Nan Becklean's Open Salon Blog

The Age of McCain

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 23:08:20 -0400

I’m three years older than John McCain and wish there were age limits for the highest office. We septuagenarians just aren’t as sharp as we were even if we think we are. Too bad, but that’s the way it is.

Perhaps there are exceptions but, although I still work full time, do the Times acrostics and most of their crosswords without a problem, read and listen to books as much as possible, whiz away on the computer and internet, take every vitamin known to the health industry, ride my elliptical daily, eat well, don’t smoke or drink, and weigh what I did in my twenties, I’m not the woman I was as little as five years ago.

I don't like to be less than--- nor do my contemporaries---but that's the deal nature made with us. We got our shot---sometime during those three score, ten years plus---and now, fair's fair, it's time for the fleet of foot, quick of mind and retentive of memory.

McCain may be one of the exceptions. I sure hope so. After all, heaven help us, he might win.

Pundits and Pronouns

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:08:54 -0400

I only heard it said twice thus I was only stunned twice. Two days ago Gloria Borgia of CNN, part of The Most Annoying Political Team on the Planet, said it was important to find out if Obama had “our values.” She said this with an emphasis on our and, as she looked to the other white team members for agreement, wore an expression of great concern. No one on the panel of white wise people demurred. Then last night on CSPAN following the convention, the historian Richard Norton Smith also used the expression “our values,” again underlining our in the context of whether Obama had them or not.

Would someone please explain how it is whites came to own these values? And---what exactly are they anyway? Are they the values of McCain whose reputation as a womanizer is well known and who dumped his ailing wife, mother of his children, for a young heiress? Or John Edwards, who—well--- he’s an easy shot but still what about his values? Anyway, he claims to have found them again. But then values have come and gone for FDR, the Kennedy brothers and Bill Clinton but, nevertheless, today they are greatly revered.

Wait a minute---I think I’ve got the answer. Obama is faithful to his wife! How wild is that? And he likes to spend time with his kids---no nanny in his household. Good grief what kind of a candidate is that?

I mean--clearly--he doesn't have our values.

Pas De Deux

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 13:08:12 -0400

I have a thing about fire. Ask my ex-husband. The first time I had some money of my own, I put in a fire alarm system. He wouldn’t pay for one because he said, “Houses don’t burn down in Scarsdale.”

I already had an escape ladder, three fire extinguishers and a plan, sort of. We had one staircase and four small children. Of course I was insane during those years. This did not escape my husband’s notice.

“You’re crazy!” he would say.

He said it on Christmas Eve of 1963. It was the first Christmas all of my children were out of diapers—and I thought they were in need of a couple of pets.

“You’re crazy!” he said.

A golden retriever puppy and black and white kitty awaited me in the next town and after the children were asleep, I set forth on a snow and ice-packed road. As I neared an intersection, the car hit a patch of ice and pirouetted three hundred sixty degrees–slowly enough so that I could imagine my husband’s wrath if the car and I were totaled while on an unapproved mission.

My husband looked almost as irate as I'd pictured when I returned. He told I needed to see a psychiatrist and then added, “but don't think I’m going to pay for one!”

A couple of hours after the pets were bedded down in the basement playroom and the presents, assembled and wrapped and I had joined my husband in bed, I heard my elder son’s voice in the hall calling to his older sister.

By now, everyone was awake except my husband. I threw on a robe and accompanied the two littlest down the stairs to what was to be much excitement and confusion. I suggested they just play with the pets and not unwrap presents until the sun came up and their father came down, but instead I put a medley of Christmas songs on the stereo to muffle any sounds that might penetrate the second story of our unburnable house.

As each gift was exposed, I took the paper and stuffed it into the fireplace. We were expecting guests for champagne at ten, others for dinner at four, and my husband would be in a far better mood if the nitty gritty of Christmas was out of sight upon his descent. I checked the damper. It was open. I lit the papers and, hurrah, the flames leaped up and out, Aargh, above and beyond the screen, scorching the mantle.

Not open.

I gathered my flock into the front hall and called up the stairs in the tone of someone announcing a delightful surprise.

“Fire,” I sang.

Pajama bottoms flapping, nostrils flared, my husband sped down the stairs and into the living room; he had never moved this quickly before. By now the flames were subsiding while the smoke collected around the perimeter of the ceiling where it left a gray mark not to be painted till spring when we ‘d saved enough money. He opened the damper, the windows, the door, groaning, and shaking his head in disbelief.

Who could blame him? It wouldn’t do much good to explain –although I tried, and, in the telling, had a laughing fit–to the delight of the children and the mystification and disgust of their father who didn’t like laughing to begin with.

“You one crazy woman,” he pointed out without a verb.

Tears rolled down my cheeks, and I collapsed on the stairs while the children held the animals and danced.

My husband, a man of few words, muttered one of them several times, “Shit,” he said again and again, stepped over my body, climbed the stairs and disappeared into the bedroom.

