Morning pages and pages

At the beginning of February this year I wrote a blog (“Attack of the morning page!”) about restarting Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. I’d owned this tome since the early 2000s, but I’d only read the introduction. Around the turn of 2021 I was watching lots of self improvement, goal-setting, and productivity routine videos on YouTube. Many of the creators mentioned Artist’s Way and swore that morning pages (three pages of longhand free writing as the first task of the day) had changed their lives. Interestingly, most of these ardent supporters hadn’t actually read the book. They had a friend who’d read it, or they’d read a summary, or they’d ordered the book and were looking forward to reading it soon.  I already had the book, so I decided to dive in. Here’s what happened…

Cameron intends the program to be attacked at the rate of one chapter per week, so that’s what I did. The titles indicate the week’s theme. Chapter 1 is “Recovering a Sense of Safety.” The succeeding topics are identity, power, integrity, possibility, abundance, connection, strength, compassion, self-protection, autonomy, and faith. Each chapter contains an essay about the topic, along with exercises and tasks, and concludes with a check-in on morning pages, artist dates, synchronicity, and other issues.

Some elements of the program were helpful. For example, the check-in at each chapter’s end, which gently remind about essential process aspects, such as writing daily, regularly doing something you enjoy (the weekly artist date), and noticing stuff.

Cameron also provides steady reassurance that creative endeavors are important and worthwhile. She encourages self compassion rather than shame, and she makes good suggestions for ways to understand, nurture, and placate the internal child. Her emphasis on synchronicity reminds artists to be aware and receptive. I especially enjoyed the exercises where Cameron asks you to remember hobbies and pastimes, to imagine alternate lives and careers. As an anxious person going through a stressful time, my sense of possibilities had contracted, and these exercises made me feel excited and hopeful about getting out in the world again.

Other aspects of the book were more problematic. Affirmations, creative “contracts,” and artist’s prayers just aren’t for me. I’ve tried them before. Cameron does make clear that the reader is free to pick the exercises that appeal. I respect that, but feel that too many of the tasks fall into the “nope” category, such as the amateur psychology ones asking me to write about how my parents tried to quash my artistic dreams. (They didn’t.)

The major failing of the book for me was the relentless proselytizing for Cameron’s view of god, which repeatedly disrupts the narrative. At first she explains that the reader can take the concept of god to be abstract, but it’s clear over the course of the book that she believes that god is an intentional force working through humans. She’s as authoritarian and convinced that her truths are universal as any televangelist or Baptist teacher of my youth. I kept wanting to throw the book across the room every few pages, something that I was never allowed to do during the Sunday service. This isn’t a ding on Cameron, except for the fakeout at the beginning, as by the end of the book she’s asking the reader to “reevaluate your god concept.” I should have paid attention to the caveat suggested by the book’s subtitle: “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.”

She can’t quite conceal a level of disdain for anyone who isn’t pursuing an artistic career full-time, in spite of her insistence that everyone is creative and can benefit from this book. Also dismaying is the encouragement to categorize all acquaintances as supportive or antagonistic. Avoid “crazymakers” (a section that reads like she’s settling some old scores), she recommends, but also avoid your friends who don’t fully support your dreams (maybe they want to talk about the new ice cream shop rather than your new play).

 At the end of the book there are some extras: a Q&A, a creative clusters guide, a reading list. Cameron attacks people who have taught Artist’s Way classes, whose sins include making money and making changes to the program; thou shalt have no guru before Julia. The creative cluster section is her model of the ideal way to work through the book, in a group where members take turns leading. She repeatedly suggests that people who own the book buy a copy to give a friend. The most eye-popping sentence for me was “If you follow the spiritual practice of tithing, I recommend buying the book and passing it on.” Line her pockets, folks!

In summary: did I find the book useful? Some things have changed for the better in my artistic life since I started the book. I got an unexpected check that was almost equal to the cost for a writing class that I was considering and used that money to take the class. I also took a left turn and started a podcast a few weeks ago. Check it out, if you’d like!

On the minus side, pumping out the Artist’s Way morning pages according to Cameron’s specifications felt like a chore much of the time. Once I’d finished them, I didn’t want to write anything more for a few hours. My old morning writing routine, with stops and starts and pauses to watch the news, gave me pages with poems and drawings as well as various fleeting thoughts. The morning pages in themselves aren’t intended to generate creative content, and they didn’t. No poems. No drawings. I felt happy today when I did my final set. Tomorrow I can go back to the way I like to write in the morning.

