Jessica's Take

Sublimation vs. Sublime

2012-02-03T18:00:00.001-08:00

My partner and I were at a big disadvantage today, just based on who our opponents were. One of them has an insanely powerful serve and groundstroke, the other can get almost anything at the net. My partner and I are both recovering from injuries that kept us away from Friday Tennis for a lot of the fall and then, after that, left us fumphering around the court, trying to compensate for our shortcomings, an activity at which I’m all too well-practiced.

She and I shouldn’t even play together, but we do.

We lost the first two games quickly and embarrassingly. We swung at balls and missed them entirely. Repeatedly hit shots into the net. Not here and there, but over and over. By the third game, we were high-fiving that we had simply scored a single point.

The subject of sex came up (as it often does in Friday Tennis) and after a short discussion (the details of which are better left unshared), my partner and I started playing the littlest bit better. We took a game. Then lost a game. Then took two games in a row and we were tied 4-4.

The reason this is important to mention is because there are different ways to lose a set. There’s the humiliating way (6-0 or 6-1), and then there’s the way that we did, 6-4, with our heads held high.

We started a new set and my partner and I made the mistake of switching sides, something you should certainly try if you’re getting creamed (6-0), but not if you’re playing decently with lots of close games, as was our situation. This was because we convinced ourselves that our short sex conversation had been the key to our success. That we had found ourselves in some sort of Bull Durham Reverse Universe where the transmutation of sexual energy was enhancing our strokes (so to speak), a phenomenon Freud may have considered a type of “sublimation.” If we just continued thinking about sex while we were playing tennis, we reasoned, we would be unstoppable.

This conviction proved very, very wrong.

I’m not sure what was responsible for our inexplicable underdog comeback in the first set, but whatever it was, it was gone once we switched sides and no amount of lascivious thought or innuendo seemed capable of getting it back.

My partner and I went from being Roadrunners back to being Coyotes, with shot after shot leaving us tail-singed and gape-jawed. I looked around for some Acme dynamite and in doing so, managed to miss yet another ball.

I think we ran out of time before we could finish the second set, but we played about five games and my partner and I only won one of them. I think that one was a fluke. I had stopped thinking about sex head on and instead began trying to remember the name of the Bull Durham movie, not actively, exactly, but like Muzak in the background – using just enough brain power to wrest my mind away from berating myself for our bad judgment and occupy it enough to let me go about hitting a proper backhand, which is likely the precise function our sex talk served to begin with.

By the end of the game, I still didn’t have the movie title. All I could conjure was Susan Sarandon writhing around while Kevin Costner is painting her toenails, a scene I remembered as itself sexy and unexpected and, in the world of movie scenes, perhaps even sublime.

Ok. I'm Still Doing It.

2012-02-01T19:12:00.000-08:00

During my time with Therapist Number 2 (Number 3 if you count my short stint with The Woman Who Only Wore Purple), I felt like I had some really big fish to fry – namely, I wanted to quit smoking cigarettes, leave my job and lose weight, three things that were unlikely to ever happen together.

I would lay on her leather couch with her Dachshund on my belly and bemoan my inability to become waiflike despite how meagerly I ate or how ferociously I exercised.

“We don’t exercise to be thin,” she told me one day, her long, reedy legs crossed at the knee in her massive leather shrink chair.

“We don’t?”

“No, we exercise to have a relationship with our body.”

That was one of those statements that, depending on my mood, could strike me as either totally asinine or absolutely profound. On that day, it was profound.

Everything I understood about exercise suddenly shifted. It no longer became a means to an end, but an end unto itself. I stopped caring about results. It stopped being about my self-esteem. I stopped doing things simply to suffer through them and made a commitment to stoke that relationship that she talked about in a good way, every day.

I just had a similar revelation at a writing workshop I attended last week.

Surrounded by a dozen women, writing from prompts, reading aloud, sharing reactions, reading some more, I began to remember why we write. As Natalie Goldberg says, “We write to study mind.”

Maybe she didn’t say exactly that, but that’s her general gist: writing helps us understand how the mind works. The writer’s job is mostly just to show up and write.

This is a perfect revelation for today, because today is our third birthday. I started this blog February 1, 2009 with this post. I wrote then, “I’m not entirely sure this is a good idea…” and in retrospect, I can say it was a very good idea. It did, in fact, keep me out of trouble. It landed me a bit of work. It keeps me connected to a lot of folks.

But mostly, it helps me understand how mind works. That delicate mystery machine that I delude myself into thinking I have control over. It is here that I learn what’s important to me, when I sit down to write one thing and come up with quite another. I’ve posted things that crack me up and that scare the shit out of me, and doing so has created that relationship that Therapist Number 2 was talking about: no ends, just flexing and stretching and trying to engage my heart.

Thanks for being here with me for our birthday. Sorry, no cake.

Boyz 2 Men

2012-01-16T18:40:00.000-08:00

The world is feeling out of whack to me.

In the last few weeks, I’ve learned about the conditions ofseveral local boys – teenagers who are going through the kinds of trying healthsituations I’d expect to hear about my mother’s friends. Not about my son’s.

A heart surgery. A gall bladder operation. Amysterious loss of vision. Circumstancesthat would make a parent pine for something as mundane as a concussion or abroken foot.

Hearing about these incidents reminded me of my husband’sstory, a story that I tell with the authority of someone who actually witnessedthe events, even though they took place before I ever knew him.

My husband lost his vision when he was in his twenties. It happened gradually but efficiently,over the course of a few months. Initially, his vision became blurry. As if he were driving in a car whose windshield was verydirty, is how he describes it. Astime went on, he was barely able to see things directly and was left with onlya peripheral vision. And colorblindness.

It took a while for a diagnosis. He went to ophthalmologists and neurologists, submitted toscans and spinal taps, and ultimately it was decreed that his condition wasLeber’s Optic Atrophy – a rare affliction that involves the degeneration of theoptic nerve. It’s genetic. It’s not correctable by glasses. It’s neurological and untreatable andhas left him with either 20/200 or 20/2000 vision (I can’t rememberwhich). In either case, legallyblind.

My husband was a PA when he lost his vision. That is, he was a Production Assistantat The Movie Channel, an entry-level job that require he screen a lot of moviesand write snappy 30-second promo spots to run on the network. I think it was his first “real job” outof college, and he had moved from his home in Boston to New York to start hiscareer in television.

Once he received his diagnosis (and prognosis – which was,basically, this is your lot in life), he went to his boss to resign. He said that his vision problems wereuncorrectable and he planned on moving back with his parents and figuring outhow to go on with his life from there.

His boss said to him, “Look, you have a lot of problems.You’re unorganized and your workspace is a mess. Why don’t you go back to your desk and work on thoseproblems and I’ll figure out what to do about your vision issues.”

My husband’s boss then went to bat for him. Somehow, they found machines andcontraptions that would enlarge text and video sufficiently for my husband todo his work. His boss got thecompany to buy it all for him. Theidea that an organization would make that kind of investment in a ProductionAssistant was outlandish.

Yet, they did.

My husband remained at The Movie Channel for a while, andthen moved on to become an On-Air Producer elsewhere. After a year he took the same job at Nickelodeon andremained there for 16 years, where he became a Senior Producer, DepartmentDirector, VP, Senior VP and ultimately Executive VP Creative Director ofNickelodeon Worldwide, which was an insanely highfalutin title for someone whoremained as messy and disorganized as he was as a PA.

Disorganization was not the only characteristic thatremained a constant for him. Another was his Vision. Nothis eyesight, but his ability to see and create things that don’t yet exist inthe world. Losing his eyesightdidn’t affect his Vision at all. Perhaps it even enhanced it.

What I’m saying is, he went on to become an award-winningproducer of visual entertainment and groomed a staff that went on to rundivisions and networks of their own – a prospect that no one could have seen orpredicted through that dirty car windshield.

I am heartbroken when I imagine what these young men aregoing through with their medical hurdles. I can’t even fathom how scary it must feel. And for their parents – the anxiety of what’s to come, whatkind of lives their children will now be able to lead.

I don’t know anything about medicine and even less abouthaving to endure that kind of struggle in a life, but I see it proven time andagain that our essence, our magic – our superpower – exists in a place beyond ourphysical circumstances. I want tobelieve that these boys, like my husband, will discover a power withinthemselves that will transform them. That they will find their own greatness not inspite of their hardship, but perhaps because of it.

What if they learn early and with certainty that ourperfection has little to do with flawlessness and everything to do with lovingthe parts of us that are broken?

Zen And The Art Of Auto Body Maintenance

2012-01-09T18:40:00.000-08:00

It’s no secret that my Friday Tennis Game sometimes takes onthe qualities of a sacred confessional. Last Friday did not disappoint. I ran quickly through the details of The Teenager’s first vehicularmishap, explaining how he backed out of a driveway into a car that was parkedopposite that driveway, a maneuver that I myself have managed to execute onthree separate occasions in the 11 years we’ve lived in suburbia. I told them how the car he hit belongedto his friend and how the driver’s door needs to be replaced, how the friendtook it for two estimates, and how each estimate came in at $4,000. I had given the friend the name of aparticular auto body shop that I thought might be more reasonable, but the boyneglected to take it there.

“So, I took it myself,” I told them, with a self-satisfiedsmile. It was obvious from mydemeanor that the estimate I acquired was much, much lower.

“Did you cry?” asked Shelley.

I was startled by this, because that was going to be my bigconfession. Not that I did cry,but that I announced to the owner as soon as I met him, that I might cry.

“I hope you cried,” said Eileen. She told me that she uses a certain brand of gum as an aidfor just such interactions. “Ifyou put it in your mouth and just let it sit there – don’t chew – it’s sostrong it will make your eyes tear.” She keeps some in her purse all the time.

When I was 27, I worked with a guy who accused me one day ofusing my feminine wiles to get what I wanted in the workplace. He wasn’t even talking about promotions– just getting my projects moved up to the top of the roster so I could meet myclients’ deadlines. I rememberbeing so affronted when he said this to me that we had a big falling out anddidn’t speak to each other for days. I also remember being mortified that my tactics were so transparent.

Now, I’m barely even sheepish.

It’s no secret that a woman reaches a point in her lifewhere she doesn’t have many feminine wiles left. I’m thinking I may have two or three at most; I may as welluse them.

As I’ve matured, I’ve found the Threat of Crying to be moreeffective than Actual Crying. Youcan still come across as pathetic, but you don’t get all pink and puffy. For me, it allows oxygen a continuedclear passage through my nasal cavity. Also, there’s no awkward moment when someone has to decide whether it’sappropriate to put their arm around you.

The auto body shop owner was a man, but I’ve used my fewremaining wiles with women as well. “Are you really nice?” I asked the woman at the insurance company when Icalled to find out that The Teenager’s insurance rates would increase almost100% if we filed a claim for the damage. “Because I might cry during this call and I need to be talking tosomeone really nice.”

“I can be,” she said.

“Would you?” I pressed.

These conversations didn’t need any gum or onion-chopping orany pinching myself hard on the underside of my arm. Because I really am on the verge of tears over thisincident, even though I got a much lower estimate from my auto body shop andeven though no one got hurt and no one is even angry about what happened. But from the moment I got The Call fromThe Teenager, a truth solidified for me, one that I had been entertaining as hypothetical,but been able to push safely away, which is that my baby boy has gained a levelof independence and taken on an amount of responsibility that I have no controlover. And things are going to getbroken, despite how much I try to will them otherwise.

There is a Buddhist saying that goes, “The teacup is alreadybroken.” I usually take that tomean, don’t get too attached to the way things are – they’re going to change;impermanence is the nature of the world. This has been a notion I’ve found solace in over and over when I findmyself too worried about things I can’t control.

But it’s a concept that’s harder to embrace when your childis getting behind the wheel of a car every day.

For now, a better maxim might be, “Don’t send a teenager toan auto body shop to do the work of a distraught and zealously frugalmiddle-aged woman,” which may not be as elegant a metaphor, but is a notion Ithink every one of us can get behind.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T13:05:00.000-08:00

Many, many years ago, I spent New Year’s morning walking through Hoboken with my boyfriend. We’d decided that morning (or maybe the night before) that we needed to break up. We’d been together for several years – longer than I’d been with anyone at that point in my life – but the writing was on the wall and we both knew it.

I think I was 29.

It was snowing that morning, which made our walk all the more wistful. Because we really liked each other, and we loved walking through Hoboken together, and also because Hoboken is especially beautiful during an early winter snow. It made the whole sad thing all the more sad.

Somewhere along our walk (I remember it being around 14th Street), one of us had an uncharacteristic moment of profound maturity and suggested something that, even as I write it, seems so outlandish I can’t believe the other even entertained it. One of us suggested we go see a therapist to break up. Because we were both in our twenties and each of us understood that we had gotten to “that place” we all get to in a relationship where we start doing our stupid, self-destructive things and that it would just be a matter of time before this union crashed and burned as had the others that came before it.

If we saw a therapist together and hashed it all out, we thought maybe we could do it differently with the next person. Maybe we could walk away from each other feeling not like victims, but empowered to stop playing out our same silly games in every subsequent love affair we had for the rest of our lives.

The logic was: If we broke up mindfully, we could perhaps each go off and find happiness in the world.

Therapy took a good, long time – much longer than the two or three sessions either of us had envisioned. After we were done, we bought a house together. And then we went on a 10-day trip to Hawaii, a trip that, after we got married, we referred to as our honeymoon, even though it took place before we had exchanged vows.

I just received this message today from an old friend: “On this first day of 2012 let go of the past. Don't waste a good minute worrying about a bad one. Know that everything is perfect exactly as it is. Trust that there is a reason, even when you can't see it.”

I don’t really believe in New Year’s Resolutions, but I’m making an exception this year and resolving to try and remind myself of my friend’s wise words every single day. And maybe to also try and eat more kale.

Happy New Year!! Thanks so much for spending time here with me.

SAT Words for Gas Money

2011-12-14T15:06:00.000-08:00

The Teenager’s friend parks in front of my house and walks in without knocking. He says he’s been video chatting with my son but was dumped when The Teenager received a chat request from his girlfriend. “Not his Real Girlfriend,” says the friend. “That other girl who he pretends is his girlfriend.”

All of this made complete sense to me. I knew the friend was talking about a girl from the mid-west that The Teenager had met on his Alaska trip over the summer. What I didn’t know was who the Real Girlfriend was, so I start grilling the friend, naming names. I’m met with only a coy smile.

I name the girl that The Teenager made a pact to pierce his ear with. And the other girl he spends Sunday nights “studying” with at Café Eclectic, a local antidote to Starbucks, with couches and loud music and table service. I know he pays for her when they sit for hours writing papers. I’ve had to remind him that even though they only order coffee, he still has to leave a tip.

I get no information so I go back to folding the laundry on the dining room table.

The Teenager and his friend bounce from room to room, snacking, playing with electronics, preening in mirrors. They stop in to the dining room to complain about the high cost of gas, perhaps hoping I might take pity and throw them a twenty.

Later, when the laundry is done and I’m back at my computer, they infiltrate my tiny office and whine about how bored they are. I suggest going to a movie. They can’t find a good one, they say. “You can go grocery shopping for me,” I tell them. I’m unable to fathom how two teenage boys, each with a car at his disposal, can’t seem to find anything to do on a Friday night.

The Teenager is picking things up off my bookshelves and putting them back in the wrong places. His friend has discovered that if he pulls down on my office door while moving it open and closed, he can make it creak like the doors in horror movies.

They complain more about gas money and the fact that I don’t keep enough drinks chilling in the refrigerator and I shoo them out and try to go back to work.

I’m not sure what made me think of the SAT flash cards, but a quick succession of ideas assembled in my mind – a phenomenon that has become so rare it left me marveling that the process could still take place.

I stick my head into the TV room. “We’re going to play SAT Words For Gas Money,” I say, knowing that the phrase “Gas Money” would get their attention.

“What’s that?” asks the friend and I quickly explain how I would ask them SAT words and give them each a quarter for every word they can define. I get the flash cards and my bowl of change and set up at the living room coffee table. They sit on the couch facing me, ready for action.

In my usual fashion, I revise the rules before we begin. “Not a quarter, a nickel,” I say. I was afraid I would go broke.

They pooh-pooh a nickel and we settle on a dime per word. As it turned out, my fear was needless; they botched up one word after another – words that I was sure they would know.

The Teenager is scheduled to take his first SAT in six weeks and I really had no idea how grim the vocabulary situation was. I’m not talking about crazy-ass words, either. Comprehensive. Notoriety. Altruistic. Words that I use all the time in sentences. Sometimes even correctly.

“Nuance,” I say to them.

Blank stares, both.

“Teenager, I used this word the other day when we were talking during breakfast,” I say to His Blankness. “Do you even know what I’m saying when I talk to you?”

“Not usually,” he says.

Occasionally, they get a definition or synonym correct and I slide a dime across the table into their small piles. If their definition is not quite right but was in the ballpark, I give them a nickel. By the end of the round, they each have $1.75, barely enough to drive to the next town.

“One more, one more,” says The Teenager, determined to win a full $2.00.

“Eclectic.”

I think, How cute that his favorite hangout came up as an SAT word.

However, The Teenager does not look amused. Worse, he looks resigned. He doesn’t seem like he’s even trying to figure out why his Sunday haunt might bear that name.

“No,” I tell him, scooping up the rest of my change and dumping it back into the bowl. “Eclectic, does not mean ‘Coffee and Tea.’”

Roadrunner, Roadrunner

2011-12-02T16:03:00.000-08:00

Early on I would just go to see who vomits. Which is really out of character for me. I usually can’t abide anything bilious, but somehow, in the runners, it didn’t make me gag, but instead left me with a feeling of awe that was at first unexpected and which later I feel like I became almost addicted to.

When people talk about runners, they usually focus on the Runner’s High. The euphoric feeling afterwards that you can do anything. That you’re gorgeous and invincible and, well, perfect. However, that is not how these runners present when they’re walking beyond the finish line, holding their sides, leaning forward to gently hurl. Still, I find it so captivating, I can’t take my eyes off them.

This is just one of the things I’ve discovered about high school cross-country, a sport that I knew virtually nothing about three years ago. In fact, when my son was a freshman and a dad in town asked if he was playing a fall sport, the dad responded with a snort when I said cross-country. “That’s not a real sport,” the dad said. At the time, I felt like I knew what he meant. You’re not embattled in head to head combat. There is no ball. There’s nothing about it that reeks of good ol’ boys.

I nodded when the dad said that, because, as usual, I wanted to fit in. But if he made the same declaration now, I would snort right back.

Because I would now find that statement dismissive and disrespectful of what these kids endure over the course of their season, and, yes, it’s different than having a drill sergeant for a coach who makes a whole team run suicides for an hour if one kid forgets his mouth guard. There is a soul and a humanity to running a long distance race that I find utterly humbling.

Kids come through the finish line and, even if they don’t vomit (and many don’t), they are in agony; it’s displayed on every pore of their face. There’s not much hooting and hollering; they’re someplace inside themselves and to witness the quietness of it feels both intimate and raw.

Some kids just walk off and back to their groups. They’re finding their breath and calming their legs. Others need to be held, and their teammates rush towards them, two kids flanking on either side. They walk the runner slowly, holding him up, bringing him back to life.

These kids do look like they’ve jut come off a battlefield, like they’re the walking wounded and you can see in their eyes that they’ve just been to a place that they’d never expected to go. It hurts. Some cry. Many walk off for a few minutes to be alone.

I just came back from the team banquet, an event that was about as low key as you can get. Pot luck, field house, no slide shows or trophies. Mostly just pasta and camaraderie.

The two captains, one senior and one junior, spoke about how the boys train six days a week, run four to seven miles every day, in the August heat and the October rain. And, as the team captain said, “when it’s time for a race, there is no one to blame things on. All there is is you and your time.” If that’s not a little microcosm of life, I don’t know what is.

Finally, the captains each told the story of how he’d gotten to cross-country. They had completely different styles, but their tales were similar. “I didn’t make the soccer team…” “I needed to get faster for baseball…” After years of these banquets, I feel like it’s a cross-country refrain. “I’m here because I wasn’t good enough.”

If not for the mortal humiliation my son would feel, I would have stepped right up onto the table at the end of those speeches and sang out a refrain of my own, one that may have been implied but needs to be spoken, loudly, to any and every kid who is willing to test himself this way: Look at you! Look what you’ve accomplished! You guys are plenty good. You’re fucking amazing.

This piece ran on Montclair Patch today and the comment there are very heartfelt. You can see it HERE.

Short Story Link

2011-11-28T18:24:00.001-08:00

I got a short story published in an online literary magazine. The link is HERE. The issue is Wilderness House Literary Review #6/3 and the story is called Stanford Avenue. I want to link it here in case I ever need to find it again.

The site is unusual in that you have to click on the story link and it gives a PDF file. I'm not really sure why they set it up that way. It seems a bit of an inconvenience.

You don't need to read the story. In fact, it's probably better if you don't. You can just send me a note that says: Good job, Jessica! That would be perfect.

How My Mind Works

2011-11-25T16:52:00.000-08:00

Prologue:
My husband recently treated me to his spot-on impression of me: “I have a backache. Do you think I’m dying?”

***

The day before Thanksgiving, my neighbor called to see if I had a rolling pin she could borrow. I told her I sort of did; our rolling pin is now just a cylinder – the handles were unscrewed, dismantled and lost by one of my sons when he was a toddler. You can still roll with it, though, so she came over and I presented it to her. “It’s really only a dowel,” she said. Which is true. A rolling pin without handles is basically a dowel.

Twenty-seven Thanksgivings ago, my brother was home from college and he needed a ride to the home of one of his high school friends. I brought him there and came inside to say hello to the kid who I hadn’t seen in a few years. The kid’s older brother was there with his girlfriend and I talked to them for a while, lamenting how I had graduated from college a year before but still wasn’t able to find a job I liked. “Are you interested in communications?” the girlfriend asked me. “Because I work for a company that’s actively looking to hire.”

I was a psychology major and had a very different idea about what “communications” meant than she did, but I said yes and she gave me her colleague’s name and I called the woman and got an interview and then got a job there all within a few short weeks.

I thought of all this because my brother’s friend’s last name was Dowell.

At that job, I met my husband. He was one of very few single men working among a sea of linen-clad, pedicured, estrogen-laden Communications professionals. He and I went out for lunch a few times and then occasionally to the movies. I had a boyfriend at the time, but didn’t think much of it. I was in New York and my not-yet-husband was thin, well-dressed, and fun to talk to, so I assumed he was gay.

It turned out I was wrong about that and we started dating and then one thing led to another and now here we are, 27 years later, lending dowels to our neighbors.

I was thinking yesterday, about how much I have to be thankful for and topping the list was finding someone who can reflect to me who I am and help me laugh about it.

I’m glad we have been left with a pastry-rolling dowel. Because the people who come into our lives and become the most important to us are often the result of chance encounters and uncharacteristic decisions, and my gratitude for these types of happenstance may never have come into such clear focus if what I had was still a regular old rolling pin.

Wanted: $20,000 USB Port

2011-11-21T13:37:00.000-08:00

I’ve spent the past few weeks looking for a new car, a project that should be easy and fun, but for me is playing out like some kind of existential reckoning.

I don’t think I’ve ever “shopped” for a car in my life. I was either handed down cars, or stumbled upon something in a used car lot. The few new cars I’ve bought had been decided upon long before I ended up at a showroom. I didn’t test drive a series of mini-vans, I just walked into a Honda dealer and bought an Odyssey. I own the car I drive now because I liked the way my neighbor looked in hers – sophisticated and put together. I bought one for myself, thinking I might look the same way.

(I don’t.)

The root of the problem lies where most (ok, all), of my problems begin: I don’t know what I want.

I’ve studiously considered small, mid-size, sub-compact, luxury, hatchback, new, used, certified pre-owned, American, foreign, financed and leased. I can speak with frightening eloquence about any given car’s ranking in its class, its gas mileage, what comes standard, what fully-loaded costs. Car sentences come out of my mouth that make my best friend burst out laughing and my husband’s eyes glaze over.

I thought that research would bring me closer to understanding what it is I want, but, in fact, it’s just made things more cloudy and confused.

My family is no help. “Just get something with a USB port,” my husband has said. The kids agree. Beyond that, they couldn’t care less.

