The history surrounding the history of Joseph McCarthy, the late Republican senator from Wisconsin, is enough to make a “freedom of speech” lovin’ woman like me shudder. I’m sure it is no coincidence that Senator McCarthy died right after I was born. He wouldn’t have stood a chance against me once I hit grade school.
Anyway, for my foreign readers, Senator McCarthy was a nasty, paranoid piece of work. Here’s Wikipedia’s take on him:
Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread Communistsubversion.[1] He was noted for making claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. Ultimately, his tactics and inability to substantiate his claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate.
The term McCarthyism, coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy’s practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today the term is used more generally in reference to demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.[2]
I also learned that McCarthy was equally ruthless at “outing” gays.
Separated at Birth? Google Image
When McCarthy claimed that someone was a communist, generally speaking, it ruined his/her life. There were many innocent victims of McCarthyism, whose professional and private lives changed. Folks were fired, not hired, scorned. It impacted people in government, industry and in the arts. Many of us have heard of the folks in show business in particular who were charged. And anybody who had had any dealings with the Soviets was fair game.
We all like to think that we would never cast spurious allegations against anyone or anything on our planet. We all like to think that we are good, kind souls, who would never malign anyone unjustly. That we would never spread rumors or false charges.
Friends, yesterday I learned that I had done just that. I “red-baited.” So while I can ‘splain, I must set the scene.
John’s sister sent us a link to a video:
Naturally I wrote back because I love animal videos, they make me smile.
It was only the next day, when deleting emails from my phone, that I learned of my crime. Because instead of typing “He’s So Cute!” as I had intended, instead I maligned that little guy. Accused him unjustly. Probably ruined his new life for ever:
“He’s a Soviet,” I, courtesy of spell check, responded.*
Fortunately, John’s sister does not succumb to hysterics. Or to the politics of fear. Or to spell check. In fact, she gave me the benefit of the doubt when I confessed my crime to her.
I was scratching my head. I thought, is this some old Russian film and Elyse recognized it?
For the record, please let me state that I have no inside knowledge of the political leanings of this moose, any members of the baby moose’s immediate family, or indeed, I have no information about moose politics in general. May I also state, unequivocally, that I have never actually seen a moose in the wild.
Lastly, let me state that as a reasonably well-informed individual, I also know that the Soviet Union is no longer a union, and even the folks in the former Soviet Union are not soviets.
*Clearly, there are communist infiltrators at work at spell check. We must seek them out and destroy their lives. Let’s get Ted Cruz on it.
This is a week for repeats here on FiftyFourAndAHalf.com. Sorry.
But when I learned a little while ago that actor Omar Sharif died of a heart attack today, well, I thought I’d re-run this story, which isn’t mine, and which I love.
It’s a story that was told to me by Omar Sharif. Sadly, it was in an interview on TV that I saw many years ago, and not in person.
“I was sitting there on the set of Lawrence,” said Omar of his first meeting with co-star and newbie actor, Peter O’Toole. And this tall blond man I’d never seen before walked up to me and introduced himself.”
“‘I’m Peter, Peter O’Toole,’ he told me.
“I’m Omar Sharif,” I responded reaching out to shake his hand.
And then Peter responded, with an impish, Irish grin on his face:
“‘Nobody is named ‘Omar.’ I shall call you ‘Fred.'”
And with a toss of his head and a resounding laugh, Fred Sharif concluded: “and he did!”
You’re going to call me WHAT??? Photo Credit, Irish Times
As the daughter, granddaughter and sister of Freds, I love this story.
RIP, Fred. I hope you are off riding camels again with Peter.
It was always the same. Mom and Dad. The kids. They were a unit, Mom-and-Dad.
I’ve written before of my parents and the great love I was privileged to come from. Here. And Here. But I haven’t told you that it all ended up in heartbreak. My Dad’s. Poor Dad.
Whenever I think back to our home growing up, Mom and Dad were together. The end of the day would find them doing dishes together, and then they’d sit at the kitchen table and talk, smoke cigarettes, and laugh. In the summer, they’d relocate to the front porch, where they’d laugh. The sound of their voices, their laughter is as much the sound of my childhood as the train running by the house.
After they retired and moved to Florida, Mom started having health problems. She’d always had some; she’d contracted polio in the late 40s and got emphysema from smoking. But in the mid-1990s, Mom had a series of strokes.
