Hawley Roddick's Open Salon Blog

Reality Is Way Overrated

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:11:32 -0500

T.S. Eliot wrote in two of his works that "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

I'm with T.S. on that one. Consensus reality can be unrewarding. Why spend a lot of time there?

On my previous blog posting, emma peel commented, "I am amazed that you had the presence of mind to be able to write a novel in such a state of anxiety."

She was referring to my writing my first published novel, Together (St. Martin's Press & Pocket Books; out of print for now), which I began during eight weeks of radiation treatment for breast cancer. Writing that blog, I'd wondered if anyone would comment on the curious fact of the novel, because writing it under those circumstances might suggest I don't live totally in the moment.

After being diagnosed with early breast cancer, I told only my husband and my parents. Not a single friend knew. As a result, no friend treated me as if I had cancer and so, most of the time, I experienced myself as cancer free. Much better than living 24/7 with the reality.

As for the Together, writing it allowed me to live in the story I was imagining about smart, attractive, adulterous couples in New York — rather than on the busses, trains, and taxis, and in the waiting rooms, I frequented because I had a potentially lethal disease. Even on the radiation table, instead of being there in my mind, I visualized my white cells healthily multiplying. Why? Because my (excellent) doctor had said my white blood cell count would sink low during radiation therapy. Who was he to tell me what my body would do? I'd show him. And I did. In a follow-up appointment after radiation was completed, he frowned and shook his head as he said, "I can't understand why your white cell count is so high."

Aha! I tactfully kept silent but was elated that my imaginative reality had trumped his scientific one.

Imagination in waking reality is, of course, complemented by dream reality, which can be even more satisfying. When I was about seven, I asked my mother how we knew the world I was talking to her in was more real than the dream world I'd so recently inhabited. Her answer, "Because we do," was unconvincing.

While I remember only three nightmares while asleep (two in childhood and one recently), I've had many more nightmares (daymares?) in waking reality. For instance, a robber pointed a butcher's knife (that I'd watched my husband sharpen to a razor's edge before making chicken salad earlier that day) just above my heart to let me know I should not scream for help. I was too terrified to whisper, never mind scream.

Then there was the phone call in sixth grade to tell me that Billy Nuveen, a boy who had given me a terrific rush at the recent Christmas dancing-school party, was dead. The explanation about how he died raised more questions than it answered, so the tragedy allowed no sense of closure, and I still sometimes wonder if we might have married — dreamer that I am.

During my year in Rome, I almost died of pneumonia. I was so miserable and in so much pain that one night, my temperature having held for days at 104 degrees, I stared into the bathroom mirror and, weeping, begged aloud, "God, please make me better or let me die. I can't stand this." I lived just down the Tiber from the Vatican, so I figured if there were a God, S/He was as likely to hear me there as anywhere.

I awoke a few hours later on the healthy side of a medical crisis, feeling fine if weak, with a temperature of 94 degrees. That nightmare was over.

Another non-dream nightmare consisted of horrendous, incapacitating anxiety attacks that occurred over more than a dozen years before they were diagnosed as a reaction to eating shellfish from polluted waters. I stopped eating shellfish until the ocean was cleaner and have had no more anxiety attacks.

I survive waking nightmares because my imagination can free me from consensus reality.

Denial is my other favorite coping mechanism. It worked for the 22 years I was married to a man I thought was absolutely faithful to me the whole time. Only after we split up and he rather casually referred to his countless infidelities did I realize I shouldn't have beat myself up whenever I wondered if he were screwing around. If I'd known the truth earlier, I'd have left him then instead of waiting until our son was in college. And what kind of life would that have been? Since I may have known at some level that my husband was betraying me year after year, perhaps I didn't let the knowledge rise to consciousness because I didn't want to be bothered dealing with it when I quite enjoyed my life in denial.

Surely I'm not alone. Don't lots of us often avoid what we laughingly call reality? A story I heard Ram Dass tell during a lecture in Santa Rosa, California, is a case in point. He stood on the stage in a long white robe and sandals as he told us that he'd run into an old Harvard classmate who had known him as Richard Alpert. Ram Dass was dressed at that meeting as he was when he told us the story. After the two men chatted for a while, the friend clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Great to see you, Dick. You haven't changed at all!"

Denial and imagination are precious resources. If Ram Dass' "be here now" doesn't fit your mindset and setting, just the right dosage of either or both may do the trick. (For anyone too young to remember: Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert directed followers to take LSD only when the set, setting, and dosage were right.)

