Shame and the Sixth Grade

Mandy Abrams was my meanest friend.

                  Her family lived in a small green house with white shutters, and Mandy shared a room with her two siblings, Greg Jr. and Elise. Most of what I remember about Mandy took place when we were in the fifth grade and she lived in that little house. I always entered through the back door, which went directly through the kitchen. A dilapidated toaster sat on the counter with a crucifix hanging directly over it. There was a small alcove just off the kitchen with a wooden table that served as their dining area. The table was piled high with catechism materials.

Mandy’s mother, Beatrice, was a slight and timid woman who wore her hair in a short, brown bob. Mandy looked a lot like her in that she was skinny, bony and had the same ashy brown hair, but she also had blue eyes and buck teeth like her father. All my memories of Mandy’s father, Greg Sr., are of him standing in front of the fireplace, clutching his overalls, smoking a pipe and slurping from a tall can of Budweiser. Greg was extremely imposing with a gruff voice and coarse, dark beard. He was usually either sneering at everyone or barking orders at his kids in a deep voice that made me shudder.

                  We didn’t like to hang around the house because of Greg Sr. and because it was too small to play in there, so we usually went three blocks down the hill to Morse Park where we could circle around the pool or collect sticks and interesting-looking bits of trash along the irrigation ditch. One time, Mandy suggested we leave our typical path and explore a path that ran along the ditch and behind some houses.

                  “I’m not sure where that path leads,” I said meekly.

                  “Why do you have to be such a chicken? It’s just some houses,” she replied.

                  Mandy started marching in the direction of the new path and I followed tentatively behind her. Dogs started growling and barking from behind the fences of neighboring houses and I grew increasingly nervous as we walked. I tried appealing to Mandy’s sense of reason.

“I don’t think I should go on too long of a walk because my mom is picking me up back at your house,” I said.

                  “Yeah in like three hours,” she replied.

                  We continued along the path behind the houses and the more we pursued it the more overgrown it became with grasses and shrubs. A tall, concrete retaining wall ran alongside the path to separate the ditch from the adjacent houses and it constricted the path even more. My heartbeat quickened and beads of sweat glistened on my forehead. We proceeded around a darkened curve – each step further away from the familiarity of the park.

The only solace I had was a small, black tape player that I carried. I had just gotten it for my 11^th birthday along with a Whitney Houston tape that I had been begging my parents to buy me for several months. We listened to Whitney croon, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and crunched the leaves while we walked. “Let me see the tape player,” Mandy said, jutting out her hand. “I want to find a better song.” I handed it to her and she immediately grabbed it and scaled up to the top of the concrete wall. She started walking along the top.

                  “What are you doing up there?” I asked, hesitantly.

                  “The path was too narrow,” she responded simply. “It’s easier to walk up here. Come up.”

                  “I can’t. You know I’m afraid of heights.”

                  “Fine. Stay down there,” she huffed.

She started walking more quickly along the wall and disappeared around another curve before I could catch up to her. When I finally got to where the path turned, she was nowhere to be found.

                  “Mandy?” I called out her name a few times. “Mandy? Where did you go?” Panic started to expand in my chest. My friend was gone, my tape player was gone, and I didn’t know where I was. I tried to swallow down the tears along with the stinging sense of betrayal. I tried to strategize. I thought about going back home, but I knew Mandy would be mad if I left her behind.

                  I called out her name a couple more times. Nothing but silence. A soft breeze rustled through the maple trees. “Um… Mandy? I don’t know where you are, but I guess you started walking back.” I tried to sound nonchalant but my voice still quavered. “I’ll head that way, too, and, um, meet you back at the park? I hope you still have my tape player. ” I gulped. Still nothing. I started to walk back. I was taking my time and kicking rocks to make noise so I wouldn’t be scared if she jumped out at me.

                  A few minutes later Mandy emerged from a person’s backyard where she had been hiding all along. She scaled the wall, jumped down, and brushed a few dried leaves off her shoulder.

                  “I was right behind you, stupid. Here’s your dumb tape player. It doesn’t even work anyway.”

                  She thrust it back at me. I fumbled trying to grab it and it fell. I picked it up, blew off the dirt, and opened it up. The tape was tangled within. We walked home in silence.

                  I only remember going to Mandy’s house one more time after that. I went through the back gate and rushed past her bouncing dog. The back door was open so I went in and found Beatrice alone in the kitchen rinsing dishes and pretending that everything was normal. It had been prearranged that I would come over, but Mandy’s father was clearly very angry about something so I didn’t know if I was staying.

I could hear Greg pacing back and forth in the living room yelling, “If you kids are too stupid to pick up your shit, then you don’t get to have anything!” As I glanced into the living room, I saw Mandy and her brother kneeling on the floor with their pants down and their hands clasped behind their backs. The front windows were open and their backsides were exposed to me and everyone else in the neighborhood. Tears streamed down their faces. Mandy turned her head slightly in my direction. She didn’t speak, but her eyes said, please. Please. Don’t look at me.

When Greg noticed me he calmed down somewhat. “Hey Alice,” he said. “We’re almost done here. Go wait outside and Mandy will be out to speak to you in a few minutes.” I went out back and sat on their concrete porch. A few minutes later Mandy came out. Her face was red and swollen from crying, and her voice was monotone with a few, intermittent hiccups. “My Dad says I have to clean my room so we can’t play today,” she said flatly. She went back inside and let the screen door shut gently behind her. I walked home.