So this is how my conversations go with the car salesmen. Sitting across from them at their desks, my mind on one thing and one thing only: will I regret foregoing leather seats? They lean toward me, look deep into my eyes and ask the question that I’ve been hoping I’d know the answer to by now: What is it, exactly, that you’re looking for?

They want to help me. They want to meet my needs. I can feel it emanating from them, in their breath, and in the way they tap, tap, tap their pens gently on a clean white sheet of paper – a sheet that could soon be filled with whatever my imagination puts forth, however I care to spell out my heart’s desire.

“I need a car with a USB port,” I say. And it should be black.”

They wait, pen poised, but I’m finished. They smile. I smile. And then we go drive some stuff around.

I barely pay attention to the cars as I drive them. I ask the salesmen whether it’s scary to get in a car with a stranger, to be a passenger next to someone you don’t even know. One guy told me he was car-jacked a few years ago. A guy he took out pulled a knife on him about a mile from the dealership. He let the salesman out of the car and drove off.

“I’m not going to do that to you,” I tell him.

He thanks me.

We park, shake hands, exchange numbers. I have little recollection of the encounters. I want the earth to move, but it stays put.

That I don’t know what I want is not entirely true. There’s a specific model of VW, which is not only a convertible but it’s a hard-top, auto-retracting convertible that, when the top is opening or closing, makes the car look like a Transformer. It’s a 2-door, tight-fit, over-priced, poorly rated car that is so cute in red it’s almost unbearable. That’s the car I want.

“Really? A convertible?” my husband says to me. “You don’t even like driving with your windows open.”

True.

If someone just put a car in my driveway and started sending me monthly bills, that would be ideal. But so far that hasn’t happened and it doesn’t seem likely that it will. So, I’m going to have to read more Edmund’s reviews, visit more dealers. Find myself a 4-door, automatic, front-wheel drive USB port, even if it kills me.

Opposites Attract

2011-11-16T20:01:00.000-08:00

My husband just came back from a speaking engagement at Philadelphia University. He was asked to give a presentation to a group of animation students. He put together a bunch of work he had overseen when he was the creative director at Nickelodeon. I’m not sure what it all amounted to, but he said he left them with this sentiment: You all have a lot of opportunity right now, because everything is falling apart. If you’re willing to think and figure things out, there’s probably a lot of different ways your careers could go.

He told them, “When I started at Nickelodeon, it was kind of a nothing network. We had to build it up into something. If you went there now for a job, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun.”

This is one of the things my husband does best: imagine things that don’t exist yet. I don’t even know how that’s done.

He told me that afterwards, one after another student came up to him and said the same thing. That they really appreciated his perspective. That everyone else that comes to talk to them – everyone – describes a future of doom and gloom. Even the professor said that to him.

“I don’t do doom and gloom,” my husband told the professor. “For that, you need to talk to my wife.”

Six Flags. Big Dimples. First Wife.

2011-11-13T07:51:00.000-08:00

I’m in the car driving home. I have four teenage boys in the car. They’re tired and the ride is long, so they’re draped over the seats and armrests, occupying even more of the car than they need. Long legs. Smelly socks.

Big Dimples is sitting alone in the third row of my SUV, the area we would call “the way back” of a station wagon when we were kids. I can’t hear most of what he says from back there, only that he keeps yelling up to the front to turn the music louder.

The Parkway is slow, but not crawling. Still, it feels like we’ve been in the car forever. Each of them has slept for a little while, but we’re close to home now, so they’re all eager and alert.

“Let’s play the wave game,” one of them says.

I imagine them standing up and sitting down the way people do in a stadium. I tell them I don’t want them standing in the car, but I quickly realize that’s not what they’re talking about. They’re talking about waving to people in other cars. The way you do when you’re five. And they begin.

This unnerves me; I feel like we’re going to get shot. There’s something about being in close proximity to Big Dimples that makes me feel like I’m living on the edge, and I feel that way now, even in my four thousand pound car.

The girls who are driving behind us look like they’re in college. They see Big Dimples and they smile and wave back. The boys are giddy. Big Dimples has his hand up by his ear – he’s asking them to call him.

The girls smile and shrug their shoulders. How can we call you when we don’t have your number, they appear to be saying. Big Dimples starts holding fingers up. Nine fingers. Seven fingers. He’s miming his phone number for them.

“She texted me!” he yells.

I attempt to intervene but it’s half-assed. I’m not sure yet if they’re doing anything wrong and I’m curious to see what happens. “That girl shouldn’t be texting while she’s driving!” I yell out.

The driver isn’t texting, someone informs me. The passenger is.

Big Dimples shares the conversation with the other boys, but I can’t hear most of what he says because the music is on, the air-conditioner is blowing. I’m trying to appear blasé, so I don’t want to ask him to repeat himself.

The other boys vacillate between awe and mockery. “They’re asking where we’re going,” Big Dimples says.

“Are you going to tell them your friend’s mom is driving us home from an amusement park?” one of the boys shoots back.

The boys learn that the girls are in college and that they’re on their way home. They don’t live nearby and they don’t know they’re texting with high school freshmen. By this time, Big Dimples has stored their number in his phone, probably labeled as Girls On Parkway.

The girls pull out from behind us and start to pass me on the left. I’m sure they want to see who’s driving. I shield my face as they drive by, embarrassed by what I’ve just witnessed.

“This how Big Dimples is going to meet his first wife,” says one of the boys.

I sneak a peek at the girls before they drive off and they’re smiling – giggling – and a part of me thinks he’s probably right.

Long Live The Gecko

2011-11-10T18:19:00.001-08:00

Let me just start by saying, I’m not proud of anything I’m about to write.

I can’t blame it on the storm. Before we ever lost power – long before – I felt “done” with the gecko. I’ve tried to get rid of him, but someone always talks me out of it. But this storm that took out the power, that catapulted The Teenager out to some friend's heated home for days, that left my husband stranded in Boston a little longer than he planned, seemed like just the Unfortunate Event that might set me free.

By the third day without power, the house was cold – colder than the outside air. I think it was 52 degrees inside and the gecko was barely moving. He’d been looking sickly to begin with – for weeks he had an opaque quality to his skin and yucky stuff on his toes. He barely opened his eyes, which made him look even more grumpy than usual. His tail, an indicator of virility, was far too thin.

“Just so you know, I’ve decided not to take any extraordinary measures with the gecko,” I said to my husband in one of our thrice-daily phone calls during which I mostly complained about how cold and unpleasant life here was.

“You can’t do that,” he said. “You have to bring him somewhere warm.”

I reminded my husband about my injured shoulder and how taxing transporting a gecko tank would be. “You have to,” he said.

So I did. I took the gecko over to a friend who had power and heat and a big heart. I grumbled, even as I set up his warming lights, knowing this was just going to prolong his miserable life. And then, in for a pint, in for a pound, I drove to the pet store to get him crickets.

I could have just asked for 10 crickets, as I always do, but for some reason I launched into a confessional speech about how I really didn’t want to “save” my gecko, how he was ill and how I would have happily let him freeze to death, but I didn’t, I moved him to warmth and now here I was, needing to feed him crickets.

The two guys behind the counter were speechless. Both in their twenties, and obvious animal lovers, I’m sure they didn’t know what to make of me, a middle-aged lizard hater.

“How do you know he’s ill?” one finally managed to ask.

I told them about his skin issues and his tail and his surly demeanor and they gave me a bottle of emollients for him. “He’s not molting properly,” one said. “He’s probably in pain.”

“What am I supposed to do, spray him with this?” I said.

No, it goes into a basin. Lukewarm water, preferably distilled. The gecko was to soak in it for 20 minutes and then I was to gently rub off his molting skin.

“Are you kidding me? You want me to give the gecko a bath?”

Had they not heard me when I said I was hoping he would just die?

One of them talked about how much he was probably suffering and that if I was going to let him perish, I could at least make him comfortable in the meantime. This reasoning would normally make no sense to me, but the storm had really rattled me, so I entertained their pleas.

I turned the bottle over to see how much it cost.

“Look,” sang the guy with two earrings as he wagged his finger at me, “someone cares a little!”

“If you buy the Reptile Bath, we’ll throw in the crickets for free,” said the other.

“Ok, but I’m not bathing him at my friends house,” I said.

No, of course, whenever your power comes back on, they said.

I took the crickets to the gecko and unceremoniously dumped them into his tank. He seemed neither grateful nor joyful and I wondered whether it was possible that he might just die of scorn.

Geckos can live for 20 years, the pet saviors told me. Ours is seven. I try to imagine myself thirteen years from now, gray and liver-spotted, inquiring whether I can get a Senior Discount on crickets at the pet store and it’s not a fantasy that I care to engage in.

The Sag

2011-11-05T16:27:00.000-07:00

I remember several years ago, my older son had some friends over on a Saturday night around Halloween. One of the dads came to pick up his kid; the dad had obviously slipped away from a Halloween party to execute the retrieval. He had on a suede vest and a purple shirt, jeans, some large pendant hanging from his neck. He may have said he was a Dude From The Seventies, and I remember thinking, “Huh, I dress just like that most of the time.”

It got me wondering: Would my kids, when they’re 40 or 50, show up at a Halloween party in a pair of jeans slung low on their hips – below their butts, even – with a colorful pair of boxers displayed, announcing they were Dudes From 2011? Egad.

If this Halloween was any precursor, that particular demise of society has already begun, because just days ago, I opened the door to eight giggling, early pubescent girls and, in an attempt to make small talk, asked one – a neighborhood girl – what she was supposed to be. She promptly uttered the name of my 12-year-old son and when I looked confused, she pulled up her tee shirt to reveal several inches of striped boxers, cinched below by a pair of belted, sagging jeans.

I gave her an extra Reese’s Cup, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. And then I watched her take the porch steps, slow and wide-legged, just as my son does, so her pants wouldn’t fall down completely.

My Brain Has A Mind Of Its Own

2011-10-24T18:16:00.000-07:00

I was in the supermarket the other day, procuring my twice-weekly stash of Brussels sprouts, when I saw one of my tennis friends at the other end of the produce aisle. We drove our carts up to each other and hugged (because we really like each other, not because it’s expected) and immediately started talking about menopause. Why? I don’t really know. But it seemed as easy and natural as inquiring about what the other was making for dinner.

She told me about a movie she had seen recently on HBO – it was called “Enlightenment” or something like that – and she said the protagonist was a black-or-white kind of character who went off to Hawaii (maybe) and changed a whole lot of things about her life in a radical, all-encompassing way. The reason I’m not entirely clear on what the story was about is because at one point my tennis friend mentioned that the main character was played by “that woman in Jurassic Park. What was her name, again?”

I knew exactly who she was talking about, but couldn’t access the actress’s name either. “I know, I know,” I said. “She’s blond and she’s sort of….”

I couldn’t think of the right adjective to describe this actress physically, but I did remember there was always something about her nose and lips and chin that made her beautiful, but in a way that was…

“Hard,” said my tennis friend, who was also struggling with the actress’s name.

“Yes! Hard! There’s something about her that’s hard,” I said. And then I half-listened to the plot of the movie while I employed a good deal of my brain to try and remember her name.

My friend said she could only watch bits and pieces of the movie because she really saw herself in the character and it was troubling. She wept when she watched it. She turned away.

I shared with her my own weepiness. How I had to yell at myself on the way to the dentist: “Pull yourself together. You cannot be in this fragile state while someone is scaling the plaque from your teeth.”

We both nodded solemnly, a symbol of our lachrymose sisterhood. Then, I left with my Brussels sprouts and went about my day.

I slept well that night, as I usually do, and in the morning, I woke up with two words on my lips: Laura Dern.

(There is a hardness about her, right?)

I was so excited to remember the actress’s name; I couldn’t wait to get to my computer and send an email containing only those two words.

But to whom?

I had no idea who I had that conversation with. I couldn’t remember the name of the movie, or where I was when I was told about it. Obviously, I had no idea who had been doing the telling.

The name Laura Dern danced around in my head like a scene from Black Orpheus, all jubilant, whirling streamers. The context, however, was a total blank.

I lay still and rehashed every interaction I’d had the day before. Was it someone I saw at the football game? Was it someone I saw on my block? Where had I been yesterday? Who had I seen? What had I done?

Finally, my brain spat forth the image of my tennis friend, her blue eyes matching her blue sweatshirt. The name of the movie emerged. The network it was on. A few other details.

More and more my brain feels like it has a mind of its own, and not a particularly cooperative one. If I want to access information, a memory, I need to go about it passively—let it waft in when it’s ready.

People tell me secrets. “You can’t tell anyone this,” they say.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “In five minutes, I won’t even remember it.”

Road Test

2011-09-30T18:37:00.000-07:00

I was about 17, when I went to my first concert. I was with a bunch of friends and we drove what seemed like a million miles from suburban New Jersey to the Nassau Coliseum to see Jethro Tull. There were maybe eight of us and we situated ourselves inside of a flower delivery van that one of the kids drove for his job. There were no seats in the back of the van, just hard corrugated metal and errant Baby’s Breath. The drive was long. It was raining. And I remember that bumpy, endless trip as being not only one of the first times I felt really grown up, but also my first introduction to that particularly unpleasant trifecta of physical conditions: hungry, cold, and wet.

Fast forward to last Friday, where I find myself in a similar state, although this time I am not in the back of a cold, steel flower truck, but rather in the driver’s seat of a friend’s Honda Civic, parked at the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, trying to kill time with my now-17-year-old while we wait for an hour for the MVC Gal to emerge from the small concrete building beside us and take my son for his road test.

I am wet because it’s pouring. The conditions couldn’t be worse for driving except maybe if it were a blizzard. We’ve borrowed my friend’s car because you need a hand brake between the two front seats in order to take the test and my car has an emergency brake accessible only by foot. There is no back wiper on this car and it’s raining so hard you can’t see out the rear window. “Am I going to be able to parallel park?” my son muses. “You’ll do the best you can,” I say.

I’m cold because I’m not dressed appropriately. The tee shirt I have on is too light and the denim jacket I brought is not warm. We blast the heat but it’s barely addressing the problem, because my jeans are soaked from ankle to thigh due to my myriad sprints from the small concrete building to the big concrete building along with my hemispheric jogs around the car from passenger to driver’s side and back.

These sprints and jogs are the result of my major shortcoming in life: I am plan-impaired. I tried to overcome my handicap for this particular excursion, but I failed.

My first mistake was not paying a driving instructor the $100 fee to just pick my son up from school, bring him for his license, and then deliver him back home again. When they told me $100, I thought it was outlandish. Highway robbery, if you will. And I resolved to find a car with an appropriately positioned break and do it myself.

Finding the car took two minutes. My friend was happy to oblige. I also prided myself on taking my son’s Learner’s Permit out of my glove box and sticking it in my wallet, as I suspected he might need it and wouldn’t I feel terrible if we’d gone all that way only to find his paperwork was left in the wrong car?

I was also proud of myself for researching what documents were needed to obtain an initial license. I was surprised to find that the Six Points Of Identification were required for 17-year-olds, although I don’t know why I should have been. No matter. I had plenty of time to fish out his birth certificate and Social Security card, get a school report card the bore his address along with a school ID card. I even called the school to say I was signing him out for the day and the secretary armed me with a letter verifying his enrollment. “Sometimes they ask for this,” she said.

I retrieved him from school, stopped at the deli so he could get a bacon-laden snack, and we headed off. We waited our turn in line and it wasn’t until we had pulled right up to the Road Test Stop Sign that I could read the instructions underneath: Please have your Registration and Insurance ready.

I knew right away they did not want my registration and insurance; they wanted the ones that went with my friend’s car. This was the one stone I’d left unturned.

In a somewhat miraculous turn of events, my friend had just yesterday put her registration card into her glove box, a habit that I never subscribe to (and, I guess, neither did she). However her insurance card remained with her.

The MVC Gal was about to make us reschedule, but then she said my friend could have her insurance company fax a letter (to the big concrete building) and I could pick it up and bring it to her (in the small concrete building) and once that happened, my son could take his road test.

When I picked up the fax, I did not stop at the vending machine to get myself a snack because it was 11:50 and I was trying to get back to the small concrete building before noon, which is when the MVC Gal takes lunch. Miracle Number Two was that, in spite of out-the-door lines and stolid bureaucracy, I actually had the fax in my hands exactly four minutes after I called my friend to arrange it. However, by the time I reached the small concrete building again, it was 11:56 and the MVC Gal had already reheated last night’s General Tsao’s Chicken and sidled up to the folding table. I watched her tuck her napkin into her collar as she gave me an almost authentic look of regret.

“Come back at 1:00,” she said.

I was afraid to leave our spot in line, so we stayed put while she had her lunch inside the warm, little concrete building and I ate the only thing I’d taken with me from home: Trident gum.

Once she showed up, the rest went pretty smoothly. My son made only one mistake (put your blinker on for a K-turn) and I committed a few social faux pas, but two hours later, we walked back out into the rain, license in hand, and I snatched my rattling last breaths (with deep-sea-diver sound) as I watched my baby’s world expand in vastness before my eyes.

Deflowered

2011-09-25T04:17:00.000-07:00

(A slightly modified, pg-13 version of article appears on Patch today with the subhead: I’m no longer an Accents With Flowers virgin. This is the original, R-Rated director's cut.)

There’s a store on Church Street that I’ve never been in. By all accounts it looks like a florist. This is mainly because the sidewalk in front of the store has been filled with plants, planters, birdbaths and various other things you might find in front of a flower shop. Also, it has the word “flowers” in its name. I was stalking a new friend the other day and saw her slip in there, so, despite not needing flowers, I decided to follow.

The entryway of the store is filled with little gifty things – indeed, the type of thing you might find in a flower shop. There were a few racks of greeting cards and within the glass counter was a display of fancy chocolates. “Oh, you can get candy and flowers here,” I thought, filing the information away as if I were a Gatsby-era suitor rather than an eating-disordered matron.

I presented myself to my new friend and she was appropriately startled to see me. We’d just had lunch on Church Street the day before and something felt peculiar about seeing her here, exactly 24 hours later.

“Do you come here often?” she said, meaning to the store.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in here in my life,” I said.

“I love this store,” she said, and then just to make sure I understood, “I really love it.”

I glanced around once again and noticed a few odd accoutrements on the display table to my left. There were several small glass vials with cinnamon-infused oil that didn’t seem to “go” with the rest of the display.

“Everything in here is so random!” she said with unmistakable giddiness, and once she pointed it out, it was as if the store transformed into some kind of secret treasure before my very eyes.

Yes, there was a refrigerator full of cut flowers, and yes, there was a glass case of decorated chocolates, but there were also lamps and throw pillows and candles and clothes. In fact, it felt a little like someone had taken American Sampler, Dobbs and Copabananas and smushed them all together into one big eye-candy extravaganza.

I wandered into the adjoining room. Sleepwear, jewelry, handbags, tea sets, linens, kitchenware. Shelves of items that celebrate dogs and cats, including Christmas ornaments hanging on a near-bare tree. Art, books, mirrors, change purses. Blackberry jam. Barack Obama toilet paper.

The actual display layouts are as fascinating as what’s displayed. There was a table with a smattering of novelty g-strings, a journal-type book in which you could record your thoughts about parenting, and then a small stack of Bubba’s Butt Soap. Of course, I was instantly drawn to the Butt Soap. On the back of it, the directions provided simple instruction: “Insert soap bar into crack and move up and down a few times, rinse and repeat ‘til clean.” I tried to imagine that type of package copy being approved in a Proctor and Gamble brand meeting, but faltered.

“I could stay in here all day,” my friend said as she gathered up her purchases and left.

Me, too, I thought, as I went on to discover the Baby Section, the Candy Cane Section, the Naughty Section, the Other Naughty Section and then quietly tried to imagine what it would have been like to actually live in a house decorated in chintz and fringed lamps that look like they should be in a bordello, which is just where I was headed, years ago, before my husband steered me to Stickley.

Eventually, sensory overload set in and I stepped out of nirvana and back into my life. “You can get flowers and butt soap here,” I said to myself as I left – making a mental note of all the upcoming occasions where either – or both – might come in handy.

Breakfast Conversation With The 12-Year-Old

2011-09-16T04:05:00.000-07:00

HIM: Does it cost money for the bike store to take something off your bike?
ME: I don't know, I guess it depends what it is. Maybe we could just take it off here.
HIM: Ok.
HIM: Can I tell you what I want to take off?
ME: Sure.
HIM: The brakes.

Welcome to Middle School, May I Please Take Your Sanity?

2011-09-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

My youngest went off to a new school last week and the preparation made me sigh. My preparation. For revisiting that strange planet called Middle School with its unique brand of intrigue.

Not so long ago, The Teenager introduced me to the finer points of Middle School during a shopping expedition and I remember thinking, Lewis Carroll, step aside.

We were off to buy sneakers, a once simple activity that had suddenly become highly complicated. He’d asked me to take him for weeks, and I’d put him off. He already had a pair of sneakers, and I didn’t understand why he needed another one. Finally, I relented.

As we got into the car he asked if we could pick up one of his friends (I’ll call him James Dean). Then, thirty seconds after we arrived at the store, another friend sauntered in. I’ll call him James Dean’s Cousin. James Dean and my son both acted like it was a huge coincidence that James Dean’s Cousin had just shown up.

“Are these two here for a fashion consult?” I asked my son, marveling that teenage boys would want to shop together.

“They have to make sure they’re real,” he said.

I walked gingerly up to a pair of sneakers perched regally atop a Lucite pedestal. I gave them a little poke. They seemed real enough.

“I don’t think this store is going to sell counterfeit sneakers,” I said. Three pair of eyes rolled.

We were not shopping in a bona fide sneaker store. It was a skate store: skate shoes, skateboards and skate clothing. There was an element of “cool” to the store that seemed to make James Dean feel right at home. Another friend bounded into the store out of breath. This boy lived over a mile away, but it appeared that he had run over quickly in order to partake in the activities.

James Dean gave the okay to a pair of green on green, leather and suede high tops. “I like those,” my son said. “But I can’t get them.”

“Why not?” I asked.

He explained that another friend already had those sneakers.

“How about these?” I asked, picking up a pair of multicolored Nikes with a gold Swoosh.

“Taken,” he said.

“By whom?”

The same kid: Marlon Brando. Brando evidently had the green ones, the gold swooshes and six other pair. The boys all agreed: You can’t get the same shoes as someone else. They told me a story about a reasonably popular kid who showed up at school with the same shoes as another boy and was instantly branded a “biter.”

I used context clues to determine that a Biter is a middle-school version of a Copy Cat.

“Excuse me,” I said. “But if a kid has eight pair of sneakers, he’s not allowed to say that no one else can have the same sneakers as he does.”

The boys all shook their heads, pitying me my cluelessness.

I made an eye-contact appeal to the store clerk. A look that said, Even though I’ve been an adult since before you were born, we still have in common that we are no longer in middle school. So can you please help me out here?

The clerk caught on right away. “My friends and I wear the same shoes all the time,” he said to the boys.

This idea so repulsed James Dean and James Dean’s Cousin that they just up and left, muttering something about looking at sneakers in another store down the street.

The store clerk went on, “That kid with eight pair of sneakers needs to get a life. He’s in here every day!”

This had the exact opposite effect on my son as I had hoped. His eyes lit up and I could already see his little brain working hard trying to figure out how he might organize his life to be in this store every day; how he, too, could own eight pair of sneakers. How, perhaps, if he did own eight pair of sneakers, middle school would not feel like such a mystery planet after all.

I launched into my speech: “I don’t understand. People sell fake sneakers? You can’t have the same as anyone else? There are only so many designs! How can everyone have a unique pair of sneakers?”

These are the types of questions that get asked just prior to your innocence being peeled away. Questions that usher you from that blissful land called ignorance and into the mayhem called middle school. It happens gently and quietly and, if you’re lucky, privately. With any luck, you’ll be wearing the right shoes for the trip.

Lovely Rita

2011-09-09T18:27:00.000-07:00

I was almost late for an Emergency Coffee Date today because I was having A Moment with the meter maid. I’d put my quarter in and nothing happened and while I was cursing, I saw her walking to her car. I yelled, “Excuse me,” in that voice I reserve for people at whom I’m about to launch a hissy fit – although she didn’t know me, so she was unaware that my usual voice is not so shrill.

“I just put money in the meter,” I called over to her, “and it didn’t give me any time.”

She started toward me. “This happens all the time,” I added in a voice you could tell was exasperated whether you knew me or not.

