My dad’s best friend told me last week that I should write about happy things. My dad laughed and said someone else told him the same thing at temple that day. On Yom Kippur. As they were atoning for their sins.
I wasn’t at temple. I was sitting with a friend in a coffee shop listening to him go through all sorts of emotions because he loves his children so much, and organized Judaism has pretty much fucked them over.
I laughed. At my dad’s best friend. Not my friend in the coffee shop. My friend I just listened to. And nodded.
I think my Yom Kippur was better than their Yom Kippur.
When I told my daughter about what my dad’s best friend had said, she groaned. “The world is not a happy place right now.” Then she added, “You cannot write about the truth and make it happy.”
I laughed. A hearty, real laugh that came from deep in my soul.
A few bi-monthly wine group get-togethers ago, a friend of mine said, “I don’t think the world understands the power of female midlife rage.”
We all laughed. And drank some more.
When I was a kid, my dad lied to me. Perhaps unintentionally. He told me that if I was smart and worked hard and was the best in the class, I would succeed.
“The truth is, if you are smart and work hard and are a cis-gendered man, you will succeed. If you are anything other, you will end up laughing with your friends 50 years later about how angry you all are at being rendered invisible.”
Even Elizabeth Taylor - the most beautiful woman in 1950s Hollywood - became a laughingstock when she got older.
At night, when I was a kid, I would lie in bed and make up stories, closing my eyes when my mother came to check on me. I couldn’t fall asleep. It was only a few years ago that I learned insomnia and ADHD go together.
I was only diagnosed with the H part, though. I never had a deficit of attention, just a deficit of calm. I would recite word for word the story that the teacher just read, even though I was zooming around the room when she read it. I noticed, as I was zooming, that Nancy was whispering something to Brooke, who looked annoyed because she wanted to hear the story. And, later, I noticed Jason, standing at the bus stop as we pulled up, looking like the saddest person I’d ever seen.
When we were 18, Jason died in a motorcycle accident. He was speeding. Driving recklessly, the news announcer said.
I still wonder why he was so sad at the age of 8.
Perhaps if I had told him to smile more, he wouldn’t have been sad.
The first time I heard of Carrie Nation, I was in high school. Our social studies teacher couldn’t stop laughing.
“She would come into bars with a hatchet and tear saloons apart. She was crazy,” he said with a grin I can still see.
Carrie Nation was a wealthy widow who owned an upscale hotel in Medicine Lodge, Kansas at the turn of the 20th century. In addition to her paying visitors, she also “fed, clothed, and lodged the downtrodden and destitute—both white folks and Black—in some cases for years at a time,” according to Mark Lawrence Schrad, who wrote a book about Nation.
Nation also opened the first domestic violence shelter for women in the U.S. Unsurprisingly, most of the violence was caused by husbands getting drunk - in a dry state in which it was illegal to sell liquor. Her first husband had, in fact, died of alcohol poisoning.
Nation tried legal recourse to shut bars down, but the town’s mayor and sheriff - even the state’s governor - laughed at her. She was a threat to the bribes they were getting.
So she went after the source - the people who sold the drug that created the family violence. And she only destroyed bottles and shelves, not people.
My high school social studies teacher never talked about that part.
He also told us in no uncertain terms that the Civil War was about state’s rights, not about slavery. Which, even at the time, seemed like the stupidest thing I had ever heard.
My social studies teacher didn’t like me very much. Maybe it was the faces I made when he said stupid things.
I have been told that my face is expressive. Unconsciously so. Recently, when I’ve been at school board meetings, and people get up and talk about space aliens coming down to steal our children’s pubic hairs, I have been told that my face is more entertaining than the women who are warning us of this dire scourge.
Obviously, I cannot see my face as these things are happening. Apparently, though, my mere presence at school board meetings is an exercise, for people on the dais, in holding one’s laughter. They struggle, I’ve been told, to maintain poker faces. I do not have a poker face.
I am not kidding about space aliens. No hyperbole here. People actually say this shit. And I think they believe it.
Hyperbole is one of my favorite words by the way. I use it immensely less often than I should.
The funniest joke I ever heard was about 25 years ago, when my then spouse (and now best friend) was talking about her bewilderment at pop culture, and I said, with a shrug of my shoulders, “But you’re an iconoclast.”
In an instant, she got indignant. “I am not an iconoclast,” she bellowed.
I think both of us were shocked at her response. It took a couple of seconds before we were on the floor because we were laughing so hard.
You know, ‘cause iconoclasts… don’t like being labeled. Even as iconoclasts. Apparently.
A few years ago, some of the younger women in the newsroom at the radio station I worked at were talking about a guy from another office making lewd comments. I was too old and too dykey to get lewd comments, but the same man had once blocked me in the hallway outside the studio as I was about to go live on the air. He would only let me pass, he said, if I smiled for him.
I did not smile for him. And I wasn’t late getting on the air.
My co-host, who had been silent as we were talking about this man, finally couldn’t take it anymore, and turned around and shouted at us, “That’s what guys do!” Then he went on a whole rant about stuff that guys do, that women should just deal with.
This was in July of 2017. Before #metoo. Within the year I was gone. Because working in that environment was untenable.
This was my dream job - helping to tell the stories of my hometown. Which is often misunderstood. But when the management philosophy of your dream job is to demoralize employees, it turns into a nightmare. So I left.
Now, my dad’s best friend - the one who told me I should write happier - keeps complaining to me about how my former co-host, who is still on the air, keeps getting his facts wrong. Or lets people lie on the air with no follow-up or correction. It drives my dad’s best friend crazy.
“How can he be a journalist if he doesn’t check his facts,” he has said to me, with incredulity, a number of times.
I think my dad’s best friend believes the lie. He believes that people get where they are because they work hard and check their facts. That is not the case. As my wine group can tell you.
I have found that the people who say the stupidest things often have the loudest voices, or the most influence. I have found that people get ahead by putting their heads down rather than standing up for what’s right. And people who do stand up - like Carrie Nation - are ridiculed and lied about. And I am here, on this Substack, every week, scooping my heart into words, hoping that people are touched by the truth of what I’m writing, and will subscribe. So I can keep writing. So that truth will win. And we can all be happier.
Because the truth is hard. Especially as our democracy teeters, and hate is trending. And I notice too much to stay silent.
I know. It’s hilarious.
Thank you. I read this after reading HCR’s extensive quotes of General Milley’s remarks at his stepping-down ceremony. He tells the truth, too. It shouldn’t feel refreshing or brave, but it does.
Nothing makes a white man angrier than not being taken seriously. Especially when women decline to obey. But there’s a delay while he processes such an improbable event when a woman goes on to laugh in his face. That gives a brief interval in which to escape. One important exception, of course, cops.