Author: oldladywriting

The Patriot Game

When I was a young girl, Ireland was not on my list of “places I could only visit in my wildest dreams” (or in another lifetime).  So, when another lifetime arrived, I was not even mildly interested.  And who knows why?  Maybe it is just not a place that influenced my culture.  For some centuries, my people looked to Paris—the literature, the music, the films, and, aside from that brazen Corsican conqueror, the history.  Of course, we have forgiven the French after La Grande Armée was soundly defeated by the grander Russian winter.

In the ‘80s, as a Poli Sci college major, Ireland first burst on the scene of my life through a World Politics class.  I was so spectacularly ignorant of the land’s history, demographics, and political structure (and, in fairness, the professor was terrible), that it came as a bit of a surprise to me that the island is divided, in every possible way but geographically.  In that Dark Decade, The Troubles were someone else’s.  Car bombingswere often in the news, the IRA was a terrifying specter of terrorism, and Sinn Féin seemed scarier than the Nazi Party.  Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers were already dead, and “The Crying Game” was not yet made.  In my mind, Ireland was a lawless, scary place, Belfast was Beirut, and no one in their right mind would go there.  This is how well they taught us in college—or how well I paid attention:  I figured that the entire country was a mess, with Belfast at the center of the steaming rubble.  It kind of sort of did not make sense to me that the island was partitioned and Ulster belonged to Great Britain.  It still totally does not make any sense—the 18 year old me was right on the money!

Quite obviously, I have no Irish roots.  But, many Americans do, and I have a “real American” (as my relatives initially referred to him) spouse.  At some point in our European travels, he started lobbying for an Ireland trip.  When the previous decade’s Big Birthday was coming up, it was his fervent wish.  This is how much I thought of Ireland:  we went to Greece.  (Don’t feel bad for him, he loved it.  Greece is great!  And we did eventually make it to Ireland.)

In the spring of last year, I had an opportunity to go to Dublin for work.  (Yes, there are occasional flashes of brilliance in this job…)  The week following my business trip, “Chess” was starting a very limited engagement with the English National Opera at the London Palladium.  Nigel Havers was touring England with “Art”, one of the best modern plays. And the original “Les Miz” was still at the Queen’s Theatre (sadly, no more, as of the date of this writing, replaced by the 25th anniversary abomination).  So, Dublin, then London, but I had the weekend in between at my disposal. 

In my lifetime, so many “enemies” changed.  As scary as the IRA was in the ‘80s and ‘90s (I know the 70s were even scarier, but not on my personal radar), 9/11 changed all that.  And then it came to me, for reasons passing understanding—Belfast.  I will go to Belfast for a couple of days, just to say I went.  It might be a terrible depressing place, but just the fact that The Troubles are over and I have the opportunity to visit—well, never could I imagine such a thing a couple or three decades before.  I mean, BELFAST!

Belfast at night

Words cannot do it justice.  Maybe more accurately, *my* words cannot do it justice, because I am simply not skillful enough in describing how this entirely foreign, previously unknown town of sorrow and rebellion got under my skin and into my heart.  I finally not only understood, but felt the history of these people, NOT my people, NOT my religion (on either side, really), yet still deeply moving and traumatic.  I sobbed throughout my visit—the walls surrounding the Catholic enclaves, the murals (oh, those murals!) depicting their struggles for self-determination and the right to join their ethnic brothers and sisters in the Republic, the room in the City Hall with quotes from the families of the disappeared and the murdered… 

City Hall

Dublin is like the continental South—joyful, friendly, party town.  There are some dark moments there, of course, and memories of the Empire’s oppression are alive and well.  But Dublin is a capital of its own country and people.  The Republic is still a comparatively new political entity, of course, but these days, it is a fabulous country with a rich heritage, and God bless it!

