My Year with Eleanor (20 page)

It wasn't technology that had distracted me all this time, I realized, it was
me
that distracted me. My BlackBerry, computer, and TV were simply the devices I used to distract me from my worries—just as I'd been using sleeping pills to escape my worries at night. I decided to call it a day and try mindfulness again tomorrow.

My eyes drifted back over to the Eleanor book next to me on the bed. I opened it with a sigh. But, of course, Eleanor didn't disappoint. During the 1940s, her anti-Semitic beliefs faded away as she developed strong friendships with several Jews. Although she never publicly commented on the shift in her viewpoint, perhaps it's what she was thinking of twenty years later when she noted that “the narrower you make the circle of your friends, the narrower will be your experience of people and the narrower will your interests become. It is an important part of one's personal choices to decide to widen the circle of one's acquaintances whenever one can.” Because of those friendships she became one of the biggest public supporters of Jewish causes. She lobbied Congress to ease immigration laws for Jewish refugees seeking asylum in the United States, and when she was unsuccessful, she gave the lawmakers a public spanking.

“What has happened to this country?” she scolded in her newspaper column. “If we study our history we find that we have always been ready to receive the unfortunates from other countries, and though this may seem a generous gesture on our part we have profited a thousand fold by what they have brought us.” By 1947, she was calling for the creation of the Jewish state that would become Israel. “It isn't enough to talk about peace,” she once wrote. “One must believe in it. It isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.” I still felt betrayed by her anti-Semitic remarks, but in a way I respected her more now. It was one thing to try to change other people's minds about something, but she was willing to change her own mind first.

B
y my third day, I was going out of my damn mind. The rain made it impossible to go anywhere. Meals were the most exciting part of my day. Turning on my disco fireplace each night was a wildly anticipated event. The quote was “
Do
one thing every day that scares you,” yet somehow
not doing
was even harder.

After the ceremonial flipping of the fireplace switch, I decided to try one of the tactics Dr. Bob had recommended to help me stop my fretting and focus on the here and now. “Start by compartmentalizing the worry in your life,” he'd said. “Establish a thirty-minute ‘worry time' during the afternoon where you write down everything that is troubling you. Every day that time—and that time only—will be solely devoted to worrying. Keep a pen and paper by your bed. If you start worrying while you're trying to go to sleep, write down the worry and leave it for your worry time the next day.”

“But won't dwelling on my worries just make me more worried?” I'd asked him.

“On the contrary, your worries will seem more manageable. You'll realize that you don't have as many worries as you thought you did. It's not a hundred different worries; it's the same five over and over. After a while, they'll probably start to bore you. Once you're bored with something, you lose interest in it.”

Another reason writing down worries is useful is because you can look back on them later and have proof of how unproductive worrying is.

“Studies have shown that when people are asked to write down their worries over a two-week period and predict what will happen, 85 percent do not come true,” Dr. Bob had told me. “What does that tell you?”

“Most of the time there's nothing to be afraid of.”

“Exactly.” He looked triumphant.

Sitting cross-legged on the bed with a pad of paper, I started writing: “I'm worried my parachute isn't going to open when I go skydiving in a few weeks. I'm worried I'm going to bomb onstage doing stand-up comedy. I'm worried I'm going to get my ass handed to me by Mount Kilimanjaro. I'm worried that I still don't have a full-time job. I'm worried that I'll run out of money before I—” I stopped midstroke and the ink pooled on the paper where I'd left the tip of the pen. There were so many I's in that paragraph. Worrying, in addition to accomplishing nothing, is also self-indulgent, I realized. So often it's about you and your feelings. Yet another reason why it's good to limit it. Give yourself a bit of time, then get on with living.

I
arrived at dinner on my last night to discover Margaret had gone home. Left without a word, obviously. I was surprised by how much I missed her presence. I knew nothing about her except she was married, according to her left hand, and favored nubby sweaters. Before bed, as I packed my books in my suitcase, it hit me that in lieu of gadgets, I'd been using the Eleanor books to distract myself too. Every time I started to face my worries this week, I'd turn to the books. They were just another form of avoidance. Wow, what a failure this week was.