“Is it jammed?” she asked. By this time we were both at the meter in question and she could see for herself that it wasn’t. “You can just leave your car here,” she said, and then she called me sweetheart, as if she were my grandmother and not an Hispanic woman 15 years my junior. “I won’t give you a ticket when the screen is blank like that.”

This certainly took some of the fight out of me and I realized that I was not going to be able to take out my crappy day on this particular civil servant. She gave me a sweet smile and told me I should go off and do my errands; my car would be fine.

“Do you want another quarter?” I asked, holding out the second coin I would have fed into the meter.

“No, sweetheart, you just have a good day,” she said.

I started thanking her effusively – too effusively, perhaps – and then I started to apologize. I told her I was having a crappy day and I didn’t mean to take out my bad mood on her or her parking meters. I had been apologizing for things all day already – a misunderstanding I’d creating in a hasty email exchange this morning, all the awful shots I made during my tennis game – and felt there was far more to apologize for. For not being the woman who lost her husband to a brain aneurysm or the mother who had to treat her child’s newly diagnosed leukemia, as was the case with two old friends this week. For acting petty and small with my family to cover up the fact that I’m feeling really vulnerable and scared about money and new schools and impending college searches. And soon, to my Coffee Date, for being late because I’m having A Moment with the meter maid.

I thought the meter maid was going to smile again and be on her way, but instead she stood right in front of me and said, “Sweetheart, sometimes we all have days like that.” Then she told me about her mother who had Stage 4 cancer and another family friend who just lost her 12-year-old in a car accident. I was still stressing out about being late for Coffee, so I had to re-play what she’d just said to me before it sunk in. For a brief moment, I stopped thinking about myself and I looked at the meter maid. She was dressed like a cop and had a beautiful French manicure. She looked like she had a little gem pierced into her face – it was tiny. Maybe it was just a mole. And her eyes were dark and sparkly; she looked right at me when she spoke.

“I’m telling you all this because we always need to remember that no matter how bad our problems are, they could be much worse,” she said, and then repeated one of my favorite little axioms about how people, when invited to drop their problems into a well and pick anyone else’s problems to take home with them instead, all invariably choose to take back their own.

I then hugged the meter maid and let her go back to her work. And I went in to meet my Coffee Date and ended up having the most delicious cup of coffee I can ever remember.

Etiquette

2011-08-10T08:10:00.000-07:00

I’m sure I don’t need to really spell this out, but just in case, here it goes.

If you ever find yourself working at Weight Watchers – as one of the people who checks the weight of others, say – and the weight watcher in question has come in for her monthly weigh-in, and she knows her weight is up from last month (she already knows it!), and she says to you, “How bad is it?”, you can just quietly lean over and tell her her weight. You don’t need to say to her, “Here, I’ll just give you the print-out and you can see for yourself…will you be able to see it without your reading glasses?”

Because when you say something like that to a woman of a certain age – especially when that woman’s birthday is upon her and she will be A Certain Age And Then Some, it hits her in the same way as asking a woman who is a little thick around the middle whether she is pregnant. And I think we all have come far enough in life by now (and by “all” I mean even my 11-year-old son) to know that that is a sentence that should never, ever be uttered unless the thick-middled woman has her sonogram print-out pinned to her lapel.

If you misstep, and you do make a gauche reference to reading glasses, you just need to be prepared for the possible reaction. The Woman of A Certain Age may not actually follow through on this, but what she wants, at the conclusion of your sentence…she wants to reach across the desk and punch you in your fucking face.

Ok, so now you know.

Here's Why I Don't Do Dishes On My Birthday

2011-08-09T17:03:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure if it’s a Leo thing, but many of us with August birthdays don’t just celebrate the day we were born, we celebrate the whole week. Sometimes the whole month. For me, celebrating doesn’t entail much more than saying, “It’s my birthday!” To which someone will respond, “Oh, Happy Birthday!” and I’ll offer a big, gushy, “Thanks!” and, voila, I feel celebrated.

I usually keep my birthday expectations very low. Similar to Mother’s Day, if no one ends up in the emergency room and/or I don’t have to clean up vomit, I consider the day a resounding success.

I was not born with this perspective – it’s been acquired.

In my twenties, I spent a bit of time as a PA. PA is short for Production Assistant and can mean many things in terms of skill and responsibility. For me, it meant doing all the impossible things that no one else wanted to do. Keeping someone’s ice coffee cold in a heat wave. Trying to find magenta duct tape. Fixing a broken Xerox machine.

You can often tell which are the PAs at any shoot. They’re the ones running ragged to prove themselves while simultaneously stifling their fury about being the lowest paid, least respected members of the crew.

The first PA job I was ever given was for a Man-On-The-Street interview spot. We were going to shoot at the Willowbrook Mall and we had a call time of 10 AM. I remember all those details, including the exact date of the shoot not because it was my first time, but because it was my birthday.

Most of the crew was traveling from Manhattan, but I already lived in New Jersey, as did Steve, the production manager, so he and I were going to drive to the mall together. I don’t remember what time he was scheduled to pick me up, but I do remember that our plans changed substantially, because early that morning, as I was washing my breakfast dishes, a glass broke in my hand. The sink filled with blood and I could not get the bleeding under control. I called Steve, “I’m going to be a little late. I have to go to the ER.”

Steve offered to bring me to the hospital. Our first stop was the triage nurse who listened to my story and started taking down my information. “Birth date?” she asked. “Today!” I said.

For the first time she looked up from her notes. “Today is your birthday?”

I smiled and nodded like a 7-year-old.

“Honey, what were you doing washing dishes on your birthday?”

At first, I couldn’t tell if she was sympathetic or chiding, but it soon occurred to me that this must be some special brand of ER levity because the admitting nurse, the nurse who administered the Tetanus shot and the Physician’s Assistant who sewed my finger up all came up with the same sentiment.

“How did you do this, young lady?”

“Washing dishes,”

Then, looking at my chart, “What were you doing washing dishes on your birthday?”

An hour or so later, my index finger stitched, bandaged and throbbing, we headed to the mall. My finger garnered lots of attention, which I ended up exploiting over the course of the day.

My assignment was to find “men in business suits” who would agree to be interviewed. It was 11 AM on a weekday. “There are no men in business suits here,” I told the producer. “Men in business suits are all at their businesses.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “Go find me some suited men.”

I scampered off with my clipboard and throbbing finger and boldly approached the one and only business suit clad man in the mall. I told him what we were doing and asked if he’d be willing to be interviewed. No, he wouldn’t, he said. And he walked away.

I ran after him and began to beg. “Please, my boss is going to fire me if you don’t do it. I cut my finger open this morning and I got nine stitches and it’s really killing me and won’t you just give me this one break?”

I could see by the look on his face that I was getting through to him. He was on the verge of saying yes. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do what I was about to do, but it seemed the only way to secure his participation.

“Please,” I whined. “It’s my birthday.”

“It’s your birthday?” he said. Yes, it really is, I told him as I pushed my clipboard with the photo releases just a little closer to him. He took the release and my pen and said he’d be happy to do it.

“How did you cut your finger?” he said while he was signing his rights away.

“Washing dishes,” I said. And, before the words came out of his mouth, I added, “I know, I know. I shouldn’t do dishes on my birthday.”

Does no one wash dishes on their birthdays? Or take out the garbage? Or make the bed? My birthday is coming up and for the most part it’s business as usual. But if my kitchen looks a little more unkempt than usual, now you know why.

Laura the Tennis Pro Moves On

2011-08-05T11:59:00.000-07:00

And, Poof! just like that Laura the Tennis Pro turned into Laura the Respiratory Therapist.

I’ve been dreading this day for a long time. The day when Laura the Tennis Pro would really truly not be our Tennis Pro any longer. It was inevitable. She enrolled in a post graduate program to become a Certified Respiratory Therapist and during her studies, she would cram us all in for clinics on whatever day she could keep free that semester. Fortunately for her, school only lasted a finite amount of time. This last leg of it nearly killed her. Not so fortunate for us, though.

I continued to take lessons with Laura while she was in school because I knew that at some point (some point soon) the lessons would just end. That Laura the Tennis Pro would take off her Adidas, put on her surgical scrubs and go off to save people’s lives rather than just their backhands.

Still, in some secret place, I wished that Laura the Tennis Pro would find some respiratory work that didn’t require her presence every day. That she could find some special hospital or care facility that had made their patients agree to not have asthma attacks or emphysema on Wednesdays. That on Wednesdays, Laura the Respiratory Therapist would be able to sneak into a phone booth, don her Dri-Fit, and, just for a few short hours, become Laura the Tennis Pro again.

That shit never works and this time was no exception. Not only is Laura the Respiratory Therapist not going to be available for the occasional clinic, she’s not even staying in the tri-state area.

I’m really good at pretending sad things like this aren’t real and that’s part of the reason I haven’t written about it before. She has bequeathed us to another tennis pro who I’ve met over the summer and who I like a lot. But he doesn’t appear to be able to pull off an Austin Powers imitation, and he doesn’t have that same charming quality of being fearful of fire extinguishers. I don’t know if he’ll be a Serve Whisperer like Laura, although he does seem utterly capable of finding the same sort of glee that Laura did whenever Gina got hit with a ball.

I guess the truth is, I don't feel like I've learned all that I'm meant to from Laura the Tennis Pro. And I'm not even really talking about tennis anymore.

Peter the Tennis Pro. It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Maybe he’ll need a moniker all his own.

In the meantime, I just keep hearing this song playing in my head:

Into The Wild

2011-08-01T17:41:00.000-07:00

I now know that there is a qualitative difference in reading about teenage boys being mauled by a bear in Alaska when you yourself actually have a teenage boy in Alaska. Even though I learned about this horrific incident after I had spoken to the teenager from Anchorage Airport while he waited for his plane to board, I spent the whole day troubled and distracted, a sinking feeling inside that I just couldn’t shake, as if he were still in some kind of imminent danger.

Thirty days ago, I said to him, “Don’t get killed by a bear,” and he smirked and said, “I won’t,” and then he walked down the Alaska Air jet way and I watched his lanky 16-year-old self until I couldn’t see him anymore. And then I drove home hoping what he told me was true.

Months ago, there was a little joke that emerged when I was making his flight arrangements, between me and the airline representative. I was asking her how close the gates would be on his connecting flight and she said there was no way of knowing and, yes, he might have to ride the tram. I remember saying glibly, “Well, if he can’t figure out how to get from one plane to another, he probably has no business going on a wilderness trip in the first place.” We both laughed, maybe a little harder than we needed to, because we both knew that it’s so much easier to worry about things like trams and gate proximity than it is to worry about placing your beloved little speck of humanity into the unpredictable wiles of nature.

“What about bears?” I had asked the trip organizers a week before his departure.

“We have bear safety sessions,” the woman assured me. The kids go through a whole day of training on how to handle (and avoid) bear encounters. “What about earthquakes?” I’d asked her. “Lightening storms? Tsunamis?” I could feel my anxieties tumbling out of me like a water main break, but I really had no control of myself. The woman was able to address every one of my concerns and was actually doing a fairly good job of calming me down until I asked her about radioactivity from the nuclear disaster in Japan. “Should I be worrying about that?” I asked.

“No,” she said, and I could tell by the tone of her voice that it was time for me to stop.

The first report I read about the bear attack was early on Monday morning. Seven boys on a wilderness trip were backpacking without instructors as part of their leadership training. They were walking across a river when the bear attacked. The first two boys in line were mauled and, according to The Guardian, suffered “life-threatening injuries.” Two more boys were injured badly and everyone ended up in the hospital.

After I read the news, I went to meet some friends for tennis. (I try to stay occupied on the days the teenager is flying.) “Should I tell the teenager about the bear attack?” I asked one of the women. I always regard her as a mommy mentor.

“He’ll know about it,” she said. “He’ll hear about it in the news.”

“He may not, he’ll have been on a plane all day,” I said.

Her advice was to wait until he brought it up himself. “Then you can reassure him,” she said.

Reassure him?

She said I should tell him how sad I am about what happened to the boys but how I know nothing like that will ever happen to him. The other women nodded in agreement. I was completely dumbfounded. “I shouldn’t tell him how freaked out I am?” I said.

“No! You should absorb that fear yourself. Don’t share it. You don’t want him to be scared, do you?”

Well, yes. That’s exactly what I want. I want him to think: Wow, bears are out there ready to rip people to shreds, maybe a nice hotel vacation with black mold and bed bugs would be a more prudent journey next year.

I remember once being rational like my tennis friend, but that seems like another lifetime ago.

I’m not sure who brought up the subject, him or me, but the bear was discussed long before my son and I arrived home from the airport. “Those kids were attacked just a few miles from where we camped,” my son told me.

“How many miles?” I said.

“Four.”

Maybe because Alaska is so vast and such a paean to wildlife, four miles from a bear seems like nothing. It seems like having a bear in your bathroom. Having him in the shower with you. I tried to wrap my mind around what my son was telling me, which was basically, that my month-long mantra, “he won’t be attacked by a bear,” was successful merely because of dumb luck.

I expected to hear some horror in his voice, but the teenager spoke about the incident with uncharacteristic admiration. “Those kids were highly trained to deal with bears,” he said.

“Maybe not so much,” I said.

“Mom, they fought off a bear. The five other kids got the bear to leave. That’s amazing. If it was our group, we would have died. I promise.”

The words tumbled from him as casually as if he were reading a grocery list. Then in the next breath he began to tell me about the wilderness trip he wants to take next year.

My Dinner With Anita

2011-07-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

Last night, my editor at Patch asked me to cover an event. It was a Diner En Blanc that someone tried to get going in Montclair, modeled after the possibly-legendary-but-I-had-never-heard-of-it-before Parisian event that has been taking place every year for the past 20. The concept has many trappings of a Flash Mob, which, by all accounts, should have piqued my interest. But there’s no dancing involved (strike one) and you’re required to bring your own food (strike two) and it took place in a mosquito-filled park at dusk (strike three), so I was less than enthusiastic.

However, because I am a good worker bee, I agreed to check things out.

If my kids had heard Dinner en Blanc (and could speak French) they might have thought they’d died and gone to heaven – assuming, as they would, that the Dinner in White referred to the menu rather than the dress code. They would have been disappointed.

The original Diner en Blanc took place in 1988 when a Parisian guy (I’ll call him Francois) returned to Paris from some time abroad and wanted to hang with his friends. There were a lot of people planning to get together for dinner – too many – so they ended up bringing dinner (and tables, and chairs) to the Bois de Boulogne (which is a park, although about a million times bigger than the Montclair park I went to last night) and had their party there. They decided to all wear white so they could find each other easily as the group convened.

The rest is history. Every year since, some group has met at some Parisian monument or locale, dressed in white, tables in tow, and had what I’m sure was a fabulous, butter-drenched, French repast. There’s lots of secrecy around the event. Everyone knows the date but no one knows the place until immediately beforehand. Friends invite friends. Organizers organize. The event has grown to include thousands of people, all elegant and full of élan.

Last night’s White Dinner included 25. People, that is. It wasn’t fabulous, but it was sweet.

I would typically never go to something like this. I have a difficult enough time feeding my family from the convenience of my own kitchen – anything that smacks of pot luck puts me over the edge. However, like most things that I eschew, it’s still nice to be invited.

As it turned out, I had once met the organizer at a party and I knew about half the people in attendance. The organizer’s name was Anita and she had sent out 60 emails and those people sent out emails in turn, and I had a lot of questions to ask in order to write my story but the one most pressing question rolled around in the back of my head unspoken: How come I didn’t get an invitation to this?

No one knew who was coming, or who had been invited – it was all electronic word of mouth. In fact, when I showed up, many had assumed I’d received somebody’s email rather than just crashing in as The Press. But I know a lot of people – people from many different groups and niches – and I was a bit surprised that I had not even heard of it before. Even more so when Anita asked if I’d heard about this from Laurie.

Laurie, who lives next door to me.

I told myself it was because I have a reputation for never going anywhere, ever, but aside from the bugs and having to bring food, this is just the kind of whimsical thing I’m drawn to.

I tried very hard to stay focused on the event itself, but as soon as I got there, someone asked to see my bra (because of this) and I got into a long drawn out discussion about Keratin (as usual), which might be why my editor had to completely rewrite the first three paragraphs of the Patch piece.
C’est la vie.

Forget It

2011-07-20T15:04:00.001-07:00

I lost my cart at Kings this morning.

I went to Kings to buy almond butter because I forgot to buy it at Whole Foods when I was there yesterday. The main reason I went to Whole Foods was to get some Omega-3/6/9 oil that I heard about here on Patch. I’ve known about Essential Fatty Acids for a while, but I am grossed out by fish oil. I’ve tried to get my EFAs through sprinkling ground flax seed on my oatmeal in the morning, and while I enjoy its fibrous, nutty goodness, it doesn’t seem, after a year of sprinkling, that it’s done what I had hoped it would do. Which is to make my brain a bit sharper.

I did get the EFA oil, but neglected, while there, to get the other two main ingredients I needed for my smoothie recipe – the smoothie into which I would pour my EFA oil and quickly turn into the poster child for brain function that I’ve been hoping to become.

Long ago, a friend had speculated that a woman’s mental acuity drops 15% after childbirth – and another 15% with every child she bears thereafter. In my experience, I would say the drop is at least that. And it doesn’t seem temporary. Nearly 17 years later, I am still groping for words and wandering in and out of rooms looking for something I need very urgently, until it occurs to me that I have no recollection at all of what I’m looking for.

Fortunately, my husband has some weird superpower that enables him to roll with most of it. “Can you bring me the thing from the thing?” I’ll call out to him from the kitchen, and somehow he’ll know that I want is the “basil” from the “porch” and he appears with it.

Others have simply gotten used to my fumphering. “What’s the word I’m looking for,” I’ll say to a friend, completely disrupting the flow of conversation. “You know, when a person gets himself involved in things. Like events. What’s he called?”

“Um, a ‘participant’?”

“Yes, yes!” I’ll say, a little nervous that I couldn’t recall what’s probably a third grade vocabulary word.

Sometimes I just go blank.

I was almost at the end of my Kings run when I realized I hadn’t yet gotten the nut butter. I left my cart back by the chicken and started up and down the aisles trying to remember where the peanut butter lives. Eventually I found it, secured my almond butter and went to retrieve my cart over by the registers. It wasn’t there. “I lost my cart,” I said to the manager. She moved to put out an APB. “What’s in it?” she asked.

Although I knew my cart was full, ice cream was all I could recall.

Suddenly I remembered that I was looking in the wrong place, went back to the chicken department, got my cart, checked out and headed home.

I was very depleted from all that remembering, so while I was putting away groceries, I pulled out the blender and started assembling my smoothie ingredients. Ice. Silken tofu. Soy milk. EFA oil. Nut butter. Wait, where’s the nut butter?

It’s not in the bags. It’s not in the fridge. It’s not on the counter. I look in the fridge again. And in the bags again. And then the fridge again. Then I look at the receipt.

I call Kings. “Hi, this is the woman who just lost her shopping cart,” I say. (She knows exactly who it is.) “I paid for my nut butter, but I can’t find it in my bags.”

No one turned in nut butter, she says, but come on back and we’ll give you another one.

This is one of the things I really love about Kings (the other is their apples), but still, I’m hungry and I want my smoothie, and I don’t feel like getting in the car and driving back there. I wish I could wiggle my nose or something and just make it appear. I grabbed my keys and clomped out to the car, far more heavy-footed than I needed to be since there was no one around to witness my petulance.

On a lark, I took a quick look in the trunk. Guess who forgot to bring one of the bags in? Nut butter? Check. I was so relieved I completely lost track of the monologue that was taking place in my head, the one berating myself for not paying closer attention to things. I headed back into the kitchen to finish my smoothie, which, as I recall, was very, very delicious.

Sentence Of The Year

2011-07-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

This might be my favorite sentence this year. I wish I paid more attention to favorite sentences. I wish I marked them and collected them into a little pile. I’m not sure what last year’s favorite sentence would be, but it would have probably come from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

The context for this sentence goes like this: the narrator, an older man who lives in London with is wife, is convinced that she’s having an affair with a young, Chilean man. The narrator decides to leave London with the notion that somehow this might allow the truth of his wife’s infidelity to manifest itself. He goes off to Frankfurt for a few days and tries to keep busy, but repeatedly finds himself obsessing about her, the Chilean, the two of them together, what might be, what is. Here, he is ruminating anew:

“I sat at the table staring into the greasy food and waited for the tears to come, even wishing them to come, so that I might unburden myself of something, because as things stood I felt so heavy and tired that I couldn’t see any way to move. But they didn’t come, and so I continued to sit there hour after hour watching the unrelenting rain slosh against the glass, thinking of our life together, Lotte’s and mine, how everything in it was designed to give a sense of permanence, the chair against the wall that was there when we went to sleep and there again when we awoke, the little habits that quoted from the day before and predicted the day to come, though in truth it was all just an illusion, just as solid matter is an illusion, just as our bodies are an illusion, pretending to be one thing when really they are millions of atoms coming and going, some arriving while others are leaving us forever, as if each of us were only a great train station, only not even that since at least in a train station the stones and the tracks and the glass roof stay still while everything else rushes through it, no, it was worse than that, more like a giant empty field where every day a circus erected and dismantled itself, the whole thing from top to bottom, but never the same circus, so what hope did we really have of ever making sense of ourselves, let alone one another?”

Ok, that was two sentences. But really the first was like a helper sentence. That’s why I included it.

The sentence(s) come from Nicole Krauss’ latest, Great House. In the few writing workshops I’ve taken over the years, I have heard again and again that if you want to immerse yourself more fully in a writer – to feel deeply, through them, where that place is that creativity is born – then you should make it a physical experience. You should read their words out loud, or type the prose that they have typed. It’s a way to create connection, they say. It’s the way to become better.

If that’s true, this is the sentence that I would pick. I feel like this sentence says so much about everything. This is the sentence I would read and type over and over again.

Hypothetical Question:

2011-07-11T17:24:00.000-07:00

If you ask your middle schooler, directly, if he/she is the anti-christ, is it like a narc, where they have to tell you they are cops?

No reason. I'm just wondering.

Shattered

2011-06-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

The day had started with a small blood bath. A big, framed poster of Batman had fallen off the wall, down the stairs and shattered into hundreds of little glass daggers on the landing. My husband and I picked up what was big, vacuumed what was small, and pulled out the remaining few shards that had lodged in the wall. But neither of us had checked the bathroom and that’s where the little one cut open his foot, emitting a surprising amount of blood, just minutes before he had to leave for school.

I had too much work to do that day. And the Scrabble app was down on Facebook, so my usual method of wasting time wasn’t available to me. I’m not sure what all else went down, but when the teenager came home from school I was ready for a fight, I could just feel it.

The teenager sat at his regular place at the kitchen table, eating his regular after school snack, with his usual look of disinterest in anything I had to say. We started talking about the upcoming SATs. He was about to take two subject SATs (not the regular SATs) – Math and Chemistry – and we’d been arguing about it for a week.

“I don’t want to take the Chem,” he told me again, probably the fifth time in as many days.

“You’re already signed up. Just take it.” This is how the dance always starts. We began it again.

“I’m not going to do well, so I don’t want to waste my time,” he said.

He wasn’t going to do well because he didn’t study enough. That didn’t seem like a good reason to me. I said what I usually say. He said what he usually says. And then he said something new. He actually gave me a reason for not taking the test that seemed well thought out and solid. It changed my mind. So I said this:

“Ok, teenager, do whatever you want.”

“Why do you have to say that?” he said. “Do you say things that way just to make me feel like I haven’t won?”

I was about to argue him down again, but I instantly knew he was right. That’s exactly why I say things that way.

I was too ashamed to admit it, but he could tell by my silence that it was true.

“If you just said, ‘Ok, you’re right,’ then we could all leave here feeling good,” he said. “But now I have this kernel of doubt in my head that I’ll keep going back to and wonder if I’ve made a mistake. The whole process could turn me into a depressed teenager with big emotional problems. Is that what you want?”

No, that’s not what I want. I just want to be right all of the time, which is my big emotional problem.

And if I’m not right, I at least don’t want to be called on it. But mostly I want to learn how to graciously back down from an argument and not feel like I’m defective in some way.