I think the full program works well for some, but the YouTubers got it right. The key takeaway is the morning pages, and you don’t need to read Cameron’s book to find a version of this practice that works. You can set your own parameters for length, subjects, time of day; make it a habit and you may see some positive effects. People who already have a morning pages practice and want to explore it more in depth should consider buying the book.

Burnt pages

I added another book from the basement boxes my father sent me a while back to my to-be-read pile this week. This was a paperback version of N. Brysson Morrison’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, one of several volumes that I acquired as a result of watching the Masterpiece Theater Tudor productions of the 1970s. I ruffled the pages, hoping for illustrations (score! eight pages in the middle) and also found a cardstock ad bound between pages 192 and 193. Those ads are common in paperbacks of this era. I expected a page promoting a book club, or maybe a luggage set, or a collectible figurine. But this ad was for Kent cigarettes. Wow!

On the ad’s front, three lines in big type: “For the filter. For the taste. For all the right reasons.” Below this bit of poetry were two cigarette boxes in a cream and gold design, along with blue or green tape embossed with a golden castle. Regular and menthol, shoulder to shoulder in a V. The back page with weaker copy (“What a good time for all the good things of a Kent”) alongside two boxes stacked as if they’ve just finished fighting or fornicating. The victorious box with a trinity of cigarettes peeking out of the top, the loser box displaying the Surgeon General’s warning on the side.

Somehow I’d blocked memories of cigarette ads in paperbacks, but evidently they were rampant for a time. This book was printed in 1972, just three years after the US banned TV and radio ads for liquor and cigarettes. Lorillard, owner of the Kent brand, was among the companies that turned to paperback advertising as a replacement. Authors tended to be horrified by the practice for a combination of artistic and financial reasons. The authors didn’t make any money from these ads and had no choice about whose ads were placed in their books. Readers also protested, with a major objection being that children and youth would be influenced to start smoking or drinking. The deciding factor, I imagine, was that the campaigns didn’t work. My reaction of ignoring the ads and then forgetting them entirely seems to have been typical. By the early ‘80s, the cigarette companies were putting their marketing dollars elsewhere.

The image on the lower half of the back page is the one that really gets me. There’s a caption, “Coffee ’n Kent!” over a photo that looks like a painting, artistic, very Caravaggio, with a diagonal wash of light from the upper left and lots of chiaroscuro.  The model is a blond, Robert Redford type, holding a coffee mug in the most manly way possible—that is, a single-handed grip on the mug itself, rather than using both hands or the mug handle. The mug’s tilted towards his lips, maybe 15 degrees. The mug hand is also holding a lit cigarette, with a trail of smoke swirling upward. I experimented with an empty mug and a cigarette-length pencil—the things I do for this blog!—and realized that on taking a sip of coffee I would either singe my right eyebrow or set my bangs on fire.

This ad did generate a memory, not of the campaign itself, but of an experience that used to be routine. Gosh, I thought, it’s been a long time since I saw a library book with cigarette burns. Turning to a page with those ugly splotches, black in the center fading to raggedy brown edges. Sometimes leaving holes in the paper. It was annoying, especially in a murder mystery, to have entire words burned away. And yet, this memory of an annoyance was not unpleasant. I enjoyed the trip in time.

With the pandemic, nostalgia keeps flooding my brain, even when it’s nostalgia for 2019. No part of me truly wants to be back in 2019, with a criminal president running unchecked and an election coming up, but there is a longing for the sensory memories associated with being out in the world without thinking about disease the whole time. Thanks to my train writing (“A Train of One’s Own,” 2/7/21), my YouTube home page is packed with travel-related recommendations. (Maybe) thanks to my being vaccinated recently, I’ve been bingeing these videos, especially ones about sleeper trains and hotels. The Japanese sleepers are my favorite: they give you pajamas in a plastic bag. You can’t keep them, though. The turnstiles, the escalators, the echoing stations, the departure boards, the reception desks and vending machines. Most affecting, for some reason, has been the yellow line on the train platform between the walkway and the platform’s edge. That’s the one that hits like the Kent ad. I can feel it in my foot: crossing that nubbly metal strip. Stepping onto the train. My mind taking me places that my body will go…soon, soon.

Birthday

April 23 is one of my favorite days, every year.  The grass has turned a deep, living green, the trees are starting to flower, and two of my favorite geniuses have birthdays: William Shakespeare and Sergei Prokofiev.  Shakespeare’s plays and poems have been an ongoing source of amazement and comfort to me in good times and bad. Prokofiev has been one of my favorite composers since I was age 11.

