Pictured above is one of my latest Syracuse University themed gear purchases (themed? stamped? branded?), a beany hat I wear that is perfect for cold spring days, with temps hereabouts varying between twenty-eight and seventy degrees. Snowflakes were falling as I began writing this piece last week. Walking the dog that day I had on my SU beanie, my SU stretch side-pocket leggings, and an SU fleece in bright-ass orange. Am I mad for SU or SU sports’ teams? No. Not at all. I did attend SU so my wearing this stuff is an authentic choice, I guess? People who – years after graduating – continue to organize tail gate parties or attend numerous alumni functions baffle me, as I don’t have that particular need, interest, identification or loyalty – whatever it is. I had to laugh as I exited the house because, here I am, decked out like a real fan, derived from the word fanatic. Fanatic. Which I am not, not about SU the institution, as a center of college sports, as my alma mater, or anything else.
People love their tribes. I avoid them like the plague, generally, because belonging to any group, club, organization, what have you, feels like boxing myself in – and why the heck would I ever do that? One of my several recurring nightmares from childhood was that I was being buried alive, thanks largely to the film ‘Premature Burial’ staring Ray Milland, which I saw as a ten-year-old the week before Halloween. So, no, no, no boxes, please, and no tribal affiliations either. The only ‘tribes’ I claim are feminist and Democrat, and both of those are famously diverse, fractious and organized on a scattershot basis, just like the fractious Mueller fan-dam-ly from which I spring. Ah, the Muellers. What a bunch. What characters! What a – family.
The real motivation behind all that SU gear? It simplifies my life. I don’t and never have cared all that much about clothes, don’t like shopping, therefore going on the SU Bookstore website and browsing among items for useful garments distills shopping down to a couple of clicks. Simple = good. And, orange is a great color, especially when walking on country roads in rural America, and if you’ve never read Stephen Kings account of so doing, I highly recommend it, and link it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/06/19/on-impact )
Simple is good. ‘Men’s’ pants and shorts – which I have been buying and wearing for over forty years – are also good, mostly because unlike the vast majority of designed and marketed to women’s pants and shorts, they have great pockets. They’re also a lot more durable, literally built to last longer. Women want and need pockets; women want and need and deserve clothing that is durable. I also like to wear men’s boxers in summer as shorts because they’re capacious, 100% cotton for coolness, often in great colors, and they don’t ride up my hips or bum like “Ladies’ panties”, which I gave up in college. I choose comfort over all other concerns, and yes, of course, there are exceptions, although it’s been so long since I wore heels, the last time I did – for a wedding in May of 2022, it was an exercise in the power of mind over matter, and by matter, I mean mind over real live physical discomfort after about 4 hours of standing and walking around, most of it on stone floors. To think I once enjoyed – really enjoyed – those occasional events requiring a slip, pantyhose, and heels. Feh. I noticed one of the groom’s aunties had flats on, flats as in Converse low-rise sneakers, in a fabulous bright color. Genius. File under: Next Time.
I know that two of my more glam adjacent girlfriends think I dress like a slob. They’re both in professions that require a heightened style of dress: high-end NYC real estate, and Southern California business consulting. I do as well, think that I’m a tad slob-o-don-y, but I love my practical, slob-o-don garb. I remember a woman I knew slightly, as a dog owner only, accosting me in Central Park ages ago, saying, “What are you wearing!?!” She was dressed to the nines, with full-on make-up at 6:30 a.m., which I assumed was for work and also, I suspect, because dog walks were famous for bringing about romances between dog owners. But whatever her thing was, I said, “It’s 6:30 in the morning. Why do you care?’ I was wearing, I recall exactly, men’s boxers and my favorite Fire Department tee-shirt – so soft, 100% cotton and nice and loose – in burgundy. And flip flops. Did I have a boob-sling on? Maybe. Maybe not. It was hotter than hot out, and again, comfort first, peeps. My best, best friends, including the glam adjacent, are my friends in part because even if their eyes pop slightly at my lack of sartorial panache, they know better than to comment, or try to fix what ain’t fucking broken.
