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All advertising would be as clever as the one from pant-maker Bonobos that reads “Pull Up Your Pants.” It’s bold both for its simple design and for its cheeky headline — which is what makes the ad work. Bonobos as we all know are prolific procreators — or better said — masters of the slam, bam thank you mam. The declarative statement “pull up your pants” juxtaposed with “Bonobos” leads all of us who may be slightly depraved to think of one thing and only one thing. And by doing so we are compelled to read further into the ad, spending the few extra minutes to read the copy, indulging our voyeuristic natures. Yes, that side of each of us that can’t drive by a car wreck without rubber necking to see the bodies splayed upon the pavement, the side of us that holds our ears to the walls of our beige hotel room to hear the people banging loudly, very loudly in the next room, the side of us that snoops into drawers, emails, personnel files when we think we won’t get caught.
And the brilliance of the ad is that it catches us in the act of snooping! As we read the copy we discover the ad isn’t about the zipless fuck but the habit of some men to wear their pants around their ankles. The meaning of “pull up your pants” is cleverly twisted to mean just what it says, but not at all what we had anticipated. That my friends is advertising at its best!
‘You’re invited” is such a lovely subject header for an email. Or a surprise tucked inside of an envelope. I love being invited to places. I love being invited because it’s flattering to be both remembered and included. The best part, however, may be simply getting out of one’s own life and stepping into another’s for an hour or two.
I was invited recently by someone I know to attend a talk by someone I don’t know at a local library. I generally don’t go to talks, unless the person talking is someone well published, well reviewed, well known and someone I find of interest. Because the invitation came by way of a person I know to be thoughtful and interesting, it was really the next best thing to listening to someone thoughtful and interesting. Or so I thought.
So I dragged my guy out of bed on Saturday morning to hear a guy by the name of Joel Drucker speak about “Love & Laughter on the Fault Line.”
I’ll admit to not really knowing what we were up to or what the purpose of the talk was. I had skimmed the invitation and noted Joel’s wife of 28 years had died in the last year or two, and while it seemed logical to assume Drucker might touch on his marriage, I had read the invitation through the prism of David’s introduction to Joel. Namely, Joel was his tennis partner of 20 years, and one of the most respected tennis journalist in the world and works regularly for television networks (ESPN, USA Networks, The Tennis Channel) at all the major professional tennis tournaments and has written for the leading tennis print publications over the last 30 years. David described Joel as both funny and modest. And Joel was a professional writer — I always want to get up and close to story tellers to listen to them construct their stories. So from my vantage of reading the invitation with one-eye closed, it sounded like it would be an uplifting and interesting discussion. Two of my favorite subjects: tennis and writing.
We arrived at the library and were greeted by the familiar moldy stench of used books as we found our way to the room where Joel would be speaking. It was a small room with a table in its center and about 10 to 12 women crowded around it. That seemed weird in and of itself. ”Why are there mostly women here?” I wondered.
And then I heard the conversation. Sun. Shade. Skin. Most everyone there had the pale patina of someone who hadn’t seen the sun in a while. The conversation sounded confessional so I didn’t listen closely, not wanting to intrude.
As a general and specific rule, I don’t go in for up-close, personal, spilling of emotion situations. Even when warranted. Especially not with strangers. It’s hard enough to deal compassionately and wisely with the raw, spilled detritus of feelings with people I do know and it makes my skin crawl so I assiduously avoid it. Isn’t that what therapists are for to be the container for all this emotion? What I had unwittingly done is walk into a room where strangers’ emotions unfurled and I’m not proud of this, but I felt sick to my stomach.
The walls started to close in. The room was tiny. Everyone, apparently, had Lupus. Or lived with someone who had Lupus. And here I was in the middle of a group of people who were trying to figure out how to wear the persistent black cape of chronic illness.The level of my discomfort sky-rocketed when I realized the group and the room were too small to escape with grace.
Joel began his discussion and deftly wove a tale of friendship, illness, love, laughter, perseverance and perspective. His marriage was noteworthy for its simple honesty. He colored Joan as wry and witty, direct and compassionate. The “gift” of his presentation was its forthright call to remember what we have: each other, health, humor, intimacy. And yes, it was a reminder that whatever my quotidian annoyances are, they are petty and easily solved. After all, unlike Joan, I don’t have Lupus.
For more information on Joel Drucker, click here. Check out Joel here - http://joeldrucker.com/bio.htm.
One phrase a lot of people seem to be tossing around like pennies these days makes me scratch my head. It is “back in the day.”
Every time someone says this, I stop listening to everything else that follows “the day” because I immediately start wondering when that was and whether, in fact, “the day” could be pinpointed to one specific day. And if it could be winnowed down to one day, I then start to question whether the person who just said “back in the day” was a) alive, b) old enough to be aware of whatever he or she is referencing to being “the day”, c) and even knew it was the day.
