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Off-Leash Blog: Roaming the Heart's Terrain. Tanya Shaffer’s blog focuses on a variety of topics, including creativity, parenthood, special needs parenthood, writing, and travel.
Three years ago, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I recorded a video of myself singing I Will Survive. In the video, I’m wearing a gold lamé jumpsuit, long dark wig, and copious amounts of 70’s-inspired makeup, all of which I acquired for the purpose of the recording. I posted it on various social media with the following caption:
Aaaaah, Valentine’s Day. This sugary day on which singles feel alienated and coupled folks gaze at their significant others and secretly find them wanting. A day so laden with gooey expectation that the chance of getting through it without experiencing burning flashes of envy or disappointment is .3 percent (margin of error plus or minus 2)—whether or not you happen to be in menopause. This day on which everyone else seems to be getting fresher flowers, more thoughtful handmade cards, tastier food, and more passionate sex than you will ever have. This day on which, while arguing fiercely under your breath with your significant other at a restaurant, you’re acutely aware of other couples holding hands across the table and gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes. I, for one, have had some of the worst dates of my life on Valentine’s Day. I remember one such occasion, more than a quarter-century ago, in which I stomped out of an Italian restaurant, nearly knocking over the candle and setting fire to the checkered tablecloth, and started trudging home in the rain before my then-boyfriend and I had even had a chance to order, the stares of waitstaff and patrons burning holes in my indignant back as I made my dramatic exit. It is in honor of all this and more that I give you this Valentine’s offering, with mad respect to Gloria Gaynor for her timeless anthem, which has helped more of us get through breakups and heartaches of every stripe than any survey can possibly calculate. Because Yes, Yes, and again Yes! If we survived four years of Donald The Rump, we can definitely survive this day of white-tinged chocolate and brown-edged rose petals. So sing it loud and clear with me, friends—get up and dance, too, if the spirit moves you. Whoever you are, whether your couplehood or singledom strikes you today as blissful, miserable, or somewhere in the vast realm of the in-between: YOU. WILL. SURVIVE!
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A travel writer, a Broadway star and a Buddhist nun dash across a train track.
***
They come to me sometimes.
First, the solo traveler. The one who continues to wander the roads and beaches and forests of this world with pen, notebook and solitude her steadiest companions. Sand between her toes, dirt under her nails, sun-browned arms, wind-tangled hair, and the exquisite ache of loneliness forever pulsing beneath her skin. She rattles along in sweltering buses, trains and vans, closing her eyes against motion sickness, her sweaty body pressed against others whose names she’ll never know. She never marries or has kids. She connects deeply with people in each place she visits—shares food and laughter and stories and friendship and occasionally love and then moves on.
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Rules are meant to be [FILL IN THE BLANK]
BEACH CLOSED, said the sign. HAZARDOUS.
And yet the people walked toward the sea.
When my boys were in elementary school, their principal sent out a weekly email containing parenting tips and anecdotes. In one such message, she told the story of a mother and child she’d seen at the natural grocery. The child reached for something marked off-limits. The principal overheard the mother say, We’re not supposed to touch those, but let’s do it anyway.
I hope that child doesn’t go to my school, our principal wrote. I’m a rule follower.
The rules keep us all safe, she went on to explain. They keep our community running smoothly.
Of all the emails I received from her during our years at that school, this is the only one I remember.
I was raised to be a rule challenger, bender, and, in some cases, breaker. I was a young child when Timothy Leary popularized the phrase Question authority, but its guiding principle was baked into my DNA. My parents were anti-war and civil rights activists. I marched against the Vietnam War when I was three years old. My dad was a leader in a movement to integrate the swimming pool in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, a movement that eventually led to the creation of a public pool that all could enjoy. My mom, though reserved and soft-spoken, wore jeans in college as part of a coordinated effort to overturn the college’s dress code for women. She marched on civil rights picket lines. Much later, as a faculty member in the statistics department at UC Berkeley, she mentored women in math and science and pushed back against attempts to favor American PhD candidates over more qualified international students.
