HollyRobinson

Writer & Red Dirt Rambler

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Mark Sanford Makes Vampire Love Look Good

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So Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina wasn’t hiking on the Appalachian Trail, as his staff led us to believe. Nor was he off alone to “clear his head” as his wife reported. Nope. Republican Governor Sanford was hiding out with an Argentinian lover who signed her emails with “sweet kisses” and “I’ll dream with you” http://www.thestate.com/sanford/story/839350.html.

Meanwhile, we, the incredulous public, are still reeling from TLC reality couple Jon and Kate’s decision to split after Jon’s alleged affair with a preschool teacher. And that’s after picking our jaws up off the floor following revelations that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was smitten with a prostitute named Kristen.

Why the great shag fest? Because, as anybody who tries it knows, marriage is tough. It’s an institution held together by duct tape that unravels over time, when romantic notions crumble beneath the collective weight of parenting, vacuuming and bill paying.

I have proof. For many years, I was a sex and marriage columnist for three different women’s magazines. A lot of letters started like this: “My wife is too tired for sex.” Even where bonfires once raged, embers cooled: “I’m no longer attracted to my wife since she became such a fatso.” Or, “My husband’s a workaholic and I met the perfect man on the Internet. Is phone sex cheating?”

When I first started reading these letters and scouring the country for experts to dish out advice, I was in a state of disbelief. According to the media, everybody is having great sex all of the time, even married people, and orgasms are as easy to come by as sneezes. Then one night I went to a dinner party with friends and the women began talking about how they avoided sex with their husbands. One woman said, “I know not to smile at my husband when I get into bed, because then he thinks I’m in the mood. I’d rather read a good mystery novel than have sex.” Another told me, “If my husband is still awake when I go to bed, I make some excuse, like I have to go downstairs and make sure all of the lights are out. By the time I come back up, I know he’ll be snoring and I’m off the hook.”

Say what? But that’s not as bad as the hot tub party I went to a few months later — women only, all of us in bathing suits, nothing kinky, sorry – where we played one of those truth-or-dare games after a few fizzy drinks. One question went like this: “If your vagina was an article of clothing, what would it be?” Hot, right? Except that most answers went like this: “A shut purse,” “A worn out sweater,” “A tattered pair of stockings,” or some other forlorn item.

More recently, I went to my book club’s discussion of Twilight, that soft porn vampire novel. This was a true literary love fest among our book club members – soccer and baseball moms, mostly – who crooned over Edward, the vampire hero at the heart of that series. Why? Because Edward is a true gentleman, a guy determined to keep his lover safe by not biting her neck, no matter how good she smells. Chivalry is not dead. You just need to find a vampire lover strong enough to race through the forest while carrying you on his back.

What does this all add up to? I’m not sure, except that I’m not surprised that Jon chose a preschool teacher over hypercritical Kate, or that Mark Sanford ran away to Argentina, to a woman who signs off her emails with, “I’ll dream with you.” Dreams and lovers, and maybe even prostitutes, are much easier to take than the thorny reality of slogging through children and housework, jobs and disappointments, death and taxes, with only occasional moments to embrace between chores. Those of us who stay married might not make the papers, but we are truly making love.

“Teachers Don’t Like Boys, Mom”

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A couple of weeks ago, I was volunteering at my son Aidan’s elementary school after hours. The building was empty but for a knot of teachers clustered in the hallway. As we entered his classroom, Aidan leaped up to touch the door frame.

Immediately, one of the teachers scolded him about safety.

Aidan apologized. As soon as we were alone, though, he rolled his eyes at me.

“Teachers don’t like boys, Mom. If I was a girl, she never would have said anything.”

“They’re just trying to keep you safe,” I said.

Still, I couldn’t help wishing, as I do so often, that we had better schools for boys.

I say this with resignation as another school year draws to a close. Now that Aidan, the youngest of our five children, is in sixth grade, I have little hope that the system will change. Our public school curriculum in Massachusetts, as in so many states, is designed to help students conquer basic skills and prepare for the state-administered MCAS exam. Not a bad goal. Just one problem: our teachers now scramble to teach to the tests. This means lots of worksheets get handed out and there’s little time left for creative, hands-on projects.

This is a tragedy, especially for boys. Research tells us what most parents know: boys are apt to be “kinesthetic learners.” That’s educatorspeak for the fact that most boys learn best while they’re in motion. Boys want to get their feet wet and their hands dirty. They want to build things and take them apart, trap small animals and climb tall trees. Or jump up and touch whatever they can.

