Never Walked In High Heels

It was the last purposeful thing I ever remember my grandmother saying before she was permanently pulled below the waves of dementia. The entire family was gathered in my uncle’s living room, waiting for his last daughter to be married. My mom’s mother had been going in and out of our world and her own for the past several years, but in this moment she was perfectly balanced on the boarder of our harsh temporal planet and her universe where time was cyclical rather than linear. My grandmother turned to me, introduced herself, and then acknowledging the harpist hired to play at the wedding said, “if I had to live my life over again, I would learn to play one of those.”

I think of that statement often when I lay on the sofa in the home of one of my dearest friends and she plays her harp. She is newly married and nesting, the elegant harp looking slightly out of place amongst the used leather couches and prefab furniture. She looks positively angelic as her fingers leave the strings and she straightens her back in a way that shows her immense beauty hidden by her everyday posture. I open my eyes to look at her and for a split second I am jealous of her talent.

“I have got to sell my harp,” she declares walking away from the instrument out of frustration. “Every time I look at the thing in my living room I feel guilty because I know it should be played in a symphony orchestra and not be here to fiddle around with when I feel like it.” She quickly explains that she’s not about to give up playing, she simply wants to sell an otherwise brilliant piece of equipment to someone who could appreciate the music it makes on a consistent basis. She says that as she was learning to play the harp, she always was a disappointment to her teachers who wanted my friend to turn professional rather than play the harp for enjoyment.

And I am instantly reminded of my grandmother’s statement right before a vacant expression overtook her eyes forever.

I often wonder what talents I will regret not sharpening thirty years from now. Sometimes I swear to myself that I will try every activity that strikes my fancy at least once. And then I look at my friend’s harp and my uncooperative hands, a pair of toe shoes, or even the wii at our local pub, and I know such a promise is impossible to keep. The nature of this vast and seemingly endless world is one that might just give you the freedom to race towards all your dreams but it certainly won’t give you the time. Thinking of my grandmother growing up on a rocky hill in the Ozarks, the opportunity to learn how to play the harp was as slim as me learning how to dance en point. And at the end of her life, she still had unrequited dreams which she wanted to announce to someone she thought was a perfect stranger.

My friend begins playing again. For her, as for any of us really, with her talents come great responsibility to use her talents not only to the best of her ability but also with discretion. For her that means selling her professional harp to a musician who will use it professionally. More often than not we take the talents that we do have and, taking them for granted as commonplace, wish we had other skills in our capacity. If something comes easy to us, we tend to think it is easy for everyone and thus unimpressive. For my grandmother, at the end of her life, it was the harpist sitting in the corner of her son’s living room that represented second chances and unfettered dreams. For my friend playing the harp, keeping up her skills is not simply a blessing, but also a burden of responsibility. And for me, my jealously of other skills robs me of my time, so that, if I am not careful, by the end of my life, I will turn to a stranger and say what I would do differently, if I had to life my life over again.

From the moment I laid eyes on him I was stuck by how much the illness had ravaged his body. I had grown up in a place where I had seen my share of AIDS victims, or so I thought. But the ones I had seen, leaning their partner’s arm at an evening benefit for the local charity, was nothing compared to how ill he was. As he sat up in bed I wondered where the rest of him was. Then I realized his legs were still under the blanket. They were just so small that it looked as if nothing was there.

I don’t remember his name at all, which is funny because I swore to myself that I would always remember sitting on his bed. During my time at university, I volunteered to visit individuals who were struggling with the final stages of AIDS. South of the Mason Dixon line, this meant many of those we visited had been abandoned by their families. This is not to say that none of these people had loved ones who regularly visited the ward, but many did not. Given my age, my mother had to explain to me later just how terrifying the HIV epidemic was and the stigma which still remained.

“Don’t you know I’m… gay?” the last word wasn’t even whispered- it was mouthed. I nodded and kept asking him questions about the horses he used to train before he became ill. No matter how sick people are, it’s always stories which provide the most targeted anesthetic. In this case he was telling me about himself, what he did and who he used to be. He didn’t spend his whole life in this bed being nearly invisible, he was someone. And then he went and did something very strange.

“Your shoe is untied.”