My present husband builds a great fire but is on the surly side when one is requested. “A fire? We don’t need one and the kindling’s up in the corncrib,” he often says.

This time, the day after Christmas, he said, “Hell, the Abernathys won’t be here long enough to make it worthwhile.”

No question it would make the Abernathys feel welcome, something he was not entirely keen to do. I persisted and once logs, kindling and newspaper were perfectly piled and tucked around one another, he could hardly wait for the Abernathys to arrive and forthwith praise his flames.

Than he disappeared. As the Abernathy’s car came down the driveway, I called his name twice. And again. He didn’t answer so I did the sensible thing—I lit the fire. He had said it was good to go. Wonderful! The wood responded immediately. So gratifying. Flames leaped up and out, Aargh, above and beyond the screen.

My husband materialized—his face redder than the fire—choking out half his barracks dictionary. He bounded to the kitchen—he had never moved this quickly before—grabbed some oven mitts, returned to the living room, thrust his arms into the fire and moved the damper to the open position while shouting the other half of his marine-polished vocabulary in my direction.

Smoke filled the living room, somewhat disguising the scorched mantel, then moved up around the ceiling perimeters of several rooms where it left gray marks not be painted till spring when we’d saved enough money. We opened the front door to assist its departure only to discover the Abernathys standing there wreathed in gray. They coughed. We couldn’t invite them in or leave them on the doorstep and since the fire still smoldered we couldn’t go out for Chinese.

I waved goodbye, while my husband, a man of many words, muttered one several times. “Shit," he said again and again, stepped through the haze, climbed two stairs and disappeared into his office .

Morale: la plus que ça change, la plus que c’est le même–--mot.

A New Life

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 13:08:51 -0400

I’m sitting on a stool in my mother’s apartment kitchen thinking about tomorrow when my first child will be induced. She has no interest in departing the womb—nor will her future siblings—and is now three weeks beyond the due date and the necessary dilation announcing her imminent arrival. I am barely twenty-three; too excited to sleep aware my life is about to change forever. I have no idea what this means but I know it is true and I can’t wait to see the baby who is presently distending my middle to a believe-it-or-not degree. The back of me still shows the indentation of a waist, my sides are slim which means she, though we don’t yet know her sex, is in residence high up and out in the front of me, like a cantilevered rotunda. The skin around my navel has long-since reddened and stretched all around so that a split seems inevitable. When I carry my next baby, born eighteen months later, a hernia is diagnosed when his head presses against this area causing severe but temporary pain.

My husband drives me to Lenox Hill Hospital the next morning, deposits me with admissions and departs not to be seen again until evening–hours after our daughter arrives, I have nursed her for the first time, and she is back with the other babies. He seems pleased, places a flower arrangement and card by my bed. Good job, it reads. I don’t tell him that earlier I scream when the doctor performs an episiotomy without warning or, apologize when he chastises me saying “there’s no reason to scream,” or, when the nurse presents my fat-cheeked ruddy-skinned daughter say “hello, darling” and kiss her damp dark hair. I’ve been in love with her for months.

My mother appears bearing a pink satin coverlet to put on my bed in the private room I occupy for seven days where many friends and family members visit. My nursing bra is stuffed with kotex to soak up leaking milk. I have become a manufacturer of sorts. I smell like the inside of a refrigerator when milk has spilled on a shelf. I arrange and rearrange myself inside a rubber doughnut to relieve the tiny balloons of hemorrhoids I’ve acquired during labor. When I stand up it feels as if my insides are going to fall out. I have unfamiliar large, hard, alabaster-white breasts. My nipples do not turn brown but like my mother’s remain pink which I am told signifies never having given birth. My daughter sucks them vigorously and before I leave the hospital they have begun to bleed.

My sister-in-law tells me it’s disgusting to nurse. She makes a face. “Like a cow,” she says as it were a brilliant remark and then repeats it for the weeks and months to follow. “Like a cow”. It is April 11, 1956. When I sleep, I dream of my little girl.

Obama---Puh-leeze

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:08:25 -0400

I can’t take it any more. Every day I think this is it—Obama will tell us who his choice is for veep and every day it’s put off to the next. The only good thing is my husband and I can each keep a quarter---the amount we bet on what day the announcement would be made.

What happened to cleverly taking advantage of a prime news day? And, please tell me, does keeping everyone on the edge of his/her seat equally benefit the candidate? Perhaps---but, as much as I love Obama, I’m getting annoyed. It’s like waiting for a phone call from a guy who promised to call you---didn’t---so that by the end of the day you couldn’t help being, as my grandchildren would put it, pissed.

I have other things to do than watch CNN and check my email for his revealing message every minute or less. How about you?

I consider this qualifies for cruel and unusual punishment. It may signify that Obama could become another overbearing POTUS.

Nah.