The first time I ever heard about Casual Fridays, I hated the idea from the start.

“Guess what we have at our company,” a friend enthused in the early 1990s.

Great pay?  Wonderful, emotionally evolved supervisors?  Luxurious offices?  European-style, month-long vacations?  On-site day care?

No, of course not.

“We have Casual Fridays!” she announced proudly.

“What’s that?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, it’s really cool,” she said.  “On Fridays, we all get to wear jeans and casual clothes.  It’s so much fun!”

Good grief.  I found the whole idea so demented and sad, I could hardly speak.  (It’s almost as bad as those horrible off-site office get-togethers where you form teams and climb rocks so you can all bond and trust one another and forget that the person you work for is a tyrannical prick with severe anger-management issues and a tendency toward pathological lies, when necessary.)

Let me get this straight: Your workplace is telling you how to dress, day in, day out.  On Fridays, the rules are especially specific and you “get to” wear jeans and that’s supposed to be some kind of reward?  Every time I think about it, I can feel myself breaking into a severe rash.

“I’ve got a new idea,” a guy I worked with told me a few years ago.  “We need to institute some fun around here.  I’m thinking we should have Casual Fridays.  Have you ever heard of them?”

“Fifteen years ago,” I said.  “Is that horrible idea still around?”  Thinking silently — while my face had probably gone into spasms — you can’t institute fun.  Don’t you understand?

“Well,” he said, looking pained at my total absence of team spirit, “you wouldn’t have to wear jeans if you didn’t want to.”

You bet I wouldn’t.  Every time Casual Friday rolled around after that, I took care to dress up more than usual.  I also became even more suspicious of the kind of let’s-have-a-good-time mandates like bringing childhood photos of yourself (a very, very old and bad idea that still seems to hold sway in every ad agency I’ve been to in the past few years), so everybody could screech about how cute you were in the third grade.  (When I was in the third grade, I had buck teeth, a skinned-back ponytail and I was fat.  I was not, using anyone’s but a blind person’s definition, cute.  I keep my third-grade photos to myself.)

Show me a workplace mandate from Up Above that announces we’re all going to have fun, and I immediately want to become a Marxist with a grim disposition.  It’s like forcing creativity or humor.  It doesn’t work.

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July and it’s also a Friday.  Just so no one will think I’m participating in a Casual Friday, I plan to dress up especially nicely, the way I always do.

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

So, here’s the general idea: The older I get, the more I need to protect myself from incipient Old Fogey-dom.  You know, the usual stuff about how the world’s going to hell and how the younger generation is a bunch of disrespectful twerps who write with their thumbs and feel entitled.

I mean, this makes me feel really great about myself to go around defending the millennial generation, or whatever they call themselves these days.  (Yes, they read!  No, they don’t spend all their lives texting or watching TV!  Yes, they think!  Yes, they vote, they care about politics!)  How cool, how with-it am I?  Very.

But — a big but.  I am also a mother of two of these millennials.  One of whom, over the past month, graduated from college in four years, much to his parents’ delight.  He also came home, took up residence on our favorite couch, and commandeered the remote control.  Which was fine.  At first.  As was the near-total trashing of our house with all his college paraphernalia and belongings.  Hey, we’re cool with that.  For a while.

“When’s he going to get a job?” my husband started muttering a couple of days later.

“I think he’s chilling,” I reported helpfully.

“Yeah, but for how long?” the old-fogey parent wanted to know.

Father-and-son talks ensued.  Sturm und drang.  Resumes were created.  Craigslist was consulted.  Said old-fogey father went out of town, which is normal during a time of family crisis.  Non-old-fogey mother (NOFM) was left to steer the family ship.  It figures.

“I’ve got a job interview tomorrow,” the Little Millennial (LM) reported.

Much encouragement — jubilation, in fact! — greeted this announcement.  The next day, the LM was calm and confident.  “The interview went really well,” he said.

NOFM was in a quandary.  What to do?  She slipped into overdrive.  “That’s great!” she said.  “Just great!  But, you know” — brow furrowed to indicate seriousness of the topic — “people usually interview for lots of jobs before they find one.  So you should keep looking.”

“I’m chilling right now,” the LM said.

