Working Girl: The Early Years and the Christian Delicatessen

As I approach the finish line demarcating close to five decades of an uninterrupted working life—and here (and only here), I define “working” as inextricably entwined with the primary aim of earning something resembling an income—I find myself slowing down a bit to look back at my former working selves, who I left behind on that long-distance race course littered with numerous, sundry jobs along the way.  While the earliest years, say between 12 and 14, found me baby-sitting and even mowing lawns on a regular basis (the latter, my first but not my last foray into the unwelcoming realm of traditionally male jobs), I landed my first “real” job at the age of 14, at a newly opened restaurant in Bristol, Tennessee, named “John’s Deli.” John’s was a decidedly Christian (not to mention Southern) take on that ubiquitous New York eating establishment:  the Jewish delicatessen.  Why a small group of local, Christian investors decided that Bristol, in 1972, needed a restaurant modeled on the Jewish delicatessen was not mine to question.  At that time in my life, my family and I only barely, if at all, acknowledged our own Jewish background, never mind discussed it openly with others in our new home in the Bible Belt region that encompasses southwestern Virginia.  So with a newly minted work permit, as well as what would become my lifelong bureaucratic companion—a social security number—in hand, I officially began my journey as a working girl.

Despite my family’s more or less unintentional suppression of my and my siblings’ half-Jewishness, the dozen years I lived in northern New Jersey, prior to moving to Bristol, had provided me with a few occasions to eat at an authentic Jewish delicatessen.  Specifically, these were the few, very rare, excursions I recall taking in the neighborhood surrounding my Jewish, maternal grandmother’s apartment in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  Even the scarcity of those memories, however, did not prepare me for the dislocation and outright confusion I experienced when I began my first week of work at John’s Deli.  Yes, there were bagels (frozen Lenders, six to a plastic bag) and cream cheese, but where was the lox?  The matzoh ball soup?  The challah (to appear decades later in a major, northern Virginia grocery chain, labeled, much to my very Jewish, then-husband’s horror, “egg bread”)?   The Entenmann’s pastries, if not real cheesecake?  Yes, there was cheesecake, but it was a far cry from its authentic cousin that was readily available at any diner—Jewish or not—in those now halcyon Jersey days.  Inarguably, it was an exile to the culinary desert for any unlikely Jew who might stumble through the doors of John’s Deli.  To add insult to injury, my sense of place was further skewed by the lines of New Testament scripture which were painted like a decorative border on the walls below the ceiling line on all four sides of the dining room. 

I worked hard at that deli, though, hard enough to know that restaurant work, in particular food prep in the kitchen, was back breaking and relentlessly boring.  Moreover, I was not very good at it.  I could not chop fast, or uniformly, enough.  I was squeamish about touching meat (my conversion to vegetarianism was not too many years away).  I was revolted by handling strangers’ dirty dishes and utensils.  Still, I did learn how to bake the perfect baked potato (scrub the potato; prick it in a few places; and then bake it in a very hot oven, unwrapped—no foil (this was key)—for at least an hour).  And while John’s would not be my last restaurant job, it was the first one to direct my thoughts to considering the type of work to which I might be better suited.  So it was that, even at the age of 14, I began to envision a more white-collar profession in my future.  That this was a challenging prospect for a young woman who would be the first in her family to even attend college, not to mention step into a professional career, had not yet occurred to me.  Maybe that scripture, incongruously New Testament as it was, which was writ large on the four walls surrounding me as I worked, had some blessings to confer after all. 

 

Metanoia v. Habit: May the Best (Wo)Man Win

In response to my sharing with friends the news of my upcoming presentation, titled “Metanoia, Meaning, and Migration: Finding the Self through Lifestyle Migration,” at Georgetown University’s academic conference on “Passages” next month, many have asked me to explain the concept of metanoia.  As part of my Folklore post-graduate studies, last spring I conducted ethnographic research into and wrote a final paper on the stories of individuals who made a drastic geographic relocation, motivated by retirement or simply the desire for a lifestyle change, or both.  I chose to examine those stories through the lens of metanoia, a concept first used widely by Carl Jung.  Jung paid special attention to times of acute change in an individual’s life, writing prolifically about the transformation of consciousness that occurs.  He called this type of passage metanoia.  This Greek word has two roots:  meta meaning both “great change” and “beyond,” and noia, a derivative of nous, a word of complex and multiple meanings, including “higher consciousness.”  The experience of metanoia involves a transformation that can range from a minor change of consciousness to a dramatic psychic or spiritual transformation.  My research focused on the metanoia experiences of a sampling of Americans and Canadians who made the decision to migrate to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, from as early as the 1950’s, because they believed San Miguel offered the potential for a more meaningful quality of life.  My final paper related these immigrants’ stories of re-imagination and journeying beyond their previous limitations, not to mention the enormous spirit of adventure and independence which led them to craft an entirely new life and identity in Mexico. 

