BEING SHY

I read an essay by Dave Barry in the Wall Street Journal taken from his new book, LESSONS FROM LUCY: THE SIMPLE JOYS OF AN OLD, HAPPY DOG where he talks about being shy.  He says he wants to model himself after his dog Lucy.  Needless to say, Lucy is not shy.

I’ve always related to Dave Barry and love his columns and books.  But it’s not just that. We’re almost the same age.  We have a friend in common, and he’s funny and perceptive about some of the same things I think about.  This time was no different.

I believe most people aren’t shy based on my perception that almost everyone can walk into a room filled with strangers and find someone to talk to.  They can also go to restaurants by themselves and enjoy dinner.  From my observation, even if someone was once shy, by the time they’re my age, they’ve gotten over it. 

I, on the other hand, and from the sounds of it, Dave Barry, have hung on to our shyness in spite of appearances to the contrary. Dave Barry is a public figure so I know he’s friends with Stephen King and is part of a band that, besides King, includes Maxine Hong Kingston.  That’s not how most of us see a shy person behaving.  I will admit that I too can sometimes fake it and usually don’t wear my shyness on my sleeve.  But there are certain things I’ve never overcome.

It seems it’s then, when it’s most inconvenient, that my shyness shows up.  It happens at writers’ conferences where I don’t talk to anyone unless they talk to me first. I sit alone instead at the back of the room taking notes or studying my phone.  It also happens at yoga classes in the city where I sit on my mat and stretch while the people around me chatter, not because I want to stretch but because I’m not good at initiating conversations.  It’s also true if I’m forced to eat dinner by myself in a restaurant—except in Europe where I have managed to overcome the fear because the payoff is so great.

Dave Barry lists his awkward phobias, slightly different but similar enough to mine to convince me that we’re in the same boat.  He concludes his essay with a plan to be more like his dog Lucy who greets the world with a smile and an expectation that everyone will like her.  After reading Barry’s piece I tried to make the same vow, but must confess that change doesn’t come easily.  

The one time I did I was surprised.  It happened when I reached out to my yoga teacher to extend my condolences upon his mother’s recent passing.  It was then I discovered in his reaction and our subsequent awkward hug, that he too is shy.

Perhaps my take away is that there are more shy people out there than I thought. I’m hoping this insight empowers me to try to reach out to others more often.  It’s a day at a time process and doesn’t come easily, but I have to believe that life would be fuller and easier if I did, at least at writers’ conferences.

What I'm Learning as a Grandmother

Before my grandson was born, I never really understood the hype about grandchildren.  We’ve all heard it. “Wait until you have grandchildren then you’ll see that there’s no greater joy,” would be a typical refrain. 

I thought I understood when my grand son was born a year ago.  Holding him for the first time in my arms was a wonder.  But there was, at least in my mind, such a build up about being a grandmother that my own reaction, albeit emotional, didn’t feel that it measured up to all the hype I’d heard.  Now I think I understand what the hullabaloo was about. 

What helped me was a quote shared in a yoga class I recently attended. The gist of it is that the biggest enemy of parenthood is life’s distractions. The remark resonated with me because I’d just come back from LA visiting my grandson.  I was alone with him a lot of that time. I got to pick him up from daycare every afternoon before my daughter got home from work and then spend the next few hours just focusing on him.  

My only responsibility, besides picking him up (in LA traffic) was dinner and that was easy.  My daughter had it waiting, plated, in the fridge.  She took care of his bath and bedtime routine when she got home. All I had to do was to drive in that traffic for fifteen minutes and keep him out of harm’s way for a few hours.

Every afternoon I could take him in his stroller along the canals in Venice and look for ducks or dogs.  Sometimes we went to the local fancy and over priced grocery store where everyone smiled at him. Sometimes we walked along the boardwalk beside the beach.

            I raised three children and spent a lot of time in grocery stores with them, taking them to the park and to the beach. But this was different.  When I was raising my children I had other responsibilities.  Besides meals there was the general upkeep of the house, the up keep of my family’s busy schedule and my writing.  I was always trying to find time to fit in an hour or two a week.  

It was also a time, more than thirty years ago, that most women stayed home and daycare really wasn’t an option.  I was raising my kids because that was my job and my husband was out working and leaving child rearing and home chores to me because that was, as we saw it back then, my responsibility.

            Spending time with my children when they were small wasn’t always as idyllic as it was with my grandson.  I’d get glimpses of it when I’d take them to the park the first time they’d go down a slide or sit on a see saw, or at home, just before bedtime when we’d curl up together with a favorite book.  

But there were also the distractions:  the list of things I needed and wanted to accomplish that filled my brain.  I think that’s the meaning of the quote I referred to earlier.  During those early years when I was raising my children, all those unimportant details of life, were always intruding and preventing me from being completely present.

Do I wish I could get a do-over?  Of course I do.  If I got one, I’d definitely focus more on the time with my children and less on picking up the house or worrying about the minor details of life or even my writing. But since there are no do-overs, at least I get to be a grandma and that’s pretty spectacular and maybe makes up for what I missed the first time around. 