Clothing – the length or width of a skirt, the height and shape of a collar, neckline or sleeve – has been used to control, distract, hamper, and impoverish women since forever. The fashion industry, long dominated by male designers and owners while enriching mostly male stockholders, reflects our culture as a whole, and is not, in my opinion, very female forward, although that is changing, at a glacial pace, if you think glacial pre-global-warming era slow. Give. Us. Pockets.
Still, I acknowledge that my own sense of ‘fashion’, my penchant for men’s trousers and SU garb, is not only because simple is good, but because my experience of clothes, and shopping, as a girl-child led me to take a route I might otherwise not have taken. Who knows; that winding country road has and continues to be traveled, but it began not far from where I sit today, in the house I lived in with my own special mother dearest. Perennially obese with a penchant for combining sweatshirt tops and pearls over black stretch-pants, she didn’t want to buy me clothes; she didn’t want to spend money on me, period, and, especially after I hit puberty, she just wouldn’t. Like the patriarchal culture we live in, momma used her power in the consumer clothing lane to control and punish me, attempting to make me into someone I was not: a pliable, compliant, super feminine girlie girl. It is worth noting that her definition of feminine meant not speaking unless spoken to, no interest in athletics or boys (unless they were Catholic), and no pursuits that weren’t centered on the home. That I loved being outdoors, and swimming, was a talented athlete in general was considered un-ladylike in the extreme by the woman who gave birth to me. My sisters were much more in her wheelhouse of what was appropriately feminine as they weren’t good at sports (I believe my older sister skipped gym class for all 4 years of high school), spent 99% of their time sequestered in their rooms rather than wandering and playing in the woods, which I did all the time. My eldest sister was given carte blanche when it came to spending money on clothes, which weirdly also included two wigs at one point.
Thrift shopping, my mommy dearest work around, where I could spend my own, earned money, saved me, but I would never claim I was ever able to deck myself out as a result. I even occasionally have picked up perfectly good SU gear while thrifting. Not to mention a Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress, made in Italy, the real thing, a slew of gorgeous cashmere scarves and sweaters, corduroys from L.L. Bean, Ralph Lauren, and Ann Taylor, Peck and Peck sweaters and made in Scotland wool skirts, sweaters and pants, items able to withstand the weather, weather like today, 40 degrees out and rainy.
Clothes. Such fun. Ephemeral. Necessary. If ‘the clothes make the man’ (vestis virum facit), what do clothes do for or to women? Another endless subject, with so many sideroads, alleys and dead-end lanes, providing plenty of fodder for another day or days. Women are not decorative plates on the walls of men’s lives, or in the gaze of our families, culture, institutions and even other women. You don’t have to dress ‘like a girl’, in pink and pale blue or whatever ‘this year’s color’ is. One of my continual frustrations when I do go beyond my narrow on-line shopping lane is looking for the bold colors I love but getting fed a steady diet of ‘heather-ed’ pastels. Make it stop, please!!!! As writer and blogger Erin McKean wrote in 2006, a quote often mistakenly attributed to fashion icon Diana Vreeland, “You don’t have to be pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.”
Vestimenta sunt milier, which, translated from the Latin, means clothes are not the woman. My new motto? Perhaps.
This photo is of is my grandmother, Marjorie Davidson, on the left, and her sister Martha, the elder by two years, circa 1894 or ’95. I love this picture because I love – loved – my grandmother, and because of the look of fierceness on Great Aunt Martha’s face, at least as I see it. I like to imagine that, as the older sister, Martha would have defended her little sis with all her might, but it could be that the photographer was socially inept, didn’t know how to treat little girls, or maybe he kept insisting she sparkle or smile, in which case I know exactly how she felt: men have been telling me to smile for years, and I have perfected a truly frightening grimace in response.
