Christina as Little Mermaid, age 7 -- born beautiful. Photos c 2011 Barbara Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

My daughter is beautiful. She was born beautiful. But I sometimes wonder if she really wants to be.

If she liked being beautiful, then why the heck would she dress up as a skeleton for Halloween when she was 6 years old? As a warlock at age 8? As a heap of trash at 11?

And this year, at age 28 – as a perfectly presentable, but not particularly pretty, eleventh incarnation of the Doctor on BBC-TV’s “Doctor Who?”

I got an email from Christina late in September asking me to locate her clunky old black boots from high school. She’d need them for her Doctor Who costume. She’d get the tweed jacket on eBay and the bow tie from Aunt Reena’s costume shop in Valencia.

Christina at 11 goes for icky -- a trash heap with a garbage can for a crown

Once again Christina was gearing up to cast herself against type for Halloween. Why?

Christina was just minutes old when she was pronounced beautiful for the first time.

“She’s gorgeous,” said the nurse anesthetist as she suctioned out our new baby’s throat.

“You probably say that about every newborn,” my husband said.

“No. This is for real.”

Christina had the usual puffy newborn eyes and neckless body. She also had a wide, generous mouth.

Jon thought she looked like a frog. I thought she looked like a duck.

But it wasn’t long before the puffy eyes opened and it became apparent that, indeed, little Christina was in danger of growing up beautiful.

That worried me. Mightn’t Christina turn into one of those vain females who depend on their looks to get ahead? What if she decided she didn’t want to be a smart professional woman like her mother and grandmother before her? What if she decided to go with arm candy and be done with it?

An astronaut at 5 -- space fantasies

In my family and in Jon’s, smart is everything. We go to college. We read the New York Times. We play chess. We love a good debate. We edit newspapers, do science and write things.

What if our daughter turned out to be none of the above? What if she decided to just sit there, looking beautiful for the rest of her life?

And that is why, when Christina was little, I made sure I did all the recommended mom things to build up her self-esteem. I told her she was good at math. I complimented her cooking. I went to all her soccer games and cheered when she blocked a pass with her long legs and gangly body.

But I was careful not to mention beautiful in the same sentence with “you are.”

Nonetheless, despite my careful mothering, Christina figured it out. She had a face to launch a thousand ships, and she knew it.

I learned this to my dismay one evening over a Chinese restaurant dinner when Dolly, an old family friend, put down her chopsticks, looked at my daughter and declared, “You’re a beautiful girl, Christina.”

Skeleton -- scary at age 6

Christina was unperturbed. Clearly she’d come to terms with this state of affairs on her own, possibly while looking in a mirror.

Instead of blushing and thanking Dolly for the compliment, Christina was matter-of-fact. “I know,” she said demurely.

Christina went through the usual girlish pink phase when she was four or five. For a while, everything she owned from jammies to lunch pail to ballet leotard was pink.

When Halloween rolled around, however, Christina wanted nothing to do with pink – or pretty.

At the toy store, the two of us checked out the Halloween possibilities. We strolled the girly costume aisle sparkling with princess robes, angel wings, magic fairy wands and bride get-ups.

But Christina wasn’t interested. She wanted to be a witch. An astronaut. A skeleton. One year – in a departure necessitated by her love of the Disney movie – Christina opted for a Little Mermaid costume. But in no time she was back on track – as a mud monster.

At 15, a vampire

As the Black Mage from Final Fantasy.

As a clown.

As an off-duty medieval knight, inspired by the Tamora Pierce novels.

As a vampire.

And so, all these years later, I have to wonder, did I overdo it? Does my daughter think she’s not allowed to be pretty? Does she think she must always choose interesting, creative, ambitious or shocking over pretty on Halloween?

Even more worrisome, does she believe she has to play the off-putting pile of trash or the in-your-face vampire – in real life?