I want to be able to talk about the merits of taking an SAT test as dispassionately as I am able to clean up a hallway full of shattered glass. And when I see that the teenager is right, not clench my innards as if something is being ripped from inside me, but instead feel my heart light and buoyant at the wonder of having he who I taught how to speak in the first place, able to now speak up for himself.

Folding Back The Page

2011-06-26T08:12:00.001-07:00

I play tennis with Ann on Fridays. Or, I did, until her surgery. She had to get some things in her wrist fused together from an old injury and she hasn’t been able to play for a while.

Ann loves Friday tennis for much the same reason we all do: it makes us feel better. Not just the hitting (or the occasional winning) but the being together – a sometimes unlikely group of women who know just enough about each other’s triggers and downfalls that with a little time and a lot of good vibes we are often able to put our collective Humpty Dumptys back together again. At least for a little while.

Ann is especially good at this. Probably the best. It’s her superpower – making people feel better about whatever crappy circumstance they find themselves in. She does it as naturally as breathing.

After her surgery, Ann showed up at the courts on Friday with her dog, her field chair and a big canvas tote. She set herself up by the net (where a referee might stand) and tethered her chocolate lab, organized her water bottles, applied her sunscreen and donned her hat. Before she sat back to enjoy, she reached into her tote and pulled out a bubble machine.

It was small and brightly colored – not the kind of thing you’d use for Danceteria. More like for a playdate with 3-year-olds – that last contraption to amuse before things begin to deteriorate. She set it up at her feet and every time one of us hit a great shot, or we had an especially good rally, she tapped the button with her toe and hundreds of tiny celebratory bubbles flew out.

“Great serve!” she’d call out. Or when that didn’t apply: “Good try!”

Ann can see the good in everything, and she helps you see it, too.

When she came to my house last week and got me talking about the teenager and his impending Alaska trip, she couldn’t have been more excited for him. In an effort to put a damper on that goodness, I ran to my magazine pile and pulled out the Trip Brochure. It’s a glossy, 48-page catalog that lists all the trips from this particular outfit.

The teenager’s trip is on page 34 and 35, and the brochure has been folded open to that page for months. On the left, there’s a small picture of someone sea kayaking in Prince William Sound and a little detail map of where they’ll be hiking. The right-hand page has two large, vertical photographs, one of a group backpacking at the foot of a mountain range and another of the crevasse. It’s not called a crevasse in the brochure – it’s described as an “ice climb on the Matanuska Glacier.” There are half a dozen kids in the photo, some standing close to the precipice holding ropes, and the others at the ends of those ropes making their way up what seems to be an endless drop down an ice-walled canyon. The photograph is taken from just far enough away that you can see the vastness of the glacier and the profound vulnerability of the climbers.

People who have seen the picture – “outdoorsy” people who hike and climb and eat snakes for breakfast – all look at that shot and say, “Hmm, that looks dangerous.”

I shake the photo in front of Ann, daring her to try and find something positive to say about what the teenager is about to do – what I have agreed to send him off to do. She takes the brochure from me, looks closely at the picture and then folds the page in half. Meaning, she tucks the crevasse away so that only the backpackers at the mountain are showing. They’re all facing the camera and smiling. They’re all on rock solid ground.

That’s how I’ve been spending this past week – trying to keep folding back the page. Even in the middle of my madness about thunderstorms and bears and the earthquake that rocked some part of Alaska last Thursday night (7.2), I take another breath, fold the page back and tentatively move a little closer to putting him on a plane Monday morning.

I try and picture Ann at the airport with me as I’m walking back to my car, my child in the air, and I imagine thousands of tiny bubbles surrounding me in some kind of surreal Lawrence Welkian moment. I can hear Ann’s voice in the background, “You can do this, Mom -- you’re doing it! Good job! Good job!”

Ben

2011-06-23T15:27:00.000-07:00

The following piece ran on Patch a few weeks ago, in my regular Monday column profiling kids. This kid is my son's friend and it's one of my favorite profiles. It was the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend and Ben, the teenager and I were sitting in the kitchen. I'd just had two people cancel interviews and I had a kid column due on Sunday night. I didn't know where to find another kid -- everyone was out of town. Then, like a gift from G-d, a profile emerged.

My conversation with Ben started out casually. He was in my kitchen with my son and I asked him to describe his process of getting rid of clothes or shoes that he no longer wears. “I put them in the box in my room,” he said.

You keep a box in your room for outgoing garments? Like a hamper? “No, it’s a trunk that sits under my mirror. Whenever I have a shirt or something that doesn’t fit me anymore, I put it in the trunk and every once in a while my mom and I go through it and decide what to throw out and what to give away. My hampers are in my closet.”

Hampers? How many hampers? “I have one for clothes that definitely need to be washed and another one for things that I’ve worn once but that I might be too lazy to wash. So I can fish that stuff out and wear it again.” He clarified further that he put the box there for the unwanted clothes and he created his own hamper system.

Wait, you’re a 16-year-old with no dirty clothes on your bedroom floor? “My room is perfectly organized. I hate clothes on the floor,” he said.

Ben described his laundry routine, his kitchen routine, his house tidying routine. He has a reputation among his friends for keeping things neat and organized and sometimes being stife with snacks (a word I learned means “stingy”) because he doesn’t like messes of crumbs.

“If I come into a room and it’s really neat and organized, I just feel a great sense of relief,” he said. I kept glancing at my son during the conversation, as if to say, “See, I told you there were people like this in the world,” but my son wouldn’t meet my eye.

“I don’t like stuff sitting in a dish drainer,” he said. “What if it needs to dry?” I asked him looking over my shoulder at my dish drainer piled high with drippy plastic ware. “Take a towel and wipe it off,” he said. “The drainer is just like a waiting room. There’s no reason for that stuff to stay there.”

This is the child I’ve always said I wanted, although I feel the uncomfortable need to clean off my countertops while he talks. “My mom thinks she’s really tidy, but when I do a clean sweep of the house, it’s always her stuff that’s lying around,” he said.

I began to quietly empty the dish drainer.

Many people are hard-wired to be tidy, and Ben seems to be that, but also there may be bit of a reaction to the Oscar/Felix dynamic that exists between him and his older brother. “You can’t believe what his room looks like. You can’t go in there,” said Ben, adding, “That’s where I got my second hamper. He would never use it.”

Ben believes that cleaning helps clear your mind. That even though things are going to get dirty again, it’s worth doing just to see them clean for a little while. And getting into good organizing habits leads to other useful things, like learning general life skills and how to keep things in working order around the house.

Ben’s Tips to Keeping Things Clean and Organized

1. No procrastination.
2. Don’t put stuff away just to get it out of the way. (If you stuff everything into a closet, you’re just going to have a messy closet.)
3. Use it, clean it, then put it away.
4. Don’t rush. Take your time and do a good job.
5. Leave things better than you found them.
6. Don’t let things get to the point where someone has to ask you to clean things up.

Do these rules of Ben’s inform his life overall? “No, not all,” he said, all smiles. “This is just strictly about my own house.”

BoyBrain

2011-06-20T16:51:00.001-07:00

“Can you give these books back to your mom?” I said to my son’s friend, handing three novels out my car window.

“No, I can’t take them,” he said. “I’ll probably lose them.”

“Just bring them into your house,” I said.

“I’ll lose them before I get inside,” he said.

We were having this conversation at the curb just a few yards away from his front door. I took the books back and replaced them on the passenger seat of my car, because I suspected that he was probably right.

“Remember yesterday, B went to the bank to get a debit card,” my son said. I nodded, one of the few things I did remember about yesterday. “He lost it before he got home.”

“Come on!” I said. These boys are all prone to exaggeration.

“He really did. He left the bank with his parents and went straight home and by the time they got home it was nowhere to be found,” reported my son’s friend.

I wish I could pin this phenomenon on teenage boys, but the 11-year-old and two of his friends were scouring the house this weekend looking for his lost video camera. “It was right next to the computer,” one said. “Yes, it was. We all saw it there,” another concurred.

“One of you must have moved it,” I told them, “picked it up and accidently put it down somewhere when you went to get something.”

“We didn’t. No, no. No one touched it,” they insisted.

“You must have picked it up and you just don’t remember taking it with you somewhere,” I said. I offer up these pearls of wisdom, not to make them feel inadequate, but in an attempt to expand their thinking. To break the vicious little cycle they create for themselves of walking to the computer, then over to the front door, then back to the computer, then back to the front door, looking in the same two places over and over again like a small contingent of ants whose brains are the size of atoms (I’m guessing) and cannot conceive of any reality beyond what they’ve been programmed for.

The ants, however, reject my theory out of hand, in that inimitable way that only pre-teen ants can. “Well, I’m going to look for it other places,” I said, and in under a minute the camera was in my hand.

“It was on the kitchen counter,” I told them.

“Oh, you must have put it there when you got us Vitamin Waters,” one ant said to another.

“No,” said my son, the most stubborn ant of all.

We have a game we play in my house. It’s called, “Do you think it will take me more than 15 seconds to find your lost thing?” At least that’s what I call it, because finding other people’s lost things – especially boys’ lost things – is apparently my one and only superpower. I almost always win at the game, and part of the reason for that is because 90% of the time, the cell phone is wedged deep within the sofa cushions and I guess I’m the only one who remembers that fact from one lost cell phone to the next.

But the other reason is a little scarier, which is that after all this time I believe I have actually come to think like a boy. In that scattered, too-many-things-going-on, pinball machine way that boys appear to process information – which is to say from every direction and not at all both at the same time.

When I witness boybrain in action, I don’t even think “Oh, you poor, poor creatures,” anymore. Instead, I just put the books back on the passenger seat and say, “Yeah, I get it.”

Does This Stranger Make Me Look Fat?

2011-06-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday, I spent the whole morning nearly buck-naked with a perfect stranger. And it wasn’t by accident. In early May, as Mother’s Day approached, I said to my husband, “Please don’t send me flowers. If you’re going to spend money on me for Mother’s Day, buy me a session with Jennifer.”

This was a big step for me on many levels. The first being Asking For What I Want, and not because I’m depleted and at the end of my rope, but just because I might enjoy it.

The second was Asking For Help, specifically for something other than killing a bug or plunging a toilet.

And finally, of course, the naked thing.

Jennifer is a wardrobe consultant and I was about to try on for her everything in my closet.

People who know me – who know how infrequently I leave my house – are puzzled that I’d even need such a service. “Did you tell her you were looking for some Downstairs Outfits?” one friend joked.

But this idea came about because I had a meeting to go to a few weeks ago and I nearly cancelled because I didn’t have anything to wear. I don’t mean, “Oh, I don’t have a thing to wear.” I mean, literally, I had a skirt and no top that matched. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone shopping, but I couldn’t believe I’d let things go this far.

Years ago, when I worked as a bartender, I remember sharing with a few of the “regulars” that I was about to start therapy. “You’re going to pay someone to listen to you talk about your problems?” they said. “Don’t you have any friends that will do that for you?” That exchange echoed in my head when I made my initial request to my husband. I have many fashionable friends. Why not just ask one of them to go through my closet with me?

But there’s something about cleaning out your closet with a total stranger that feels a little reckless – a little more dangerous than with a friend, tried and true. My friends are not going to force me to get rid of the skinny jeans that I wore exactly twice but I now can’t button, because I’m going to tell them that I’ll get back into those jeans one day and they’ll humor me because they love me. A stranger won’t do that. That’s the beauty of strangers; you never know what they’ll do.

I told Jennifer about my cranky feet and how I have to start an outfit with whatever shoes I’ll be able to tolerate that day and work my way up from there. I explained that I’m not very fancy, but I want to look more put together.

“I get it,” she said. “You want to look good, but not like you’re trying too hard.”

Yes, I told her, because right now I look like I don’t try, ever, at all.

She explained what we would do for the next few hours. We’d go through everything in my closet, make outfits, toss whatever looks awful and then she’d make suggestions about what I should pick up to round out my wardrobe. “Do we need coffee for this?” I asked. “Or wine? Or Xanax?”

We ended up needing none of the above and the process itself was the most fun I’ve had with my clothes on. (That was cheap, I know, but I couldn’t help myself.) Jennifer has a keen eye and is a master of diplomacy. She cheerfully rebranded all my Grateful Dead clothes “Bohemian” and let me put them back in the closet.

Even so, in no time at all I slid comfortably into my role as the naysayer. “I can’t wear that! I look to hippy. I’ll be too cold. Too much skin.” But she took me by the hand and forced me to look at myself with new eyes, and by the end of the first session, I had a dozen new outfits to wear – things I never would have put together myself – and I already owned them all!

But it wasn’t just the outfits that made me giddy. There I was, doing something I probably shouldn’t have been doing, with someone I don’t even know, and once I got used to unfamiliar hands reaching around me to clasp necklaces and smooth pleats, I couldn’t help thinking, Girlfriends, we should all be spending our mornings naked with strangers.

Bidding Wars - A Very Unlikely Happily Ever After

2011-05-31T03:52:00.000-07:00

In the 1999, my best friend and I bid on the same house.

I was pregnant with my second child; she already had two small children. We both lived in a town where people with school-aged children all seemed to be moving away. I was sad and exhausted from losing friends and neighbors. I said to my husband, “I don’t want to spend the next two decades saying goodbye to people.” So he agreed to move to the suburbs.

I didn’t think my friend and I would even look at the same houses. Our situations were completely different. We were selling a brownstone whose value had doubled since we’d purchased it. They were coming from a rental apartment.

But I was mistaken. Not only did we both look at the same houses, we both fell in love with the same houses. And unfortunately, so did many other people. It was the beginning of the Montclair Bidding Wars and finding a house...loving a house…even being able to pay for a house…had no bearing on whether you might one day own the house.

My best friend seemed a little more desperate than we were. Her youngest was just a baby who should have been napping frequently during the day. Their upstairs neighbors had young children and wore heavy shoes. All day long they frolicked and clomped above the nursery. My best friend and her baby were sleepless and cranky.

We had a whole house, a parking spot, a lovely babysitter, an easy life. I wasn’t suffering. I just didn’t want to be left by all my friends anymore.

At one point, we were both smitten with a house on the hill. “We’re going to bid on it,” my best friend said to me.

“Ok, you take it,” I said. It seemed like I was being magnanimous but really I just wanted her out of the running. I wanted to be able to look for houses without worrying that my best friend was going to want what I wanted. Plus, the house on the hill had no first floor powder room, so I “unselfishly” allowed her to pursue it.

Others, too, were undaunted by the lack of powder room, largely because the house was an easy walk to town. Bus, train, shopping – it fit perfectly the specs of what all us City Mice were looking for. Several couples bid on that house, and my best friend and her husband lost out.

There were other houses that we came close to bidding on, but mostly we passed because of location. My husband is legally blind and we needed to be within walking distance of a lot of things. My best friend lost a second house to a higher bidder and the process was making her tired and grumpy.

The house that we both bid on was for sale by owner. I’d heard about it from a friend who lived on the block and once I saw it I decided not to tell my best friend about it at all. It was a house that she, too, would surely fall in love with because it was perfect in every imaginable way. It was spacious and beautiful, decorated by an artist, new kitchen, first floor powder room, and it was a short walk to shops, bus and train. I left that viewing certain – certain – that this would be our next home.

I’m not sure how my best friend found out about the house; I think her realtor told her. I was probably not right in withholding the information from her, but I was right about one thing: when she saw it, she wanted it too. After the two of us put our bids in (along with two or three other couples), the owner asked for everyone’s best and final offer. “Is it just going to be about the money?” I remember asking the owner, “because there are a lot of reasons we need this house.”

Along with our bid, I included an impassioned letter about why we had to have this particular house. I went on and on about the location, my husband’s vision issues, how all of our Mission furniture required just this Arts and Crafts style house as residence. I added that we had friends on the block and tried to drop the name of someone we both knew from business. I think I even invoked the notion of kismet – the house number was the same as our first house. I was all good omens and schmaltz in my letter and I went to sleep that night with absolute confidence that my powers of persuasion would finally yield us the house of our dreams.

But just to be safe, I called my friend and asked her to withdraw her bid. “My husband is legally blind,” I said with a complete lack of shame. “We need to live where he can walk.”

“My son hasn’t napped in months,” she said. “We need to move now.”

We lost the house. My best friend got it. Nobody felt especially good about it, least of all me. “Don’t worry,” she said to me, “we’ll find you a house right in this neighborhood. We’ll be neighbors and we can borrow cups of sugar from each other all the time.”

“Yeah, right,” I said, back in the days before “whatever” had made it’s way into my personal lexicon.

My best friend just left my house a few minutes ago, having taken an early morning shower here. Her hot water heater isn’t working. She drove her car to get here, but only because she had to go straight to work. Usually when she comes to borrow, she walks. Because we survived the war and now live two houses apart.

How I Got There

2011-05-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

Honest Tom Pomposello, when he was alive, was a big, soulful and cynical man. He was a TV producer in the small company where I worked, and he was a blues guitarist. He had a Grammy Award (or maybe an Emmy) in his office with a subway token Scotch taped to it. When I asked him why, he held it up and said, “Because this and a subway token will get me downtown.”

That was a long time ago. The impact of his gesture would have been entirely different if the award had sported a MetroCard.

Tom stopped at my reception desk one day and said, “Let’s give each other a poem a day.” So we did.

It seemed easy for him. Every day he placed a Xeroxed copy of some great poem in my inbox. Some days it would be a whole story, or a passage from a book. The world is ugly and we need to spread beauty, he seemed to be saying.

I don’t remember what I offered him in return. Probably Patti Smith lyrics. Once I copied a passage from a John Irving book of short stories that I can’t even find anymore – something to do with a brandy snifter.

One day Tom told me, “You need to read Writing Down The Bones.”

I did read it, but it was years later. It was before Tom died, but our relationship had already changed. He had started his own company, become less frivolous and maybe even bitter. If I’d met him then, he would have never suggested we share poetry. I don’t think it was something that would have seemed important to him.

Not only did I read Writing Down The Bones, I studied it, along with Natalie Goldberg’s other books on writing. I did the exercises and found writing partners and somehow after reading and writing and writing some more I felt as if I’d become a writer myself.

So even though it was a friend in New York City who had called me last October and said, “Natalie Goldberg is teaching on the east coast in the spring,” it wasn’t really she that got me to the workshop. It was Tom, who, a lifetime ago, nestled a Yeats poem in and among my pile of Memos and Status Reports and Smiler’s Deli Bills. Even though I’ve never been a big fan of poetry, I remember crying before I’d finished the first stanza, and I thought, anyone who would pick that particular poem out of the millions of poems floating around the universe must know a couple of things about writing.

Natalie, too, knows a couple of things about writing – things I want to share – but not yet. First, I have to share this poem, today.

When You Are Old
By W. B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

My Grumpy Walk In The Park

2011-05-24T18:26:00.000-07:00

There are days that I am just looking for trouble and yesterday was one of them.

I could feel it brewing inside me early in the morning, but it became crystal clear during my morning walk. I was in the park. It was about 9:00 a.m. There were all the regular dog walkers with all their regular dogs, most of them running freely around the grass. In the morning, this park seems to be the unofficial off-leash haven for canines. Normally, I don’t mind it. What I mean by “normally” is, I walk through this park five out of seven days a week and it never bothers me that people have their dogs off-leash. But today, I was appalled.

I did a lap and silently counted the number of off-leash dogs. Six. That doesn’t seem like a lot, perhaps, but there were only seven dogs in total.

As I was passing the school, I noticed a group of kids making their way from the school house to the park. Sometimes they have gym class in the park. There was a gym teacher and a long line of 6- or 7-year-olds crossing the road, heading toward the field. I looked around at the dog-walkers. Most had called their dogs to heel, but none had yet attached a leash. I left the park in a silent huff, knowing full well that I would continue to seethe if the dog owners did not do the right thing.

My iPod wasn’t working properly and no matter how I fiddled with the settings it continued to play the same song over and over. I cursed the iPod – all iTechnology really – and when I wasn’t busy doing that I was playing the monologue in my head of what I would say to the guy with the black lab who couldn’t be bothered to leash his dog when there’s a park full of small children at play.

A small part of me was proud of myself that I’d left the park and not spent my morning walking up to people and berating them. But soon the time came for me to head home and the only two routes were through the neighborhood or back through the park.

Even as I reentered the park I chastised myself. “Don’t go this way,” I said, “you’re just going to end up furious.”

But I guess on some level I wanted to be furious, because I found myself on the park path, eyes darting around at all the dog walkers, and I was almost disappointed that those dogs were now all tethered to their owners. Well, almost all. The one who wasn’t – the black lab – stayed so close to his owner’s leg that they looked like a single (albeit asymmetrical) creature.

Earlier in the week I’d met some women in the city for lunch. We’ve known each other for decades and we get together once or twice a year just to check in. In this gathering (that’s what we call our meetings…gatherings) I heard things coming out of my mouth that I truly believe but usually feel as if I have no business saying. One such thing was this: If we want to be happy, it’s a choice we must make every day – many times a day. We can’t wait for our situations to be “right” or “perfect” or even “good.” We just have to choose happy. Simple as that.

I thought of my little diatribe when I was in the park, scowling at dog owners, itching for a fight. I reflected on what utter bullshit I had spewed at our gathering and promised myself I would email each of the women when I returned home and tell them what a colossally misinformed ass I had been. Because, obviously, if it was that easy to be happy – switch-flipping easy, as I had professed – then I would never have spent this morning so grumpy.

I didn’t email my gather-mates though. I spent the day surly, and was completely content to be just that. The key assumption – “If we want to be happy…” – was not present for me yesterday. I wanted to be negative and I wanted to stay that way all day. And I did.

A long time ago, that was simply my M.O. I could hone in on the negative anytime, anywhere and was happy to dwell there indefinitely. Now, not so much. It’s like a little vacation for me to be gloomy. It’s almost fun.

Don’t get me wrong, I have dozens of things to be down about. We all do. I used to spend all my time recounting them all so I wouldn’t forget a single one. But now those things are like the dogs in the park. Most of the time – nearly all of the time – when they’re running off-leash, I think, Dogs. Running. Look at them go.

And then I turn my attention to something else.

The Day Before

2011-05-20T18:32:00.000-07:00

We all walked off the tennis court this morning so delighted that it was raining. This is because we’d just played indoors. It only costs $11.25 apiece for four of us to rent a court for 90 minutes, but still, it would have seemed like a complete waste of money if it hadn’t rained at all.

It was sunny when we got there. In fact it had been sunny since I woke up this morning. It occurred to me that we should probably cancel our court reservation – just play outside – except the forecast was for rain when I booked the court two days ago, and at the time the woman at the desk asked if we could come and play later (because she couldn’t be there at 9:00 to open for us) and we said we couldn’t and she said, never mind, I can get someone else to come in and open for you. So we had to show up. We had prepared for a bad weather tennis day and the fact that it ended up being a perfect-weather tennis day made us all feel sheepish and foolish and a little self indulgent. At least that’s how I felt.

Which brings me to the Rapture.

I hadn’t realized the Rapture was so imminent until earlier this week. “Should I do something?” I asked my husband on Wednesday?

“I don’t think you can really prepare for the end of the world,” he said. And I guess he’s right. At least not in the way that people prepared for Y2K.

And I did prepare for that computer-induced apocalypse in my own way. Not with gold ingots and a bunker full of astronaut food, but mentally, in a kind of quiet acceptance that there, with my not-even-six-month-old next to me in bed, the fireworks heralding this particular New Year may be the first and last he’d ever see.

Tomorrow’s End Of The World doesn’t seem nearly as plausible to me. Even though all the craziness on this planet lately seems to fit a lot of the predictions, I don’t think I’ll be spending any time tomorrow holed up in bed with my kids, holding my breath, hoping it won’t hurt.

But if tomorrow does mark the end of the world – that is, if the saved all fly up to heaven and I’m not one of them and am instead relegated to be here, corporeally, fending off brimstone and pestilence along with my already unwieldy mass of laundry – there is one very sorely missed Hoboken pizzeria that I might have to visit. Their slices are so cheesy and vast that they require two plates to serve them, and I may have to drive over there right away and eat three pieces – four even – and maybe even follow it with an ice cream chaser. Also, I’d try a Dirty Martini. And I’d be doubly grateful that my 11-year-old did not have to get his gums lanced at the oral surgeon’s yesterday. And I’d probably stop lamenting that Steve Carell left The Office.

I guess there might be a few other things, as well.