A day passed.  A second inteview was set up.

“How did it go?” the NOFM asked.

“Really well,” the LM said.  “They liked me.”

Another maternal dilemma.  “That’s great!”  Pause to furrow already-furrowed brow.  “But I bet they’re interviewing lots of other people, too.  They might choose someone else.  I know you want this job, but it might not happen.”

LM indicates lack of concern.  NOFM realizes that — when the disappointing call comes — she’ll be the one he turns to for comfort, who will gently remind him that yes, life is hard, failures are inevitable, doesn’t he remember that she told him so?  Oh, yes.  There’s nothing like a mother’s wisdom.  Even if that mother is an old fogey, in spite of herself.

That afternoon, two days early, the phone call comes.  “I’ve got the job,” the LM announces.

NOFM is thrilled, goes around bragging to all her friends, boring people to death, not that she cares.  She’s the mother of an employed son!  Who will soon be moving all his college paraphernalia out of their house.  Her faith in the millennials is unwavering and justified.  Her rejection of Old Fogey-dom is total and complete.

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

I grew up in West Texas, mostly in Wichita Falls, Abilene, Midland and Lubbock.  So I have a high tolerance for desolation.  Too many trees, too many mountains and I start feeling claustrophobic.

But even by my warped standards, the highway from Marfa to Van Horn in Far West Texas is desolate.  You can see forever — a horizon that stretches, unbroken, for miles.  An empty road.  The land on either side of the road is fenced, but only occasional ranch houses can be seen from a distance.  All of a sudden, you find yourself thinking of the very first people who came here, the native peoples, the Spanish conquistadors, the Anglo settlers.

The sheer loneliness and emptiness made me recall a story that’s always haunted me, of the legendary rancher Charles Goodnight’s wife — whose first name I don’t even know.  She and her husband settled on a gigantic ranch in the Panhandle of Texas and he would be gone for days and weeks, herding cattle, mending fences.  She would be left alone.  She was so lonely at those times, I once read, that she found herself talking to the chickens.

Just a little beyond the tiny town of Valentine, on that desolate road, my husband and I were speeding along last week.  He was gloating about the great mpg we were getting in the Prius (”Did I buy that car at the right time — or not?” he said for the hundredth time.)  I’d fallen into the kind of hypnotic trance West Texas induces in people, when he mentioned something — not mpg — that got my attention.

“What did you say?” I asked him.

“We just passed a Prada store,” he said.

Well, he could have said we’d just passed the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower and it wouldn’t have had quite the same powerful effect on me.  Prada?  Prada?!

“Turn the car around immediately,” I said.  My heart rate was out of control.  Where was my credit card?

I guess we’re probably the last people on earth to know about this art project in the middle of nowhere in Far West Texas — a facsimile of a Prada boutique store, complete with shop window and a selection of 2005 shoes and purses on display.  Prada Marfa, they call it.

We peered in the window, noting the two bullet holes in the glass (”Communication between two worlds,” a small sign notes).  Along a ledge on the sides and back of the “store,” people have left their business cards under rocks.  So we did, too.  An occasional truck roared past, not slowing or stopping.  I guess they were used to Prada Marfa, bored by the hoopla.

We got back into the car and kept on driving, through Van Horn, to Guadalupe Peak, which my husband insisted we had to see, since it’s the highest point in the whole state.  Leaving the mountains, the land began to flatten and the grasslands disappeared into the harsh scrub brush we were so familiar with.

“Bet we could get some land really cheap around here,” my husband said for the umpteenth time.  “Can’t you see us living around here?”

No, hell, no.  But he kept up that kind of irritating chatter even when we drove into Pecos, where the wind was blowing red dust across vast, godforsaken vacant lots.  “Why don’t you like Pecos?” he asked.  “We could live here.”

I told him my only problem with Pecos was that I probably couldn’t find a tall enough tree to hang myself from (”Cut down Ma!  She’s gettin’ mental again!”).

That’s West Texas for you, though.  It leaves you talking to chickens, daydreaming about hanging trees, hallucinating about Prada boutiques.  Once you’ve lived there, it’s in your blood.  You can leave there, but you never escape.  You just think you can.