When I was about sixteen, my father noticed that I was enjoying a lively social life with lots of dates with lots of boys. I was into clothes, make-up, haircuts. An experiment with peroxide had turned my bangs orange.

My father’s mother and grandmother had been starchy church women, schoolteachers both, and my father had decided it was time to set me straight.

Christina at GeekGirlCon as "Doctor Who" hero; bow tie from A Chorus Line in Valencia, CA

“Barb, you need to develop your mind as well as your beauty,” he told me one day. “Your beauty won’t last your whole life, but your education and your mind will.”

I took that as a double-edged compliment: My father thought I had beauty and that I was potentially smart.

At age 28, Christina is now safely out of the woods. I think I can relax. She is beautiful, sexy and graceful – but nobody’s arm candy.

And she’s smart, smart, smart. She doesn’t play chess, and she doesn’t read the New York Times. She’d rather bake you a birthday cake than suck you into a debate.

But she did make it through college nicely, and – like her mother and father before her – Christina is a devoted editor and writer. If she’s going to dazzle the world, she’d rather do it with a good story than a gorgeous face.

And Christina knows a good story when she sees one. A pretty girl in an angel costume does not make a story; she’ll tell you that. There’s no tension there. Pretty is just pretty, and that story is going nowhere.

A pretty girl dressed up as a pile of trash, on the other hand – now that’s a story.

Next Halloween: My son the boy

© 2011 Barbara Newhall

The Oakland Tribune, August 9, 1987

Up in Siskiyou mountain country, in the northwest corner of California, there is a spot known to the Karuk tribe as Kota-Mein.

In the Karuk language, Kota Mein means “center of the world.”

Like their ancestors before them, the Karuk people hike up to sacred spots like Kota-Mein, Chimney Rock and Doctor Rock to talk to the Great Spirit and to receive power.

I have never been to Kota-Mein, but I have been to Bass Lake, Mich.

If I were drawing a map of the world, its center would be at Bass Lake, just where its outlet flows into the great, blue Lake Michigan.

I have lived in California for nearly two decades, but like my forebears – my mother, her mother Toto, her mother Nana, and her mother, Grandma Harlow – I return to Bass Lake every chance I get.

I am drawn there as surely as a Michigan mosquito is drawn to the juicy ankles of anyone foolish enough to venture outdoors after dark in a Michigan summer.

Chimney Rock and Doctor Rock have been compared by their devotees to black holes in space, vortexes, whirlwinds of energy. Those spots on Earth have, it is said, the power to give the worthy pilgrim a vision of transcendence.

Last month, I left my husband behind in the Eastbay with a freezer full of spaghetti sauce and meatloaf.

The children and I boarded a Boeing 767 for a pilgrimage to Michigan. I wanted to show them my secret spots. Peter, 6, and Christina, 3, were enthusiastic.

They donned hats and mosquito netting to pick raspberries in the woods with their grandfather.

They watched the cherries being harvested. They caught a toad and inspected a patch of poison ivy.

Peter and Christina aboard a classic inner tube.

They learned to soothe their mosquito bites by wiping them with spit.

They met their great-aunt Ruth and made friends with a half-dozen second cousins, some of whom were drawn here, as we were, all the way from the West Coast.

They chased minnows in the warm, brown water of the Bass Lake outlet.

They took wet fistfuls of the creamy, miraculously clean Lake Michigan sand and let it drip off the ends of their fingers to make dainty drip castles.

They heard the story of the drip castle party their Uncle David and Aunt Alice once threw on the shores of the Pacific.

My brother and his wife, also a Midwesterner, once invited some California friends to a beach party, promising to initiate them in the intricacies of drip castle building.

They discovered, to their chagrin, that Northern California sand does not drip. The project was a flop.

Christina and Peter drift toward Lake Michigan.

When they grew sweaty, my children waded down the outlet into the Big Lake. They threw their bellies onto the breaking waves and dove for the smooth rocks buried in the sand.