But those are not really preparations. Those are things I’d do after the fact. After I knew we were all going to hell in a hand-basket, and that we could set our watches by it.

I wondered today, as I walked out into the rain after tennis, whether there was a word for that feeling we all had. The bizarre satisfaction that the worst-case scenario that we’d planned for had, in fact, come to be. If there is, it’s probably German. I imagine it to be a word like schadenfreude, where, when you come to understand its meaning you think, what kind of culture would have that incident happen so often that they actually need a specific word for it?

But a word might come in handy come Sunday, when it seems like there are going to be some people or other who might have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do, and the rest of us might need a way to process the experience. I’m thinking that if anything deserves a post-mortem, it’s the Rapture.

One Happy Mother

2011-05-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

The other day I agreed to let the Almost-Teenager have four friends spend the night. Don’t ask me what I was thinking. As far as I’m concerned anything beyond one single houseguest is a “sleepover party” and I’m philosophically against sleepover parties, so it’s a mystery. It seemed like an okay idea at the time – when the Almost-Teenager was alone and well-behaved and asking politely – but as soon as just one boy showed up, I could feel the shrillness in the air and I knew that my decision was a very bad one indeed.

Early in the evening, the five Almost-Teenagers left the compound and went on a short neighborhood adventure. It was quiet while they were gone, quiet enough that I noticed how tense I’d become while they’d been braying here with their hootenanny antics.

Instead of seeking out my husband for comfort and solace – asking him to help calm and center me – I did what I always do: I cornered him and started complaining that we have too much “stuff.”

I don’t know how those two things have become inextricably entwined in my psyche, but they are. I go from “The Kids Are Acting Looney” to “I Feel Like Every Single Thing In This House Has One Purpose And That Is To Stand Between Me And Whatever It Is I’m Looking For.” My husband usually finds these rants of mine understandably distasteful. He feels defensive and ashamed. He does have a lot of stuff, but the truth is, so do I. And I have a really difficult time going through it and getting rid of all I don’t need.

On the heels of that ugly scenario, I read this blog post from my friend Laura about her being gifted a session with a personal stylist. Someone who came to her house, went through her closet with her and instructed her what should stay and what should go. The stylist took what remained and showed her how to put pieces together so they actually look good. So that she looks good.

So last week I told my husband that what I wanted for Mother’s Day. Please don’t get me a plant, I told him. I don’t want any gifts that I need to keep alive. And that one year that y’all got me that tree pruner – that was imaginative, but it didn’t really sing Mother’s Day to me. I’m happy to have Mother’s Day be business as usual, but if you are going to go to the trouble of getting me something, this is something I’d really enjoy.

I don’t know why having a clean, streamlined, efficient closet would make a difference in how I feel about a slew of sugar-pumped boys ransacking my house, but in my mind’s eye, it does. I might not convey any more authority when I yell, “Put your popsicle sticks in the trash!” but at least I know I won’t be wearing the sea-green tee shirt (which is wrong, wrong, wrong) when doing so.

I have to say, I feel the difference already. In fact things began to shift starting with that initial sleepover breakdown. My husband did not get defensive during my fit, and instead listened to me quietly. He said something rational like, “We can clean out the basement and the playroom together, but we’re not going to start that project tonight.” I felt heard, so I calmed right down. He didn’t take my barbs personally – or at least I think he didn’t. The whole thing passed uneventfully and I thought, Wow, this is how grown-ups act.

I don’t know why it requires something cataclysmic for me to put my own life in order. Or to ask for what I secretly want. I don’t want to turn into (or remain?) a person who feels like she needs to endure months of feeling stifled or oppressed in order to break out, Helen Reddy style, and roar about what she’s rightfully entitled to. I just want to be a woman who says, “Hey this seems like fun and would make me feel good,” and have that sentence be completely independent of how many lunches I prepare or how many carpools I drive. To provide for myself simply because I like making myself happy.

And because it feels good to be one happy mother.

Mother's Day Eve

2011-05-08T15:36:00.001-07:00

Driving a car full of 16-year-old boys on Mother's Day Eve:

“Yo, what did you get your mother for Mother’s Day?”

“I made her something in my ceramics class.”

“I used to make my mom stuff. She hated it.”

“I actually made her two things.”

“She said, ‘I’m not important enough to you to spend your money on?’”

“Yo, she said that?”

“I made my mom a bunch of stuff.”

“What are you, like six?”

“My mom is really clear about things like that. She told me to get her a gift certificate to Century 21.”

“What did you make your mom?”

“Like six things!”

“Like what?”

“Like to go out to lunch.”

“You made your mom coupons, man? I did that when I was in first grade.”

“Wait, you’re going to take your mom out to lunch like six times?”

“No, man, I don’t take her.”

“Yo, you just go with her??? Here, mom, here’s a coupon that says I’ll go out to lunch with you???”

“Man, that’s rude.”

“What? She likes it!”

Thank you, Dr. Sarno

2011-04-29T17:01:00.000-07:00

My partner and I decided to split up this morning after losing a quick 2-6 set. (Maybe it was 1-6 and I’ve blocked out some of the horror.) We had confessed to each other before we started playing that neither of us could move laterally today – a circumstance that is easily compensated for in day-to-day living, but one that is suicide on the tennis court. She was having gall bladder pain; I still have an ailing hip.

“Who do you want to play with…Hemorrhoids or Migraine?” asked one of the winners, as we readied to switch partners.

We’ve all gotten into this groove of starting off tennis by naming our Malady of the Day. It makes me feel a little better (that we’re all ailing) because often I assume it’s only me. I’m the oldest in the group and therefore it seems logical that I would deteriorate more quickly.

But today, as we delved more deeply into one player’s hemorrhoids (so to speak), it occurred to us that perhaps they were related to the fact that her son finally picked a college to attend next year and her concurrent realization that her oldest “baby” is actually going to be leaving home soon. She spent a few stoic minutes recounting the stress of it all – how her eye’s pop open at every day at 4 a.m. with that special variety of anguish that you can muster once you’ve become a mother.

We all quickly moved the conversation on to our own physical impairments, because those things we can laugh about. Kids leaving home, not so much.

Years ago, I started to suspect that many of my physical problems were about something other than structural atrophy. I’d suffered from back pain for years and have been going to a chiropractor since I was in my twenties. After reading a book by Dr. John Sarno (Healing Back Pain: The MindBody Connection) and actually going to see him as a patient, I came to understand that a lot of my problems were coming from my brain, not my spine, and with this realization, my back pain began to fade away.

But there’s always something there in its place. When one thing clears, another emerges. Carpal Tunnel … bladder infection … I spent all of last weekend thinking I had some fatal lymph node disease.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve felt good for a single day since the middle of February, shortly following a local tragedy where a teenage boy in my town died suddenly one morning before school. Hmmmm.

Dr. Sarno’s theory is that our brains create these ailments within us to distract ourselves from really difficult feelings – he says “unconscious” feelings. That when we must attend to our backaches or our hemorrhoids or our hives or our migraines, we are, in a way, protecting ourselves from the debilitating feelings that come with losing love. In whatever form that loss takes. Sometimes this explanation seems crazy and simplistic, except it’s really the only thing that makes logical sense: why are we all able to hobble onto the tennis court in various stages of duress and completely forget about our UTIs and our gall bladder eruptions. Is it maybe because tennis serves the same distracting role? That our malady is not needed for that hour and a half?

“Hemorrhoids or Migraine?” Hemorrhoids asked me this morning.

“Yeah, heads or tails?” said my partner, Gall Bladder.

I couldn’t choose. So Migraine led us in a Rock/Paper/Scissors type of game.

I ended up with Hemorrhoids, and we played ok. Gall Bladder and Migraine won, but not by much.

Afterwards, Hemorrhoids told me that she spent the in-between-points time talking to herself. She told her body that she appreciated what it was doing for her, protecting her from feelings that were both scary and unspeakably sad; from thinking about a situation that is both heartbreaking and inevitable. “Thank you,” she said to her body, “but it’s really not necessary.”

And just from her sharing that, my hip pain is starting to feel better already.

The Five-Second Rule Retraction

2011-04-26T11:26:00.000-07:00

I read an article recently, maybe in the New York Times, about how the Five-Second Rule should really be the Zero-Second Rule. Meaning, all of us moms who have been working under the assumption that any food dropped on the floor requires at least five seconds before it’s contaminated have been wrong; a quickly retrieved graham cracker is not fine to feed your toddler.

I’ve been abiding by the five-second rule long before I became a parent. With the possible exception of ice cream, I couldn’t imagine a single thing that could be so tainted by touching the floor that you wouldn’t just brush it off and eat it. But that’s where my liberal views about food safety begin and end.

I assume everyone thinks the way I do: M&Ms that have dropped on the floor are okay, while fruit that sports white or green mold must be eliminated. Apparently not. I was recently enlightened at the home of my BFF after we’d returned from a morning walk where she grabbed a pomelo off her counter, placed it squarely on the cutting board and then turned to grab a knife.

“What are you doing?” I asked. The alarm came through in my voice.

“I’m going to eat some pomelo,” she said. “Do you want some?”

I don’t know much about pomelos (aside from that they can pass for grapefruits) but I’m pretty certain they’re not supposed to be furry.

Her husband grabbed the knife away from her. “You can’t eat that. It’s full of mold.”

“I know. I was just going to cut the moldy part off,” she said.

Her husband and I looked at each other as if she were mad. A full quarter of the fruit was covered white and green. “What?” she said. “This is what I always do.”

At that point we repositioned ourselves. My BFF secured a new knife and halved her pomelo. I followed her husband to the computer where he looked up guidelines for eating moldy food. Most websites agreed: soft fruits and vegetables should be thrown away when they display mold.

“Is this considered soft?” my BFF asked. “It’s soft inside, but outside, where the mold is, is hard.”

It’s a wonder her family has survived as long as it has, I thought. Just today I threw away a newly opened container of hummus—a container whose expiration date was still a long time coming—not because it smelled bad or tasted off, but simply because I was getting a bad vibe from it.

From the USDA website: “When a food shows heavy mold growth, ‘root’ threads have invaded it deeply. In dangerous molds, poisonous substances are often contained in and around these threads. In some cases, toxins may have spread throughout the food.” A statement like that doesn’t even seem to me open to interpretation.

The pomelo was wrestled from her hands and tossed in the trash, but not before she defiantly slurped down a big, succulent, mold-free section. That was weeks ago and she’s survived.

This weekend, as we wound up our walk, she told me she’d come into her kitchen that morning to find a half-gallon of milk had been left on the counter. “It wasn’t there when I went to bed,” she said, “so someone must’ve left it out during a midnight snack.”

“I sniffed it and tasted it, and to me it seemed fine,” she went on. “So I put it back in the fridge with a note saying it had been out for maybe eight hours, drink at your own risk.”

Later that day I was in my own kitchen, popping a batch of popcorn on the stove and telling my husband (who believes everything in any refrigerator is potentially poison) about my BFF’s decision to let her family members choose for themselves whether to drink the milk. My popcorn maker is a little broken so when I pour the popped corn into a serving bowl a lot of it spills over onto the counter, onto the floor.

“That seems so reckless to me,” I said to my husband as I bent over and scooped up a handful of fallen popcorn near my feet. “And kinda gross,” I added, tossing the retrieved kernels into my mouth.

Open Mind Follow Up

2011-04-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

I got a lot of response from that last post – An Open Mind is A Terrible Thing To Waste. Most people wanted to know what it was I’d changed my mind about. Some wanted me to talk about the process further.

Over the past month, someone told me that I’m the most opinionated person he’d ever met. Someone else pointed out repeatedly that I “always need to be right.” Neither of these things was said maliciously – more like fact. It was like they were saying, “Your hair is brown.” I honestly never thought of myself in either of those ways, so it seemed like something I should take a look at.

It was that inspection – why am I so invested in my perspective on such-and-such – rather than the subject of the article, that resulted in my change of mind.

The piece I had read was by Laura Zinn Fromm. The overall question was: should we let our children see us drinking? My thoughts about drinking are extensive (and not especially interesting), but they led me to quickly discount anything the writer was saying. From my perspective, it wasn’t even a question of whether her kid should see her drinking…I didn’t think she should be drinking in her example at all.

The reason I didn’t mention her piece in my original post was because I don’t feel like the point is what we change our minds about. I feel like the point is that we change our minds. How fluid and easy a process it is when you decide it’s ok to let go for a moment of things you “believe” in and allow yourself to walk in someone else’s shoes. How freeing that act is. How surprised you might be to find that you don’t lose any of your identity when you take another point of view, and in some ways maybe you become a happier “you” as a result.

I was afraid if I mentioned the piece, people would form an opinion about whether I was right to change my mind on it. Would focus, again, on the topic, rather than the process. But the fact is, the article could have been about legalizing pedophilia and the process would be exactly the same. Poof. I changed my mind.

It was in this headset that I watched myself (on a few separate occasions) get myself into a small huff about something that I felt strongly. One was the grumpy people in my school tour group. The other was about the article I’d read. A third, which I didn’t mention in my original post, was during a “discussion” I was having with someone about homeopathy vs. Western medicine.

In each of these cases, I felt the familiar agitation begin. I noticed myself stop listening – or at least listening only as much as I needed to in order to fuel my own opposing point of view. Formulating my response and position while I was in the process of collecting information. Not after I’d gotten it.

All of those places where I dig in trail back to some big deeply held belief, one that would feel really threatening if I discovered it to be “wrong.” “I send my child to the best school available,” in the case of the tours. So mind-changing sometimes becomes the process of saying, “I might be wrong about this; I’m at least going to give this other point of view the benefit of the doubt long enough to hear what the person believes.” But sometimes mind-changing is challenging on another level. Because you have to reconcile the fact that you’ve just spent an awful lot of your time defending and arguing (even if only in your own mind) a particular point of view.

The whole prospect is made out to be so distasteful that there’s even a horrible, disgusting term that sums up the experience. Who would actually sit and eat a crow? Not me.

I urge you to read Laura’s article, because she is an excellent and thoughtful writer and a topic worthy of consideration if you’re a parent. Then you can agree or disagree with her as you see fit. But what I really urge, is for you to notice the next time you find yourself agitated about what someone is saying to you and just take a moment to see what it’s like to change your mind about it. Not forever. Just for fun.

Poof.

An Open Mind is a Terrible Thing To Waste

2011-04-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

Not long ago I spent the week giving tours at my kid’s elementary school. This is by far my favorite volunteer position of the year, largely because I love the school so much but also because it’s the only time I can talk and talk and talk and talk and someone actually listens to what I have to say.

Since I’m organizing the thing, I usually have several other tour guides with me each day, and I send them out with a half dozen people as a group starts to amass. My tour goes at the end. It’s usually the group of “stragglers.” The people who show up late (sometimes very late). I don’t care how late they are though, because giving tours makes me so unspeakably happy.

However one of the days was not the exercise in unbounded ecstasy that I had hoped.

It was rainy. Two of the tour guides canceled and I was only able to replace one. So we had fewer people than we needed, and of course, that would be the day that more parents showed up. It seemed under control at first, but as I was starting my tour, my straggler group instantly doubled in size. Suddenly, I had far too many people, but that wasn’t the worst of it. My group seemed a little grumpy.

No one said anything outright grumpy, but, as my grandmother would say, there were a couple of people with a big puss on their face. (This, by the way, is something my grandmother would say mostly about me.) I wasn’t sure what the nature of their grumpiness was, but I convinced myself that some of the people in my group had already made up their minds that they didn’t like the school. And I could feel my bliss start slipping away.

I think one of the reasons the group’s mood affected me so much is because I do that all the time. I make up my mind about something before I even give it any thought and then I cling to that opinion as if my very life depended on it.

I didn’t even realize I do this until this thing happened the other day: I actually changed my mind about something. Not about something like What Should We Have For Dinner Tonight? It was more of a moral something – and it was provoked by column I’d read. I disagreed with the author in a knee jerk way and I felt more and more righteous as I read the reader comments, all of which agreed with the writer. I spent days mulling over how I might respond to the article. Whether I should be haughty or high-minded. Everything I composed in my mind seemed apt to make other people feel small.

And then this completely bizarre thing happened. I reread the original story and I thought the writer made a good point. In fact, I agreed with her. And all of a sudden, I felt my whole body lighten up, not from being swept into the mainstream (because her view was a typically unpopular one) but because I was able to relax my Always Having To Be Right muscles. And when I noticed how easy it had been – to do a complete 180 – the sheer act of it made me giddy.

During Tour Week I was so drained from what I perceived as the resoluteness of my group that one day that I came home and crawled right into bed. It wasn’t until the following week that I had my big mind-changing experience, and I spent a lot of that day marveling about how easy it was to do. Poof. Just change your mind about something. I think everyone should try it.

Or maybe not.

Out Of The Closet Tennis

2011-04-08T17:48:00.000-07:00

I called Gina this morning to see if she wanted to play for me in our Friday morning tennis game. “Oh. I would. But I have an appointment.”

Gina (like most in my group) knows that if I’m looking for a sub, there’s something very wrong. In this case it was my wrist. I had some Carpal Tunnel type of thing going on and I couldn’t grip my racquet.

“Haircut?” I asked nonchalantly. I tease her about always making haircut appointments during our tennis times. I can’t understand why she does this – choose hair care over tennis – although she does always have a nice cut. Not one strand is ever out of place.

“Pedicure,” she admitted, although I know she didn’t want to.

“Pedicure?” Wrapped in my question was not only the message that she was breaking my heart by opting for toenails over tennis (especially in our newfangled climate, where open-toed shoes still seem months away), but also the slightest hint of mockery about being a suburban, pedicure-procuring BoBo, delivered in the way only a suburban, tennis-playing BoBo can.

I can completely relate to being coy about certain “commitments.” When I have to schedule any kind of medical appointment (for me or for my kids), my tennis time becomes “meetings.” As in, “I’m sorry, do you have anything in the afternoon? I have a meeting that morning.”

If I have to schedule a work meeting, my tennis commitments become “appointments.” “I’m sorry, I have to be somewhere at 9. Can we meet at noon?”

I just finished a week-long volunteer job at my son’s school which required my being there every day from 9:30 to 11:30. I cancelled all my tennis for the week except my Wednesday Clinic. The time conflicted completely with my volunteer commitment, but I asked someone else to take over the event I was running for all of Wednesday. I kept telling her I had to an appointment that morning that I couldn’t get out of. She didn’t press me for details and I didn’t offer any.

Finally, at the end of the week I confessed. “I had to play tennis on Wednesday morning,” I told her.

“Oh, I play on Mondays,” she said. “That’s why I showed up in sweats.”

Still, I continued with what turned into an apology. A needless one. “I play often, but if I miss this Wednesday Clinic, I’m depressed for the entire week,” I said.

I could tell right away that it didn’t faze her in the least that I had shirked my responsibilities to go play tennis. Or that I put tennis before a commitment to my child’s school. Yet I felt sheepish and ashamed. As if choosing to do this thing that I love somehow made me a lesser person.

So I continued to explain my decision to her. I told her how, if I don’t play tennis I’m mean to my family; how it’s my way to get frustrations out. How it’s like therapy for me – that important; I made it sound as if I might jump off a bridge if I didn’t play that day. I impressed upon her that what might seem like self-indulgence is really a long-term benefit to all of humankind.

She couldn’t have cared less one way or the other.

I don’t know how we’ve all become so hard-wired to feel bad for doing what makes us feel good. Why we can’t just say, “I can’t make it then. I play tennis that day.” Say it while looking the person right in eye and smiling like you feel like a million bucks.

Nagging Evolution

2011-03-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

The teenager has already unfriended me on Facebook and is now threatening not to respond to my phone texts. “Are you TextNagging?” he wrote me one day, in response to what seemed (to me) like an innocent question. Although one I had posed in three prior text messages. Describing his responses as “selective” doesn’t even come close.

He has been charged with raising a substantial sum of money for a trip he wants to take this summer. So in addition to odd jobs, he’s been spending the last many weeks tutoring after school and on weekends.

I have become his ad hoc manager in this endeavor, first sending out an email to my Mom List, asking if anyone knew anyone, blah, blah, blah. But also keeping track of his appointments – since I need to drive him to most of them, they need to fit into my schedule as well. Basically, all he has to do is make the appointment and show up.

How hard could that be? Right?

“Please call your Wednesday people and tell them you have a game that afternoon. See if they can reschedule,” I say to him in the morning as he’s walking out the door.

When he arrives home, I ask, “Did you call them?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“No one answered,” he says.

“Did you leave a message?”

“No.”

Initially, I had thought this might be a shortcoming of my teenager alone, but upon closer inspection I have discovered that this is standard operating procedure.

“Why didn’t you leave a message?” I ask.

“They’ll see my number as a missed call,” he says. “They’ll just call me back.”

“No. No they won’t,” I explain. “Because you are calling grown ups. And that’s not how we roll.”

My son believes that if he calls one time and there is no answer and he hangs up, the ball is in the other person’s court. This is how many (maybe even most) young people operate. They don’t listen to their voicemails. They don’t read their emails. If you need to be in touch with them, it’s either by text message or through Facebook. And for me, with my teenager, half of that access has been denied.

“If you don’t leave a message, it doesn’t count as calling back,” I nag. “And if you don’t call back, they think you don’t care or aren’t interested.”

He looks at me as if I were speaking in tongues. No they won’t, he says.

But they already have. He’s lost one “client” already because the mom left a message on his voicemail that he never responded to. In this case, it wasn’t that he didn’t call back, he just never checks his voicemail to begin with.

I remember being at a lecture a few years ago with Michael Thompson, author of Raising Cain. Among other things, he spoke about boys’ brains and how they develop and asked the male audience members when they remember becoming “organized.” “Not until I was in college,” said one. “In my thirties,” said another. “Never,” proclaimed one courageous soul. The point, according to Thompson, is that we sometimes need to moderate our expectations of boys. They’re built a certain way and often cannot perform the way we wish they would.

I remember coming home from that lecture and slipping into my son’s room. He was in 5th grade at the time and just about to fall asleep. “I’m sorry I’ve been treating you like a defective girl,” I said to him, using the author’s own term. My son had no idea what I was talking about and I’m sure didn’t even care.

But these communication issues don’t seem like organizational impairment. They seem like the mores of an entire generation that are, well, stupid. Or so I thought, before I read Pamela Paul’s article in The New York Times last week, “Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You,” which posits that it’s not just teenagers who eschew voicemail, but practically everyone except, apparently, me.

Whether or not that’s all true – that voicemail is passé and that boys can’t manage their affairs – doesn’t matter a whit to me. I can nag just as facilely in a text message as I can face to face. And in a way that Mr. Darwin would surely be proud.

Socks: A Love Story

2011-03-20T18:09:00.000-07:00

Sometimes someone will offer me an idea for a column or a blog post. “Oh, you should write about such-and-such,” they’ll say – and it will make sense, their suggestion, because such-and-such might be somehow related to things I’ve written in the past, or such-and-such might be a very funny idea or event, so I always completely understand where they’re coming from. But the truth is, while I might think such-and-such is interesting, I find that I don’t really have a lot to say about it. And that’s because when I start to write, even if it seems like I might be writing about someone or something in particular, what I’m really writing about is –well – me.

But if I did write about other people though, I might have to write about my friend DH (not his real initials), because there is really no end to the satisfaction that comes with knowing that someone else is crazier than you are.

DH told me long ago that he numbers his socks. He said it in an offhand way and at the time I didn’t press him for details. But recently the subject came up again in an electronic exchange and then when I saw him today for lunch he halted the conversation, stuck his leg out into the aisle, slipped his shoe off and displayed his left foot clad in a white athletic sock with a neat number 50 rendered in black Sharpie marker just around his instep.

“What sense does it make to number your socks?” I asked him. Everyone has asked him. And his answer could fill a short book.

Originally I thought maybe he used a binary system, but he corrected me. “Whole numbers, base ten,” he said.

The 50 on his left foot matches the 50 on his right foot. This is so they can be properly paired after washing. These white socks are a wide assortment of Hanes, or Fruit of the Loom, and various bargain brands. It’s very difficult to tell which go with which, he tells me.

That’s the beauty of men’s sweat socks, as far as I’m concerned. Possibly the only beauty. They all look enough alike that you just pair ‘em up as you lift them out of the laundry basket. “No, no. They wear at different rates. You don’t want to put on a left sock that’s nearly new with a right sock that’s seen better days,” he says.