If I'd Waited till 50 for a Mammogram, I'd Be Dead

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:11:24 -0500

"Most women should start regular breast cancer screening at age 50, not 40, according to new guidelines released Monday by an influential group that provides guidance to doctors, insurance companies and policy makers." (November 16^thNew York Times)

The new guidelines must be valid, because we all know how trustworthy insurance companies and policy makers are when it comes to looking out for our health and to telling doctors how to treat us.

Nevertheless, if I hadn't had a mammogram at 40, I'd have died of breast cancer. I only had a mammogram because I had a lump in my breast, but if the guidelines had been for women to have mammograms at least every other year beginning at 40, the cancer could have been found even if I hadn't discovered a lump. Here is my story, which I tell in the hope that it helps other women make decisions about mammograms that serve their own best interests.

We were vacationing on Captiva Island in Florida with our young son, when my husband noticed a lump in my right breast. I put worry on a back burner where it simmered quietly until we got home to Manhattan, and my doctor sent me to Sloan Kettering for mammograms. Relieved to learn there that the lump looked harmless, I left and was halfway down the block when I heard my name called. I turned to see the doctor who had read my mammograms running full tilt, waving to catch my attention. "Come back!" she yelled.

Frightened, I returned to her office, where she explained that she had found a tiny cluster of calcification flakes in my left breast that could be symptomatic of cancer and that should be biopsied. Never underestimate the value of a topnotch mammogram reader.

The doctor who performed the surgery biopsied the tissue while I was still on the operating table and —discovering cancer cells—closed the incision so that my nipple and breast were needlessly disfigured. In a follow-up visit at his Fifth Avenue office, he told me he mutilated my breast because it must be removed and he didn't want me to consider radiation. I had a strong impression that he was drunk. After I left his office I mentioned this to a physician friend and added, "But I didn't smell alcohol."

My friend said, "Vodka is the doctor's drink because it can't be smelled on the breath."

Exploring my options, I called Ron, my brother-in-law at the University of Washington in Seattle, and asked him to consult a physician there for whom he'd worked as a graduate student. I said my New York surgeon insisted that I must have a mastectomy, but given that the cancer was caught very early, and there were just a few cells, not a lump, surgery seemed extreme.

Ron's M.D. colleague said, "Tell your sister-in-law to get out of New York. It's a city of cutters. She should talk to Oliver Cope at Massachusetts General in Boston and Leonard Prosnitz at Yale New Haven about radiation."

I did. But first I went to the hospital where the biopsy had been performed to collect the evidence. The nurse who handed me one slide said, "Hang on to it. It's all they could get."

One slide.

First I consulted Dr. Cope, who had pioneered radiation as an alternative to mastectomy and should be honored in any history of women's health. But his enthusiasm for his work had unintended consequences, brief but intense, for me. When he learned I'm a Wellesley graduate, his intellectual enthusiasm overcame his physician's reserve, and he said with excitement, "You'll be fine unless you have [X — I can't recall the Latin word he used]."

Alarmed, I asked, "And if I have X?"

"You'll be dead in a few weeks," he said cheerfully, providing intellectual information without considering what impact this might have on me beyond a Wellesley grad's thirst for knowledge.

"When will we know if I have X?" I asked faintly.

"As soon as the man in the lab reads your slide. Come back to my office in an hour."

I wandered aimlessly around the first-floor public areas of Mass. General trying to get my mind around the nightmare that I might leave my seven-year old son motherless. When I finally returned, after what seemed like several decades, to Dr. Cope's office, he said I had a few cancer cells that might or might not have leaked through the cell walls and that I definitely didn't need the mastectomy my Manhattan surgeon was so hot to perform. He also told me that after radiation, plastic surgery would repair the sadistically disfigured breast. Even though I could have radiation at Mass. General, he advised me to consult Dr. Prosnitiz, because New Haven is closer to New York than Boston.

New Haven was indeed more convenient than Boston for radiation three times a week for eight weeks, but it wasn't a slam-dunk: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I (a) put my son on a bus that took him to summer day-camp in Riverdale, (b) took a bus to Grand Central, (c) caught a train to New Haven, where I (d) took a cab to the hospital. After radiation, I reversed the routine, arriving home in time to meet the camp bus that dropped off my son.

While in transit, I distracted myself from anxiety over having breast cancer by starting to write a novel on a yellow legal pad, which passed the time on the train and in the hospital waiting room. That was my first novel, Together, (by Ellen Roddick, which is what I was called then). It was published by St. Martin's Press. In the photograph by Quincy Howe, Jr., on the book jacket, I show cleavage.

Twitter Alphabet in Playfully Tweeted Short Stories

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:07:50 -0400

This was fun to write. Is it fun to read?

