort required naked, agonizing, self-examination.

My friend was astonished when I told him.

“You actually got that?” he asked. “You mean that no matter what you did or said, your parents still loved you?”

“Of course,” I said, not quite grasping his shock. “Didn’t yours?”

He shook his head. Then, in an answer that felt as if it had been torn from him like adhesive tape ripped off an open wound, “I can’t ever remember anything from my parents being unconditional,” he said. “Everything they ever gave me, from hugs and kisses to a bicycle and a college education, had strings attached.”

That wasn’t the first time I closed my eyes in gratitude for the parents I’d been blessed with, even though my awakening to their specialness hadn’t begun until college. Up to that point, I naively believed that all parents were like mine: people who worked hard at their relationship and whose love for their children was a natural extension of the deep and abiding love they felt for each other.

I hasten to add my parents were far from perfect. But I can say unequivocally that I never once questioned their love for me or my sister. Nor did I question their hovering parental presence that offered me the illusion of invisible protection on long dark nights when I had strayed too far from home. Those gifts were a given.

Over the years, the fundamental knowledge of this invisible support lent me a quiet internal strength in hard times. As I grew older and entered college, stories of mothers to whom iron control was as natural as breathing and fathers to whom beatings were as natural as eating evolved into more complex tales of darkness and dread. And each time I heard of another parental obscenity visited on a child; each time I heard of twisted psyches stealing youth or older hands groping in the dark, I’d close my eyes and say thank you into the ether . . . even though I didn’t believe that anyone or anything was listening. Slowly I became resigned to the fact that unimaginable terrors lurked in the deepest corners of countless family closets, and that there was little I could do to make it better.

After I had children, my awareness of danger increased as my sense of protectiveness grew. Since most of us manage to create monsters in the dark without any parental coaching, I tried to keep my anxieties in check, to allow my sons to grow into adulthood without being plagued by additional pain and fear that I had projected into their lives. I was mostly successful on the big-ticket items, but nevertheless managed to pass on my quota of emotionally expensive frights, from my fear of bees to my strong disapproval of smoking pot . . . until the day a joint saved my son’s life. He’d been hospitalized for eight days with “intractable hiccups.” Nothing worked—no drugs or acupuncture. He hiccupped 24-7.

Then my neighbor brought me an article from The Lancet, the British medical journal that said to forget all the drugs. Marijuana is the cure for intractable hiccoughs.

The doctor read the article, checked my son out of the hospital, and he went home to smoke a joint that I had to walk at least 50 feet to procure.

Hiccups gone, miracle drug worked.

Even with all my conscious effort to love and protect, I’ve reluctantly accepted the fact that the best and most loving parental intentions imaginable can’t shield children from the cruel vicissitudes life.

In spite of my desire to keep my sons safe, I understood it was the natural order of things that they would eventually be forced to name their own demons and fight their own battles. I also knew it was the natural order that I allow them to do so.

With that knowledge reluctantly integrated into my psyche, I let go of what I couldn’t control, compensating by becoming more aware of the gifts at hand—that, beyond the trauma and the chaos my sons endured, they had generous hearts; that they were healthy and bright and creative, that (post adolescence, of course) their behavior was considerate and their sensibilities loving. In the complicated journey toward acceptance, I tried to tuck away the insidious fear that every parent dreads the most: that serious harm, in all its malevolent indifference, would be visited upon one of my children.

Neither I nor my sons escaped unscathed.

When Ben was a senior at Berkeley, he called to tell me that he’d been beaten up by a gang of strangers. It wasn’t a mugging. Nothing was stolen. Reduced to its simplest terms, the attack was vicious and random.

He was walking home from a friend’s apartment at nine o’clock at night. On the way he passed a gang of five guys walking in the opposite direction. As was Ben’s friendly habit, he nodded, said hi and moved on down the sidewalk. Then out of the blue, the gang turned, pounced on him from behind and pummeled him to the ground. As suddenly as it happened, all but one of the assailants fled. And my son, my precious son, was left lying bruised, bloodied and broken on the dirty sidewalk while a brutal stranger looked down at him.

In a totally unpredictable gesture, the remaining thug put out his hand to help Ben up off the ground.

“I figured if I refused his hand, he’d get mad and shoot me in the face. And if I took his hand, he could use that opportunity to beat me up again,” Ben said afterwards.

He opted for life. The guy helped him up, looked at him and said, with perfect Kafkaesque élan, “No hard feelings.”

Then, without another word, he ran down the street to meet his fellow humanoids.

The moment I heard this story, something broke inside me. I knew then that all my caution, all my faithless prayers and invocations into the ether couldn’t protect my children from harm. The only safety I can offer is to love them unconditionally, just as my mother loved me all these years.

I thought about all this after my Macintosh dream, and I realized that it was more than back-up and support—and even unconditional love—I am beginning to miss as my mother fades away. I’m beginning to feel the loss of the vague but comforting sense that, no matter what happens, somebody cares for my well-being; no matter how my future turns out, there is at least one person in this world who’s wishing that my body stay healthy and my life stay safe.