Creating Characters

I go to yoga classes in the city near my apartment on the upper Westside.  Although I’ve been taking classes there for about 5 years and recognize a lot of the people, I don’t really know any of them, but I still find them fascinating.

The class I go to most regularly is on Wednesdays at 10:30, Level One yoga. About half of the class is women like me, between 55 and 70, along with two or three guys also that age. The rest of the class is mostly women somewhere between 30 and 40 years old.  I observe them all.

It would be easy if I recognized them.  I used to see David Duchovny at my gym.  Actors are obvious.  They’re better looking than the rest of us and work out like their job depended on it—which of course it does.  But that’s not usually the case with my fellow yogis.  They’re not as handsome or as fit and not easily recognizable.  My speculation has been that they’re journalists, lesser known actors or artists, or teachers if it’s the summer or spring or winter breaks.

For several years there was a guy who came to yoga every Wednesday.  I think he was about 45 or so and lean and fit, but not super handsome so he probably wasn’t an actor.  He’d put his mat down in the first row and take off his shirt.  He’d also practice some of the harder poses until class started.  All of this annoyed me—he was, in my opinion, being a show off.  But besides being annoyed, I’d wondered who he was. Then he disappeared, leaving at the same time as our yoga teacher who went on maternity leave. I briefly wondered if he’d been her husband.  But that didn’t really work since he was, again in my opinion, too old for her.  But I decided he’d been coming to class because he had a crush on the instructor, explaining why he left when she did.  What he did for a living puzzled me.  Fast forward last week.  He shows up again. The woman I’ve designated our “class leader,” because she talks to everyone, asked him where he’d been.  “Travelling,” he said.  Hmm… Now I really don’t know what this guy does or who he is. Who travels for 18 months?

There are other interesting characters in the class.  The distinguished 60 plus man who’s all arms and legs,  shows up late every week, is totally inflexible, but keeps on coming. Then there’s the man with the therapy dog, sitting quietly in the back corner. I usually don’t notice them until the end of class when I’m leaving when I marvel at how well behaved his dog is.  There has to be a story there.  Finally there are the joggers, a band of 40-somethings, naturally fit and flexible, who head out to the park to run after our 90 minute class.  They just make me tired.

As fiction writers we create characters seemingly out of air, but maybe not so much.  Is it possible that my musings about my fellow yogis provide the blocks for building characters?  What they look like, what they wear, how they talk, and their regular attendance at yoga every Wednesday could all go to creating a believable character who will some day appear in a book. So much of what we do isn’t even conscious, but comes with being an artist.

Labor Day Weekend and the End of Summer

Kayaking yesterday on a near by lake, I saw a man loosening the bolts on his dock to take it in for the season.  My son, visiting for the weekend, stayed up late Saturday night to watch Notre Dame football.  The leaves on the sugar maple are starting to turn.  This morning when I went outside, there was a chill in the air:  all signs that summer is over—at least in the northeast.

A lot of people make New Years’ resolutions, but how many of us still think of September as the real beginning of the year and a time for fresh starts? It also means the end of the summer.  Although summer isn’t officially over until the 21^st, for all practical purposes Labor Day is when summer ends.  That could be the reason I greet September and the Fall with a certain amount of melancholy. I even start counting down the days in early August, anticipating summer’s end. 

I’m not sure of the reason although I’m sure it has to do with the fact that September for me still means the beginning of the school year in spite of having graduated from college over 40 years ago. Although I’m a lawyer and was in school for a number of years, I never liked the rigidness.  I’m not very good at following rules—at least when it comes to the ones made by other people.  Maybe that’s why I’m a writer.

But besides school starting, September also means that official “fun” is done with until next summer.  This is not to say that there is no fun to be had during the rest of the year, but it has always seemed, except for maybe Christmas, summer is the time when the fun is scheduled in, be it trips to the beach, picnics, outdoor concerts, hikes and best of all, anything involving water. 

Living all my life in the northeast, summer is the only time we can go boating, water skiing and swimming.  Once September comes, you’re pushing it.  This past weekend I wasn’t the only one who sniffed the air and said, “Dammit, it’s starting to feel like fall.”  This sentence, mind you, is always accompanied by a sorrowful shake of the head.

There is, of course, the positive side to the arrival of Fall.  It’s a time of the fresh starts I mentioned earlier and the do-overs.  Just as in high school when I would harbor hope that the new school year would be different than the old with new teachers and new opportunities to succeed, there is still that optimism in the air every September.  Whether it’s something simple, like a resolution to go to yoga class more often—and I’m not the only one, September classes are almost as crowded as January’s—or to finally take a painting class, most of us view September as a kind of reboot or renew.  We are starting with a clean slate, with a chance to do what we’ve put off for months or even years.

Deborah Nolan has two romances with Montlake, SUDDENLY LILY and CONFLICT OF INTEREST and one with Desert Breeze Publishing, SECOND ACT FOR CARRIE ARMSTRONG.  Her second romance, STARTING OVER, is coming out in January 2017 with Desert Breeze.

When she is not writing, she is usually taking yoga classes in NYC or Hudson, NY or art classes in the city.