The Salmon of Knowledge

Belfast is a Northern city, beautiful but sad, the Empire not a distant memory but a giant wing over the skyline, the memories fresh in their defiance despite the recent reconciliation, the specter of the martyrs ever-present, the separation of religions still a reality, the most bombed street in Europe (not in Stalingrad, not in Dresden) eerie in its quiet, the very ground almost unsteady with the winds of unrest of those few recent decades. 

And what about the IRA, heroes or villains?  Hard for me to say now, after walking through Belfast.  The violence is suppressed, but it all just feels unfair, even to this semi-detached outsider.  In the immortal words of Rodney King, “Can we all just get along”?  It hurt my heart to think of what happened in that city and in that lovely land just a short time ago.  I left a little bit in love with Belfast, and over the past year, I have been aching to return.  It touched me in a way few other places have over the years.  It’s almost as if I find its troubled past enticing.  It’s almost as if I want to go back and be reassured that it continues to thrive.  And, as we say back in the Old Country, what is not a joke to the devil—might we see a United Ireland yet this side of paradise?

When Did the Arc de Triomphe Start Leaning?

In this lifetime, my relationship with Paris evolved and improved quite significantly.  I first spent a summer there as a student after my sophomore year of college.  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Dickens does not mention anything about lack of funds and lousy boyfriends, but that was an overriding influence of my Parisian summer.  Because 19 year old girls are inherently stupid in love (don’t argue, I know this!), spending three months with a total wastrel seemed somehow preferable to spending them without him, albeit in the City of Lights.  If I could travel back in time to slap the silliness out of the 19 year old me, I would absolutely do it—and the Butterfly Effect be damned. 

Another reason Paris was less fabulous the first time around was because I was poor.  New York, Rome, Paris, they are incredible cities under the worst of circumstances, but the best of circumstances are better.  And so, living in a boarding house with a shared bathroom in the Latin Quarter and not being able to afford even an occasional restaurant meal is a slight bit of a bummer.  I am a Right Bank girl at heart.  On all my subsequent trips to Paris, I made a point to only cross the Seine for sightseeing purposes.  C’est la vie.

Still, it was an amazing summer, because studying French language and cinema at the source of it all, at 19, with a group of new friends (some of whom are now old friends) was an experience of a lifetime. 

There have been several trips since that glorious, sunlit summer, and in various configurations (BFF and I; mom, grandma and I; spouse and I; spouse, younger son, BFF and her daughter and I, etc.)  In March of 2018, my mom and I made the pilgrimage.  It was our Second Annual Girls Trip. I had a purpose; she tagged along.  It was also my Big Birthday Year—we started celebrating months in advance.

It had to be March because Salvatore Adamo was giving a concert at the Olympia.  Salvatore Adamo at the Olympia, let that sink in!  It would be my second time seeing him live.  The first was several years earlier, at the Bataclan—we actually sat in those chairs that I would later see on TV and photo images, scattered on the ground after the horrific terrorist attack…  And now, Adamo, one of the fondest musical memories of my childhood, the iconic venue, my now beloved Paris, and my fiftieth year—the perfect combination if ever there was one.  I knew there was only one PIC* worthy of this type of shenanigan—my mom!

The topic of “MY MOM” can (and might) take up volumes.  But not today.  Today I will only say that she is a woman always ready for an adventure, which is a marvelous quality to possess when one is a parental unit of #oldladytraveling. She has the motive, method, and opportunity—in other words, the desire to travel (especially with her only child), the means to afford it, and a seemingly limitless supply of vacation days despite still being employed on a full-time basis. Eh voila, I offered, she accepted, we went.

I am a recovering Obsessive Overplanner. As of this writing, I do not have a single vacation planned for next year, and it’s already June.  The Paris trip, however, pretty much planned itself.  I bought the concert tickets, and proceeded to work in concentric circles from the epicenter that was Olympia.  The hotel had to be close to both the Olympia and the Opera, where the airport bus would drop us off, the Olympia and the Opera are already close to each other, and the Fragonard Museum of Perfume was determined to also be nearby.  And the rest, as they say, would be gravy.