After all my years of living, I understand now that I was blessed in the way few children are. And that for many people with abusive parents, the death of a father or mother signifies secret relief. But I count myself among the fortunate few. And I have never lost sight of that gratitude.

There’s nothing now I can do to maintain a grip on that sense of security. There’s nothing I can say to prevent its fading into a long and endless night. Because as painful as it is to acknowledge, this particular kind of solace dies with the last parent.

Now, the only thing I can do to keep the gift alive is pass it on.

 

THE WOMAN IN THE BOX

Years ago when Venice was more hippie and less posh, there was a woman in who trudged along the Boardwalk every day with her home in tow. Almost five feet long—four feet wide at the top end and three at the bottom—the residential box looked like a chubby coffin mounted on skate wheels. It had a hinged hatch over the narrower portion and a screened window at the other that exposed innumerable possessions stuffed inside.

During the day, the woman dragged her heavy home, adorned with bottles, bags and other paraphernalia for living, where ever she went. At night, she parked her box, climbed inside and went to sleep.

When I saw first the woman during my daily walk along the beach, my immediate thought was, homeless . . . there but for the grace of God go I. At the same time, I suffered a serious claustrophobic shudder, imagining how stultifying—no, terrifying—it would feel to live cooped up in a tiny space like that. Then a strange thought crossed my mind: the reason I was so horrified was because I had lived in a box for years. Mine was portable, too.

The predominant room in my house was reserved for that part of me formed in the cauldron of the forties and fifties: the nice girl. An obedient child of the Silent Generation, I didn’t make trouble and I didn’t make waves. I observed the rules, avoided confrontation, stayed in my female-assigned place and bowed to authority . . . especially male. The ramifications of being raised in this social and gender-determined cloister have had a profound effect on my life.

Throughout my childhood, I was regularly reminded of the limits of my sex. Girls can’t, girls don’t. When I asked why I should bother going to college, my mother told me that a college education would make me a better wife and mother. Nothing about discovering a passion, finding a career or following a dream. Nothing about supporting myself. My husband would, of course, do that for me.

It took the nice girl in me fifty years to ditch this outmoded way of thinking—piece by painful piece. The first step came about when I questioned the sanity of living by the proposition that if you make your bed you must lie in it. I  progressed through a painful phase of introspection and continued through a prolonged period of self-doubt and hand-to-hand combat with my demons. As it turned out, my husband never did support me. And I made every single payment on the house I live in today.

In spite of my life-long efforts to jettison my box and its accouterments, however, I still drag remnants with me. One outstanding moment of partial divestment happened years ago when I finally faced the culmination of what had taken me six months to gather the daring to do: I took two men to Small Claims Court who owed me money for work I’d done over a year earlier—work the two men had praised and used, but never paid for.

Free lance writers are easy targets because they have no power, no corporate clout, behind them. In the past, I’ve let editing debts slide when I couldn’t collect them after a couple of attempts because I was too phobic about confrontation to press further. But by my court date, I’d lived long enough to understand that if I couldn’t take the risk—couldn’t gather the courage to finally stand up and claim what was rightfully mine—I could kiss the ragged edges of my self-respect goodbye.

And so it was with fear and trembling that I sat before the judge as he listened first to my side and then to theirs. I had papers on hand to prove they had contracted for the work I’d done, thus preventing my terrified incoherence from killing my case. In fact, I was so nervous that when the judge finally ruled in favor of the plaintiff, I had to check the sign on my table to make certain I was the one who matched that description.

I try to remember that moment of triumph when I’m preparing to engage yet another enemy looming unnaturally large in my imagination. Because when all is said and done, most victories are accomplished one small skirmish at a time. That is, after all, how I’ve managed to reduce the size of the load I carry.

Every now and then I take inventory of the paraphernalia still stuffed inside my box as I struggle to dump another piece of irrational fear here and a section of unreasonable demands there—sometimes getting speared by splinters and corrosive memories in the process. Minor injuries, it seems, are the price of personal progress.

Looking back on my life, I’m astonished at how long it has taken me to begin the work of breaking free. I’ve become so habituated to accepting my boundaries that it never occurred to me I could push the limits and break out the walls. Like a captured bird who lives a lifetime in a cage, I assumed the bars were an integral component of my natural habitat.

After years of struggle, my box is slowly being reduced to a manageable load. Weary of dragging around the remnants of my emotional past, I often wish I were rid of my burden completely. Besides knowing this is an unrealistic expectation, it could be a benefit that I’m still carting around leftover rubble from my past. I need reminders of what I’m capable of building around my life.

Otherwise, there’s always the possibility that, in some misguided moment, I’d attempt a new structure. It might be more original and even more beautiful than the last—an emotional McMansion built to impress. But the odds are I’d still end up like the woman on the Boardwalk, dragging my box with me day and night because it’s the only home I know.