My self-education in the stock market comes at a time when there is no winning that can’t be snatched away like a red cape from the bull’s pathway. Each time the caboodle goes up, it comes down too – as though not one stock could think independently, but rather must follow the herd. Either all arrows are red, or all arrows are green. We all go up, we all go down. The vicissitudes of the market, as the saying goes.
I’m really tired of watching things go up and down – while never funding what I really want, which is a trip to somewhere I’ve never been. What use are those graphs in vivid movement if I never leave the house? I stay put, a graph in flat line.
The end of summer – and August, my least favorite of all the months. August is when tolerance is pushed past the limit, when nothing more can be done for summer and nothing much can be started for fall. It’s a seedy month – when all the flowering has been done, but the dead and drying leaves refuse to let go. It’s a time of suspension – in the air, in our actions, even in the way the insects drone without end. I walk outside at night or early in the morning, hear those herds of cicada that can’t be seen, and I think, they are flat lined too. Waiting.
I won’t be able to tolerate seeing that movie that promises to be all the rage – “Eat, Pray, Love.” I won’t even read the book. All I know is that it’s about a woman who takes off from the responsibilities of life for one year to travel the world and experience Life. She divides her year between three countries, Italy, India, and Indonesia. It’s a spiritual quest too. And of course she falls in love at the end. It is written in part or in whole from the real life experience of the author. She came home to write the book, and it was an instant success.
Yesterday, while waiting to get my hair trimmed, I flipped through a magazine and saw a page of “gear” that we must own now that the movie is coming out – it’s called “The Eat, Pray, Love image.” For example, there is a canvas striped hobo bag that you could buy for $190; a blue chambray shirt with a nehru neckline, $112; bright pink canvas espadrilles for walking the markets of New Delhi and tasting new delights from the hands of another – at $100 or so. It’s the gear, the look, the lifestyle – though few of us could replicate the Julia Roberts toothy grin and thick hair that piles atop her head in Bohemian fashion. We should all run out to adopt the look of the middle aged woman (who doesn’t look middle aged) who has fortuitously taken a year to travel the world and experience all that few of us can even imagine.
Women at middle age, realizing that they have maybe 20 years left before they are immobile or at least compromised – they wake from the instinct of giving life to others and they crave to experience life for themselves. They want to have Fun, as our contemporary Cyndi Lauper told us when we were young – that is, we want to travel, eat foods we have not cooked ourselves, see people and places for no good reason other than to experience Life. Women are the natural born keepers of life – which is why they give birth – and, after childbearing years are done, they still have the impulse to live life which is really just the continuum of giving life. That’s why the marketeers think they can peddle this book and movie to us, that we'll latch onto it like life itself. It’s odd, however, that in the course of my own “travels” – to the bank, grocery store, yoga class – I’ve heard women say, “No, I don’t want to see that movie, “ or, “I can’t bear to see that.” One woman said, “I got to New Delhi with her and I tossed the book in the trash.” I think most women know the difference between real Life and the improbable one that is sold on the screen or in a book. The first question everyone has is, how'd she get the money? This particular subject of wanting to experience our lives while still mobile is too treasured and touchy for most of us to face in facsimile form.
I looked for a long time at that striped hobo bag in the magazine, knowing I had one similar to that (for much less money) when my children were young and diapers were kept there. And the blue chambray shirt – to this day I call it my uniform -- I had several. Julia Roberts is smiling . . . that familiar hobo bag slung o'er her blue shoulder . . . you too can have this life, she seems to say.
I think most women by the August of their lives know the difference between marketing, the stock market, and the markets of New Delhi. Let the real one stand up.
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