Of course these are very different kinds of rules from the ones my boys’ school principal was talking about. These were matters of principle, not safety or courtesy.
Even so, when I read the words, I’m a rule follower, my gut registered it as if she’d written, I’m a sheep.
Yet though I would never say, I’m a rule follower, I would also never say, The rules don’t apply to me.
The former calls to my mind the sickening phrase just following orders—also known as the Nuremberg defense—while the latter evokes a certain orange braggart who deems himself above the law.
So what’s the difference between a rule breaker and one who thinks the rules don’t apply to them?
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“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” - E.B. White.
My dear friend M recently told me she needs an unselfish reason to write her story. Without it, telling the story feels yucky to her, like some big ego trip. A voice comes into her head saying, “You’re just trying to get attention,” and that stops her words from flowing.
I get it. I’ve got those voices myself, the ones that say things like, Who the hell are you to think you’ve got something valuable to say? Everything worth saying has been said a million times over.
There’s no arguing with that choir. Those internal carpers will out-reason me every time. Which is why I try to put aside reason when it comes to making stuff. The reasons for our actions that our brains come up with are rarely the real ones anyway. Mostly, we follow our mysterious longings and invent rationales afterwards.
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I’m aware in a way I wasn’t when I was younger that my time on earth is finite. I’ve lost many I held dear, including my father, stepfather, and one of my three brothers. My mother, at 91, is fading. I belong now to the rising generation of elders.
Though there is at times an undercurrent of sorrow, this bone-deep sense of mortality does not depress me. It focuses me. It’s like a giant leaf blower blasting away the detritus of shit-that-doesn’t matter, clearing the deck so I can see what does. For me, that’s caring for friends, family, and community, and doing my best to be in right relationship with the wider family of humanity, the planet, and all non-human beings. And my creative work, which is, for me, both source and fulfillment.
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There he is—Professor Harry G. Shaffer. See him tearing around the campus of the University of Kansas like a man hellbent on jotting down an idea before he forgets it. See his white hair flying, papers spilling from his old-style leather briefcase, his jacket and suspenders and lightly scuffed Florsheim shoes. See him adjusting the microphone for his intro economics class, where he lectures to some 300 students at a time in his scratchy, heavily accented voice. See how these students adore him, how they laugh at his jokes, repurpose his sayings, draw hearts on their end-of-term evaluations and write comments like, “I want to sit him down by the fire and feed him warm cookies” and “I wish he were my Grandpa!” Behold the Facebook group Harry Shaffer is the Man, made up of current and formers students, which at the time of his death in 2009 boasted 800+ members. Read tribute after tribute to “the man who never left home without his toothbrush.” See how they celebrate his daily greeting, “Good afternoon!,” sometimes transcribed phonetically as “Gut ahftanun!”
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My fifteen-year-old son E likes cats. Since keeping him engaged is one of my priorities and challenges on this trip, and twenty-year-old C is generally up for anything, we do a lot of cat stuff in Japan.
Which isn’t hard, because Japan has a national obsession with felines.
In our first week, we visit a cat temple, a rescue cat café, and a cat museum. Later we stay in a guesthouse with three resident felines that seem to run the place. Small ceramic maneki-nekos—beckoning cats, also known as lucky cats—crowd the shelves of souvenir shops and dwell behind registers at convenience stores. Most are made of white ceramic with red inner ears and a red collar, their right front paw raised in greeting, though some are gold, black, or red. The arms on the larger ones are sometimes mechanized, the raised paw perpetually bobbing up and down. There are even cat islands here—eleven of them— where untold numbers of cats roam free.
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Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood is hopping, and unlike Takeshita Street (which I wrote about in Japan Journals 1), the crowd of humans enjoying its alleys, restaurants, and covered outdoor market appears to contain more locals than tourists.
