False Faces.....

Halloween is less than a week away. Around my house there is some anticipation about costumes and trick or treaters rapping at our doors. This has me thinking of my past Halloweens...the ones from long ago.

I always loved dressing up. In my world we didn't use store bought costumes. My mother would either sew a costume for me or we would put together something from what we had in the attic. Over the years I have been an array of all manner of imaginative characters from Aunt Jemima to a Radio City Rockette, from a Beatnik to an Alien. Dressing up was fun and great effort was made to conceal identities. We were brazen in our subterfuge, hoping to fool our friend's mothers. We we so bold we even tried to trick the nuns at our church convent by assuming other identities when asked who we were. It was silliness, good fun and healthy mischief.

We always sang songs when we trick or treated. Of all the songs we would sing on doorsteps one was always my favorite....

Who's behind that false face
Nobody knows but me
Who's behind that false face
Nobody knows but me
I won't tell you
You will have to guess
If the guess is right
I will answer yes!

A simple song for a child to learn certainly. My children all sang it. Well perhaps not my youngest....he was a bit shy and would just stand there with his bag held out. Sorry.....I digress.

The song is simple, yes, but it belies something I think about often. False faces, masks if you will. Personal masks, private faces concealed from others. We all have used them at one time or another. I consider them a sort of defense mechanism, protection actually. A sort of armor. We wear a face in public and sometimes it is not our own.

Now I am not talking about people who hide their true self from others, people who claim to not feel comfortable showing their "real selves". People who "act" one way in front of people but claim to be very different on the inside. I am talking about people who do not care to show the world at large what things they are feeling at that moment. People who have control, show restraint, have strength. I was raised in a home where I was taught to keep my emotions in check in public. I might be upset or hurt or angry but I was taught to wait until I was at home, in the privacy of my room, before letting those feelings register and spill out. Nothing was ever repressed, just postponed until I was in a suitable environment for it's unleashing. My parents were big on the concept of .... never let them see you sweat.

For some this goes against human nature. Certainly for my husband who's every thought is displayed on his face in vividly glorious detail. One only need look at him to gauge his mood. He's not one to keep it in check certainly. He was sometimes confounded by my lack of visible emotion early on...thinking I was cold. I am anything but cold....I just don't like to display my thoughts. He'll often point out this oddity to me, interpreting my blank face as a worry of what someone might think of me. The funny thing is I don't worry what someone thinks. I just don't want them to see what I am thinking.

The face I want them to see is my own. The face I want them to see is my calm, cool, collected self. The face I want them to see is one of my choosing. I'll be blowing my stack once I get in my room at home.

Nobody knows but me.

Indeed.

Going Home

You Can't Go Home Again is a novel by Thomas Wolfe. Published after his death, this novel deals with a small town man's search for his identity out in a great big world. Who Says You Can't Go Home is also a song written and performed by Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora refuting the point. I have heard the phrase, you can't go home again, used as a way to illustrate one's passage, a marking of time, leaving one's childhood for a grown up life and the inability to return to that "home" again. Many think it can't be done.

Today I took a little road trip with my Dad. My son was playing in a football game against a school about 75 miles from home and I drove him to the game. Initially I had planned on taking some CDs of stand up comedy acts, some favorite comedians of mine, to listen to on the long drive. I thought it would both pass the time for us and I also thought he would enjoy them. It's been a long time since I spent that time alone with my Dad and for some reason I felt I needed to fill it with something.

Today was a beautiful fall day in the Northeast. The sky, cerulean and crisp, the leaves in various colors and stages of yellows, greens, reds and oranges. The route travelled was a two lane country road for the most part and there was little traffic along the way. We set out and I was about to put the CDs in the player and Dad simply said. "Leave them". He said, "It's a beautiful day kiddo...let's just talk".

So we talked. We talked about national politics, the election. We talked about our local taxes. We talked about our health care plans. We talked about my satellite radio. We talked about his buying a new car and that he wanted a Nissan this time. We talked about being pro choice vs being pro life. We talked about SNL. We talked about the Redskins. We talked about his sister's season tickets and making that trip to see her in Virginia a reality. We talked about Adam (Pacman) Jones and Maurice Clarett. We talked about John Madden as a football commentator, Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw and Tony Kornheiser. We talked about how much we dislike "Jaws" and "the Playmaker". We talked about how much he wanted Penn State to lose today (they didn't) and that thankfully Notre Dame would not lose as they had a bye week.

We talked about our church. We talked about his health and my mother's health. We talked about his doctors and his newly diagnosed anemia. We talked about my health. We talked about my children, his beloved grandchildren. We talked.

