Kat – The Daily Write

Why We Loved Our Rooming House

After the tornado of 2006, we walked around town to see the wreckage. St. Pat’s Church: gone. A hundred years of genuflecting and chanting Latin responses: “Dominus vobiscum.“ Et cum spiritu tuo.” I remember a basin filled with holy water, which my mother said was unhygienic. A friend claimed she had drunk a little and was none the worse for it. Later, when the Mass was translated into English, I lost interest in the church. But when I taught at a Catholic school, my students learned to recite the Pater Noster and Ave Maria.

By 2006, most of the schools had stopped offering Latin, and we were also living through Climate Change. Perhaps a Pater Noster now and then would not have hurt. The tornado took a sharp turn southeast and uprooted a gazebo in the park, ripped a roof off a sorority, and then tipped over and smashed several houses on Iowa Ave.

But I was so happy when I saw the old boarding house on Iowa Ave. was intact!

It wasn’t exactly a boarding house, though I love to call it that. We roomers shared a kitchen in the attic, next to an artist’s room. When you share a kitchen, you get acquainted fast. You make lots of small talk and share occasional treats. We were an eclectic group: a dancer, an engineer, a couple of art students, an education major, a mystery man who was never there, and me. And we formed a kind of loose community.

How often does a group of strangers bond like that? Fate must have gathered us together. This was the way humans were supposed to live, with humor, kindness, and tolerance.

I wasn’t home much, but I was there to make tea for the dancer after she had an abortion . Likewise, she made tea for me when I was strung-out from insomnia. But perhaps I was fondest of the education major, who was smart, athletic, altruistic, and entirely without ego. She introduced me to the “hot pot,” which you plugged in to boil water for your tea. She also shared her space blanket when we sunbathed on the roof. (I got a terrible sunburn, though.)

Often we gathered on the engineer’s balcony. He had the fanciest room: actually two rooms, one of which was filled with shelves of tools. Sometimes he invited us up for cheap beer. I was lucky to have seen the Room for Rent sign. I wasn’t around much, but it was a peaceful house.

Was it the house itself? Some kind of a portal to generosity?

It was chance. It was luck.

And a very happy time in my life.

The Plié

No, wait. This couldn’t be happening. Gym shoes and shorts for ballet class? It should have been toe shoes and tutus.

“Mom, these clothes aren’t right”

“They’re on the list.”

I sat cross-legged in my gym clothes on the floor of a small studio in a rickety Victorian house. Nobody was happy, nobody was smiling: we all wanted to be ballerinas in ballet shoes and tutus. Even the ballet teacher, Mrs. Wu, was a disappointment. She wasn’t even Chinese, and we had wondered if the gym clothes might be a Chinese thing. Mrs. Wu was just an ordinary woman with a pixie cut and black stretch pants.

Mrs. Wu smiled. This was the big moment. Soon she would teach us to plié, perhaps in first position, perhaps in second… I knew this from reading On Your Toes, Susie, a Scholastic Book Club novel that had inspired more than one of us to take ballet.

Mrs. Wu had other plans. No dance moves for us. No plie, no twirling, no twisting and torquing. First, we had to gallop around the room. That seemed pointless. Then we had to lie down on our stomachs, arch our backs, and reach our hands back to clutch our feet and rock. She told us to rock like a rocking horse. She had a thing for horses.

We had all dreamed of dancing in pink shoes and tutus. We didn’t even have the dignity of wearing tights and leotards.

After class I told Mrs. Wu, “I think I’m in the wrong class.”

“The wrong class?” A line furrowed her forehead.

“I think I need a more advanced class.”

“We all begin at the beginning,” she snapped.

My mom allowed me to resign from ballet. Mrs. Wu was the only ballet teacher in town, alas.

Years later…

I’m buying a snack in a tiny store downtown. Two charming, slender people, a man and a woman in workout clothes, are carrying a basket around the store and finding nothing. The store carries celery, ice cream, and beer. It’s that kind of store. Every day it’s a different journey.

“Excuse me,” the slender doll of a woman said with tears in her eyes, “but could you tell us how to get to a supermarket? You see, we don’t have a car. And there’s nothing to eat here. See?” She raised her eyebrows at the brown celery.

“Oh, it’s easy to take the bus. I don’t drive either.” I wrote down the bus routes to two different stores. “You can catch either one at the corner.”

“Oh, thank you! Thank you! We don’t know anyone in town.”