Because this is decidedly not a travelogue, and because I leave scrapbooking to my mom, I will only mention the *firsts* that happened on this trip:

  1. The first time I actually bought perfume in Paris:  Yes, yes, I know, France is the motherland of perfume, and I do love and wear it (occasionally to excess), but I have never actually bought it there.  I mean, these days everything is available everywhere, and dollars are cheaper than euros.  Except Fragonard—it is not being exported to the US.  So we went to the Fragonard Museum of Perfume, learned a lot about the history and the process (all facts which I promptly forgot and cannot now recall a single one), and bought several bottles of scents with tremendous joy and glee.  This is truly an experience that can only be shared with another girl!
  2. The first time I rode in a cab in Paris: I mean, not to/from an airport, but just because.  And the “because” of it was that we were overserved champagne at some café on the Champs-Élysées—what better reason could there be?  On our first day, we walked along looking for food, were beckoned in by a friendly waiter named Pierre, and proceeded to have a raucous repast consisting primarily of various bubbly beverages and cheese. I am a ridiculous human being who will always walk when she can, take public transportation when she cannot, and only resort to cabs when there is literally no other option.  My mom felt there was no other option. She might not have been wrong.  I have to report that taxis in Paris are really no different than taxis the world over.  Enough said.

3. The first time I visited the Musée des Arts et Métiers:  Paris is full of museums, and every time I delude myself into thinking I have visited them all, or at least all the major ones, a new one springs up like a mushroom right in front of me!  My mom and I were wandering around, looking for covered shopping passages, feeling very hip and urban and deservedly European when we stopped for another obligatory kir and pâté at a café right across from this heretofore undiscovered gem.  Thus fortified, we entered and enjoyed many scientific curiosities, tools that mom recalled from her engineering training, music boxes, and other fun stuff.  Highly recommended!

4. The first time I visited Opéra Garnier:  As centrally located as it is, and as much of a Right Bank girl as I am, I have never been inside until that trip.  I decided that time has finally come to visit the Phantom’s old stomping grounds.  They do tours in English, and we signed up for an evening one, during which you not only explore the opulent stairwells and halls, but get to sit in *his* box.  It is exactly as I imagined—a gorgeous, luxurious, sparkling, and absolutely quintessentially French palace.  The Phantom was right in demanding only the highest standard of quality for the prima donnas to grace this magnificent stage, and if he had to smash chandeliers to achieve it, more power to him!

5. The first time I attended Theatre in Paris:  No, not theatre in Paris, but Theatre in Paris.  During our exploring of the area near Olympia, mom and I wandered into quaint little enclosed square with an imposing equestrian figure of what I, in a moment of unexpected lucidity, perceived to be an English king (well, it is just a parlor trick, isn’t it—his appearance was of a era significantly later than the end of French monarchy). It was, indeed, the visage of Edward II, the “most Parisian of all Kings”, and there was a theatre in the square as well–Théâtre Édouard VII**. My mom, who speaks not a word of French beyond what the general populace does (that is to say, a word of greeting, thanks, and farewell, if that), became immediately excited and said that she wants to see a play just for the experience, the understanding of the dialogue being a bonus she had no right to expect.  I dimly recalled some new-ish initiative of subtitling French plays for the English-speaking audience.  Thank you, the gods of Internet!  Not only did I confirm this, but we ordered tickets to a show, which provides an English language program and makes sure your seats have a good visibility of the subtitles scrolling at the top of the stage.  What a great deal!  The play we saw was “Somewhere in the Life”, adapted from “Park Your Car in Harvard Yard” by Israel Horovitz.  It was quite wonderful, one of those talky, relationship plays with two actors.  Maybe because it was a translation and an adaptation from English, I felt that I could understand about 60-70% without subtitles. Or maybe my French is that awesome.  Yes, definitely the latter.