DH lives in that fairy tale world where every sock has its perfect mate and they will live happily ever after. When Left Sock Number 50 goes, Right Sock Number 50 is tossed right along with it. Here, in my laundry land, that’s not how we roll. When one of my kid’s socks has a hole, I assume it has a few weeks left until it turns into a Big Hole. Then that sock gets thrown away and its mate is stowed as a replacement for the next sock casualty.

DH explains how his socks wear out more quickly in hiking boots than in sneakers, but that the real problem for him is the elastic going, which seemed to occur on both socks simultaneously. I suggested he not ball his socks (I’ve heard that increases the life of the elastic) and he was nearly aghast at the idea of balling socks at all. “I don’t need to ball my socks,” he said, sounding the littlest bit high and mighty. “They’re numbered. I can just keep them in a stack.”

He flipped over the placemat and drew me a picture of his drawer of stacked socks. He showed how Number 51 sits on top of the other Number 51, and how they, in turn, lay on top of their sock brethren. He explained his numbering system, his sorting system, some of his past trials and failures relating to sock care, and by the end of the conversation I was almost ready to pull out my own Sharpie and start numbering the socks in my household as well.

“Does your girlfriend know you do this?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question. Or at least one to get him to admit his own kookiness.

If I wrote about other people, I would then relay perhaps the sweetest exchange I’ve ever heard.

“The last time I saw her she asked me which socks I had on,” he told me. “And I said Number 54. And she said, ‘Oh, I think you look really good in those!’”

Lucky Charms

2011-03-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

My husband and I met when he lived in Hoboken, NJ, a town known, in recent decades, as a party destination for the young. St. Patrick’s Day hails big in Hoboken. There’s always a big parade down the long main street that bisects the town. The parade rarely ever ran on St. Patrick’s Day proper. Rather, you would wake up one day, notice that the yellow stripe down the middle of Washington St. had been painted green and would know that the parade was not too far behind.

Hoboken would schedule their parades based on the bag-pipers’ availability. Being a small town with a small operating budget, they couldn’t really afford bag-pipers on the prime weekends – directly before or after St. P’s Day – so they would schedule them when they weren’t in such high demand. Often, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade would emerge in the middle of February, and revelers would come out and get toasted as if it were March 17th itself.

We were never big revelers, so we had our own way of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. One that, thankfully, had nothing to do with either corned beef or cabbage. On March 17th, we would assume Irish names and use them for the entire day. My husband became Timmy O’Shea, and I, Cassidy Muldoon. I’d like to take credit for this idea, but it was my husband’s. I think he was even responsible for naming both of us. I was happy to go along with it, as it had nothing to do with eating fatty meat or ingesting green libations.

Once we had children, we thought the naming ritual might be a fun way to celebrate a day that had nothing to do with any of our heritages. When our oldest son was a toddler, my husband dubbed him Brian O’Brian for the day. It was something we giggled about for 10 minutes in the morning and then it was over. When the next child came along, years later, we resuscitated the ritual, but my husband gave him a name that he didn’t like. So, since the little one is a bit moody and easily offended, we just dropped the ritual altogether.

Today at tennis I was telling the women on the court about our Irish names. We all decided to take on our own Irish names and it added some (extra) silliness to our play. Then one of the women told her own story about St. Patrick’s Day and I loved it so much I wanted to pass it on.

When her youngest daughter was in preschool, the teachers would bring them outside to play on St. Patrick’s Day and when they returned to the classroom all the chairs would be askew and the books out of place. The teachers told the kids that the chaos must have been a result of leprechauns who had obviously entered the classroom while it was unoccupied. Her daughter came to associate leprechauns with the quiet mischief of rearranging furniture, setting bric-a-brac awry.

This morning, when her daughter came downstairs, she announced how excited she was to see what the leprechauns had done in her own house. Her mother (who is Italian) had done nothing to commemorate the day, but she, like me, is a less than stellar housekeeper. So her daughter was not disappointed when she came down to find chairs pulled away from the table, clothes dropped on the floor. “Oh, look what the leprechauns did!” she said. Delighted.

It’s true, I don’t expend an awful lot of energy picking things up and putting them away. But I do silently berate myself for being so lax about housekeeping. No more. Ever since tennis this morning I look at my counter full of dirty dishes, the eight of clubs playing card that has been sitting under the hall table for two weeks, my son’s socks on the TV room floor and it no longer appears to me as a personal (or even a familial) failing. In fact, there’s something about it all that now seems delicious.

I don’t know if that’s why the Irish consider themselves lucky, but that seems like the real key to living a charmed life. To be able to look around you and see the magic in things just the way they are.

The Perfect Partner

2011-03-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

“I feel bad if I’m losing. And I also feel bad if I’m winning. It’s kind of an impossible situation.”

This sentiment was uttered by one of my tennis mates. I’m not sure which one, but I’m pretty sure it’s a true statement for all of us. There’s never any pleasing us, in tennis.

If you appear to enjoy winning, you can easily be branded as Too Competitive. If you seem not to care whether you win or lose, you risk being Not Competitive Enough. So besides all the craziness that goes hand-in-hand with feeling worthy of or entitled to a win, you have the added worry of how you’re perceived. And of not disappointing your partner.

If this isn’t the most stressful aspect of Ladies Doubles, I don’t know what is.

In that way that Tennis is a microcosmic version of Life, it seems that we all bring to the court all our habits or insecurities that we bring to our relationships. Am I doing enough? Will you still like me even if I screw up? Should I take risks to please you? Should I just play it safe even if it means blowing the point? Do you have my back? Is it ok if I whine? How much can I whine? Can I trust you to tell me to back off?

It’s endless.

Some of the women I play tennis with don’t even like doubles for that very reason. “I don’t like having to deal with the whole partner thing,” they’ll say. “I’m better when I’m on my own.”

I’m definitely better with a partner. But it has to be just the right partner. Someone who wants to win, but not too much. Someone with an excellent sense of humor. Someone who is supportive if I’m making mistakes, and who will maybe offer advice, but only if it’s advice that I like and doesn’t make me feel bad or incompetent. (Are you getting the sense of what it must be like to be my husband?)

I need someone with unconditional positive regard, but not someone who tells me how great I’m doing too often because that really botches up my game. But she has to tell me sometimes, because otherwise I will assume she thinks I suck. But it has to be genuine, because if not I’ll know she’s just saying nice things because she feels sorry for me for spending all this time and money and still being such a bad tennis player.

I don’t really respond to tough love or to being chastised, although sometimes I need a little kick in the butt to remind me to stop doing stupid things. I need someone who abides by the same laws of tennis karma – calling the opponent’s balls “in” if they’re questionable, understanding that it will all work out in the next point.

And of course it helps if she’s a partner who’s fast and can cover the whole back of the court.

I play tennis with a lot of different women – different ages, different levels, different strengths, different styles. I don’t really ever feel disappointed in my partner, even if she is acting spacey or playing lazy or is just having an off day. I imagine none of the women I play with do.

Yet we are all so worried all the time that we’re letting each other down. That our ability to hit a backhand on any given day has anything at all to do with how much we need and adore each other.

Old Lady Tennis

2011-03-12T16:37:00.000-08:00

Blond Tumbleweed sent me an email at 5:30 AM asking if I wanted to take her place at tennis yesterday morning. It seems she missed a step on her way downstairs and took a little spill. I would normally jump at the opportunity to play for her, except that I was already scheduled to play and I already didn’t want to.

I had my own injury going on. A pain and stiffness in my hip that seems to come about from writing. Well, from sitting. Dr. H has diagnosed it as Gluteal Amnesia, a term that I thought he’d just made up to amuse himself or humiliate me, but I googled it and it appears to have, if not widespread notoriety, at least familiarity among a few sports coaches and practitioners. (Laura the Tennis Pro has also been diagnosed with GA. It makes me feel a lot less old and decrepit to have the same malady as a 32-year-old athlete.)

I urged Blond Tumbleweed to come to tennis despite her injury. I told her how much pain I was in from my hip problem and reminded her that Curly Tumbleweed was coming off a respiratory infection that has left her sinus cavity so clogged up she can’t hear and it would be surprising if she could run at all without coughing up a lung.

On Fridays we play on Court 5, at the very end of the club. Court 4 usually remains empty for the whole time we play. The older women who used to play on both Courts 3 and 4 last year have winnowed themselves down to a single court (3) this season, so we are down at the end all by ourselves.

The three of us confessed our disabilities to Kelly (our fourth) and she reminded us that she has had a torn ACL or meniscus or some other knee related problem for the past year. Since we were all injured, I suggested we just play a nice game of Old Lady Tennis and call it a day.

This group that plays together on Friday is a high testosterone conglomeration of power hitters despite their all being middle-aged women. Aside from me, everyone was an athlete in high school, many in college, and a few have even joined women’s soccer and volleyball leagues as adults. Balls fly around the court at crazy speeds. I usually just pray a lot.

But we all agreed to play mellow tennis and I instantly felt better about not having to worry about running after speeding bullets or leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

Blond Tumbleweed served first and Curly Tumbleweed returned. The ball whooshed past me so fast in each direction I barely had time to register that a point was going on.

“That’s not OLT!” I said, using what I considered a clever code for Old Lady Tennis so that the old ladies playing a court away would not be offended.

“What?” said Curly T, ears entirely clogged with week old mucous.

“Never mind,” I said.

The game went on like that for an hour and a half. No one played like an old lady except, of course, for me.

“That wasn’t an Old Lady Serve!” Kelly yelled out as she received a serve from Curly Tumbleweed that nearly knocked her over.

“Shhhh!” I said, trying to protect the feelings of our Court 3 elders.

“They can’t hear us,” said Blond Tumbleweed.

“What?” said Curly again.

Curly Tumbleweed and I took the set, and maybe played the best tennis we ever had as partners.

“Do you have that?” I’d yell back to her as a ball ripped past me.

“What?” she’d say, running up and hitting it.

I play better tennis when I’m injured. It doesn’t make any logical sense, but I think I do certain things that garner a better outcome. I pay attention more, because I know I’m going to be slower to react. I don’t run after crazy balls, but try and take them in a smarter (safer) way. I make sure I’m completely stabilized before I take a shot. And maybe most critical, I keep my expectations (about winning) really low.

I watch the Court 3 ladies play and I love how confident they are. No one is reckless. Their points go on forever.

“We belong on that court,” Blond Tumbleweed said to me after the set was over. She pointed to the old ladies and I shushed her again.

“They know they’re old,” Curly Tumbleweed said.

“And they know they’re better than us,” said Kelly.

Pump the Shackle. Twice.

2011-03-09T13:17:00.000-08:00

It seemed like an easy assignment. Pick up a combination lock at the hardware store and drop it off at the high school before the teenager goes off to lacrosse practice. But I know how things can go with all that's related to the teenager, so fortunately I gave myself a little extra time.

The guys at the hardware store are usually extremely helpful. I’d hoped to get a lock whose combination could be reset to something memorable. This is because we currently have several combination locks in our kitchen Junk Drawer and I have no recollection how to open any of them. We also have several codes that are printed on the back of the MasterLock packages. However, none of those codes seemed to match any of our locks.

The hardware store guy was nice, but couldn’t direct me to a resettable lock. They had the kind that you can make a word for the combination, and I called my son to see if that style would fit on his lacrosse locker. Just get a regular lock, he said.

I had one in my hand, standard silver with a black face. I think it cost three or four dollars. But then the inevitable happened. My eye was drawn up to the top of the peg-board display to a line of colorful, newfangled locks.

“What’s this?” I asked, removing a bright blue $11.99 specimen. It wasn’t even in a typical MasterLock hanging package – the lock was affixed to a snappy, pyramid-shaped case. It looked as though the lock itself was onstage.

“Those are new,” the guy explained. “They’re directional.”

Meaning there are no numbers. The combination is a series of arrows – up, down, left, right – and you just move the face in the proper sequence, like a joystick.

I reached up to replace the blue lock, quietly deeming it too flashy. “They’re really popular,” the guy added.

So of course, I bought it.

I drove to the high school, pulled up to the front door and began fumbling for all the various ID I was about to need in order to drop something off at the front office. As I pulled my paperwork together, the teenager strolled up to the car from his lunch hour and knocked on the window. “I got you a lock!” I said, elated that I would not have to enter the school after all.

He grabbed at it, but I realized he should just take the lock, not the whole pyramid package, so I flipped it over to see what the combination was so I could release it from its plastic home. No combination on the back of the lock. None on the back of the package either. I squinted at the infinitesimal instructions and learned that the information we needed was inside the pyramid. I literally had to saw open a trap door on the package with my fingernail to get at it.

Two small paper rolls fell out; they looked like tiny treasure maps. I opened the first and it was useless, just a bunch of stickers to decorate your lock. The second contained the information we needed, so I carefully ripped off the tiny circle of tape that held the roll intact and let it unfurl before me. It did indeed contain the combination, but when we entered it, it didn’t work.

“I have a class that starts in three minutes,” said the teenager. As if I were somehow dragging my feet.

He tried the combination. No luck. I looked back on my treasure scroll and at the very top was a tiny little sentence or two that explained how you had to clear the lock before the combination would work. That seemed simple enough. Except I didn’t know how to clear it. And the instruction that explained how had just been partially destroyed when I removed the tape. Literally, the first six words had been ripped off and I couldn’t find them anywhere.

“How do I do this? What did it say?” I said, frantically jamming my hand into the crevice next to the front seat to try and retrieve the itty bit of paper.

“Mom, I have to go,” said the teenager.

“Read it in Spanish!” I told him.

“What?”

“The instructions are written below in Spanish. Read that. What does it say?”

“I have no idea,” he said, validating anew my disappointment in our school district’s language program.

I’m not sure how I figured out that you need to pump the shackle twice, or how I even knew what the shackle was, but once we did that and entered the code, Bright Blue gave it up and the teenager dashed off with his popular, overpriced combination lock while I tried to imagine the over/under on how many days it would take before he’d lost the thing entirely and I was back at my junk drawer, racking my brains for combinations long gone.

"Is That An Anus?"

2011-02-25T15:15:00.000-08:00

Anne Lamott is one of my favorite authors. She’s written a bunch of novels and a couple of books of essays, but she’s probably most well known for her book about writing, Bird By Bird. In it, she talks about how daunting it can be to make up characters and then have them go do things. There’s so much that goes into creating a fictional world that the whole process can become overwhelming. It’s tempting to say, “I don’t know what the hell these people are supposed to do,” and then just drop the project and go eat chocolate. So what she does to combat this, is she keeps a tiny, 2”x2” frame on her writing desk – an empty frame – and this trinket is there to remind her that all she needs to write, at any given moment, is whatever she can “see” in that 2x2” frame.

I could expound a bit on what she means by that, except this post isn’t about writing. It’s about frames. So I’ve already said all that needs to be said about Frames on Desks. Which is that, basically, they can be there simply as reminders.

In a past post, I’ve discussed The Stealing Game that I play with my neighbors. Everyone brings a wrapped white elephant gift – a gift that they themselves have received that they have no use for – and each person gets to pick a present from the pile and, essentially, take home someone else’s rejects.

There is stealing involved, but this, too, is not germane to the story.

Each year, after the holidays, my tennis group also gets together for a White Elephant Exchange. This year the gifts were all displayed in front of the fireplace, and we sat around Shelley’s living room, drinking wine and acting civilized. There isn’t the same cut-throat tension in the room when my tennis group plays this game. The real “entertainment” isn’t so much in the stealing, it’s more about what people wrap up to give away.

Shelley and Ann sat next to each other, close to the gift pile. Shelley picked up a gift bag when it was her turn and started pulling things out of it. I can’t remember all that was in it. One thing may have been a special light that screws onto your faucet and makes your water look bright blue. The last thing she pulled out was a picture frame. It was a small oval with an opening about 2 x 2.5.” It was the kind you’d put a tiny portrait in, but this frame came with a photograph already in it: a pink daisy with a black pistil (center). The photograph was cropped close and tight; mostly what you could see was the pistil, a dark organic looking center surrounded by bits of delicate pink membrane.

Ann craned her head around to look at it. “Hey, is that an anus?” she asked.

Ann is like a 40-something version of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blond. Pink is their signature color and each of them is informed by a cheerfulness that is unfaltering, even on their darkest days.

“It’s a daisy,” someone corrected.

“Really?” said Ann. She went on to explain that she has a chocolate lab and from a certain vantage point, the photo looks a lot like the dog’s anus.

We speculated a bit, as a group, what sort of marketing strategy might lead a frame manufacturer to fill its frames with photos of anuses. (It’s not “ani” – I checked.) And soon, once Ann herself could see photograph as a daisy rather than an anus, we moved on to finish the game.

I ended up with the framed daisy/anus. I didn’t steal it; Shelley offered it to me and I accepted. I don’t usually like coming home with anything from these events, committed as I am to getting rid of things. But there was something about this photograph that I needed.

The great irony is that Ann is a woman who would normally look at a photograph of an anus and ask if it was a daisy. That’s just how she looks at the world. It’s usually me who would make the mistake that she had.

So I keep the frame on my desk, with the daisy/anus staring right at me. It reminds me that we always have a choice about how we perceive things. And that sometimes it only takes a tiny shift to move from seeing something as an anus to seeing it as a big, fresh, vibrant daisy.

In Defense of Hothouse Flowers

2011-02-16T16:33:00.000-08:00

I am a delicate Hothouse Flower. I don’t mean to be, I just am. All us Hothouse Flowers are like that. We are born, not made.

I would typically not write about my Hothouse Flower-ness, except I had a troubling exchange with a friend the other day and realized she was under the mistaken impression that we are delicate by choice. And so I am writing on behalf of all Hothouse Flowers so that the rest of you buck-up-and-deal-with-it Tumbleweeds have a better understanding of what’s involved.

The topic came up because my friend’s husband is also a Hothouse Flower. He’d recently had general anesthesia for surgery and passed out a day and a half later at a restaurant. She was empathetic in retelling the story, but you just knew that if it had been she who’d had anesthesia, there would have been no fainting going on.

Most of my friends are Tumbleweeds. Maybe all of them. Perhaps Hothouse Flowers are not drawn to other Hothouse Flowers, for reasons only Darwin could explain.

It always surprises me how sensitive I am compared to others. For a long time, I thought everyone felt like I did. I don’t like getting pedicures because the feeling of someone handling my foot is both too ticklish and too intense. Same for massage. It takes me literally a month to recuperate from a dental cleaning. I’d actually considered not having children, ever, because I didn’t think I could hack the delivery.

My friend spoke about her husband as if he had something to do with his own sensitivity. “He’ll tell me ‘I feel something coming on,’” she said (I’ll call her Blond Tumbleweed), touching the glands in her neck to demonstrate. “Do you ‘feel things coming on?’” she asked me.

I nodded emphatically, Yes, yes, I always feel things coming on. And I begin my arsenal of preventative measures so I won’t get sick.

Blond Tumbleweed rolled her eyes and snorted at the mere idea of ‘something coming on.’ “Call me when you’re on your death bed,” she said. “I don’t need to hear about it before.”

Another friend, Curly Tumbleweed, was with us and she chimed in as well. “It has to do with how you’re raised,” she said. “When I was a kid, if I threw up in the morning my mother would say ‘Ok, can you go to school now?’”

I once played in a tennis match with Curly Tumbleweed and thought I’d broken my finger trying to catch a ball. “It’s not broken,” she said, “it’s just jammed. Come here, I’ll pop it out for you.” And with that she grabbed and pulled until I saw stars.

I’m pretty sure every woman I play tennis with is a Tumbleweed. They all show up to play with sinus infections and IBS. They wrap an ace bandage around injuries that I would be in traction for. Years ago, Blond Tumbleweed showed up on the court achy and stiff. “I can barely move my legs,” she uncharacteristically complained. Later, I found out that she’d gone to the doctor and was diagnosed with Fifth Disease (a.k.a. Parvovirus) – a relatively mild illness in children, but one that in adults presents with a rash as well as joint pain and swelling. I too had had Fifth Disease six months earlier and didn’t leave my bed for days. At one point I was in such agony my husband suggested I go to the hospital. “No, I can’t. It will be too bright there. I’d rather just die here in my bed.”

I’m not proud to be a Hothouse Flower, but neither am I ashamed. I disagree with Curly Tumbleweed – I don’t think it’s nurture at all. My brother is a Tumbleweed. He carries on with walking pneumonia and gout. Being a Hothouse Flower is just the hand you’re dealt.

I tried to explain that to Blond Tumbleweed this morning when she was scoffing about me and my “feeling something coming on.”

“You think it’s easy to be a Hothouse Flower, Blond Tumbleweed, but it’s not,” I said. She smiled to humor me, and then left me in her dust.

It's Fun To Have Fun But You Have To Know How

2011-02-14T17:02:00.000-08:00

There are two main reasons I never go anywhere. One is social anxiety. The other is I never have the right shoes.

Both those things nearly kept me from the Girl Talk show last week, as well as a third: It was not a show at which I belonged.

There’s a good chance that you’re not familiar with Girl Talk. This is understandable. Especially if you’re on the north side of 40. For the uninitiated, Girl Talk is a deejay (aka Greg Gillis) who creates club mixes that seem to be one long fusion of hip-hop samples mashed up with almost every classic rock song riff you’ve ever heard. Prince, U2, Simon and Garfunkel with Ludacris, Jay-Z , and Usher. It’s loud and frenetic with a backbeat that makes the room shake.

This is not music I would naturally come across, except that it ended up as the staple soundtrack for my Sunday morning spin class last month. I found the mixes so infectious, I downloaded the album and have been listening to it all day, every day for weeks.

Before I even wrote this column I had a name for it: It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time. That sure does sound fatalistic, I thought. So I decided to try and reserve judgment until after I’d actually seen the show. What Happens When A Neurotic Middle Aged Woman Ends Up In A Mosh Pit was another possibility that kept popping into my head. Stop it. Just find some shoes and go.

My maiden voyage with Girl Talk existed under the most ideal circumstances imaginable. A music business friend was able to get tickets to the sold out show. He also got us VIP access. The theater is a mile from my house. We scored a free parking spot, right across the street. It was raining, so I had a built in excuse to wear my Timberlands. And the show started at 9 PM, well over an hour before my bedtime. Still, I worried.

My 16-year-old asked me if I was excited to be going. “I’m nervous,” I told him. “I don’t know what to wear.”

“Yeah. Everyone is going to be judging you,” he said, reminding me I would be effectively invisible. Which I was – not only invisible, but removed. Our VIP status allowed us access to a small gated area that stood about four feet above the dance floor. We could easily see the stage over the heads of the floor crowd and were not packed shoulder-to-shoulder with what appeared to be every 18-24 year-old in the tri-state area. It wasn’t like a “box seat” at the opera – it was just a cordoned off slab of concrete. I called it my Safe Haven.

Overlooking the dance floor we had a perfect view of those individuals being lifted overhead and redeposited within the crowd, the confetti and balloon mayhem, the sweatband boys and the girls dressed for drama.

This kind of show is probably not for everybody, and I’m pretty certain that includes me. I was never a club girl, even in my heyday. And I wear more on the beach than most of the girls were wearing that evening. But the deejay is masterful. There was a long piece about him in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago and the description of his exactitude made me think of things I’d read about Ira Glass. Standing in my Safe Haven, it occurred to me that, aside from my companion, I might be the only one in the whole theater who has ever even heard of Ira Glass.

I thought that life with a teenager and my constant exposure to the Girl Talk album would provide all the preparation I needed for a night like this one. But what prepared me most was an electronic exchange with a friend, hours before the show:

Me: I’m having second thoughts about Girl Talk.

Him: Be not afraid. It is fun, and fun is good.

Me: Sometimes I’m not so good with fun.

Him: Even if you don’t like it, I guarantee there will be plenty to write about. For example, there’s usually a guy whose only job is to reload and fire the toilet paper gun all night.

Me: Toilet paper gun?

Him: Oh, and don’t forget some earplugs. Fun can get really loud.

My sensible shoes and I ended up leaving the show a little early, in part because my senses had reached full saturation, but also because I didn’t really want to know what this crowd would be like once the music shut down.

I woke the next day at 7:00 for an early morning spin class in which I found unexpected delight in the instructor’s nine-minute ELO mash-up, as well as his butt jokes. The music was loud, but there I didn’t need earplugs. Who says I don’t know how to have fun?