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

We’d already been to the Tuesday night Star Party at the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis.  The rain and lightning showed up, but the stars didn’t.

So, the next night, we tried our luck with the Marfa lights.  Imagine it.  About 25 people — tourists, locals, scampering children — all gathered together, staring at the darkening southern horizon east of Marfa.  The wind blew and people wrapped themselves in blankets and stared.

I’d read about it.  Indians had seen those lights.  So had early settlers and cavalry members.  The lights were said to be the size of basketballs.  White, mostly.  But maybe red.  They came briefly, then disappeared.  Or they came and stayed for hours.

They were some kind of atmospheric disturbance, some hypothesized.  Or the ghosts of Coronado’s soldiers, still searching for gold.  I scanned the horizon, thinking about the ghosts lost in this vast country.

“The lights are crinkly, like little clouds,” one woman told her companion.

“Maybe, if you pray hard enough, you’ll see them,” a woman from San Antonio had said earlier.

We all stared.  Occasional lights appeared on the horizon.  Small white lights — like light bulbs in nearby ranch houses.  A red light.  Nothing, but nothing, the size of basketballs.  Funny how you can stare so hard and want to see and believe — even if you don’t know what it is you want to see and believe in.  You just want something to happen, to be a witness to something extraordinary.

“That light isn’t it,” the woman said, dismissing the houselight.  “The Marfa lights are like gas — kind of wispy.”

We continued scanning the horizon.  My husband elbowed me.  “I’ve got a laser in my pocket,” he said.  “Wouldn’t it be funny if I — “

“Don’t you dare,” I said.  I elbowed him back.

“Is it that red light?” the woman from San Antonio asked.  No one answered her.  We were all too intent on the horizon, looking for something.

A small red light danced on a nearby desert plant.  I knew where it had come from.  I elbowed my husband again.  I could just see the scene he was about to set up: A dancing red light, not as big as a basketball, but who cared?  “Ohmygod!  It’s the Marfa lights!”  Pandemonium.  Cameras flashing.  People screaming, calling on their cells.  “We’re seeing the lights!  Get your butt over here!”

Then — a lynch mob, when onlookers realized the source of the red light was a jokester from Austin who couldn’t keep his laser in his pants.  “Put that damned thing away,” I whispered and elbowed him again.

He and I left, still scanning the horizon to the south as we drove away.  Still looking for the ghosts, the atmospheric disturbances.  Maybe it had always been like this, I mused: Some prankster with a torch, a flashlight, fireworks.  Some Plains Indian with a sick sense of humor who began it all centuries ago.

No ghosts.  Just a keening desire to see something unearthly and mysterious, to believe.  We drove back to Marfa itself, where the lights are manmade and electric and scientifically knowable.  This time, my husband kept his laser in his pocket.

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

My friend Pamela and her husband had two sons, so she knew what it was like to live in a heavily male household.  She used to tell me the story of how the three guys would watch the Three Stooges on TV, each of them identifying with a separate Stooge.  They wouldn’t allow Pamela to come into the TV room till “the girl” on the Three Stooges made her appearance.

“You’re kidding,” I used to say, screaming with laughter and disbelief.

“I’m not,” Pamela would say.

Anyway, I used to find that story hilarious.  It was funny right up to the minute our daughter left for college and I was left in a household that was lopsidedly male.  That’s when I began to understand the essential truth of Pamela’s Three Stooges story.  I was living with two people who often liked to eat standing up in front of the refrigerator.  When we had canned whipped cream, they tipped their heads back and sprayed it in their mouths. 

God.  It was awful.  Aside from several apt descriptions like “nauseating” and “disgusting,” I believe this is a good example of Testosterone Poisoning.  I’d never known it was so bad till I saw it myself, unedited, unexpurgated and up close.  “Get your own damned whipped cream,” I told them.  I took to marking my own, personal can of whipped cream with threats to vital parts of the male anatomy.  “Do you really want to risk it?” I wrote.

In recent weeks, one of these males — a recent college graduate — is back in our house.  I mention this educational achievement since it isn’t terribly obvious in the mostly monosyllabic household conversations he has with his (also allegedly well-educated) father.  Most of the conversations go something like this:

“Hey, you’re getting fat, old guy!”

