Things I Learned on Sullivan's Island

At some point the flag people were going to add a stripe for each state, but when Kentucky and Tennessee joined (I think those states are correct), it got to 15 and started to look awful crowded. Then a resolution was passed to bring the stripes back to 13 for the original colonies and a star for each new state. Phew! We wouldn't want a cluttered flag...

Real forts are conceptually similar to the ones we all built as children in backyards and under coffee tables. They are burrowed-in places that are difficult to access and easy to defend from the inside. But I never had a control room or a maze for ammunition under my coffee table - I was happy with a blanket.

The Women's Army Corps was created in WWII (I think) so more men could go fight.

The slave trade ended officially in 1808 but continued in secret (or whatever it means when it continues but it's not suppposed to) after that.

Between 10 and 12 million Africans were forced to emigrate in the slave trade. About half of them passed through Charleston (of course I hope y'all will fact check me, if you are genuinely interested in knowing the actual for-real truth).

The Gullah people have retained aspects of their African culture unlike any other people. Words like "gumbo" have origins in the languages of West Africa.

Sullivan's Island has the coolest lighthouse I've ever seen.



On the shore when the wave goes out there are lots of little what look like blowholes in the sand that bubble bubble while the wave recedes. I tried with my toe but couldn't figure out what caused the effect.

Postcard stamps now cost 28 cents.

Ants like to eat shrimp.

Chiara visits Charleston, SC

The forecast for Charleston, SC, is scattered thunderstorms into the indefinite future. They greeted me on arrival yesterday and appeared during today's lunch at a delightful bistro with the best fish and chips I've ever eaten. If one were to assume that the storms blow away the 100% humidity, one would be quite, quite wrong. It's oppressive and makes breathing difficult; AC is not a choice here the way it sometimes seems so at home. Apparently it can be gotten used to, but that probably takes more than 24 hours.

I'm staying with 6 friends - 2 adults, their son and daughter, and 2 cats out of a novel. Oscar is neurotic and takes adult Prozac, designated by CVS as "canine" (yes I know cats are felines). As my friend tells it, Oscar's life took a turn for the worse when their first child was born, and when they had a second and moved from Cville to Charleston, he completely lost it. Each time he enters the house, he takes an interminable amount of time and engages in nighttime rituals, alternating meowing to go out with meowing to come in. He and Sebastian, who lost one-third of his tail in a past life, follow like dogs when the family takes walks.

Other than being humid, Charleston is beautiful. Like Rome, Charleston has strict laws about the appearance of buildings, requiring city approval to change the color of one's home, if one happens to be rich enough to live downtown. Walking by Rainbow Row, near the Battery, I learned about the classic Charleston sideways porch.


In the days before AC (and Charles Towne was founded in the 1600s), apparently such a design, paired with a slightly off-kilter orientation toward the harbor, enabled a sea breeze to blow through and, if not actually cool things off, exchange stale inside air for oppressive outside air. And, with the likes of Blackbeard hanging around, probably the air inside was pretty stinky.



My favorite Charleston sight today was at the elementary school we visited for work, where one of the books in the office was titled "Pirates Don't Change Diapers." That's funny, I thought that's what swashbuckling meant - as in, "little Johnny, does that lovely aroma arising from your backside mean that you need your swash buckled?"

Yesterday's favorite sight happened at the dock of family friends, who live on the intracoastal waterway. We walked through their spongy yard, past an awfully realistic fake dead plastic bird (the coastal version of an owl) to the wooden walkway that wound through some reeds. I spied little black crabs that looked like spiders. I have a friend who is scared of spiders and I wonder: if something looks like a spider but isn't a spider, is it still scary? Other local animal life apparently includes dolphins and alligators which made an appearance in my friends' neighborhood recently. You know what they say: if anything will make a cat neurotic, it's an alligator. So far my scariest creature feature has been with these beautiful dark blue bugs the size of a hummingbird. They live in the trees - Charleston is famous for live oaks and the Spanish moss with which they live in harmony.