                  Our friendship ended the following school year. We were in the sixth grade and Mandy wanted to start hanging out with the popular kids at recess. She wrote me a note that read, “We’re not friends anymore. I’m mature and you’re not. You look like an ass skipping around the playground during recess. I’m sorry, Alice, but I don’t want to look like an ass. – Mandy.”

                  We went to different middle schools, different high schools, and then completely drifted away from each other’s lives. I still have the note she used to cut the cords of our friendship. It’s buried deep in a trunk of keepsakes at my parents’ house. I don’t know why I kept it. It’s sort of a morbid thing to do - like saving a bruise or something.

                  About ten years ago my mom ran into Mandy at a local grocery store in the neighborhood where we grew up. She was working as a check-out clerk. She had a six-year-old son and she had been in and out of drug rehab, but said she was doing better now. Mandy asked after me, and my mom told her I was working in advertising but had just returned to school to become a teacher. Mandy said, “That’s really good to hear. I always knew Alice would make something of herself.”

                  She meant it as a compliment but it didn’t feel like one. Not when I measured it against the fact that she probably never even dreamed of achieving anything for herself. Maybe that’s why I kept the note: to remind myself of our separateness. 

Off Plan

It took a long time for me to find my place on the playground. You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I actually had kind of a difficult time making friends when I was a young tike. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it was because my hair was cut short and I wore my brother’s hand-me-downs. For most of the first through third grades my classmates had trouble deciding if I was a boy or a girl. Maybe it was because I spent my pre-school years playing with my brother and the other neighborhood children. Friends were pre-packaged and convenient. Before school I never had to “make” them, and therefore it took longer for me to learn how to initiate friendships.

I have a smattering of playground memories that pretty much sum up my social ineptitude during this period of my life. In one scene I’m huddled close to the school building on a cold day. I’ve curled up in a ball and wrapped my puffy winter coat around my knees. I proceed to toddle back and forth on the sidewalk while exclaiming, “Look! I’m a midget! You should try this!” in an attempt to amuse my teacher (who is also standing close to the building). But my teacher is not amused. She is busy rubbing her temples and telling other children not to “tattle” on each other. She has no interest in becoming my midget friend.

In another scene, I’m sitting alone in a giant cement cylinder on the playground. I have become so engrossed in the process of making a Spartan-like sand colony for a community of ants that I completely miss the bell and forget to come inside when recess is over. When I finally emerge from the cylinder, the playground is desolate. I sheepishly return to the classroom, humiliated and ashamed, and discover that my third grade teacher has arranged for the entire class to sarcastically chant, “Good afternoon, Alice!” in unison. I make it to the end of the day, and then I walk home crying.

Then, there’s a smattering of memories in which I attempt a few athletic playground activities: a couple of precarious swats at the tetherball (a Medieval playground device that practically lynched any child who came within 30 feet of it); an attempt to climb to the top of the jungle gym, which was quickly abandoned when I got four feet off the ground and discovered I was afraid of heights; and a few dismal passes at a game of four square. I know four square is the most simple-minded game ever invented, but I’ll be damned if I ever figured it out. “No, it touched the line, Alice!” the other kids would scream, “You’re out! You have no clue what you’re doing!”

Interestingly, these playground experiences didn’t end at Slater Elementary School. I encountered them again in college.

When I went to C.U. Boulder, I applied to the journalism school and decided to major in advertising. I wasn’t particularly passionate about advertising, but I thought it was intriguing, it had a creative flair, and it seemed like a reasonable job source. In actuality, I majored in advertising because I was too chicken to get a degree in the subject I really loved: English. There were no jobs for people who had English degrees (other than teaching) and I certainly wasn’t going to become a teacher, for Christ’s sake. I wasn’t completely crazy.

The capstone course for my bachelor’s degree was a class called “Advertising Campaigns.” The course was held in Macky Auditorium, which was a very old, ornate building with stone walls and broad, wooden staircases. It smelled of antique carpet and scholarly discourse. Had I been an English major, it would have been a great place to wear glasses, quote Whitman and stock up on self-importance. But when it housed the advertising campaigns class it was nothing more than a den of nightmarish stress.

Basically, the purpose of the campaigns course was for the university to sucker each advertising student into paying $1500 in tuition so that they could pimp out our services to local businesses. The professor chose our campaign groups in order to simulate a real world work scenario in which you never get a say in the people you work with, and most of your co-workers are self-righteous jerks who spend all their time at the coffee machine and never pull their weight on projects.

Several groups in our class were matched with stimulating clients: a skateboard manufacturer, a travel agency… one group even got Illegal Pete’s and a semester’s worth of free burritos. My group got saddled with a law firm comprised of mind-numbingly boring engineering patent attorneys. To make matters worse, there were all kinds of legal restrictions about how a law firm could advertise its services. If I recall, they weren’t even allowed to have a logo. For nine weeks my group worked on their campaign, and I think all we generated was a line item in the yellow pages that denoted their firm name, address and phone number. We also suggested that they establish a web site. Due to the publicity restrictions, it was a site comprised of plain, black and white html text that also listed the firm name, address and phone number.

But it’s not the campaign I remember most. It was my group. They hated me with the red hot passion of a thousand suns. This was a serious problem for me emotionally, because after nursing my elementary school playground wounds I spent many painstaking years convincing everybody in my life that they should like me. And while I sometimes irritated people (like my roommate) with my stealth hug attacks and my impromptu sock puppet shows, by and large most people DID like me. But, for whatever reason, not this group.