As Aidan observed once, after spending an entire science class watching a movie about the life cycle of frogs, “We’d learn a lot more if the teacher just brought tadpoles and frogs into the classroom and we could look at them.”

Students in our public schools are rewarded for being quiet and respectful, for scoring well on tests, for coloring inside the lines, for collaborating instead of competing, for writing about their feelings, and for civilized classroom behaviors that don’t include farting or burping. All fine skills. The thing is, most girls – I’m basing this on our own family of three boys and two girls, plus the children of friends – seem to want to please their teachers and be praised. That’s why so many more school valedictorians are girls. The boys, not so much. Until you show them why something matters in the outside world, they mostly don’t see the point of doing something that bores them silly. And I mean silly.

It doesn’t help matters that most teachers are hard-working, well-meaning women who are already overwhelmed with the responsibilities heaped on them by school administrators, inclusive classrooms, parents, needy kids and the threat, always, of losing their jobs or having their pay cut. Would things be different if more men populated our classrooms? I have no idea. I only know that, as it stands now, boys are more likely to fail in school and to be three times more likely to be labeled as ADHD than girls because of their activity level (http://www.healthcentral.com/adhd/c/1443/13716/addadhd-statistics/). Aidan earns A’s and B’s in school, yet I’m constantly fighting battles like this one: When he misbehaves, his teachers take away recess. Please. Are they out of their Vulcan minds?

Recently, I was walking with a few friends and listening to their lamentations about next year’s teachers and class sizes. When they asked my opinion, they were shocked when I shrugged and said, “Maybe it doesn’t matter. It’s just school.”

But I can’t help seeing school as a necessary evil instead of an inspiration. It’s great that Aidan has learned how to do algebra, read a map, write an essay and navigate social situations without a black eye. Outside of school, though, is where Aidan does most of his real learning. He pursues his interests with passion: rock climbing, coin collecting, fishing, engineering, snowboarding. Our house is one big science lab; in recent months Aidan has built a hovercraft in the driveway, figured out that you could shrink potato chip bags in the microwave oven, and erected a K’nex roller coaster taller than he is. He has memorized the periodic table and taken apart an old computer. He surprised me in the kitchen by saying, “Here’s a cool invention for kids, Mom,” and pushing a cup of milk onto the ice dispenser of our freezer. Instead of dispensing ice, cereal came pouring out of the freezer and fell into his cup of milk. Messy, but way cool.

What would a perfect school for boys be like? Classes would be small and held outside half the time. Boys of all abilities and temperaments would build, paint, draw, take things apart, play computer games and listen to music while reading if they felt like it. If they wanted to write about volcanoes instead of the weather, or study the Civil War in January instead of September, why not let them choose? And, if they wanted to do math standing up or run a few laps between exams, why not?

Oh, wait. Our boys couldn’t do that. That would be breaking the rules.

The American Gerbil Show: What Our Pets Teach Us

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The animals were groomed and shiny. The judges wore white coats and serious expressions as they rated the furry contestants for conformation, color and disposition. There were competitions for agility and speed. Every owner hoped to win Best in Show.

Was this The Westminster Dog Show? Nope. This was the American Gerbil Show. The competitors may only be palm-size rodents with tufted tails, but their owners still eagerly trekked to this year’s Massachusetts show from as far away as Nebraska to talk gerbil.

The American Gerbil Show is held twice each year by The American Gerbil Society. Some of the day’s events are just for fun, like the Gerbil Olympics, where pet gerbils take on paper tubes to prove their jaw power and race against each other in plastic balls. Their owners cheer them on from the sidelines, shouting things like, “Yeah, you got this! Go, go, go!” When it comes to exhibiting groupie level enthusiasm for these curious rodents, it’s tough to tell the kids from the adults.

But serious business is conducted at these shows, too. Gerbil enthusiasts have been breeding these pocket kangaroos since the animals were first imported to this country from Japan in 1954. By now, the color variations have spun out far beyond the golden agouti gerbils that my own father once raised by the thousands. Today there are lilac and nutmeg gerbils, Siamese and Burmese gerbils, dove and polar fox gerbils, honey cream and silver fox, and many more.

There is even, as of this spring, a blue gerbil in the United States, shown by the show’s coordinator, Libby Hanna. Her devoted husband flew to Helsinki, Finland to pick up the animals, turned around in the airport, and flew right back – his Christmas gift to Libby. “Massachusetts is a real hot spot for gerbils,” she assured me. “We had to have blue gerbils.”

The new blue gerbils were certainly a show stopper. So was Herman the Show Jumping Gerbil, an athletic YouTube celebrity (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-HUFPO-Bek) who is even more debonair in person than on screen.