The Woman in RED

2011-02-08T18:30:00.000-08:00

I’ve stopped writing about my gecko because a while ago something happened that I wanted to write about but I wasn’t really sure how. What happened with the gecko was this:

I had been on a year-long tear trying to get rid of him. (Spot is his name.) And I chronicled that effort here, in a series of posts called The Gecko Chronicles. After trying to pawn him off on the Science teacher, I decided to take a new approach. I made a commitment to talk to anyone I saw at the pet store cricket counter and ask if they would be interested in adopting my gecko.

The first woman I tried this out on ended up being the last. She was about my age and wore one of those red Gap T-shirts with the word RED written on it. She had a shopping cart full of pet supplies and when I saw the cricket guy hand her a bag of crickets I asked her what kind of lizard she had. She, too, had a leopard gecko – two actually – and when I asked if she’d be interested in a third she said she’d be happy to take him.

That seemed so easy, right? And it was. I can’t remember how we got from that painless, positive exchange to her crying and telling me that her son was going to die and it was all her fault, but I’ll tell you this: it happened in a moment. In the blink of an eye. One minute she’d agreed to take my gecko and the next she had tears running down her face.

I didn’t know what to do or what to say, so I just nodded in an understanding way and muttered something like, “I’m so sorry,” and then we both made our way up to the register to pay for our items.

While she was checking out, she wrote out her address and phone number on a small slip of paper she took from her purse. I could call her, she said, or I could just bring the gecko to her home and leave him on her porch. She’d take good care of him, she assured me. He’d be no trouble; she had to buy crickets anyway.

I put her number in my pocket, paid for my crickets and made my way out to the parking lot after her. She was walking just ahead of me and as I got close to her I watched myself reach out and tap her shoulder. I didn’t really want to be tapping her shoulder, but I’d been recently thinking a lot about how we (and when I say we, I guess I mean I) don’t really connect with each other anymore. How all of our interactions are electronic and perfunctory and lacking in real caring for our fellow human beings. So it was that thought that impelled me to tap her, and then when she turned, for me to ask outright a question that was none of my business, which was, “Is your son ok?”

Obviously a son who is “dying” is not ok. But the mother said it was all her fault and it is just not in me to walk away from a statement like that. I would literally spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how this woman could have been killing her son. So I had to ask. And there in the parking lot, in the bright midday sun, she told me.

I am not going to tell you what she was doing to kill her son, in part because I don’t remember exactly her son’s problem, but mostly because I’m pretty sure he was not actually dying. He had some bad reaction once, years ago, to some behavioral medication she had given him and he had some residual physiological problems as a result. It became clear almost immediately that her son’s death was not imminent or even likely, but rather that she was having a very bad day.

I understand those days. I have wept in front of strangers. The big difference between me and the woman in RED is that unlike me, she does not feel the need to disappear once that weeping has taken place. So she told me more things.

She told me about all of her kids, all of their psychological issues, all of the medication they were on (names and dosage) and even the names of some of their mental health professionals. She shared with me some of her own diagnoses, her meds, her docs. She told me where her kids went to school, what schools they’d been kicked out of, what infractions had caused their dismissals. She told me a bit about her husband, including what he did for a living and how much money he’d made last year. Maybe she even told me a few other things that have faded over time.

After an hour, I excused myself. I left her with an empathetic pat on the shoulder and a wish for “good luck.” I drove home with my crickets. My back ached from standing for so long. I told my husband about her and he said, “There is no way we’re giving her the gecko.”

My husband is not definitive about much, but I could tell by the look on his face that this was not negotiable.

So I ripped up her number and fed Spot his crickets and wondered how I would explain my change of heart to her if I ever ran into her again.

"Tragic Loss"

2011-02-02T09:10:00.000-08:00

There is never a time when it makes sense to be anything other than happy. Being unhappy never improves the situation.
- Lama Sumati Marut

That’s what I posted on my Facebook status yesterday around noon.

A little past 12:30, I received an email with the subject line: Tragic Loss. It was from the high school. A boy had died. A senior. I didn’t know him. I didn’t even recognize his name. Still, everything shifted.

I had posted my status line in response to the weather. Lots of people seemed to be depressed about the impending storm (another in a long line of storms this year) and the quote I posted always inspires me, when I get wrapped up in little things – little, uncontrollable, inevitable things – to notice that I have a choice about how I feel in the presence of those things. That those circumstances – snowstorms, traffic, stomach flus, fender benders – constitute the “small stuff.” That sometimes, most times, and if you’re a lama, maybe even all times, most of us can train ourselves to see brightness, to understand that most of the events in our lives have no inherent goodness or badness, that it is our minds that make them so. The lamas would say this is true of all events.

That’s a hard pill to swallow when a boy has died.

I panicked when I read that email. I thought my Lama Marut quote would be taken as being unfeeling, uncaring. Disrespectful. That it was like a dare to the universe to “bring it.” I went back on Facebook to remove it and I read it again. Then with tears in my eyes, I read it again. I was unhappy. And, no, it was not improving the situation.

I did a google search on the boy and turned up a Facebook Fan Page he’d created about himself that read:

On July 6th, 1993, a legend was born.

Whether you call him Mitch, Mitchell, Clifford (?), Gimpy, or Gimpsy, you can't deny this boy's sheer awesomeness.

He won our hearts in New Orleans.
He charmed us with his wit, wisdom, and sexiness.

If you're a fan of this 4'10" bundle of amazingness, (and who wouldn't be?), you are morally obligated to join this group.

Right then and there I fell a little bit in love.

In the past, I would have spent the entire day looking up information about this young man – who was he? how did he die? – and propel myself into a deep, inexorable funk. Yesterday, I wafted in and out of obsessing and funkdom, but I didn’t dwell there. In between, I made my family its favorite dinner. I took time from my work to watch The Office with my son. I charged my Kindle for the impending ice storm. I left the Lama Marut quote up.

I didn’t know this boy. And my sadness is not improving anything. But I remain unenlightened: It’s making me feel better to cry.

The Stealing Game

2011-01-30T15:59:00.000-08:00

The first time I played The Stealing Game was probably eight years ago at a PTA holiday party. We were asked to bring a wrapped gift worth about $10. Everyone picked a number out of a hat and it was in that order that we selected our gifts from a big table display. You chose a gift. Opened it. Showed it around. And then the next gift selector could choose from the table display, or steal your gift.

It shows how much I’ve evolved over the years that that first time I played I was completely horrified by what I thought was the most barbaric game ever invented, and now I count the days until one of these gift exchanges takes place.

There are now two of these events that I’m invited to every year. One with the women in my neighborhood and the other with my tennis group. Both gatherings have the same rule – no one is to buy a gift new. We are to bring something that we’ve received as a gift but don’t want. A White Elephant exchange, if you will.

My neighborhood group got together a few weeks ago at a local bar and we filled a table with wrapped boxes and gift bags. It is inherently understood that every gift on the table will be awful. No one has high hopes of coming away with a prize. The whole point of the game is just to go through the process of giving. And getting. And stealing.

Some people are better stealers than others. And, as is true in most situations where (even) a (crappy) prize is available, people’s true colors are bound to come out.

The gift I brought was a square glass cheese plate – pink, green and blue paisley -- with a matching cheese knife. It was not something that would go well with most entertaining accessories unless perhaps it was 1969 and you were entertaining the cast of Laugh-In. However, I’m a bit of a sucker for paisley, so I “stole” this gift during last year’s tennis exchange. Unfortunately, I never once used it. I never even took the ribbon from around it. So I stuck it in a gift bag and offered it up to this new group.

We all picked numbers. I was Number Seven. The best number to get is One, because you get your choice of every gift and you get another turn at the very end to steal whatever anyone else has chosen. For most of us, this game provides the perfect real-life opportunity to practice non-attachment to things you erroneously believe are yours.

When my turn came, there were already a few interesting things that had been opened. A cookbook. A nice grill brush. A curious little indoor waterfall. There’s a whole Let’s Make A Deal mentality when it’s your turn to pick: should I go with what I see before me – or should I take a chance and pick Door Number Two?

I did select a new gift, mainly because I liked the tissue paper that it was wrapped in. I opened it up and it became immediately clear that there actually was a “prize” in this game, and that I’d just unwittingly picked it.

My gift was a beaded evening bag. It was tasteful, beautiful and elegant. I held it up to show it off and it was like ten hungry wolves just feasted their eyes on dinner.

“I love this!” I said.

“There’s no way you’re going home with that, girlfriend,” said one of the women. You could see the gears beginning to turn in all their collective heads.

Number Eight’s turn was next and she apologetically (but swiftly) took the purse from me. “You can borrow it whenever you want,” she said.

Number Nine took the purse from Number Eight, less apologetic, but just as swift. Number Ten made it seem like she was going to take a gift from the table but she, too, took the handbag.

Then it was Number One’s turn again. Number One, who had ended up with a butt-ugly piece of jewelry as her initial selection. Who had proclaimed herself a “terrible stealer.” Who looked longingly at the purse – the only appealing gift at the table.

We all held our breaths to see what she would do. And then she made her choice.

The Hazards of Reading

2011-01-26T08:38:00.000-08:00

Here is why I’m not playing in my beloved Wednesday Tennis Clinic this morning.

Last night, I was lying in bed, minding my own business, reading my Kindle, and decided it would be a good idea to flex my leg muscles as tight as they could be. I did this for a few reasons.

One is, I had taken a particularly rough spin class in the morning and whenever we are “climbing hills” the instructor is always quick to point out how we are building muscle, up there, at the top of the leg. That it isn’t just rampant sadism on his part, these hills, it’s actually a torture that he throws in for our benefit. I don’t have muscular legs – I never have – and so last night, out of the blue, I decided to see whether my sadistic spin instructor was speaking the truth.

The other reason is that I don’t like reading on a Kindle, and no matter how good the book is – and this book I’m reading (To The End of The Land by David Grossman) is very good – I find little ways to distract myself, because deep down I hate the fact that what I’m holding in my hands is an awkward, confounding piece of electronic gadgetry and not a nice, refined, tree-wasting paperback. Flexing my leg muscles – the upper muscles, tightening my right thigh as much as I can, then pounding on it with my fist – that’s exactly the type of small distraction that keeps me from finishing my book in time for my book group meeting.

I don’t recall that musculature being tight or compromised during the day, but it must have been. Why else then would a few flexes and pounds result in the type of throbbing ache that prevents me from falling quickly to sleep?

A little after midnight, my leg ached so badly I had to get up and take some Advil, and hobble downstairs to get the icepack. After that I was able to sleep, but when I woke up this morning that whole area was tight and unmoving. I considered the possibility of playing tennis anyway – something I would have tried to do in the past – but my experience has shown me that doing so only makes this kind of thing worse. So I quickly resigned myself to a tennis-free day – perhaps a tennis free week – and, overall, I have to say I’m taking it quite well.

The silver lining here could have been that my muscle flexing antics produced thighs of steel. That my oft-jiggly legs were so toned and tight that I actually hurt my fist in pounding.

Or that I set aside my cheapskate tendencies and, despite having paid for my Kindle version of Grossman’s amazing novel, I go out and buy the book (which is only available in hardcover right now, dang!) so I can actually enjoy it.

But, more likely, it’s that I’m going to get to see my beloved Dr. H before the week is through.

How I've Become So Well Adjusted

2011-01-26T08:29:00.000-08:00

Gina shows up to tennis 15 minutes late. “Sorry, ladies. I was at the chiropractor. He gave me an extra long hot oil massage before my adjustment,” she says in my general direction, “and I completely lost track of the time.”

I shoot her a look. “Hot oil massage?”

“Oh. Doesn’t he do that for you?”

Gina tries to make me believe that Dr. H. likes her more than he likes me, but it’s just not true.

“Who are you talking about?” asks one of the other women.

One of us utters his name and the rest of us nod dreamy eyed. Half the women I play tennis with see him. “We all love him,” Gina says.

I met Dr. H. a decade ago, when I crawled into his office, unable to lift myself onto his examining table. I was brand new to town and the former owners of our house had done an amazing thing: they had gone to the trouble of writing up a 7-page guide of all the Need to Knows about Montclair. Best hardware store, best liquor store, best bagels, best haircuts, and thank heaven, best chiropractor.

“I don’t know if you go in for this type of stuff,” wrote our house seller, “but Dr. H. is no voodoo practitioner. He’s helped me and my wife out many times over the years,”

That number came in handy when I threw my back out and found myself completely incapacitated, not even able to drive myself the mile to his office. That was the first time Dr. H. put me back together again, but it would not be the last. Since then, we have gone through a lot together.

I can’t speak to chiropractic technique; I’ve been to lots of practitioners and they all seem to do similar things. But Dr. H. is a master handler. And I need a lot of handling.

Once I pegged him as a Doc Who Listens, I began seeing him for everything under the sun. “My toe hurts. I have a toothache. I can’t find my keys in the morning.” He was somehow able to fix it all.

“Is this sepsis?” I asked him one day, referring to the rash running up and down my legs. “How do you know about sepsis?” he asked back. “I watch House,” I said.

The rash ended up being Fifth Disease, but no more House for me. Dr. H forbade me to watch it ever again, along with ER, Gray’s Anatomy and every other doctor show. I was also not to read the Linda Sanders, MD column in the New York Times Magazine. And I must stay off the CDC website.

Much of my relationship with Dr. H. involves his digging his thumb deep into my muscle tissue and my cursing him out. But there is also his unique ability to counsel me through my myriad health worries. He’s taught me how to gauge the seriousness of my maladies, so I don’t have to run in and see him every three days with this or that problem. He’s taught me how to manage my particular brand of health anxiety and he’s also taught me how to keep myself from kicking him in the groin if he hits a tender spot. Or maybe he’s just figured out how to move more swiftly out of harm’s way.

I know he doesn’t give hot oil massages, and I know he likes me better than he likes Gina. Dr. H. and I have real history together. She’s just a recent fling.

“He gave me his cell phone number,” Gina says in a stage whisper as she takes her spot next to me on the tennis court.

“Well, he gave me his home number. Ages ago,” I say.

“Home number? You mean the number where any family member could answer? That doesn’t seem very private,” says Gina.

“I have his daughter’s cell number, too. I’m like part of his family!” I say.

I know I’ve gotten to her with that, but she appears imperturbable. “Yeah. If you say so,” she says.

My One Day At A Time Winter

2011-01-22T17:14:00.000-08:00

Seventeen years ago, we had a winter like this. I remember it well because I was pregnant with the teenager at the time. I did not have a good pregnancy and to commemorate that fact, I wrote a 25-page essay entitled My Miserable Pregnancy that still makes me shudder when I read it. It was an unprecedentedly grumpy forty weeks for me, and a big part of my malaise was a result of that winter of unrelenting snow.

It was 1994 and if it didn’t snow every Wednesday, it came close. Not just a few flurries or a shimmery coating that makes everything look crisp and clean. That year offered up a substantial snowstorm – at least 8-12 inches – every Tuesday night.

The reason I remember this is because we lived in Hoboken and although I was working from home at the time, I saw my therapist in New York City on Wednesdays around noon. I know it’s hard to believe that someone so well-adjusted would even need to see a therapist on any Wednesday, no less every Wednesday. Yet there I was, pregnant, nauseated, grumpy and mental, pulling on snow boots every Wednesday morning, praying that my slick and slushy walk to the bus stop would not land me on my procreative derriere.

Like Manhattan, Hoboken is a walking town, so neglecting to shovel your sidewalk was beyond irresponsible – it was practically an act of aggression. The streets are narrow. No one has a driveway. When someone shovels out his car after a storm, he's invariably dumping his car snow onto your freshly cleaned sidewalk, and so you must shovel it all over again. It’s a tiny, crowded city and there really isn’t much room for snow. Although that didn’t keep it from coming.

Besides being pregnant that winter, I also had to quit smoking. I am not a cold-turkey kind of a gal, so that was a long, drawn out process that added to my general misery. I systematically broke all my cigarette habits, one by one – all the million ways that I smoked which ultimately added up to the uber-pleasurable experience that constituted smoking. I changed my brand. I stopped having a cigarette with coffee. I made myself smoke only in the basement, hold the cigarette only with my left hand. Once all my happy little rituals were gone it became so unpleasant an experience it seemed more appealing to simply endure nicotine withdrawal than to continue.

Eventually, that winter resulted in my quitting therapy as well. I was so stressed out about getting there every week (in the snow) that I wasn’t even dealing with my childhood misery when I arrived – I would spend my time talking about fresh, snow-related misery – misery that would have been greatly diminished if I’d simply never left the house to begin with.

This winter reminds me of that one. But different in some big, important ways. First, I’m not pregnant – and for that reason alone, we can all be grateful. Next, I don’t have to be anywhere. If the snow is bad enough that school is cancelled, we just hunker down until there’s movement again. I’ve missed some tennis, and I get a little petulant about that, but in time it passes.

Right now there are mountains of snow in the supermarket parking lots, mounds that flank my driveway. I risk life and limb every time I scale one of the snowdrifts to put money in a parking meter, and that’s if I can even find a place on the street to park. There’s another storm predicted for this coming week and even though this town is big and expansive compared to Hoboken, I can’t imagine how another foot of snow is going to fit. How will it ever all melt? How will it ever go away?

But somehow, miraculously, it will. Ninety days from now it will all be gone. Ninety days seems like an eternity when you’re miserable. So that’s why I’m just taking it one day at a time.

Spin Gas

2011-01-09T16:00:00.000-08:00

The fire department was just here (for a false alarm; long, unrelated story) and the two guys who came in were in full fireman regalia – coats, hats, gas masks – and it took every ounce of my faltering maturity not to say to the both of them, “Gee, that gas mask would have come in handy in my spin class this morning, because someone was cutting farts like you would not believe.”

I had actually been thinking about gas masks (as well as those little surgical masks that doctors wear) as the only reasonable antidote to this morning’s gas crisis. In fact, it was one of my suggestions when I was recounting my class experience to my husband. I found it a very big coincidence that just a few hours later, there were two men in my house with gas masks. That almost never happens. It was almost as if they were a gift from the heavens.

In case you’re wondering whether a grown woman feels like it’s déclassé to devote a whole conversation – indeed, a whole blog post – to farting, the answer is yes, she does. I pride myself on having a lot of gastrointestinal empathy in general, even if my conversation is not especially high-minded. It was with this empathy (and immaturity) that I relayed to my husband the events of the class.

“It was a hard class,” I told him, “made harder by the fact that some guy was farting big, smelly, guy-farts, and it became really unpleasant to breathe.”

“You know who was farting?” he asked.

“Not specifically,” I said, “but it was surely one of the big guys.”

“Doesn’t that declaration seem a little sexist?” my husband asked.

He had a point. But, “these were definitely six-foot-three farts; not five-foot-six farts. Plus they were awful. Eggy and sulphuric, like the Secaucus swamps.”

“Does that always happen on Sundays?” he asked. My husband and I can have long, drawn-out conversations about intestinal gas, and this was well on its way to being one of them.

It had happened once before on a Sunday, but the truth is I’m usually up in the front of the class, impervious to any line of fire. But today I was late and took a spot in the back row – riding off into a sea of behinds.

“Not only guy-gas, but Sunday-morning gas,” my husband said, he in his own way empathetic about the ways of methane. “That’s gas accumulated from Saturday night. God only knows the source.”

Just thinking about it made me start to gag all over again.

Spin Gas is tough. It’s not like being in an elevator where everyone can hold their breaths for 20 or 30 floors. You’re already gasping for as much air as you can get just to get through the next song. And I’m certainly not faulting the guy (ok…or girl), but the whole experience has motivated me to move a little more quickly on Sunday mornings, and snag a teacher’s pet seat right in the very front row.

Stuck

2011-01-06T19:29:00.001-08:00

The ladies that play on the adjacent court on Wednesdays are old. Not older than the hills, but they all have at least 20 years on our group. They’re all gray and braced and slow and accurate. They wear Christmas sweaters over their tennis clothes during the holidays. Sometimes during water breaks, we speculate which one each of us will grow into. (I think I’ll become the one who wears her tennis duds just a little too tight – the skirt is too short, the top rides up on her belly. Sometimes I think I’ve become her already.)

If I had to pick one word that described yesterday morning it would have been “stuck.” At the last minute, the teenager texted me that he’d forgotten his gym shorts, could I please drop them off at the main office at school? Because the teenager is more apt to get into a college on his grades, rather on any sports scholarship, I agreed. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the school ruin his GPA because of gym. So, already a little late for tennis, I ran into the high school with gym shorts in hand, only to be stopped by the Entrance Monitor. These are people who, at first, appear as if they might function like a concierge, directing you helpfully toward points of interest at the high school that you surely don’t want to miss. But in fact they’re there to thwart efficiency, requiring photo ID and a monotonous sign in process before you’re able to proceed to your destination. As if there are so many adults in this world who actually want to spend that much more time with a teenager that they would try and sneak into a school and attempt to procure one. That desk at the high school – that was the first place I was stuck.

Next I was stuck behind a school bus. No further explanation needed there.

Then, the parking lot was full of snowdrifts and plowed piles, reducing the available parking spots by a third. Women were stuck in parking lot limbo, waiting for others to get in their cars and leave so they could take their spots.

When I got inside, the older women from the next court had just amassed in the lobby and were descending the stairs. They take the stairs slowly. One step. Then a little rest. Another step. Rest. It’s hard to believe these are people who are about to play tennis for 90 minutes. I was stuck on the stairs behind them.

I wasn’t even the last one to arrive. After I’d gotten settled in, Laura the Tennis Pro announced she’d just received a text from Gina. “I’m in the parking lot but I can’t come in. My effing key is stuck in the ignition.”

I always marvel at Gina’s ability to be ladylike. To use “effing,” instead of “fucking” even in a private text message. Even when she’s stuck.

Eventually, she did get her key out and came down to join us. During the break, she and I imagined ourselves twenty years hence, taking the court steps one at a time – maybe having a twinge of arthritis that slows us down even further – and when we do, pulling out our trusty iPhones to message the other ladies in the group. “I’ll be a little late today,” we’ll tap out with our rickety old thumbs, “I’m stuck on the effin steps.”

It's Not Easy Being Random

2010-12-29T15:05:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I agreed to participate in David’s Second Annual Pay It Forward Day. I don’t know David. It was an event sent to me as an electronic message by an old work colleague. The event was to take place December 1st, from 7:00 AM to 8:30 PM. Participants were asked to perform a random act of kindness. Pay for someone’s coffee. Help someone out. Get the next person’s gas. “When you do something for someone,” David wrote, “there’s a good chance they’ll do something nice for someone else.”

This is exactly the type of thing I love getting involved in. Or so I thought.

I made a commitment to myself to participate and immediately had specific Random Acts in mind. I had two doctor appointments that day and I was going to bring a bouquet of flowers to the receptionist at each office.

I don’t know if anyone remembers December 1st, but it was a wet and windy Wednesday. Branches and trees were falling and the rain came down in torrents. I couldn’t bear the thought of parking and walking to a florist before my noon appointment, so I excused myself from Act I and arrived at that doctor’s empty-handed. The rain continued. I did not want to go to the florist any more at 3:00 than I did at noon, but I had to get some milk so I went to the grocery store and picked up a potted plant for receptionist number two.

The gift seemed to please her, and I was happy I had kept my promise, but deep down I knew I had cheated. This was a doctor I visit often, and I have a close, friendly relationship with the receptionist. There didn’t seem anything random about bringing her a plant at holiday time. It was just a nice (albeit an uncharacteristically nice) thing for me to do.

Later that day, I felt the disappointment mounting. Then a friend emailed me and told me she couldn’t get herself out into the horrible weather to perform her random act, so she was going to do it tomorrow. I jumped all over her, saying that there were still plenty more hours of Pay It Forward Day remaining. She was stuck in the house with her young kids, she said. You can figure something out, I said. I simply would not let her off the hook.

She said she was going to make an online donation to an organization that she’s supported in the past. I told her I thought she could do better than that.

It’s not that I’m against organized charities – I’m not. But charitable donations do not smack of Random Acts of Kindness – at least not to me. I feel like the whole point of Random Acts, is to do something that’s really atypical for you. Even better if it’s anonymous. Better still if it’s a little difficult. Nowhere is this written, but I had embraced it as if it were law.

