I Ishi (and you Ishi too)

One of the few raunch-free references in Michael Tolliver Lives, by Armistead Maupin, which I read during my longer-than-anticipated journey to Maine, was to Ishi, the last of the Yahi, a native people of California who were massacred during the Gold Rush. Ishi, who was discovered in a state of starvation in Oroville in 1911 and taken to UC San Francisco to be studied by anthropologists and placed on display as a living museum piece, became an object of enormous public curiosity. He was dubbed "the last wild Indian," and anecdotes about his habits and skills and demeanor were regularly reported in the press—until he died four years later of tuberculosis—and became fodder for numerous books and movies and even a stage play.

My instinctive empathy with Ishi reminds me of my response and others' to earlier feral loners, like the Wild Child of Auvignon and Mowgli, the little boy adopted by wolves in Kipling's Jungle Book. I suspect the bond we feel with these social isolates reflects our deep, usually well-buried sense of aloneness and of the fragility of social connectedness. Who doesn't feel, in some way, on most days, that they are members of a lost tribe, cultural orphans, misplaced persons?

Vacation, part 2: Reading rainbow

In among the light motifs of island sunrises and sunsets, night skies and fireflies, there was a literary leit motif to my vacation this summer. B Island is a buttoned-up kind of place where bad language and PDAs are frowned upon and fretted over, and the island library is reliably staid. But even in this conservative outpost, as in the adulteriferous conservative movement at large, racy currents rage beneath still waters.

It all started at JFK. With seven hours in a dreary airline terminal waiting for my one-hour flight to Maine, I clearly wasn't going to survive on a skimpy Monday New York Times with its too-easy-even-for-me crossword puzzle. Airport book kiosks are a stunning case study of catering to the lowest common denominator, so when I saw a paperback by Armistead Maupin, I grabbed it, thinking it would be a quaint sequel to his charming '70s San Francisco Chronicle serial, Tales of the City.

It wasn't. Or rather, it was a sequel, but it was hardly quaint. It had, among many other points of interest, graphic descriptions of three-way ass-fucking in the Viagra-popping viral-loaded Baghdad by the Bay.

So when I finished it on B Island, I was consterned that someone might pick it up and start browsing and freak out. I asked Other if we should burn it. He was worried that it wouldn't burn completely in the wood stove, and our landlady would find it among the ashes. He suggested we discreetly slip it onto the paperback rack of the library. I was scared we'd get caught, though I toyed with the idea of inscribing it with the name of the primmest islander or the most vicious gossip and leaving it on a roadside bench. In the end we decided to carry it off the island when I took Other to the airport (he was leaving a couple days before me), and he would dispose of it. But alas, he accidentally left it at the counter of the parking-lot office when we picked up our car. I was embarrassed to go back to retrieve it, especially since the parking-lot operators are hand-in-glove with the gossipers of the island, but Other had also left a serious read, Elizabeth Costello, that he wanted to finish. So I nipped in and as unobtrusively as possible removed the two books from the counter, where they had remained all day, and put them at the bottom of my suitcase when I got back to the island.

Islanders might be shocked by graphic gay sex. But I in turn was shocked by a hetero sex book I found in the cottage. It was raining, and I had read everything I'd checked out of the island library, and I was bored. I spotted on my landlady's shelves a Judy Blume book for adults. I read very few best sellers, so perhaps I'm a little naive about what popular fiction consists of these days. I remember the Judy Blumes I read to C in elementary school. Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing and Freckle Juice were pleasantly down to earth. Summer Sisters was downright earthy. All sex all the time, coy euphemisms for body parts, only the thinnest veneer of a plot, not much else.

Is this what ordinary people read?