The class took place from 6:00 to 8:30 PM. Though I was completely worn out from working all day and going to school full time, every Tuesday and Thursday I came to class with a smile – sometimes even bearing muffins. But the second my group mates caught sight of me the women would roll their eyes and the men would turn away and avoid me. One evening, when a few of them went outside to smoke, I was coming back from the computer lab and I happened upon them while they were talking about me behind my back.

“Alice is such a pain in the ass,” one woman said.

“I know. She has no clue what she’s doing,” another one joined in.

I was right back at four square.

Completely stunned, I locked eyes with one of the women while she puffed smoke out of her mouth. This was a scenario that would have bothered most decent people. I know that on the rare occasions when I’ve been caught talking about someone behind her back, my face bursts into a volcano of shame and my butt starts sweating. But not this woman. She just stared me down cold like Medusa – completely devoid of guilt.

I honestly cannot remember what I did to make myself so abhorrent to my campaigns group. I ended up with a decent grade in the class, and I always pulled my own weight. If anything, I was an over-achiever when it came to group projects. Of course, now that I’m older and more self-actualized, it’s pretty obvious that I was simply out of my element. The advertising career path did not fit my personality or my skill set. The people in my group were the type of people who went on to be very successful in advertising. That industry is completely cutthroat and there is a 5-6 month turnover for most of the creative jobs. The best copywriters and creative directors scratch their way to the top and they don’t care whose eyes they have to claw out along the way.

Because of my experiences in the campaigns class, I had an inkling early on that advertising wasn’t going to be a fit. So why didn’t I just change my major? The answer is simple: I had a plan and I was too scared to deviate from it. I had to finish what I started, because at the time I wasn’t brave enough to come up with something new.

I worked in the advertising/marketing industry for a little over four years. It was a decent career and it helped me develop as a writer, but it never became part of my soul. Then the most amazing thing happened: I stumbled into teaching. While volunteering for an inner-city youth ministry, I started to notice that even my most difficult times mentoring high school students were more fulfilling than the best times at my job. In 2002 I went back to school to get my secondary teaching license and my master’s in education. I had no idea if it would work, but I didn’t over-think it.

When I walked into my first English Methods class in graduate school, I encountered an eclectic array of overwhelmed literature dorks with brassy senses humor and absolutely no sense of fashion. These were my people. I knew it the instant I walked into the room. Several of those colleagues became some of the closest friends of my life. They were simply vital during those formative years of teaching (which was a lot like boot camp only it lasts three years instead of eight weeks, and all of the people you work with are dangerously high on Mountain Dew and hormones).

I relished my coursework and my teaching practicum. The first time I stood in front of a group of students, I knew it was exactly where God wanted me to be. It was never part my original plan, and eight years later I’m still climbing a pretty steep learning curve, but for me the classroom is (as Frederick Buechner put it) “the place where my deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Last week I saw a new movie called “The Adjustment Bureau.” It was an interesting commentary on this concept of life plans. The hero and the heroine (played by Matt Damon and Emily Blunt) discover that their entire lives have been planned out by a mysterious organization led by a “chief” who may or may not have been God. This chief plans out each person’s life, and the Adjustment Bureau is responsible for making sure everyone stays “on plan.” If someone deviates from the plan, they introduce little scenarios (such as spilling a cup of coffee or missing a bus) to get them back on their designated course. Somewhere toward the middle of the movie there was an extended metaphor that involved fedora hats and doorknobs. I got a little confused at that point. But there was one part I did like: when Matt Damon and his love interest went off plan, they had to sacrifice what would have amounted to a great deal of fame and fortune for them both. But then something spectacular happened – they created something new.

And that’s exactly what happened to me on the playground all those years ago. When I couldn’t find my place in any of the established games, I invented a new one. It was called “the laughing game,” and it took place around this nebulous piece of playground equipment that was basically just four feet of wooden fence with two cement posts on either side. The premise of the game was this: a group of about four girls would sit on one side of the fence looking completely stoic. Then the comedian would perform some kind of skit and, if she could make the other girls laugh, she won. It took me six years to come up with my own game, but once I did I always won. And people always wanted to play it with me because I made them laugh.

Brilliant things can happen when you go off plan. When I was 18 years old I planned to become an advertising executive and work on Madison Avenue in New York. I was going to have Italian shoes and a briefcase and an apartment on the upper east side. Instead, I became a high school teacher. I have five minutes to eat lunch, and everyone I work with is going through puberty at exactly the same time. But every day I get to teach people how to express themselves, and I have a special talent for making them laugh when they feel discouraged or soul sick. That’s worth more to me than Madison Avenue.

So, I guess when I look back on my life, I’m most grateful for the things that didn’t go according to plan. It’s only when we go off plan that we allow ourselves to forge new paths and explore uncharted territories. When we stop reading maps and start making discoveries, that’s when we become truly fulfilled. That’s when we become truly brilliant.

Page 80 Thinking

I recently learned that screenplays have a very specific formula. Each page in a screenplay represents one minute of screen time, and specific events must occur within a certain number of pages. For example, in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller explains that in a screenplay the hero needs to “save a cat” before page 30. Meaning, he has to do something noble or morally redeemable early on so that the audience is willing to root for him until the end.

Another rule of screen-writing is that the first kiss between the main male and female love interests has to occur within the first 80 pages. Again, this is designed to maintain the audience’s interest. No one wants to see a movie in which two characters pine for each other indefinitely and never actually get any fulfillment. People go to the movies to be filled with popcorn and unreasonable fantasies, not longing.