An acrimonious alligator ate Alice's astonished attorney as an appetizer & afterward acted awkward & anxious about ablating an ace asset.

Bold bankers built boomer billionaires’ blessed budgets, but behemoth battering busted balances before beautiful bequests became bountiful.

Clever crooked cops (craftily conferring, creeping cautiously) coolly collected copious cannabis cash covertly, carefully closing cases.

Depression doomed demented Deedee’s darkling dreams during delirious dipsomaniac days delivering dahlias — drifting, distracted, dazed.

Every elegant entertainment elicited enthusiastic, energetic emails earnestly expressing erstwhile Episcopalians’ eerily elemental ecstasy.

Frances’ fabulous fractals fried Francis’ fractious forebrain, finally fogging forever friendship’s fragile foundation, finishing frostily.

Glimpsing glamorous Gloria’s gorgeous gams gave guileless, gaping geeks greater gumption Googling glamorous guiltless-gilt gal gifts.

Hapless Harlequin hazarded honorable happenstances—hindered horrendously, hopelessly hopeful, hilariously humorous, handily handsome.

Images illustrating influential Indian iconography initiate infinite intellectual interpretive identification including intimate iconology.

Juries jailing junkies jumpstart jackass jokester justice, jabbing Janus, justifying jerks, jackhammering jurisprudence, jamming jails.

Kitty, kindly kissing Kat’s kitten (Kinky Knight), kept knitting keepsakes; keen Kat, kneeling, knifed kindling; Kinky Knight keened.

Luscious lovers leave luster lingering lastingly, lamenting little, lacking loss, letting limits lessen, liltingly luring luck. Lucid.

Many miracles make marginal martyrs meekly melt; meanwhile, mistily morbid men meander meaninglessly; most march mindlessly, missing much.

Naked navigator’s noontime nosh: naan, nachos, napoleons, nasi-goreng, nasturtiums, nectarines, noodles newberg, Newtons, nougat, ‘n’ nuts.

Optimizing options, oligarchs overlook optimism, offering omnibus opinions on official occurrences, operating ostentatiously or opting out.

Personifying plausibility, prominent people promenaded—passing perilously perceptive pedants pondering preferable paradigms purposefully.

“Quite quarrelsome quarterbacks quasi-quit qat* querulously,” quipped quintuplet Quentin, quashing queasy, quarrelsome questioners quickly.

(*Cross between opium and cocaine.)

Randy rockers race rapturously riverward relishing random radiant revelations released rarely, realized reluctantly, righteously recorded.

Seven silk scarves swirling, sweet Suzette (sizzling seductively) straddled salacious sailor Samson, saying simply, “So, sugar, shall …?”

Troubleshooting time travel (tantamount to transcendental tourism) takes tedious testing trials, tentative tasks, tribulation, tall tales.

Usually upset, unctuous Uncle Underwood ululates under umbrellas uncannily, utterly usurping ultimate utopias, undercutting understanding.

Voluptuous villains’ vast, venomous victories verify viciously virulent visions vested vexingly. Vindication vanishes. Vodka vaporizes.

What’s with wakeful, warm-blooded wanderers wishing whirling wizards would win while watchful WASPs, whose waistlines wither, wane woefully?

Xanaxy xenophobic xylophonists: xerographed Xana’s xenoliths; x-rayed Xerxes’ xylem/xerophytes; x-rated Xanadu’s Xmas xebecs.

Yes, yesteryear’s yentas yakkety-yaked; youthful yokels yoked; Yugoslavian yogis yearned; yo-yo yachtsmen yelled; yardbird yeggs yodeled.

Zonked zany zealot zoologists’ zaftig zitherist’s zillion zebras zipped, zoomed, zigzagged zestfully. Zowie zoogeography!

Pedofilia - from Michael Jackson to Etan Patz

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:06:47 -0400

During Michael Jackson’s trial for pedophilia in 2003, I lived in Santa Barbara, and Neverland Ranch was in Santa Barbara County, so the trial was treated as a local event. We Santa Barbarians were privileged to varying versions of the Inside Story. Example: “My best friend’s hair stylist told her that one of his clients overheard the sister of a guy who cuts grass at Neverland say on her cell phone at Trader Joe’s that Jackson did sexually abuse that boy.”

Based on such solid evidence as well as on media stories from actual reporters actually covering the case, people I knew thought Jackson was guilty. After all, the pervert charges first surfaced in 1993 and never quite went away. And, to be frank, Neverland and Jackson, however beloved by many, were considered by more-or-less neutral observers to be just too weird for him not to be guilty of something illegally weird.