Prokofiev was born in a village in Ukraine in 1891. He was a musical prodigy who started studying at the St. Petersburg Conservatory at age 13. By many accounts, his people skills were lacking. He seems to have had a robust ego and not much tact. He also had a spiky, self-assured voice that developed early and stayed strong throughout his career. Complications related to the Russian revolution led to his spending a couple of decades in the 1920s and ‘30s concertizing and composing in the United States and Europe. He missed Russia, though, and returned to the Soviet Union to live in 1933.

My first encounter with Prokofiev was with his 1936 children’s classic Peter and the Wolf. This piece, for orchestra and narrator, introduces listeners to the instruments of the orchestra by associating each character in the story with an instrument. The story also reinforces Soviet propaganda about how youths should behave, which zoomed high over my head. My parents bought the Disney-fied version, a record set with Sterling Holloway, better known as the voice of Winnie the Pooh, as narrator, plus a picture book telling the story. I loved that Prokofiev had given the role of the cat to the clarinet, the instrument I’d recently started to learn. The accelerating arpeggios as the cat climbed the tree to get away from the wolf were way beyond me (it’s a scary enough cadenza to appear on many major orchestra audition lists), but I soon figured out how to play the cat theme. 

I searched the family record collection for more Prokofiev and found several albums with his and other Russian composers’ works. Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and Prokofiev, filled with fiery melodies and vivid orchestration. I loved them all, but Prokofiev the most.

I’d stack albums with Romeo and Juliet, Lt. Kije, and Love for Three Oranges on the spindle of our stereo and walk with my book in circles around the living room, listening and reading. It was one of my ways of stimming, which is short for “self-stimulating behaviors,” a term for the repetitive movements that all humans do in response to being bored, nervous, or tense. These are often more noticeable and considered more “problematic” in people on the autistic spectrum. Fortunately my parents didn’t complain. I found something exhilarating about the way Prokofiev would take a melody to places it shouldn’t go, but did.

Some musicologists seem to have a disdain for Prokofiev. It might be because his music used conventional structures and was tonal at a time when serialism was more in fashion. Or it might be his idiosyncratic melodies, which are sometimes described dismissively as “quirky.” Or maybe it’s for Cold War reasons (Stravinsky, the other big Russian composer of the time, stayed an ex-pat, and it seems that a fair number of scholars took “his” side). Or maybe it’s because of Prokofiev’s popularity with audiences.

Access to a bigger music library at college let me explore Prokofiev in more depth. Soon I had new favorites: the piano concertos, especially the third, its opening featuring the clarinet section, hooray!, the piano sonatas, the later symphonies, Visions Fugitives, the Sonata in D for violin and piano. So many pieces from so many genres: operas, ballets, and movie scores, as well as symphonies and sonatas. All in that voice.

Sadly, Prokofiev’s voice was muffled when he fell into disfavor during one of the Soviet Union’s artistic corrections in the late 1940s. Many of his pieces were censored. He became a recluse, staying mostly in his home outside Moscow, but, lucky for us, he continued writing new music. By the time he died, on March 5, 1953—the same day as Stalin—he’d added even more symphonies and operas and ballets to his oeuvre.

When I became a parent, I hoped that Sonny would like Prokofiev’s voice, too. When he was four, we acquired a video version of Peter and the Wolf, starring Elmo of Sesame Street and the Boston Pops. Sonny already had a favorite composer by that point (Schubert), but he watched the video a lot. His favorite character was the grandfather, who is represented by the bassoon. Sonny built himself a cardboard bassoon and made it part of his stimming–in his case, running in the basement–trotting back and forth holding it while puffing out his cheeks. When the time came, six years later, for him to pick a wind instrument to study—he chose bassoon.  I wonder how many other people have had a lifelong passion for an instrument ignited by this composer…I bet there are more than a few. Which makes Prokofiev eminently worthy of celebration.

Happy 130^th birthday Prokofiev!

Right in the eye

My new word of the week is orbisculate, a verb that means ”to accidentally squirt juice and/or pulp into one’s eye” (or onto one’s shirt or person), as sometimes happens when one is eating grapefruit. In addition to grapefruit, other citrus fruits—oranges, lemons, and especially limes, in my experience—also have this explosive tendency and must be handled with care.