“Wha-… oh yeah. I can’t tie my own shoes. Fortunately I don’t really walk much so-“

“Will you let me tie it for you?”

To say I was taken aback would be putting it to moderately. I was shocked. Can you get your shoes tied by a dying man? Was there precedent for this? I hesitated, not wanting him to lose any more of his precious energy.

“Please. I’m a very good shoe tying kind of guy.” I nodded and moved my foot to where he could reach my shoe, his transparent fingers working the magic it takes to tie a shoe, the motions of which I still cannot comprehend. He did it deftly, as every adult I know does. In a flash, he was finished a simple double knot remained which was tied with such determination that it would take my friend seven minutes to undo that evening.

I am here. Even though I am ill, I lived. I am somebody.

Six years later and I still think of him almost every time someone ties my shoes. Within a month he had left his body and someone else had taken his place in his bed. Long after his name was gone from my mind the stories of who he was and the actions of what he did that winter night stay with me. He was a man who desired, like all of us really, to be known and loved rather than to be immortal. Even in our weakest moments we want to touch, interact , and even to serve in order to confirm that our existence will be snuffed out long after the breath has left the body.

In his case, I think that for the rest my life, his existence will keep burning.

Being an individualist is not terribly popular these days. There’s a lot of talk about what someone can do for society, how to help the faceless “others” who are less fortunate than you or even how to help charities of this nature by making a tax deductible donation to X. Theses are all good actions worthy of some (albeit often minimal) praise on some level. But even with the best of efforts to move towards utopia, something insidious almost always creeps in, and here is no exception.

Perhaps I simply see this because I am an American living in London. But recently it seems as though there is more attention given to the ‘toiling masses’ rather than the individuals who are either in need of help or those who can help. The power and the preciousness of the single human being has been replaced by concern for a faceless mass who seems to always be in need of help and never getting any. Charity has become an impersonal act of the bank account rather than requiring eye contact.

But the ‘faceless mass’ way of thinking has done more damage than simply disguising taxes as alms. We have forgotten that each of use are created and not generated. This fact has little to do with any sort of deity and more to do with just how many fingerprints and events it takes to form a constantly evolving person. Our current popular views on biology and society, taken to the next logical step, teach not only that life is random but also that each of us are not particularly unique. If we are nothing more than cells and labels, existing for eighty years or so, then the value our impact for the history of man is small, we can do little to change the world, and there is a vast amount of feebleness in any of our actions. Often when I talk to people is seems as if they refuse to hold their own sprit, the part of them which has yet to be defined by any scientist, dearly. The willingness to compromise to things which insult the soul for the security of feeling others standing beside us is rampant within ourselves.

If we stop recognizing the value of the individual and his unique spirit, we cease to acknowledge the most powerful natural resource in existence. It is not enough to try and help in order to ‘do good’ in the world, like everything else ‘doing good’ can quickly become yet another form of legalism. But when you look the individual, be he servant or the one in need, you begin to value that person until it is impossible to generalize a person back into a faceless mob. Looking at a person means understanding them, their conditions, and valuing him for it, rather than expecting him to relate in predetermined way which ultimately casts him back into obscurity.

Less and less people want to live forever. This is not to say they don’t want to die, they just want to go on surviving as a biological entity rather than being themselves to the greatest of their ability. A group of such people no doubt make a homogeneous mass which is easy to define and then dismiss. It is the unique individual who understands that he is fearfully and wonderfully made which makes the conditions of society better; it has never been the other way around. Most people who cannot acknowledge their own value, simply as people who will never again exist are content to live simply at the status quo. If you look at every civil rights movement in history and think of where it would be without the individuals associated with leading it, it doesn’t take long to see the value of the human spirit who sees people living rather than a group surviving.

Each person has value because man is an end unto himself. He needs to be nothing but himself to the best of his ability. Even if you don’t believe a part of you lives on forever, your own individual uniqueness acts as a form of accountability simply because you will never exist again. In some way, a person by being himself has value because he is one, and with that single man, he can only reach people by seeing what each person is.