Last Charleston lesson for the day: don't touch the Spanish moss because it contains chiggers which will cause you to itch for a week and a half. And that will make Oscar pitch a fit.

family=forever

This weekend my cousin D2 was kind enough to get married so we could have a family reunion in Lexington, KY. Raised as an only child, I got my sibling fix (complete with altercations and time outs from grandma) from my group of tumbling cousins, who now have little tumblers of their own. There's something really special about getting together with a bunch of people you've known since you were small, and their parents who (by virtue of being her siblings) have known your mom since she was small, or just enough bigger to boss them around.

There are so few people in the world who have known us since we were born. To have a whole clan of them seems an amazing gift, that as an adult I have truly learned to appreciate. Initially it's tough to relate to people who saw all the awkward stages, from diapers to glasses to funny poofy hair to bad boy(or girl)friends and all the other stages that one can spend an entire life trying to forget or trying to insist "That wasn't me! That was another person! I'm different now!" But after being past the worst of the awkwardness, it's comforting to have all these people who don't actually care, because they've loved you, or at least teased you, since you were very tiny. To them, probably like with your parents, the "you" that is really true is that cute little person who they once held in their arms or tickled or took to a baseball game, or in one case, the emergency room. (More about that later, but wild mushrooms were involved).

Maybe this time it sunk in because I'm in the middle and can participate on both sides: without children myself, I first drove to Aunt & Uncle M&M's and was tucked in cozily for one night before being driven to Lexington with love. After arriving, I got to play cousin-auntie to the smaller cuties, my cousins' children. Friday night we played chase in the courtyard at the rehearsal dinner, pretended to hide from Mom and Dad (who I graduated high school with), and had a potty party outside the single restroom up a rickety stair at this charming historic home. Saturday little Ada's namesake was learning to swim between her mom - whose own life has enough parallels with my own to be eerie- and me. The reception was the absolute best with dancing and then sleepy bodies who trusted me not to drop them while slowdancing, apparently because I'm related to them. And my personal favorite conversation, with my now-grown cousin whose diapers I changed I was babysitting age, about his friends who are NICKnamed Bill, Willy, and Harold.

So here's the point: family is forever and I'm glad I have enough years in me yet to say THANK YOU to every last one of you. You know who you are.

layers of The Other Guys

Last night we saw The Other Guys, which is actually getting strong reviews. I feel like this film was written by the Coen brothers, had they grown up as cool jock types with lower IQs. Hmm that is confusing. What I mean is, there is more than meets the eye with The Other Guys, but probably not as much as in the best Coen bros films. Fargo, O Brother, and The Big L come immediately to mind of course!

Let me explain. For me it has to do with the movie having multiple layers and the sense that these guys, Will Ferrell (the feeler) and Mark Wahlberg (the angry dude) are dealing with literally everything in their lives all at once. Gone are the days of action movies with a single plot and reliably evil bad guys. No, instead these guys are having identity crises (as in, do I want to be a respected, macho detective or a traffic cop? A pimp or a steady sweet husband?), relationship crises, emotional crises, and figuring out how to behave in public, all while they're trying to catch (kind of) bad guys and stop a retirement fund from being robbed.

Boys, welcome to the club. For several decades now, women have been struggling with these very issues! As in: how do we manage to be Donna Reed perfect uncomplaining mom and wife, sex kitten, accomplished careerists, all while maintaining some sense of ourselves and our interests in things that don't fit into those categories, like, oh, sleeping? It's enough to make a gal stay home, pun intended.

I'm actually really impressed with the guys in the movie, and for the people who made it. They are grappling with some serious shite and not embarrassed to fall down and make mistakes (the dudes who jump 20 stories to their death on accident, now, they were just idiots). It's really, really frickin' hard to balance all that life stuff all at once, and I have not the slightest clue how to do it. But certainly, I can recommend trying, and being open to guidance, and being open to learning stuff about yourself that you didn't realize before being kidnapped and shipped to the west in your red Prius (it's not a spoiler if I don't tell you how or when it happens in the movie).

