April 15 Isn't Just for Taxes Anymore

Dear Steve,

Thank you for making April 15 something more than a day to pay taxes. And thank you for your love.

The gift of this heart-shaped necklace with diamond chips was so sweet. You and I were never much for pomp and circumstance, so sliding a plain white box over beside my dinner plate last night was as formal as we've ever gotten with our romance. Perhaps we are like the couple that Rogers and Hart were thinking about when they wrote, My Romance.



Gee, hearing Bernadette sing, reminds me of that time we watched her sing Send in the Clowns and as she did tears, real tears flowed down her cheeks, and we were charmed and touched.

Extraordinary moments occur ordinarily. An evening, in a go-green apartment, a rowdy puppy-dog romping, tax forms, receipts, Schedule C's, W-2's, seemed to matter intensely. The forms were so critical. And then the things that only appeared to be making April 15 extraordinary fell away, with a few words.

And then we were thinking, not backward on the economic exigencies of the last 12 months, but forward to a life, potentially, entwined and returning jointly, for as long as we both shall live. We will live, (if I said yes?) uninterruptedly together, always, with memories of the first dinner in that crazy basement apartment, you and me, oh, and Phil was there, too, and Leah the dog, and we talked and Phil walked me to the train station, and Phil scolded you for being rude, but I was, nonetheless, enthused about you and wanting to meet again soon, even though my thin shoes were wet from the walk in the rain.

And then we were thinking forward to a marriage, but Leah bounded in with that first interruption to prove that together is never without interruption even by dogs needing to be walked in the back alley of a big city where, even then, there was not privacy but the passing company of a gregarious neighbor with a doberman. And the mist of the evening glowed in a distant lamplight and our breaths took in, not just the night breeze, but the alley-air reminders of yesterday's supper-trash from apartment 12g and even the diaper refuse from 8b. But that was long ago and prescient of other interruptions to come.

And back in the apartment I said, "Yes, yes," and we fell together into loving arms. But not for long, did we embrace, because it was, after all, April 15, and we had yet to check the filing status box, "Single," and walk to the post office before the midnight deadline.


My darling Steven, I am so overwhelmed that you chose me to be the one and only one with whom you would say, "Yes, married filing jointly" for the rest of your life. Thank you for that, for the beautiful necklace reminder, and for your love.

XOXOXOX
Betsy

The Tenth Year

Dear Mother Teresa,

I miss you today, ten years after you slipped the surly bonds of earth. But it was more than ten years ago when I stood by a pond and cried, grieving your passing a year or two before you actually did. You had suffered a heart attack that day, from which you recovered. Yet that was when I knew it would not be long until you would be with us no more. And then I cried.



The lines of your pen were as jagged as the lines on your face. And I love both. And the words you wrote and your dear face were beautiful, always.

Here are some more of your words:

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think
that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person
who has nothing to eat.

Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary.
What we need is to love without getting tired.

Keep the joy of loving God in your heart and share this joy with all you meet especially your family.

A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.

You and I, we are the Church, no? We have to share with our people. Suffering today is because people are hoarding, not giving, not sharing. Jesus made it very clear. Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do it to me. Give a glass of water, you give it to me. Receive a little child, you receive me.

It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing.
It is not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving.

Yesterday is gone.
Tomorrow has not yet come.
We have only today.
Let us begin.

Yes, your words are beautiful, your life was beautiful, your face was beautiful. Oh, how I wish, I looked like you.

Missing you still,

Betsy

Sex and the Married Woman

Dear TierneyLab of the NY Times,

A while back I promised my blog readers (not a large group, mind you, but a promise is a promise) a hard-hitting blog on sex.
Yes S-e-x, sex.