Though few of us end up making a movie based on our lives, our lives do represent a kind of story and more often than not we employ the page 80 principal, especially as it applies to romance. For example, from what I recall, by age nine a girl has to have at least one boy in her life who she thinks is gross; by age 11 a girl is supposed to have her first serious crush, and somewhere between the ages of 13 and 15 she’s supposed to have her first boyfriend.

For girls at least, your first exposure to Page 80 thinking typically takes place at something called a “slumber party,” a pre-adolescent ceremonial ritual (disguised as someone’s birthday celebration) that is designed to determine how you measure up against your friends in terms of development.

At slumber parties, all nearly-pubescent girls are required to play a series of torturous mind games, the most infamous being “truth or dare.” It was never wise to pick “dare” because you would inevitably be required to take off your clothes and streak through the living room where the hostess’s older brother was playing video games with his friends. So, the only real option was truth. Considerate people (like me) asked questions that were just personal enough to be revealing without causing significant emotional trauma. Questions like “Do you shave your armpits?” or “What’s your bra size?” were perfectly safe because no was supposed to be shaving yet and anyone wearing a cup size larger than an “A” was to be envied – not pitied.

But halfway through the game a pretty girl (who was also a borderline bully) would take things to another level. The tension would build and she would inevitably ask something like, “Do you get your period?” or “Have you ever kissed a boy?” Everyone, and I mean everyone, was required to get their period before they turned 14. If you failed at this task, you would be labeled a circus freak and sold to a company of gypsies instead of entering high school. Also, it was generally understood that the first kiss should take place some time between the 6th and the 9th grades. So, if you hadn’t kissed anybody by the time of your first slumber party, you had to at least be willing to reveal the name of the boy you wanted to kiss. Thinking about it wasn’t the same as doing it, but it was good enough for age 12.

A girl most definitely needed to have kissed someone before she finished high school, but she didn’t have to go farther than that. At least in my day, only sluts had sex while they were in high school. Sex was for college. You were supposed to have a lot of sex in collage, and you were supposed to tell everyone within a four mile radius of your dorm. Without the public venue of slumber parties, most girls talked about their sexual escapades in the bathroom where it would echo. Or, if the professor was liberal enough and the course was one of those nebulous “study of literature” classes, some people even managed to work their sex life into the occasional essay.

My deficiencies in Page 80 thinking occurred some time after my first slumber party. Sure, I wore a bra before about half of the girls in my class and I got my period before the deadline, but I consistently fell short from that point on. Despite the fact that I didn’t even kiss anyone until college, I still planned to get married by the time I was 23, have my first kid when I was 26, and have my second and final kid when I was 28. This gave me a buffer zone of about two years, thereby guaranteeing that I would have all of the big stuff accomplished by the time I turned 30 and rigor mortis set in.

But that’s the thing about life’s screenplay. People think the writer is working off of an outline and each page is already carefully planned out, but then the characters take over. New characters are introduced and the story takes on a life of its own. Now I’m 34, single, childless, and have made a serious departure from my original script.

Yet, when I think about my story, I try to cling to authors who defy formula. There are plenty of storytellers who never adhere to the Page 80 romantic principle. For example, Jane Austen’s heroines never kissed until after they were married or at least engaged, which never took place until the end of the story. Also, the characters who defy formula often spend more time saving cats than they do kissing. Consider Sally Field in Norma Rae or Places in the Heart. I don’t remember her kissing anybody in either film, but I do remember her holding up that “union” sign. And I remember her picking cotton to survive, caring for her children and rescuing some random blind man all on her own - without a husband.

Maybe I can look at my story the same way. I saved many cats ahead of schedule. I donated blood. I helped feed the poor and disenfranchised. I cared for and taught more than 800 adolescents. And my story is no where near over. Maybe what I really need is a sequel to my movie – or better yet, a miniseries. My story will become an epic. I’ll make comeback after comeback, and my audience will stick with me because this is one character they’ll want to root for until the end.

Gone to the Dogs

I started wanting a dog when I was about seven years old. I used to sing “Only You” to my grandmother’s schnauzer, and he would get so excited that it just sent these tiny injections of joy directly into my heart. But, up until recently I had such a busy lifestyle that getting a dog wasn’t really feasible. Things changed in the winter of 2007, which was a particularly difficult season. I was lonely, stressed out and overburdened. I was sick of my hectic lifestyle and in desperate need of some dog love, so I offered to watch a friend’s chocolate lab over Thanksgiving break.

Shortly after he arrived at my apartment I came down with the stomach flu and a fever. I felt really guilty that I couldn’t walk the dog, but he didn’t care. He climbed onto the couch, wedged himself between the cushion and my body, and draped his paw across my stomach. Apart from eating and going outside to pee, that dog did not leave my side until the fever broke. Later in the week I felt better and we were out walking. As I watched him prance to and fro with little droplets of snow on his nose, I knew I needed a dog of my own.

I immediately began to draft a strategy for what I called, “Puppy Plan 2008.” I researched breeders and put a deposit down on a yellow lab months before she was even born. I read umpteen books on dog training and marked them up with a highlighter and sticky notes. I watched hundreds of hours of dog shows on Animal Planet. By the time I brought Nellie home as a puppy, I had a full Excel spreadsheet detailing, down to the minute, when she would eat, sleep, poop, practice leash training and commands, and participate in “bonding” exercises.

I was surprised to note that Nellie was a sentient being who had her own ideas about when to eat, sleep and poop. Those early days of her puppyhood were adventuresome and trying. I still lived in an apartment at the time, so potty training was especially athletic. Whenever I saw Nellie crouching on her hind legs, I’d dive across the room, scoop her up, tuck her under my arm like a football and run down three flights of stairs to put her on the grass. We did this approximately 437 times a day.