Unlike most of the new-to-me words I’ve mentioned on this blog, which are long-established words that I’ve just encountered, orbisculate is still in the wrapping paper. Neil Krieger, a Boston-based, grapefruit-loving scientist and educator who died of Covid-19 in April, 2020, coined the term in the late 1950s, but it caught on mostly with just his family. His children, Jonathan and Hilary, believed for a long time that orbisculate was already in the dictionary, but it wasn’t. Yet.

In order for a word to get into the dictionary, says dictionary.com, it needs to be in widespread use, with a generally agreed upon meaning, and it needs to have “staying power.”  Dictionary writers and editors (fancy name: lexicographers) are always on the lookout in reading and conversation for new words that seem likely to linger, as well as for a word being used in a way that merits a new definition.

I had a gig for a while proofreading a dictionary for World Book, which publishes dictionaries as well as encyclopedias. This involved many hours of sitting at a folding table in a windowless gray room—far removed, unfortunately, from the glamorous demesnes of the lexicographers. This was a bit sad, because I never got a chance to speak up in person for “foofy,” a wonderful word that took a long time to find a home in Big Dictionary publishers like Merriam-Webster, Macmillan, or the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

Each year hundreds, or even thousands, of new words and new definitions make their way into the dictionary.  The lexicographers read, listen, and make lists to monitor for a time to see if the words fade or flourish. Also they welcome write-in suggestions from folks like the Kriegers.

In tribute to their father, the siblings have developed an inventive marketing campaign for orbisculate. They’ve made a website, orbisculate.com, which includes merch (proceeds donated to charity), a petition, and a checklist of 78 goals for the word, 78 being Neil’s age when he died. These goals include the word’s being used in a cookbook, as a temporary tattoo, on the label of a grapefruit-flavored product, in a comic strip, on a lawn sign, and on a story on a major news site. It’s working: I learned about the project when CBS ran a story about it.

Orbisculate is just one of many words that might eventually live in a major dictionary. Foofy, I’m thrilled to report, made it to the OED in December of 2020. Other 2020s candidates include BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color), hard pass, cancel culture, flex (in the meaning of showing off), performative (in the meaning of doing for show), allyship, long haulers (in the Covid sense), supposably, dogfooding (the use of a company’s product by employees before a public launch), and @ (verb: to respond to or challenge a claim, as in  “Don’t @ me, bro”).

Now that foofy is a done deal, I’m getting behind orbisculate. It’s fun to say—always important for me with words. I appreciate the old-fashioned yet snarky feel of orbis (Latin for sphere, the basis of orb meaning eye) combined with osculate (also Latin, meaning kiss). It feels like a word that would have been around since the 1920s. There’s a clear definition and even a noun form, orbisculation, to go along with the verb. (I propose that an adjective form be added, “orbisculous,” describing items with a tendency to orbisculate).

Off to sign the petition…

Buzz

It was all over the TV on Tuesday: Breaking! News! The Johnson and Johnson vaccine is being paused due to a rare but dangerous side effect, a blood clotting disorder.

A little bee started buzzing around my brain. I’d received the J&J vaccine two days before. I’d made it through the shot–just a little sting–and the fifteen-minute post-injection period without going into anaphylactic shock. My only reactions so far had been shoulder twinges and feeling tired more than normal. I’d thought I was basically done with side effects. The prospect of being on high alert for the next couple of weeks set a bee buzzing in my brain.

The warning signs, said the doctor-commentators, included headache, stomachache, and leg pains. But don’t worry, it’s a very rare complication. One in a million—although concerning enough to close down clinics and stop giving the shots. Rare complications are the ones that I tend to fixate on during bouts of hypochondria. That passing pain at my right temple: surely an aneurysm fixing to blow. A morning cough: my first Covid symptom.

The bee was joined by a buddy. I began to feel indignant. I’d just started to relax! I realize that I don’t have some kind of right to feel relaxed, so this wasn’t a good reason to pout. Nevertheless I pouted and made a generic “Yikes!” post on Facebook. Friends rallied around with supportive comments, most of them statistics-based.  One in a million means that the odds are on my side. Then they gave me more statistics. I had a much bigger chance of being struck by lightning, or drowning in the bathtub, or being in a car accident.

The bees weren’t convinced. Half the hive was in motion. I started assembling my outfit for the day and took a tumble over an electrical cord, nearly face-planting onto the sharp corner of my dresser and scratching my arm (chances of dying in a fall: 1 in 106).  I swore for a while and then decided on an expedition, a trip to a favorite park where I could walk away the stress. I grabbed the car keys. About a mile from the house there’s one of those complicated intersections with a traffic light pattern that ensures left-turn bottlenecks. I was on my way through in the right lane when the SUV directly ahead of me sideswiped a sedan in the left lane (chances of dying in a car accident: 1 in 107). I was able to stop without adding a third car to the mess, but now the whole hive was buzzing.