It turned out they were ballet dancers, new to a professional company. I was very impressed and bet their teacher was not Mrs. Wu!

Every time we saw each other at the store, we talked about celery. We compared it with the crisp celery we could get pretty much everywhere else in the world

“But this brown celery must be special, it’s so expensive!”

One day they gave me tickets to see them dance in Romeo and Julie. They danced the lead roles.

“Oh, thank you!” I was awed.

It was a beautiful ballet and I was amazed by their talent.

It was my proudest ballet moment.

To Wash or Not to Wash: The Politics of Bathing

In the 1970s I had a glorious bathing ritual. Every day I immersed myself for half an hour in the tub, enhancing the luxury with a shot of Mr. Bubble or Vitabath, and reading a paperback. I washed with a “natural” sponge, but disdained the loofah, which was rather like a Roman bath tool that uncomfortably scraped the oil off. May I just say, Ouch!

I also invested in a plethora of shampoos. Shampoo was my hobby. In fact, our bathroom was too tiny for my collection of shampoo so I stored it in the chifforobe. There was Herbal Essence, Breck, Prell, Lemon Up, Redken, Pantene, and countless others I have forgotten.

But while we women were getting super-clean, the times they were a’ changin’ for men. Several of my men friends were washing less. Truthfully, they were not washing enough. I suppose people would call them “hippies” now, but that was a label nobody used. Some people of that persuasion called themselves freaks. There were some VERY handsome freaks. Even if they didn’t wash enough, we trailed happily in their funky cloud of armpit odor, because we knew it was a privilege to be seen in public with such beautiful men!

I understood where they were coming from (that’s the ungrammatical way we talked) with their sparse bathing. Soon I had read Dune, The Environmntal Handbook, and a variety of underground papers, not to mention my favorite book about the simple life, Thoreau’s Walden. There was a politics of not bathing. I wanted to conserve water. I really did. I wanted to lessen pollution. The daily bath became shallower and a little less bubbly, but I couldn’t give it up.

It probably balanced out: my daily bathing and others’ near abstinence. A friend who regarded bathing as bourgeois “crashed” at our apartment when he was passing through town. He was handsome, smart, and witty, but he stank. I mean really stank. He said he only took a bath once a month. As for his jeans, they seemed never to have been washed. I was awestruck by this god who didn’t follow the rules of hygiene But, really, couldn’t he have conformed just a tiny bit more?

After all, he could have used my bubble bath and shampoo!

Night Owls & Notebooks

It’s 6 a.m. You got four hours of sleep. You were up late writing, and the work was pointless. As you comb your hair, you wonder, Where is my energy? Where is my pep?

I envy people who get up and are instantly awake. No pushing the SNOOZE button again and again and again. A friend used to rise at 5 a.m. (“That’s before the sun!” I said, incredulous) and bike around her upscale suburb before her family got up.

How, I demanded, could she perform this feat without coffee? I have always needed coffee. A travel mug of coffee accompanies me everywhere. Years ago I snuck the forbidden brew into my classroom. We were told not to drink coffee in while we taught because we had to be good role models for our students. Since coffee was not illegal, I paid little attention to this rule. Okay, I paid no attention to this rule. Coffee is not a drug.

But it doesn’t matter whether you’re a morning person or a night owl.

It’s all part of being human.

Notebooks vs. Electronics

If I’m stressed about my schedule, I write down EVERY DETAIL in my planner.

And then I hear the call of electronics.

Do not succumb. It is best to avoid screens early in the day. You do not need Meta or X or Google to lure you down a rabbit hole when you’re frazzled and half asleep.

A popular alternative to screens is writing free-form in your journal. For years people have read books on journaling and taught journaling, and I like the idea of letting the writing flow, of not knowing what you’re going to say until it appears on the page.

So write your lovely journal. Try to be upbeat in the morning. I am not a positive thinker, but it doesn’t hurt to be positive in the MORNING journal. It’s a different matter in your AFTERNOON or EVENING journal. Then you can embrace negativity!. They begin as thick green leaves which soon flatten and vanish, only to bloom as beautiful pink lilies in late July or early August.

Postscript: Might as well drink coffee while you scribble in your journal and look at flowers. I’m just saying…

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A person reading a book

Description automatically generated Author KatPosted on April 16, 2024Categories Uncategorized Edit “Night Owls & Notebooks”

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