Little Girl Lost

It’s not news that parents of prodigiously talented children can be ruthlessly ambitious and even abusive to them.

Bobby Fischer’s mother, who wrote newspaper ads to find competent chess partners for him when he was as young as eight years-old-old, abandoned him at age seventeen. Beethoven’s father, in pushing his son to be a Mozart-styled child pianist, abused and neglected both Beethoven and his brothers. (Indeed, by the time Beethoven was nineteen, he filed and won a legal order against his father, making him the de facto head of the household.)

Barbara Follett

The long-forgotten, but once famous math prodigy, Zerah Colburn wowed the American public with his feats. Cashing in on his fame, his father brought him to Europe. But when the father died, penniless Colburn was left to fend for himself, returning twelve years later, at age nineteen, to a mother who did not recognize him.

But surely one of the most heart-rending stories of a child’s prodigious talent and a parent’s narcissistic interest in it is that of Barbara Follett’s.

As early as age eight, Barbara Follett believed in herself as a writer and when her father, the critic and editor, Wilson Follett, bought her a typewriter, she closeted herself in her bedroom and began work on her first novel.

It was to be a tale, written, revised and re-written, of a girl who ventures into the woods and vanishes into nature. Friends, when needed, could always be imagined. “I pretend,” she once explained, “that Beethoven, the two Strausses, Wagner, and the rest of the composers are still living, and they go skating with me.”

Her father, Wilson Follett, having already written about his three-year-old daughter in Harper’s, contacted Knopf.  Barbara’s novel, The House Without Windows, came out to  overwhelming praise in 1927.  Barbara was twelve.

The Voyage of the Norman D followed. The Times Literary Supplement lauded it. The Saturday Review featured it alongside Dorothy Parker. She was no longer just a childish anomaly; she was an author.

But just a week before the book came out, Wilson Follett announced to Barbara and his wife that he, having just turned forty, was leaving them for a younger woman. And he did, leaving them in dire financial straits on the eve of the Depression. At sixteen, Barbara was taking subway into New York to work as a secretary.

Without the support of her father, Barbara, remarkably, continued to write, creating two other manuscripts. But eventually her writing stopped. She married and for a while they were happy, hiking and backpacking between her secretarial jobs. Barbara briefly traveled to Mills College where she studied dance. But on returning to her home in Boston, she discovered that her husband had been seeing someone else. They soldiered on, but within a few months they quarreled, Barbara left. And was never seen again.

For reasons never to be known, her husband waited two weeks to go to the police and four months before requesting a missing persons bulletin.

Betrayed first by her father and then by her husband, Barbara Follett was never found, her prodigious talent unrealized. All that remains of her work today is in six archival boxes in the Columbia University library.

And both the irony and tragedy of the loss of Barbara Follett is encaptured in an anonymous essay Wilson Follett wrote for The Atlantic. With muted guilt Wilson Follett asks: “Could Helen Hayes be lost for ten days without a trace? Could Thomas Mann? Could Churchill? And now it is getting on toward forty times ten days…” The father, having left the daughter, never found her.

And I would one day love to write the biography of a child writer about whose life we know next to nothing. But that wouldn’t be a biography, really. It  would be fiction

Swaying the Fearful Chandelier

Over a dozen  years ago I had a colleague who said he didn't believe there was a husband in the world who wasn't made happy by coming into his house and hearing his wife singing.

I told myself he thought that way because he was from Montana where, I surmised for some reason, men have kinder hearts. Because at that time I was living in New York and married to a professional musician. A real jazz genius. A guitar wizard. (And please understand, I'm quoting reviews, just not using the quotation marks they came with.)

My husband had assured me that I couldn't sing. That I couldn't sing for shit.

And so I didn't. Except in church. And that's still the only place I do it. (Though in the last few years I've come to sing with a huge community chorus where nobody can hear me, but I can still raise my voice.)