Someone had planted a row of daffodils at the park entrance. While I walked I tried to drown out the bees by calculating whether avoiding disaster twice already in the day made it less or more likely that I would get a fatal blood clot. Probability doesn’t work that way, I’m told, but I’m fuzzy about how probability works in general. On the one hand, I don’t really subscribe to the idea that “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” though I appreciate the nice setup and punchline. It’s mistakenly attributed to Mark Twain and sounds like his style. Twain himself wrongly attributed it to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Whoever came up with joke—maybe a different English politician, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, maybe the Duke of Wellington, or various others—it went the Gilded Age-equivalent of viral in the mid 1890s. On the other hand, probability and statistics class was the hill upon which my college math major died. I don’t have a good grasp of the subject.

   My friends explained that the stats just remind us that we all do way riskier stuff every day than get a vaccine. Familiarity breeds complacency. I drive frequently. I bathe daily. I trip over stuff every few days. I go outdoors when it’s raining. I get a shot once every few years.

 Ultimately I’m glad I got the vaccine. The benefits of the vaccine far outweigh the risks. I’m lucky to have received a shot before the program was paused. What odds there are of my life returning to normal increase with every vaccinated person.

However, it took a while—some hours, in fact—to settle the bees.

Bird

I saw a bird this morning in the top branches of our cherry tree. All black, songbird-sized, bright yellow beak. It pecked at the fruit. I moved closer to the window, and the bird glared briefly in my direction and flew away.

The best match on an internet search was the common blackbird, aka Turdus merula, aka the Eurasian blackbird. The trouble, as the final name suggests, is that those blackbirds don’t seem to frequent the continental US. They aren’t on The Official State List of the Massachusetts Avian Records Committee or other local bird-identification sites.  Types of blackbirds found in my  state include the red-winged blackbird, the common grackle, the brown-headed cowbird, and the European starling. None of these looked very much like the bird I’d seen, and the starling was the only one with a yellow beak.

I wondered what kind of symbolism might be associated with a blackbird. I’m not particularly superstitious myself, but always curious. I’m always looking for connections between things. The connections are constructed, but interesting. I entered the question “What does it mean when you see a blackbird?”

Top answer: death.

Ruh-roh. I didn’t need anything to make me more anxious about my coronavirus vaccine appointment, which was 28 hours away. I’m scheduled to get the single-dose Johnson and Johnson vax. It engenders a mixture of hope and terror (I’m a baby about needles), and it’s on my mind so everything I hear or see gets connected to it. In response to news reports about extreme reactions to the shot, some CNN doctor said, “Well, it’s a powerful shot.” I didn’t find that comforting. Now I had to work bird lore into the mix.

The blackbird has plenty of other symbolic associations, most of them vibing with black, bird, or night. Blackbirds can signify change, mystery, magic, night, singing. Also they can be the Devil in disguise, evidently. I looked for something benign that would resonate. Many of the gurus avoided the death aspect entirely and stressed the “change” meaning. I looked up starling symbology as well, which like the blackbird stuff, was vague and contradictory. Starling can stand for family relationships, illumination, luck, etiquette, and acceptance of one’s lot in life.

Is it significant that confusion reigns in “Blackbird” the 1968 Beatles song? Paul McCartney is clear about where the opening guitar lick originated: it’s based on J.S. Bach’s Bourree in E minor for lute, a piece that he had practiced. As to where and how the song took shape, accounts vary. McCartney wrote it in India after hearing a blackbird sing one morning. He wrote it in Scotland while meditating on the US civil rights movement. He wrote it in his father’s house to comfort his ailing step-grandmother. The lyrics are about nature, or love, or justice.

I like the song, although as with a lot of Beatles tunes I mostly know little bits of it. Mostly the snippets that play on ads. The Beatles had been broken up for years by the time I started listening to Top 40 radio. Early in the pandemic, back when we were still trying to do choir rehearsals on Zoom, the director had us sing along to a karaoke version of Blackbird. “Everybody knows this, right?” she asked. Sure, definitely, yup. She muted our mics so we could sing along without the distraction of sound echoes and delays.

The guitar lick started. This will be fun! I thought. This is a great song! “Blackbird singing in the dead of night,” I warbled, enjoying the lovely leap of a fifth on the “of.”