Again and again, they climbed aboard a much-patched inner tube and drifted down the outlet into the Big Lake.

The hours passed.

My mother sat on a beach towel spread on the sand, watching her daughter and grandchildren. “This is life,” she sighed.

Behind her, Lake Michigan’s waves crashed noisily on the beach, just as they had crashed when I was a girl and when she was a girl and when our great-grandmothers were girls.

When I was a seventh-grader, I painted a picture of this beach in art class. Sand, grass and lake blended together in a misty – and I thought – very successful portrait of my beach.

My art teacher was displeased. “It doesn’t look real,” she said. “Too sweet.”

Before we left, I showed Peter and Christina one last secret spot – the view of the Big Lake and outlet from a high sand bluff to the north.

From this bluff, there is nothing to see but beauty. Even the human bathers, many of them grown fat on too much cherry pie and sweet corn, take on a certain grace when seen from up here.

Photos c 1987 B.F. Newhall

I had my Nikkormat along and, as always, I took a picture of the outlet.

The Siskiyou Indians forbid photographs of their “power sites.” When my pictures returned, I saw that, sure enough, it had happened again.

My magical spot was gone. What I held in my hands was a 3 ½ by 5-inch glossy of – just another beautiful beach.

I’ll have to go back and try it again.

© 1987  The Oakland Tribune

Orchids

There’s nothing I can say about these orchids.

Except that they were growing in Thailand, on a farm, where there were so many feats of blossoming splendor that by tour’s end Jon, Christina and I were wailing, “No! Please! Not another stupendously beautiful orchid! Get me out of here! Take me to the snake ranch!”

Where, of course, the snakes were beautiful too.

© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall

. . . orchids . . .

. . . and more orchids. Photos c 2009 B.F. Newhall

I confess, I’m not very good at being in the moment, even if — especially if – the moment is a nice one. If I’m having a good time, my mind tends to lurch into the future to the day when this loveliness will be no more. My thoughts sink into nostalgia and sadness at the knowledge that everything ends, especially, it seems,  the really good stuff.

Be alive to the moment. Be present to the holiness of this place. Buddhism recommends this. Modern psychology encourages it. Christianity and Judaism know about it. (“Be still and know that I am God.”) In my opinion, it’s what Edna St. Vincent Millay was thinking when she wrote “Renascence:”

God, I can push the grass apart, And lay my finger on Thy heart!

The physical therapist reiterates it as she contemplates my overstressed and overdeveloped trapesezius  muscles. I gotta do it, she tells me. Relax those muscles. Let go of that anxiety. Be in the moment. Be here now.

But — and here comes the big but – when I encounter something beautiful, I can’t seem to just sit there and be with it. For reasons I don’t understand (yet) I am greedy and grasping when it comes to beauty.

An exquisitely foggy day in the canyon behind my house? A star magnolia blossom battered by yesterday’s rain? Across the Bay in Marin county, a footpath cutting into the steep western flank of Mount Tamalpais? In Florence, the Last Judgement frescoed onto the interior of the Duomo? On a scorching, sun-pierced day in Bangkok, a Thai peddler offering me a hat?

In each instance, I feel I must do something about this wondrous event. Make it last. Make it mine. And so, like a lot of people, I get out the camera and take a picture.

What you see posted here, therefore, is the work of a greedy woman, a person who can’t get enough of that wonderful stuff, beauty. Right now, however, I’m not regretting my greed. As I upload these photos, one at a time, I notice myself lingering over them, studying them, savoring them. I am lost in the moment.

Beauty drove Tess Gadwa  to larceny on the way to church yesterday. A Greenfield, Massachusetts, blogger, Tess says she found a painted Easter egg  lying on the ground, forgotten and forlorn.  Instead of putting the egg back where she found it or handing it off to a deserving child,  Tess boldface kept the thing. The Egg Thief’s reasoning: “Beauty is worth stealing when you find it.”

Text and photos © 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall