Phoebe Kate

When I was five years old, I unexpectedly stumbled upon one of the great laws of the universe—though I didn’t realize it at the time, of course.  My introductory lesson in Cosmic Wisdom 101 occurred on the first day of school.  The teacher, Sister Rosalie (I went to a private Catholic school K-8) distributed workbooks to a classroom of squirmy kindergartners and told us,  “Now, children, open to the first page and look at the picture.”  I took one look and breathed a sigh of relief.  I knew exactly what to do without any explanation.  Thanks to a busy mother who had become adept at keeping an only child amused, I was an old hand at workbooks.  “Remember, boys and girls, only look at the page we’re on,” Sister Rosalie admonished.  “One page at a time.  Don’t look ahead.”

Don’t look ahead?  When I had already aced the first page?  That nun had to be kidding. 

And that’s when I blew it.  Big time.  I blithely flipped onward to see what was to come. It was all easy stuff I’d done many times before.  Some pages had a few words of instructions, but no big deal — I’d learned to read when I was four, thanks to the phonetically friendly books of Dr. Seuss combined with a little parental instruction.  Kindergarten, I remember thinking as I thumbed through the workbook, was going to be a breeze. 

Then I came to page 12.  What I saw there filled me with pure terror. I’d never seen anything like it in a workbook before.  It was a menacing array of messy fruit (yes, fruit can indeed appear menacing under the right circumstances, trust me) — an entire 9×12 page bulging with bananas and apples and pears and peaches and grapes, like a helter-skelter harvest.  A closer inspection of the grand pictorial salad revealed the presence of fruits I didn’t even recognize and couldn’t recall ever seeing on my parents’ dinner table. There was no sense or logic to it at all, no instructions, no clue to the nature of the assignment.  What was I supposed to do with all that ominous produce?

That afternoon, I announced to my mother, with the dramatic flair that would earn me a performing arts scholarship twelve years later, “I’m dropping out of school and there’s nothing you can say or do to stop me, Mother.”  She retreated to the sanctuary of her kitchen with soon-to-be-permanent crows-foot crinkles around her eyes, the easily recognizable hash marks of brave women who have endured long tours of difficult maternal duty.

After dinner, my father joined me in the living room where I huddled in an unhappy heap in front of the TV.  “Your mother tells me you’re quitting school,” he remarked, folding himself comfortably into an armchair with his Meerschaum pipe.  “I can’t say I blame you.  I almost quit school, too, you know, when I was about your age.”

“You did?” I asked, visibly brightening.  It reassured me to know that being a dropout ran in the family.

“Yes, in the first grade.  I took one look at my primer with all those words I couldn’t understand and decided that I really want to learn how to read as much as I thought I did.”  He puffed on his pipe, surrounding himself like a mythological soothsayer in clouds of smoke.  “What’s your reason for quitting school?   You can read already, so it can’t be that.”

“The fruit page!” I wailed.  “In our workbook!  I looked ahead and saw it and it’s awful!  I can’t do it!” and promptly burst into tears.

He puffed contemplatively on his pipe.  “I don’t think it’s anything for you to worry about.  When the time comes, I’m sure you’ll handle it just fine, just as I did with my reader.”  He laughed that dry little laugh of his.  “And do you know what will happen then?”

Miserable, I shook my head.

“You’ll feel very silly for getting so upset over it.”

And I did.  Whatever I had to do on the much-feared page 12 of my kindergarten workbook was so inconsequential that I have long since forgotten it.  But I do remember staring at the gold star Sister Rosalie had given me for a perfect paper and wondering why I’d been so apprehensive.

Call me a slow learner in the classroom of life, but this is a lesson I’m still struggling to apply four decades later.  For the better part of a year now, I’ve been dreading doing something that was inescapable.  For months, I’ve woken up every morning and gone to bed every night feeling like I had the proverbial sword of Damocles hanging over my head.  Inevitably, the moment arrived when I could no longer put it off – and that was today.  Though my hands were shaky and I wanted nothing more than hide under the bed like a little kid, I made myself do what needed to be done. 

And guess what?  It wasn’t that bad, really.  In fact, it was surprisingly easy.  And yes, I feel very, very silly.  And very, very relieved.  The truth is that fruit pages — the difficult, unpleasant, scary things we know we must do but dread — are never as awful as we conjure them up to be. 

–phoebe kate 

My informant in the fifth grade has leaked the carefully guarded secret of how boys get a girl’s attention.  Is it wearing clothes from The Gap?  Dousing themselves with their father’s Chanel for Men?  Cleaning up the dirty mouth with Orbit gum?  Getting all A’s and being promoted to the gifted class?

Duh.  It’s dropping coins.

Seems that latest school cafeteria pickup routine is for the pre-pubescent male to covertly toss a quarter on the floor when no one’s looking, then pick it up and go over to the Girl of His Dreams and say, “Did you lose this?” — thus, of course, commencing a conversation and, more importantly, A Relationship (or so he hopes.)

Now, it’s been quite a while since I was in elementary school — in fact, it was commonly called “grammar school” when I darkened the doors of said institution — but if some boy smelling of dirty sweat socks had pulled that sort of simple-minded ruse on one on us young ladies, we would have delicately recoiled and ignored the lout.  Or hauled off and socked him, depending on our mood du jour.  Hey, back in the day, we were nobody’s fool…at least, not most of the time.

Which, of course, I informed my informant.  She inquired how did a boy signify his interest when I was her age.  I told her I’d gone to a co-ed K-8 Catholic private school.  Boys dropped pencils (or feigned such) so as to crawl around the floor looking for it.  What they were really doing was trying to peek up under the pleated school uniform skirts of the girls.  In response to their interest, we’d usually give them a swift kick if the nuns weren’t looking. 