It’s the simple things in life that you usually don’t bother to understand. This is particularly true if you’re have a physical disability from very early life. You watch your father cook maybe once, it being difficult to see the countertop from a seated position, and after that you hear words like boil, sauté, fry and they literally mean nothing. Everything is simply something that Dad does standing in front of a stove. The idea of me, heat, metal, and sharp objects strike most people as a very bad combination. So when someone is always going to fry your eggs for you, you never learn what exactly frying an egg means.

Three weeks ago, when I committed myself to learning how to crack an egg, I couldn’t even think of holding one. The logic in my head went something like this: eggs are wrapped in special containers at the store, despite this, they still often break before one gets them home, the empty eggshells I see are brittle and paper thin. Ergo: eggs are extremely fragile and given my hand’s amazing ability to crush things I have no business holding them. When my friend asked me to hold an egg for the sake of warming it up from the fridge, my hands shot to behind my back and I took a step away.

I’m not sure why I even was so determined to learn how to crack an egg except that’s it’s the most difficult thing that I could think of to do. Holding one for the first time was shocking: its weight was something which was unexpectedly assaulting to my system. I thought they would be like air to hold, a brittle shell which would require just the pads of the fingertips to touch. In my twenty five year old brain, an egg felt like paper Mache, having never touched one for myself. What I found was a slippery stone that was so unexpectedly smooth that it took all five of my fingers to hold onto it.

“You’re going to have to whack the thing harder than that if you ever want to crack it,” my friend stated as I gingerly knocked it against the bowl. I was afraid the shell would end up in the bowl. Which it did. And the entire contents of the egg ended up in my lap. The worst outcome possible of attempting to crack an egg had come to reality. And the world did not end. So we move on, grabbing another egg out of the pack. (I had bought one of those super cheap value packs with fifteen low quality eggs for under a pound. I figured if I ever showed a real talent for consistently cracking eggs successfully, then I might be able to move on to organic grade free range eggs.)

The thing is about eggs, they are built in such a way that seems like they are meant to be cracked. Between the support of the yolk to the membrane which keeps the shell together after it’s cracked, man has yet to engineer any better form of packaging. But I never knew that because I had never come near holding one. The fact of my inexperience was interpreted as I could not crack an egg when, in actuality, I simply didn’t know how. To complicate the situation I technically could tell someone exactly how to crack an egg. I knew how to complete the task in theory but because I knew nothing about an egg itself, I was petrified of doing it at all. My own condition didn’t directly stop me from accomplishing a task, it was simply a lack of occurrence.

In a way, that lack of experience is them most disabling thing about being disabled. When three different therapists are watching you at age seven attempt to pour juice into a cup, there isn’t much room for the spills that come whenever you are gaining experience. And when Mom has always poured your juice for you, how can you even remotely begin to know what fine motor skills it really takes to hold a jug. There’s so much of the world you don’t even know how to begin to experience unless you can sit there and honestly be given a chance for a raw egg to fall into your lap. It’s not that you don’t know unless you try, it’s that you don’t know until you’re given the opportunity to really make a mess in order to figure out how things work.

Six days later, my friend and I made a fifteen egg omelet for a dinner party. It was made of free range eggs.

The summer marks my forth year in London. I realized the other day that I have now spent longer being graduated from school than I have spent in my undergraduate education. And although I’m not exactly where I want to be, I like where I am.

The problem is the shift between living three years somewhere and four years is drastically different physiologically speaking. It’s like for the first few years out of college one is allowed to make whatever mistakes you can or be wherever in the world you want to be. And then the timer goes off with a ding and we are all supposed to come home and settle down, leaving our stories of adventure to tell the next generation. But as I get closer to the forth year milestone to pressure to come back to “the real world” increases. Adults who taught me growing up now call me to ask when I’m planning on coming home. And then they get upset when I tell the truth. That I don’t need to go home. For right now, I am home.

In the US, college is four years long for most people. After that, most people move to a drastically different life before coming into where we are going to actually be growing old and having a family. Its like that fourth mile marker signifies it’s too far away to turn around and come back home. And as I approach that point the questions become much more persistent… Athena, when are you coming home?

