One Writer’s Journey: The Book Tour
By Jill Culiner
Episode Twenty-Two: Inside the Yellow Windows
“The harvest is always richer in another man’s field,” Ovid wrote over two thousand years ago, and so it seems when I pass through towns and villages. In the night, wooden frame houses with lit windows have me longing to leave the bus, take a peek, step into another life, one that seems warm, stable, and perfect. It’s what I call, “The Yellow Window Syndrome.” Of course, nothing is really better elsewhere.
A book talk in Raleigh and an invitation to stay with Susan, a long-lost relative, and her husband Don, does give me a chance to see how others live. My own life, often itinerant and always on a shoestring, is usually pared down to simple good food, small villages, houses made of natural materials, wood-burning stoves, and a garden patch. Security is out of reach, but dirt trails have always been invitations to adventure. With my dogs, I’ve followed many into deep forests, scooped valleys, onto flat plains, and into other countries.
I now find myself ensconced in Susan’s huge house with six bathrooms and six bedrooms. Beautiful wood floors are covered by expensive carpets in neutral colors, and in the “basement” apartment where I’m lodged, broad windows give out to a luxuriant garden. Even the guest bathroom is filled with so many perfumes, oils, and beauty products that a professional salon would find it hard to compete.
A book talk in Raleigh and an invitation to stay with Susan, a long-lost relative, and her husband Don, does give me a chance to see how others live. My own life, often itinerant and always on a shoestring, is usually pared down to simple good food, small villages, houses made of natural materials, wood-burning stoves, and a garden patch. Security is out of reach, but dirt trails have always been invitations to adventure. With my dogs, I’ve followed many into deep forests, scooped valleys, onto flat plains, and into other countries.
In the oversize kitchen, dernier cri, nothing much is going on: “We aren’t really into cooking. We eat out most of the time. We’re taking you to a Japanese restaurant tonight.” But the deep cupboards are filled with the latest equipment, and the enormous refrigerator is packed full with food. Most will certainly be wasted—in the USA, 40 million tons end up in landfills each year. What is important is purchasing the food, having it here, and then going out for something fancy. The many other cupboards in this huge house are equally filled with clothes, cloths, linens—who could possibly use all of that in a lifetime? No one. The average American throws away eighty-one pounds of clothing every year. Why all the excess?
Perhaps to underline security, to show that disaster has been kept at bay.
Yet fragility is here, after all. Don is overweight, has heart problems, and, because of financial difficulties, he has no life insurance. He’s a doctor, and under a lot of stress—not because his patients have worrying illnesses, but because he needs to attract more clients into the clinic. If he doesn’t, his partners will ask him to leave.
“Basically, a doctor should be seeing 30 to 50 new patients every single month, and that means publicity, putting your face out there, offering competitive services and reasonable pricing.”
“Since when is being a doctor a business?” Obviously, I live in another world.
He laughs at my naivety. “Times have changed in healthcare. You have to keep your eye on the competition, know how other practices are performing, what they’re offering for similar services, the insurance plans they’re accepted, and their availability for patient scheduling.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Hire a sales rep, start using marketing techniques and social media. On top of that, we have to be very careful about lawsuits. Awhile back, I worked with a nurse who was excellent at her job, but she was so inconsistent you couldn’t count on her. Eventually, we fired her, but when people called us up for references, all we could say was, ‘Yes, she worked here,’ but nothing else. That caller could have been anyone, a lawyer, a friend of hers trying to get us to perjure ourselves so she could sue. Believe me, this is life on a tightrope.”
Susan, on the other hand, radiates stability. A solid-looking woman with practical hair and glasses, (although in the family photo album, she had once been a lovely slender princess with waist length golden hair) she dedicates herself to charities, to women’s associations, and brings in speakers (like me). Her job is to make life look easy, to reign over her expensive doll collection from France, the plush sofas, the very many table and chair arrangements, the baby grand piano no one can play, the huge TV screens, expensive hi fi equipment, and the framed art on every wall.
Life also revolves around her grandchildren and her daughter, with whom she shares long conversations about illnesses and allergies, undiagnosed, imagined, and improbable. “She’s married to a very ambitious and successful man. The problem is, he loves to travel, but she’s terrified of the outside world.”
Of course, disaster can come crashing in at any moment, Susan admits that. Take her friend Cynthia, a lovely woman, a doormat wife who worked hard to please a husband who was definitely not good to her, putting her down in public, letting doors slam in her face. If anyone dared take her side, he forbade Cynthia to contact them again.
Hubby began spending a lot of time in Chicago, taking care of their business. Cynthia knew he had friends there, and that he’d run into a childhood sweetheart who had eventually become a close colleague. One day he came home and announced that the sweetheart was his soul mate, his “true love”. That he was leaving Cynthia, their children, and their home.