After five days of storming, I heard the patter of rain stop almost immediately. I eased open my sliding glass door. I slipped into the backyard and walked to the labyrinth under the moonlight, taking care to step with intention. When I arrived, I told Alice I wanted to learn to just
be
. But
just being
required work. It wasn't enough to go on a silent retreat. You couldn't get rid of a few little objects and accomplish a major change in mental awareness in a matter of days. I'd have to work at it, not just for the rest of the year, but probably for the rest of my life. As I spiraled toward the center, I felt less guilt about the silent retreat not being an unqualified success. When walking a labyrinth, you could think you were going one direction, only to find out you were going the opposite way. Unlike a maze, there were no dead ends, just as there were no true dead ends in life—just opportunities to turn things around. Yes, I'd failed at meditating and been so distracted that I couldn't even focus on worrying, but we were all a work in progress. Even Eleanor, a onetime anti-Semite, became one of the biggest supporters of Jewish causes. “It isn't enough to talk about peace,” she'd said. “One must work at it.” She was referring to actual war, of course, but the same could be said of inner peace, as well.

And with that, I abandoned all thought. I continued walking the path, spiraling and spiraling, feeling the bricks cool and moist under my feet, making my way toward the center.

Chapter Eleven

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear, for newer and richer experience.

—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

A
s a kid I often dreamed about falling. It was never clear where I was falling from, but it was obvious where I was headed. During these dreams my body would jerk violently, waking me up before I hit the ground. (“You're lucky,” my childhood best friend had said in a tone of deep certainty. “If you hit the ground in the dream, you die in real life. It's a scientific fact.”) For twenty-nine years, skydiving had literally been my worst nightmare.

I thought about all the physical risks Eleanor faced in her lifetime. In 1933, she took a two-and-a-half-mile ride underground deep into an Ohio coal mine. Coal mines were dangerous places, vulnerable to roof cave-ins, explosions, and flooding. When these disasters occurred, rescuing the miners was a difficult and often impossible task. But Eleanor wanted to witness the miners' working conditions for herself and ultimately deemed them “dark, dank and utterly terrifying.”

She later attended a meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama. Back in 1938, state law prohibited blacks and whites from sitting together at public gatherings. Eleanor strode into the racially divided auditorium and sat on the “black side” with her friend, civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune. When informed by the police that she was breaking the law and had to sit on the opposite side with the whites, she picked up her chair and placed it in the center aisle. She never stopped fighting for equal rights, even when threats were made on her life.

In 1958, she was about to fly to Tennessee to speak at a civil-rights workshop when she received a phone call from the FBI. “We can't guarantee your safety,” they said. “The Klan's put a $25,000 bounty on your head. We can't protect you.”

“I didn't ask for your protection,” the former First Lady retorted. “I have a commitment. I'm going.” At the Nashville airport she met up with a friend, a seventy-one-year-old white woman. They got into a car and drove off into the night alone, their only protection a loaded pistol placed on the front seat between them. If Eleanor could pack heat and face down a bunch of homicidal racists at the age of seventy-four, I could skydive. Though I knew my skydiving wouldn't change the world, I did think it could change me. And if I could take this kind of risk, maybe then, if I had a chance to make a difference in someone's life someday, I'd have the courage to do it.

E
leanor once said, “It is only by inducing others to go along that changes are accomplished and work is done.” She was referring to leaders like Lincoln, Gandhi, and Churchill, who had to have a following in order to bring about real reform. I'd decided to co-opt this principle and use it as an excuse to make Bill, Chris, and Jessica jump out of the plane with me.

Matt was so terrified of heights that not only had he refused to skydive, but he couldn't even handle coming to watch us do it. He did, however, e-mail me an article titled “How to Survive a Skydiving Accident” the night before our jump. It was full of harrowing tales like the first-time skydiver whose tandem instructor suffered a heart attack and died in the middle of their jump, or veteran skydivers whose brains “locked” during the free fall, causing them to forget to pull the parachute cord.

“Oh, you're a riot. Thanks a lot,” I wrote back. “Also, how absentminded do you have to be to forget to pull your parachute cord? Who are they letting jump out of planes—Alzheimer's patients?”

“Good point,” he replied. “I mean, what else have you got going on in that particular moment? Did you get the photo I attached, by the way?”