This subject was not an accidental one.  As my own retirement looms on the horizon, my husband (already retired) and I have engaged in an ongoing discussion—part fantasy and part practical—that asks, to quote The Clash:  should we stay or should we go?  Will we stay put in our cherished and familiar community or will we strike out into the unknown, relocating somewhere totally new and different, perhaps where we know no one?  While not giving short shrift to the pragmatic reality that our retirement income will stretch further elsewhere, we have also, like the San Miguel immigrants, given serious consideration to the possibility of experiencing our own metanoia in making a drastic geographical shift.    

One of the most striking statements that I heard over and over again from the San Miguel immigrants was that the decision to relocate inaugurated the arrival of a “new self,” or that finally, in Mexico, they were able to bring forth their “authentic selves.”  What is it about the confines and demands of the quotidian and the familiar, with their endless cycle of responsibilities and expectations, which suppresses the emergence of our “authentic selves”?  Is it merely habit?  Recalling how my beloved Proust frequently took Habit to task, I did some research and came up with this, from my much underlined and dog-eared copy of Remembrance of Things Past: “As a rule, most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.” Yes indeed.  Habit, that hobgoblin of creativity, has no need to draw from my more authentic, richer self to enter into my daily routine. It is well equipped to carry the day on its own. 

This is not to say that I cannot experience my own metanoia, here in my familiar realm, by initiating dramatic lifestyle changes once I have finally broken free from the shackles of a 40-hour work week, where the dragon’s breath of Habit is especially fiery.  But then again, the tantalizing specter of new horizons, my own San Miguel de Allende or Shangri-La you might say, seems to beckon me more urgently than ever before.  Will I heed the call?

Stepping on the Head of the Dragon

Well into the second week of 2015, I remain steeped in Virginia Woolf.  Having just read a tiny gem of a short story, “Lappin and Lapinova,” I find myself considering the following:  Upon what illusions do we depend to maintain the smooth operation of our daily lives?  The story first.  Woolf’s little tale is about a newly married couple temperamentally unsuited to each other.  For the first two years of the marriage, the couple is able to sustain the fiction of a happy alliance by spinning a fantasy story around the reality of their relationship.  Woolf, drawing the story to a close with a trivial incident that nonetheless bursts the fantasy bubble, brilliantly and abruptly concludes:  “So that was the end of the marriage.”

The illusions I depend upon to maintain the smooth operation of my daily life do not, fortunately, concern my marriage, but rather my profession.  In this regard, the precise question that has been pressing itself upon me more and more urgently with each passing month is whether I will continue to work as an attorney for the three years remaining until I am eligible for full retirement?  As I consider that question, I am simultaneously examining the illusions I rely upon to imbue continued meaning into a profession that no longer inspires me.  Consider those illusions:  that my professional stature, based on 27 years of hard work, dedication, and well-respected accomplishments, are a reflection of my true self rather than merely a persona; that my co-workers are dependent upon my prodigious output and the fact that I am, as the only attorney on staff, singularly indispensable; and that it would be foolhardy and irresponsible to retire prematurely and forego the full recognition of and reward for 30 years of service, to embark on the life of an artist.  These illusions, I recognize, are neither absolute and rigid nor easily dispelled. The reality, I know, is somewhere in between.  So, I will continue to wrestle with them and suspect that 2015—and perhaps beyond—will require my stepping on the head of a dragon or two (my “women of the well” friends will surely understand this allusion!) before I come to any resolution. 