Well, when I was in my first post-high school job at Pittsburgh Plate Glass in Tipton, PA., the office staff, all underpaid women, at least one of whom was so intelligent she should have been running the plant instead of bringing the CEO coffee when he required it (but that is another topic and that stellar woman finally left that job and got a degree in library sciences and ran a library in Louisiana for years before moving to Arkansas where she still lives and thinks her grandson is the cat's meow.) But I was young then and had no thoughts of grandchildren but had plenty of thoughts of men and sex. Nonetheless, I kept those thoughts pretty much to myself and lived the other part of me, fairly conservatively, considering that it was 1970. My naivete showed, I suppose, for the underpaid, non-unionized women dubbed me Pollyanna.

I did not have sex in 1970. But the study on reasons people have sex that you blogged about on Tierney Lab became my muse for this post. The study had a flawed sample. (Is that n or N?) Not to blame you for the makeup of the study sample, but the researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss from the University of Texas could have done a bit better than focusing their sex research on college kids, ("a fairly homogenous sample of students at the University of Texas"). Fairly homogenous? These people all wear the same brand jeans for heavens sake! I like them, I love them, but many of them are still gleaning their opinions from the backs of cereal boxes and whatever is the 180 degree opposite of their parents' views. And, they believe, as perhaps Meston and Buss believe, that they are inventing sex! And for them, they are. We all invent our sex lives because it is seemingly so hard for adults to talk to children about sex.

So I am talking.

Reading the study, I felt excluded. But why should that be? I am experienced. I have been having good, regular sex several times a week for over 30 years. Why aren't Meston and Buss asking me instead of some 18-year-old hot off initial forays into sexdom. Here's why. I have only had sex with one man in my life. Refer to my poem of last year. So, I'm a wet blanket to the researchers, but I do think they could glean a thing or two from those of us who have mixed fidelity and sex. Now, I am not going to say that I can't learn from the under 25 group, for they do have experience that I do not. However, I have experience that they do not also.

Reason 10 for having sex. I agree, it is pleasurable to be close to someone physically and reach orgasm.

Reason 9. Sex goes hand in hand with love. It is a final expression of the desire for intimacy that love initiates. There are multiple kinds of love. Not all lead to the desire for sexual fulfillment. However, the kind of love that one bases a marriage upon does usually seek intimate fulfillment. Sex is a way of going in the direction of intimacy.

Reason 8. Sometimes desire strays from marriage commitment. Of course a person committed to fidelity occasionally wants something else. Duh! Sex can be a way of refocusing on the partner to whom you have made a commitment. It is a reminder that love is better than lust.

Reason 7. Sex is a way of communicating respect. It can be saying, "when you want me, I want you, but if you aren't ready for this now, I will wait for you. You are important to me and your feelings, whether they are active now, or passive now are important to me and primary to me, even over my own passions."

Reason 6. Sex can be a way of grieving together, a way of facing hardship together. I remember the days when our daughter was fighting cancer. We felt so helpless, so battered emotionally. We retreated to each other and found in sex a respite of sorts. Perhaps not the best sex, but a unifying sex.

Reason 5. Sex can be a way of expressing mutual joy. Easier than reason 6. A new house, a new job, a move, a new baby, an intellectual discovery, whatever, can trigger a joining together and an agreement that something is good.

Reason 4. Sex is absurd. There is a certain absurdity in life that brings one to the edge of despair and laughter. Sex can certainly be an active symbol of that absurdity. Two people wrapping around each other, joining intimate, sensitive body parts, breathing hard, making weird noises. It is an acknowledgement of the absurdity of life, but at the same time it is an existential leap into love and the arms of another.

Reason 3. Sex says I'm betting you. I'm putting all my chips into your pile. Whatever you do, I'm behind you, I'm with you, I'm protecting you, I'm part of you. And it is saying, "Thank you for betting on me."

Reason 2. Almalif. We have this little expression. It probably comes from some old movie we saw one time. You say it very quickly. All my life. Allmylife. Almalif. Sex is a joyful, intimate, restatement of the commitment that I made in 1975 on October, 3rd or 4th or was it the 5th. (I never can remember the date.) I say to my partner, "this is for keeps. I love you and I will never let you go. Almalif."

Reason 1. To give my partner pleasure. Apart from receiving pleasure from the sex act, another goal is giving pleasure. Sex is communal and communion and works best when the focus is on the other whose focus is on you.

