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Sara Mansfield Taber

Monthly Archives: April 2013

LIFE NOTES New Garb for Bad Luck: A Pair of Wellies

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Aging, Life, Thoughts and Miscellany, Women's Lives

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Aging, Life Notes, Women's Lives

The other day I was half-listening to Woman’s Hour on the BBC when I heard a caller say, “In your late forties your luck runs out.”  The words rang out clear and cool as a spring breeze.  Whoever said them, uttered them as though they were the simple truth.  And, instantly, I found myself washed through with relief.  Immediately, I had a sense of being forgiven, of being handed a free pass.  All the difficulties, all the unforeseen storms that had blown my way as I neared fifty were, perhaps, not my fault, not preventable: just how life is.  Part of life’s weather.

I remember a therapist saying to me one time, “Around fifty people start to come up against stuff.  They get sick.  Things happen.” I was in my mid-forties then and this didn’t ring any bells.  I thought she was being needlessly negative.  But then things did start to happen as I closed on fifty, and things continued to happen after the half-century mark too.  Not all the time or anything, but big, noticeable things I couldn’t sweep under the rug: My father was struck with a galloping version of Parkinsons, my mother’s heart problems stepped up, my family of origin seemed to come up with new forms of psychological torment every month, and, at fifty, almost right on the dot, I was diagnosed with cancer. I was tossed a bit of luck in that it was found early, but it wasn’t nothing. It’s like, at around fifty, some sort of sell-by date has been hit.

Much as it might sound like it, I actually don’t feel grim about this. Certainly, these things that happened to me, and that happen to many around this time, aren’t happy things, but it is a relief to think of “things happening” as normal, developmental, just how it is—rather than “things happening” as being a moral failure.  In America, in this country where we are supposed to prevent all hardships through eternal optimism, where we “create our luck,” where being unflappable in the face of any disaster is the mark of a person worth feeding, it is a relief to think that maybe, just maybe, we aren’t responsible for the rough weather that comes our way.  We don’t have to deny the trouble that shows up, pretend it didn’t occur, just to prove how strong we are.  Rather, my BBC friend makes me think, there’s another, better way: We can say, “Yep, around the half-century mark, tough stuff does happen along.  It’s no one’s fault.”  Our job is to face into whatever variety of wind it is—dust devil, tornado, or gale, wail and rail as we need to, bear it as bravely as we have in us, but mainly just contend with the lousy weather and muddle through as best we can.  Rather than being humiliated or shamed or condemned for bad luck (“Surely you did something to cause this,” carps that nasty, so-robust inner critic) perhaps we can be straight-forward about it and also treat ourselves to a little compassion.  Just announce to ourselves, “Okay boys and girls! Time to put on the Sou’wester and Wellies and go down to the wreck.”

Global Nomads and TCKS- 13: The American zest for work

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Family and the CIA, Global Nomads and TCKs, Life Abroad, Spies

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Henry James

Here is Henry James describing Americans’ energy and love of work via his hero Christopher Newman, in the novel, The American:

Exertion and action were as natural to him as respiration; a more completely healthy mor­tal had never trod the elastic soil of the West. His experience, moreover, was as wide as his capacity; when he was fourteen years old, necessity had taken him by his slim young shoulders and pushed him into the street, to earn that night’s supper. He had not earned it; but he had earned the next night’s, and afterwards, whenever he had had none, it was because he had gone without it to use the money for something else, a keener pleasure or a finer profit. He had turned his hand, with his brain in it, to many things; he had been enterprising, in an eminent sense of the term; he had been adventurous and even reckless, and he had known bitter failure as well as brilliant success; but he was a born experimentalist, and he had always found something to enjoy in the pressure of necessity, even when it was as irritating as the haircloth shirt of the mediaeval monk.

Global Nomads and TCKS- 12: America: To love and to hate

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Family and the CIA, Global Nomads and TCKs, Life Abroad, Of Many Lands, Spies

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Here is a bit of hemming and hawing about what I love and don’t love about my country:

It is strange. The things I love about my country are the very things I hate. I love the rawness of the American spirit and I hate its crudeness. I love Ameri­can boldness and I despise its brashness. I love Twinkies and Ripples chips and Oreos—they reflect a special brand of American brilliance-and I also hate their aftertaste. I love the American passion for independence and yet I hate the way it dissolves to selfishness. I hate American sloppiness but I love dressing casually in cut-offs and a T-shirt and being able to go to a restaurant that way if I want. I adore the extravagance in any direction that is possible in the U.S., but I despise the rampant materialism. I love the direct look in an American’s eye, and I love the basic honesty, but I also hate the lack of style and politeness. I love and I hate the lack of rules for social interaction. I love devil-may-care and I love the perfect centerpiece. I love the egalitarianism, the true story that in America you can rise from rags to riches, that you can be born poor and gain respect. Most of all, I love the sense of possibility that suffuses the air of my country. In America, you can ride over the horizon.

Think of the things you love and the things you dislike about your home coun­try. Lay them out in specifics.

Of Many Lands: Journal of a Traveling Childhood

 

Global Nomads and TCKS- 11: American generosity

10 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Family and the CIA, Global Nomads and TCKs, Life Abroad, Spies

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Czesaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz on America:

All of us yearn for a certain point on the earth where the highest wisdom accessible to humanity dwells, and it is hard to admit that such a point does not exist, that we have to rely only upon ourselves.

Nevertheless, in the fall of 1950 I said farewell to America. That was probably the most painful decision of my life—though none other was permissible. During my four-and-a-half-year stay, I had grown attached to the country and wished it the best. Its overheated civilization may have sometimes irritated me, but at the same time I had never come across so many good people ready to help their neighbor, a trait that could be all the more valued by this newcomer from the outer shadows, where to jump at one’s neighbor’s throat was the rule.

 Native Realm

Global Nomads and TCKS- 10: The pleasure of asking for carrots in another language

03 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by Sara Mansfield Taber in Family and the CIA, Global Nomads and TCKs, Life Abroad, Of Many Lands, Spies

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I reflect here on the pleasure of speaking another language:

One day I went out marketing with my mother in Tokyo. At each little shop— the butcher’s and the baker’s and the vegetable seller’s—I did the talking, asking for a kilo of carrots or onions, a sack of sugar buns, a pound of Kobe beef, using the Japanese from my summer tutorial. Each time a clerk at a shop responded to my words by loading carrots into a paper cone or tying up buns in paper and colored string, I felt a little dollop of triumph drop through my body.

Do you remember the delight of communicating in a new language? Recollect a time you felt that sense of satisfaction. Or recollect your frustration with having to tackle a new language. Or bring back that time you goofed up in another language or couldn’t understand what was going on around you.

Of Many Lands: Journal of a Traveling Childhood

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