Still, she never let it dampen her sense of humor.
“My dog,” she said to me during our daily 10 a.m. call, “is no help at all.”
“What do you mean, Mom?”
“Yesterday, I needed C.K. to be Lassie. He wasn’t,” she giggled.
Huh?
C.K. was Mom and Dad’s golden retriever. He was sweet as are all goldens, but had no rescue training that I knew of. So I didn’t get the connection to Lassie.
“Well, yesterday when I fell and was lying on my back on the patio unable to get up, I told C.K. to …” her own laughter had interrupted her.
“When you were WHAT?”
“Well you see …” Mom went on to laughingly explain that it had been raining in her part of Florida for days. Finally, shortly after we’d talked the day before, the sun came out. And Mom decided to go outside with CK and sit in the sun.
Google Image (Thank God there was no pool)
“I thought I’d warm my bones a bit. But the gods were agin’ me” she said, laughing harder.
I was not catching on.
“Well, I climbed onto a chaise lounge and lifted my face to the sun. But things didn’t work out the way I planned.” She was now having trouble telling the story, she was laughing so hard. “I nestled back, and wouldn’t you know it, the damn chaise lounge collapsed!”
“What?” I said. “Are you OK? Did you break anything? Are you hurt?” I got that helpless feeling you get when you are hundreds of miles away and can do absolutely nothing.
“I lay there on my back until Dad got home at lunch time. I couldn’t get up. And all the while I was laughing and saying to C.K., ‘Why aren’t you Lassie? Why don’t you go get help? What good are you?’ But all C.K. would do was lick my face. It didn’t help – his breath was awful.”
Dad gave up his morning job that day. And it began several years of loving caretaking, with admirable assists from my sister Judy and my brother Bob.
“I thought for sure I’d lost her,” Dad confessed to me a few days later. “I got home and she was nowhere to be found. I looked all over the [small] house, expecting to find her on the floor. I DIDN’T expect to find her on the ground outside – she never goes there!”
My Dad was a very imperfect man. He had a temper and a sarcastic streak. But he had an incredible soft spot for Mom. He fell in love with her in the 1940s and never stopped loving her. They were inseparable.
When I think of their later years, I remember one time in particular, during a family vacation in a beach condo in Florida. During hurricane season. The winds were blowing and we were all watching the wind out on the Gulf of Mexico, out of the plate glass storm doors.
Somehow, Mom had an accident. In her pants. She pooped. In front of her whole family. Poor Mom was mortified.
It was possibly the one time she didn’t laugh at something awful that had happened to her. Instead, tears welled up in her eyes, and she headed back, head down in humiliation, to the bedroom she shared with Dad.
Nobody else knew what had happened. But Dad sensed that something was terribly wrong, and headed back to see what he could do.
Dad turned on the tap in the bathtub, and helped Mom undress. He got her into the tub. He cleaned her tenderly, and then took her soiled clothes out to the washer and started it up. He grabbed two beers out of the fridge and then went back to Mom. He sat on the toilet keeping her company, washing her back, telling her jokes and stories. Bringing back her laugh.
The two of them spent the rest of the evening together in their room. The rest of us could hear them laughing all evening.
That’s love.
Fast forward to 1995, and Mom really was failing. After the incident with the chaise lounge, Dad stopped working, or he worked from home. He was fortunate that my sister and brother, Judy and Bob, lived nearby and could and did help. A lot. But Dad was Mom’s caretaker. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.
All five of us visited in 1995, and then again in 1996 for Mom and Dad’s 50th wedding anniversary; we hadn’t expected Mom to make it. But she did. At the celebration, Mom was still somewhat aware of what was going on around her, but not always, and not often. That was October 1996.
Dad, Judy and Bob continued to care for Mom at home. She had more small strokes, but still her sweetness lingered. Still, Dad knew he was, as he said, fighting a loosing battle. Dad was exhausted, demoralized. He hired some outside help, but even combining resources we couldn’t afford much. But for Dad, it was a labor of love.
My 10 a.m. phone calls continued. Sometimes Mom was receptive, sometimes not. My long-distance job became keeping Dad’s spirits up as much as Mom’s.