So there are ten new reasons for Meston and Buss. Some of these are repeats from their list, with a twist. But some of these, my most important, tried, experienced reasons, seemed missing from that list. So many of the items on your list seemed to really miss the point or, no (that sounded condescending), they describe only one level of what is so important to us as humans because it is not a simple, superficial thing.

I guess I should admit that I still am a Pollyanna and naive. But perhaps, I'm working on my own experiment. What is it like to live a whole life with one man in committed fidelity? I guess it's more of a qualitative experiment. The University of Texas survey is quantitative, so they can't really be compared I suppose. I love the experiment that Annie Dillard describes in Teaching a Stone to Talk. It describes a life-long commitment of sorts. The individual she describes is a bit nuts. The person spends time everyday encouraging a stone to speak. How do we know for sure that a stone can't talk, if we don't spend the time training it properly?

So, maybe I'm nuts too. But my experiment has been run before, and successfully, I think. Meanwhile, as I run my test, I am very glad to say that in my preliminary results, I have found love, I have found intimacy, and by george, I have found really good sex.

brd

Why Humans Have Sex: 237 Reasons

Marriage, How to Make it Work

Dear Lisa and Peter, (And Annie and Josh)

Disclaimer: Lisa and Peter are not a couple. Peter gets married on the 11th of August and Lisa gets married the 18th. Both are the adult children of my friends. I have been invited to as many weddings this summer as I was when I was 25 and my own friends were getting married. I appreciate weddings more now than I did then, but that's another story. (Annie and Josh are a couple.)

Your weddings are hard upon us and I wish you very happy wedding days. But that really doesn't matter at all. Wedding day disasters happen and apart from some surface emotion on the part of the bride and groom's parents it doesn't matter too much at all. (The bride and groom sometimes are not even informed that a disaster has occurred.) I myself was party, Lisa, to a near disaster at your mother and father's wedding. In 25 words or less, we had volunteered to engage the services of an accompanist for the ceremony. He was a great pianist. He lived in Philadelphia, an hour+ from the church. He was not dependable. Need I say more.

But, as I said, that doesn't matter because weddings don't matter. Marriages matter. We just celebrated the 60th anniversary of my parent's wedding. At their party I was asked to read a couple of things that they liked, which I had included in my own wedding ceremony. The first is a poem from George Herbert that was set to music by Ralph Vaughn Williams.

Love Bade Me Welcome

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.

This poem speaks of balance of Love and Guilt. More than you can imagine now, your lives will call upon Love, first one, now the nervous groom, and then the other, now the hopeful bride, to both Love and Forgive, Then Admit, and Submit to Forgiveness, To Serve without Rancour, to be Served Undeserved.

The other thing I read was this passage from the Bible, Song of Songs 8:6 and 7

Set me as a seal upon your heart,
As a seal upon your arm;
For love is as strong as death,
Jealousy as cruel as the grave;
Its flames are flames of fire,
A most vehement flame.

Many waters cannot quench love,
Nor can the floods drown it.
If a man would give for love
All the wealth of his house,
It would be utterly despised.

This is such a strange metaphor. Love strong as death. Yet is there anything we know stronger than the grip of death. It wields a permanency, a power over our lives and imaginations. But, here is the secret. Love is stronger than that.

Grow your love. Nuture it. Don't let it falter. For if love is healthy, it is stronger than death itself. I have used a term sometimes when talking about these things. "Deliberate desire." Desire can be a flippity gibbet, but one that can be controlled, and investment in your love is how to do that.

I could use some talk now about the centrality of our faith in all this. But you can say those words and do. Unfortunately, I think that Christian marriages fail as often as others. Live in love, act in love, commit to love, for God is love, and the other things, the precious fruits of a stable and happy marriage will be yours.

With all my best wishes,

Betsy

bell hooks and Foundational Love

Dear bell,

Thanks again for your presentations at the Writing for Reconciliation Conference. We all wish that we had seen more you. I am hoping that you are feeling better and that your year of engaging with difficult things goes well. I certainly understand the challenges, for my mom and dad are 84 and. . .


So, I am reading the article from the Shambala Sun. This after having read enough of your work to feel like I have begun to taste what you are saying. I have focused on two quotes that you have used. They were helpful to me. Almost “aha!” On page 60, you quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saying “Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace. . . If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.” Later you quote Thich Nhat Hanh who, “thought it was quite plain that if you have to choose between Buddhism and peace, then you must choose peace.”

These quote crystallize for me the themes you are communicating in your books on love.
Love as foundational to political action. Love as foundational to relationship whether in our households or on our globe. You don’t have to do much convincing with me to get me to embrace the concept superficially. But if I accept it down deep in myself, what changes does it demand, socially, politically, even in my family. And it is hard. Here is why I think it is hard. For me, part of the definition of love includes relationship. You don’t love someone and then walk away and remain distant and inaccessible. So if love becomes foundational, all escape routes are blocked.

Is love the cornerstone on which we could actually build a society capable of existing peacefully and productively in the world? Is this a practical, a doable, an achievable thing? It sounds like a dream. How could you build, for instance, a political party founded on love? How do you deal with an attack similar to that of 9/11/01 based on love? I have thought about these things and the answers I come up with are a little filmy.

But I want it to be true, bell, I really do.

Betsy DeGeorge

Return to the Shack

Dear Zora Neale Hurston,

I have been investigating the term “Shack” and it’s derived forms, “shacking, shack-up, shacked” and so forth. In my search, I have visited your work, Mules and Men, originally published in 1935. It is a fascinating work, revealing your community to me in an intimate way.

As I read the book, I discovered that your hometown, Eatonville, Fla., reminded me, on the surface, of the town in Toni Morrison’s Paradise. However her paradise is very dark while yours is quite light. The warmth and laughter of your town is rather heavenly. Hers just gropes in the twilight hoping for such bliss.

At any rate, in a passage of banter between storytellers Gold and Willie Sewell, you capture some classic repartee like that heard in cultures everywhere since the dawn of gender. After a long tale explaining how man became stronger and woman earned the keys to dealing with that, Willie says, “Y’all lady people ain’t smarter than all men folks. You got plow lines on some of us, but some of us is too smart for you. We go past you jus’ like lightnin’ thru de trees, . . . and what make it so cool, we close enough to you to have a scronchous time, but never no halter on our necks. Ah know they won’t git none on dis last neck of mine.”

“Oh, you kin be had,” Gold retorted. “Ah mean dat abstifically.”

“Yeah? But not wid de trace chains*. Never no shack up. Ah want dis tip-in love and tip yo’ hat and walk out. Ah don’t want nobody to have dis dyin’ love for me.”

Richard Jones (another of the tale tellers) said; “Yeah, man. Love is a funny thing; love is a blossom. If you want yo’ finger bit poke it at a possum.”

Well, Zora, this is interesting talk, and according to information shared provided by comments to my last survey, it is the first literary usage of the term shack up. Here I would interpret that it means marriage or a permanent relationship, not a one-night stand. In fact Willie’s term for that may be tip-in love.

You seem to see love as passing like “Lightnin’ thru de trees,” too.

In Dust Tracks on a Road, you wrote about love: "Under the spell of moonlight, music, flowers, or the cut and smell of good tweeds, I sometimes feel the divine urge for an hour, a day, or maybe a week. Then it is gone and my interest returns to corn pone and mustard greens, or rubbing a paragraph with a soft cloth. Then my ex-sharer of a mood calls up in a fevered voice and reminds me of every silly thing I said, and eggs me on to say them all over again. It is the third presentation of turkey hash after Christmas. It is asking me to be a seven-sided liar. Accuses me of being faithless and inconsistent if I don't. There is no inconsistency there. I was sincere for the moment in which I said the things. It is strictly a matter of time. It was true for the moment, but the next day or the next week, is not that moment. No two moments are any more alike than two snowflakes. Like snowflakes, they get the same look from being so plentiful and falling so close together. But examine them closely and see the multiple differences between them. Each moment has its own task and capacity; doesn't melt down like snow and form again. It keeps in character forever. So the great difficulty lies in trying to transpose last night's moment to a day which has no knowledge of it. That look, that tender touch, was issued by the mint of the richest of all kingdoms. That same expression of today is utter counterfeit; or at best the wildest of inflation. What could be more zestless than passing out canceled checks? It is wrong to be called faithless under circumstances like that. What to do?" (1942). (Quoted in Women's Intellectual Contributions to the Study of Mind and Society.)

