Since I didn’t get to go to St. Louis after all, I signed up for Netflix and watched two full seasons of Frankie and Grace.
I loved it. I think maybe I have some material for the writers. And since I’ve been told I look like Danny DeVito’s wife, maybe she can be brought in to play me. Just a thought.
As a baby boomer I can really see how the two characters, the bohemian, whacky artist Frankie, and the always dressed in the most stylish clothes Grace, are the warring sides of the women of my generation.
Not by itself a big revelation. But coming at this moment in my life, when I’m not very much younger than Fonda, and wondering what to do with what I hope will be three more decades when it seems like we could sort of enjoy what we worked so hard for, because I’m exhausted, and I’m damn tired of it.
It feels like we are always trying to do the right thing, but we don’t know the whole story till it’s over and it’s too late. But you know what really gets me is that some people did have the right stuff and they figured it out.
Take Hillary, for example. She and I are the same age, but the difference is that she grew up in a place that was not Alabama. She grew up learning things that I never learned.
In Alabama we grew up believing that what was in a book was sacred. We didn’t have discussions, arguments, and disagreements. Iin my house we didn’t raise our voices. Or cry in front of one another. We couldn’t. Leave it to Beaver was on, after all.
And there were not many role models for me in a small artist enclave in Alabama. In fact, I remember a woman who I really, really admired that could have been the prototype for Frankie. And of course, my momma would have been Grace. No doubt.
Like that women could be lawyers. Doctors even. I grew up thinking that women shouldn’t even work unless they had to. You know, to help out their husbands or what have you. I really didn’t even think much about earning a living because it never was made clear to me that that was part of what people actually did. I have spent most of my life trying to figure out what this is called. And I guess it’s name would be “white privilege” — that whole genteel southern thing that made me somehow immune to the necessity of actually working at something in order to pay bills.
Because you didn’t talk about money in my house. Not the prices of stuff, or how it got paid for, or whether or not you could have done without it. I realize now that my father’s generation didn’t think that way either, and it’s no wonder he struggled to make ends meet. He had no idea how that was done either. I always hear how someone is the first generation to go to college. Has it ever occurred to anyone that my mother’s generation was the first to have a complete set of silver? And only if you were wealthy did you even expect to have that. But when you grew up reading Better Homes and Gardens and Architectural Digest and House Beautiful you didn’t even think twice about those things.
But here’s the real truth of the matter: In my family, the people who had money were my mother’s family, and they got it by accident mostly. Running a shoe repair shop and investing in something called Magnetic Tape in Opelika, Alabama was what made them so comfortable after growing up very poor. And my father, whose mother had grown up in a very prominent family (though no one seems to have heard of them now) lived as an impoverished but proud widow.
And our generation still has issues. Lots of them. And that’s more apparent right now than it’s ever been. We know what happened. NOW. Now we know. Now we have to go back and figure out that it wasn’t our fault that things didn’t work out as promised.
He was a salesman when I was growing up. At first he sold fertilizer, for a company called VC. Virginia/Carolina Chemical Company. He took that job for one very important reason: To move our family to beautiful Baldwin County, Alabama where he’d spent the loveliest moments of his childhood, before they moved to Mississippi and the world went so haywire.
I know he must have loved the early days of selling fertilizer. He was, after all, the son and grandson of one of Mobile’s most well known farming families. Warley Farms. Warley Fruit and Produce. He’d grown up on that farm in St. Elmo, and it must have been wonderful in those early years. He had a wooden airplane that he would go into the fields to fly, and his sister Barbara always told me how she’d always have to be the one to go fetch it when he set it off flying. She was three years younger and that’s just the way things were back then.
And down here you traded on your name. Whether it was Warley Farms or another name, people knew you could be trusted. Until you couldn’t, of course. And that day must surely have come for my father, at a very sensitive age, because his father died suddenly when my father was 15, the same year that the US entered the war.
My grandmother struggled to make a life for her two children after she was widowed. As a Red Cross volunteer, she managed to earn enough to collect social security benefits later, and during the war they built a house that she lived in until she became unable to live alone any longer. One of those small boxy but sturdily built two bedroom homes with the plain moulding around the doorframes that told you it was built during wartime.
And then as soon as he was old enough, my father like millions of other young men signed up in the Navy and four years later came back to attend college, something I doubt most young men gave two hoots about before the war.
And so to many of us it matters whether you wrote your own speech if you said you did. It matters if you wrote your own book if you said you did. It matters if you are WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE.
Now I realize that we are all works in progress. But seriously?
But maybe I’m just getting overwrought because the only book I have written is called Delusions of Grandeur. And unlike Trump, I really did write it. Every word. And had a committee of professors with doctorates who edited and sent it back to me till it was as perfect as it could be, because it was a work of non-fiction. My story. In 2007. And I know about three people who have read it that didn’t have to.
And it pisses me off when people ghostwrite books and make a fortune. That’s gotta burn more than just a few people out there. Really?
My friend Glynn Wilson at New American Journal has done a great job encapsulating the story of The Art of the Deal, and I recommend you read it if you haven’t already…
So Newhouse gave us Trump....
and then go back and read the very first diary that I ever wrote on DailyKos…
you might even figure out who the puppetmaster was when I painted that painting. But then you knew that, right?