These sisters, Martha and Marjorie, were the best of friends their entire lives, although those lives took significantly different paths, and my grandmother outlived her beloved sister by over twenty years, living to be almost ninety-eight. My sense was that their parents were enlightened, good people, who loved all of their children, and were respected and loved in return. Martha and Marjorie were educated beyond what was much more conventional for the time; after graduating from high school in Monticello, N.Y, they attended Oneonta and Albany Normal Colleges, respectively, and they both went on to teach, Martha for many years in the Oneonta School District, in Otsego County, New York, and Marjorie on the eastern end of Long Island, in the Hampton Bay S. D.
I don’t know how my great aunt met her future husband, Ward Woolheaver, but I know she waited many years to marry him because in true gothic novel fashion, he was married already, with a wife in a mental institution, a wife he would not divorce her in her diminished and vulnerable state. And so, having met and fallen in love they waited, until after many years the first Mrs. W passed away, and Ward was free to wed. By then Martha was in her fifties, and I believe Ward was at least a decade older. From all reports, my grandmother’s, my dad’s, and my mom’s, Ward and Martha had a great life together, buying a home in Franklin, New York, where they loved to socialize with friends and family. It wasn’t a long marriage, however, as both of the pair were very heavy smokers; I clearly remember Martha wreathed in a cloud of smoke, with a long, schmancy cigarette holder, upswept hair, and chunky bracelets. So stylish, I thought, even if I also thought I was going to die when she visited: along with my dad’s pipe, fresh air inside our house during those dinners was in very short supply. Her husband, Ward, died first, I’m not sure what year, but I know that Aunt Martha lived alone for at least a decade – moving to a ground floor apartment in Oneonta – before succumbing to lung cancer in 1968.
I do know that my grandmother met my grandfather when he returned from World War I to finish his high school education. She was his Latin and physics teacher, and by the time he completed his schooling, he was almost twenty-three, and she was almost twenty-six, and they’d fallen in love. She urged him to go on to college, he was so bright, but his dream was to farm, so she left teaching to become a farmer’s wife. According to my dad’s first cousin (and mine once-removed, I think is how it works), my grandmother worked harder on the farm than three hired hands put together, and I believe it. Her husband, my grandfather, was an extremely difficult man she loved a lot, as did I, a man who was volatile and abusive, expecting absolute obedience from his wife and children. He was insecure and ego driven in a way she was not, picking fights whenever and wherever he could, at home, and in public. He didn’t know how to be loved; he feared it. His favorite brother, Fred, had died suddenly at eighteen, going septic from a scratch on his cheek, one minute perfectly vital and alive, then dead less than forty-eight hours later. I don’t think my grandfather, sixteen at the time, ever recovered from the loss. Like Marjorie and Martha, the brothers had been best friends, and I’ve often wondered if he felt that Fred, who he and everyone else had loved, haunted every room in the construct of his own much more difficult temperament.
But I digress.
My grandparents married in 1921, and bought the farm the same year, where they grew cauliflower and kept dairy cows until retiring in the mid-fifties. Their fourth child, my uncle Jay, was born in 1926; he joined an older brother, and two older sisters, Bill, Betty and Martha, at home in New Kingston, the latter named after my grandmother’s sister. Aunt Martha visited to meet baby Jay at the farm in 1926 or possibly even 1927. I’m not sure; the roads were less traveled, and much less travelable back in the day, thus what is a forty-minute ride to Oneonta now was at least ninety minutes back then, if the weather was clear.
Great Aunt Martha wasn’t a huge fan of her brother-in-law, and from what I’ve heard, and the little I remember, the feeling was entirely mutual. Still, she very much loved her baby sister, prioritizing that relationship by keeping in touch through letters and calls, while making visits to the farm whenever she could, and could stomach putting up with her sister’s bully of a husband, always trying to pick a fight. Unlike her sister, Martha had not learned, nor would she ever learn, that when it came to her kid sister’s husband it might be better to keep her tongue behind her teeth. Still defending her sister, Martha picked fights right back at him, and for that, I am deeply grateful. You go girl.
