When I Was Good

I've decided I look better in a scarf. A headscarf like the pretty silky coverings I used to wear to church, where I copied my grandparents' every move: bobbed, made the sign of the cross, sat, knelled, sat, bowed my head, followed the index finger underlining the printed passages, intoned the Lord's Prayer and sang hymns, until I knew more or less what and what not to do which included being quiet, not fidgeting and not taking part in the Holy Communion as agreed with my parents.
Sometimes it was a pretence, following, as a lot of it was in Latin, but I don't remember ever feeling bored, not mind numbingly so anyway. I liked the ritual of it, the incense that was swung up, down and over the aisles, and the passing of the collection plate, though I think I enjoyed the car ride to Portsmouth more, because when it wasn't Pop's turn we travelled in a Rolls. A racing green one, though on that my memory might be deceiving me, but the interior was definitely cream leather, and John, the driver and family friend, it has to be said, had a sinful side. Sinful in a Roald Dahlesque kind of way, because other than his humour he was a gentle, noble and benevolent giant who towered over everyone, including his more fragile and soft wife, Mary.
He was the stuff of fairy tales, or at least then that's how it seemed, but then everything to me did. People and places were all enchanted: Pop was a troll, Nan was a good witch, John was a giant, Mary was a fairy godmother, one of my cousins was Pinocchio and another was a boisterous comic book hero...such is an imaginative child's mental imagery, not that they always kept to the roles assigned. John was Bluebeard sometimes, Nan was the old woman in the woods trapping children in Hansel and Gretel, which is not to suggest I feared them, not in the slightest, just that my mind boggled with the fantastical and experienced no difficulties in transferring it to the world I was living in. All was given free rein, although I might not have spoken such fantasies aloud.
I was quiet, as quiet as a mouse. No trouble. There. My parents might have reported different at home: a little madam, possibly. Not naughty, but prone to tantrums and whines. Whereas here I was in my Nan's words: 'A poppet' and 'As good as gold'. And although I'm sure that was true, can I really have been that good all the time?
I liked best of all having them all to myself and integrating myself into their sleepier way of life, that of chores such as grocery shopping, cooking, eating, dropping into friends or friends dropping in and walks to the beach with Sam dog. I was perfectly comfortable being around and with adults, not so much with children who were older, younger or of the same age, especially if play was prolonged, including cousins or the neighbours' offspring. Adults were so much more interesting.
I still think that today. The truism I told myself is the same too: those I find intriguing are usually at least a decade, no make that two or three, older than me, unless there's a rare quality about them or something in their background from which I can learn. The problem is as I get older I'll run out of candidates...those whose company I enjoy, learn from and look up to; there's no way I ever want a little or young person to consider me in the same manner, but not due, as you might think, to my awkwardness around children, but because I don't think I'd have anything useful (or of note) to impart. And isn't it strange that you can remember being a child and yet you don't know how to converse with one when you've grown? I never get it right; either I find myself talking down or talking way above them, or talking of something far beyond anything they might have experienced or are likely to because that time has gone and they're not at the stage to be interested. Often too, they have experiences I don't, and I'm glad I haven't had.
Yet my own childish insight into the adult world started in such a way. I wasn't treated as according to my stature which is to say I was included and consulted, and my questions, though annoying, were answered. I didn't always understand them nor were they always the answers I wanted or hoped for, but then neither are those we receive from God or the Cosmos.

Picture credit: Fall of Rebel Angels, Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Carping Cap