The holy (and eminently practical) Brides of Christ also imparted to us girls two invaluable gems of wisdom to guide us through the soon forthcoming tumultuous adolescent years.  First, NEVER WEAR PATENT LEATHER SHOES.  They reflect your panties.  And second, when you start to go out with boys, ALWAYS BRING A PHONE BOOK ON YOUR DATES.  You might find yourself (God forbid!) in a crowded car of kids and have to sit on some boy’s lap.  Put the phone book on the male lap and then sit.  Aha!  Sin and temptation avoided!

The only problem was: this was New York City, and the Manhattan telephone directory, with 8 million people and God knows how many businesses, was about 12 inches thick.  Cute accessory to tote under your left arm while a darling little evening purse dangled from your right one, huh?  But hey, who knows.  You might need to call someone whose number you didn’t know, right?

And I still, years later, feel uneasy whenever I wear my grown-up lady Mary Jane pumps.  Those nuns are in heaven now.  But they are WATCHING.  Oh yeah, they are. 

Dammit, where’s my phone book?

–phoebe kate          

Put down that Triple Whopper with cheese for a moment and read on.  A new study was just released that cites fast food as a cause of not only obesity, diabetes and atherosclerosis but (drumroll, please) cirrhosis of the liver as well.  (Was that splat I just heard the sound of your chocolate shake hitting the ground?)   

Seems that fast food’s high fat content and insufficient (read: nonexistent) nutrition is just as bad for us as boozing it up   – except Big Macs will apparently do it to us a lot quicker than martinis.  Alcoholics can blithely drink on for years before blood tests indicate a liver problem.  The ever-popular Super-Size-It fare, however, can slam a person with detectable damage within the space of months or even weeks if a trip (or two or three) through the drive-through is a daily habit, which it is for many Americans.  Even more disturbing, children are now being diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver — a previously unheard-of condition in young people – and diet is clearly the culprit.

Will this new study curb the allure of the Golden Arches and other meccas of empty calories?  Probably not.  Despite previous reports on diet-linked diabetes and heart disease, the number of cars at take-out windows hasn’t seemed to decrease.  People pretty much do as they please, regardless of what anybody says. 

Personally speaking, I’ll happily pass up the Extra-Long Chili and Cheese Coney  – but do keep those Cosmopolitans coming, bartender, please.

Cheers.

–phoebe kate    

Have you ever noticed that people don’t turn off TVs when they leave the room?  I’m not talking about a quick refrigerator raid or potty stop — I mean, when they go off to work or shop or hang out with friends somewhere else or retire for the evening.  We have 5 televisions in different rooms of our house and at any time of the day or night, all 5 of them will be on with nary an eye watching them.

I used to think this was just my peculiar family.  Then I began to observe the same pattern of behavior in almost everybody else’s home I visited, too.  In one empty room, CNN will be on.  In other parts of the house, MTV and sports and soap operas and the Food Network and HGTV and ”E! True Hollywood Story” and PBS and “The Disney Channel” will be playing to no audience whatsover.

I’ve been pondering this phenomenon for quite awhile.  Are we too busy or lazy or preoccupied to hit the off-button on the remote control?  Or is it that we like the welcoming sound of electronic entertainment when we walk in the door hours later?  Do we fear that by turning the TV off frequently, we’ll wear it out faster?

After much consideration, I think I’ve stumbled upon the reason for this seemingly illogical and inexplicable behavior.  Just like animals instinctively mark their territory to warn others to STAY AWAY, we unconsciously do the same ourselves, using our TVs.  

Back in the day, when people only had one big hulking black-and-white TV with rabbit ears in the living room, viewing was a communal activity.  Program content was geared to be acceptable for everyone from the sandbox crowd to octogenarians.  With the advent of cable and satellite TV and the proliferation of shows tailor-made for highly specific target audiences, nobody in a modern family wants to watch the same thing anymore. 

So we buy more sets and put them everywhere and everybody goes their separate ways to enjoy their particular flavors of entertainment.  And when each leaves, the set stays on to remind others that is our personal taste and our personal space.  While the message we’re sending to others may not be as aggressive as that of bull moose and male rhinos, we’re nonetheless making a loud and clear statement about our right to inviolable individuality. 

Animals, however, only mark their territory to ward off marauders and interlopers with malevolent intent.  Who are we giving a STAY AWAY message to? 

And more importantly, why?            

–phoebe kate

“The fog comes/on little cat feet,” Carl Sandburg wrote, and last week it padded into my corner of NC and stayed for awhile, a rare thing for this particular part of the coast.  I’m talking serious fog here, folks –the pea-soup, can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face variety and I loved every minute of it.  My town, to tell the truth, is a painful eyesore with as much charm as a mole with hair growing out of it.  Anything that blurs that unfortunate reality is a good thing.  A very good thing.  With the ugly strip malls and decaying downtown blessedly obscured, I could imagine I was anywhere I wanted as I ran my errands. 

Day 1:  Bar Harbor, Maine.  Lobster pots, chic shops, schooners and yachts, quaintly picturesque cottages.  Ahhhh…delightful. 

Day 2:  A village somewhere in Ireland.  The dim flicker of lights in the mist isn’t coming from McDonald’s and Golden Corral but cheery pubs with pints of Guinness awaiting me.  I can almost smell the Shepherd’s Pie and soda bread baking and the corned beef and cabbage bubbling.

Day 3, Manali, India.  Deodar trees, tea shops, snake charmers in the streets, Buddhist temples, enlightenment, inner peace.  Any minute, the fog might lift and reveal Himalayas’ amazing peaks. 

The fog lifted.  There was Wal-Mart and Wendy’s.

Oh, hell.

–phoebe kate