But the other day I raised the subject with the thirty-something who was cleaning my home. Let’s call her Pam. Pam said Jackson was such a beloved icon of her youth that she was convinced of his innocence. She said he just loved children, boys and girls alike, and innocently. The media indicate that she is not alone. Many, including Jackson’s friend Elizabeth Taylor, have voiced similar convictions over the years.

Pam went on to tell me that for three years her former fiancé’s father had sexually abused her daughter. When Pam found out she took the bastard to court. Attorneys and social workers believed her daughter but didn’t have enough evidence to convict the pedophile whom the girl had called Grandpa.

I have to wonder if one reason people believe Jackson was innocent (beside the fact that his guilt was not established) is that children are sexually abused by adults often enough that we want to believe our favorite stars are better than the perverts who pass as normal all around us but surface often and close enough to make us nervous.

Pedophiles (whether or not they are in their victim’s family) can, after all, be good at hiding in plain sight. A friend told me her father had raped her repeatedly when she was a child. During that same time, he was head of the ethics committee of a prominent association of professional psychotherapists. He was a pillar of his local and professional communities. My friend said people would rather think she and her mother were lying about him than believe that he was doing what he was doing to his little girl.

Unfortunately, just as people don't necessarily recognize pedophiles, pedophiles don’t necessarily recognize that they are dangerous. The mind numbs as Michael Jackson asks with wistful self-justification, on camera, “What’s wrong with sharing a bed” (with a boy)? And the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) actually advocates legalizing sex between men and boys. I even saw a sickening report on television about men who exchange stories about their repeated rape of their own daughters. They seem to think they are, as responsible parents, teaching their girls how to love.

Recently a client I was interviewing in connection with his memoir, which I am writing, said that as children, he and his little sister went to Saturday afternoon movies. There was a bald man who habitually attended, too, and who wanted to sit next to his sister and massage her thigh during the movie. They told their parents, who were too innocent to understand the implication. The kids coped by changing seats whenever the pervert sat next to the sister.

My client's story reminded me of the man who sat next to me at a Saturday afternoon movie in the seemingly secure Manhattan suburb where we lived. I was nine or ten. He massaged my thigh throughout the film. Later at home, I told my mother, who asked if I’d reported him to the theater manager. I said, “No. I thought that would be rude.” She said it is smart not rude to report dangerous people; and it is very important.

Still earlier, when I was six, I was walking to school when a woman stopped her car on the shady suburban street, rolled down her window, and tried to persuade me to get into the car. I said no. She persisted, offering to drive me to school. I said no. She offered me candy. Aha! Just the ploy we children had been warned about, even in that safe town. Recognizing the script, I repeated firmly the one-word line I’d been taught: “No.” Then, improvising, I added, “I’m almost there. I’ll walk.”

I still wonder what her life story was and what my life story would have been if I’d gone with her. She seemed both plaintive and dangerous. While women pedophiles are much less common than male pedophiles, they do exist. I'll never know if she was one or was instead a kidnapper with other twisted motivations or ...

Yet another time, my friend Corny (for Cornelia) and I were sitting on a bench by a river in a woods where we were never allowed to be without a grownup, because dangerous men might follow the river up from the city. We went there without an adult all the time, which is why I was perhaps more familiar with the sight of male masturbation and orgasm than many other gently raised little girls. (Me at nine to my mother: “What’s that white stuff than comes out of a man’s penis when he pulls on it?” Poor mother later said she sometimes thought I’d never live to grow up.)

Anyway, a scruffy looking man on a bike stopped, leaned his bike against the bench where Corny and I sat, and told us we should rub each other “like this:” on each of us, he rubbed the central spot just above the area where our tightly crossed legs met. I was scared but didn’t want to be rude or provoke this stranger. My mind raced. I said, “I just remembered. I have to go home right now and practice the piano.” Corny said, “Me, too,” and we fled.

One thing that probably hasn’t changed from my mother’s generation to mine to my son’s is the ghastly fear that our children might fall into the hands of a pedophile despite our best efforts to keep them safe. The defining event for my generation of parents in this regard was the May 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz in Manhattan. Last month, the media marked the thirtieth anniversary of the traumatic tragedy, and “Etan Patz” rose to the top of Google Trends. When I saw it, I was unprepared for and unguarded against the memory, and the horror and fear I’d felt at the time resurfaced with all its old intensity. The assumption was and is that six-year-old Etan was kidnapped by a pedophile while walking alone to the school bus.

Like Etan’s family, mine also lived in Manhattan in 1979. The Patzes lived downtown. We lived between Lincoln Center and Central Park. On lampposts in our neighborhood, have-you-seen-this-boy fliers with Etan’s beguiling photo appeared. We parents saw them whenever we went out; whenever we took our children to the school bus stop and waited to see them safely board; whenever we picked them up from the school bus and walked them home.