The feminist hat is going on. And it's not a top hat or a bonnet or some other floppy affair, it's a flat cap like my dad wears, and has always worn, but don't stereotype him, or through him me, because he's not a farmer or a country dweller. He doesn't live on a manor, he doesn't shoot game, he doesn't fish, he doesn't drive a mud-splashed land-rover to transport his good lady wife and two bouncy retrievers, although he does have a wife (my mum) and an elderly Staffordshire bull terrier, both of whom usually travel in the back of their Honda Estate. So if anything he's a glorified cabbie, who's received little thanks for the service he's provided over the years. But then, good ol' Ma provides all the meals and cups of tea so they're even. No, there are no butlers, cooks or housekeepers; just a three-bed semi, where everyday chores needed to be done are done by themselves.
Got that. Right, I can proceed. So, the flat cap I earlier referred to has a plaid pattern (and before you make the assumption: we're not Scottish) and is at present perched on my head. Perched, because it's borrowed and well, my head must be slightly bigger than its owner's which means, due to slippage, it resembles a beret, except without what I call the apple stalk and the classic style of the French. Throw it on, worry later (or not at all) is my fashion motto; I wish it was my motto for life.
Conservative dresser, no. Flamboyant, no. Snappy, definitely not. Trendsetter, are you joking! Comfy, yes. Colour coordinated, mostly, and with no all-black or all-white ensembles, or heels. It's low or flats; a pair that doesn't say look-at-me, look-at-me and which connect instead with surfaces softly. Unobtrusively going about my business, though I don't really have a business to be going about and I'm not entirely convinced I'm as unnoticeable as I like to imagine, but if I was I'd be the perfect observer.
Though I am, if I say so myself, quite good at taking things in that other people miss, but that's generally because I don't have my face to the phone and because I guess I was taught to be aware: aware of my place in my surroundings and aware of those around me. Or maybe that wasn't taught but developed out of self-consciousness, which apart from the inferior yet nonchalant fashion sense is still (painfully) with me.
Anyhow, I really should get on with it: the carping I intended to do. That's what the flat cap is worn for, which although it should weigh no more than a feather is as heavy as a palm-sized beanbag. Ah, school days. Why am I saying 'Ah'? What was 'Ah' about stupid P.E.? I hated the unfolded apparatus with ladders and climbing ropes, and laid-out obstacle courses with hoops, nets and balls. The only sport I was okay at was running and we didn't do a lot of that, not pure running; there was always other props involved like a bat or a ball, and when you don't have an accurate eye or understand where to throw if by fluke you catch a hit it's never going to be an easy ride, no matter how much outside training you do in the back garden with your dad.
This cap, nice though it is, makes me nit-pick forgotten issues and avoid bigger, far less trivial subject matters, as it's easier to find fault retrogressively since there's nothing you can now do to change it. There's also something stopping me from broaching this sensitive topic even with this feminist cap on because it will seem like, no, it will definitely come across as a rant against man, of the male kind, not man as in the human race. But since I've started, I must try to give you a sense of what this cap would have liked me to voice, and voiced sooner:
Why do some men, plurally and generally, feel its within their rights to in some way target women, as if 'Woman' is a legal tender that passes between hands, many hands. A grope, a kiss without consent. A vicious assault either because the woman already was or to make her vulnerable. When does it end? Where does it stop? Because they doesn't even have to be an actual act, but unless there is one there's very little any woman (or anyone) can do about it. That kind of man has to show what he could be capable of, in spite of already engendering fear. Why are some men s.o.bs? And when will a woman's sobs be heard?

Picture credit: Title unknown, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Them's the Rules

No to ridiculously cumbersome hardbacks. No to responsibility being foisted upon me though it usually is because 'capable' often seems my middle name, and which I then get on with instead of rebelling which I might do if I was asked, as there's really no telling whether my mood will be mild or grudging.
No to obsession and obsessive, often unbidden, thoughts; try stopping them, particularly when they're your friends as well as your enemies. Books fall into that category, as do issues that cannot be resolved or that I don't have ultimate control over. And these issues may be positive indeed, just too many all at once and dependent on other people as well as your own feelings. Good things can bring uncertainties, periods of instability and upsurges of cortisol. Good stress is exhausting and real, although it could also be it's just a perception of mine.
The Schizoid Type, in the split-pea soup, though I'm not, I don't think, but then neither do I think there's anything freakish about it, not if that's how you're made and to live with a split is manageable. What other choice do you have? And don't we all do that to some degree: live with a split, or in danger of splitting, personality?
I came across the split-pea definition in a novel by Saul Bellow, though it's probably uncool of me to like and not be offended by it, as is my use of 'uncool'. An inoffensive yet tired, nearly expired expression. I'm an eighties child, only really I should have been born way, way, way before that, so what did you expect? That I would condemn it, follow the spoken and unspoken consensus? In a word: NO.
I willingly let go all the rules I'm supposed to follow to be socially attuned and make my own, as I see befitting me. That's my prerogative, isn't it? I uphold all the civilised ones that polite society used to maintain, those largely forgotten by others, such as saying 'please' and 'thank you', holding doors open and avoiding talking with my mouth full.
Tune out, drop out is my mantra. Don't ride the modern bullet train. Slow down, calm down, stand still. Chill off the grid. Switch off that mobile device, lock it away, shove it somewhere you can't see it. No, I'm not being crude, I could be but that would destroy this polite argument, and disappoint my late grandparents if they happen to be looking down on me, if they still happen to be interested in what's going on down here. They'll probably glad they departed when they did, although might wish it had been under better circumstances. Maybe they no longer care. But that's a different argument that has nothing do with being brought up a nice young man or a nice young lady, and remaining so as you age.
Religion does not enter into this, or it shouldn't, although we do worship modernisms as if they were gods. As well as defer to a god, through a prayer, through a plead, in moments of need. Raise our eyes to an all-powerful figure shielded from view or petition the almighty universe to intervene.
These attainments that are so-desired are nothing. There's always someone or a system to outdo. Would we be happier, would we lack purpose, if there wasn't I wonder? The obsession (to outdo and to grasp) exhausts the man, which if memory serves (a human one with the ability to make errors) one of Saul Bellow's characters also said in a spiritual conversation with an alter ego, or maybe it was a guy friend, though in, I think, a slightly different context because the time frame would have been, if I'm correct, 1940s Chicago when there was more to lose and there wasn't so much to have.
There's nothing wrong-headed with being, what was described and maybe still is (I wouldn't know), a deadbeat. But you object: it's a derogative term. No. That's just how you've been led to think of it. Because couldn't it be someone who's doing their own thing, going their own way, at their own pace and not doing what's expected? Yes, you may think they're wasting time, delaying the necessary – those essential requirements to get on and be a contributing member of society. Isn't that so? That's your world view. Yet they could come good if left.
What's the rush? Time may appear speeded up but you can't rush growth.

