Women Don't Buy Corvettes

Actually, some of them do. But it’s not the usual thing for women in middle age – or I don’t hang out with the right women. Those women and I seem to be infected with the same need for motion that sends men out for sports cars. We contemplate running away from home; we consider selling our houses, we may have left spouses, or seen one zoom off in that red Corvette to some trophy wife or alternate lifestyle. We feel impelled to give away all our treasures, or start a new collection. We drop a group of friends and look for new ones. But we don’t seem to buy Corvettes.

My friend Amy and I fantasize about owning a loft in NYC, just to be there three months a year. Now that would be a change from SUV suburbia in the Bible Belt. “Selling New York” on HGTV has much to answer for: When the realtor shows the view – all skyscraper and sky – from some downtown condo window (costing only millions more than will ever be in my bank account) – I suddenly feel I need that place, that life, that movement, that noise, that trendy urban scene. I would look as out of place as a hippo in a birdbath, but this reality matters nothing to my impulse. The inner me – the one who is younger, thinner, richer, and still has every option open – now wants that condo, despite years of choosing not to take the train into Chicago when visiting the Illinois in-laws only an hour downstate. Even Amy, who paints as well as writes, and who used to dream of a retreat in Taos or Santa Fe, has this new need to change something –even if it’s just to change one fantasy location for another.

I recently discovered that someone I met in an online writing group did move to NY. Her name popped up in facebook as someone I might want to befriend, and on her page is her location: NY, NY. I don’t think she looks at facebook much; I haven’t heard anything back, but I know she probably left behind her adult children and new grandbaby (well, new when I knew her five years ago) in South Carolina or Kentucky, or wherever she used to be, someplace Southern, someplace not all that far from Arkansas – especially culturally. A little more googling and digging and I ran into an online interview she did with Gregory Maguire, and I saw that she is a member of a NYC writing group. She acted on that urge to move and is living her fantasy life, or so I gather. I don’t know if it has met her every expectation, but I am impressed.

I think about all this while picking the penultimate batch of blackberries in the rain in my backyard. Maybe the restlessness comes from knowing our established routines so well; we’ve been plotting our paths for years. Because we each move along a given trajectory for so long, drastic change, change that we fantasize about, would require something extraordinary in escape velocity. Catastrophes or miracles might move us, though sometimes the depth of the rut is scary enough to catapult someone out. Most of us don’t figure that the Corvette alone would do anything much, aware of the web of home and relationship that roots us here. And some of us buy the minivan instead of the Corvette (to haul the grandkids around), or remodel the house instead of buying the bachelor pad out of town (to accommodate an older parent’s moving in), having grown attuned to the needs of the family’s generations.

This is not New York, although it has its own joys. The blackberries are almost done for the season, but the pears – a larger than normal crop – have yet to ripen. My movement towards the new is liable to be slower, less pronounced, a subtle shift of microdegrees in my course rather than the about face or the right turn. Next year I’m putting in blueberries, and when my husband and I get my car paid off, maybe I’ll get a hybrid.

Little Disappointments

I enjoy crossword puzzles, although I haven't been doing them lately, but I couldn't resist the one in the paper labeled "Drill, Baby, Drill." I thought it might be a political satire in crossword form, and I was encouraged by the first answer I wrote in: "bias." I had visions of Sarah Palin and BP showing up between the crosshatches. I worked away, hoping for the punch line, only to discover that the puzzle's theme was actually dentists and puns dentistical: "brushing bride" and "moment of tooth."

Speaking of the Palin crowd, I heard the reporting on Sharron Angle's response to an interviewer who asked her whether abortion was ever okay. Her reply was no. The interviewer then asked about cases of incest and rape, and Angle's response was one of those God Trump Cards that shuts down any further discussion. She said: You know, I'm a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.

Angle has taken a lot of flack about this, perhaps rightly so, with most folks jumping to the conclusion that Angle believes rape and incest are God's plan. I don't think she meant to go there, although her politics in action might boil down to the same thing as if she did, but I was reminded how placidly we can see a difficult destiny for someone else as God's plan. And how infuriating it is, if you're the one suffering, to be fobbed off that way. It is not easy to see our misfortunes as blessings -- or to be told to do so by someone more or less well-meaning. I'm not arguing that we don't learn through difficult situations, but sometimes suffering is just suffering, and the "God will take care of it" answer is just not answer enough.

Even if it were the only answer, most of us would need some sympathetic validation of the unfairness of our situation, some tea and cookies, or an understanding friend.

So, take Jonah. When God tells him to go to Nineveh, he goes the other direction. As a child in Vacation Bible School, I believed that Jonah brought his own fate on himself -- being swallowed by a whale and having to do what God told him to do after all. Why wasn't Jonah being good and doing what he was told? (I was an obedient child.)

Now, I have a lot more sympathy for Jonah. I may yet die in my own big fish. Certainly, I hope not to have to go to the modern equivalent of Nineveh or somewhere worse. And if Sharron Angle tells me that is my fate, she better look like she's at least sorry about it.