As another mother who was in Manhattan in 1979 said last month to Lisa Cohen, author of a new book on the case [Note: She has posted a comment below], “Etan’s disappearance forever changed the way children are raised in the city.”

Her remark reminded me that in 1969 when my son was born, a friend, the photography critic and author Vicki Goldberg, said (referring to a Francis Bacon quotation), "Now you have a hostage to fortune. Your life will never be the same again."

I never forgot the quotation, and I have come to understand that every child is a hostage to fortune, and in the post-9/11 world, we all know more surely than ever what can befall a hostage. Pedophiles are terrorists in the starkest terms: they spread terror.

Coca(ine)-Cola and Other Remedies from the Bad Old Days

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:06:10 -0400

Once upon a time, Americans didn't fool around with illness. Never mind health plans. Just pop into the druggist. Got a headache? Take an aspirin. Got a cough? Take an aspirin with heroin. Huh, what's that you say? You'd like something in between, instead of going straight from aspirin to heroin? Too bad. Evidently you were out of luck.

My eyes were opened to our nation's druggy past when I received an email this week that pointed me to a Web site featuring advertisements from as long ago as the 19th century, and I discovered that we sure were cheerful about cocaine, heroin, and other family soothers. I knew Coca-Cola’s name reflects the fact that it originally contained cocaine, but I only just learned that it also contained wine and was supposed to cure hysteria and melancholy. I bet it did!

Toothache? For 15 cents, you could pick up cocaine drops from the druggist. If you were feeling plain tuckered out, you could sip wine laced with cocaine and advertised as restoring health and vitality.

Overweight? Try amphetamines marketed to solve the problem. Depressed? Try methamphetamine in, for instance, the theatrically named, “Lady out of the Dark.” (How nice that the copywriter was literate enough to correctly place out, of, and the in lower case, indicating that he knew more about writing English than many people today. Not that I imply we’d be better writers on methamphetamines.)

As another aside, let’s not forget that women were widely believed not to have orgasms, and doctors treated female complaints not only with drugs but also by massaging their patients’ genitals until relief came through a “paroxysm.” But the poor guys suffered strain in their own hands and fingers from applying this highly successful and remunerative treatment so often. And thus was born the vibrator, originally a medical tool.

But to get back to drugs. Another product aimed at housewives leading lives of quiet desperation contained Dexedrine to make life seem worth living. Once these wives hit menopause, they could do themselves and their families a favor by taking barbiturates designed to make them more stable mentally.

Women seemed to need more medicinal support than men. Nursing mothers were urged to depend on tonics from Anheuser-Bush and Pabst that contained alcohol. (The Pabst family sent my first husband and me a luxurious wedding present; I failed to appreciate its connection to nursing mothers.)

People of all genders were encouraged to take Quaaludes for anxiety and, for a cough, Bayer aspirin that contained heroin. An evident Bayer competitor, Smith, claimed the combination of glycerin and heroin in their cough medicine was “scientifically conceived.” Alternatively (or, for all I know, in combination), for coughs our ancestors took a syrup that combined codeine, chloroform and marijuana. For asthma, on the other hand, cigarettes of some sort were recommended for those six and older.

If you were in pain, you could turn to injectable opium, which Panopon Roche claimed was a good alternative to morphine. Children as well as adults were dosed with morphine and heroin for colds, coughs, and congestion. We can well imagine how silent teething babies became when given the recommended morphine.

If your child had to see a doctor and balked at being examined, Abbott encouraged the doc to use a pentobarbital suppository. Both pentobarbital and Phenobarbital were the doctor’s friend in controlling adult patients freaking out for whatever reason. (In the 1960s I knew a physician at a well respected Manhattan hospital who, when he was at home in their Park Avenue apartment, gave his baby Phenobarbital. His wife explained that he worked hard and needed quiet at home.)

But times have changed over the past 150 years, although chloroform was only taken off the open market in 1976. Some drugs enjoyed legally in olden times are today used illegally. Other drugs that once were available freely now require a prescription. We are still taking the drugs our ancestors relied on, but now they're harder to get. And more expensive. Is this a clear symptom of progress? All I can say for sure is that California could solve its financial problems by legalizing marijuana and that vibrators have come a long way, baby.

Historical ads for products containing drugs: http://www.pharmacytechs.net/blog/old-school-medicine-ads

History of vibrators: http://www.tbd.com/content/article/basic_article.article:::love_life_history_vibrators