As the story went, visiting the farm in ‘27, and after examining and exclaiming over baby Jay, Great Aunt Martha said to my grandfather, ‘Well, I hope that’s it, Bill.’
‘What do you mean Martha?’
‘I said, I hope that’s it. I hope you’re going to give Marge a rest.’
‘What does that mean, Martha? Give her a rest?’
And where was grandma at this stage? Tending to the baby? Hiding out in the kitchen or living room? From many other confrontations I witnessed between my grandfather and any one of his many sworn enemies (a long list that included my mother), I believe she would be sitting right there witnessing it all, giving nothing away, a female embodiment of the Rock of Gibraltar, albeit a rock with a slight smile on its face. (You go girl.)
‘I mean: I hope this is it. As in no more children.’
Nine months later, maybe ten, my father was born.
All hail Great Aunt Martha! Without you, I would not be here, you darling, pugnacious little girl, you loving sister, you fight picker, you marvel of a woman. You, Martha the First, rejecter of sparkle. All hail!
“The Dalai Lama say that the world will be saved by Western woman. Not any women, perhaps not all women, but Burning Women. Women who have stepped out of silence and into the fullness of their power. Angry women who love the world and her creatures too much to let it be destroyed so thoughtlessly for a moment longer.
Burning woman is the heart and soul of revolution – inner and outer. She burns for change, she dances in the fire of the old, all while visioning and weaving the new.” ~ Lucy H. Pearce
*the future is female, as is more of the past than I was aware – by which I mean I have been following several spaces that celebrate women in the arts, science, culture and elsewhere, and I am overwhelmed by just how many women historically occupied those spaces yet were never taught, never celebrated, never brought into the light as artists, as composers, as writers, journalists, chemists, engineers.. the list goes on and on…and, I am burning.
The first time I had an orgasm I was twenty-three, and while I may have had other orgasms previously, I suppose, I hadn’t really had all that much sex, let alone great sex, by that point in my life, so who knows? In other words, I wasn’t sure. This one, however, was so big, so much the mythic Holy Fuck, that I couldn’t not mistake it for anything other than what it was. Unfortunately, it came at the hands of a lying sack of shite, but I didn’t know that then, although it would be made clear not long after the Big Oh, when he finally, finally invited me back to his swanky, rent controlled apartment on 86th street between the park and Columbus Avenue, which apartment he shared with an ex-girlfriend, now just a non-sexual pal. You understand, right? Yes, sir, absolutely, sir (subtext: can you do that thing with your tongue again?!!)! The arrangement with his ex was made clear soon after he and I met and started frisking around one another. The apartment was a three bedroom, you see, and they paid very little in rent; both he and ex/pal were visual artists, and neither was willing to give the place up even though they were no longer a couple, and so it goes. In any age in any large, crowded city, and certainly in New York City, real estate can collide with love, thus this ‘situation’ was completely within the realm of credulity. My realm, for sure, as I was both young and dumb. And, he was very, very sexy. That orgasm, JHFC, life forms on Mars might’ve seen or felt its vibrations.
However, it turned out this story of his was absolutely, no question, a load of horseshit, total fucking fiction. Non-sexual roomies? Living together as exes and good friends? Sure, pal. We’d finished playing tennis on that fateful day (*not the day of the Big Oh), on the courts in Central Park, (*tennis is a great game for meeting and frisking if you’re into or looking for that), and Mr. Big Oh/Lying shack of shite said he wanted to show me his place. Okeedoke! Thought bubble: tennis then sex? What could be better? Not much. Yay.