While she was a perfectly pleasant during the daylight hours, Nellie experienced a complete personality transformation at about 8:00 PM every evening and became what a friend of mine termed, “Demon Dog.” Just as we approached the staircase after her evening pee, Nellie would start protesting, bucking like a staillion and resisting the leash. By the time I got her up the stairs and into the apartment I was scratched and bleeding out of puncture wounds from her tiny needle teeth. Then she would go completely schitzo, run around the apartment in a frantic rage, and repeatedly launch herself onto the couch until I took her down like a sumo wrestler.

Nellie needed constant supervision. Once, I left the room for 30 seconds to start a load of laundry and came back to discover that the puppy was no where to be found. “How far could she have gone in a one bedroom apartment?” I asked myself, opening and closing kitchen cabinets. After an extensive search I found that she had fallen into a crevice between the couch and the end table. She was just sitting there, listening to me call her, while peacefully chewing on a copy of “How to Raise a Puppy You Can Live With.”

I had a lot of rules for my dog in the early days, most of them centered in Cesar Milan’s (Dog Whisperer) philosophy that canines need humans to be leaders, not overly-sentimental basket cases. So, I was determined that I would be a calm, assertive pack leader. I would not baby talk to my dog, and I would certainly NOT refer to myself as her “Mommy.” I would not give her any affection until she had received a structured, disciplined walk, and absolutely, positively, under no circumstances was the dog allowed to sleep in my bed.

It’s difficult to determine when these rules started to disintegrate, but the more I grew to love Nellie, the less structured things became. I couldn’t wait until she had been walked and put through a 20 minute training regime. One look at her fuzzy widdle ears and her tiny wet nose and I simply had to suffocate her with hugs and kisses. Also, I didn’t use baby talk with my dog – it was something much worse. I spoke normally when other people were around, but as soon as they left me alone with Nellie I began to sound like some kind of escaped mental patient with a speech impediment. I said nonsensical things like, “You need go ow-sigh and go potties?” and “No bites. That hurt Mommy.” I felt ashamed that the State of Colorado was trusting me to educate America’s youth.

After two months only one rule remained steadfast: Nellie still did not sleep in my room or in my bed. Then, one night, I watched the movie “Into the Wild,” which was not (empirically) considered a horror film, but I have an overactive imagination and the sight of Christopher McCandless’s corpse in that abandoned bus was enough to haunt me for several nights in a row.

“This is just silly,” I thought to myself on the fourth night of insomnia. “I’m laying here in the dark, afraid, when I have a little puppy who is perfectly capable of distracting me.” So, I moved Nellie’s crate into my bedroom, thinking her mere presence would provide enough comfort. But I couldn’t see inside her crate in the dark, so it was almost like she wasn’t even there. Shortly thereafter, she was out of her crate and sleeping on a doggie pillow on the floor next to my bed.

About a month later, I was feeling particularly lonesome and found myself, again, unable to sleep. So, I piled some blankets on the floor next to Nellie’s pillow and tucked my arm into her soft fur. I slept with her again the next night, and the next. My back hurt so much after two weeks of sleeping on the floor that I finally gave up and put the dog in my bed, which is where she sleeps to this day.

If you asked my friends to describe my personality, they would probably say something like “structured to the point of insanity” or “considerably anal.” And that’s if they were being nice. I’m not just type-A. I’m a capital “A” in bold, 24-point font. But having a dog has helped me let go of some of the structure in my life, and that’s not frightening – it’s totally freeing. More importantly, though I made up all these rules for how I was going to raise Nellie, they all went out the window as soon as I loved her. She taught me one of the most important lessons about love: there simply are no rules. True love is unstructured, undisciplined, and completely disarming.

Yesterday, Nellie went to the vet for her one year check-up and booster shots. The night before her appointment, I made a list of things I wanted to ask the vet about, such as Nellie’s occasional dry cough, excessive panting after exercise, and the fact that I had missed her heartworm preventative two months in a row. Stupidly, I decided to Google all of these symptoms in order to prepare myself for the possible prognosis. After about an hour of surfing the web, I determined that Nellie was suffering from heartworm, hip dysplasia, cancer, heart disease, and lung conjunctivitis.

I felt the worst about the heartworm, because it was I who had forgotten to give her the preventative medication during the months of January and February. Heartworm is a parasite carried by mosquitoes, and it can only be treated with a very dangerous drug that contains arsenic. I read blog after blog in which dog owners wept over the dangers and painful side effects of this medication. I clicked on photo after photo of parasites eating the hearts of dogs from the inside out. Not good bedtime reading.

By the time I stumbled into bed at midnight, I had worked myself into a state of absolute, irrational hysteria. I was convinced that the next day I would take Nellie to the vet and she would say, “Well, Alice, your dog is going to die. You should have remembered the heartworm preventative. C'est la vie.” I ran into the bathroom, thinking I might vomit. Then I came out to find Nellie sleeping peacefully on my pillow with her paw tucked under her chin. “Look at her!” I exclaimed to absolutely no one. “How could I not have noticed she was in such a weakened state?” I wept into her furry tummy and begged God to let my dog live. Nellie rolled over and yawned.

Mysteriously, the anxiety disappeared as quickly as it came. “It’s unlikely she was bitten by a mosquito in the dead of winter,” I told myself, and eventually I, too, fell asleep. The next day I told the vet the whole story about my paranoia the night before, thinking we would both have a good laugh about it. She chuckled, but she also looked a little afraid. “My mother always told me I was overly imaginative,” I attempted to explain.