I don’t know when the day was or if there ever was a day but what I do know is that things are bad right now for a whole swath of folk. We see it, breathe it, hear it — and some of us live it, daily. What ever is going on right now is soul-crushing for too many people. And perhaps this collective use of this expression is simply a way to build solidarity with each other as a way to acknowledge that yes, we’ve all seen better days.
So let’s hear it for better days. Let’s hear it for the boom-times. Let’s hear it for the day when we can all remember when today, this day, this week, this month, this year, this era (2007 to ?) was “back in the day” and finally behind us.
I recently moved.
After seven plus years of residing in the same place, the tangled web of marital discord unraveled. And I found myself standing in our kitchen packing up the Riedel wine glasses for cabernet and pinot and the slender stemmed glasses for anything blanc we liked to drink.
This was the second-coming of packing under duress in as many years. Last year, we packed up Napa — in a hurry — almost as if we were running from the inevitable bill collector who may show up on our doorstep asking us to pay for a life well-lived. We packed Napa fast. Although we packed without too much thought about what goes where, what gets tossed, what gets stored, the Napa move still required that we consolidate the remnants of 15 years (together, alone and with another spouse); the remainders of three previous lives (Grandfather, Grandmother, Mother) and the shadow of a childhood that simply begged to stay (Brownie uniform, Junior and High School Yearbooks, diaries, broken bits of sentimental detritus). What couldn’t be left behind, found its way to San Francisco and now, here we were, here I was, packing it again. Deciding all over — does it stay or does it go?
This exercise made me think about “stuff” and the plutonium-like half-live of emotion that keeps us tied to “things” for much longer than required. I’ve carried around a ceramic vase my parents received as a wedding gift circa 1950 for the past 20 years. My parents had a protracted and bitter divorce — theirs was not a marriage worth celebrating or remembering; yet, in some corner of my soul, I felt that tossing this vase would be a betrayal of my duty as their daughter.
There was my mother’s college yearbook, too. My mother loved college, she loved bragging about being a Southern Belle / Homecoming Queen and so for 15 years or so I toted her yearbook from city-to-city to honor a period of her life that was meaningful and joyful to her. I have no children of my own who could benefit from hearing the stories of our family; my brother’s children never knew their grandmother and thus wouldn’t be interested in flipping through a black and white pictorama of a time and place that were utterly irrelevant to them.
And here I struggled to decide whether I could give myself permission to un-hitch myself from a past that didn’t belong to me and get rid of the yearbook, the ceramic vase, the yellow plastic comb, the bits of costume jewelry once and for all.
Was I betraying my family, my history, my mother and my grandparents by tossing the keepsakes of their lives into the big trash bin of my life?
The larger question I was asking was one of duty. What do we owe our parents and our grandparents and what do we owe ourselves – especially when these so-called duties are in conflict with each other? Was I disloyal for wanting to lighten my material load at their expense? What made the two moves particularly hard for me wasn’t about my crumbling marriage, per se, but having to make decisions for myself about what I needed and wanted in my life and what I didn’t.
I tried crossing the border somewhere between Tabarka and Oum Teboul. Or at least I thought that’s where I was. “We let you friend cross, but no you….NO you….” The guard declared abruptly as he thrust my passport back.
I stood there, silenced.
“You American? America no good. No pass. You friend – he go, he British.”
I adjusted the straps on my backpack and shifted my weight from one leg to the other trying to buy myself to time to figure out what was happening. All I knew is that my friend Russell was being waved through the border between Tunisia and Algeria, while I was being refused entry.
“This is a silly mistake. I am an American. That gives me certain rights and allows me to travel the world unimpeded, does it not?” I thought to myself.
We were in the middle of nowhere. No cars. No buses. No tourists. Trans-boarder crossing between Tunisia and Algeria isn’t the same as, let’s say, crossing from Tijuana to San Diego. Or from remote places like Foz do Igucau, Brazil to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. One would need a straight face and an abundance of diplomacy to refer to this desolate outpost as a border. It was more like a random line drawn in the dirt. One side Tunisia. The other, Algeria.
I looked around the small room looking for something, anything that might help us – or them – understand this is all a ridiculous misunderstanding.
Russell and I had been hitchhiking the better part of June, during Ramadan, trying to get from our beach-head landing at La Goulette in Tunis, across Algeria and Morocco and eventually back to Barcelona where we both had jobs bar tending, and where our adventure started. Yet we couldn’t break away from the smothering hospitality of Tunisians. Each time we accepted someone’s invitation for a cup of tea, the person insisted we stay the night as an honored houseguest. One night turned into two and when we were ready to shove off and continue our hitchhiking adventure, it caused such offense to our hosts that we felt obligated to stay a few more nights.