I scrolled down to the bottom of his e-mail and double-clicked the attachment. Suddenly my entire screen was filled with a photo of four stark-naked skydivers beaming at the camera in midair. The picture was a disturbing testament to the bodily effects of falling at 120 miles per hour. The women's breasts were inverted to the point of resembling upside-down cereal bowls. I e-mailed it to my fellow jumpers with the subject line “Sorry, But You Need to See This.”

Bill responded almost immediately from his BlackBerry. “Jesus, my eyes! Can we keep this a safe space please, Hancock?”

“Oh my God,” Jessica added. “
What is going on with the boobs?
”

“That's what's going to happen to your boobs tomorrow, Jess,” Chris wrote. “Sometimes, they stay that way.”

“Seriously, you guys
cannot
make fun of me if I start crying up there,” Jessica replied. “And we're doing tandem, right? People strapped to our backs?”

“I recommend doing everything in tandem,” Bill wrote. “I've got a dude strapped to me at the drugstore right now.”

“Yeah, it's always tandem for your first jump,” said Chris, who'd skydived once before. “I think they do that because some people pass out on their first skydive.”

“Really?” I said. “I didn't know blacking out was an option. Do I need to put in a request for that ahead of time or just tell them at check-in?”

The weird part was, even though this had been a lifelong fear, I wasn't as anxious as I'd thought I'd be. At the beginning of this project I'd gotten nervous about the mildest of challenges. Haggling with a vendor over a secondhand bureau, going to my first swing dance class. Even
thinking
about doing something intimidating had been enough to set off butterflies in my stomach.

But because the project was so big, it forced me to deal with my fear in a new way. As the year had progressed I'd noticed that the more I worried about future fears, the more overwhelmed I felt. I couldn't conquer one fear while worrying about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and skydiving and whatever else I had coming up, or fear would consume my life. So to make the project more manageable, I took it day by day, focusing only on the challenge right in front of me.

T
hat morning we found four seats facing one other on a train out of Penn Station. Jessica and Bill divided up the Saturday
New York Times
. Chris and I tried to arrange our long legs so that they weren't knocking against one other.

“The place is called Long Island Skydiving,” I told the group. “Apparently they specialize in first-time jumpers.”

“How long does skydiving take?” Jessica asked.

I cued up the company's website on my BlackBerry. “It says here ‘Please plan to spend at least three hours with us on the day of your skydive.' ”

“Three hours, or all of death's eternity,” she sighed. “What's our stop again?”

“Speonk. It's about a two-hour ride.”

“What kind of name is Speonk?” she asked.

“Actually, as I discovered this morning when I was looking up our directions, it was inspired by a Native American word meaning ‘high place.' ”

“It's also the sound your body makes hitting the ground when your chute doesn't open,” Bill said, without looking up from his newspaper.

“Did Eleanor ever skydive?” Chris asked, changing the subject.

“The first commercial skydiving centers didn't open until she was in her seventies. But from what I know of Eleanor, given the chance, she totally would've skydived. She once took a mile-long toboggan ride at Lake Placid, and those things are no joke.”

He searched my face. “You look pretty at ease for someone who's about to face one of their worst fears, by the way.”

“I know, it's weird, right?” The last-minute freak-out had always been my specialty. As recently as a year ago I'd been at the front of a long line for an amusement park water slide when I'd suddenly decided I couldn't go through with it. All the kids behind me, along with their parents, had to make way for me as I trudged back down the stairs past them, trying not to meet anyone's gaze. So although I'd felt strangely normal all morning, I knew there was a good chance it just hadn't hit me yet.

“Just wait till you get on the plane. Longest fifteen minutes of your life.” Chris grinned.

T
wo hours later, when the conductor announced that the next stop was Speonk, Jessica turned to me in a panic. “I need to have sex,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“You know, one last sexual encounter for the road in case I don't make it.”

“Well, don't look at me.”

“Or me,” added Chris.

She looked over at Bill, who had folded the
Times
metro section into a hand puppet, which he was using to conduct conversations with nearby passengers. She turned back to us. “Actually, I think I'm okay.”

The skydiving company consisted of a small landing strip next to a commune of trailers, one of which had a pirate flag perched on top. A sign out front read “Long Island Skydiving, Drop in here.” Inside, one wall was covered in photos of happy customers in midflight.