“Yeah, well. Nellie’s perfectly healthy,” the vet replied with her hand on the doorknob.

“I won’t forget her heartworm preventative again. I put a reminder on the calendar in my cell phone!”

Before I knew it the vet was out the door, “Sounds good, Alice! See you next year!” she said, briskly heading down the hall. Hopefully, I wasn’t the only freak she had to deal with that day.

It’s true. I do have an overactive imagination. It’s both a blessing and a curse. But, more than anything, this experience frightened and amazed me because I never realized how deeply attached I am to Nellie.

Dog love is difficult to explain.

This is all I can say: my dog is devastated when I leave the house and she’s elated when I come home. She’s equally elated when she gets to chase a crunchy-looking leaf blowing in the breeze. I can buy her treats and toys, but she’s perfectly content with a stick and a sunbeam. She has no yesterdays, and no tomorrows. It’s as though that dog is in tune with something about God – the universe – eternity – that I will never fully comprehend. I envy that.

The Feminine Mystique (Reprise)

Yesterday I was watching a commercial for a cleaning product that shall remain nameless. It started off in a sunny living room – white walls, white sofa, white carpet. Yellow tulips in a vase on the dining room table. A woman was standing at the door as her husband and children left for the day. “See you later, family!” she sang.

After she closed the door the blonde, perfectly put together mother (dressed in khakis, a yellow cashmere sweater set, and a pearl necklace) proceeded to clean the house. Moments later she put away her dust mop and settled onto the sofa for a day of pleasurable reading. Her hair and make-up were still in place. Not a drop of sweat graced her brow.

When her family returned home, the woman’s husband exclaimed, “Wow, honey! You must have been cleaning all day!” She winked into the camera with a knowing smile.

This commercial immediately came to mind when I was re-reading Betty Friedan’s "The Feminine Mystique." I’m a high school English teacher and every year I teach a unit on feminism. Betty Friedan won critical acclaim for her writing about housewives, many of whom (despite the standard assumptions about women in the 1950s) did not find ultimate bliss washing dishes and ironing. These women had achieved their supposed American dream: a husband in a suit, children in ball caps, and a roast in the oven but, surprisingly, they were actually quite miserable.

In the 1950s it was common to see advertisements like the one described above, because society was determined to convince women that the secret to happiness could be found in a bottle of Windex. Supposedly this is no longer the case. Which begs the question, why is this blissful, cleaning housewife still appearing on my TV screen in 2008 with the only real difference being that she’s wearing slacks instead of a poofy Donna Reed skirt?

Now, I’m no dummy. I know how cleaning products are marketed and I know this was an advertisement and not a realistic depiction of the average American woman. I’m not asking why the ad agency chose to sell the product this way. I’m asking why it still works.

Here’s a dose of reality: today’s women never clean the house in cashmere, khakis and pearls. On the days I actually have time to clean the house I wake up, put my hair in a pony tail and I don’t shower. I throw on an old t-shirt, paint-stained shorts and a jogging bra (that is, if I wear a bra at all), and no matter how wonderful the cleaning product is, I always end up hunched over the tub scrubbing and sweating. I attempt to de-clutter the living room, dig through piles of mail, lug the vacuum cleaner up and down the stairs, separate the recycling, haul old banana peels and chicken bones out to the trash, and pick up a sack of dog turds along the way.

By the time I’m finished cleaning I’m covered in stains, sweat and dust. My joints ache and my throat burns from inhaling bleach fumes. And here’s the real kicker – I live by myself. I can only imagine how this task is compounded for women who are actually cleaning up after kids, pets, and spouses – for many, all of this in addition to the pressure of their careers outside the home.

The most disturbing thing about commercial Blondie and her fantasy cleaning product is not the fact that these products are still marketed mostly to women, it’s the fact that Blondie’s lifestyle is still considered the ideal. And, just like in Friedan’s time, women who feel unfulfilled or stressed out by their “traditional” gender role become confused and self-deprecating, thinking they must have done something wrong if they fall short of the status quo.

In a sense women are still experiencing Friedan’s “problem that has no name.” Though we are encouraged in a variety of pursuits, we are also expected to find fulfillment as wives and mothers. Only now, a woman is supposed to be some kind of hybrid 1950s housewife and modernist: partner in her firm, soccer mom, grad. student, and scrap-booker all in one.

Yet, when it comes to perpetuating an impossible ideal, ladies, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We’re so committed to maintaining the status quo that we refuse to let people see the truth. Case in point: Last year I visited a friend of mine three weeks after she had her first baby, and I quickly learned that having a newborn is nothing like the prim and proper spectacles of joy that our Aunts describe at baby showers.

When I arrived at her house my friend answered the door looking beaten and cadaverous – hair hanging in her face, dark circles under her eyes. One leg of her sweat pants was hiked up to the knee. She wore a gray t-shirt stained with breast milk and vomit. “I haven’t slept in 42 hours,” she sighed as she flopped on the couch, which was piled with a mountain of laundry, diapers and bits of graham cracker. Then the baby let out a blood-curdling scream that made me want to dive under the couch to shield myself from what I could only assume was an incoming siege. My friend stumbled over a toy train to pick up the baby and was greeted with a smear of molten green poo erupting out of the child’s onesie. I gazed at the scene in utter shock. I was sure that within the next five minutes the President would somehow get wind of the situation and declare a state of emergency.