One day in early February, though, I heard a shrill voice shouting in the background when Dad answered my call. I had heard a voice like that during my first hospitalization for colitis in 1974 — a woman who was suffering dementia. The voice that had so terrified me when I was in the hospital at 17. An old woman who’d lost her mind, whose bed was moved into the hall so she didn’t disturb anybody (except she disturbed everybody). A woman whose voice I still hear in nightmares.
Only this time, that horrible voice was my mother’s. My sweet mother was possessed by the devil.
You’re trying to kill me so you can have my things. Mother! Help me!
That was my Mom shouting in the background. My sweet Mom. Yelling. Screaming. Terrified. Lashing out.
You want my stuff. You never loved me.
“Lease, she won’t stop yelling,” Dad said, with a voice filled with hurt. “What have I done?”
I should have listened to my mother. She told me not to marry you. That you only wanted my things.
Dad explained that Mom had started shouting at him in the middle of the night. She hadn’t stopped. She hadn’t rested since about 3 a.m. Neither had he.
“Lord, I’m tired, Lease,” he said gently, quietly.
“Let me try, Dad,” I said. “I’ll cheer her up.” I could always make her laugh. She was an easy audience.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. She shouted at me, too.
Till Death, they say. That’s what he’s waiting for. MY Death. Then he’ll have all my stuff.
“But Mom, everything you have is Dad’s too. And what he has is yours. That’s the way it works.”
No. He wants my things. He wants me to die.
“No, Mom. Dad is right there, helping you. Come on, Mom. Everything is going to be OK.”
But I lied. Of course it wasn’t going to be.
We all tried, Dad most of all, to bring back the real Mom. But she seemed to be gone. Replaced with an abusive Banshee, who was nasty to all of us, but saved her sharpest spears for Dad.
Two days passed. Three. Then a week. Stupidly, we waited for it to pass. The five of us kids did what we could – but Judy and Bob bore the task of really helping Dad. They were there. Fred and I weren’t.
Ten days passed with no let up. Mom’s doctor told Dad that the only thing for him to do was to put Mom in a nursing home. Dad was determined not to. Adamant. No.
For a dozen days, Dad’s heart was torn out with each word Mom spoke. She was accusing him, always. Of not loving her. Of wanting her things. Of having married her for her stuff. and worst of all, of wanting her to die.
He knew that it wasn’t Mom speaking. Dementia was shouting at him. Not Mom. But it didn’t help the hurt.
For two weeks Dad was assaulted, constantly. The five of us all thought that the time had come. That Dad needed to have Mom go to a nursing home, at least for a short while, or it would kill him. It was killing him, with each word she stabbed at him. We suggested it short term, at least to let him catch his breath. He knew we were right, but still. He couldn’t do it. In sickness and in health. Till Death.
Mother! He only wants my things! He wants me to die! Mother!
Mom shouted from her recliner in the Family Room. From her bed in the night. From her wheelchair. From the bathroom.
After two weeks, Dad, exhausted, sat at the dining room table, with his head in his hands, knowing that he had to make a terrible decision. That he had to put Mom, his Doris, the love of his life, into a nursing home. That she was going to die, and it would kill him, too.
“I held my head in my hands, and looked down at the floor,” Dad said. “I was so tired. So hurt, even though I knew it wasn’t really her yelling at me. Screaming those horrible things. Not stopping – accusing me of wanting her to die.”
You never loved me.
“I couldn’t take it any more, Lease,” he said. “I lifted my head, turned towards her and said ‘Would you please be quiet for a little while and give me some peace?’ Her eyes widened, then her mouth slumped and she stopped. She stopped yelling at me! The relief was overwhelming,” he said, weeping.
I already knew what had happened. All I wanted was to be with Dad at that point. I was still so far away.
“At first, the peace was just such a relief,” he said, with a mountain of grief in his voice. “But I realized within a minute or two what had happened. Another stroke.”
Mom paralyzed by this, more powerful stroke, was never able to speak again.
Dad was broken-hearted for as long as he lived – because he’d silenced her. Because he spoke to her harshly, out of patience. Out of exhaustion. Out of hurt. Mom died a month or so after she went to live in a nursing home. Dad stayed by her side, all day, every day. Holding her hand, talking with her, wishing she would speak to him, laugh with him, just one more time.
Judy Holliday’s voice is very similar to my Mom’s. Listening, I can hear her, clinking dishes and laughing with Dad.