“See, Noelle, look at how not scared those people are,” said Chris.

“More importantly, look at how not dead they are,” Bill added.

Chris leaned in toward one picture. “Oh my God. Is that Ricky Martin?”

“It is,” drawled one of the employees, a sixtysomething man, who had come up behind us.

We all crowded in. The Latin pop star was frozen in the sky grinning at the camera, clouds lurking nearby like groupies. The wind was flaring his nostrils wide and pushing them up into two tiny parachutes. In a thick good ol' boy accent, the employee introduced himself as Cody. He contemplated Ricky for a few more seconds. “Some big calves on that feller.”

We were ushered into a room full of folding chairs facing a TV monitor. There we watched a videotape in which an older man sitting behind a desk explained the risks of skydiving. The grainy production quality and the fact that the room was done entirely in wood paneling suggested it had been recorded in the 1970s, but the defining feature of the video was the man's beard, which was so long that it fell past the top of the desk. Jessica described the tape as “Professor Dumbledore tells us how we'll die” and took a picture of the beard with her digital camera.

“It looks like the kind of a video a group of separatists in Montana sends to the president announcing that they're seceding from the Union,” Bill said.

Soon it was time to sign the “If I die, no hard feelings” waivers. As an extra legal precaution, the company insisted that we say our names into a video camera and read the last paragraph of the contract out loud while they filmed us. With a perfectly straight face, Bill recited, “I, Bill Elizabeth Schulz, understand the risks that I'm about to undertake . . .” The general information form asked that we provide an emergency contact person, but cautioned, “Do not use anyone else who will be on the plane with you.”

“Oh my God,” Jessica whispered.

The four of us piled into a van that would drive us a few hundred yards down the airstrip to the plane. With the exception of the windows, every inch of floor, walls, and ceiling had been upholstered in gold shag carpeting. Cody swiveled around in the driver's seat. “Welcome to the Shaggin' Wagon,” he said with pride as the engine coughed to life. “We bought this baby off some guy for $200.”

“There's a lot of DNA on this carpet,” Chris murmured.

Bill climbed in and admired the seventies decor. “But just think about how many mustaches have been in here!”

There were no seat belts—in fact, there were no seats. This didn't inspire a hell of a lot of confidence, especially when he drove us down the landing strip with the sliding door all the way open. When we reached the takeoff area, the instructors taught us the importance of arching our backs during free fall and picking our feet up upon landing to avoid being trampled by the tandem partner strapped to our back.

The single engine plane had only enough room for two skydivers and their tandem partners. Dr. Bob told me that the longer you expose yourself to a fearful situation, the greater the reduction in anxiety in the future, so I wanted to go in the second round. Bill wanted to watch me freak out, so he decided to go with me. Chris and Jessica would go first. Jessica was paired up with a blond man named Timothy, who was slight with a gentle manner. He strapped her into a full body harness. Right before they jumped, Timothy would clip his harness into Jessica's, fusing them together for the skydive. He tested out the strength of the harness now, briefly clipping himself in behind her. Jessica was so petite that when Timothy stood up straight, her feet dangled off the ground. She looked like a child being carried in a Baby Bjorn.

“Okay, everything looks good,” Timothy said, detaching the harnesses. “First group, we're up!”

“I love you guys,” Jessica said shakily as she and Chris turned to follow their tandem partners to the plane. As the plane rolled away, there was an awful moment where Jessica looked at us apprehensively out the window. She suddenly seemed very young. For the first time I felt nervous, not for my own safety but for the safety of those I'd asked to come with me. Why had I brought all three of my closest friends? I remembered how your emergency contact couldn't be someone on your plane. I should've mixed in some lesser friends—spread the field a little. The sky was hazy and glaring; Bill and I squinted as we watched the plane circle higher over our heads.

“Is that them?” I asked when a speck emerged from the plane. Fifteen seconds later, a second dot followed. As the specks grew, I felt as though I was watching the process of gestation on fast-forward. Within seconds they'd evolved into wriggling human beings. After less than a minute the two chutes bloomed open, revealing their primary-colored insides to the dull, white sky. Chris's limbs were almost comically gangly next to Jessica's compact body.

“Like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell,” I observed as they floated down. Even thirty feet up, I could detect a happy bewilderment radiating from their faces.