“You think you have a partnership,” Cynthia said, “and it’s only an illusion.”
Hubby moved to Chicago, lived with true love for six months. “He was wracked with guilt,” says Susan with great satisfaction. “About the children, about the wife he left behind. Then, one night, when she was driving home from work, true love fell asleep at the wheel, crossed the white line in the road, and was killed. Hubby had lost everything. His love was gone; his marriage was over. He went to stay at his mother’s house, but she died suddenly. Then what happened? He had a stroke. Now he can’t move or take care of himself. You see? He was punished by fate.”
“Well…fate has its hands awfully full, these days,” I say.
“Meaning what?”
“Mistresses and lovers are an everyday occurrence. They are part of life.”
“Not my life,” Susan says stubbornly. “I don’t even want to talk about them.”
I’ll bet Cynthia said the same thing, once upon a time.
The next day, we visit Susan’s friend Debby, another woman snug in a luxury palace. “Sure, walk around, take a look. The house is for sale anyway, three quarters of million. It’s too big for us.”
Here, there are faux classical Greek pillars, burbling indoor fountains, a hot tub, canopied beds, badly painted murals, froufrou curtains, all the kitsch a lot of money can buy. But the business Debby runs with her husband—selling expensive beds and mattresses—is going badly.
“Too many entitlement people out there. Like, this woman comes into the shop, finds a mattress she likes, lies down on it, tries it out, and then orders it. When it’s delivered, she raises hell. Claims it isn’t the bed from the showroom, the one she’d ordered. Okay fine. So we have it picked up, and we deliver the identical one that’s in the showroom, even though it’s forbidden to sell showroom models. After she receives it, she comes in, says she’s sure there’s no latex in the mattress, even though we claimed there was. She starts shouting: ‘You’re all a pack of dishonest thieves. You come and pick that mattress up and give me the mattress from the showroom with a guarantee that there’s latex inside.’ Then she tells us to cut the showroom mattress open so she can see what’s inside. So that’s what we do. Then she says, ‘Okay. But how do I know this is the one I’ll be getting?’ So I say, ‘take a marker, put your name on it.’
“When it arrives at her house, she then tells the delivery men she wants them to remove all traces of the marker. They say, ‘No wa-a-ay, lady.’”
Debby sighed. “You see what I mean? Fifty percent of our clients are like this now, so we’ve decided to close down the showrooms, sell directly from the warehouse: what you order is what you get.”
Both Debby and Susan are horrified that I’m traveling by bus. “My son was going on a Greyhound trip,” said Debby. “But when we saw the sort of people getting on the bus, we dragged him over to the airport and bought him a plane ticket. There are dangerous people on buses, people with knives. How can you take risks like that?”
But tonight, as I climb into my luxury bed in the silent huge bedroom, I find myself thinking of the bus station downtown, right next to the colossal new mall that Debby and Susan love to haunt. At this very moment, life is humming in the station: buses pulling in and out, security men moving people back. There are odd conversations; there are strange meetings. Yes, bus stations can be chaotic and uncomfortable places, but there’s always something going on.
I miss them, the bus station crowd, the drivers with their opinions, travel tales, and good nature, and all the people with their stories. Good to know everyone’s out there, and that I’ll soon be back in there with them.
©2021 Jill Culiner All Rights Reserved
Long ago, J. Arlene Culiner set out to have a life of adventure, not one of security and comfort. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, traveled, by bus, train, car, or truck throughout North and Central America, Europe, and the Sahara, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, in a haunted stone house on the English moors, and presently in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village. Her experiences in out-of-the-way communities with their strange characters and very odd conversations are incorporated into all her stories.
Perhaps to underline security, to show that disaster has been kept at bay.
Yet fragility is here, after all. Don is overweight, has heart problems, and, because of financial difficulties, he has no life insurance. He’s a doctor, and under a lot of stress—not because his patients have worrying illnesses, but because he needs to attract more clients into the clinic. If he doesn’t, his partners will ask him to leave.
“Basically, a doctor should be seeing 30 to 50 new patients every single month, and that means publicity, putting your face out there, offering competitive services and reasonable pricing.”
“Since when is being a doctor a business?” Obviously, I live in another world.
He laughs at my naivety. “Times have changed in healthcare. You have to keep your eye on the competition, know how other practices are performing, what they’re offering for similar services, the insurance plans they’re accepted, and their availability for patient scheduling.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Hire a sales rep, start using marketing techniques and social media. On top of that, we have to be very careful about lawsuits. Awhile back, I worked with a nurse who was excellent at her job, but she was so inconsistent you couldn’t count on her. Eventually, we fired her, but when people called us up for references, all we could say was, ‘Yes, she worked here,’ but nothing else. That caller could have been anyone, a lawyer, a friend of hers trying to get us to perjure ourselves so she could sue. Believe me, this is life on a tightrope.”