Quan Yin Stepping on the Head of the Dragon

Truncated Virgins

Between Christmas and New Year’s, I headed into D.C. to meet a friend, visiting from Papua, New Guinea, to see the new exhibit at the National Museum for Women in the Arts:  Picturing Mary:  Woman, Mother, Idea.  Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea | National Museum of Women in the Arts  According to the NMWA website, the exhibit “examines the concept of womanhood represented by the Virgin Mary and the power her image has exerted through time.”  To be honest, I was disappointed by the relatively one-dimensional representations of Mary depicted throughout. In all fairness to the exhibit curators, I should have read the website description more carefully beforehand, so that I understood the exhibit was presenting exclusively Renaissance- and Baroque-era masterworks (6^th to 18^th century) from museum, church, and private collections in Europe and America.  Had I done so, I would have known not to expect more unorthodox and, dare I say it, irreverent depictions of Mary.  Even while this impressive array of works revealed Mary in her myriad roles as daughter, cousin, and wife; the mother of an infant; and a bereaved parent, I could not help feeling impatient with these, to my mind, truncated representations of a mostly submissive and chaste Mary. 

                                          Elisabetta Sirani, Virgin and Child (detail), 1663.

Before going further here, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I feel obliged to confess myself a lapsed (read, recovering) Catholic.  But despite having left Catholicism behind as early as 1976 if not before then, I continue to nurture a fierce admiration for a Mary who I see as something other than a patristical icon of femininity, love, suffering, and chastity.  The Mary who I hold in my psyche is not such a unilateral figure.  Rather, she is a courageous feminine spirit who more closely aligns, in the way I’ve internalized her, with her Virgen de Guadalupe and Black Madonna manifestations.  That is, as Guadalupe, she is an intercessor, closely connected to the major events in a woman’s life—sexuality, childbirth, the loss of a child.  As the Black Madonna, she is the Queen of Nature, the agent of all fertile transformation in the outside world and in the psyche. These more cthonic Marys, with their potent feminine energy, speak to me much more strongly about what it means to construct a powerful and resilient female identity than the admittedly gorgeous images of passive maternal compliance depicted in the NMWA exhibit.

 "Coyolxauhqui Returns as Our Lady disguised as La Virgen de Guadalupe to defend the rights of Las Chicanas" by Alma Lopez. 

I think I speak for most D.C. area feminists when I say that I have always viewed Frida Kahlo as the NMWA’s poster woman.  The museum’s permanent collection proudly showcases Kahlo’s 1937 “Self Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky,” and NMWA’s gift shop prominently displays numerous items sporting Kahlo motifs.  Part of Kahlo’s genius was her willingness to take on taboo subjects which challenged cultural norms not to mention feminine beauty ideals.  I can only imagine how Kahlo, with her penetrating, unwavering gaze and a heavily arched eyebrow, is viewing the truncated Virgins who have taken up temporary residence in her D.C. home. 

                                       Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky, 1937

 

 

The Machine

Lately I have found myself returning over and over again to a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”:  “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.” Some days, especially those days when I work at the office (three out of five days/week), I feel lucky if I can live “outside the machine” for even those thirty minutes.  To me, living outside the machine means freedom from those demands—quotidian and episodic alike—which take me away from my creative self.  And I throw a huge net around the term “creative,” to include reading for the sole purpose of personal edification as well as the more affirmative activities of creative writing and engaging in my fiber art.  I seem to have it inverted:  in the 21^st century, for me at least, the machine is the demanding mistress, where formerly art and creativity occupied that historically archetypal role. 

Here’s the breakdown of a typical day when I work from the office (rounded to the nearest quarter hour):  daily ablutions 2x day (45 minutes); commuting (45 minutes); work (8 hours); personal email (1 hour); exercise (45 minutes); meal preparation and eating (1.5 hours); domestic responsibilities (2.0 hours); sleep (8 hours).  Totaling 22.75 hours, that leaves only a shocking 1.25 hours left in the day, time I sadly confess to spending, more often than not, exhausted in front of the television.  While I do include about 30 minutes of reading in the above-noted 8 hour chunk of sleep time, I am usually semi-comatose by then, so that this reading period only infrequently qualifies as “personally edifying.” Further, I do not count time spent on a more rote fiber art project in front of the television the same as time spent working, in a focused manner, on a more challenging, non-derivative piece.  As I actually commit this insane schedule to paper, I am horrified that it has come to this.  No wonder I feel so depleted so much of the time.  Add to this the fact that I am a part-time graduate student (Masters, Folklore), and there would seem to be an overall negative balance of time in my day. 

So the question, then, is whether it is possible to carve out more time outside the machine?  And, if not, then how does one maximize that seemingly meager 30 minutes?  Then again, given the schedule I just delineated, even 30 minutes looks like a glorious luxury.  Does this seem absurdly skewed, as a template for living, or is it just me?