The Bolter
I was that kid whose name was often broadcast over public loudspeakers, the zoo, the supermarket, the department store, once on an ocean liner, and another time from a police car when I disappeared on a trip to Fire Island. That day was going really well after I joined a family having a vast beach picnic and was fed lobster until the families left with their own children. When I was a teenager, I saved my babysitting money until I had enough to go to Europe on my own. My sister made the mistake of revealing her earnings, so my parents suggested she pay for stuff. I remained mute until one day I announced I was spending the summer in England and Ireland. One year my mother gave us money after she finished a design job. My sister got her roof fixed; I flew away. My father’s nickname for me was “The Bolter” after an English woman with five husbands who was always running off. I only had three husbands.
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The Beauty Lie
We grew up without mirrors. I mean, there was a round, smallish mirror in the dining room and standard size medicine cabinet mirrors but nothing to see your entire body or even most of it. For a family of mainly women, three daughters and a mother, the aspects of femininity that I noticed in friend’s houses, the vanities, the collection of makeup, the mirrors, just didn’t exist. My mother’s credo, honed at Harvard design school, was “form follows function.” She washed her thick, chestnut hair in the kitchen sink with dish detergent, rarely wore makeup, and remained absorbed by her work and my father. Luckily, she was a knockout and when she did dress up, lipstick, mascara, she took my breath away. We were important but tangential and reflective; our beauty reflected on her. My father’s judgement was sacred and harsh. His only caveat applied to weight. Whatever you do, don’t get fat.
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Exile on the Gold Coast
I drove six hours from Leland, Michigan to Chicago to spend time with my new granddaughter and immediately got the cold from hell which banned me from any further contact. The nadir was a lunch at Gibsons when I sat alone at a separate table while my son and daughter-in-law sat with the baby, I believed far from anything infectious but apparently the entire restaurant was considered too close. I was told I didn’t respect boundaries and other awful ways that boomers violate the code of millennials. I spent a day crying and then, as this cold worsened, realized I was in fact, sick.
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