“Ha.  You weigh more than I do!  You’re gonna be a tub of lard when you’re 40.”

Or, “Wanta race at the hike and bike trail?”

“Sure.  I’m gonna kick your butt, fatso.”

And so on and on.  The insults, the abuse, the total competitive male weirdness are unreal — at least to me, as someone who grew up in a mostly female household, without brothers and with a father who rarely spoke.  So this is how men talk when they’re by themselves, I think.  It’s even worse than I imagined.

When you’re a female without brothers, you think the Three Stooges are an aberration who couldn’t amuse anybody over the age of 5.  You have to live with men before you grow to understand a few things.  They like the Three Stooges.  They think they’re funny.  They think they’re role models, for God’s sake.

Like a lot of other things in life, what you originally took to be fiction is true.  My apologies to Pamela for ever failing to believe her.  She knew a lot more than I did.

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

When Obama made his eloquent, moving speech about race earlier this spring, I found one segment of the speech to be especially haunting.  It was the part about his grandmother, who reared him and deeply loved him.  But she was also fearful of blacks and occasionally used racist terms.

That’s what I loved about this speech — its nuances and its openness to the complexity of other human beings.  Here was a woman who was very much of her time and place, who could easily be dismissed as a racist.  But she was more than that.  Racism didn’t define who she was — or how could she have loved and cared for this grandson who was half-black?

This touches me because it speaks to the world I grew up in.  I was brought up to believe blacks were inferior, that any kind of intermarriage was a sacrilege.  (This was taught to me by a white mother and a father who was half American Indian — a fact that could usually be ignored, as long as my father stayed out of the sun, as my mother urged him to do.)  I grew up in neighborhoods in small West Texas towns where teams were picked by eenie-meenie-miney-mo — and still get queasy when I hear those syllables, remembering what usually came after them.

But that was also many, many years ago — and it was a different time.  Once, years ago, my husband and I tried to explain to our kids the tremendous changes we’d seen in our lifetime when it came to race.  How we’d glimpsed bathrooms and water fountains that were designated “white” and “colored.”  How riots erupted in Southern cities when schools were integrated.  How grown men dressed up in sheets and burned crosses.

I know that we still have racial problems to this day.  But you can’t tell me things aren’t better.  They’re not good enough, yet, but they’re still better.  And the fact that a black man is the Democratic nominee for president is something many of us never thought we’d live to see.

Can anybody watch or listen to Obama for even a few minutes and maintain any shreds of racism or white superiority?

Well, yes.  It seems they can.  Check the reactions of some of the voters in lesser-educated states during the primaries.  They wouldn’t vote for a black man, some of them said.  You have to give them some credit: At least they were brazenly honest about it.  Others, feeling the same way, denied it and voted their skin color, if not their pocketbook.

My own small world is predominantly well-educated and liberal.  Obama signs dot front yards in our neighborhood.  Racists are “others,” people we shake our heads at for their small-mindedness and easily aroused sense of threat.

But, I’d bet, you don’t have to look too far in the lives of any of us, search too far into our family trees or old circles of friendship, to find one of these “others.”  They are there, we know them, we may like or love them, we have no idea what to do with them.  So many of them are — like Obama’s white grandmother — both racists and something more than that.

In my own life, I’m talking about a friend who’s in his 80s.  Our politics are very different, but, for months, he’s included me in his mass emails of jokes and third-hand political rants.  For the most part, I’ve deleted them without looking at them, since I hate mass emails to begin with.  But sometimes, I’ve looked at them and been appalled by their content.  I protested once, but have mostly ignored and deleted what followed.

Until today’s email, which was a “joke” about Obama and alluded to his being assassinated.  I wrote the friend and asked him to take me off his list, saying the so-called joke was contemptible and beneath him.

But that’s the easy part, you know.  Demanding to be taken off an offensive list — which I should have done long ago, but didn’t. 

That’s easy, piece of cake, no thought or emotion needed.  But it takes me back to Obama’s speech, his own life, our own imperfect lives with imperfect friends in an imperfect world.  What do we do about the racists in our lives who are more than their racism, who are often benevolent and loving and caring in other ways?  Who are they to us?  It’s one thing to judge the racism; it’s entirely something else to judge and scorn the racists who are something more than their worst traits.