6. Honorable mention goes to the first time I ate caviar in Paris—because wherever my mom is, there it is.  You can take a woman out of Russia, but…

And this was our Parisian adventure and Second Annual Mother and Daughter trip.  If you are mildly curious about the First, as well as subsequent, annual trips—stay tuned!

*PIC – [in this context] Partner in Crime

**“In the early to mid 1900s,under the direction of Sacha Guitry, the theatre became a symbol of anglo-franco friendship, and where French people could discover and enjoy Anglo Saxon works”.  (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Run Your Own Race

I have had a strange quasi-vicarious relationship with running since 1980.  It terrified yet attracted me.  I heard stories from my mother about having to run cross-country in college along the Volga embankment.  Given that I was second slowest only to the much heavier girl in my class back home, I dreaded the humiliation a decade in advance.  Even at age ten or so, I was occasionally giving myself pep talks that in college, everyone else will be too mature to tease the unathletic girl.  Of course, history showed that in the US, the university I attended did not have a phys ed requirement.  Go Blue and God Bless America!

In sixth grade, when I secretly quit the art studio that I was attending at the Young Pioneers Palace, I did so for several reasons.  One of them was that there were too many girls (they were all girls, if memory serves) who were much better artists than me.  And I hated getting paint all over myself.  I was quite a sloppy artist.  And I longed to paint with watercolors when all we were allowed was gouache, for reasons that are still passing understanding.  But most importantly, I got a better offer.  I was old enough to ride the trolley after school by myself, without my omnipresent and ever vigilant grandma.  My BFF decided to go to the track and field school with “Olympic reserve”.  She asked me to come along.  Apparently her father was some kind of a coach there, and he got us in—his tall, lean, fast daughter, and her friend with zero athletic prowess but a game attitude.

The school was fun.  I was terrible, of course, but since the exercise was neither mandatory nor graded, and gave me a chance to spend time with my friend rather than with grandma or the pretentious girls at the art studio, I went regularly.  The thing is, I am slow runner, but knowing that you have no chance at winning can be kind of liberating.  At the art studio, I tried and failed. At the track school, any attempt was a win for me.  And then came hurdles.

No, not hurdles as in virtual obstacles—real hurdles.  Here is why I loved them, even if I did a faceplant the first time I ran at one.  You don’t have to run as fast as the runners, or jump as high as the jumpers (that’s another thing I am really bad at, jumping).  I mean, of course Edwin Moses runs fast and jumps high (am I dating myself, mentioning Edwin Moses?  Al least I did not say David Burghley), but in the track and field school with “Olympic reserve” in 1980, the friend of the daughter of some dubious coach whom we never actually saw there had some mild fun with the hurdles. 

Once my grandmother found out, I don’t remember how, that I was hurdling rather than painting, there was a huge row.  There was always a huge row about something at our house.  My grandmother is of the “spare the rod, spoil the child” parenting philosophy, but this is not about her.  Soon thereafter we left the country.  And my friend stopped going once I left.  That still strikes me as sad.

So this was 1980.  In 1982, a huge beautiful film about 1924 Paris Olympics won the Best Picture Oscar for 1981.  I was living with my mother in Jackson, Michigan at the time and had no idea what an Oscar was.  My mother, who was in her Americanization phase then (to be fair, it lasted about three decades), took me to the cinema behind Paka Plaza (now defunct) to see this award-winning movie.  I instantly fell in love with Nigel Havers, a quintessentially English actor who played the part of the hurdler Lord Andrew Lindsay (David Burghley in real life).  This led to a lifetime love of British entertainment, especially PBS and BBC America.  And as for Nigel Havers, I actually saw him live on stage in Norwich, as Serge in “Art” a year ago.  How things do come full circle—and how can I write this and not feel like the luckiest girl in the world?

Briefly inspired by “Chariots of Fire”, which I saw over 25 times in the cinema alone and Lord knows how many times on VHS once we acquired a VCR, I did try to run then.  My mother bought be a book on running, or maybe I borrowed one from the library, and took me to a back road behind our apartment complex.  I might have run for a minute as recommended for beginners, spent another 30 sitting in the grass, and went home not to run again until 2016.