Now this isn't a posting about how aesthetics have no place in church (because they do) so that anybody with any kind of voice at all ought to be bellowing out from the choir stalls (because they shouldn't be). Nor is it a pity-me piece. Professionally speaking, my ex-husband was right: I couldn't then nor now channel the early Rickie Lee, the later Bonnie Raitt, Fiona Apple, Shawn Colvin, Norah Jones or any of the one-named wonders--Madonna, Rihanna, Sade, Beyonce, Pink, Jewel or Adele (there are more, of course)  in any way, shape or form. I can, however, warble quietly through the soprano part in the Faure Requiem (probably because I'm a Francophile) or Bach's "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott" (probably because I'm Lutheran and it was in the water I grew up drinking).

Having said that, I do take issue with my ex-husband's claim that I couldn't "sing for shit." Singing, like dancing or breathing or eating or making love is something that somehow our bodies want to do. Not always from a choir stall. Not always on a dance floor. But we are the creatures who make things with our bodies, in all ways. The brain does not have the lock on creation. The body is at least as much a poet. (And being a poet, from the Greek, just means "to make.")

So to say that someone "can't sing for shit" isn't much different than saying that they can't make love for shit, or eat for shit or breathe for shit. Our bodies make the world we live in. Talk about original blessing!

I keep singing. I sing softly so no one hears, just in case I do sing for shit. And I sway when it's not the time to dance. And hunger when it's not yet time for the body's other hungers. But I know better than to distrust or dismiss these impulses. These are our holy markings--markings that make us both to want to live within our skin and beyond it as well.

See how the fearful chandelier
trembles above you
each time you open your mouth
to sing. Sing.

--Donald Justice

The Cherry Tree House

www.100abandonedhouses.com

I don’t know where I found the 100abandonedhouses.com website, but I know that once I started looking at the images of once-elegant and capacious derelict houses in Detroit, I was deeply intrigued. Kevin Bauman’s emotive images of homes lost to the past are all at once compelling,  disturbing and elegiac.

I have a passion for the neglected architecture of the past.

That’s why I’m so drawn to the massive, vacant Moorish hotel in Sharon Springs, NY. Built in the 1920’s, it catered to a predominately orthodox Jewish and dwindling clientele until 2004. After that, it was purchased with an eye toward turning it into a spa, but the developers have done nothing with it. So there it sits, high on a hill at the end of Sharon Springs’ main thoroughfare, its stagey glamour fading as the stucco crumbles and the paint chips away, the driveway more pitted after each spring’s thaw.    

Hotel Adler, Sharon Springs, NY

However, it is possible, though perhaps not safe and surely less than legal, to ramble around its 150 rooms and yawning public rooms, imagining (and it doesn’t take too much in the way of imagination) the ghosts of the place.

Like the Adler Hotel, which has a bit of an institutional vibe about it, Kirkbride buildings fascinate me. Thomas Story Kirkbride, a 19^th-century psychologist, believed that architecture played a therapeutic role in treating the mentally ill. Advocating what he called “The Moral Treatment,” Kirkbride theorized that the structure of the asylum itself could play a beneficial role in the patient’s potential for recovery. And so, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, there was a national explosion of asylum building, most of it along the principles Kirkbride espoused—ornate, multiple-winged stone or brick buildings that, in the twentieth-century, came to epitomize the kind of patient treatment shown in the iconic 1970’s movie, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”—shot on location in a deteriorating and still-functioning Kirkbride building in Oregon.

Throughout the United States, dozens of these complexes have been left to fall to ruin or razed entirely, taking with them much rich architectural history as well as the stories and spirits of those who lived and died in them. (“The Moral Treatment” also stressed self-sufficiency--patients helped with gardening, sewing, raising chickens. And since many spent their lives in these institutions, there were also cemeteries with elaborate landscaping, several designed by Frederick Law Olmstead who, himself, died in a mental hospital whose gardens he designed.)

I suppose it’s not surprising that I live in an old house. Mine is in an enclave of similarly old and elegantly designed houses on land procured for the scientists, as well as other civic leaders, who helped build the General Electric Company at the turn of the last century. These homes are generous in scale, amply spaced on wide, tree-lined streets and are in some ways mute testaments to a lost era of this city’s scientific innovation and cultural richness. Because I care about the houses and the stories of those who lived in them, I serve on the board that helps maintain this plot of homes.