Here I encounter dogs for the first time in Japan. Small dogs, well-groomed, on-leash, many wearing glowing neon collars, trot obediently alongside their owners. They pass each other with nary a bark or a yank. My incorrigibly exuberant pups would probably get me arrested here.
D is meeting with colleagues tonight, and E has gone off in search of more clothes. Within the first 48 hours in Tokyo, fifteen-year-old E has absorbed the Metro system, and with the help of Google Maps and Google Translate he’s off to peruse a giant mall. Though well-versed in the city buses of Ann Arbor, Michigan, this is his first time traversing a foreign metropolis on his own. Fortun,ately Tokyo is not only the most populous city in the world, but also the safest. Although E maintains a perfect deadpan at all times, I sense his elation. Or perhaps I’m just projecting onto him the sense of wild liberation that comes to me, even now, when I find myself alone in the great wide world, ditching the expectations of ordinary life and following my senses the way a gull or a squirrel or an off-leash dog might, answerable to no one, if only for a week, or a day, or even an hour.
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After Annelyse Gelman, “How to Pray”
It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all?
- Oscar Wilde, “An Ideal Husband”
Bless the missteps, the stumbles, the chances lost
Bless the heaviness
The memory of those things brings
Bless friendship abandoned
Love unrequited or forsaken
Opportunity squandered
The gentle Spaniard
With eyes of softest brown
Whose hands you held and lips you kissed
On the Peace March
in Nicaragua, 1990
Then lost at a rally
And never found again
The Dutch friend met in Ghana
Who said if you didn’t write her back this time
She wouldn’t write you again
And why, oh why, did you not?
The number a friend gave you
In your solo performance days
For a major presenter
He was sure would be intrigued by your work
And the prestigious director
who handed you his card
Bless those times you sat by the phone
Those numbers in your hand
Dialed and hung up
And dialed
And hung up again
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This is the first of a series of posts about a 3 ½-week trip I took to Japan this summer with my wasband* and two sons, ages 15 and 19.
*a husband to whom one is married but amicably separated
The wasband and I are big on international travel. In my pre-child existence, my travels were deeply intertwined with my writing. I wrote plays based on travels in Central America and India and a memoir of a year spent volunteering and traveling in West Africa. I also lived in Europe for a few years as a child. I believe that exploring other cultures builds flexibility, humility, and the understanding that just about every aspect of human life can be approached in a variety of ways. Because of this, I love to take my boys out of the country when possible. It’s also immensely fun.
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There was a sign on the wall at the Lawrence School of Ballet, in Lawrence, Kansas, where I grew up, that read, Make sure the song you came to sing does not remain unsung. Throughout junior high and high school, coming and going from dance class, I saw that sign almost daily.
That sign frightened me—What if I don’t find my song?—but it also filled me with determination. I would find my song. Nothing and no one would keep me from it. I would find it, and I would sing.
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My journey with The Fourth Messenger began in the year 2000, on a nine-day silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California.
It was my first retreat, and to me it felt hardcore. Meditating all day, alternating fifty-minute periods of sitting and walking, stopping only for food, kitchen duties, sleep, and to listen to a dharma talk each afternoon. Every couple of days we had a one-on-one meeting with a teacher. We weren’t supposed to bring reading or writing materials, but I secretly bucked that rule, feeling both sheepish and defiant. In the evenings I sometimes hiked instead of sitting. Once an owl swooped close to my head, beneath a half-moon so clear I could see every contour. Oh, it was beautiful. Oh, how the silence entered me.
But oh, how hard it was for me to sit so long. One of the hardest things I’d ever done. I was perpetually restless. When the retreat ended, a woman told me she’d made working with the frustration she felt about my fidgeting part of her practice.
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When I broke up with my boyfriend last summer, I did what I always do under such circumstances: fled the country. Not everyone considers this the healthiest way to deal with personal crises, but I figure it's my life, and if I want to run from it, I can. Fortunately, I’d recently gotten some moderately lucrative on-camera acting work, so I had enough cash to take off.