A few side tables at the American Gerbil Show displayed gerbil paraphernalia for sale: gerbil purses and gerbil hats, wooden gerbil houses, gerbil art and gerbil books. There were even hand-knitted gerbils trucked all the way from Ohio by their creator.

As I mingled with the gerbil fanciers, I couldn’t help but recall one of my mother’s favorite sayings: “There’s a lid for every pot.” These were people who wear their passions emblazoned on their t-shirts: American Gerbil Society: Christmas Revels, Audubon Society. If they weren’t here, this crowd would be out walking for good causes.

One example: Tom and Renee. Tom tells me that he’s had pet gerbils since the 1960s. These days he specializes in rescuing gerbils with disabilities, like his personal favorite, a blind gerbil called “Blindy.” In an unfortunate incident, Blindy once caught his leg in the crack of a coconut shell while taking a dust bath. Blindy couldn’t see which way to pull his leg out, Tom explained, so he thrashed around and broke it. Tom and Renee had to nurse him back to health.

“It was a good thing that happened, really,” Tom mused, because it showed their adopted son that, “when parents love you, they don’t abandon you. They take care of you no matter what happens. It was a good lesson in love.”

Good lessons in love: that’s what our pets, small or large, teach us all.

Singer Susan Boyle: The Poster Child for Late Bloomers

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As I stumble through American Idol withdrawal and recover from the fact that vanilla is still the flavor of choice in the U.S. whether we’re talking ice cream or singers, I’ve been increasingly thankful for Susan Boyle, the hairy angel on Britain’s Got Talent. Whether she wins or loses the chance to sing for the Queen, she is the inspirational poster child for late bloomers everywhere.

Besides looking like that crazy spinster aunt in Wal-Mart clothes that your mother always invites to dinner because she lives alone with her cat, Boyle is a creaking forty-eight years old. That’s right: she’s more than twice the age of Kris Allen, our newly crowned American Idol. Yet, Boyle’s age, hairy church lady looks and lousy luck in love didn’t deter our feisty lass from climbing up on stage and belting out “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables in a way that made even the only female judge, Botox beauty Amanda Holden, cast cow-eyed looks of awe at this unlikely Scottish songbird.

Why did this performance become such an instant viral plague on YouTube that even my son sent it to me via his college email? It wasn’t just for that okay tear jerker of a song. It was because Susan Boyle gives all late bloomers hope that we still have a chance to realize our own dreams. Want to be a singer? Write the great American novel? Run a marathon? Be a millionaire? Take up painting? Invent a flying car? Sail around the world? Watching Susan Boyle, we know it’s not too late! Even if I could wave a magic wand and somehow combine Kris Allen and Adam Lambert into one perfect manchild megastar, they could never do that. They’re too beautiful. And way, way too young.

As writer Malcolm Gladwell noted in his wonderful October 20, 2008 New Yorker essay, “Late Bloomers” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell), “doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.” He points out notable examples of that, from Orson Welles to Mozart. However, Gladwell goes on to note that many geniuses are late bloomers, not prodigies who burst out of the gates at age fifteen, talents and ambitions razor sharp. Late bloomers muddle ahead, experimenting and failing and trudging forward for decades before they’re a success, or even noticed at all. Until then, many late bloomers are perceived as failures. They have to rely on mundane jobs (think of Einstein toiling away in his patent office) or kindly patrons as they inch forward toward their dreams.

What’s so inspiring about Susan Boyle? She dreamed her dream not for a mere seventeen years, like bluesy, confident American Idol finalist Allison Iraheta, so perfectly at home on stage next to veteran rocker Cyndi Lauper, but for almost half a century. Now that’s star power.

Why Our Stories Matter

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The last time I called my father, he asked me what time it was.

“Don’t you have a watch, Dad?” I asked.

“No, they always take those away when you travel, and the clocks in the train station are all wrong,” he answered.

“He thinks he’s going on a trip,” said my brother, who’d driven down to Myrtle Beach from New York to visit Dad in the hospital. “He keeps trying to do up his seatbelt.”

Dad was going on a trip. It was his last journey, the same one we all eventually make. For him, the journey came just after Christmas. I’d been to see him the first week of December, and we’d managed to play a game of Monopoly, though his hands were so shaky that I had to move his little cannon around the board for him. Still, Dad’s blue eyes gleamed with the hope of landing on Boardwalk.

