Jun 6, 2018 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I’ve been reading a lot of Pema Chödrön lately. In case a gentle reader hasn’t been exposed, Pema is the American Buddhist nun, a foremost student of the Tibetian meditation master, Chögyam Trungpa and best selling writer of Buddhist aphorisms. In fact, I would say, she’s the Oscar Wilde of Buddhism. She’s so smart, she’s so witty, she rocks, she rolls, she gets the mot juste. And because of her, I have learned to practice, somewhat, the ingenious art of Tonglen, which basically means, breathe in what you most fear, most hate, have the strongest negative feelings about, breathe it in deeply and then exhale its opposite emotion as a way of distancing your thoughts from your behavior. And of course, your thoughts from your thoughts!
I practice Tonglen a whole lot with my darling husband who drives me absolutely nuts. And it often helps. Instead of saying, “You idiot, you boring lamebrain, you white male who is now repeating the story I have heard you tell eight thousand times,” I try if I can catch myself, to breathe in frustration, and to breathe out patience, humility, gratitude. I was having a minor spat with my son on the phone a few weeks ago and initiated the breathe in, how unappreciated I feel you ungrateful child, and breathe out gratitude, confidence. calmness……. And it worked with being a mother too! The thing with Tonglen is, it actually does put some air in between you and your very negative feelings, that is, if you can catch those negative feelings in the nick of time. Nip them thoughts in the bud as it were. Because I am the very new Jew Bu, the challenge is, to catch those negative feelings before they are out in the air waves, so to speak.
It isn’t easy.
Tonglen works in the dressing room when you’re trying on bathing suits, (breathe in your sadness about your body, breathe out joy into the department store for all those who suffer like you do). Tonglen works on the phone when your friend is boring you to distraction. It can even sometimes prevent an orgy of writer’s block, though not always, and not this morning. Breathe in your feelings of inadequacy, breathe out confidence!
Ideally says Sister Chödrön, if you see in the distance a man beating a horse, you can practice Tonglen by breathing in how horrified, how frightened you are by this spectacle. Breathe in your sorrow for the horse, and kinship and pity for the man who is clearly not able to control himself. And breathe out loving kindness into the world.
Why not go over and beat the man up? Report him to the PETA? Or just shoot him?
I would love to ask Pema, are we meant to breathe in our pity for the children who are detained at the border, separated from their parents, and breathe out loving kindness to 45 and his pack of merry white men?
That’s my universal problem with Tonglen. It works in minor disputes, on the personal and perhaps even on the familial and community level. But it sucks with things like children separated from their parents by a brutal regime. It doesn’t work on the Holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, or the pogroms of Europe that sent my ancestors here to America. Nor does it work with the Chinese Exclusion Law or Jim Crow. Or lots of other epic horrors I can think of.
But it works with my husband, and it works in the dressing room of the department store…
As much as I admire, Sister Chödrön, I don’t think I would have liked to have her as my mother. Or my best friend, or even my shrink. Though my shrink is the one who turned me onto Chödrön.
How infuriating it would be to be in a relationship with someone so enlightened. Someone whose goat you couldn’t get. Someone you could not behave like an infant with. Someone whose wisdom you could not escape.
Still, I love Pema, and every little bit of her wisdom helps in the small, entitled, silly little life I call my own.
“Deeping Tonglen….
In Tonglen, after genuinely connecting with the pain and your ability to open up and let go, then take the practice a step further and do it for all sentient beings. This is the key point about Tonglen: your own experience of pleasure and pain becomes the way that you recognize your kinship with all sentient beings. Practicing Tonglen is the way you can share in the joy and sorrow of everyone who’s ever lived everyone who is living now, and everyone who will ever live.” (Comfortable with Uncertainty, Shambala Press).
May all beings everywhere be happy and free from suffering!
Illustration by the fabulous Aimee Levy
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May 22, 2018 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Beware of the dirty old man at the yoga studio, the one who takes advantage of the hug-y New Age environment to hit on every woman he can get his hands on. You’d think if he read the newspaper or watched the news, he wouldn’t keep on doing this, but you would be wrong!
I’ve been dodging the advances of B. for years now. I used to see him three times a week, when he was loitering after his 2 o’ clock gentle class and I was arriving for the 4:15 level 2-3, I used to frequent.