I got into trouble on the second line, “Take these broken wings and learn to fly.” Same number of syllables, but differing in rhythm and melody—I couldn’t quite remember how. I got back on track with the last lines of the verse, “You were only waiting/for this moment to arrive” and breathed a sigh of relief. Second verse, same problems.

Then the background music changed. More lyrics popped onscreen. I couldn’t even guess at the tune or the rhythm. Across the Zoom gallery some of my fellow choristers were smiling and singing, while others echoed my confused expression. I kept my mouth moving, chanting the words. “Blackbird fly, blackbird fly/into the light of a dark black night.”

Time slowed, as it always does when I’m really screwing up. The karaoke lasts for just over two minutes, but it felt like two months before I hit the safety of the final “You were only waiting for this moment to arise.”

The director unmuted us. “How did it go?” she asked. Some of us had loved it. Some of us had gotten confused. One of us, a Millennial, had never heard the song before and had been lost the whole time.

When it was my turn, I said, “I realized I don’t know this song as well as I thought.” Which, on consideration, led to my personal meaning for blackbird: muddling through life’s dark spots.

Rainbow

April is autism awareness month. I tend to have mixed feelings about participating, but this year Sonny’s all in. He’s making a series of videos about his perspectives as a young adult on the spectrum, so we’re having more conversations about autism than usual.

“Hey Mom,” he said, a couple of days ago. “Are you Team Puzzle or Team Infinity?”

“Ummm…I’m not sure what that question means,”  I replied.

“Which autism symbol, the puzzle piece or infinity sign?” He showed me some artwork a friend had posted on Facebook, a big rainbow-colored infinity symbol beside a little blue puzzle piece with a slash through it.

I felt a twinge of guilt about my ignorance. Admittedly I have a rather poor visual memory and often have trouble with pictographs and icons. This morning, as is not unusual, I opened Safari twice while attempting to check my email. One’s a circle, one’s a leaning rectangle, but they’re both mostly blue. If I ever manage to distinguish between Camera and Photos on my first try, it will be a day of rejoicing.

 If I had been still active on autism parenting sites I’d have been more up to date. I discovered online support groups when Sonny was about 11. Life with a young child on the spectrum had been isolating, as many of the moms in my suburb who had neurotypical kids acted as if autism were contagious and shut us out of routine social activities. It was a relief to find a place where people empathized and gave advice without a sneer at my parenting skills. Many of us parents eventually realized that we were on the spectrum ourselves, and that also led to a new level of self-understanding and acceptance.

 When I was active on those sites, the puzzle piece was the dominant autism symbol. It had originated in the UK in 1963 with the National Autism Society (NAS). The NAS no longer uses this symbol, and given that its puzzle piece featured a drawing of a crying child, that’s a good thing. In 1999 the Autism Society started to use a logo with colorful puzzle pieces formed into a rainbow ribbon, rainbow being chosen as a reference to the autism spectrum. Autism Speaks (AS), an organization founded in 2005, uses a puzzle piece colored blue as its logo. The blue was intended to suggest calmness and acceptance. It’s perhaps emblematic of AS that its cofounder, Suzanne Wright, took credit for the puzzle piece becoming a worldwide symbol of autism, despite the fact that it had already been in use for 42 years.

Autism Speaks is, to put it mildly, a problematic organization. People correctly accuse it of pathologizing all autism as a disease to be cured or eliminated. Many in the autism community see AS as more supportive towards distressed neurotypical parents who want their children to behave “normally” than towards the children themselves. That’s a valid criticism.

I don’t think the world would be better off with no autistic people. Many scientists, musicians, and artists have been on the spectrum. I imagine that some things would have been easier for me if I’d been born neurotypical, but I don’t know that I’d be happier or a more productive member of society.

Many on the spectrum despise the AS logo for reasons unrelated to the organization. The blue suggests depression. The shape implies that autism is a problem that needs to be solved and that autistic people don’t fit in.  I had taken a different message from the puzzle piece, which was that every piece of a puzzle is as important as the others. I may be a minority of one in that view. In the course of writing this blog I discovered that there are some jigsaw puzzles on the market that purposefully throw in a few extra pieces that won’t fit, which was disquieting. In any case, Autism Speaks is so strongly associated with the puzzle logo at this point that I was delighted when Sonny educated me about an alternative.