Don’t I need to be purer or better than I am to start heaving rocks in their direction?  Or am I simply showing that, like everybody else, I’m a product of my own time and place, limited and flawed and wracked by ambivalence?

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker) 

We’re like everybody else.  We order DVDs from Netflix and watch them on our flat-screen TV and reassure ourselves we’re not missing a thing.  Sometimes, that may be true.  Other times, we’re just flat wrong.

My husband and I saw Casablanca recently at the Paramount Theatre’s classic summer series.  It’s my all-time favorite movie and I’ve probably seen it a good 25 times in my life.  But it’s different, better, incredible, incomparable on the big screen.

We were sitting, as usual, in the third row, which is why it’s often hard to get friends to go to movies with us.  But, once you go up front, you can never go back.  Anywhere else is diluted and anemic.

The faces — Bergman, Bogart, Lorre, Rains, Greenstreet — were extraordinary, looming over us like Mount Rushmore, staring out from the shadows.  And God, all the wonderful lines, from “I was misinformed” to the “start of a beautiful relationship.”

But it’s the scene with the Marseillaise that sends me over the top every time, swooning and choked-up and crawling with goosebumps.  We once saw the movie with a young French couple who’d never seen it before, both my husband and me swinging out into our usual emotional orbit when the French national anthem overpowered the Nazi melody.  At some point, we turned around and looked at the young couple, certain they’d be overcome with emotion and offering their profound gratitude for our having introduced them to this wonderful movie and its highly stirring scene involving the French national anthem.

But, au contraire.  They appeared deeply bored.  One of them, as I recall, may have even dozed off.

So much for that.  But at the Paramount — which was filled with an audience of people like us, middle-aged and reverential — everyone else was as thrilled as we were.  Thank God no moron ever re-made Casablanca, praise the lord someone had the good sense to let sheer perfection alone so we could see it again and again, on the large screen and the small, seeing something immortal that only gets better with time.

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

When should you end therapy?  That’s the question today at CNN’s website, http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/06/18/healthmag.end.therapy/index.html.  The article posits some useful suggestions — but I feel I should add a few of my own.

After all, I’ve been in therapy several times.  I’ve ended it.  I must know something.  Right?

Years ago, one of my friends told me she knew it was time to stop therapy when she found herself and her psychiatrist swapping recipes for turkey dressing at Thanksgiving.  She left the office, walked out into the cold November air — and realized the therapist might possibly be more neurotic than she was.  Adios.

I questioned my own therapy several years ago in Dallas, when my therapist whipped out a mirror and applied lipstick while I was telling her about my problems.  (My problems!  They were interesting, fascinating, complex, heartrending!)  She snapped her compact shut and smiled at me apologetically, with her freshly made-up lips.  “I’ve got a cocktail party after your appointment,” she explained.

Well, maybe her smile was apologetic or maybe I just made that up to comfort myself for being such a loser that I didn’t stand up and march out of the room seething with indignation.  But, no.  Oh, no.  I stuck around for another several months, undeterred.  Typical.  Pathetic lack of self-esteem.  But that’s why I was in therapy in the first place, no?

I only left after another interaction that didn’t even involve a compact mirror.  One day I was talking, and the therapist — this time — was listening.

“What you’re saying is so interesting,” she said.  She pulled out a tablet and started jotting down notes.  “I hope you don’t mind if I write this down.  It’s very insightful.”

Oh.  Well.  I preened for a few seconds.  (Finally, I was being appreciated!)  Then I suggested that — since I was so helpful, so insightful — that we could perhaps split her fee.

She stared back at me, blankly.  Was I serious?  Kidding?  Demonstrably, irrevocably insane?  She looked a little horrified and uncertain.

Good grief.  I could handle the vanity, the inattention, the lipstick — tragic as that is to say — all paid for by me and my insurance company.

But the lack of humor, the inability to get my jokes?  That was fatal.  I declared myself cured and never came back.

Even as I write this, this same therapist is probably applying lipstick in front of some chump and using my insights and keeping her whole fee.  Come to think of it, she was probably smart enough to realize that my little joke about fee-splitting wasn’t really a joke at all.

