Modern Christian Spinster Goes Rogue
Deck the Halls!
Dearest, most precious and essential six subscribers:
There’s been some unauthorized, rebellious, spinsterial activity here. I’m referring, of course, to the two old posts that mysteriously reposted themselves within the last week. This was apparently prompted by the launch of my two new blogs (VickeryEckhoff.com and Fat Cats on Forbes.com).
As of this writing, my first Forbes.com post was viewed 19,502 times and was shared on Facebook 4,527 times. Perhaps the spinsters felt slighted and decided to take matters into their own bloggy hands. In any event, please don’t walk away while we’re growing. All three blogs will have regular, new material, so please stay tuned and follow. I promised the spinsters you would, and you know how they get when disappointed.
xox
Last Days at Nirvana Farm
In the end, it wasn’t moving out of our home of more than 30 years that got me. It wasn’t packing up and selling off the last of our family belongings or even sweeping the house when it was empty, locking the doors and driving away. It was two photographs that arrived in my e-mail box from someone I barely knew, after returning to my studio apartment in New York City.
Like many townspeople in Bolton Landing, NY, she had came to the two-day tag sale we’d staged the weekend before closing. It was an opportunity, for some, to pick up cheap armchairs and rugs and wicker porch furniture. For others, it was a time to see the inside of the house for the first time, one of the great ones built on Millionaire’s Row on Lake George. And for several who’d actually worked on the property, it was a time to come back, sit on the porch, and reflect on what Nirvana Farm had meant to them.
“I’m sure it is with mixed feelings that you close up shop at the farm and move on,” my new friend wrote eloquently in her e-mail. “What a beautiful, peaceful spot it is.”
I knew it and yet I didn’t, or at least I hadn’t allowed myself to feel it, not in the four years since my dad had died, then my aunt, then my sister Mary, and, a month ago, my sister Karen’s husband, David. It seemed that I’d only known how beautiful Nirvana Farm was when my mother had been living there, before her passing, in November, 1988, with my dad and my sisters and me gathered at her bedside. Read more…
No Country for Old Broads
What I Learned on the Red Carpet from Javier Bardem
I’d just passed a significant birthday when a 24-year-old colleague suggested the unthinkable: “What you need is a nice, 60-ish retired math professor,” she declared, sipping a latte. “You’re a tall blonde WASP. You should be dating Americans, not those Latin lovers you go for.”
My kittenish pride was wounded. Swarthy men were my specialty: How could I forget the dashing Chilean I’d lived with for six years after grad school; the Spanish producer with eyes the color of robin’s eggs; the Uruguayan guitarist I met backstage at Carnegie Hall; the bohemian Colombian designer at a recent writing job; and my greatest love of all, an Italian motorcyclist and photographer I’d tearfully given up after seven years, just two weeks shy of turning 40? He baked me cakes and wrote love poems. But I wanted marriage; he didn’t.
Getting him out of my system was difficult: two Milanese, a Roman and one Sicilian later, I still hadn’t found anyone as warm, adventurous or good in the kitchen, so I decided to give Italy a rest. Shortly thereafter, I met an Argentine videographer in Wholesale Liquidators who asked me, within months, to be his fourth wife. I declined.
Over the next five years, I made a conscious effort to expand my borders. There was a former Kurdish shepherd who owned a multi-million dollar townhouse off Washington Square; an Indian management consultant born in London; a blue-eyed Slovakian video editor; a Russian producer and mountain climber; and the biggest charmer of all: a Frenchman and former trapeze artist who worked for the circus. Read more…
Chap. 4, The McSpinster’s Guide to Love
Dear Fellow Spinster:
I apologize for what I am about to say, specifically about my Sunday School teacher, Miss Cummings, and also my dad’s older sister, Lenore. What did they do? Frighten me half to death, that’s what. My mother tried convincing me that they were God’s perfect children, that I needed to love them, see them as God did, but it was hard. Sure they were sweet, but they were single women in a married world. That’s how it was with old maids. There was always a defect there, some flaw that made them unpopular with the opposite sex and scary to children.
Like most girls born in the fifties, my sisters and I were raised to be wives: We had the right moral instruction, good education, proper training in etiquette and ballroom dancing and stylish clothes from New York City department stores. Even the toys I got for Christmas provided perfect training for future wedded bliss: an E-Z Bake oven, a little Hostess Buffet and miniature percolator that made real coffee.
We dreamed of brides, flowers and cake, my sisters and I. After Sunday School, after we’d changed out of our Sunday best, we held practice weddings in our basement—with dolls. My mother played Handel’s Wedding March on the record player, Carol wore a black choir robe and read from one of the many Bibles in our house (we each had one, in addition to our own matching copy of Science and Health). Rita, next oldest, had us round up all our dolls. She and Molly walked them up a makeshift aisle in pairs. Sandy threw rice. I carried daffodils picked from the edge of the lawn. And then, with God as their witness, five trolls, three Barbies, Tressy, Patty Play Pal and Chatty Cathy all got married to Mickey Mouse. Read more…
Chap. 3, The McSpinster’s Guide to Love
Dear Fellow Spinster:
Everybody loved me growing up. That’s how it was. We may have been five girls and five girls was too many; we may have been poor compared to the millionaires next door, but where love was concerned, we had an embarrassment of wealth.
My sisters loved me, and so did my teachers and Sunday School teachers. My grandparents did, too, and my dad—he loved us, all five of us, to pieces. That’s what he used to say all the time, in different ways, of course. Sometimes, he said it while imposing rules (no TV on school nights). Sometimes he said it by taking us on some very creative adventures (for breakfast, to Jones Beach, at sunrise, for example. He kept a frying pan in the trunk of the car. We’d find an isolated sand dune; he’d build a fire and make eggs and bacon. After we finished, he scoured the pan with sand and threw it back in the trunk).