The infinity symbol has no missing pieces. It’s mysterious, like the universe, like a brain, an understanding rather than a solution. It’s not necessarily a problem that needs to be solved. Better understood, sure. It can be any color; though I like the rainbow versions the best. The symbol also suggests motion, which I hope could remind neurotypical people that people with autism have active brains. I’ve been in far too many conversations where Sonny was treated like a piece of furniture—something to talk about, not to.

“Definitely Team Infinity,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Sonny.

Bears, bunnies, buds…

Spring’s little green buds are out. Nary a one on March 31, they were adorning every branch of our garden cherry tree on April 1! Happy, and restless, I contrived an errand–paper towels—and headed for CVS. Paper goods and other cleaning products are stashed in a dull aisle at the end of the store. On the way I detoured to the “seasonal” aisle. CVS’s definition of seasonal is always colorful and multifaceted. This week seed packets, bug spray, garden stakes, novelty umbrellas, and the occasional gnome jostled for shelf space with Easter baskets, stuffed toys, egg-coloring kits, and oh the c-c-candy.

The paper towels slipped from my mind. A basket, some fake grass, jelly beans, neon-pastel plastic eggs, a big chocolate rabbit and a little stuffed rabbit…I could assemble it into an Easter gift for Sonny. I did something like that most years when he was a kid. I pushed away the thought that Sonny is 23 years old and doesn’t even like jelly beans, as well as that we already had a package of Peeps and a couple of Cadbury eggs in the pantry… A woman with a little girl in tow expelled an impatient breath. She had her eye on a cellophane-wrapped extravaganza on the shelf above my head.

I socially distanced to the appropriate six feet, which took me outside the aisle. That broke the spell.

As I loaded the paper towels into the car, I admitted that the person who wants the pretty basket with candy and a stuffed bunny sitting in plastic grass is me.

Mostly I want the toy. I had a bit of a stuffed animal habit as a kid. A pair of teddy bears, three dogs, a monkey, a red horse, and, yes, an Easter bunny lived on my bunk bed. My favorite, placed at the center of the bunch, was a lion with a huge, scratchy mane. Whenever we went to a toy store, I scanned the dollhouse stuff and then lingered at the plush creatures displays until it was time to leave. I longed for an enormous panda bear, bigger than me, with a big, soft belly and enveloping limbs, the kind you could barely fit in a car to take home. Obviously this toy, with its rent-payment price tag, was out of the question. I knew that. I could even predict what my mother would say: “Where on earth would you put that thing?”

“On my bed with the others,” I would have replied. I wanted to have enough stuffed toys to cover the bed’s surface completely and then pile a few more on top. During the day I could look at them, and at night I could crowd them around me, making things nice and cozy and tight and safe.

 Sonny’s birth was an excuse to troll the toy departments again. We gave him teddy bears and easter bunnies and took him to places like FAO Schwarz (the plush animals displays, OMG). He preferred exotic animals, such as the ones for sale at kids’ museum or aquarium gift shops. Stuffed snakes, frogs, fishes, and beetles. Also he went for TV toys: the Abominable Snowman from the Rudolph shows,  Elmo from Sesame Street, various Teletubbies, Gary from Sponge Bob, etc. None of them lived on his bed. They got played with for a while and then were passed down to various cousins.

The household member whose soft toy enthusiasms were closest to mine was definitely our golden retriever. He adored a series of stuffed ducks from the pet store. When presented with a duck, he’d shake all over, taking time to sniff the toy. Then, very gently, he’d take the thing into his mouth and carry it around the house.  He’d use it as a pillow as well as something to catch and fetch. And then at some point he’d rip a seam and pull out half the stuffing.

For a while I switched to a grown-up version of plush toys, the throw pillow. This was HGTV-approved (pillows add color and texture to a space, as well as comfort). HGTV convinced me that one couldn’t have too many throw pillows, which turned out to be far from true. Having to shift six pillows in order to sit on the couch turned out to be annoying. Having no room for Dave to fold his laundry on the bed proved even worse. He started dumping my beautiful pillows on the floor and leaving them there. I put most of the pillows in various closets and forced myself to stop buying new ones.