Susan, on the other hand, radiates stability. A solid-looking woman with practical hair and glasses, (although in the family photo album, she had once been a lovely slender princess with waist length golden hair) she dedicates herself to charities, to women’s associations, and brings in speakers (like me). Her job is to make life look easy, to reign over her expensive doll collection from France, the plush sofas, the very many table and chair arrangements, the baby grand piano no one can play, the huge TV screens, expensive hi fi equipment, and the framed art on every wall.
Of course, disaster can come crashing in at any moment, Susan admits that. Take her friend Cynthia, a lovely woman, a doormat wife who worked hard to please a husband who was definitely not good to her, putting her down in public, letting doors slam in her face. If anyone dared take her side, he forbade Cynthia to contact them again.
Hubby began spending a lot of time in Chicago, taking care of their business. Cynthia knew he had friends there, and that he’d run into a childhood sweetheart who had eventually become a close colleague. One day he came home and announced that the sweetheart was his soul mate, his “true love”. That he was leaving Cynthia, their children, and their home.
“You think you have a partnership,” Cynthia said, “and it’s only an illusion.”
Hubby moved to Chicago, lived with true love for six months. “He was wracked with guilt,” says Susan with great satisfaction. “About the children, about the wife he left behind. Then, one night, when she was driving home from work, true love fell asleep at the wheel, crossed the white line in the road, and was killed. Hubby had lost everything. His love was gone; his marriage was over. He went to stay at his mother’s house, but she died suddenly. Then what happened? He had a stroke. Now he can’t move or take care of himself. You see? He was punished by fate.”
“Well…fate has its hands awfully full, these days,” I say.
“Meaning what?”
“Mistresses and lovers are an everyday occurrence. They are part of life.”
“Not my life,” Susan says stubbornly. “I don’t even want to talk about them.”
I’ll bet Cynthia said the same thing, once upon a time.
Here, there are faux classical Greek pillars, burbling indoor fountains, a hot tub, canopied beds, badly painted murals, froufrou curtains, all the kitsch a lot of money can buy. But the business Debby runs with her husband—selling expensive beds and mattresses—is going badly.
“Too many entitlement people out there. Like, this woman comes into the shop, finds a mattress she likes, lies down on it, tries it out, and then orders it. When it’s delivered, she raises hell. Claims it isn’t the bed from the showroom, the one she’d ordered. Okay fine. So we have it picked up, and we deliver the identical one that’s in the showroom, even though it’s forbidden to sell showroom models. After she receives it, she comes in, says she’s sure there’s no latex in the mattress, even though we claimed there was. She starts shouting: ‘You’re all a pack of dishonest thieves. You come and pick that mattress up and give me the mattress from the showroom with a guarantee that there’s latex inside.’ Then she tells us to cut the showroom mattress open so she can see what’s inside. So that’s what we do. Then she says, ‘Okay. But how do I know this is the one I’ll be getting?’ So I say, ‘take a marker, put your name on it.’
“When it arrives at her house, she then tells the delivery men she wants them to remove all traces of the marker. They say, ‘No wa-a-ay, lady.’”
Debby sighed. “You see what I mean? Fifty percent of our clients are like this now, so we’ve decided to close down the showrooms, sell directly from the warehouse: what you order is what you get.”
Both Debby and Susan are horrified that I’m traveling by bus. “My son was going on a Greyhound trip,” said Debby. “But when we saw the sort of people getting on the bus, we dragged him over to the airport and bought him a plane ticket. There are dangerous people on buses, people with knives. How can you take risks like that?”
But tonight, as I climb into my luxury bed in the silent huge bedroom, I find myself thinking of the bus station downtown, right next to the colossal new mall that Debby and Susan love to haunt. At this very moment, life is humming in the station: buses pulling in and out, security men moving people back. There are odd conversations; there are strange meetings. Yes, bus stations can be chaotic and uncomfortable places, but there’s always something going on.
I miss them, the bus station crowd, the drivers with their opinions, travel tales, and good nature, and all the people with their stories. Good to know everyone’s out there, and that I’ll soon be back in there with them.
©2021 Jill Culiner All Rights Reserved
Long ago, J. Arlene Culiner set out to have a life of adventure, not one of security and comfort. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, traveled, by bus, train, car, or truck throughout North and Central America, Europe, and the Sahara, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, in a haunted stone house on the English moors, and presently in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village. Her experiences in out-of-the-way communities with their strange characters and very odd conversations are incorporated into all her stories.
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