Great space, nice building, impressive – I’ll give you a tour. Sure! One of the bedrooms was his sculpture studio, the other was her painting – wait. The other was her painting studio?! But. Suddenly, I was walking in fog, brain fog, my stomach down around my feet, slightly nauseous. Stunned. I kept walking, to the third bedroom, which was huge and flooded with light, facing the street, and nicely furnished with a king-sized bed, the only bed I’d seen so far. Harumph. Full length mirror in the corner, check, and dresser, check – complete with a bit of feminine mess, as well as a framed photo of the schmuck standing next to me embracing a woman not me (obviously) on its surface. There he proposed – y’know, that we engage in more co-ed wrestling. I thought you were friends, that she was your ex, you said she was just a friend. He laughed, shrugging his shoulders. Well, then, fuck no, asshole. I actually did that, although I didn’t say asshole or fuck no, I mumbled and bumbled and got out of there PDQ. I was young and dumb, but I wasn’t a total dope, although he sure made me feel like one, in that moment, in their bedroom. Their bedroom. Ugh.
Look, he was a sculptor who did odd jobs – one of which was maintenance of a cemetery in the Bronx, fixing gravestones and time worn statuary, and another of which was teaching tennis. I didn’t know this then, how could I, but common wisdom says that tennis teachers, especially at the casual play level, y’know, just for fun and exercise, are generally rabbits, as in they’ll fuck everything that moves, so yes, find your frisk there with another player/student, but don’t fuck the instructor unless it’s purely to burn more calories, no strings attached.
We met playing tennis in Central Park; I was twenty-three, looking for friends, real friends, in NYC for the first time, having left the east village for greener pastures, or so I hoped. I was working at a bar a bunch of tennis types frequented, Hanratty’s on Amsterdam and 96th. I’d played tennis in high school, not too seriously, but was pretty good, so, sure, I’ll play! Hanratty’s, by the way, had great food, and was always busy, yet I was consistently the only waiter who made money there, which confused me. It took me several years to figure out that this was because everyone else who worked there was spending their tips on cocaine. Young, and dumb. And, for three years at that point, not drinking, or doing drugs. Nope. Sober as a judge, yet none the wiser for it. So, basically, I was missing a lot of signs, all over the place. (psssssst: if they don’t take you to their apartment, rather insisting on meetingelsewhere, they def be married or attached, GF!!)
Mr. Big Oh/Lying Sack of Shit was good looking in an untypical way, in great shape, with lots of hair, and he was funny, smart, interesting, different. He pursued me in a way that was pointed but subtle, if that makes sense. He was also good friends with a couple I was trying to befriend, two classically trained, college educated pianists who had apartments in the neighborhood. She worked at Hanratty’s with me, and gave music lessons, while her boyfriend taught both tennis and piano. They were several years older than I was, and Matt, Mr. Big Oh, was in his thirties. Surely, if he was lying to me about his relationship, one or the other of my brand-new forever friends would say something? Surely, they would? Ah, no. Nope. That’s on you, new kid in town. And maybe they didn’t know? They knew. She did say something, when I questioned her, afterwards. FEH.
But, let’s get to the first time certified Big Oh, and put his lies aside for now (mostly). He pursued, we frisked and flirted, played tennis, and drank with his friends (he’d known the couple for at least five years to my three or four months) at the bar at Hanratty’s, him drinking booze and me drinking seltzer, or water. And, he lied, he lied like a dog, no one challenged him or warned me, and I didn’t, ever, question or challenge him because – naïve. And so, one hot afternoon in July, my birthday month (he was a Pisces, another water sign, compatible! and of course I remember that, along with his full name), we had sex in my apartment, dragging one another gleefully up five flights of stairs to my futon covered captain’s bed.
What happened next? Oh, the usual. Shorts, tee shirts, undies flung hither and yon, saliva swapping, hands everywhere, breath all breathy, and the absolute pure joy and fun of skin on skin contact with another human being. My. Favorite. Sport. Sex. So great. And at one point, Mr. Big Oh was eating our heroine out, and here it is, the Big Oh, like a train boom appearing in a tunnel and I am right smack dab (legs spread!) in the middle of the tracks. Run. Me. Over.