I was sort of amused by him in the beginning. He kept his hands to himself, I knew he was flirting, but I thought it was mildly ok. He’s clever, he’s from New York replete with old fashioned Bensonhurst accent (for which I’m a sucker) and so elderly, I felt no physical threat. I remember too, standing in line with some forty-something yogis before class one day. The two guys were bemoaning the fact that the twenty-something yoginis thought they were too old and wouldn’t accept dates. We made a joke of it. I confessed the only guy lately who flirted with me attended senior yoga at 2 PM. Just wait, I told the guys, this is LA and it gets worse! We all laughed!
Then, one day, old B came up behind me and thrust the front of him, into the back of me, put his arms around me and I was so shocked, I turned around to his leer, drew myself up–shot him a dirty look and walked off.
I stopped going to that class, and forgot about old B. until today. He remembered my name and called it out like we were old friends. He came forward, arms out, eyes twinkling… I backed away, and it was only then, I realized, he’s the same old pre-#MeToo letch, who hasn’t learned his lesson, who isn’t even scared to keep at it. Everybody hugs everybody at the yoga studio. It’s the perfect place for a slimy operator like B. to get away with his groping. Still and this is the point: The person who is really scared is me! Yes old B. inspires fear in me. Yesterday, the year before and maybe even tomorrow I’ll still be afraid if he’s coming toward me. I shrink from him. I lose my voice around him. It’s hard even to write this about him because he still, old as he is, discredited as he is, possesses his ancient power!
Part of this has to do with my own history. Back when I was small and defenseless some one much bigger and stronger and more powerful had his way with me. But part of that fear is the childish desire not to be unpleasing. The childish impulse to run and not to tell. To say it ain’t so! Because that’s the way I was raised and it’s bred to the bone. Isn’t that how men and women, boys and girls got in this mess to begin with? Isn’t this what these perps have counted on?
So while we may be weary (and I for one am) reading the long list of protocols: may I touch you, may I kiss you, and on and on, this is where we have to go before we get to the place where we should have been all along.
In the meantime, I’m rehearsing what I’m going to say if I see old B. at the yoga studio again. I vow not to be speechless again!
Illustration by the fabulous Aimee Levy
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May 1, 2018 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I’ve been attempting to stream the funeral of Flo S. What an idea, a live stream into one’s past! Our families were friends back in Shreveport a zillion years ago.
The S’s had three children, just like there were three of us! The kids were friends, the parents were friends. I’m getting picture but no sound. Flo wrote me after she read a blog I wrote about Chuck, her son who died of AIDS twenty-five years ago.
The funeral service is being streamed from B’nai Zion Temple where I went to Sunday School in Shreveport, Louisiana eight million years ago. The Rabbi’s a she! And she’s brandishing a guitar. Our rabbi was bald and I only remember him brandishing the Torah and telling us tales about the lampshades the Nazis made out of Jewish children.
I never liked going to the temple. I was afraid of the rabbi, for one, Mama was a self-hating Jew and I was always loyal to my mother. Self-hating or not we always had brunch on Sunday (the gentiles had dinner). And our brunch always included smoked fish of some kind and bagels. These were obtained at the deli counter of a grocery store called Weingartens (sounds Jewish—yes?) and were located off to the side to separate them from the bologna, the liverwurst, the ham, the rolled turkey, the potato salad. The Jewish side of the deli had half a dozen kosher salamis, a few very dead smoked fish with milky eyes, some desiccated slices of lox, a couple of jars of herring in cream sauce and little squares of Philadelphia cream cheese.
As I stare at the long ago chapel at Binai Zion Temple, I remember my mother fainting when she was called on to light the lights on Friday and then again at the Friday night service after my father died. After that, we more or less stopped going. By the time I was fourteen, I was at the convent, and my mother didn’t celebrate the Jewish holidays anymore.
When Flo and I talked on the phone a couple of months ago, we had planned the call for several weeks. Not because I’m so busy, she was.
“It’s terrible you don’t talk to your sister and brother,” Flo said. I expected that.
I replied, “It is terrible, But there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“That’s what your sister says, you know, your sister visits me!”
“I’m glad!” said I, “If I lived in the same town as you, I’d visit you too!”