After enduring three weeks and several rounds of this forced hospitality, we felt trapped by a culture of hospitality we couldn’t understand, in a city we couldn’t seem to leave and so far off our schedule, we wondered if we’d still have our jobs waiting for us.
That we had finally managed to extricate ourselves from Tunis, left us light-headed and giddy. It may have been the conceit of youth or naive belief anticipating we could hitchhike from Barcelona, through Italy and across Northern Africa in a mere thirty days with no more than $100, a camera, a day pack, and not end up where we found ourselves now, stranded staring at two lackadaisical Tunisian National Guards.
“At least we’re out of Tunis”, we laughed to ourselves.
Russell, ever the charming Brit asked the guard “what’s the matter my dear man? Is there a problem with letting the lady through?’ He pulled out a cigarette, offering one to the guard, tapped his own against the counter and said “do you mind terribly if I…. and lit up. “Listen, is there something we can get to drink, a Coke perhaps? It’s terribly hot.”
The guard came back with a warm can of coke which Russell and I took turns drinking. We looked around the room. We looked out the door. We looked for some sign of intelligent life that might guide us out of this odd situation.
“So sir, as I understand it – I can go through, but my American friend cannot – is that correct?” “Is there any way at all you can simply wave her through today? It would be a tremendous favor, you see.”
We were the only people within miles of this outpost, we had no form of transportation to get ourselves in to Algeria or back to Tunisia – we were stuck either way, and to us, it seemed like a reasonable request that the guard simply let us through. It was obvious to them, and to us, we were in a tight spot.
“No. No. No. You pass, you – he said pointing in my direction “you need visa.”
So that was it. It wasn’t a matter of chauvinistic anti-Americanism run amok at the border. As a citizen of the United States, I was required to have a visa to pass into Algeria, but my British friend did not.
“May we get a visa here?”
“No, no visa here. Tunis. You get visa in Tunis.” Russell and I looked at each other.
We looked at each other again and laughed out loud. We had asked for adventure and like some boomerang-effect, we adjusted our packs and headed back to Tunis on foot.
Growing up my mother’s thumb was in a semi-permanent state of going from her mouth to my forehead, brushing the wisps of hair away from my eyes, and saying plaintively “can’t you do something with your hair?” It was the early ’70′s and we all had long hair hanging in our face — but that seemed beside the point. While it annoyed me, and to this day I wear my hair pixie-short because of it, I realize now it was one of the ways my mother told me she loved me.
Our relationships with spouses and lovers, parents and children and friends, fray because we don’t recognize we’re being told we’re loved in a language that is recognizable. Some relationships break apart while others never take flight because we don’t or can’t hear what is intended rather than what is said.
I think back to an inchoate summer love affair with a former co-worker who was divorcing and whom I had had a secret crush on for years. Our little dates were fun — we’d play a game of pool or drive up a winding road cooled by the shade of eucalyptus trees or lounge by his swimming pool — flirting and enjoying our time together. We’d talk about bike rides we would take, or weekend get-aways to Napa, but our plans never gelled. And when the shimmering outline of the Napa weekend crystalized, and we picked a date, he cancelled.
I was disappointed but being grizzled by age, I know that we all have myriad claims on our attention and time and our fervent wish to do something can get postponed. The next time we were together, we drove to downtown to meet friends for cocktails. It seemed odd to me but he wanted to caravan and so he drove himself, as did I. Our caravan plan lasted 10 miles before he unleashed in inner Mario Andretti and he sped away up the freeway essentially leaving me to drive on my own. I was shocked, frankly. Even though I lived in the city where we were having cocktails and could drive it alone, it just offended me deeply that a man who would be willing to sleep with me, didn’t want to ensure I arrived safely at our destination. Or didn’t want to arrive together for our two friends to see. It was both confusing and hurtful. He simply didn’t care enough about me to want to do what men do for the women they care for: protect them.
While there were other little, minor communication mishaps between us, what resulted was that nothing added up between us.
I stepped back. I stopped calling. I stopped emailing. I didn’t respond flirtatiously as I would have previously. I backed off.
And so did he.
Six months later we got together for a casual drink after work and he told me “I don’t know if you know how much you meant to me while I was going through my divorce. You were a life saver and I appreciated the time we spent together.”
As much as I liked hearing him say this, I had no idea he felt this way. I simply couldn’t pick up on his intention and his feelings; I missed it entirely.
Which brings me back to my mother and her ever present thumb. I misunderstood my mother in many ways. I didn’t see her as the fully complex human she was. Growing up, her comments felt like a flowing river of criticism telling me that I simply didn’t measure up. Or that’s what it sounded like at the time. And I simply turned away from her, placing my heart at an oblique left angle, to protect it and myself from the pierce of her verbal arrows. And that was the path of our relationship; forever hobbled together, but never fully in sync with each other.
I came to realize she loved me, but I didn’t recognize this bond between us as love. I missed it entirely.