He landed in the hospital two weeks later with pneumonia. Given his emphysema, his prognosis wasn’t great. I wanted to fly down to see him, but Christmas and New Year’s were in the way and our four children were coming home from college. Plus, the doctors were noncommittal. He might bounce back, they said. Let’s get him into rehab. I made a reservation to fly down from Massachusetts to South Carolina the week after Christmas. Dad died the day before I arrived.

I flew down anyway, taking off from Boston in a blizzard on the last plane to have its wings de-iced for the day. I drove so fast out of the Myrtle Beach airport that a tiny, sunburned, Napoleonic cop handed me a ticket for $100.

“Do you have any idea how fast you were going?” the cop asked.

“Not fast enough,” I said.

I spent the next week helping my mother clear out Dad’s closets and dresser drawers, marveling at how my father, a career Navy man who served his country during the Korean War and Vietnam, still folded his briefs and t-shirts in that tidy military way despite his palsied hands and lack of breath. The neat rows of shining shoes bothered me the most, clear evidence that Dad never went anywhere at the end. Only his slippers were scuffed.

I kept a soft flannel shirt and a few family photos. Otherwise, off it went, all of that detritus of life carted away to the Salvation Army in the mafia-sized trunk of my mother’s lumbering American sedan. My last stop was at the funeral home to retrieve Dad’s ashes, which weighed so much that I staggered when the funeral director handed me the brass box.

Death is seldom convenient, but for me, Dad’s death has a peculiarly sharp resonance because I wrote a book about him that he never saw. My memoir, The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter, is due out today by Harmony. To research the book required spending many hours with my father, talking about how and why he, a Navy officer, became so entranced by gerbils – “pocket kangaroos,” he liked to call them — that he retired from the military and raised them on a grand scale. My dad was a world- renowned gerbil expert, a Gerbil Czar with nearly 9,000 gerbils housed on our 90-acre farm in Massachusetts. We kids were his first employees.

Despite what some readers might think after James Frey published his memoir-that-wasn’t, A Million Little Pieces (which probably made more money because Oprah gave him such a sound scolding for faking it), most people who write memoirs are not fanciful liars, but dogged researchers. In my case, I interviewed family, friends, my father’s employees, and anyone else I could get to talk to me about Dad, hoping to capture a life on the page.

At Dad’s memorial service last week, our family gathered for an outdoor ceremony at a cemetery that is, literally and figuratively, on a dead end street in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Standing in this cemetery, you get no sense of the world beyond. There are no traffic sounds or children shouting, no ambulance sirens or buses honking their horns. None of that busyness of life to interfere with our contemplation of that last journey we all make, leaving behind our shoes and hats and families who love us. When the minister sang, though, a mockingbird sitting high in an oak tree above us suddenly started chattering and singing, too, louder and louder over the minister’s fine soprano until we were all laughing.

“That’s Dad, having the last word,” my brother said, looking up at the bird.

“I hope so,” I said.

For all I can think, as my book makes its way into the world, is this: what if I got something wrong? Dad read the book before he left for his last journey, but what if he missed something, too?

Ah, well. As the brilliant writer Jim Harrison says in his poem, “Larson’s Holstein Bull” from In Search of Small Gods, “Death steals everything except our stories.” That’s why it’s so important to tell them as best we can.

American Idol’s Lambert v.s. Allen: Good v.s. Evil?

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My son, Blaise, an erudite English major at Bates College, recently caught me curled up in a chair, red wine in hand, watching American Idol. Blaise is a 21 year-old idealist taking a class in deconstructing the media, so he was quick to lecture me on the evils of falling prey to would-be Idols who are manufactured with their own little stories, just like those American Girl Dolls his sisters once loved. There’s the Idol with the dead wife, the blind guy, the impoverished mother of three, etc. “Idol panders to the prurient interests of the masses,” he said. “How can you stand to watch it? You have a master’s degree in English, Mom!”

Exactly. With my pedigree, how can I stand NOT to watch AI? I was a reality TV show virgin until this year, when I accidentally stumbled onto one of the early American Idol audition shows while searching for a public television documentary on prison torture or plague viruses, I forget. I was after some mind expansion. Instead, I found people singing their hearts out in front of psycho judges who speak in tongues, using words like “dope” and “chops,” or uttering playground insults like, “Your singing sounded like a cat being dropped off the Empire State building.” I was hooked.

I’ve watched every show since then. With the help of my DVR, I can zip through the drearier performances, like those by Matt in the Hat, kind of like skipping some of Proust’s descriptions of his bedspread. Now that we’re down to the final battle between Kris Allen and Adam Lambert, I’ve come to believe that American Idol is like great literature everywhere, offering us the classic conflict of good v.s. evil.