Since both morale and funds were low (the on-camera work notwithstanding), I decided to begin my trip where people knew and loved me and would be likely to buy me meals. My father and his wife spend every summer at a nudist colony in the South of France and had begged me to visit for years. Though the thought of being naked with my father made me slightly uneasy, I decided now was the time. Perhaps the stripping away of clothing would help me to cope with the unadorned truth of my break-up.
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I was late because I overslept.
I was late because I was dissolving in tears.
I was late to protest the tyranny of time.
I was late because I was sucked into a Black Hole. Fortunately it didn’t like the taste of my deodorant, so it spit me back out.
I was late because I was smelling every flower and petting every dog
I was late because I fell asleep on the couch by the fire, covered in a mauve wool blanket, one dog snuggled against me and two more on the rug beside me, and when the alarm went off—I’d set it because I had to meet you—I thought I hit snooze, but I accidentally hit stop. That’s why I’m still asleep, and what you see here is not me but a holographic projection. The real me is still asleep on the couch by the fire and will sleep there for a hundred years, until awakened by True Love’s Kiss.
I was late because I was deciding whether to jump from a bridge into the choppy silver waves and let the fish feast on my flesh.
I was late because I was frolicking in the autumn leaves.
I was late because I’m genetically coded for lateness.
I was late because of the rain.
Because of the traffic.
Because of the traffic caused by the rain.
Because a woman with a walker was crossing the street in slow motion, and I had to wait for her to pass.
Because I was standing at the tippy-top of the world, wondering what would happen if there were no gravity and I were lifted off into space to float around the universe. Would I find another planet with life on it? Would they accept me? Love me? Would I finally feel at home?
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On May 10, 2001, I sat on a mountaintop near Dharamsala, India, watching the last rosy gleam of the sunset reflect off the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, and made a decision. Throughout my adult life I’d boldly proclaimed to anyone who would listen that if I found myself 35 years old and single, I would have a child on my own. Yet for all my bravado, I’d never imagined that day would come. Now my 35th birthday loomed large, and I was, in fact, unpartnered. Blame it on the writer-slash-actor’s peripatetic lifestyle, excessive pickiness, a volatile emotional temperament, or just plain bad luck: my intimate relationships had not panned out as I had hoped.
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I say my
house but
it’s not
I say my
yard my
trees but
they’re not my
dogs I say my
children but
they’re not my
body no maybe
my mind no not
even these
memories these
thoughts these
words this
life?
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Get lost, you say
to an unwanted caller.
I dare you to
say it to me.
Exile me to a place
where I'm drawn
out of self's cage
into ochre and rust,
spices, exhaust,
blaring horns, thrumming
strings, blazing
color so pure
tears rise
like dust
to my eyes.
*Inspired by the poem “Gratitude List,” by Laura Foley
Praise be to cold water, sliding down my throat
Praise be to the moments when my younger son smiles at me, no device in hand
Eyes meeting each other across clear thin air
Praise be to the moments when I see my older son fully
in all his sweetness, bravado, and vulnerability, unobscured by his fears or mine
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Years ago, before I had kids of my own, I yearned for every baby and toddler I saw. I had only to pass someone pushing a stroller or toting an infant to experience a sensation in my chest that felt simultaneously like a constriction and an expansion. I loved those babies and toddlers, every one of them, and by love I mean I ached for them with a ferocity that bordered on frightening. I wanted to grab them and make a run for it, to pour my vast untapped reservoirs of maternal affection into their little selves. Fortunately I managed to keep those impulses enough in check to stay out of jail.
Now, with my own two baby boys grown into towering teenagers, I no longer feel that craving when I encounter the three and under set. I still think they’re cute and all, but I’m perfectly content to smile and walk on by. But even though I’m also the mother of three charming canines, a huge and painful tenderness still wells up within me every time I pass a dog.
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