Nostalgia

Never let go of anything.

Visita Inesperada (1953) by Remedios Varo

My visiting friend left a week ago and I’ve gone off the JG diet, so I’m eating more leafy green things and getting more exercise and more sleep. But in the first days after she left, I just felt sluggish and kept eating lots of cheese and there was a “Creature from the Black Lagoon”-shaped hole in my life. Adding insult to injury, one of my closest friends left town yesterday to tour with an internationally beloved singer-songwriter, and he sent me photos of himself bowling in Los Angeles last night.

So this morning I stared at an image of a huge bowling alley and reflected on the enormous commercial spaces of LA, a thing you don’t think you’ll ever miss until you move somewhere smaller and leafier that has no shiny, well-lit hangars packed with hot people in tight clothing. Then I read this post by my friend, who I’ll be referring to as The Creature from now on thanks to her implication that I’m the kind of person who adorns her house with Live Laugh Love signs. The post is about my collection of Starbucks adult sippy cups, which I accumulated feverishly during the Golden Age of Starbucks Adult Sippy Cups (2015-2019), which coincided conveniently with my children reaching the ages of six and eight and refusing to eat any vegetables that weren’t blended up in a smoothie, hand-delivered in a big sippy cup first thing in the morning.

By around 2019, my kids forbade me from buying further Adult Sippy Cups because every time I encountered a new color I loved, I wanted it. But these days, all of the ASCs are ombre and covered in nubs and I just want plain, perfect colors with a transparent matching circular lid that fits tightly into the top.

In her post The Creature fails to mention that I’ve graduated to a 32-ounce white, strawless Yeti that keeps water cold all day long, a hydration delivery system that I strongly recommend in spite of its tendency to make your hands feel weak and arthritic due to the heft of the receptacle.

This Week In Women and Luxury #3

I’m not mad at The Creature or anything. I like that she’s comfortable insulting me in her posts. Mutual insults are the foundation of any solid friendship. If you can’t mock your friend’s taste and habits, what kind of intimacy can you possibly foster? That would be like writing an entire book about yourself and not making fun of yourself or anyone else — like say, your husband. I don’t read those books. Dramatic writing requires conflict, and good writing requires a sense of humor. No one says so but that’s because so many writers are self-serious bores.

The Creature is not, which is why I can call her The Creature and also why I gave her my treasured 24-ounce rose gold ASP as a parting gift.

I love this part of her post about being raised without indulgences:

“Growing up, I was obsessed with things families did that my family didn’t do. We didn’t go to Disney World. I asked my parents once if we could and my dad looked up from either a legal pad or The Berkshire Eagle or a Molson Ale and said “We are never going to Disney World” and then turned back to same. My brother and I didn’t drink milk. We didn’t have cable or wash our cars or replace them when they were old. Our towels, older than our cars, weren’t fluffy. What else. We didn’t use fabric softener or dryer sheets or bottled salad dressing, there was only one dressing, my grandmother’s, ½ oil, ½ red wine vinegar, one clove of garlic and one teaspoon dry mustard. That was it. There were no Kleenex or nice hand towels next to the sink. You just dried your hands on whatever towel was there and when you were sick you got a roll of toilet paper. In 1984 or so my parents started using balsamic vinegar and we had to get cable eventually because the TV stopped working without it.”

I also grew up in a house without cable or soft towels or Kleenex. My mother made the Good Seasons powdered dressing that you mixed with oil and red wine vinegar – maybe that’s a Chicago thing, or maybe she picked up that habit in the South. The Creature grew up in the Northeast, which I think is apparent in details like “one teaspoon of dry mustard.” There are some implications of a kind of ascetic middle-class snobbiness here, which my mom shared. (My dad’s parents were working class and I don’t think he had strong feelings about such choices, beyond the distastefulness of wasting money, which as an economist he couldn’t tolerate.) Not using dryer sheets or fabric softener, for example? These things were for suckers in my mom’s opinion. Anything scented or infused with lotion was also foolish.

A few years ago, I told my mom I wanted to buy her a moisturizer I’d been using because it smelled just like fresh honeysuckle and cucumber. It didn’t smell artificially scented in other words, it smelled like real plants and blossoms.

“What, cold cream?” she asked incredulously, like some unfrozen housewife from 1961. “I hate cold cream.”

We also didn’t have AC (in North Carolina!) and we dried our clothes on clothes lines outside, until they were all starchy and stiff and covered in pine needles. We did go to Disney World once or twice but only because my aunts and uncles and cousins were going. My parents avoided enormous commercial spaces, which was one reason I cherished the tacky excesses of Los Angeles for so many years, and why I accumulated so many adult sippy cups. Having kids activated some rebellious core self who was determined to live in air-conditioned comfort and watch frivolous entertainments on a gigantic TV and throw pool parties featuring fruity booze concoctions and pop music, with kids dragging wet towels through the house and my brother’s dog barking at everyone splashing around in the pool, convinced that they were all struggling not to drown.

It's a testament to how often I change my mind and turn against my previous notions of how to live that I moved from San Francisco (precious, curated, hip) to Los Angeles (extra large, extra shiny, messily mainstream) and back to a college town (small, precious, not that hip) and now I spend a lot of time weeding and throwing pottery (not even joking) and drinking quirky college town margaritas bastardized with mezcal and Aperol. The fact is that they’re delicious. My kids still have an appetite for boba, cultivated in LA, so we go to the local boba place in Chapel Hill that’s even better than the boba places in the suburban corridors of LA because they don’t use fake flavors and corn syrup so everything tastes leafy and blossomy and good.

I might spend far too much of my time pulling weeds instead of spraying Round Up but I will never be a purist. I grew up among purists and let me just say that it’s a punitive lifestyle that doesn’t agree with me. I mean, I do love some dimensions of a punitive lifestyle, don’t get me wrong. I’m attracted to the suffering in any picture. If you’re mooning over someone or someone is about to dump you, I will not let that shit go. I want to savor the torment with you. If you have an impossible task in front of you that feels like it will never end – maybe you’re writing a book or you just got married – I’m down to discuss exactly how horrific things are bound to get. People sometimes think I’m trying to fuck with them, that’s how much I love talking about the punishments of mundane life. If you’re in hell, I’m more interested. If you’re depressed, you probably don’t want to talk about it, but I do.

What’s chafing is that I will savor the suffering part but I won’t agree that it means life is bad. I can accept your interpretation but I can’t share it. As long as you don’t blame yourself for your suffering, as long as you can tell yourself the story (real or fabricated) that your suffering is righteous and noble or at least faintly worthwhile, you can learn to enjoy it. This includes the suffering and sacrifices inherent to having kids. The idea that raising kids is all about light and laughter (see also: the image my friend used in her post) is so ludicrous. If you can’t loudly wallow in the abject misery of having to whip up a meal for your offspring every single night of the week, why even have kids? One of my favorite parts of parenting is lying on the ground, refusing to make dinner again. These are the trenches where your traumatic bond to your spouse is solidified.

But most of all, I love suffering followed by indulgence. Leafy greens, then JG diet. Run four miles, then lie on your back reading something frivolous. Do all of the laundry, then ignore your kids to play Candy Crush. Sweat it out in the buggy heat and then lounge by a pool sipping a cold beer.

Anyway I miss The Creature. We’ve been in reasonably close touch since we met a few years ago but we’ve never spent more than a day or two together, so a whole week together reminded me what it’s like to spend time with someone who isn’t just funny but does the work of entertaining you — diving into good subjects, trying out stupid voices, becoming dramatic about small things, dancing in the kitchen, and leaping into conversations with your favorite friends to see if they might be her favorite friends, too.

I also leap right into new friendships, but I don’t entertain as much. I entertain myself and my kids and my husband, but I don’t take that shit on the road anymore. That used to be my whole thing. I was the youngest child who provided much-needed comic relief in my family. I was voted Class Clown and Best Sense of Humor my senior year in high school. Telling jokes meant proving my worth, which is probably why I turned against it eventually.

Turning against the things you once loved: Very anxious-avoidant. Very Gemini. Very cupboard full of sippy cups. It’s unwise. Stay in love with everything instead. Don’t withdraw, don’t grow dismissive, don’t tell bad stories about who you once were, a person you don’t recognize anymore because now you’re different. Don’t put anyone or anything behind you. Fall in love and stay in love forever. No shame, no regret.

That’s my new thing. But I’m sure I’ll turn against it eventually.

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