I left my friend’s house and sped home with a mixture of terror and gratefulness. None of my other married friends had ever dared reveal the secrets that lay behind the iron curtain of motherhood. This friend was trying to save me. She was giving me a chance to escape. Then, a counter-argument struck me cold. Immediately commercials for baby shampoo began to rush through my mind –images of adorable little cherubs with soap on their tummies were getting tickled by their exceedingly happy mothers. I shook-off the bubbles and re-focused on the images from my friend’s house. “Those commercials are a rouse!” I exclaimed to absolutely no one. “Propaganda designed by evil capitalists to snare us into mating so that we’ll buy their shampoo!”

By the time I got home I had fully convinced myself that I was never having children. Then, the counter-argument struck again. I immediately felt guilty. “Of course I want children,” I sniffled. “What the heck is the matter with me?” All women want children, right? That’s what we do.

You know, Betty Friedan became famous because she unearthed the seemingly impossible truth that many women want something other than the status quo. I’ll go ahead and concede that things are somewhat different now. The average woman is perfectly free to admit that she’s miserable, and many of them do, repeatedly, while screaming at their husbands and drinking lots of vodka. On a more positive note, it’s now perfectly acceptable for the average woman to take her destiny into her own hands and follow her bliss. I can still want children. But I don’t have to imitate the ads. I can be my own kind of wife and mother and I can want lots of other things, too. Most importantly, I’m free to be content with what I have.

Still, I’m troubled by the few flickering embers of Friedan’s theory that permeate the lives of today’s American women. Single women still feel pressured to find their fulfillment in family life, and as their biological alarm clocks tick on they begin to ask themselves, “What if I never accomplish this goal? Will I still matter just the way I am?” Married women may feel deeply fulfilled as wives and mothers. But they may also feel a little bit betrayed, because no one ever told them they would have to say good-bye to their white sofas and sweater sets. They have discovered the difficult but noble truth of married life: that every day is about rolling up their shirt sleeves and tackling the dirty work that comes along with selfless commitment and love.

If Betty Friedan were still alive and writing in defense of women, I wonder if she would title her latest article, “Would you give us a break, already?” Because there’s no real mystique about what the modern woman needs in order to be fulfilled. We just need a break from conflicting ideals and impossible expectations.

Maybe I’ll write that article one day. I can’t right now, though. I’ve got to slap on my pearl necklace and go mow the lawn.

Teaching Police

With my travel fund exhausted and my friends out of town, I found myself with very little to do during spring break. So when our School Resource Officer asked if anyone wanted to volunteer as an actor for the police department’s training program I responded with a very professional, “Me! Me! Pick Me! Me!” Not only was I the president of the drama club in high school, I explained, but I also received a varsity letter for my thespian activities. Undoubtedly filled with pity at the sight of my nerdiness, the officer agreed to refer my name to his sergeant.

When the sergeant called to schedule me into a training class he told me that we would be working in an abandoned warehouse, which was quite dusty. He said I should wear a long sleeved shirt and durable pants because I would be crawling around on the ground a lot. (I instantly wondered what sort of crime involved crawling.) Before he hung up the sergeant made sure I was prepared to get “roughed up” by some cops and to get shot with paint balls and fake tazers. He also told me that our school librarian, who recently became a grandma, was the only other adult from my school who had volunteered.

Still excited by the prospect of pretending I was a drug dealer or terrorist, I readily agreed. But I must admit it was hard to prepare myself mentally. In my mind’s eye, I pictured myself and the school librarian crawling toward a cocaine stash through some dark, rat-infested warehouse with water dripping from the ceiling. Inevitably, she would drop her glasses. I would turn to help her and accidentally cut myself on a piece of shattered window pane. Then the police officers, smelling my blood, would leap out of no where and shoot me repeatedly with paint balls, causing enormous welts to sprout up all over my body. Of course the welts wouldn’t hurt immediately because I would have already passed out from fright.

When I arrived at the training facility I was relieved to discover that it was just an empty office building that was somewhat dusty but still retained its structural integrity. I also learned that crawling is not part of your crime; it’s what you do after the cops have cased the building and found you standing in the kitchen with a shotgun. Even though it was pretend, I was so scared when the officers screamed at me to show my hands and drop to the floor that I readily crawled to them like a trained basset hound. Not very authentic.

The teaching officers took all the volunteers aside and fitted us with suits of armor that included several layers of padding, mesh material, and a gigantic mask with very few air holes. By the time I was outfitted and given my acting assignment, I looked and sounded like Darth Vader. (That is, if Darth Vader had the body of a linebacker and the attitude of a disgruntled trailer park housewife.)

As the day went on the sergeant set up five rooms with different scenarios through which the trainees must progress and respond accordingly. I was assigned the role of an angry woman who was visiting her boyfriend at a rehab. facility. My character was understandably upset because in the nine weeks her boyfriend had been in rehab. he A) failed to get sober, B) had an affair, and C) spent all their rent money on beer. We didn’t have any prepared dialogue but the police officer playing my boyfriend had already encountered this scenario on several occasions, and I couldn’t even count the number of times I had a fight with my drunk, cheating boyfriend while he was in rehab., so we were both confident we could improvise.

When our scenario was about to begin the sergeant prepared the officer trainees in the hallway and then yelled, “Room two, we’re hot!” which was the signal for me to put on my Darth Vader mask and start lumbering toward my cheating boyfriend while I cried, shouted profanities, and pretended to hit him. The officers were supposed to separate us, make us sit on the floor, and determine what the problem was.