* * *
Mom suffered from dementia at the end of her life — that’s what turned her from being a sweet woman into a Banshee. That is what broke my Dad’s heart. It is a disease that has broken many hearts and will continue to do so as our population ages.
On May 29, 2011, I was fifty-four and a half years old. And I was seriously irritated at the GOP in Congress. You see, they had announced that they were going to take away Medicare from those then under 55 years old. And that meant me. I spouted off about it to anyone who would listen.
They’re gonna take Medicare from ME! I’m 54-1/2! That’s where they’re gonna start!
After the first 528 times I mentioned this fact to each and every person I could corner, I still felt unsated. I wanted to tell more people of my irritation. Whether or not I knew them.
And so I heard a voice inside my head (something I rarely admit to):
Go forth, it said, and start a blog.
Oh and give it a stupid name to keep yourself humble.
And so I did. Both of those things. FiftyFourAndAHalf was born with this post.
Blogging has been a completely different experience than I expected.
My original plan was to do a political/humor blog. But in spite of a never-ending source of fodder, I found that I wanted to write about other things, too. That part didn’t really surprise me.
What surprised me was that blogging, and Word Press, became a place where I met new friends, discussed topics important to me. Where I laughed and cried along with folks I will probably never meet.
Thanks, everybody. And while I’ve been writing less than usual and reading less than usual, I love the special place that is the ‘sphere. So, yeah, thanks for being out there, for reading, and for giving me stuff to read too.
I’m really not at all sure how it happened. But apparently I did. I don’t like to talk about it. But I can feel you twisting my arm. UNCLE!!!!
The thing is, I’ve been telling the story of my life for years. For my whole life, in fact. It’s fascinating. Intriguing. Hilarious. Well, it is the way I tell it, anyhow.
It’s the stuff of legends. Because like every good heroine in every good novel, I had a transformation. A metamorphosis. A change of life (no, not that kind). I went from being a pathetic, shy, “please don’t notice me” sort of person into, well, me. The person I am today. And you will agree, that I am not shy, retiring or ashamed of breathing air. But I used to be. Really. You can trust me on that. You see, I was there.
Besides, I can pinpoint the transformation. I know exactly when the moth turned into the butterfly. It happened on January 22, 1977.
As it happened, I’d moved to Boston in October, and truth be told I was horribly lonely. Living away from home was not the wild time I had dreamed of in my yearning to be an adult living in the big city away from my parents. There I was living in Boston, a city filled to breaking point with people my age, but I didn’t know a soul. I had no friends. No one to talk to. No one to go out with, and I hated going out by myself. I was miserable.
Actually, I was so painfully shy that I avoided talking to anyone I didn’t have to. I didn’t know how to make friends. I was afraid that if people knew the real me, they wouldn’t like me. So I made sure that no one had any opinion of me at all. I was pretty much invisible.
In fact, that’s how I had always lived my life. In high school, I had a small group of close friends, and really didn’t ever try to go beyond them. I was in Players, but there I could pretend to be someone else. That’s what we were supposed to do. But mostly, I was still friends with the folks I’d gone to junior high school with. I didn’t branch out much. I kept quiet, kept my head down. Nobody knew me. I always worried that if people knew what I was really like that they wouldn’t like me. So I didn’t let anybody in. Then if they didn’t like me, well, they didn’t know me.
My invisibility was confirmed a year or so after my transformation when I was parking my car at my hometown’s train station. My boyfriend Erik was with me, when Kevin, the heart-throb of Players pulled up next to me. I’d had a huge crush on Kevin all through school. He played the lead in all the plays, could sing and dance and was incredibly handsome and talented. In spite of that Kevin was always nice to me – in fact, he was one of the first people to seriously encourage me to sing.
(Google Image)
I got out of the car, walked over to him and said:
“Hi Kevin, it’s Elyse. How are you?”
“Ummm,” said Kevin, clearly not recognizing me.
“We went to high school together,” I reminded him. I mentioned the plays we’d done together. Erik stood next to me.
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember you.” And he walked away.
Naturally, I was mortified. It was proof positive, in front of a witness, that I had been invisible. That nobody had noticed me. That this guy who had really actually given me my first smidge of confidence on the stage didn’t remember me. (And we won’t even get into the fact that he could have just said, ‘oh, yeah, how are you doing, it’s been a while.’)
Now, back to my transformation.