It’s taken me until now to actually realize this question does signify a certain rationality which everyone who is annoying me by asking this question is, ultimately aware of. It takes three years (as in full years) to settle into a place and make it yours. In the past year, I’ve notice a shift in my own life, my friends call me up to see how an audition went, or arrange for informal picnics where we used to have stilted and even semi-rehearsed coffee dates. We don’t notice who brought the last tickets or cup of tea. My friends here know that I am not going anywhere for a while (barring a fabulous opportunity… everyone knows I’m not settled down that much). The friend who lives in the red Dutch barge in the opposite quay and I are already making plans for our Christmas Cakes.

This is where my life is right now. It consists of understanding art and acting as well as boats and tides. It means waiting all week in patient expectation to bake with the women who live in the quays and learn how to weigh flour on an eighty year old scale given to her by her grandmother, while my American measuring cup sit uselessly in my kitchen. I get to listen to actors debate about Mamet and offer my opinion over Turkish coffee in our local pub run buy the old man from Ephesus who swears he’s in love with me. And no, while I was getting my degree and sitting with my hand raised and my ankles crossed, this was never where I envisioned my life being.

But now I’m here, I see no reason to go back.

There are few stories told today about women. An inspirational story has to have someone such as Sandra Bullock in it in order to sell, and even then there is something about these female characters which seem either glossy or angular; a rough mock up of what a woman might possibly look like. Recently, I’ve been looking for a fictional female character that I wanted to emulate. This meant finding a woman who was strong in the face of adventure and gentle in the eyes of loved ones. This is how I rediscovered Mrs. Kay Miniver.

Mrs. Miniver was a film produced in 1942 and follows one woman’s adventures during the opening of the Second World War. What would no doubt be looked down upon as being “a common housewife” by many today, provides the heroine ample opportunity for courage, grace, grief, and even humor within an ordinary backdrop which produces a most extraordinary life. Between the open communication she shared with her husband to her fierceness in finding the joys in life even in difficult times, we watch a rare sight in the unfolding of this movie. We see a woman in the fullest sense of the word.

We are bombarded by images of two types of women today. Surprisingly, I’m not talking about the vixens and the angels, which you’ll hear feminist academics drive on about at intellectual conferences. Rather, I see the two poles of femininity today as being victimized or being controlling. She must either have no strength left within her that she must depend on someone else to be happy, or, she must be steely and cold, demanding that someone else make her happy. Neither makes for a particularly stable or happy individual.

Today I think we see the controlling woman as the standard rather than the other. A woman must have her life put together and have a goal beyond her family which, she will, come hell or high water, succeed with. I’m a career woman myself and I’m not saying that a housewife is somehow superior. But the grace of a woman, I think, comes from fully facing the challenges which are in front of her… all of them. What makes Mrs. Miniver so special is that she can be facing a German gunman in one moment, and overjoyed at the return of her husband the next. For her, there is no point in fantasizing how life ought to be, when there is so much to discover within how life is.

In the movie, there are no sex scenes or cleavage shown, nor is there any room for a damsel in distress fainting at the most climatic moment. In this way, Kay Miniver’s story is remarkably modern. Oddly enough, I think hers is a life which most women have in front of them, were we not so preoccupied with fairytale endings and Hollywood love scenes. What we learn from Mrs. Miniver is that it is not in making things how they ought to appear which leads to a life of beauty, but in accepting things as they are. Or in the words of another admirer of Kay Miniver, “: What goes to make a rose, ma’am, is breeding… and budding… and horse-manure, if you’ll pardon the expression. And that’s where you come in…”

I was in a small group this week where we were studying historical intricacies of the Bible. In many Christian circles, one is never given the opportunity to ask about what facts there are available from the resources of archeology and history which can bolster our faith on the days when all reason points to doubt. Much of the modern church seems to take the idea that we have been ‘saved by faith’ as a reason for us to keep our eyes closed the rest of our lives.

Turns out, there’s a lot of evidence I never heard about in my Sunday School education. And I can think of no reason why this would be so. Much of this evidence would help me to understand theological debates better, rather than shaking my beliefs. Why then have I never heard of these sources which can act as corroborating evidence, or translations which would help me to understand nuances in the Bible that people point to as contradictions. Why was I never even taught how the Bible was put together in the first place?