They all got us to sit quite successfully. It was difficult for me to hear them through my mask and over my own shouting, but I could tell by their hand gestures that they were concerned about my plight and wanted to help, so I continued. “He cheated!” I wailed through the tiny air holes, “And he spent all of our rent money on beer!” I repeatedly broke into hysterics while my drunk boyfriend told the officer, “But ah luuuuv her. She my woman.” Finally the sergeant called, “End scenario” and I was allowed to take off my mask and breathe again while they debriefed the role play.

However, my conflicts with my fake boyfriend didn’t end there. We were asked to replay the scenario through several rounds, each one with me becoming increasingly violent. This is important because (as they explained to me) many officers will immediately assume that the male is the assailant and address him first, when oftentimes the woman is the dangerous one. Approximately 30% of all domestic violence calls end with the woman being taken into custody – not the man. So, they were trying to train the officers to analyze our behavior and assess the situation without making assumptions based on gender.

In one version of our scenario I was supposed to go completely berserk, grab a baseball bat, knock the top off of a trashcan and then attempt to bludgeon my boyfriend to death. Since this situation was considered lethal, the officers were required to shoot me if they couldn’t get me to put down my weapon. I didn’t mind getting shot, but hitting the trashcan was kind of challenging because I’ve never been particularly good at team sports. It’s difficult for me to hit anything with a baseball bat even when I’m not wearing seven layers of padding. Plus, every time I put on my Darth Vader mask I pulled hair into my eyes and my breath naturally fogged up the lenses, so I was batting blind. But I think whirling the bat around haphazardly made me look even crazier and further encouraged the officers to shoot me, which is what they were supposed to do.

Two of the three officers passed the test. One shot me with her paint gun and the other decided to use his tazer. After each instance I was supposed to fall down on the ground and pretend to be wounded, which I think I did rather convincingly, but because my authentic cries were filling the confines of my mask I couldn’t hear the sergeant say, “Cease fire – end scenario” and I continued to “die” long after the other actors had taken off their masks. Then I felt a little poke on my shoulder. “Umm, Alice?” the sergeant said. “Alice? That’s a good job but it’s over now. You can stop.” I took off my mask to find him standing there with a smirk on his face. Then someone in the corner whispered, “Drama Queen.” (I'm not positive who it was but think it was my fake boyfriend, who also happened to be smirking.)

In the final round of our scenario I had to hold a fake baby in my left hand and beat up my boyfriend with my right. After a couple of practices all of the trainees were able to determine that I was the aggressor, probably because my boyfriend was cowering in the corner while I snarled and tore at his flesh (all the while holding a baby inches away from the madness). One of the trainees managed to pull me off my boyfriend, take me to the ground and handcuff me, but during the process the baby went flying against the wall and cracked her plastic skull open, so the officer got reprimanded for that. But I think he still got an “A” for effort.

Though I was hot, sweaty and tired at the end of the day, I can definitely say this was one of the most exciting, unique learning (and teaching) experiences of my life. I have a new appreciation for police officers that goes well beyond respect. I know it sounds kind of cliché, but police work is nothing like what they portray on TV. Police officers are noble people but they are also real people with real fears, and overcoming those fears in order to protect others is no easy business.

During one of the debriefing sessions a seasoned officer gave the trainees a compelling speech about overcoming the instinct to flee. “Your partner is like your brother,” he said. “If you left your brother behind to die in a gunfight, you would never be able to live with yourself.” He went on to explain that they had to trust each other no matter what, and I heard this reminder to trust echoed throughout the day. It made me wonder whom I would trust with my own life and where I would find the strength to express that level of vulnerability.

We had some down time between scenarios so I got to talk a lot with the officer playing my boyfriend. He told me about how he majored in political science in college, how he liked creative writing, and how he and his wife read five books to their son every night. It was refreshing to see the person behind the uniform. Also, though the officers talked tough when they were instructing the trainees, they were always tender-hearted when it came to dealing with victims (even fake ones). At the end of each scenario I took off my mask and one of them was readily cradling me, picking the tazer parts out of my armor, and helping me to my feet. They also gave me a chocolate donut.

At the end of the day the sergeant closed the training session with the words, “Remember: we need to carry olive branches as well as arrows.” He wanted all the officers to understand that it was as much their responsibility to promote peace as it was to use force. That is definitely a lesson I will carry on into my personal life, and I admired this sergeant – not just as an officer of the law, but as a teacher as well.

Most importantly, though, I learned that despite my meager training as a high school English Teacher, I can still hold my baby in one hand and beat the tar out of my no-good, cheatin’ boyfriend with the other. And, if I deem it necessary, I can give him a few good swats with a baseball bat before the fuzz has a chance to take me down.

Nellie - 6.5 weeks old

Nellie is a ball of furry snuggles.

She's a lover, not a biter (usually).

She also has several pretty, contemplative poses.

And she will defend you against

any vicious shoelace that

comes your way.

Widows and Orphans

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27)

I have had such a joyful time volunteering at the Lafayette Senior Center. I only help serve dinner there once a month, but I love talking to and sitting with all the elderly community members. They have such amazing stories and we keep each other company. This coupled with my time teaching high school makes for a pretty amazing life. The above Bible verse came to mind this evening for some reason, and I didn't have anywhere to write my thoughts so I put them here. So many of my students have faulty parents, divorced parents, or no parents at all. They are, essentially, orphans. So many of the people at the Senior Center have lost their loved ones - namely their husbands and wives. Without even realizing it I have been given these opportunities to look after widows and orphans, and that is my "religion." It's not the type of religion that the media and politicians talk about or the type of thing you see on one of those evangelical TV stations. It's the real thing. Real Christianity: caring for one another. And it is such a gift.