Muscling up to straighten sign!

But it’s this awareness of the lives lived here that also makes it so bittersweet to come across the rare vacant home in my neighborhood. It sounds fanciful to say this, but I swear the windows have some strangely mournful quality, as if they are eyes, bereft of life. So often the sagging shutters appear resigned, like fallen shoulders. Why a vacant home should have more of an anthropomorphic aspect to it than one which is lived in is unclear to me.

Certainly I understand that this is my projection on inert, inanimate objects. And yet the idea of a house or of any building where lives had been lived, full of the common human joys and woes, is also susceptible to projections. This is why haunted houses make such good subject matter for short stories, novels and films. You need go no farther than to the FX series “American Horror Story” to see how a house, in season 1, “Murder House,” and a mental institution, in season 2, “Asylum,” become, themselves, main characters in the mini-series.

Driving home the other day I passed one of the two vacant houses in my neighborhood. This one has an especially dark and looming quality. It is discreetly plastered with notices advising potential trespassers that the property may not be lived it in its present state. (You can’t actually read these notices until you are already trespassing…)  I don’t know what’s wrong with the house. I don’t know why it doesn’t appear to be in either a realtor or a bank’s hands.

And yet as I looked at the house I was struck by the twin cherry trees in abundant blossom right in front of it. They were frosting pink and as full as dancers’ tutus. They stood in harsh contrast to the vacant windows, the sagging porch, the peeling paint. They seemed to offer hope or maybe a challenge or maybe even a promise—that life returns and that one day someone will peer out from a second-storey window to gaze with pleasure at the splendor of the trees.

from the archives, a Doctor Who introduction

I have just finished watching, over the course of a week, the 2005 season of “Dr. Who.” I  didn’t do this voluntarily, of course. At least, not at first. I was cajoled, coerced and cornered into watching it. I was guilted into watching it. And by the time I sat down to watch the first episode I’d heard so much about it I’d stopped listening to what my daughter was saying. But it was when she said, “It’s just so sad because I don’t have anyone around me who will talk to me about Dr. Who!” that I caved. It was that appeal to help allay her existential sadness that put me over the edge.

The first episode is called “Rose.” Rose Tyler

Rose Tyler

is about twenty, given to wearing jeans, pink hoodies, Union flag tee shirts and substituting ‘f’s for ‘th’s. She lives with her mother in a council estate in a dodgy part of London and she sells clothes at a toney Harrods’ styled store near Trafalgar Square. At least she does for the first part of the first episode until she is accosted by mannequins who come to life and try to kill her.

Rescue comes in the form of a humanoid alien called The Doctor. He saves Rose, blows up the clothing store and tracks her down at her apartment to pick up the arm of the mannequin  he had broken off as they two of them were fleeing the advancing pack.

He tries to explain to Rose about the  war that’s going on, the intergalactic battle aimed at destroying the human race, but he knows she won’t believe him. He knows what humans are like: “You lot,” he says, “All you do is eat chips, go to bed and watch the telly while all the time underneath you there’s a war going on.”

  

Then he enters his blue Police Public Call Box, Rose hears some strange cranking kind of sound and the Call Box disappears. End of The Doctor. For the moment.

Because the human race really is under attack and the Nesting Consciousness located in the subterranean tunnel under the London Eye is set to activate the signal that will animate every plastic mannequin in Britain for all-out human destruction.

In a stunning act of diplomacy and bravery, The Doctor, aided by some gymnastics from Rose, defeats the Nesting Consciousness, deactivating the mannequins, saving Britain and the world.

Rose's mother, Jackie Tyler

Does this sound compelling to you? Credible?

Can you believe that Rose, leaving mother and boyfriend behind, decides to travel with The Doctor in his Police Public Call Box which is not really that at all, but a TARDIS time machine, bigger by far on the inside than on the outside?

Can you believe that Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction series in the world and that next year it will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary? Can you believe how much I laughed during the thirteen episodes I watched? Can you believe I much I cried during the thirteen episodes I watched?