When I went away to uni, a theologian who was also a member of our congregation got wind that I was planning to take a philosophy class my first semester at school. The man begged my father to dissuade me from doing so, citing the plethora of young people who had lost what they believed in university classes. Thankfully, my father refused to take his advice. Why would any theologian, who knows what he believes to be truth, be afraid that his beliefs would not stand up to questioning?

The irony of the entire situation is, of course, that if students are never challenged in their faith, it will never grow strong enough to stand up to a debate or even an honest question. As is the case in any field, if something doesn’t stand up to questioning, what exactly is the point of fooling yourself into believing it? Challenging one’s own beliefs is like taking a hammer to the hull of a boat: you may learn where the boat is going to spring a leak… but you might learn that the entire boat was a lot stronger than you had originally thought. Either way, the boat needs to be checked over well before you send it out to sea.

So why don’t we bother looking at the common challenges raised by any of our beliefs rather than examining them fearlessly? This is one of the many places where organized religion as a whole fails miserably. Dostoyevsky argues in his The Grand Inquisitor that it is because most people are afraid of responsibility and freedom that they would rather run to a mind controlling church. To a point I think he’s correct, but there’s something more insidious than feeble going on as well. If our believes don’t have to stand up to the challenges placed before us, then everything is under control and whatever we base our world around is completely tame. The leap of faith becomes a bunny hop, and we understand the universe completely.

What we miss in that flat world which we think we understand, is the breathtaking intricacies in which faith is rooted.

I’ve been told there was recently a horrific earthquake in Haiti. My pastor tells me the president’s approval ratings are at fifty percent. Evidently there’s been a change over in congress. Supposedly Google and China are at odds. Oh and Johnny Depp is dead (I read that one on Twitter… it wound up being a hoax).

Other than that I have no idea what’s going on in the world. I haven’t turned on the news, listened to my favorite talk radio station, or opened a paper since New Year’s Eve. This was the resolution I made for myself. And so, what I know of the world I get in snippets: the boldface overly dramatic Evening Standard sign, conversations with friends, a headline I happen to see from the paper the man opposite me on the tube is holding or a dubious Twitter feed. There are no images of mass graves coming into my home while I’m eating dinner. I haven’t seen a lying politician for months. And my blood pressure has probably dropped.

This year long experiment has already changed my worldview in so many ways. I can no longer assume myself to be the most jaded one at a cocktail party as every piece of news hits me fresh. I listen to other people and their opinions more, because I cannot offer my own. And once I hear of an incident, it is the principles rather than the particulars which I am left to think about.

But my favorite effect of not watching the news is I see the things in front of me much more clearly. With the extra time I now have, I’ve made an effort to spend it with the people who surround me in daily life. The truth is, everyone’s life is so dramatic that each person could be their own news show. If broadcasts are supposed to inform us about the events that shape our world, why do we not respond with the same amount of passion when our friend finds out that her husband is having an affair as we do when we hear about a politician doing the same to his wife. How can I honestly say I feel pain for people who lost their homes in a natural disaster, when I don’t even bother to understand why a man outside Waterloo Station has lost his?

I’m not even saying ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ and everything will be fine. The truth is I don’t like the idea of being nice for niceness sake, it becomes another excuse for legalism. I think western society’s obsession with the news can be another form of this devotion to the standards of society. We appear to care about the world around us while not actually looking at the issues close to home. It’s like driving in the desert; everyone is looking at the mountains, which are miles away, wondering how the people there can live in such harsh conditions. We almost marvel at the drama of it. What we miss are the folks who we drive past that desperately need a cup of water. Perhaps we are even on our way to help the folks on the mountainside ourselves. But while this is admirable, we aren’t anywhere close to our destination. The fact is, when can’t even get where we think help needs to be without looking around and seeing first where we are.

I never really realized how heavy an egg was until last week. As I put it to my friend yesterday when we were meeting for lunch, “I’ve always had people to crack eggs for me.”

This year, in a feeble effort to simulate Julie and Julia, my neighbor and I decided that we would start baking each Saturday. Four weeks into our challenge and we’ve thus far made Victoria sponge, carrot cake muffins, a diabetic coma inducing chocolate meringue (aka a gooey chocolate stack), Norwegian cinnamon rolls, and a much bigger mess on my kitchen table than I ever knew was possible. My neighbor will tell you otherwise but the mess is mostly due to my interactions. During our second week of baking I decided that this had to be a therapeutic activity rather than simply that of leisure. My mother tells me that this is proof that I’m adopted from a bunch of militant Germans.