“And your brother calls me on Chuck’s yorseit every year.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t called you,” I said. “And it’s great to hear your voice! I would know your voice anywhere.”
“I loved what you wrote about Chuck. Do you know I read it on Chuck’s yorseit?”
“That must mean I wrote it on or near Chuck’s yortseit.”
We were both quiet.
Then I told Flo some of the things I remembered about their house: the ping pong table in the “kids area”, the black board in the kitchen with a new vocabulary word every day; how when my father was in the hospital before he died, it was at her house my siblings and I stayed because we were too young to stay alone. I also told her how I could “see” her in her tennis dress, how I remembered her very orthodox parents visiting and how her father and mother draped cloth napkins over their heads and how it was the first time I ever saw a woman making Jewish motions over the candles. When he was growing up and was briefly observant, my son used to admonish me, “How come you don’t know how to do that thing with your hands?”
“You know your mother dropped me,” Flo told me presently, I wasn’t surprised, my mother dropped almost everyone; she even dropped me for a time.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Ruth was a little nuts.” And when Flo told me why my mother dropped her, I remembered how mean my mother could be: for a long moment, I felt her ancient power, how cruel she was. And indeed Flo admitted she’d been very hurt.
Then it was my turn, I’d been rehearsing the question ever since I knew Flo and I were going to speak on the phone.
“Do you know why my father hated me?”
Flo on the other end made some kind of noise.
Flo didn’t say, “Your father didn’t hate you.” Flo didn’t say, “How can you say a thing like that?” She didn’t say what my sister said when I asked her that question: “You had the happiest childhood and everyone loved you.”
“I don’t remember,” replied Flo. And why should she? You don’t live to ninety something dwelling on things like that.
Flo told me she liked my first book, and was reading my second book, and after she finished she was passing them along to members of her family.
A couple of weeks later, I heard from Flo’s son, that Flo was ill. And a couple of weeks after that, she’d entered the hospice program.
Flo was a great southern Jewish lady. You’d have to be from a small town where there weren’t many Jews to know what that means. And, even if I’m disappointed she couldn’t shed any light on the central existential mystery I will no doubt carry to my grave, I’m so glad we were in touch and we spoke.
I’m lighting a candle for Flo tonight.
Illustration by the fabulous Aimee Levy
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Apr 11, 2018 | Blog - Mary Marcus
My husband is exquisitely silent this Sunday afternoon. No ranting about the pres; no musings about the state of the world, and he’s not wondering what’s for lunch, dinner, or trying to engage me in audience attendance.
Ever since a friend came over with a stack of trashy novels and we selected a few, and he’s “in” one, he’s turning those pages, fast fast, he’s next to my son, and his dead mother, the fastest reader I’ve ever known. In a few hours he will have gobbled this one up.
I’m not going to mention which trashy novel he’s reading. It’s not on the bestseller list (the one I selected is) and it’s not even by someone I’ve ever heard of, not that it means anything that I haven’t heard of the writer. It’s a big book, it’s got a nice cover and it weighs several pounds.
Looking at him sitting on the leather chair he made himself, glasses off, totally intent, I wonder what constitutes a trashy novel?
First and foremost: None of the characters are very clear, you have to keep going back to figure out who is who. My husband and my friend say they don’t care who is who.
The writing may be okay, but never beautiful or makes your heart beat, or causes you to reach for a pen to underline. And you don’t think. You don’t draw pararells, you learn absolutely nothing and when you’re done you’re actually relieved. “That’s why they are so great!” says my friend and my husband.
If you’ve stayed up late with it, the next morning, like being on a bender, you can’t remember anything about the book at all. Not even the name of the freaking main character.
Like trashy food, a quick hook up, a B minus movie, it doesn’t tax you.
I asked my husband, “So is it good?”
“No,” says he, eyes still on the book. “It’s a complete piece of shit!”
“So what keeps you turning the pages?”
“Quiet. I’m reading my trashy book.”
I knew a Jesuit from Shreveport who used to read trashy novels and tear off the pages one by one and toss them in the trash. He was a Shakespearean scholar, he liked good books, but he also liked trashy books.
I don’t know if I do or I don’t. I very seldom read what I consider to be trash. It makes me feel kind of awful; it makes me feel like I’m doing something dirty, like getting off when I shouldn’t be getting off. And besides, what’s the point? I suppose the point is, better trashy novels than trashy TV or surfing the net? But maybe not.
