Goodbye to the Cuckoo’s Nest

Cathy LaGrow 10 Comments

Massive old buildings have always fascinated me. I mean, really, who doesn’t want to wander around one for hours, imagining every fantastic and ordinary and wondrous and sordid thing that took place within its walls?

Or is it only writers who do that?

In September of 2008, the Oregon State Hospital in Salem (where they filmed the classic movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) orchestrated a series of tours of the facility, since large chunks of it were about to be torn down. The tours, though unpublicized, quickly became the hottest ticket in town. (Besides the Hollywood connection, the Hospital gained notoriety in 2005 when The New York Times published a story detailing how the unclaimed “cremains” of 3,489 former patients had been found in a storage room, in mouldering cans whose labels had rotted off.)

So what did I do when this fabulous opportunity to see a historic building presented itself?

I had a baby that month, and missed the entire thing. Continue reading →

Short Stories can rock. Honest.

Cathy LaGrow 9 Comments

I used to hate short stories. Well, “hate” is a strong word. But I really, really disliked them.

Short stories, at least to someone who loves Really Big Books, can feel like a gyp. Just when the tale is taking off and gaining momentum and you’re invested in the characters – bam, it’s over. You feel like you’ve been a victim of “bait and switch.”  False advertising. Premature elucidation.

The few short stories I had read weren’t even very good. So for a long while, I steered clear.

Then my oldest brother (those boys crop up here often, don’t they?) went to Canada on vacation, and brought me back a short story collection written by the person who would become my Favorite Living Writer (more on her in a future post, I promise.) My mind was forever changed. Well-executed short stories ROCK. Continue reading →

Five Little Dionnes and Where They Grew

Cathy LaGrow 12 Comments

Mercifully (for her, for us), Kate Gosselin has mostly disappeared from the weekly covers of the tabloids. For a while there, it seemed as if Kate and her reverse mullet were going to be with us until the Lord returned.

A couple of months ago, I checked out the first season of “Jon & Kate + 8” from the library. I can see why people watched the show – it was fascinating, but also, it makes you think to yourself, Hey, I don’t have it so bad! I can handle two toddlers, easy-peasy! Say what you will about Kate (and there is plenty to say); there are very few women who could manage to care for two toddlers and six babies at the same time, few people who could keep things organized and keep everyone fed and clean, without losing their own minds.

Of course, one can easily raise objections to the very idea of putting children on display like that. But the Gosselins were not the first (or the most egregious) example of the media (and people’s curiosity) exploiting a set of multiples. That sad distinction belongs to five sisters who were born in a snowy hamlet in Ontario, in the middle of the Great Depression. Their survival was a miracle; their lives were a tragedy.

In late 1933, a 25-year-old farmwife became pregnant for the seventh time in eight years (a thought, by the way, that just clobbers me.) This time, Elzire Dionne suspected she was carrying twins, but when she went into labor in May, two months early, her doctor delivered five identical baby girls. Combined, they weighed less than 14 pounds.

The odds of conceiving quints naturally is 1 in 65 million (it’s probably less for identicals, but I couldn’t find the stats.) In 1934, there were no NICU’s – and there were no known cases of quints surviving, ever. The Dionne’s doctor wrapped the tiny babies in old napkins, placed them on a corner of the bed, and waited for them to die.

Unbelievably, the babies lived. They were kept in a wicker laundry basket next to the stove, and fed water and corn syrup. Once newspapers got wind of the story (“World’s First Surviving Quintuplets!”), it spread across the globe. The new babies were an international sensation.

Within four months, the government of Ontario had declared the Dionnes to be “unfit parents” (but only for the quints, evidentally), and took the babies from their parents. For the next nine years, the Canadian government turned the girls into Ontario’s biggest tourist attraction.


A large compound was built across the road from the Dionne farmhouse and was opened to visitors. The babies lived there with a doctor, some nurses, and a handful of policemen. Their playground was a “public observation area” where, eventually, 6,000 people per day filed by to gawk at the girls. Their mother (who had three more babies after the quints) ran a souvenir shop on the premises, selling cups and postcards and candy bars covered with pictures of her daughters.

The girls were required to follow a strict schedule, and were regularly subjected to inspections and testing. They were used to sell a wide variety of popular products, and were featured in several Hollywood films. Hollywood celebrities filed by, along with the masses, to stare at the girls.