My daughter was right to cajol and coerce me into watching the show. And not just because it has a cult following to rival the Grateful Dead and a whole line of Doctor Who-related merchandise. (I gave Linnea a TARDIS cookie jar with special sound effects for Christmas.

It’s that this series, for all of its campy theme music, absurd special effects, stock war-of-the-world plotlines, is chiefly about two things: the love that human beings share with one another and our need to hope that disaster will be and can be averted. You might be able to say that same thing about Star Trek, but Doctor Who takes the time to develop relationships that themselves change and deepen . And because The Doctor periodically has to go through ‘regeneration’ (which is why eleven different actors have played The Doctor throughout the years), the theme and knowledge of impending loss is always a part of how we come to know and care about The Doctor. He won’t be ours just as he is forever

We pretty much know how every episode will end: The Doctor makes it better. But along the way there is a very real, very believable development of characters you come to truly care about because they remind you of the people in your own life, the people you love best, the people you’d want most to be protected.

Writing Blocked

All the anti-malware programs I had on my computer started fighting with each other last week and in the midst of the melee, nasty little viruses began to creep in, making a right mess of my laptop. It wouldn't turn on or stay on if it did turn on and I didn't want to bring it back to the Slippery Geek who chewed me out when I spilled wine on my keyboard last year. So I got a recommendation from a co-worker and on Thursday I brought my laptop to Omni Computers, figuring I'd have it back at the end of the afternoon, or Friday at the latest.

I don't know why I thought that.

The boys at Omni told me they'd be done with it on Tuesday.

That seemed a long time—a whole weekend without my computer! But I felt confident they could fix it and confident I could make it through that desert stretch of days without it.

After all, there's an old laptop at home. True, it doesn't have Windows, but I was able to find and download a free program that works like Windows. I was able to program my printer to work with it. It doesn't have a mechanism for disenabling private browsing, so I can't connect to Netflix, but I was able to find some decent movies online to watch. (I want to have a conversation with someone about whether Liam Neeson in “After. Life” was a psychopathic murderer or a compassionate undertaker. I'm going for the latter if for no other reason that that Liam Neeson is sexy, even as a mortician.)

But this clunker of a computer doesn't have two things, two things that I very much need for just about each and every day of my life. It doesn't have my files on it. And it doesn't have Solitaire.

What does this mean?

Essentially, it means I cannot write. 

I cannot edit my stories or work on my novel because there are no files to edit. And I cannot write because I cannot interrupt myself to play Solitaire. That's just the way it works. The writing life is a dance of consternation and procrastination. It's a bad dance, but I do it well. It goes like this: First you try to write and you feel blocked or challenged or depressed or clueless or lazy or some combination of things, so you procrastinate by playing a few games of Solitaire. A few games. Only until you win one. Then you've got the victory you need to exit out of Solitaire and try to write some more.

But if you're not winning very quickly—which is most of the time--and the minutes are passing like sands through the proverbial hourglass, you begin to feel consternation at yourself and for two different and distinct reasons: 1) You're not winning at Solitaire, you are merely wasting time (as if winning isn't wasting time) and 2: You are not writing which is what you're supposed to be doing and all those rejection letters won't arrive unless you give them a darn good reason to by opening the veins of your soul and letting the ink flow.

So eventually and unaccountably, you have the good sense to exit out of Solitaire, loser that you are, and go back to editing or writing or whatever aspect of wordsmithing you'd set for yourself to do that day.

See what I mean? Procrastination + Consternation = Goal Achieved.

That's how I wrote my last novel. That's how I write every sermon or short story or column. Do you know how much prosciutto and rosemary crackers I've eaten since I sat down to write this blogpost? Solitaire keeps my weight down.

At least I've made it through the weekend and in a few hours I can go to yoga class and try to stop thinking about my laptop. MY laptop. I want it back.And until that happens I am confounded, reduced to doing things like the laundry and abdominal crunches and shampooing my hair and running out to Target for an external hard drive and a pack of playing cards.
In case this ever happens again.