My husband would say, my wife would have gotten along well with Cotton Mather. (Is Dan Pense the 21st century non-literary equivalent of Cotton Mather?) If so, I’m going to try and lighten up.
The assumption when you take up a book is whilst inside its pages you are in another world. The world of a trashy book is no world at all: it’s a bogus plot driven realm where a lot seems to be happening and actually nothing really takes place.
There’s a difference, a big one, between “escape” books and trashy books. Agatha Christie who wrote eighty or so escape mysteries always takes you somewhere, her characters speak like real people in her milieu spoke and you can read them again, having completely forgotten who did it, and enjoy the book anew. I don’t think anyone re-reads a trashy book. Why would you?
My husband finished his last night. This morning he has bags under his bloodshot eyes.
“Was that book any good?” I asked him again. “Did you at least enjoy it?”
“Of course not!”
“Then why did you read it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wish I could write one of those books,” I sighed.
“I’d like to as well.”
“You never told me you wanted to write.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s not easy to write any book. Trashy or not.”
“I know.”
“But if you had a choice, would you write a good book, or a trashy book?”
“Trashy!” said he and he smiled.
Illustration by the fabulous Aimee Levy
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Mar 14, 2018 | Blog - Mary Marcus
My son used to have this amazing recording of a traveling preacher with a strong gospel voice recorded during the Great Depression. The preacher was railing against the danger of the chain store. How on earth did he know? I only heard the recording once, driving around the south side of Chicago near the university campus. But the voice of the preacher will be inside my brain forever. His voice was far away. There was no real sound technology in those days. “No more chain stow,” he railed.
My son’s car radio and all his tunes were stolen some time later and he never could find that recording again. Now as we face the end of the chain store, and I mean specifically the closing of Barnes and Noble, the big store that was the gateway to the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, I find myself wanting to stand on a street corner and rail for the return of the chain store. Our Third Street Promenade branch was never a really good book store, not like the big B & N in New York in the eighties on the Upper West Side. Or even the West Side Pavilion branch that closed five or so years ago and was replaced with a furniture store. But was it was indeed a bookstore with real books, floors of them.
Barnes and Noble I miss you, I’d cry.
Barnes and Noble, who will replace you? Barnes and Noble, you might have killed off the mom and pop, but what will we do without you?
I used to complain about the Barnes and Noble employees, you’d go in there and ask for Imre Kertesz, or even Kafka and the male or female behind the desk would invariably say, “who?” And then ask you to spell out the name so he or she could enter it painstakingly in the computer and tell you, “no.” Even the year Kertesz won the Nobel this happened to me at B&N.
At the rival Borders, however, (remember Borders? First they were big book, then they became big candle, big coffee mug?) Their store became a Ross Dress for Less in Westwood. In Santa Monica it is now Forever 21. Borders always had Irme Kertesz –because somewhere, somebody in management loved books and was in the biz of books. Unlike Amazon, who put the books biz out of biz first—and then everybody else after that. Amazon, you don’t know jack about books. You killed off the bookstore and yet you didn’t even have an idea about what you were doing. Or did you? You know a lot about marketing, a lot about toilsome things like stars.
Farenheit 451 used to be the scariest book I could think of. It was right up there with The Haunting of Hill House, The Shining and The Turn of the Screw. Amazon is far scarier than a book burning. We don’t even have to light the match for an auto de fe. We have done this to ourselves, and we do it to ourselves every time we hit the place your order button to save a few dollars and a trip to the store. Now, even the big chain book stores are over. Which means, I’m sorry to say, books as we knew them and loved them could be over too. I hope not.