Picture credit: Man Lying on a Wall, 1957, L S Lowry

An Underlining Finger

And breathe. That's what most people think of or say when they need a moment to calm themselves; not I. I'm more likely to mutter, “And back to Kafka” which obviously takes longer to say yet has the same effect, that of a very necessary pause to regain control. Of yourself. Of the situation.
You're wondering whether it works aren't you? as, well, Kafka doesn't naturally spring to mind at the first sign of stress or disturbance. That may be true (for you), but don't knock it till you try it I say, though you may feel more inclined if you're vaguely familiar with the man and his works. If you are familiar with him you may be thinking: he's never struck me as all that calming. Try; go back to Kafka.
Actually, I haven't known him all that long and yet wish I'd known him longer. I knew of him but didn't think he was for me until approximately three years ago; what a fool I felt when I discovered he was!
What a waste of years! But maybe I wasn't ready...
Why hadn't I listened to prods? My uncle being one, a baptismal font of literature – the unusual and the classic, among others unrelated to me, some of whom don't even know I exist on the page or in person. Though I realise now, a few seconds after I've said it and put down it here, that it's wrong to state I hadn't listened; I just hadn't acted, or to be more accurate still had been unable to, because I have non-negotiable conditions with typesets. Get a Kindle, NO! That's advice I WILL ignore forever and a day, and the very worst kind to give to someone who likes tangible objects. A subject I've touched on before, and could touch on again but I won't.
So, returning to my point, as yet only partially made, Kafka was systematically dismissed because I couldn't find a translation of his works in a copy that suited my exacting eye. The print was too small; it was too dense, like being lost in a forest and made dizzy by trees that all look alike and stand too closely together. Entertaining the thought of engulfing myself in such pages was exhausting, and therefore the idea quickly departed like a ladybird for home who believes its house is on fire.
I eventually gave in with Amerika/The Man Who Disappeared, and rattled through it, mostly with a finger underlining the words as I read to keep my place and my focus. The transition to enjoying Kafka, as others have found, occurred, yet though I wanted more I didn't want to repeat that exact same experience. It was too taxing and lessened the immersion one usually feels when aligned with somebody else's creation. I had been unable to totally abandon myself to it as I would have liked and as I know would have happened had my eyes being doing all the work and not been combined with finger-reading. That finger is indispensable when you're learning, but can and should be dispensed with when you're a seasoned pro, because it does if you hit a sweet spot tend to speed reading up, almost akin to being a passenger on a fast train whizzing through countrified stations, and yet you don't (as a passenger or a reader) want to reach your end destination quicker.
All good things, particularly in the reading of stories, must however come to that stop, where you'll alight, feeling wiser, amused or perplexed, your heart plummeting until it feels as though it's in the soles of your feet and not in your chest where it should be. And as I've alluded to where Kafka's concerned that's certainly true, and yet with much regret I had to turn my back on him.
My opposition to tight print was such that it made him inaccessible, then last year a suitable text magically became available. This collection of his works had as large a typeface as feasible with space around the stories so they could breathe, just as Kafka had at one time expressed. The reading of it for that alone was sublime, while the pieces it contained were acute and surprising. And Metamorphosis, I've now had the good fortune to realise, is genius; but sadly, The Trial and The Castle I'll still have to forego because in their cases not even an underlining finger will suffice.

Picture credit: The Railway Platform, L S Lowry