Their compound, dubbed “Quintland,” was surrounded by barbed wire.

When the girls were nine years old, their parents won back custody, but the fractured family found it impossible to mend itself. The girls were unhappy and felt isolated, and they left home at eighteen, severing almost all contact with their family. One of the sisters died two years later, after entering a convent. Another one died at 35. The surviving sisters wrote a scathing book about their ordeal. Two sisters are still living today.

******

The comparisons between the Dionne sisters and the current rash of mega-family media darlings are obvious and easy to draw (although by any measure, the Dionne case was the most extreme, and the most tragic.) But all of this makes me think about the much broader issue of “celebrity,” that monstrous sub-culture we have created.

Human beings who accomplish or produce monumental things are legitimately famous (or infamous.) People who are known simply for being born, or because of how they behave, are spectacles.

In the Dionne’s case, what is so appalling is that those girls had no say in the matter – they were victims in every sense of the word. In today’s world, however, there are masses of people who make spectacles of themselves, in order to be famous – famous for, um, making spectacles of themselves. (As a naturally shy person, this concept just confounds me to no end. I don’t want anyone staring at me. Pretty much ever.)

Look, no one is more curious than I am. I understand the fascination with sociology, with anomalies. Here is the problem, though, with the slippery slope of curiosity: when we train our attention on something, we begin to consume it, to use it up, whether that thing is a book or a snowboard or a meatball sandwich. Or a person.

And human beings were never intended to be feasted upon.

I am no preacher, but here is what I would say to those who would be famous, those individuals who are yearning for attention: Go out and do something, or say something, or write something, or make something. We all cling to the surface of the same earth – by God, contribute something while you’re here. Your life is too valuable and too unique and too vital for you to just stand there, absorbing stares. You are not a tree, or a mountain range, or a sunset, or a shooting star. You are something infinitely more precious. You are flesh and blood and bone and spirit and soul and laughter and sorrow and love and rage and tenderness and joy and determination the likes of which the natural world can only dream of.

You were not created to be a spectacle.

******

By the way: Yvonne. Annette. Cecile. Emilie. Marie.

Those were the Dionne girls’ names.

Just thought we should know.

My So-called Age

Cathy LaGrow 15 Comments

I now understand the term “coltish.”

My running route takes me onto the campus of the local high school, and when I run there, in the evenings, the various fields are full of teenagers practicing sports. They seem to be all arms and gangly legs, and they resemble nothing so much as baby horses, playing in a meadow. Coltish: it describes them perfectly.

I no longer resemble a baby horse, and it’s difficult for me to believe I ever did. The last seven years have not been kind to my body. To whit:

A half-dozen pregnancies, half of which lasted long enough to become physical experiences spat up from the bowels of hell. (Cumulative weight gain: about 120 pounds. Number of days spent thinking I was dying: all of them.) Two deliveries, one torturous. Twenty-eight months total of exclusive breastfeeding. Punishing insomnia. And so on.

All of this at an age, and a stage of marriage, when I should be sending my kids off to college.

Several months ago I finally started running again, after four and a half straight years of pregnancies and nursing. The first time I went out, it was as if I had commandeered a stranger’s body, heavy and stiff and foreign. My arms couldn’t get in sync with my legs. I struggled through a mile, stopped, and thought My God. What was that?

But I went back the next day, and the next – five days in a row, that first week, feeling like a cadet at boot camp. My knees ached and my shins splinted and my sides stitched. Over the months, as I lengthened my mileage, I ended up running through that high school, past all those teenagers. And it dawned on me, as my lungs burned a hole in my chest: That used to be you. And now it isn’t.

Profound? No. But I had never been forced to confront it before.

Sometimes one of those young girls runs across my path, chasing an errant ball, and then waits to one side until I have passed. I always avoid eye contact. Not just because that’s my Standard Operating Procedure, but because I don’t want to see what I imagine to be in her eyes, what was in my eyes at that age.

A vague censure. That, or complete indifference.

Wait, I want to call out. I am old enough to be the mother of your older siblings. I’ve had two babies recently…there’s a good reason for the cellulite, for the plodding motion. I don’t sleep well. I’m doing the best I can.

If I feel churlish enough, I’ll mentally cry out, Let’s see if you look so good after a quarter century and two babies!

(Did I mention that I’m operating on very little sleep?)