Being shy was fine as long as I was at home – my few friends were still nearby. But when I moved? I didn’t know a soul. Worse, I didn’t know how to make friends. And I had no idea how to learn a skill that I believed you either have or don’t have. I didn’t have it.
In January 1977 I found myself in the hospital. Sick, miserable, far from home and family. My boss, on his way to visit a sick colleague, stopped in to say hello. He was embarrassed as I was sitting in my hospital bed (appropriately) in my nightgown. He didn’t stay long. Nancy, my office mate, came too. But she was older, married with kids. She too could only stay a minute. My parents came up over the weekend. Otherwise, my only contact was with doctors and nurses. People who got paid to talk to me.
(Google Image)
It was pathetic. I was pathetic. I had no friends. Nobody cared. I cried myself to sleep for the first two nights I was there.
On the 22nd, a light bulb went off.
Maybe if I talked to other people, if I took my nose out of my book, well then maybe, maybe I could make a friend or two.
And really at that moment I decided that being shy was stupid. All it got me was loneliness. And being lonely for life, well, that didn’t sound at all appealing.
So I forced myself to be not shy. I made myself talk to people I didn’t know. To let them get to know me and decide, based on knowing what I was really like, whether they liked me or didn’t.
But talking to strangers is really hard. So I developed a fool-proof strategy. Whenever I was with someone I didn’t know, I’d say to them:
“Don’t you hate trying to figure out what to say to people you don’t know?”
As it turns out, everybody hates trying to figure out what to say to people they don’t know. And they all have something to say about just how hard it is!
I’d stumbled onto success. And then I went further. I was nice to people. I made them laugh. I asked them about their lives. Let them tell me their stories. Let them help me develop my own.
I was a different person. A completely different person.
I even have a witness to this transformation. You see, I was in a play that winter/spring. Rehearsals started in January, just before I went into the hospital. And at the first couple of rehearsals, I sat next to Howard. Howard kept chatting me up, being friendly to me. I had my nose in a book, grunted my answers and really was too shy to be more than polite.
OK, so I was a bitch to Howard. He remembers. He would testify to the existence of the shy Elyse. After my metamorphosis, Howard became one of my closest friends.
It’s a great story isn’t it?
But, you ask, how did you get it wrong, Elyse? You know I’m going to tell you.
You see, about 3 years ago, I went to a reunion of my high school acting group, the Players. It was the 50th anniversary of the start of the group, which is well-known in Southern Connecticut. There was to be a tour of the completely renovated school building, a review show starring Players from all the different eras who still lived in the area, a dinner and many, many drinks.
My old, close friend and fellow Player Sue and I decided to meet and share a hotel room. I picked her up at the train station, and we drove through our memories together. It was great – we caught up, laughed, acted like 16 year olds who were allowed to drink. We had a blast.
At some point, I mentioned to her how shy I was in high school.
“You weren’t shy in high school.”
“Yes I was. I was horribly shy. Afraid of everyone.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“Well, you were one of my best friends,” I responded. “Of course I wasn’t shy with you.”
Sue looked at me skeptically and the conversation went on to more interesting topics.
The next day, the day of the reunion, we linked up with other friends from our era. Of course my close friends remembered me. But so did people I didn’t remember. In fact, most people from those days remembered me. I was shocked. How could people remember invisible me?
I mentioned my surprise to Karen. Now Karen was someone I looked up to. She was (is) smart. Funny. Talented. She’s someone I would have liked to have been close to in high school, but, really, I was way too shy. And she was really cool.
“I would have had a lot more fun in high school if I hadn’t been so shy,” I said to Karen.
“Elyse, what are you talking about?” Karen said, her eyebrows furrowed and her entire body leaning towards me across the table. “You were exactly like you are now back in high school. Talkative. Funny. Vivacious. You weren’t shy in the least.”
Vivacious? Me?
According to everybody there, which constituted most of my high school universe, the story I’d told for decades is wrong. I was not shy. I did not transform. I am probably not even a damn butterfly.
I am so confused. How do you get the story of your own life wrong?
* * *
I decided to re-post this piece from last year after a fun discussion about introverts and extroverts over at Gibber Jabber.
So what are you, an introvert, an extrovert, or as brilliantly suggested by Glazed suggested in yesterday’s comments, an ambivert?
FiftyFourandAHalf 