My love just doesn’t pass like that. I fall in love for sure, with this one and that one, and it’s electric, but it stays in some form or other, inside me. My heart holds it as in waiting for some paradise when the days are eternal enough to grant those intercourses** I long for here and now.

The meaning of the word “shack up” has deteriorated. You might really appreciate the change. I, for one, would rather have had it remain as a more permanent expression of a love that can last and last even in the most difficult of circumstances.

Betsy

Wagner's Ring and the Final Contract of the Gods

Dear Fafner,

I wanted to get your perspective on contracts. Sure, there are plenty of lawyers around, but your reputation for getting folks to fulfill their part of the bargain is, well, mythic. Your contract, it seems, was the last of Wotan's great contractual arrangements, his first being with his wife. That and yours and the new order are the things I am thinking about.

Supposedly, marriage was the first great contract. And, it seems to me, the conditions and requirements in Wotan and Fricka's deal were not what I would expect or want. I suppose that's because I'm from the new order. Wotan and Fricka were bound to each other just as were Zeus and Hera. Obviously fidelity was not a part of the obligation, so what were they obligated to do? Were they simply promising to create progeny for the Gods? Perhaps they were promising not to kill each other. Was Valhalla part of that deal too? If Wotan was obligated to provide a home, Valhalla, for Fricka, then the whole schema fits together for me. Wotan sells out love and youth (hence immortality) to fulfill the primary contract.

Valhalla Motive
Failing to provide an emotional home for Fricka, he provided a castle in the sky, a materialist's dream of the superlative abode, the golden treasure at the end of the rainbow. Wotan, in utter disregard for real relationship, engages in pretty illicit traffic when he promises to pay for Valhalla with Freia as his currency.

I surely don't want to offend you, but did you know what you were getting? Were you tempted just by Golden Apples or did you really want love with all its demands and tragedy. Poor Fasolt fell in love right away and it was his demise. I don't know if Wotan or Fricka ever really had a clue about the love thing, though Fricka does seem to have at least a sibling style love for Freia. Otherwise, though, she appears to be a true victim/victimizer operating in the patriarchal system, passing on her pain and kicking the dog. But I digress to the issues of feminism here. I really mean to just study the terms of the contracts.

The giants' theme makes me feel that you didn't quite know what was happening. With apologies to the Norns, I hate the word fate because I don't live in the world of the fates. But these notes are so fateful in nature to me.

Giants' Motive
Maybe falling in love is where we touch fingers with the fates. Yes, I recognize that theme from daily life--not every day, thankfully. Oh, but it does take a weighty stack of gold, a penultimate prize, to sell out love. Even Wotan knows he's made a bad deal with the loss of Freia.

I wanted to ask about one more contract, or broken contract. It is Brunnhilde who dared to break contract with her father, and she ends up in flames. Brunnhilde gives up everything, except her beautiful steed Grane (understandable), for love. She is alone, totally devoid of her deity, no longer daughter of Wotan (heaven) or Erda (earth), but daughter of love, true not to contract but true to love and relationship. I'm not sure Wagner had this all together. I think he is confused about the integrity of love apart from passion/sex. But I do think Brunnhilde has gone on beyond passion to a form of loving that is higher. In that she becomes the final mythic hero.
Redemption through Love Motive
What do you think? Could you put on Tarnhelm one more time and become Erda, the wisest person in the world and tell me if love is the final contract?

Thanks for your thoughts.

Betsy

PS: Most interesting informations at the The Wagner Experience.