headdressing – The Great Adjustment

Death is near

During a psychedelic moment in Amsterdam, a friend once mirthfully said to me, “Death is near… but not near me.” We were seated, giggling, at an outdoor cafe. I didn’t see Death, but our squad took his word for it.

When death is near, things tend to get profound

When death is near, things tend to get profound – and at times – darkly amusing. Our brains, between waves of panic, find pools of calm where we make connections on kaleidoscopic levels.

My Uncle Frank ( an incredible teacher, coach, family patriarch and documentarian); Kate (my dear friend, fashion entrepreneur and activist, mother of two darling young girls); Little Richard (my first cognizant toddling memory of a tv image). These are just a few who passed away in the recent days of the shitdown, each warranting proper memorializing. We kind of barely spoke of it. It’s untenable when death is so near and we have lost the luxury of mourning losses per our pre-Covid conventions. Our brains and hearts can’t metabolize so much collective and personal loss and trauma all at once. Bodies are piling up in unusual places and services with tears-in-physical-proximity-to-loved-ones are verboten.

Kate Kruger (December 29, 1973 – April 11, 2020) with her girls.

Uncle Frank Greco, family historian. (February 1, 1932 – March 18, 2020)

The legendary Richard Wayne Penniman (December 5, 1932 – May 9, 2020)

Zooming with my Foxhole girls, B said it best. The data is fierce, said B, we are NOT every man for himself. At the same time, we are finding ways to be more self-reliant.

The thought of my absence from my father’s side as he went through chemoradiation would have been unimaginable before The Great Adjustment. He sent a photo of what he calls his Hannibal Lector disguise, the bespoke computer-designed thermoplastic mask that held his head to the table during treatment these past few weeks.

Masks give us quite a lot to unpack, both as a symbol and a tool.

I mean masks give us quite a lot to unpack – both as a symbol and now as a tool. Maybe that’s why masking is so provocative and charged. Images of face coverings stir us emotionally and culturally with ramifications that may be both practical and archetypal.

Where are we on a spectrum, where what was once disturbing and uncomfortable, becomes a lifeline to survival?

Housework

I’ve taken to ironing the sheets. I recall telling J., back in winter, that we could move to Doha if i could have freshly ironed sheets every day. That’s how spoiled i intended to be.

Well, now i have them. Ain’t if funny how life plays out sometimes.

For the most part, doing the laundry and other housework has become a meditative and comforting activity, helping to shape the amorphous hours and days of the shitdown.

Bilbo loves to help make the bed so he can tunnel in later.

I think about my grandmother and how she even had one of those machines for ironing sheets in her basement laundry room.

She would always put on a “housedress” for her duties of cooking and cleaning and then change into a proper dress later to go out shopping or have dinner – always looking great and put-together in public or when “company” officially came by. The housedress signaled a time for chores, but also signaled an off-duty status; a respite from public presentation. As a child, i equated her housedresses to my “playclothes.”

These designations remind of the loungewear/ activewear everyone is donning in their super-private lives right now, at least from the waist down. My foxhole girls sent me a package of cuddly clothes which are the equivalent of modern-day, luxury housedress for me.

Suiting up in the housedress was also about performing tasks properly, prioritizing household management as a craft, and executing every domestic duty with great pride. I’m usually really into aprons, which are like that as well. Speaking of housework, I discovered this book in 2006, and have referred to it and calmed myself with it so many times through the years. I think it’s available electronically now. H., i think i gave you a copy? M., you can find it in the casita. ❤️

Back to the housework garb, i grew up watching women doing housework in headscarves and i tend to tie-one-on when it’s time to get to housework. Headscarves have traditionally filled practical purposes – to keep hair out of food, protect from sun, etc. – and to supply that get-to-interior-chores-uniform signal. The older Italian women would tie a “moppine,” the Italian-American lenition of the word for dish towel, on their heads. Our housekeeper P. at my parents house was another role model. Not only did she wear a housedress, but always had a kerchief tied on her head.

The kerchief history for black Americans has been a complicated one. Enslaved black women in the antebellum South were required to wear kerchiefs of acceptable humble fabric not only for practicality, but to designate their inferior status. The reclamation of the headwrap to become a powerful expression of identity has occurred in during my lifetime.

And now, living on the Arabian Peninsula, the importance of headdressing – for both men and women – has become something i’m pondering quite a lot. The headdress has signified both oppression and power, progression and regression, imprisonment and liberation. Maybe more on that later.

But for now … it’s just housework.