Growing Pains
What to wear during a growth spurt.
Yesterday on social media, I was tagged in an event addressed to “elders.” This morning when I woke up, I saw I’d been turned into a 50-foot woman. Richard said, “At least you’re standing up straight.” I was on my way to the bathroom, and I was looking out at the horizon rather than at the floor. I could see the horizon through the trees in the backyard because I had lifted off the roof of our house. Richard said, “I hope this change is temporary.” I said, “All change is temporary. Isn’t that what makes it change?” He said, “Suddenly, you’re philosophical.” I said, “Sudenly, you’re Jewish.” It can happen like that, a shift, and what are you going to do? The thin rats survive. The rats that adjust survive.
I wrote to the person who had tagged me in the post, “I’m not ‘an elder.’ I have been misidentified.” She wrote back and said, “Yeah, the category is stupid. The Harris campaign has organized people into age groups.” At that time, I didn’t know the effect this would have on me, being placed in the wrong category, that it would turn me into a woman who could pick up cars as they sped along the roads. I could pick up cars and look through the windscreens into the faces of the drivers. They looked concerned, and I understood their concern because of all the years I’d been a woman on the small side.
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is an independently made movie released in 1958. In 1958, I was twelve, and every transformation in the life of a female human invites some form of misidentification. At twelve, you want to wear high heels. You are holding your shoes with little heels sole to sole, wanting the space between them to be large enough to see the world. In the space you can see through, you see a world you are missing from. Other than the high heels, nothing else looks like you. It looks like sitting at the kitchen table, smoking with a sad expression on your face. Being thought to be “an elder” is the same as being thought to be a twelve-year-old girl. You are missing from the pictures passed around, and while you are missing, you grow to the height of 50 feet.
In the film, Nancy Archer is a wealthy heiress with husband troubles. Nancy drinks. Nancy has been in the loony bin that rich women wind up in when their husbands are scheming to take their money. Like in the movie Gaslight (1944), starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Ingrid Bergman was already a 50-foot woman when she was cast in the role of Paula Alquist, a figure so gullible and drowsy she spends the movie slipping and sliding on the oil oozing from her no-good husband. “Get up, schmendrick,” you call out to her, “You’re Ingrid Bergman, you could eat Charles Boyer in one bite and not need to spit out the bones.” Ingrid can’t hear you, because she’s been miscast in a Hollywood movie.
Out driving one night in the desert, Nancy Archer has a close encounter with a very tall alien. The alien turns her into a giant. Never mind how. Her husband and her doctor keep her sedated. What fun is that? She breaks her chains and sets out to make things right. She finds her unfaithful husband in a bar with his girlfriend, Honey, lifts off the roof (of course), drops a ceiling beam on Honey, and grabs up her nogoodnik husband in her hand. The sheriff shoots at her. Bullets have no effect (of course). It takes an exploding power line to bring her down. At the end, her husband also lies dead in her hand.
I said to Richard, “I’m going for a walk.” He said, “Stay off Warren Street. You’ll squash the historic preservation.” I said, “No worries, I’m going after the people who call other people ‘elders’.” He said, “How will you recognize them?” I said, “By the smug expressions on their faces.” He said, “On your way out, could you please re-attach our roof?” I said, “Sure thing, babe. Do you need anything from the Hannaford’s? I’m going in that direction.” He said, “I could use some Lactaid.” I said, “Hell, I’ll bring the whole dairy case.” He said, “Be careful.” I laughed. He said, “Force of habit.”
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The Killing, a romance
We are streaming “The Killing” (Hulu), starring Mireille Enos as Sarah Linden and Joel Kinnaman as Stephen Holder, a show that aired from 2011 to 2014. Richard is seeing it for the first time. I'm remembering it the way a dream is smoke until it gradually takes shape.
Two detectives meet in the first scene and are almost always together on screen. They have enormous, charming sexual chemistry, and one of the things that allows their relationship to grow is that the man is the less experienced one and has to learn from Linden the magic of applying imagination to a set of clues. What story could they tell? Holder isn’t made smaller in size because his role is not to instruct or correct the woman. His sexiness rays out from his inclination to let Linden show him who she is.
In the first season's murder, there are a lot of red herrings. There would have to be. The original of this show is Danish. The deepest mystery is the way, piece by piece, two separate people become a team. What does each person have to do to earn the other?
Guest Post by Richard Toon
When I was twelve, in preparation for confirmation in the Church of England, I had to attend classes at the village church of St. Peter and St. Paul’s. The reverend Nibblet, vicar of our parish, said to the class, “Ask God what he wants of you.” I’d recently realized I didn’t believe in God, but I was willing to give it a go. I got down on the hassock and said to myself, God, if you want me to do something, please give me a sign. As I did this, a bright shaft of light sliced through the chancery window and Illuminated the spot where I was kneeling. It shone on me like a spotlight, confirming for me I was not a believer. In his account of synchronicity, Carl Jung reported that as he was writing the word beetle, a beetle walked across his paper. He said this wasn’t an example of synchronicity. It was an example of coincidence.
Prompty People
1. I love this prompt from Rebecca Makkai.
Who is the richest person you know in real life? You wind up alone in this person’s bathroom, and no one will miss you for ten minutes. What do you do?
2. “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.” ― Raymond Chandler
Using Chandler’s model of “I needed” and “what I had,” create your own two lists and see where it takes you.
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Loved this post. But rejoice, Laurie! Unless they know you've had your second Saturn Return, they can't classify you as an Elder. And if you are, it is a privilege, as it implies 'the wisdom of the elders.' There's some truth to that...I am 75. Inside, you never feel age as my father told me. He was still a teenager (apparent to me and my mother ;)) even though he was 80. But I think the categories need a change because many are getting to live longer than those in the Celtic dark ages. Maiden Mother Crone (Elder, no longer producing offspring) don't cover it. I like Maiden, Mother, Matriarch and Mystic. The last is when they finally stop coming to you with their problems to solve and you get to do your own true thing with more peace.
I was wondering why I shuddered at "elder." I'm almost 86 and I wake up feeling - not elderly. But old and tired and enthusiastic if the dog is happy and if my writing, which I have time for now and use it, is going well. I'm not wise, and I'm not labelable. I'm also not bored very often. These are the same reasons that keep me from reading "Oldster." (Except, grumpily, if Laurie Stone has a piece in it.) Being my age, and poor, I no longer have to claim I know anything, or say, "I only write for money." I write for me. And read for me. And take a walk and cook dinner . . . and I don't give an aardvark's ass how old you are.