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Category: change

Life Preserver

Life Preserver

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If all birthdays should hold within them some memento mori, some reflections on our own mortality, then my recent one was complete even in that way, with the funeral of an acquaintance, a woman my age (too young to die!) held Saturday in a local cemetery.

Attending this funeral brought many thoughts to mind: Sadness for the family, especially the two twenty-something children who now must make their way without their mom; gratitude for my own health and family, for everything I have; and relief that I’ve escaped a trap that suburban living makes women especially prone to.

It isn’t always easy to schlep to the office, but the suburbs have a way of sucking women in and making everything about the kids. While I made sure I was home with the girls as much as possible when they were young, and I look back on those years as some of the most precious and happiest of my life, I tried always to have a separate self, a career (writing) self — an Anne that is not also Mom.

Now I tell my girls to do this, to keep themselves alive. The childrearing years only seem like they’ll last forever. In truth, they’re over in a flash.  When they are, you want a self to go back to.

Digital Trail

Digital Trail

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I’m not a big Facebook user. I remember posting vacation photos on the social media site once years ago — and realizing how much control I lost when I did that. I’ve been skittish about the site ever since.

But I give away data all the time, in ways great and small. The books I order, the words I write, the tweets I tweet — all leave a digital trail.  All I can do is make it a faint one.

Privacy has been on my mind these days, what with revelations that Facebook sold user data to Cambridge Analytica. I was amused to learn that an enterprising AP photographer was able to snap a picture of the talking points that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had in front of him at yesterday’s congressional hearings.

The New York Times reports this tidbit: “Resign? Founded Facebook. My decisions. I made mistakes. Big challenge, but we’ve faced problems before, going to solve this one. Already taking action.” And, if he had been asked if Facebook should be broken up, Zuckerberg was prepared to say: “U.S. tech companies key asset for America. Breakup strengthens Chinese companies.”

 It’s a fitting irony that Zuckerberg was outed not by social media but by old-fashioned media. Long live the camera … and the pen!

(Savvy Facebook users might learn that this was my high school.)

Empty Room

Empty Room

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Suzanne and Appolinaire moved out over the weekend. They left a stuffed-full center-hall colonial for a small blue house on a steep hill in Arlington. Walk up their sidewalk a few yards, crane your neck, whip out your binoculars — and you can see the Washington Monument. It’s that close to the city.

Meanwhile, in the outer ‘burbs, there’s an empty room. It’s been empty before, of course, while Suzanne lived in Africa for three-and-a-half years. But now she’s married, and — unless they’re between houses, as they were these last three months — they won’t be moving back.

It’s all as it’s supposed to be, and I’m delighted they’re settling into their new place.

It’s just that there’s this empty room — its exposed ticking mattress cover; the blank spots on the wall where the Les Mis poster used to be; the gaps in the book shelf. Even the cello is gone.

I’ll have to get used to it, that’s all.

Our Films, Our Selves

Our Films, Our Selves

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Today “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” opens in theaters, the first half of the seventh and final Potter book to hit the silver screen. When the first Potter film came out the girls were in first, fifth and seventh grades. Now two are in college and the youngest is in high school. You need only look at Daniel Radcliffe’s jawline, no trace of boyishness left, to know 10 years have passed. But through the magic of cinema his 11-year-old face will always be with us and will remind me, at least, of those relatively (and in retrospect!) serene elementary school years.

Actors are pegged not only to the ages of their debut (think Shirley Temple) but also to their strongest performances. I learned the other day that Jill Clayburgh passed away in early November. For me she will always be the devastated wife and mother of “An Unmarried Woman.” I must have seen that film half a dozen times in its heyday and was always inspired by the New York setting and by Clayburgh’s journey to selfhood (which sounds very transactional and 1970s but, hey, that’s when the movie came out).

The last scene is a classic, as Clayburgh attempts to carry a huge painting that her lover (Alan Bates playing an artist) has given her. Bates is dreamy and Clayburgh loves him, but he’s leaving town and she has worked too hard at independence to follow him. So he hands her the large canvas as if to say, here, you want to be a self-sufficient woman, try this on for size. Or at least that’s the message I took from it at the time. I was much younger then.

In Design

In Design

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The scene: a class on Adobe In Design. The characters: Seven people who know what they’re doing and one who does not. The latter, an editor, works in words not in images, cannot find all the tiny buttons and tabs with which one works in this program, cannot even remember to use the mouse instead of the keypad. But she — heck, I’ll just come clean and say I — press on, determined to get as much out of the class as possible.

I don’t plan to become a designer; I just want to demystify the process. I repeat that to myself all day, a silent mantra, but there comes a time in mid-afternoon when I’m hopelessly confused. I don’t know how to manipulate the image, I don’t even know what layer I’m on. The class is moving fast and by the time I ask a question I’m six steps behind the others.

The secret to staying young, I’ve heard, is to keep learning. But learning is risky. It requires a willingness to appear foolish in front of others. I felt foolish today. Based on that, I should have lopped a week off my age. At least.