My dad declared his love frequently and urgently. Toward the end of his life, he said “I love you desperately” so often I had to ask him to stop. “I know you love me without your needing to say it,” I told him one morning on the sun porch, looking down over the lawn toward our boathouse. He nodded dolefully, but did not comply. Later that afternoon, as he drove me to the train station in Hudson, NY, for my trip back to New York City, he said it again. Read more…
Chap. 2, The McSpinster’s Guide to Love
I was born under a curse, the kind you find in fairytales. It goes like this: First my parents had a girl. Then, two years later, they had another girl. The next baby — was a girl. After her came another baby — a girl. And then my mother, Adelaide, Wellesley girl, did something very unusual for her, not being Catholic: she threw away her diaphragm. Two years later, I came along, on a hot August day, a Friday, at 4 pm.
This was the day that my dad had an epiphany. “Honey,” he said, taking me out of my mother’s arms right there in the Glen Cove hospital, “This one’s mine.”
He named me Vickery. Vickery Ames. It was a strange name, to be sure. “Like Hickory Dickory?” people like to tease. ”Yeah,” I always answer, “something like that.”
My mother had chosen my sisters’ names: nice, unfancy, two-syllable names you couldn’t mispronounce or mimic like nursery rhymes, but no such luck for me. I was named for my dad’s first love, Vickery Gratton, which is never a good thing to do. Fortunately, she was a minister’s daughter, and he was only seven. At least she wasn’t a showgirl. People find this fascinating. Read more…
Chap. 1, The McSpinster’s Guide to Love
Dear Fellow Spinster:
Here’s a little tale, not about how George and Laura Bush invited me to take an outdoor shower (more on that later) but a real story, the one I’ve been building into a memoir for the last three years: about how a tall blond WASP, Latino-lover and one-time girlfriend to a mountain-climbing, motorcycle-riding Italian photographer became an ex-girlfriend, a solitary Sunday School teacher and librarian in a Christian Science Reading Room, of all places. From Latino-loving biker chick to head librarian. How does that happen?
I have come up with seven possible explanations for this strange trajectory into spinsterhood: varnish, the US Navy, the Sons of Hercules, Cosmopolitan, horses, being raised in a religion most people find weirdly suspect, and John Gotti. Buckle up—it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Read more…
Meet Ouchy
photo: Galina Arlov
Dear Fellow Spinster:
What does “the premier provider of adult clown services” have to do with the Stupak amendment in the health care bill—and why should you care?
Before I answer that, a caveat. Ouchy the Clown and I aren’t “friends.” I don’t use his services or contribute to how he makes a living. How does he do that? Besides being a DJ and doing “straight razor shaving,” he offers this rather unusual service to clients. Are you ready?
“I am a trained, certified meeting facilitator. Oh, and I am a clown. Did ya miss that part? I specialize in:
- Brainstorming sessions
- Conflict resolution
- Organizational development”
Ouchy, whose tagline is “Happy to Beat You,” is well aware of the irony. “ Sure, it’s weird to have a clown facilitator,” his web site admits, “but you’ve seen stranger things, I’m sure.” Read more…
Male Spinsters, Benvenuti!
Dear Luvs2Cuddle:
Thank you for writing. No, I’ve never heard of a male spinster, though why not? There are many unmarried men of gentle family like you past the common age for marrying and unlikely to marry. There may be even more of them than the female variety. Perhaps the dictionary definition should be revised to include pioneers like you. Congratulations, dude, on breaking the lace ceiling, and welcome to the club!
I’m sure you’ve tried Match. I did. I think I was viewed something like eight thousand times. Oh, I was popular with young guys and old guys, alright, but particularly atheists. I think there’s a correlation between atheists and looking for love online. It’s amazing how many there are, many expressing such personal virtues as “loves to laugh” and “extremely open-minded” at the same time that their “religious views” articulate a particular hostility toward people of faith. Hello! I did go out with a couple and sure enough, all they wanted to do is argue about Jesus! Let me say, do not challenge me on the Jesus front, dude. You will lose! Anyway, the last one tried and I decimated him and then, at the end of the meal, he apologized for attacking my religious views and invited me out again. That happened twice, actually: two different atheists. Weird. I said, “the conversation has been stimulating, but I’d rather save the arguing until later on—after we’re married,” which only made them look perplexed. Like they didn’t get the joke. Read more…
John Edwards and Me
Dear Fellow Spinster:
It’s hard knowing where to start a story as long as mine: my first memory of lying in a crib in the childcare room at the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Huntington, Long Island, wrapped in a blanket and staring up at a mobile that hung like a branch just beyond the reach of my tiny fingers? My need to forgive my dad, who charmed nearly everyone with his mad genius and good looks, and who I lost nearly three years ago? My dream last week of a certain philandering Senator otherwise dubbed “the little Breck girl” back when he tossed his hat into the presidential ring and the name “Rielle Hunter” still meant nothing to the public?
Hmmmm. They are all related, these stories: my upbringing as a church girl, the senator’s infuriating penchant for affairs, my dad’s infuriating talent for charming ladies far and wide and the way he cheated on my mother right up to the day she died of breast cancer and I sat at her bedside at our home on Lake George, holding her hand until her eyes closed forever.
Let’s have fun, shall we? John Edwards for five hundred, please. Read more…