In this corner, Ladies and Gentlemen — let’s just call it the “right” or the “red” corner — we have good boy Kris Allen, the cute and humble guitar picker from Arkansas who has already landed himself a Barbie trinket of a wife. He sings white boy mood music kind of like Jack Johnson, well suited to animated children’s stories. He’s exactly the boy you hope shows up at your front door to take your daughter to the prom.

Facing off Chris in the opposite corner — yep, you got it, that’s the LEFT or the blue corner — we have Adam Lambert, a favorite of the judges, because hey, guess what? As Randy would say, “You can sing, dude.” In fact, whether Lambert is singing Johnny Cash or Led Zeppelin, he sings like he’s on fire, or maybe just his pants are smoking. He’s Steven Tyler, Mick Jagger and Cher all rolled into one. Without a doubt, he should win.

But will he? Perhaps not. Remember that, in the greatest works of literature, there are unreliable narrators and multifaceted characters who are never just good or bad. For many, I expect Kris Allen represents all that is good and whole and milk-fed, right down to his lucky jeans, business major, and that weird curling tongue thing he does when he sings. Meanwhile, Adam Lambert is the sort of guy whose unrevealed (yeah, right) sexual identity has landed him on magazine covers and provoked the likes of Bill O’Reilly to try and knock some common sense into us before our poor innocent children can all start wearing black nail polish and cutting their hair in crazy ass polygons. But Adam has a big sexy body, he’s from California, and he looks good in LEATHER. Scary good! Any girl (or boy) who went to the prom with him would have a night to remember.

What will America do? That’s really why I’m watching. I want to know how the story ends.

Still in Love with Spock After All These Years

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May 11, 2009

Still in Love with Spock After All These Years

My love affair with Spock is no passing fancy. I was starstruck at age 11, when I first watched Star Trek on TV and hid under the coffee table because I was afraid of having the salt drained from my body by an alien and being covered with red welts, just like Darnell in “The Man Trap.” I wanted to be Spock, whose blood was immune to such things. I vowed to live long and prosper, and I wore a red turtleneck every day of sixth grade because I wanted to be mistaken for a member of the Enterprise crew. (You can imagine what this did for my popularity.)

I could only do that weird split-finger Vulcan salute with my right hand and never my left, due to some genetic quirk. Despite this minor physical shortcoming, I persevered. Whenever my best friend and I played Star Trek, with our very own cardboard box Enterprise bridge and my pet gerbil as an extra crew member, she was always fearless Kirk to my rational, conflicted Spock.

Spock was the first man to whom I wrote a love letter, and in return for it I received an autographed photograph. I pressed that picture inside my favorite horse book, My Friend Flicka, for the next six years or so. (I would still have it, but my father was a Navy officer, so nothing was forever.)

I thought my lust for sexy Vulcans was gone for good, too, until I went to see the latest Star Trek movie with my youngest son, now 11, exactly the same age I was when Spock first ignited my passions. It was Mother’s Day, so we saw Star Trek in a sold-out IMAX cinema north of Boston. It was a digital, full body experience far removed from the pale, flickering television of my youth. This theater had a towering screen, rumbling seats and a sound system that made me feel like the theater was being nuked the minute before the opening credits.

But I didn’t think about the theater at the time. While my husband and son were entranced by the battle scenes, I had eyes only for Spock. Or should I say “Spocks”? Leonard Nimoy was the Spock of the future, a grand old man who can still do the most famous split-finger salute in the universe and say “Live long and prosper” and make you think he means it. Our present-day Spock was played by Zachary Quinto, who had to have his fingers glued because he couldn’t do that funky Vulcan finger thing, either. Must be the same genetic quirk I have. (William Shatner used fishing line to perform the trick in the original series. Check out http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25459863-5012980,00.html)

I first noticed the actor Quinto as Sylar (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0704270/bio) on the brain-bruising Sci Fi conundrum that is Heroes (http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/) . He is perhaps best known as the villain who can open the craniums of his victims the way you or I might lift the lids off of yogurt containers. Could Quinto possibly pull this off, I wondered? Could he reignite my passion for all things Vulcan and make me remember why I loved Spock?

Yes, yes, yes! Quinto plays a brooding Spock with such loyalty to his human mother that he does unVulcan things like clock whatever dumb ass insults her. He has the classic arched eyebrow, the ability to easily subdue lesser men with a single shoulder pinch, and says “fascinating” with authority.

Did I care whether the Federation, with its courageous Enterprise crew, subdued this latest rebel ship of the Romulan Empire (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Romulan_Star_Empire)? Not one whit. On Mother’s Day, I cared only that the movie brought my first love back to me.

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