I was mid-way through a rant about Malcolm Gladwell when I saw this tweet from my friend Jenny. “Rest in peace, Nancy W. Kappes,” it said. My heart dropped.
You probably didn’t know Nancy W. Kappes, Paralegal, but your life would have been richer if you did. Nancy was a self-professed ‘bad mom,’ an impious Catholic, a lover of bad jokes and “Judy Garland trail mix” and one of the sweetest and most supportive and laugh-out-loud funny blog readers one could ever hope to have. We met when she sent Jenny and I an email about a post that I’d written at Jenny’s blog, an email in which she shared her own strategies for coping with family politics (“sit back with a trashy book, a tumbler of Grey Goose (when I’m flush-Seagram’s when I’m not) and my huge bottle of assorted pharmaceuticals. (My “Judy Garland Trail Mix.”)“) and colorfully described her ex-husband (“he made the baby Jesus cry.”) I laughed out loud, and saved her message. If emails were made of paper, hers – the hundreds sent over the two years that followed, and the hundreds read and reread and reread again – would have been dog-eared and creased and stained with tears of laughter. I might just have to print them all out, so that they can become exactly that.
She called me Mama Cat, and she had a knack for knowing exactly when I needed to laugh or be flattered or be sternly admonished for being too hard on myself. She rarely commented on the blog itself. She preferred to send long, funny discursions on whatever I had written about. Or, sometimes, on what she hoped I’d write about. Or on the Pope, and goats.
Nancy died this weekend. I feel like I’ve been kicked in the heart, and not by her awesome goat.
I really think that I need to get a haircut. I’ve been keeping it longer because I can pull it back and get it out of my face and if there is one place that I do not want my hair, it’s my face, but still, pulling it back does not stop it from getting messy, and also, I have this toddler who has a hair fetish and do you know what is worse than a messy ponytail that is not messy in the fashionable ‘Gisele Bundchen just throws her hair into a messy ponytail’ kind of way? A messy ponytail that is being dismantled, strand by strand, by an aggressive toddler with peanut butter on his fingers.
Not shown: messy ponytail, grabby-handed toddler, resentment of Gisele Bundchen.
Let’s say that you go to the drugstore to buy diapers and tampons and Vanity Fair magazine, and while you are there, you buy one of those little tubs of Noxzema – not the big one, the one that slides to one corner of the shopping basket and tips it with its weight, the little one that fits in the palm of your hand – and you take it home with you, whereupon arriving you take it immediately to the bathroom, thinking, I will just open it up and smell it, because you know that the smell will transport you, you know that it will make you feel fifteen again, and who doesn’t want to feel fifteen again, just for a minute, to feel fifteen the way that fifteen feels when a fifteen year old is standing in the bathroom with a tub of Noxzema in her hand, listening to the clatter of her parents in the kitchen downstairs, believing, knowing, that the thick smelly cream, deliberately smeared – upward, upward, so as not to pull down on the skin – will lift all the dark crud from her pores and from her anxious, adolescent soul.
I like to think that I’m the sort of person who doesn’t take things for granted. I know how fortunate I am to have the life that I have; I know, too, that the terms and conditions of that life include no guarantees against frustration and sadness and pain and loss. I know, even the most difficult moments, that I have much to be grateful for, that I lead a life that is, for the most part, what the old philosophers might have called choiceworthy. I know that it is choice, largely, that defines my fortune and privilege: I am fortunate enough and privileged enough to be able to choose, to some not insignificant degree, my path and all of its little detours, to choose my pace and my direction, to choose to linger over or to pass by the myriad distractions of life, to gaze into the gloom or to seek out the sunlight. I am lucky, I know this.
It is also a characteristic of this good fortune, this privilege, that I am vulnerable to frustration and sadness (and, possibly, to depression; I’ll reflect upon this further someday) when I am forced to confront my limitations, when I look down this path or the other and see no way around a certain obstacle – some figurative bog or rock or troll-ridden bridge – and have to stop, give up, go a different way. That’s the very definition of privilege, I think – the luxury of getting pissy about being thwarted. Not that those who are less privilege don’t get frustrated at the obstacles that they are forced to confront – it’s just that, I think, the fortunate are more likely to put their hands on their hips and stamp their feet and say that shouldn’t be there, how dare that be there? and collapse to the ground in a resentful huff.
Or something like that.