Vacation, part 1: Jet blues

To Whom It May Concern:

I would like to register a complaint re my flight (or nonflight) on July 27 (confirmation no. N17QS1). Flight 668 from JFK to PWM, which was supposed to depart at 10:55 a.m., was first said to be delayed and then finally canceled at about 12:30 pm, purportedly because of mechanical failure. Passengers were assured that they would have no trouble flying standby on the subsequent flight, 604, which was to depart at 1:43 pm. In fact, there was no seat for a single standby on that flight. We were then booked for Flight 606, departing at 5:29 pm. We were assured that our luggage had gone ahead, on Flight 604, and would be awaiting us in Portland. In fact, when we finally got to Portland more than seven hours after we were originally scheduled to arrive, our luggage was nowhere to be found. It arrived the next day. Because I had missed the last scheduled ferry to the island where I had rented a house for the week, I had to pay $100 for a special boat to deliver me to the house. My husband, who had arrived in Portland two days earlier, was forced to spend his entire day rushing between the airport and the dock in South Freeport trying to arrange that special boat. I missed a day of my vacation. So did he. In addition, I wasted at least $25 on airport food. And although I tried to be pleasant, reasonable and accommodating throughout the ordeal, I was treated with startling rudeness and misinformation, as were the other passengers.

What I would like to know is, how are you going to compensate me for a seven-hour flight delay, $125 in extra food and transportation expenses, a lost day of vacation for both me and my husband, and the delay in luggage delivery?

Battle of the Amazons

There's a stinky little fillip many women get along with their breast-cancer diagnosis—an invitation NOT to join the club. If they have DCIS (very early stage) or lymph-node-negative or hormone-positive cancer, they are deemed by some women to be not sick enough to play with the big girls, and they are cast out and ostracized. I read about this cliquishness all the time on the breast-cancer discussion boards and hear about it from my DCIS friends, who have found themselves unwelcomed at support groups.

A breast-cancer diagnosis is a trauma, period.

Nondetachment

What's a sedate old lady like me doing up at 4 in the morning, you might ask. Well, I'll tell you. I'm living the life of an 18-year-old—vicariously and badly. That is, she has the fun. I have the worry and fatigue. Delightful as it is to have C home for the summer—and it is wonderful indeed—I am remembering the downside tonight: the late hours, the worry, the cell-phone turned off. Will I ever be able to truly let her go? Not as long as she's in sight.

Beginning again

Lately my ordinary clumsiness has become more pronounced. My handwriting has deteriorated. The actual content of what I write fails to hit the nail on the head. I drop stuff. I have to throw away sewing projects—and cooking projects too. At first I thought it was the inevitable downward slide into age-related feebleness, or residual neuropathy with a side of chemo brain. And perhaps it is. 

But I'm thinking that the solution is a return to what yogis and Buddhists call "beginner's mind," an attitude of openness and absence of preconceptions. In yoga, a wide-eyed beginner is superior to a seen-it-all adept.

So I'm trying to approach even the most mundane tasks afresh, as though I were learning them for the first time, slowing down, paying attention to all the details, refraining from multitasking. Not easy for a Type A-minus woman with a to-do list extending into next year. But I'm trying. 

And I'm trying to apply the same method to yoga, which I'm re-entering after another herniation-induced hiatus. Go slow, pay attention to details, watch the transitions, get it right—but forgive myself if I get it wrong.

Birthday fatigue

Has this ever happened to you? You're all excited because you found the perfect birthday present (a $150 Le Creuset frying pan) and the perfect birthday card ("You really are a bastard") and you're taking your kids out to the perfect restaurant (Soy & Sake, a kitsch-vegan eatery for the vegan) for a perfect birthday dinner. And the kids spend the entire two hours trading stories about what a shitty parent you were: the time you spanked (once, and you stopped when she cried), the degree to which you hyperbolize (reportedly a lot—but I stand by my story that I was summoned to rescue one unnamed child from a friend's home, where he was screaming in terror from, no lie, a fruitfly), the abusiveness you allowed one child to commit against the other (uttering the words "fucking moron"), the unequal degree of permissiveness you imposed (which set the scene for one child to get drunk with his friends every Friday afternoon—and vomit on the very expensive mattress I had bought him and then had to replace—while I was at work, which resulted in the hiring of a chaperone for the other till she was 14), and so forth. They were serious, and it made me feel so tired—the ungrateful wretches.