It’s not these girls’ fault – they probably barely notice me. No, it’s my own mind that provides the negative commentary, the comparisons. Most of the baby weight is gone by now, but I feel so different – I am different. I am no longer young, not like that, certainly not mentally. (Nothing will make you feel older, faster, than trying to lift a 34-pound toddler from his crib when your back is spasming because you ridiculously injured it yesterday while getting out of the freaking car.)

It is difficult to reconcile the changes that have taken place. First I was one person, then – days and years later – I was another, and there was no line I crossed, no light that changed to signal the passage. It didn’t happen to me – one day it just had happened, and there I was.

(Having babies late in life probably condensed all of this, for me. When they scrawl “Geriatric Pregnancy” across your chart, it’s not exactly subtle.)

I will be forty in a few weeks. I feel about fifty, but I am fighting back. I take vitamins, when I remember. Three times a week I pull on my running shorts and my good shoes and my cheap stopwatch, and I force myself out the door. The first twenty minutes are torture, every time, but I persist. For my boys, for myself. I try not to do useless, disheartening math problems in my head. Like, “When the youngest graduates from high school, I will be…this old.” Or “When the oldest has his third child, I will be…this old.”

Sometimes, ignorance is best.

We have many, many miles to go before our babies are up and out. Many years of sports and trips and sleepovers and high energy and noise. I will patch this body and mind back together as best I can, and I will keep going. I will try not to drag. I will try not to act my age.

I have brought forth two boys who dazzle me in every way, and I want to explore the universe with them, for as long as I can.

Fading is not an option.

The Astronaut

Cathy LaGrow 9 Comments

Classification: memoir, non-fiction

Brother #1 came to visit last night. We were talking about books (he’d brought me yesterday’s New York Times Book Review) when he stopped and said, “Oh! I didn’t even know that Frank McCourt was dead. Did you know that?”

“What?” I said. “No, he’s not.”

“Yes, he is! It’s true.” My brother whipped out his iPhone and pulled up McCourt’s wiki page. “Look, right there.”

I pretended to disbelieve the information for another minute. How on earth did I miss that news? Then again, McCourt died in July of 2009, when I was still nursing my second baby. There isn’t a whole lot I remember from that time period.

After Angela’s Ashes (McCourt’s memoir) was published in 1996, even after all the hype and praise, even after the awards, I resisted reading the book for a long time. The main reason? When I picked it up at the store and flipped through it, I noticed that McCourt didn’t use quotation marks around the dialogue in the book.

Well, that’s ridiculous and confusing, I thought, and I set the book down and wandered away.

Eventually, sometime in the early 2000’s, I caved in and bought the book. Once I started reading it I couldn’t stop (and those missing quotation marks were no trouble at all.) When I finished the last page, I looked up and said to myself:

Stunning, stunning, stunning.

That is the most stunning book I’ve ever read.

That’s what I subsequently told anyone who would listen, and it may still be true, all these years later. If you haven’t read Angela’s Ashes, oh, you should.


Frank McCourt grew up in Ireland in the 1930’s, and his childhood defines the term “abject poverty.” His Father was a drunk who periodically abandoned the family; McCourt’s mother, Angela, was left to provide food and shelter for her four surviving children (three others died in infancy.) McCourt lived in places where the floors were covered in water throughout the cold winters, places where there was one outdoor toilet that was shared by the entire neighborhood and was never cleaned by anyone. He ate whatever food his mother could beg for – sometimes there was no food, and the children went hungry. He attended school wearing shoes that were patched together with rubber from bicycle tires, and was taught by Catholic masters who beat their small pupils whenever they felt like it.

The distinctive magic of McCourt’s writing is that it doesn’t contain a trace of self-pity, even when he’s describing the most awful events. His story should be too heartbreaking to read, but it isn’t, because McCourt infuses it with just enough gentle humor and hope.

Angela’s Ashes was so extraordinary, it earned McCourt a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and spent more than two years on international bestseller lists. McCourt went on to write two more bestselling memoirs, ‘Tis and Teacher Man.

Weeks ago, my brother sent me a quote from the TV show Mad Men, and before he even explained the context, I adored the words. “She was born in a barn and she died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.”

Frank McCourt grew up chasing rats from his crumbling home, battling typhoid and chronic conjunctivitis, and literally licking food grease off of newspaper pages when he got too hungry. He died as one of the most famous, feted, successful writers in the world.

Frank McCourt was an astronaut.