Despite my lifelong tendency to overthink, the decision to run was never a plan.  I say that it was an uncharacteristically swift decision for me, but I have been known to make those on occasion.  Some resolutions are just easier made and kept than others.  When you know, you know. 

Sometime in late 2015, I went on an 8k walk with a casual friend who runs.  She is not a conventional fitness model-looking person such as the ones one sees in videos, but a regular fun loving beer drinking gal who is but a few short years younger than me.  Yet clearly, she runs.  And that’s when I said to myself, if she runs, I can run. The 8k walk was no trouble, and I said to myself—in a year’s time, I will run a half marathon.  The long and short of it, I did.  And then another one, a year later.  And another one, on my 50th birthday.

The race is on!

Going back to “Chariots of Fire” as inspiration, the one thing that continuously strikes me as funny is that when I think of myself as Harold Abrahams or Eric Liddell, well, they were not marathoners.  They were sprinters.  Harold Abrahams was “the fastest man on Earth” in 1924.  Speed is still not my thing.

Running is a pretty cool thing, though.  I run barely faster than I walk, but I have seen some amazing sights as a runner. It is a new identity that I have tried on for size, and after three years, yes, that is who I am.  I am a runner. I am #oldladyrunning.

The Sour Smell of Success

In my fiftieth year, my career came to a screeching halt, and I started to obsessively contemplate my own mortality.  To say that it was a midlife crisis would only make sense if I expected to live to a hundred.  It was more of a half-life crisis—I had spent half of my life working in my unchosen field, and my wagon, having rolled up a certain modest hill, had somehow unhitched itself from its flickering faraway star and started rolling backwards. 

A midlife crisis is only interesting if it leads to something—a new career, a journey of self discovery, an escape from a stifling relationship.  Mine led me to a complete dead end in terms of a potential new career, a journey backward in time, and a bleak realization that I am living a life I was never meant to live, yet cannot recapture the life that was meant for me.  I still haven’t figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up—in my fiftieth year.  I did not need to discover myself—I knew myself.  I just did not know my place in this weird world. 

Through a glass darkly, it looked like I hadachieved something.  I arrived at a certain level of executive standing in a corporate field.  I hated it.  The paradox was that this well-planned life seems to have just happened to me.  Oh, sure, I set goals, but did I really—or were they set for me, by my socio-economic background, by my academic and professional accomplishments?  Success was snowballing—I never questioned that I had to take the next step up, and up, and up, until I found myself standing at a precipice, realizing that there is no path further up, and wondering how to get down.  Because I sure as hell did not want to either plummet, or keep standing on this stupid cliff. 

Professional success brought me no joy.  It is difficult to enjoy something you never consciously wanted.  Sure, the economic indicators were great, but they turned out to be insufficient.  I was buying a lot of cool experiences, but as my time on Earth passed the halfway point, I started to resent spending any of it doing things I did not want to do.  I discovered that my career is not—gasp!—my life.  It is just a job.  It is a paycheck.  A means to support my “real” life. What did that make me as a professional woman if not a failure?  Well, no, it just made me realize that after a quarter of a century of following a certain path, I wanted to follow a different one.

Left to my own devices, I would just read, go to the theater, and travel.  I am afraid I have realized that my true calling is to be the idle rich.  And so I started thinking—well, I was prompted to thought by some friends much wiser than me—that maybe it is possible to try to get back to the person that I was meant to be before I became someone else.

How does one live a purposeful life, in a sense that one takes every step deliberately and intentionally?  How does one capitalize on moments of joy and multiplies them, and discards moments of unpleasantness and avoids them?  How does one successfully battle ennui? And when something robs one of joy, how does one say, I will not go back there, I will not do this again?  I would like to learn.  It is not too late, even post-midlife crisis.