Allergic Reactions

Sometimes I think readers get the impression that my life glides smoothly from rich city streets, to patisserie windows, to moonlit summer idylls perfumed by apple blossoms: a progression, as it were, of beautiful, fortunate, poetic moments. And while it’s true that I have a great deal to be grateful for, my life actually has just as many ups and downs and difficulties and sadnesses as most people’s. Nor is it the case that I don’t notice the sordidness and suffering around me: in fact it’s because I’m overly aware of it, because it wounds me so deeply, that I try to cope by turning toward what is, as my father-in-law often says, “the good, the true, and the beautiful”. On the other hand, I don’t want to be dishonest here.

A vignette: five miles and a world from my friend’s house where the musical evening took place, I came out of the giant supermarket with my bags of groceries, one day last week, and across the expanse of asphalt saw a woman loading her minivan with her own bags of groceries. The back of her car was festooned with “Support the Troops” magnetic ribbons. The woman was overweight, with bleached short-cropped hair and a hard face, and as she emptied her shopping cart her young son could be seen crawling around the inside of the minivan. “Get in your car seat!” she barked.

“I don’t want to,” he said.

“Get in your car seat right now!” She shoved the last bags into the back of the van.

“I hate my car seat! Why do I have to get in it, I want to ride in the front.”

She slammed the door of the van and screeched at her son: “Get in your seat this minute or you aren’t going to McDonald’s!”

I find this sort of thing completely debilitating, and if it hadn’t been such a complete American cliché, I probably couldn’t have found a drop of humor, albeit black, in it. The problem I have is that I do notice; I notice even more now that I’m moving between two places. The box-store parking lot is my life, just as much as the beautiful evening with old friends. So is the family of Asian immigrants who run the sushi take-out kiosk inside the supermarket, working so hard that J. and I joke that they sleep under their counter. So is the creepy old man at the fish counter, who I can hardly bear to speak to, or the butcher with permanently red cheeks from his life spent half-inside the walk-in meat refrigerator; so are the hippies who come down from the outlying towns to buy books as have a rare espresso at the bookstore, and the endless parade of mothers in their SUVs and gun-toting rednecks in their pick-ups. In the city, it’s the readers on the park benches and it’s also the shivering girl I gave some change to today, sitting miserably on St. Catherine Street, whose dark eyes I’m not forgetting. And it's the astonishment of seeing city steps covered with drifted pink petals from a formal planting of flowering trees: a beauty entirely different from Vermont

The past few days I’ve felt crummy: I’ve had a bad headache from, I think, my usual spring time allergies: the dark side of all those blossoms. But it’s also from too much stress, too much breathing-in of the suffering that goes on around me and the impossibility of finding solutions. I wish I could just hate it and push it away; dismiss without compassion the woman barking at her child. But what made her that way? As much as I despise a world in which beautiful dark-eyed girls end up begging on city streets and small boys, bribed with fast food, learn early to cherish the fat-drenched moment when the unhappiness around them seems to abate, I’m unable to find release either in judgmentalism or escapism. As Merton said, we’re meant to hold both the dark and the light. I wish it were easier.

Comments

[Jean]

Oh, je t'embrasse tres fort! There's only degrees of awareness or unawareness, sensitivity or insensitivity - to all the horror and misery as well as the tenderness and beauty. No way to turn it on and off at will and only feel the good stuff deeply. Which makes life hard sometimes (often). You are right to remind us of the context within which you write. I can see each one of the people you described so clearly in so few words. I hope you can find the time to pamper yourself a little and not feel engulfed in the crumminess for too long.

[john kraus]

Dear Cassandra:

I feel like I know you already. Your sensitive observations that see it all, from the sad to the silly, resonate with my experience of the world as well. Somehow we all need to hold onto that inner core of love and joy to make it through this world with our eyes truly open.

[language hat]

I hope you feel better soon. (And remember, that woman probably felt even crummier than you do, not that that's much excuse.)

[dale]

Hugs, dear one.

It is hard to see the concatenation of suffering unrolling under your eyes. That's the hardest part for me. Not just the suffering now, but seeing everyone (me included, O most definitely) busily setting the stage for tomorrow's & next year's & next century's suffering.

For me though the completer the empathy, the less painful it is. I don't entirely understand why. Maybe partly because there's less shying-away involved. I've found tong len practice very rich, very helpful in this. Offering to give away my own sense of beauty and peace (such as they are) and to take in exchange a hard-faced woman's sense of endangerment and anger -- it can change my response to her, soften it. Make me face the fact that I've made every single mistake that woman is presently making, and I will make them all again -- In a slightly different guise, maybe, but no different at bottom. Which seems like it ought to be even more painful, but it's not.