Yesterday I had remarked to a friend that this drive with my Dad made me think of the good old days....the days I lived at home. Days I had time to spend with my Dad. Days I remember fondly. I said that sometimes I want to go "home" again and revisit that part of the past that feels good. Quiet times, simple times. That part that feels like home to me. Today I did just that. For in that car, all along those 75 miles there and back, my Dad and I talked like we did when I was at "home". It was like Sunday nights, sitting at the kitchen table, and playing gin rummy and talking. It was like car trips to his bothers' homes on holidays and talking. It was like sitting out on the porch on a summer night and talking. It was like those calls in the afternoon, between my classes, when I was away at college. It was like old days, good days, days gone by. The words never stopped, they never waned and they flowed from us both in abundance and with purpose. We picked up right where we left off...at home. We talked...my Dad and I. We talked.

Who says you can never go home. This afternoon I went there....and back.

Indeed.

43 Questions...

Twenty Questions was a one-time popular game in which one player is designated as the "answerer" and this player chooses a subject that the other players attempt to reveal by asking questions. If twenty questions are asked, and the subject remains unrevealed, the "answerer" wins the round. At least that's the twenty questions game I know and have played. One variation is playing the game with the "questioners" asking personal questions of the "answerer" and increasing the degree of difficulty with each round. When the "answerer" gets through twenty questions without balking at an answer they take the round. The game unearths lots of information about the players involved. This game also becomes quite interesting when alcoholic beverages are flowing. I digress.

Last week my daughter sent me a forwarded email called 43 Questions. A list of forty three questions to answer and forward on to friends. Surprisingly this email did not come with the usual disclaimer warning of all manner of doom and pestilence should you not forward the email to at least nine friends. I promptly answered the questions, sent it back to her and also sent it along to a pile of my friends. I am still getting responses back in fact one came in this morning. I caught a giggle or two when I received the email from people I hadn't sent it to initially. It made the rounds, certainly.

While I loved reading all the responses that came back to me, loved learning new things about people I have in some cases known for a very long time, I especially loved reading my daughter's responses. It was somewhat eye opening for me. It wasn't that I learned something new about her, her responses held no real surprise in content. She's my daughter, I know her favorites, her preferences and her likes and dislikes. What surprised me was her tone, her wit and her humor. My daughter is a smart ass! I couldn't be more pleased.

My daughter is a beautiful girl. There really is no other way to put it. She turns heads, a lot of them. When she was a child I worried she might become vain, become too concerned with her appearance, too focused on something she didn't do anything to achieve herself having simply been born that way. Being born pretty is not always a good thing in my opinion. It can limit a person's dimension certainly.

Reading her responses to the 43 questions introduced me to the many delicious layers of her personality. Layers I had not seen before. I was delighted and I laughed out loud at her beautiful sarcasm. I saw so many things in her responses, thoughts and attitudes I did not know she had developed. I saw how her mind works, the turns it is capable of taking. I saw the sheer fun she has in poking fun at herself... a quality I find to be very attractive. A quality I find to be a lifesaver at times. She's witty. She's funny. She has grown into a bright, lovely, young woman and is everything I could have hoped for and more.

#28. Would you be a pirate? Only if I could have a parrot on my shoulder.

Smart ass.
Indeed.

On A Clear Day....

Fall days can have a certain sparkling quality that I love. Crisp and clear, the colors vibrant, strong and true. Summer's haze disappears, the air is light and one can see for miles. Sitting outside this afternoon, looking off into the distance, I was thinking about clear days and a line from a song I knew long ago....on a clear day you can see forever.

On A Clear Day You Can See Forever was the name of a musical that opened on Broadway in 1965. Barbra Streisand starred in the film adaptation and recorded the soundtrack in 1970, the lyric beautifully written by Allen Jay Lerner. I was thinking about clarity recently, the clearness of vision, so important for a person to possess. I thought about that lyric, thought about the words to that song, and went back to it for another look.

On a clear day
Rise and look around you
And you'll see who you are

Could it be any simpler than that? Look around you and you'll see who you are. How often do we look around, look at other people, look at their lives and see everything but who we are. We see what we want, we see what we think we need. We see what we wish for, we see what we hope for. We can be shortsighted, seeing only what others have, what others are. Often we do not see what we are, what we have. We look with a flawed vision. Perhaps through a filter that clouds things ... making them appear fuzzy, blurred. Obscured.

Taking a clear look, sharpening our vision, removing that filter, reveals something quite different I think. On a clear day we can see possibility. We can see a path, a future, a road to what we want. If we look with clarity we can see solutions, we can see progress, we can see alternatives. On a clear day we can see what we are capable of, what we can become, perhaps what we were meant to be. Certainly we can see what we want to be. On a clear day.

I love to have those clear days, that clarity of vision, to help me navigate a clouded life. The clarity to sidestep the mess, avoid the pratfalls and overstep the potholes that can distract and take me out of myself. Clear days to take a long look and regain my stride and focus on a point in the distance, a point where I want to be. A point where I can be...if I look clearly.

And on a clear day
On a clear day
You can see forever and ever and ever and ever more.

Indeed