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Feb 26, 2018 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I’ve had a curious relationship with my dead mother-in-law’s house for the past ten years. And now suddenly, it’s over and done with. I would describe the relationship as close, protective, love/hate, proud, loyal, agonizing, infuriating. Indeed it’s as close as any relationship I’ve had to any house, since I’ve never had a house of my very own and have always longed for one. My ten year thing with my mother-in-law’s old house encompasses all the range of feelings people have about the places where things have happened to them and to people they love, though I have never lived in the house, except for a short period of time a couple of summers ago. I wrote almost a whole novel during that time, within its walls, and though the novel has yet to be published, I hope one day it will be. It was an odd couple of months for me. I hardly cooked a meal, I blamed it on the fact that there was only a couple of knives and forks, two bowls and maybe three glasses, none of them proper, all from the Ladies Village Improvement Society bargain box. There was just the one sofa to sit on, as I had long ago emptied the place out for selling. Back in the big bedroom, my father-in-law designed and everybody called “the motel” there was one uncomfortable bed and a broken down vintage, modernist chest of drawers so splintered, every time I reached in, I invariably had to retrieve the tweezers and alcohol. Yet it was one of the happiest summers of my life. In the early mornings I took Henry to the beach and we ran until even Henry tired out. Then we came back and I stuck post-its all over the walls of the hallway between the motel and the living room, and I figured out my book. I did online yoga, made new friends, and once in a while got invited to places I’d never been before in all the years I’d been coming to Springs, the not so fancy area of East Hampton.
Always, until the other day, when the new guy, a tasteful Mr. H, did his walkthrough and signed on the dotted line, I’ve halfway hoped, from time to time, I would one day live there with Henry and it would be my house. My husband, my son, and all my friends would come for dinner and then everybody would go home and there would just be Henry and me.
Every time in the past ten years, when there wasn’t a tenant living there, and my husband and I had words, I would imagine packing a bag, a couple cans of dog food and a few shaky toys, and I’d mentally move to the little house in the woods. Often, I’d furnish the place in my mind’s eye. It was a cool little house and it was fun to imagine what I’d do. It was far better and I think healthier, psychologically I’m guessing, than re-decorating the studio apartment in New York, where I lived when I was younger than my son, something I was in the habit of doing for years. Why didn’t I have those floors re-done? Why didn’t I use the little alcove more efficiently?
Houses get inside your skin and bones. And the little house on Fireplace Road got inside mine. No one else cared about it. My son said he never liked the place. My husband who had once been a little boy there in the summers turned his nose up also. Though I suspect with him it’s his usual inability to voice his feelings about the past.
My niece and nephew have fond memories of the place where they came and visited their grandparents every summer. Their grandma was a burn-the-bra bohemian and their grandfather a famous architect who died much longer ago than she did. Famous painters came to dinner: big deals from the New York School. Friends flew in from Paris, from Athens, from London, Ireland, in the summer in its heyday, the artistic and the louche lounged on its deck in uncomfortable summer chairs. That’s one of the things I really liked about the place: it was louche, while at the same time being ascetic and uncomfortable. Had the orange curtains made out of sheets, that covered every window been white I would have liked that too. I just happen to hate the color orange.
When I gutted the place all the boho trappings went with it. I can’t say I recreated a joint with even a single luxury feature, but it was a different place I rented out. The bathrooms were better, the old fridge got axed and the stove replaced with a Bosch.
All that’s left of the old days other than the gorgeous light, is the grape arbor that grows outside the main room, and the sad old table and chairs underneath it, Mr. H will do what he wants with the remnants.
I remember Ms. U our first tenant, whose bf was a well known sculptor who knew my in-laws. She left skid marks on the lawn and slid the slider in my face when I went to ask for the rent. Mademoiselle Nut Job came next: a painter who found out, on his last drunken night, Jackson Pollock flipped his car in front and killed himself. Yes, that Jackson Pollock. She had white-on-white monogrammed linens and never did the dishes, then fled, bleating about mice.
Two boys and a girl came next. They left a lot of beer cans. Finally, a young widow whose kid left glue-on stars on one of the bedroom’s ceiling.
I almost rented it the last time to some crazy chick at a bargain rate because she claimed to want to live there forever. That’s the thing, I was always worried when it wasn’t rented, yet secretly wanted to live there myself. In the last instance, I flew out from the coast to move her in and she went screaming into the woods never to be seen again.
What will I do with myself in my spare time now that the little house in the woods is gone?
The other night, after the tasteful Mr. H walked through, there were lights in the windows. Now the place is dark and I wonder if I’ve dreamed the whole thing up. In the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, I fell to decorating the place again.
Where will I go when I fight with my husband? Where will Henry and I live?
I asked my husband this last night. He was reading the newspaper and didn’t look up.
“I guess,” said he, “you’re going to have to live with me.”
Illustration by the fabulous Aimee Levy
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