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker) 

Oh, brother.  Like I didn’t have enough failures in my life already – such as my little ice-cream problem (those empty pints of Haagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s I have to smuggle out of the house), those suspicious noises coming out of our fake fireplace that spell r-a-t (or is it f-a-m-i-l-y o-f r-a-t-s?), the credit-card bills I’m handling by refusing to open.

On top of all this stress, I’m hearing the repeated, ever-louder sermons of the health police as they rant on and on about how important breakfast is.  Without a meal first thing in the morning, you’re going to end up dumb and fat, they say.  This is based on Recent, Important Findings.

Great.  I don’t need to hear this.  That’s because I heard it throughout my childhood.  Our mother, an early-riser, the kind of person who was actually cheerful in the mornings, always served us breakfast because it was the most important meal of the day.   Mother would set steaming plates of eggs and bacon on the table and we were supposed to eat every bite and — even worse — talk in a civilized way.

It was awful.  Our father rarely talked at all.  But, as a night person, he never, ever talked in the morning.  He’d sit there, glowering.  Which meant that my sister and I were supposed to pick up those chipper conversational balls our mother kept hurling in our direction.  We weren’t morning people, either.  On top of that, we were sullen and sarcastic, even before we were teenagers, a stage that’s now lasted for several decades.  So, Mother would get more and more deflated and pretty soon, there would be a big, terrible scene about how awful we all were, spoiling her day and her life first thing in the morning when everything was fresh and new.  Daddy would finally wake up and take Mother’s side and we’d get sent to our rooms, no matter how old we were.

Breakfast.  God.  No wonder I still hate it.  I don’t wake up hungry.  I wake up morose and crabby and barely alive.  I sit and I stare and I drink coffee.  When I used to smoke, I had my first cigarette then.  Coffee and cigarettes and complete silence — now that’s my idea of a good beginning to the day.

“I’m afraid you’re going to be a breakfast-skipper,” Mother used to tell me in tones she ordinarily reserved for fornicators and liberals and heathens.

No, not really.  I’ve just redefined the idea of what breakfast is.  So sue me.  Just don’t talk to me before noon.

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Show me a needle and I’ll never see it.  That’s because I’ve always got my eyes slammed shut.  I prefer any kind of visualization to seeing my own thin skin get pierced.

But there I was, lying on a narrow bed with an overhead fan wafting a breeze in my direction, getting narrow needles stuck in me here and there — in my feet, my calves, my arms, my head.  You find yourself doing such things — acupuncture, to be precise — when you’ve been driven absolutely bananas by weeks of allergies and sinus headaches and your own pathetic and chronic complaints that make you realize you’ve turned into the kind of person you’ve always loathed, an Allergy Bore.

Besides, I’m more open to Eastern medicine than a lot of people, having hung out in yoga and qi-gong classes for years.  I find I take acunpuncture just as I take yoga, with some kind of weird, openminded skepticism.  If I feel better, fine.  I don’t know how it works, but if it works, I don’t care why.  Go ahead and stick me, already.

I listen to suggestions, too, and take what makes sense to me.  I’m one of these cafeteria alternative medicine types.  Half the time, I find myself nodding, thinking, oh, yes, how wise.  The other half, I’m zoning out, since what I’m hearing is the most useless bullshit since popularity guides I used to read in junior high and high school.  (Be yourself?  Oh, please.  It never worked.  I wanted to be somebody else.  Somebody, you know, popular.)

So I take the needle treatment and look at the accompanying info about blood types and diets and quickly reject it.  This happened for the most part because my particular blood type wasn’t deemed compatible with bacon and avocados.  Since I don’t consider life without bacon to be a life worth living, how can it be bad for me?  (Don’t answer that.  I don’t want to know that either.)

After four treatments, my sinus headaches have calmed down and I’m mildly optimistic.  Mildly optimistic — that sounds promising.  It’s the kind of result that may save me from being an Allergy Bore.  But, so far, it isn’t life-changing enough to turn me into an Acupuncture Bore.

*******

See http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2789

(Copyright 2008 by Ruth Pennebaker)