Real Life

Dumpster chic!

September 20, 2002, by No comments yet

Although the days when I was a svelte 110 pounds are long gone, I still like to read the fashion magazines while I stand in line at the grocery checkout, and imagine what new styles I would wear if I still had the body to carry them off.

So I had to laugh when I read about the latest in fall fashions.

The fashionistas, in an apparent belated nod to the 9/11 disasters, are selling the idea of a “sartorial safety net,” according to Globe fashion maven Tina Cassidy. The new trend is to dress as if your dotcom fortune tanked and terrorists destroyed your apartment, and you had to make do with stuff from the attic and the nearest Salvation Army bin. Clothes as camoflage. The brittle, all-in-black-all-the-time “Sex in the City” look is out. Logo-splashed accessories are out. “I have more money than God” separates made from the collected silk of endangered spiders handwoven by indigenous artisans dwelling in photogenic mountain ranges are out. Intimidation is out. Comfort (physical and spiritual) is in.
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Of jerks and knee-jerks

February 19, 2002, by No comments yet

I’ve been thinking a lot about Thomas Junta lately.

He’s the hockey dad who was recently convicted of beating another hockey dad to death in full view of a rink full of horrified kids, including his own and that of his victim, Michael Costin.

Mr. Junta is a man that some reporters described as “hulking,” a 270-pound truck driver with a jutting jaw and, by all accounts, a serious anger-management problem. Is anyone out there surprised to hear that this so-called “gentle giant” had a record of arrests for previous assaults? That Junta’s own wife had sought a restraining order after he struck her in front of their kids?

Mr. Junta described the altercation that led to Mr. Costin’s death as “a stupid guy thing” that simply got out of hand. His attorney characterized Junta’s actions as self-defense. The prosecution scoffed at this description, noting the testimony of witnesses that placed Mr. Junta at the end of the fight sitting atop Mr. Costin’s chest, slamming his opponent’s head against the concrete rink floor, while bystanders screamed at him to stop.

How does a shouting match escalate into violence and death? How could anyone lose control that completely over something so trivial?

I was mulling this over as I drove home the other day. It was snowing and it looked like it was going to be a fairly substantial accumulation. The wind whipped huge white flakes around my windshield. I was more than a little anxious; our house is at the top of a continuous two-mile incline that rapidly becomes too slick to negotiate in icy weather.

As I turned the corner on the last quarter-mile before my driveway, I saw two vehicles stopped in the road, headed in opposite directions. The windows of both vehicles were open; the drivers, soccer-mom types, were holding an animated conversation in mid-road, oblivious to the snow and my elderly little car rolling to a stop behind them.

I paused a few seconds, waiting for them to finish their talking and move on. No response – the conversation continued. I tapped my horn, thinking that perhaps they hadn’t noticed me. Still no response. I waited a full thirty seconds, the snow falling faster by the second, and then tapped my horn again.

Their heads whipped around in my direction. Once more second or so of conversation, and then, finally, the Acura in the oncoming lane began to move. The driver, a thirtyish, expensively-dressed woman, her carefully made up face contorted with rage, pulled up beside me just long enough to extend an immaculately-manicured middle finger at me through her open window, and then sped past. The driver in front of me sat there passive-aggressively in the road for another thirty seconds, and then took off suddenly with a roar, vanishing over the top of the hill.

Why this ugliness? All I had done was make the two of them aware that they were blocking a public thoroughfare. I had tried to do this as politely as possible, short of getting out of my vehicle and saying pretty please. The sense of entitlement behind their ignorance was

All things must pass.

December 3, 2001, by No comments yet

I woke up late on Friday morning, so I had to race out the door without turning on the radio, which is why I didn’t hear about George Harrison’s passing until I was halfway to class. It was hard to pay attention to the road after that. Maybe it was late-semester stress or sleep deprivation, but the news hit me hard. It helped that almost every station on my car radio, including NPR, played his music in tribute. It was both painful and comforting to be reminded in such a direct way of whom we’d lost.

I remember the night when the Beatles made their network TV debut. I came to school that morning to find everyone in the playground buzzing about that new singing group from England. Only I didn’t know that it was a singing group – no one bothered to mention that part to me, so for most of that morning I wondered why Ed Sullivan would want to show a bunch of insects on his show.
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The Stories in Our Eyes

September 30, 2001, by No comments yet
Ground Zero, September 11, 2001

Ground Zero, September 11, 2001

“All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by….” –Harvey Cox, The Seduction of the Spirit, 1973.

On the eleventh of September, on television, radio, and around campus, people witnessed a sight unimaginable to civilized, sheltered lives, as thousands died in one cataclysmic event. After seeing the footage of the carnage replayed repeatedly, I fled the campus for the comfort of my own home. There, I placed on the stereo my LP of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. It seemed the only appropriate way to mourn the dead in a war not yet declared. I wept as the words of the Missa Pro Defunctis, the Mass for the Dead, overlaid with the anguished, indignant and tenderly elegiac poems of soldier-pacifist Wilfred Owen, surrounded me in that empty living room.

Was it for this the clay grew tall?
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
to break earth’s sleep at all?

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