The crossword puzzle clue was “Who said ‘One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other’?” The answer, AUSTEN. That’s Jane, in Emma.
 
Ellen is typing up her notebooks for me, notes on interviews with my mother’s friends, relatives and colleagues, notes she took while rooting around in the census records, etc. She noted that two different people commented that my mother “didn’t know how to play (games)” and she “never did anything just for fun. She read, she walked.”
 
She also did crossword puzzles, anacrostics, cryptograms. As do I. In my blog profile, I did not say I’d stopped doing crossword puzzles to clear time to work on the biography. I said I’d stopped buying crossword puzzle books. If a puzzle drops into my lap, I do it. I am addicted. Maybe anything one is addicted to doesn’t count as “just for fun.” It’s true that my father was the one who walked just to walk, whereas my mother was more likely to walk to a goal--the store, the library. As for reading, she certainly read Simenon’s police procedurals for fun.
 
My mother and I enjoyed seeing movies and concerts and critiquing them. For a songwriter, I suppose the concerts were not just for fun, but we had fun. But since anything is grist for an artists mill, I suppose you could say she never did anything just for fun. In that view, neither do I. I used to be a storyteller who wrote songs just for fun, now I am a songwriter. But it’s still fun.
 
My mother knew how to play kid games to keep us amused when I was little—pinky-stinky in the car, anagrams, chinese checkers and cards at home. When my father was alive, my parents played double solitaire most nights before bed. They didn’t play to beat each other, but cooperatively to beat the game. When I was a kid, we all played contract rummy and other card games, especially when we had a grandmother in the house. In Long Beach, my parents’ group of friends played charades, still my favorite game, at parties, and danced. My mother took me folk dancing because my father didn’t dance. She taught me the Charleston and the Viennese waltz. When she says “Let’s go dancing till the break of day,” in “Magic Penny” she means it. She wrote other songs about dancing, “Dancing Girl” is one, and at least one poem. Here’s a poem of mine.
 
FROM A WRITING EXERCISE
 
we are the daughters of dancers
dancing the steps we saw
feet flying
bodies swaying
wingfeathers fluttering
we are the daughters of dancers not mermaids
we step where we will
cockroaches flee at our tread
fleas flock to our ankles as we dance
across unmowed lawns
to unmade beds
or unmarked pages
we ask the orderly rhythms of the dance
to disorder our minds
stir our senses
so the unsought word will rise to the top
and the ink spill down
and WRITE
 
                Nancy Schimmel
                St. Dorothy’s Rest, undated
 
In her memoirs, my mother talks about teaching the boys to dance in high school. Those two people Ellen interviewed knew Malvina in her sixties and seventies, when she wasn’t dancing any more. I don’t dance that much myself, now. Creaky joints. She had them too by my age. She watched Mary Hartman Mary Hartman for fun, it certainly wasn’t an intellectual activity. Now, she’d be watching Weeds. And oh, how she would enjoy the lineup of “Little Boxes” singers for the next season! Donovan, Joan Baez, Randy Newman.
 
My mother said my first phrase was ‘byself’ meaning ‘don’t help me, I want to do it by myself.’ Actually, it was my first portmanteau word, a concept I was introduced to about nine years later when I read Alice in Wonderland. Anyway, here I am at the cottage where I’ve rented a bedroom for my sorting/writing office, having lugged in all the pieces of the large-size Gorilla Shelves from my car byself. A young, strong guy loaded in the heavy box at the hardware store, but I had to open it in the car and bring in the fiberboard shelves and metal supports in about ten trips. I intend to put them together into a work table with shelves byself too, though the instructions say two is better. Last time I had a teen-ager helping me, and the shelves weren’t the large size. I am feeling thankful that my carpenter father and my generally handy mother gave me the idea that I could do things like this. (Later: The second half of the putting together really did take two people because I was making a workbench, not shelves. So Judy Fjell helped me with that part.)
 
Since I will be mostly writing by day when Michelle (the woman I share the cottage with) works, I have the run of the place while she’s not here, so I am sitting at the round dining table in the living-room, having taken a nap on the couch. Theoretically, here is where I can work uninterrupted by the phone or the mail or the internet or the dog or the dishes or the Terry Pratchett I just bought myself for a treat, along with a book by Caroline Heilbrenner about writing women’s lives and Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, which turned out to be one of the books Heilbrenner critiques. However, sitting on this very table is Michelle’s copy of the new Harry Potter, and I don’t know if I can resist it. Temptation—my mother wrote a song about that, too. Yup, I’m giving in—reading for fun!
 
WARNING
 
Ellen called to say her computer had gotten zapped by lightening. She had a surge protector, but the lightening didn’t get to the computer through the wiring. It got in through the cable. If you have cable, and live in thunderstorm country (they’re rare here) it may be a good idea to unplug from cable when a thunderstorm is predicted. Who knew?
 
©2007 by Nancy Schimmel
The Smithsonian/Folkways compilation CD of Malvina singing her songs includes “Magic Penny.”
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
JUST FOR FUN?