Its not that my family isn’t so much of the baking type as it is my lack of life experience which make the idea of baking so novel. With being even semi dependent on other people comes a huge amount of both tactile and practical ignorance. People make you a cup of tea because it is either impossible or you’d kill yourself trying to make one. As a result, you don’t know how your kettle works, nor how long you steep your tea for, or why different people can take the same request (will you make me a cup of tea please) and have it come out totally differently. Don’t even think of asking my how my washing machine works, all I know is I can’t turn any of the knobs on it.

On Saturdays I am once transported back to my childhood. Actually, that cliché is incorrect as it suggests that I have experienced the sensations of baking before. I have never done anything remotely like baking before. When I go to sprinkle flour, I am still shocked at how cool it feels to the touch. I marvel at how easily it slips through my fingers. I get frightened every time I come within about one yard of even a butter knife, irrationally terrified of stabbing myself with it. And I still refuse to try and crack an egg. I can only see disaster coming out of any attempt of egg cracking. This is where my overly logical adult mind kicks in no matter how much I fight to be childlike. It I manage to crush an egg rather than crack it, I’ve done it wrong, ruining the whole thing. My adult mind should then logically tell me that the world will keep turning and there’s more eggs in the basket as it were, but my mind has yet to reach that level of maturity yet.

Learning how to crack an egg has become my newest goal. Each week my neighbor holds an egg out towards me, lovingly offering me an opportunity to challenge myself. And each week I shake my head, agreeing to watch her do it for another week. Watching someone else do it correctly doesn’t teach you half of what you learn by doing it badly yourself. And so I continue to be surprised by the weight of an egg, have no idea exactly what it takes to crack its shell, and always waiting for someone else to do it for me.

I’m one of the most non maternal women I know. Its not that I don’t like children, its just that I don’t really know what to do with them. Some many of my friends talk about how they were “born to be a mom” or are willing to manipulate their careers so that they can have children and, truth be told, I’ve never been like that. If you were to ask me to phrase my expectation of having children into a economic philosophy, it, like so many of my views, could best be described as laze fare.. If kids happen… they happen and I’ll rebuild my support system accordingly.

The problem is that as an only child, I didn’t grow up surrounded by little ones. A therapist once told my mother to never speak in baby talk around me in order to force my vocabulary to expand. While it worked to some extent, an above average vocabulary had another effect. Other children steered clear of those people who used particularly big words. So between not having siblings and not having an entourage of friends, I grew up surrounded by the language of adults.

I’ve not yet hit thirty and today I decided I do not like the language of adults. When I was young I used to long to understand every word of the grown-up world, the simple statements of my peers seeming flat and almost primitive. They just said exactly what was on their mind, without regard to cadence, alteration, or even tact for that matter. The adult way of speaking seemed so complex and exact. I couldn’t wait to hear that language my entire time.

And then I grew up myself.

Everyday, now that I’m in the grown up world, I see that it is this world that has the barbaric language which lacks imagination and beauty. Scoring high on the vocabulary sections of my entrance exams for universities, the are some leaflets I receive in my mail box which I stare at blankly trying to figure out what on earth the advertisers are trying to say in them. Or the words are unnecessarily large that just the sounds of them slice through anyone who doesn’t have a shell instead of supple skin.

“Patient’s gait is uneven and massively unstable with unpredictable movements and often staccato breathing when fatigued.” I live with the condition and I am not even sure what such an analysis actually means.

Last month I found myself visiting an old friend and her two young boys. They were squirrely and much past cleaning up after them, I had no idea what to do with them. Despite my friend’s aggravation at this fact, I didn’t particularly feel the need to learn what to do with young children. Just let the boys do want they want, and cleaning up after to make my friends life a little easier. I was clearing the table when the youngest boy climbed up on his mother’s lap and whispered in her ear. Intrigued, I looked at my friend.

“He says you walk like a dancer.”