Honey's Funnies

“Bastards!,” he threatened.  “Who?” I said. “My pants would not stay hung on their hook but fell repeatedly to the floor.” The importance of sharing a particular sense of humor with your partner. Is this the defining factor? I laughed till I cramped my stomach.

Admittedly, there was alcohol involved. But every now and then I see my relationship with Silver Fox from the outside, and as I notice how other old couples relate, I notice the same things in us.  There is a shorthand between long companions that references something they both love, like movies, or books, or funny language. The look passes between them and you entirely missed it. Then they laugh.

The understanding is the same, and the sense of humor is the same. We are tickled to find the same things funny, or droll, or ironic. Attitude is everything, I think; and perhaps that is why we are still couples.

Confessions of a Symbol Reader

In the cold, clear sun this morning, I thought that it might be a good thing to call up the main symbols I use in my life. Always an advocate of finding analogies for my insides in my outsides, I think it has not occurred to me before to collect them in one place and ponder how I have used them.  A little symboleering analysis: I like arches, stone walls and towers, high trees and birds, and the sky in all its weathers.

The big one, of course, is the River. A very conscious comparison, I have used it over and over in poetry, in musing, and in art to represent the flow of my life from its springing source to its eventual molecular mix into the big waters at the end.  This has been the vision driving the choices I make from day to day.

A second symbol, although rarely used consciously, is the Train. One of my favorite intersections with the Grateful Dead is their train songs: Monkey and the Engineer, Casey Jones, Tons of Steel. Trains are big and powerful and they take you from one place to another in style (or at least they once did, don’t get me started on AMTRAK). I think of them as situational, having impetus and threatening to jump the tracks. Like a lot of the projects I have worked on. Trains take stamina!

Another is Buildings. I love engineers and the miracles they construct and am fascinated with the required nuts and bolts. I remember a line from a therapy poem I wrote in my early 20s, that “My strong, straight building leans” after some embarrassingly dramatic experience. Even then I subconsciously “constructed” my life.  Now I consciously use Buildings as metaphors for my future, as I did in Bridges: Using Symbols to Build Your Life (2014).

And Bridges! How could I have forgotten about Bridges:) I didn’t actually forget, but it comes last to mind this cold sunny day. I LOVE my bridges, all up and down the Mississippi River at familiar bends and twists, places to get from one side to the other, graced with arches and fretwork to entice my imagination. Here be the crossings.

By now I have entire emotional landscapes attached to the places I walk, the city that surrounds me. I find it comforting and stimulating at the same time, and setting up storyboards for a new direction can call me up from a slump or back from an ill-conceived trainride. A mode of personal introspection that suits me to a T(r)ee.

Symboleering and Perspective: The View

It is not a good idea to look for signs and portents when you are feeling all crazy. No matter how desperate you might be for answers, when you are engaged in the full frontal focus of emotions, you can’t, as we old folks say, see the forest for the trees.  It’s not that your mind can’t make the unique comparisons required by symbol and allegory, it is that the emotion you are feeling colors your interpretation, so that your signs, like light through a prism, are predestined to bend, to lead you down what is not necessarily the right path.   

The problem, of course, is that it is those times when you are in the throes of intense situations when you need answers most; when you most want to find a sign or a clue to choose a direction. Humans have a rich history of stargazing and augury.

My own approach to this is not to avoid symboleering when inebriated, but to make sure that I take time when I am sober to do the same – ask for signs and portents with no more motivation than a sunny day. Without the nearsightedness of emotional distress, I try to expand my view of myself, fly higher for a larger perspective on my various situations and experiences. I often even concentrate on a bird to follow up a tree or into the sky so that I can see myself from a better distance, where each of my problems seems smaller in relation to the whole. In this condition, images or synchronicities that impress me as signs and portents refer to the whole and in fact give me the perspective to oversee the more emotional decisions and choices I have made when drunk with emotions.  I can keep myself in check by remembering my better goals and my broader design; who I am and what do I really want.

Meditation of any kind can do this, tune you in to your broader self; I am only advocating that whatever method you choose,  it happen with some regularity.  If I go too long without these contemplative episodes I begin to forget that I need them, and in not very long I am lost again.

Fifties Femmes

I have been discussing with other, um, experienced women friends whether or not we feel that we have gotten what we wanted out of our lives. We seem to be divided into two camps: Camp A, those who feel they have pretty much gone after what was important to them and at least to some degree, got it; and Camp B, those who feel that the culture of our youth kept them from seeking what they most desired. I do get it about the status of women in the 1950s, when we were little girls, but why were some of us more susceptible to suppression (or repression) than others? That I can't answer.

I can, however, speak to the impossibility of a woman having a job, for example, on the stock exchange. Or being invited to "the club" after a working day. Or being anything other than a secretary or receptionist in the big bad world of business. Those of you who follow Mad Men, the blockbuster HBO series set in the changing world of the 1960s, will have seen what it was like in the office in the beginning. A young friend called me when this show first came out to tell me I would love it, I should see it, and so I watched the first two episodes only to shrink with disgust at how real it was. I told her I couldn't take it, that if I were never reminded of those times I would be die happy.

So why was it that in spite of the restrictive high heels, garter belts, and girdles, Camp A believed we could be anything we wanted to be? And along came the 60s and indeed, we could. Did the women in Camp B miss the 60s because they married young and had children to tend? Did they just miss the changing opportunities because they could not internalize them? Or do we just have to put this off to differences in individual personalities, some more aggressive and some more passive?

I don't know, was hoping you all might offer up your own wisdoms.

Photo from Make-up, exposed bosoms... even talk of going to work! How Fifties women put the fear of God into British men. By David Kynaston, 3 November 2009
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1224829/Make-exposed-bosoms--talk-going-work-How-Fifties-women-fear-God-British-men.html#ixzz41lvB8cCp