[Fran]

Hope you are feeling better. My own allergies are pretty controlled this spring, knock on wood. Typepad isn't perfect, but it is easier to use and has a lot of features.

[Snowpea]

Mamzelle Cassandra,

As a Montrealer, I've been peeking in often to read about your adventures in my hometown -- it's been a lovely read. I enjoy seeing the city I love through new eyes.

Funny that the reason that I have come out of lurkdom is your suffering from allergies -- I can't alleviate your heart's ache, but perhaps something can be done for the head. My husband, who is badly allergic to tree pollen, received anti-allergy shots this winter -- and it worked! No more fatigue, headaches, crankiness, itchy eyes, sneezing, mind fuzz, or skin rashes. So it's something to consider.

En attendant, continue à écrire et je continuerai à lire!

Snowpea

[Kurt]

How much I appreciate the candor of this post. And having just watched "Supersize Me" last weekend, how much I can also appreciate the full impact of that promised-then-withheld trip to McDonalds.

This back and forth life you're leading--all the while working, I suspect, very hard. I don't know how you do it as gracefully as you do, whatever the positives or negatives of either place.

I'm not sure what I'm saying, really, but that I wonder if all the travel puts you at risk in some ways of only seing the superficial aspects of the lives of people you encounter. If anybody can avoid this pothole, I suspect it's you. Dale's suggestion of tonglen practice seems to me to have merit.

Be blessed. And next time you're in that grocery store, consider the Claritin.

[m]

seeing children being badly treated hurts more...

sorry about the allergies

[Abdul-Walid]

Amen, to the post and to the comments.

[map]

I appreciated your efforts. You managed to boot me back to a phrase works. I seem to be able to apply it when it's need is least.

"Acceptance is giving up all hope ...

... of a better past".

When I'm able to apply it, I can pause and get a picture of what my part is in the unfolding process. By that point it is often remarkably small and simple and perhaps I can glimpse a bit of the good I can do.

There's another saying
"uzi does it",
but that's a different story.

[Natalie]

Wonderful post, beth, among so many others. I can echo all that you say and react much as you do to the sights and sounds of everyday life. It's especially hard not to speak up when one comes across a parent totally unaware of what harm they're doing to their children. Once, in a supermarket I did say something to a woman who was yelling abuse at her child for some trivial misconduct. She told me to mind my own fucking business and was about to hit me but I slipped away.

[leslee]

If it makes you feel any better, it's the pollen you can't see that's the problem, not those lovely pink buds. As I understand it, bright flowers attract bees to pollinate for them so they don't have to fling their sticky pollen off into the air - that's for the trees and grasses. So enjoy those pretty blooms!

[Ron Sullivan]

Leslee's correct, except that it isn't all the trees either; the showy flowers on those are also pollinator lures. (Actually, I suspect she knows that; just a turn of phrase.)

I solicit your pity; I live on a street of fruitless mulberries. Very inconspicuous little flowers, and 'Fruitless' is an all-male clone variety. That means every flower on every tree flings its load of pollen to the wind and up my nose.

Here's dark humor: There's a credible theory tying the increase in allergies in North America to Dutch Elm Disease. Riddle me that!

And if you want to examine your sensitivities (as who doesn't?), try mentally swapping faces between the dark-eyed girl on St. Catherine Street and the fat blond woman in the parking lot. I've had some fun with that one.

[Ron Sullivan]

Leslee's correct, except that it isn't all the trees either; the showy flowers on those are also pollinator lures. (Actually, I suspect she knows that; just a turn of phrase.)

I solicit your pity; I live on a street of fruitless mulberries. Very inconspicuous little flowers, and 'Fruitless' is an all-male clone variety. That means every flower on every tree flings its load of pollen to the wind and up my nose.

Here's dark humor: There's a credible theory tying the increase in allergies in North America to Dutch Elm Disease. Riddle me that!

And if you want to examine your sensitivities (as who doesn't?), try mentally swapping faces between the dark-eyed girl on St. Catherine Street and the fat blond woman in the parking lot. I've had some fun with that one.

[Karen]

It is an ongoing challenge to embrace blessings while avoiding the big lie that the darkness does not exist. To be able to say, "this is bad and I want no part of it" is important. Battles large and small, every day. We must fight them, but we need not dwell on them.