Imbolc Valentine Moon
Tallgrass Spa on Upper Bear Creek Road. We had originally intended to go to Maui for my 70th birthday. We wanted to celebrate at Mama’s Fish House, where we’ve had both anniversary and birthday meals. The divorce and its impact on our time created a different focus for this February. Our plan was to celebrate our mutual entry into the 7th decade, Kate having preceded me, as she always does, in things age related.
We decided, instead, to combine our upcoming 27th anniversary (27!) with my birthday and Kate’s of last year by having a couples afternoon at the Tallgrass Spa in Evergreen.
As you drive in to the spa, this is the view toward the west. The mountains give any trip, no matter how short, a sense of majesty. The thirty minute drive from Shadow Mountain to Tallgrass is especially beautiful.
Upper Bear Creek Road begins at Evergreen Lake and continues for some miles. Along it are homes, many of them, that are big, stony or wooden, with elaborate grounds. This one sold recently for $2,300,000.
That was getting there. Once in the Spa we were given sandals to wear, shown to a room where we could change into Tallgrass robes (blue, one size fits all) and then taken to a quiet lounge area, beautiful with a fireplace, and a view of the mountains.
First, we had an 80 minute massage lying on tables next to each other with lots of hot oil, slippery hands, the scent of eucalyptus and mint and bergamot and, for me, a heated blanket, not for my Scandinavian wife.
In their relaxation of muscles the hands of the masseuse triggered memories, ones held in the body, not sure how they were resident there, but they were. An obvious one was her treatment of my knee, still somewhat swollen from the surgery. When her hands were on it, the journey of the last three months came forward. At another spot I remembered a moment in Rome on our honeymoon.
The biggest revelation though was the amount of tension, of anxiety I carried. As she relaxed me, I could feel my body tense, trying to get back to the state with which it had become familiar. We both knew the last nine months had been difficult ones for our family, but like all things, even that difficulty can become normal. On that table at Tallgrass my body told me so.
After this was a spa lunch, turkey sandwich for Kate, brie and fig sandwich for me. It was a pleasant time, sharing the lunch in the quiet lounge. We were creating a memory, probably the long time result, perhaps an alternative body narrative, too, for the last few months. That is, it was possible to relax even in the midst of family turmoil.
The last event of our day there was a pedicure. I’ve gone 70 years, literally, without ever having had a pedicure. The process fascinated me. In this room there were four throne like chairs lifted above the floor on risers, two steps up to them. Below the chair is a basin, a small sink, filled with soapy water. The pedicurist sits at the basin. Bare feet go into the water and the pedicurist cleans them, a very biblical, foot-washing moment and surprisingly intimate.
Did I want short or long nails? Short. She clipped my already short nails with a nail clipper. An implement somewhat like a dental pick but with a flattened end went underneath and around the toenails. Cuticle cream, tan and squirted on in small dabs, softened the cuticles, allowing Becky to clip my cuticles. I forgot the emery board which she used to smooth off rough edges.
All the while conversation was going back and forth among Kate, her pedicurist, Becky, me, and the woman getting her feet done in the chair next to Kate. The woman next to Kate was having a spa day paid for by her employer. Her husband was a chef. “I only make reservations,” she said, a line she’d obviously used before.
The talk turned to animals, llamas, dogs, mastiffs and rescues and bulldogs. Kate’s pedicurist, whose name I don’t recall, had a pitbull mix that had been attacked by a mountain lion a month and a half ago, but survived. She and Becky both live in Bailey. Sobering. Kate, whose throne was in the middle, could see out into a meadow across from Tallgrass where a herd of mule deer and several elk bucks wandered.
Exfoliation with a salt scrub came next. Becky rubbed a gently scratchy substance onto my feet, one at a time, sloughed it off with water, foliation and hydration with oil followed.
Touch, human touch, was the theme of the whole day. Where the massage was quiet, the pedicure was chatty, friendly and the lunch was just for us two. I’m now launched into my seventh decade, partnering with Kate as she walks the path, always ahead of me.
Woke thinking about the subtitle to the book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the Right. I realized I knew this one from personal experience.
Winter Moon of the Winter Solstice
My mother and my Aunt Virginia helped me. At the family farm in Morristown, Indiana I drug myself along the sofa, my head often collapsed on the floor, getting rug burns as I pulled it along with the rest of my body. They helped, but it was only that young boy who could move his legs, drag his body along. He did it. Since then, I have identified walking upright in the world as a major theme of my life.
At 12:30 we drove over to Evergreen for mussar at Beth Evergreen. It was Rabbi Jamie’s birthday and each woman brought a cooked or purchased offering of some kind. We had cranberry juice with tea and mint, apple juice, brie and a wonderful soft cheese, warm carrots, pistachios, cashews, strawberries, grapes, melon, crackers, chips, guacamole, a birthday cake, sea-salt caramel and chocolate brownies (Kate, see pic), with Halloween plates and napkins.
Racism. Is complicated. Very complicated. And, yes, I believe all white Americans are part of its grip on our culture. I’m going to try to boil down a very thorny subject into a few words, see if I can convince you that you are part of the problem if you’re white and live in the U.S.
Slaves did not vote, but if counted as full persons for population purposes they would have given slave states and the whites who did vote greater representation in the U.S. House. This would have unbalanced power between the North and the South.
They also had an unearned advantage in their social status as at least higher than that of the slave, the three-fifths of a person enslaved. This unearned social status gave low income whites, often share-croppers, a psychological and social boost which had nothing to do with their personal merit. They were better, at least, than those who toiled without compensation and freedom. That unearned and undeserved lift in personal status persists in the minds and hearts of all white Americans.
The civil war, you might say, shows the inherent goodness of the north and the hostile debasement of southerners. You might say that if you don’t factor in the unearned economic and social advantages even northerners gained from the enslaved. You might say that if the wreck of reconstruction hadn’t resulted in Jim Crow laws throughout the south. You might say that if you hadn’t grown up near Elwood, Indiana which had a sign at its city limits, No Niggers In Town After Sundown. This was taken down only after the civil rights act in 1964.
How have all these terrible realities managed to remain in place? Because those with power rarely give it up willingly. We white Americans, through our avoidance of these issues, have capitulated to the structures already in place. Why? Because those structures: biased employment choices, biased voting requirements, lack of affordable housing, lack of available health care, still unequal education, are on the fringe of our lives, happening to someone else, some other African-American self. And to fix them would cost us in taxes, in our unearned advantage in employment, in our ability to control local and state and national elections.