How did I know it was an actual, real orgasm? Well, lemme tell you – the blood rushed through my body so intensely, so bigly, so overwhelmingly, I was at first, whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa, shaking and quaking and then, well then I was alluvasudden unable to move. What the what is this?!! Paralyzed. I could not move. For several very long moments, I was immobile, and, because nothing is ever uncomplicated – I went right to the lane of, ‘Oh fuck, this is how I die, or I remain forever paralyzed, and my parents find me, naked, spread eagle on my bed in this shit hole apartment?!! The little – literal – death, or disability, from orgasm, from pleasure!?!! Waaaaaah!!’ He didn’t notice (he was busy), but, and, however, after a few very long, long beats, movement returned, as did my sense that that, why that sure was something special! Was it ever.
Since then, I have to admit, I have never had such a booming orgasm, one that paralyzed me again, and that’s okay by me. I have had many other orgasms, big and small, and all points in-between. I’ve also slept with men who could not find my clitoris or make me cum for love or money or anything else. And that’s okay, too. Even mediocre or bad sex is sex, right? Maybe. Sometimes it’s just a kind of bandaid. One fellow I was involved with while my dad was dying was so frustrated by my lack of orgasm after the first night we spent together – when I’d had several – I knew I was withholding, but his style in bed sucked, and truth he was a bandaid, a tourniquet, merely, a night out, a sex break while I watched my dad fade away. Not my best moment, although I had had high hopes when we met and started seeing one another. Ultimately, though, I just didn’t like him, so his frustration was fine by me. He wasn’t a nice guy, too controlling, and much too angry, especially at his soon-to-be ex-wife, and the way he operated in the world was how he was in bed: a dull, one note, buzz saw of a battering ram. Foreplay, fun, connection – all of these – are essential, imo, to having great sex.
Fifteen years after my revelatory afternoon in the three-bedroom apartment on 86th street, I ran into Mr. Matthew Big Oh in the post office on Columbus and 90th street, a long narrow space where it is impossible to avoid anyone, regardless of who they are, or were, to you. Oh. Matt. Although at first, I thought, wait, no, this cannot be him?! He was being led, almost as if on a leash, by a woman who was probably my age, possibly younger, and he looked old, and worn out. His expression was the most perfect representation of hang-dog (Miriam-Webster: sad, dejected, sheepish) I’ve ever seen – it was almost as if he couldn’t raise his head above the level of his girlfriend’s nose, and she was short, people. Oh Matt. Karma Baby. Not my problem, and thank goodness for that. I was just another score for him, I think, one of many; who knows how many tennis students and their friends, how many women, period, he picked up in Central Park during his prime years, long gone. Good for him. Whatever. I’m simply sorry I fell for his line, but sure, you do you, Matt.
At the time I saw him again, I was working for a writer in my neighborhood, another one of those part-time jobs I took while trying to figure my shit out, contemplating leaving NYC to write my own stories, instead of helping a dilettante with hers. Running into him was a little like watching an old journal go up in smoke: satisfying, a cause for reflection, a letting go, grateful to put a pin in it, done, over. This is not mine, not me, not anymore; this represents another life, another world, another brick in the wall of life’s experiences.
*Every once and a while I go back to Leaves of Grass, re-reading it for the umpteenth time, because it is beautiful, and powerful, and profound. It is a song, and a poem,an anthem, a celebration of life. Here is the first stanza…and if you’ve never read it, or any Whitman, I urge you to do so.
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes . . . . the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume . . . . it has no taste of the distillation . . . . it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever . . . . I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echos, ripples, and buzzed whispers . . . . loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration . . . . the beating of my heart . . . . the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored sea- rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice . . . . words loosed to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses . . . . a few embraces . . . . a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides,
The feeling of health . . . . the full-noon trill . . . . the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