 I’m still searching for comfort in all the wrong places. Without being forced away from the display, I might very well have bought a toy. That would have been bad. I already have two stuffed animals in my bedroom, both on the headboard. One is a little orange cat, very floppy, with big glass eyes. Sonny gave it to me for Christmas one year so that I could have a cat that was always there for me. I love our evil orange tabby Capone madly, a passion that’s only intermittently requited. “My” cat fits nicely on top of a pile of TBR books. The other animal is a purple hippo. I was able to rationalize the purchase neatly, as I’d bought it in a store for grownups, and it was practically a medical device, since it’s infused with lavender and is microwavable. The hippo’s purpose is to help its owner get to sleep. And two toys is plenty; two is the last safe number in the one-two-many of my autism. A third toy might trigger the deluge. In two months the bed would be covered. Forget space for laundry: neither Dave nor I would have room to sleep! It’s probably better to look to the little green buds for comfort, instead.

The Kadigan Search

So I was watching this program about Massachusetts that included a map that showed which Native American tribes were most prominent in various areas of the state. Around where we live the dominant tribe was the Wessagusset. Cool! Out towards western Mass, the name of a river tribe caught my eye: Podunk. Time to fire up the search engines…

I’ve been trying to educate myself about words or expressions that intentionally demean a race or ethnic group, like “thug” and “gyp” so that I can choose something different. I would be sorry if Podunk was one of these words. It’s so much fun to say. It’s loaded with plosives! P fires into the atmosphere, D drops the jaw, and K slams the word shut. I think it sounds like someone getting out of town for good, which is what people from Podunk often do.

To my relief, Podunk’s slang connotations don’t directly refer to the Podunk tribe. The Podunks—the word can mean both the tribe and the swampy land of their territory—had succumbed to Old World diseases and broken treaties by the mid 1700s. In the tribal sense they are extinct, but the Podunk name is preserved: on a river in Connecticut, on roads and various unincorporated areas, and on towns in several states, including Vermont, New York, and Connecticut.

Podunk became popular as a placeholder name for a small, dull, backwards town in the later 1800s. Another term for placeholder name is kadigan, which is my new-to-me word of the week. In 1846 a Buffalo, NY, newspaper ran a series of Letters from Podunk that became wildly popular nationwide. The letters satirized the small-town/small-world perspective. Soon other writers, including Mark Twain, began making jokes about Podunk towns.

I mentioned the Podunk research to my husband Dave, who grew up in Massachusetts but had never learned about the tribe. “If it turns out to be problematic,” he commented, “you could always use jerkwater instead.”

I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Jerkwater (definition: “small/remote/insignificant”) is a less attractive word, even though it applies more broadly. I could be talking about a jerkwater town, politician, athletic program, etc. Like Podunk, Jerkwater also became popular in the later 1800s. Then it referred to towns where trains stopped solely because there was a handy stream to refill the boiler (requiring that workers “jerk” the water from the stream to the train).

Podunk and jerkwater. Places that people itch to leave. I know the feeling. When I was 11 my family moved a couple of hours south from the bustling Washington, DC area to Richmond, Virginia. Richmond wasn’t small, but it was still Podunk: slow-moving, faded, gossipy, and focused on the past. My friends who’d grown up in Richmond thought of it as a favorite blanket, cozy and comforting. To me it was a straitjacket. I wanted the excitement and possibilities of a real city.

During the later 1800s America underwent the Second Industrial Revolution, which included a major migration of people from rural areas to cities. From 1870 to 1920, an estimated 11 million people abandoned Podunks and jerkwater towns for city lights. During those years the population grew from 38 million to 106 million people.

My theory is that maybe these kadigans–these caricatures of nowhereville–became popular because they were timely. People wanted to reassure themselves that giving up on Podunk and Jerkwater was the right decision. 1920 was the first time in US history when more people lived in cities than in the country. There were a lot of people looking for that validation.

The urban trend’s continued and intensified since. In 2021, about 83% of Americans live in urban areas (cities and suburbs), while about 21% live in rural (open country/small town) areas. Yes, those numbers sum to more than 100%; some urban areas contain rural areas within them.

There’s a growing longing these days for a return to a more community-connected, simpler, small-town life. Even I, a city-lover, sometimes am overwhelmed with such feelings here in my suburb, where I only know a couple of my neighbors. How my town, which has a horse farm and a farmers market and surprising number of residents who keep chickens or goats, can feel too urban is hard to pinpoint, but it does. Maybe because there are almost 35,000 of us in 10 square miles? Besides, it’s easier to go rural now that we can bring along our electronics, sometimes our jobs, and get most anything delivered to our doorstep, even in the most jerkwater of Podunks.

I wondered if there was some antonym to Podunk on the rise, but I haven’t found one. We need a new kadigan. A name for a stodgy city that drives people to rural life, whose location can’t quite be pinned down…

Letters from Springfield?