Last night at quarteting, which was held in a peaceful gathering place, I saw a whiteboard that I liked. Something along the lines of:

RADICAL ACCEPTANCE
1. Notice not accepting.
2. Practice acceptance deliberately.
3. Do it over and over.

The actual version was definitely better though not any clearer about what, exactly, one should be accepting. Reality? The chance to make a better reality? I dunno, but I hope I get to have as much fun giving it a shot as The Other Guys.

Joel & Don Find Themselves

Whenever I read TIME magazine, I always start by skipping to the back. Joel Stein's column (with an obnoxious title that I won't repeat here but will include a blog link that will tell you the title and maybe some other things you didn't want to know) is on the last page. Though I spent a while trying not to like it, I have to admit that I kind of appreciate his humor. Irreverent, sometimes self-deprecating but mostly self-important, treating serious topics like he's trying to decide between shades of red crayon (that is, not seriously at all)...this guy lightens things up and makes me feel unexpectedly well-adjusted.

TIME's week of August 2 issue - which probably came to our very own, clear cardboard (where do they get that stuff?) postal repository in Charlottesville's central hold-mail area the last week we were in Italy - held an interesting surprise. Joel was being serious, or mostly serious. He went to meet Tony Robbins and managed to write a whole entire column without making fun of him. I liked when TR explained why Joel isn't friends with a bunch of really really famous people and TR is. You can read for yourself of course, but TR pointed out that Joel is judgmental and has a hierarchical model of the world (what does that mean, anyway? I use hierarchical models but I'm pretty sure Joel Stein is not a statistics freak). Basically Joel's goal is to make fun of people. Maybe to secure his own place to make sure he's above them in some way. TR, in contrast, sees his job as understanding and helping others.

I'd love to know what TR's model of the world is so I can try and adopt it in the spare time that I'm now devoting to finding myself. Unfortunately, Stein's column is not exactly a scholarly, thorough source. (I'm probably overthinking it, but isn't that what blogging is about?) I definitely appreciate this because for me it describes a growing-up process. As petrified adolescents, humans tend to judge judge and judge some more because turning the eye inward would mean realizing what an awkward, confused, self-conscious and utterly desperate mess most of us are, at that age and perhaps any (don't get me wrong, supposedly from, ahem, education research, many adolescents are well-adjusted and that is all wonderful. PS I hate them all and their well-adjusted parents regardless of sexual persuasion). Anyway.

So, as we grow, and if we're lucky and more than a little dedicated, we get better at understanding and accepting our own faults and in turn, the faults of others (I hope everyone realized off the bat that when I say "we" and "our" in posts like this, I really mean "I" or "me" but am hoping for some of that scholarly mood and a feeling of community by invoking the royal "we". Plus a tiny wish that it's not only yours truly who had a traumatic teenage experience). Because aren't we all totally flawed and uncertain and - this is a big one - feeling out of control? Isn't that what the world teaches us? As in, "Gee you thought you were buying train tickets? Think again, sista!"

Oh yeah, I was going to mention Don Draper.









FYI, I've never actually watched Mad Men but I believe they have rad costumes. So after reading about Joel's quest for self-acceptance, I turned to the second-to-last page, about a fictional character also in search. Here are my favorite bits that create their own, more universal narrative, in a new form called "column scramble" that I believe means I'm not plagiarizing, but just in case: James Poniewozik wrote all these words, not me. I take credit only for their rearrangement, thoughtful omission, and funky punctuation (wouldn't that be a great band name? you could sell t-shirts with question marks grooving out).

When we first see him, he's struggling to answer a simple question: "Who is Don Draper?"

In a way, Don has achieved...what he wanted: his liberty. He is free - in fact, expected - to relaunch his brand. But how? As whom?

Don extricates himself...but falling back on his earliest identity: "I'm from the Midwest," he says. "We were taught that it's not polite to talk about yourself."

(The idea that you can't escape the past)

Sometimes it seems the entire series is one long setup for...inevitable therapy visits. Which isn't to say (it's) all angst.

And there's buoyancy.

The changes that have come...can be discomfiting to watch.

But they're rich with possibility.