I’m not sure what made me such a complete bitch about this “event,” but it wasn’t lost on me, even at the time, that my crummy attitude was completely counter to the spirit of what David hoped to conceive. I’ve spent most of my adult life across from a therapist, inspecting how I take out on other people my own shortcomings. Here I was, doing it again, and all of a sudden decades of therapy bills seemed like a complete waste of money.

So, partly to honor my commitment and partly to get better value out of my therapy dollar, I forced myself to stop berating my friend and instead myself go execute the Act that I thought she should have done.

I pulled out the phone book, opened it up, pointed to a name and circled it. I got an envelope, addressed it to my randomly-chosen name, stuck a twenty-dollar bill in a card and dropped it in the mail.

I did do all that. But there was a lot of time between each step. Because when something is especially hard for me, I stall. And I find reasons not to go through with it. Like: This is an old phone book, what if this person doesn’t live there anymore? And: I don’t really like that name, maybe I should open to a different page and pick someone new. Or: What if this is a substance abuser and I’m contributing to his ultimate demise. But especially: Money is tight; this is not the time to be sending it to complete strangers.

By the time I actually got the card into the mail, it was December 3rd, and even that took a lot of effort. The whole thing felt like flushing money down the toilet to me – money I really don’t have to flush.

But when I think of that man opening his mail, reading an unsigned card that starts off, “Hi, you don’t know me, but…” and having a twenty dollar bill fall into his lap, it sort of makes me wish I had put in a little more. I imagine him using it to take his son out for an ice cream, or maybe bringing home a pizza for the family. I imagine him going to work the next day and surprising someone with a cup of coffee. Or letting someone go ahead of him at the bank. And then that new person going out of her way to return someone’s dropped glove. A little domino effect that might go on and on forever.

Crestfallen

2010-12-15T19:15:00.001-08:00

Perhaps the question that needs to be asked is: Why a flash mob? Why not just show up at someone’s wedding or bar mitzvah and join in a line dance?

I really wanted it to be a Flash Mob, because in a Flash Mob there’s surprise.

I understand that now, because I can pinpoint the exact moment when it occurred to me that there might not be any element of surprise in this happening.

We arrived early at the hotel to rehearse – this is because, despite a brushing of snow on the ground and reportedly icy conditions, Claudine got us into Midtown in 30 pre-dawn minutes – and the four of us (Claudine, her two friends Amy and Joanna, and I) sat down on the carpeted ballroom floor to wait for the organizers to show up. A woman in a hot pink hoodie sat down next to us and announced, “I’m so glad to see that there are other people here my own age.” We all smiled politely, even though she looked like she was close to 70 and even if she were only 60, none of us consider that “our own age,” especially not Joanna, who is 27.

Eventually, rehearsal began and it didn’t matter how old anyone was anymore, we all set about the task of perfecting our 5-minute Cha-Cha dance. After an hour there were still splinter groups learning the basic steps while the rest of the room was running the routine. And then we were allowed a break.

At this point it was after 8:00. Nothing was mentioned about a solitary person jumping out of the crowd and starting the dance. No groups were formed that would constitute the spontaneous eruption of satellite dancers. We were all just going to start dancing at the appointed time, which was 10 a.m. It was then that my crest began to droop.

The four of us went out for breakfast and returned a little before 9:30, the time that we were to set out for Times Square. Before we left, everyone received a powder blue skullcap with a Charmin logo on it and the Spanish words “ir es disfrutar” which seem to mean something like “take pleasure in.” “Take pleasure in this toilet paper,” our hats commanded, as we put them on and headed up 43rd Street to Military Island.

There, in the middle of Times Square, were a stage, speakers, Charmin signage, filming crews and three Latina Cha-Cha dancers recruiting people off the street to learn the dance moves that we just woke up at 5 a.m. to perfect. There were tables set up where they were giving away Charmin skullcaps and herding masses of people into the barricaded Cha-Cha area.

“Make sure you wear your wristbands,” they told us at the hotel, “or you won’t be permitted into the secured area.” Huh? The only people who were not in the “secured area,” were those who opted not to stand outside for 25 minutes in 10-degree cold and listen to a Charmin pitch blaring in Spanish throughout Times Square.

At this point, none of us four had a buoyant crest among us.

One of us managed to spit out the words that the rest of us were too appalled to utter. “This is not a Flash Mob. It’s a tacky PR stunt.”

There was really no reason to stay at that point, except for the fact that we’d all gotten up at 5 o’clock and spent the last two hours practicing a dance routine that we’ll otherwise never do again in our lives. So we did stay. Until 10:00. When they announced that the moment we’d all been waiting for had finally arrived.

However, this was not the moment I’d been waiting for. I was waiting for a moment that never came at all. The moment where magic breaks open a crowd of innocent bystanders and they look on with a mix of incredulity and delight. Even the woman who came to her 4th floor Broadway office window and looked down at us standing numbly in the cold just shook her head and walked away.

In the end, we did our Charmin Cha-Cha. You might think the saddest part of it all was being mistaken for a 70-year-old, or having to wear a cheap Charmin skullcap on my perfect Keratin hair. But it wasn’t. The saddest part of it all was that in the end, you couldn’t tell the difference between the Flash Mobbers and the Times Square Recruits – the people who had bee practicing for seven days versus the people who had learned the dance seven minutes ago. In the frigid cold, with outerwear that could double as sleeping bags, everybody’s Cha-Cha looks exactly the same. Which is to say, not caliente, but more like mierda.

And so to make myself whole again -- to pick up my fallen crest and stand up tall – I have chosen to employ the tried and true strategy of denial. As far as I’m concerned, I am still a Flash Mob Virgin. This happening never happened. I will go forth to find myself a good and right Flash Mob, and when I do… Ole.

And You May Say To Yourself: My God, What Have I Done?

2010-12-13T18:38:00.000-08:00

The real secret of dance is to make it look easy. Anyone can learn steps and routines if they practice long enough, but a real dancer can pull the whole thing off with a smile on her face, as if what she was doing were no more effort than strolling out to the sidewalk to pick up the morning paper. This is the main arena in which Real Dancers and I diverge.

I guess I wasn’t the only one who asked for a bigger Flash Mob t-shirt, because I got an email the other day that t-shirts were history. Skullcaps instead. This, so everyone can dress as warmly as possible for the “crazy weather.” As soon as I saw that – “crazy weather” – I started checking my little Google Weather icon almost hourly. Since Saturday, it has had a shy little sun peeking out from behind a fluffy cloud for Flash Mob Day. Nothing too crazy about that. One email said that there would probably be a lot of people flaking out because of the weather, but if we could handle the risk and were willing to dance anyway, c’mon down.

I realized then, for the first time ever, that it might actually rain on my flash mob. That certainly made the whole thing seem less fun.

Tonight, the forecast for Flash Mob Day is just cold – bitterly cold, actually; seemingly more than a skullcap might mitigate. It seems so unfair that my one shot at dancing on Broadway is going to include a wind-chill factor in the teens.

I spoke with Claudine for an outerwear consult and she confirmed that she would be dancing in a big, long puffy coat. And that I should, too.

“I don’t know if I can do that dance in a long, down coat,” I said.

This, understandably, was not her concern. “You know what my dad would say whenever I left my house in the cold? Claudine, cover your ass!”

So, I will rise before the sun tomorrow. I will get into a cold car and set off in the dark to dance with who-knows-how-many-other skull-capped people on a frosty, windy, winter morning that may or may not include snow. This is what I wished for, so I will try and enjoy it. But will I make it look easy?

I don’t think so.

Let's Dance More!

2010-12-11T16:23:00.000-08:00

I have just reconciled myself to the fact that the cold is going to be the least of my problems with my current Flash Mob endeavor.

Information trickles in every day or two. First came the video, so we can learn the dance. Then information about optional rehearsals. Then an MP3 with the actual music. I’ve never been a part of anything like this, so receiving the emails is its own kind of thrill.

At first we were told we would be wearing matching t-shirts and were asked to give our t-shirt size when we signed up. At the time, I was still deluding myself into thinking this might be an indoor event, so I asked for an Adult Small. When I finally came to accept that we would be mobbing out of doors, I sent back an email begging for a Medium, so I could layer, layer, layer underneath.

A few days ago I started out the arduous process of learning the dance. As you might recall from my previous post, this is the part I’m not good at. If you’ve ever learned a dance routine, you may remember that at first the steps are demonstrated very, very slowly. Like you’re underwater. This instruction seems as if it has nothing to do with anything once you pick up the tempo and dance at the right speed. It’s not like learning the Slow Version and the Fast Version. It’s more like learning two different dances entirely.

My first and second attempts were bombs. I couldn’t get through the whole routine – couldn’t remember it, couldn’t execute it, just plain couldn’t. I stopped dancing and started studying the video. I took notes, writing everything down. This is how I have to learn things – by writing it and rewriting it. This afternoon I decided I was going to learn the routine start to finish no matter what.

I set up the MP-3 and had my 11-year-old assist me both as step caller and musical director. The kid happens to be an incredible dancer, so he also gave me a few tips. I found a spot to practice and I ran the steps over and over and over again, all the while shedding layers of clothing – first my hoodie, then my long-sleeve, until finally I was down to my t-shirt and ready to put on a pair of shorts.

After 45 minutes, I kind of knew the steps – but I was completely wrung out. We will be rehearsing for two hours before the event and I really don’t know if I can make it. My husband said, “If you can spin for an hour, you can do this.”

Maybe.

The 11-year-old said, “Just find a spot in the middle and toward the back so not too many people will see you.”

Thanks.

When I told the teenager what I was going to be doing he said, “What are you doing that for?”

I refrained from sharing with him my secret wish to be a back-up dancer and just said, “I thought it would be a fun story for you to tell your grandchildren.”

“I’m not even telling my children you did this,” he said.

My aching legs. My snotty kids. It all makes dancing in the cold seem like a walk in the park.

Let's Dance!

2010-12-10T14:15:00.000-08:00

The night that Claudine and I went to see David Byrne at the Wellmont, we left our husbands seated in the row and ran off to the aisles to sing and dance. The Wellmont is a theatre, not a dance club, but you’d never know it by our behavior, swept away, as we were, by the infectious beat. At one point, Claudine leaned in to me and shouted, “You know, my secret career fantasy has always been to be a back-up singer.”

“Mine has always been to be one of those dancers,” I shouted back, pointing to the white clad women on stage with Byrne executing perfectly choreographed moves.

I took so many dance classes in college that it could have been my minor (if they had offered such a thing). I wasn’t good at them, though. In fact, it was those dance classes that kept me from graduating with the highest of honors. I usually got Bs, and once maybe a C, because, among other things, I cannot turn, or leap, or master anything beyond the most basic steps. The only thing that kept me from getting Ds was that we had to attend two professional performances a semester and write about them – and apparently I was the only one in the dance department who could string together a sentence. My reviews pulled my dance grades out of the toilet, but the dancer in me has never been entirely extinguished.

So the other day, when I saw this video of a bunch of people breaking out in dance in the middle of Ben Yahuda Street, I posted it on Facebook with the comment: "If anyone is putting together one of these Flash Mob thingies, I’m totally in!”

That line was my way of expressing my love of and enthusiasm for what I witnessed in the video. In no way did I expect Claudine to send me a link to an open call for a Flash Mob a week later. “You wanted a Flash Mob…” she wrote. “you got one.”

These Flash Mobs are top-secret events, so I can’t give out much detail. But I will say this: That Ben Yahuda video was done a year ago November where, in Israel, the average temperature is about 65 degrees. And I, on this very 32-degree day, have just given over to wearing my big, long, black down coat every single outing until May. I can’t imagine that the heft and loft of that wrap is going to add much to my already dubious dancing skills. But I’m hoping that, as usual, an essay at the end might save me.

(As a complete aside -- this post is my 200th on this blog. I think I celebrated my 100th post last year, so I just thought I'd keep the tradition alive.)

The Good, The Bad and The Keratin

2010-12-04T14:16:00.000-08:00

I just sat down to write about my Keratin treatment. About how I got it on a whim yesterday at the salon, and how I left the salon with pin straight hair that completely freaked me out, even though my stylist warned me not to judge it until the next day, once it had been washed and some of the natural wave returned. And about how she also warned me to be extremely careful, in the hours before washing, not to wear hats or use barrettes or even allow the handle of my handbag to touch it on my shoulder because any little impression on it could (and probably would) remain as a permanent dent in the finished product.

I was going to write about how I woke up this morning and washed it, and then spent about seven minutes with the blow-dryer and ended up with a luscious, silky, wavy hairdo that was completely devoid of frizz and made me look like a (middle-aged) Breck Girl. I was going to recount how I showed up at tennis with my new coif and how afterwards I asked Gina to take a picture of it with her iPhone so I could send it to my Curly Girl Friends so they could see the miracle that had taken place.

I would have added the part where, embarrassed to be posing for pictures in the parking lot, I yelled out to Melissa on her way in that I had just gotten Keratin, and how Melissa called me a traitor (because she is a Curly Girl) and how I smiled and agreed. And then how Melissa said she was envious because I would now be taken more seriously, and how Shelley said, “Oh my God, it’s only hair,” and how Melissa and I shook our heads knowingly, indicating that we understood that Shelley was right in principal, but in actual fact, Straight Girls do get taken more seriously than Curly Girls, and wondering whether we should tell Shelley that it’s not because she wears her nightclothes out during the day, or that she didn’t go to Harvard that she doesn’t get taken seriously, it’s because she, too, is a Curly Girl, and that’s just how life is for us.

I would have tried to capture how this hair treatment unlocked something in me that made me feel more confident and outgoing, funnier and more charming, but I would have stopped myself, thinking that’s silly – hair doesn’t really do all that.

I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to get to any of that, or even if I could have thrown in the line about how this feels like the Botox of hair treatments (which may have seemed random and out of context), because I stopped writing after the first sentence to check online and see what exactly Keratin was – scientifically – and after I’d found that out, I just went to one more site to read about it as a hair treatment, and it was there that I found a post from a woman who was crying for help because after her Keratin treatment she started losing her hair. Fast.

Of course, I had to scroll down and read more of the posts and was heartened to learn that many people responded with sensible advice for her. But even more responded that the exact same thing had happened to them, and as I read I could actually feel the sweat develop on my palms and my breath start to shorten in my chest and I thought to myself, “Oh, gee…I’m going down.”

I stopped reading and reverted to skimming, and then once my anxiety registered an 8.0 on the Richter Scale, I found my way to my husband and curled up on his lap and told him I’d made a terrible mistake that there seemed no way to undo and began to moan about how scared I was that I was now going to lose my hair.

“You’ve been doing so well, today,” he said, “what happened?”

I told him about my time on the internet and he attempted to talk me off the ledge. “You have to do this, don’t you?” he said. “You can’t just let a good thing be good for very long.”

And I nodded, yes, but I didn’t have to. Because we both know that’s exactly what I do. I did it today, during tennis, when we were up two games right off the bat. We ended up losing the set 2-6 or something. And I do it in my mind all day long – spinning off different horror scenarios because I’ve just found myself singing joyfully, gleefully, to We Won’t Get Fooled Again at 60 miles an hour after a surprisingly pleasant errand of returns to Marshall’s.

We came back in the second set this morning, and I was able to leave my husband’s arms tonight and come back here and write – things that I don’t think I could have done even just a year ago. But still, it’s vexing. How the mind works. How it knows the job it has to do and it goes at it like a steamroller. How no amount of tennis lessons or expert advice is ever going to touch that steamroller. Only the practice of learning to leave well enough alone.

Oh! Christmas Trees!

2010-12-02T19:27:00.000-08:00

In the middle of November, I received this note: “Lots of town and FaceBook chatter about the obnoxiously early lighted Xmas tree on Valley near the A&P. This is begging for a Jessica Wolf post/column!”

Perhaps, dear note writer. But it may not be what you expect.

I saw those trees for the first time a few days before Thanksgiving. (There are two of them, one close to the road and one further back toward the house.) They’re tall and festooned from head to toe with multi-colored lights that appear to stay lit day and night. I had my kids in the car with me when I drove by and I said aloud, “Oh, those must be the trees that everyone’s talking about.”

“In what way?” asked the teenager.

“I think people are mad that they’re lit up so early,” I said.

“People are mad?” asked my son. “Does anyone really have time for that?”

His question stopped me short, and I immediately put an end to my thoughts about Christmas Trees and began instead to think about Being Mad, wherein it dawned on me for the first time ever that I have never really had time to be mad about most of the things I get mad at. I make time.

The incident that first comes to mind is when the guy in Hoboken stole my sofa. It actually wasn’t a sofa, it was a chaise longue or a fainting couch, and it actually wasn’t even mine, it was my husband’s and before that, his mother’s. It was old and ornate and it was covered in a golden fabric that was decorated with little embroidered bees. The fabric was wearing thin, so I found someone – a guy with a storefront shop – who said he would recover it. He came over and measured. I picked out my fabric. I gave him a deposit. He took my sofa. And that was the end.

The end, as in: I never saw my sofa again.

He didn’t return my calls. His shop was always locked up. The storefront eventually closed.

I called the police. I filed a small claims suit against him. I went to court. He never showed up.

I tracked him down at a waitering job. I found out where he lived. I barged into his apartment. I demanded justice. He told me he would make good.

He never did.

I spent close to a year enraged about what he’d done. I was mad about the sofa, my deposit, the court system, his ability to lie to my face, as well as the fact that he had the same name as an upstanding television dad from my youth. I was mad that I had to breathe the same air as he did. In short, I thought he should be annihilated.

My husband said to me, “Let it go.”

What? You don’t let things go if you’re in the right? I’m right about this! This guy is lowly pond scum. Why should I let this go?

“Because that’s the only way you’re ever going to feel good again,” my husband said. “You have to let it go, even if you’re right.”

My teenage boy was just a little baby at the time, and as anyone with a little baby knows, moms don’t have time for much of anything. But I was able to find plenty of time to be mad. Which, in the long run, got me nowhere.

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with thinking that it’s unbecoming to light a tree too early in the season. But, I sure hope it was a fleeting thought for most.

I actually like the trees, and I don’t mind at all that they were lit in the middle of November. Someone had the forethought to string their lights up before it got so cold that their fingers become numb with the job. Also, it seems that they went up right around Fall Back Day, just as daylight was beginning to get cut short. That’s the whole point of tree-lighting, isn’t it? To help us endure the short days and long nights with something sparkly and festive to look at?

I love outdoor Christmas decorations, and as far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as too early or too late. Or too garish, for that matter. It’s dark and cold, and it will be for months – I say: bring it!

(This post appears on Montclair Patch, HERE.)

Learning To Drive

2010-11-28T17:36:00.000-08:00

In a day or two, the teenager will get his Learner’s Permit. I’ve been anticipating and dreading this day for years. Everything about me is ill suited to teaching someone to drive. Besides being averse to wind, rain and darkness, I don’t like traffic, tunnels or any major thoroughfare on Long Island. With me at the helm, my son will only be able to drive locally, and then only on bright, sunny days. I’m not sure, but I think that may end up being limiting for him.

When I got my Learner’s Permit, my dad was still alive. We had a 1975 beige VW Bug. That’s the car I learned to drive in and my dad nearly disowned me in the process. We lived on top of a mountain, in a town with tiny, Hobbit-like streets. The mountain flanked a lakeside community whose winding roads sometimes bisected the lake – narrow passes with steep banks on either side. No guardrails. Guardrails were for wimps.

At night it was even worse. There were barely any streetlights, so if you didn’t drive with your high beams on, you could easily misjudge one of a hundred hairpin turns and end up in someone’s living room.

One day, early in my education, my dad had me drive up and down the mountain. I had to learn to get our four-speed Beetle going from a complete stop on a hill. He would have me drive halfway up the mountain, stop fully, then start going again. We rolled backwards a lot, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. It was summertime and the trees were green and lush, canopying the road. The VW’s windshield was practically flat; in the front seat, you were nearly on top of it. I didn’t even notice the inchworm because I was concentrating so hard on getting the car going from a dead standstill. And I did get it going – at the exact moment that the inchworm splat against the windshield. It landed right in front of my nose. I screamed. And covered my eyes. And must have taken my feet off the pedals, too, because we started rolling backwards down the hill, and my dad – who never yelled at me or even raised his voice for any reason – had an absolute shit fit right there next to me in the car.

In truth, I’m sure it didn’t go on for very long, but it felt like hours of screaming about never letting go of the wheel and never covering your face and a whole lot of other instruction that would have seemed reasonable and sensible if it weren’t being delivered in such a loud, humorless manner.

“Bugs freak me out,” I reminded him, as if that were a valid and excusable reason to abdicate all control of a moving vehicle. And at the time, to me, it was.

Learning to drive was, for me, this defining moment where I was asked to put aside a lot of childish beliefs and behaviors, and quickly take that first big step toward becoming A Responsible Adult. Beliefs and behaviors that, up until then, defined me. Maybe it was a step I wasn’t so ready to take, letting safety supersede my fear of bugs. Often when we take on a new challenge, there’s a part of ourselves that we need to leave behind.

Just today, I read something in a friend’s Yoga blog about teaching her son to ride a bike. She’d quoted the novelist Sloan Wilson as saying: “The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.”

I didn’t teach either of my kids how to ride a bicycle. I always said it was because I couldn’t run fast enough, and that’s actually true. But I also know deep down that I’m the shaky one in the equation. Or at least “the other shaky one.” The one who worries not only about rain and traffic, but also about what exactly will be left behind. And how that’s going to change things. Who’s never quite sure how to execute this Mother Dance I am continually asked to engage in: that of both holding on and letting go.

Putting The Great Back Into Grateful

2010-11-24T12:23:00.001-08:00

This post is running on Patch (click here), but I'm posting it here as well.

Several years ago, I remember showing up for my tennis group on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Someone asked me how my holiday was and without missing a beat I said, “It was awful.” The woman was visibly startled by this, so I qualified it by explaining myself. “It wasn’t that the meal was charred or that anyone had expired at the dinner table,” I told her. “Thanksgiving is just hard for me.” During that moment, I realized something that’s taken me practically forever to understand: when people ask me how something was, they’re mostly just making small talk. They don’t want to know that Thanksgiving represents a lot of sadness for me and in general it’s a day I simply try to endure. If nothing cataclysmic occurred, my proper answer should be, “Great. Yours?”

I made a small promise to myself that I would try to remember this in the future. That instead of being the Queen of Too Much Information, I would answer questions like that politely, and then quickly refocus the conversation onto others.

Soon after that Thanksgiving, my life started to crumble in unexpected ways. Every time I turned around it seemed like another rug was being pulled out from under me. Things went on like this for a few months until I found myself praying not that my life would be what it had been, but simply that I would finally hit the bottom. We all go through periods like this, where, although deep and lonely, we just want arrive at a place where there’s nowhere left to go but up.

I got my wish. I did hit bottom. But getting up was harder than I thought. I was out of balance in every imaginable way and just plain tired. I sought the counsel of an old friend and yoga teacher who I knew once had a similar hole to pull herself out of.

One of her suggestions to me was to get myself a pretty little notebook and to number each page, up to 40. Each day, she told me, write down a few things you’re grateful for.

At first blush, this seemed stupid and useless. I didn’t even want to get up in the morning, no less root around for things to be grateful for. It’s hard to even write that sentence, now. It not only seems so foreign, it seems so arrogant. But because my friend had been there -- to that very low place where you have to rebuild the meaning of your life -- she was able to give me some instructions that really helped. “Some days,” she said, “the only thing I honestly felt was: I am grateful for mint toothpaste. And that was all I wrote.”

That was exactly the example I needed. I needed to be shown that I could discover gratitude amywhere. And if it didn’t feel right or true to be talking about all the things I should feel grateful for, there were a million other places I could look for – or notice – my gratitude.

I’m not going to tell you that suddenly I was able to sit down and rattle off pages and pages of reasons to be grateful. It was actually hard to fill those forty sheets. But at the end, I could tell there’d been a slight shift in my perception. I was at least noticing as many good things as bad. So I got myself another notebook and started the exercise again.

By the next Thanksgiving I had a slightly better attitude. I made a big effort to keep my expectations low to try and avert disappointments. But I also made little efforts along the way to remind myself of things I love, and I tried to focus only on those things throughout the day. I started the day with exercise, even though it made food prep a little more harried. I served Brussels sprouts, even though I don’t consider them “special” – they’re one of my favorites and I eat them all the time. I listened to music while I cooked. We played Apples to Apples after our meal. It wasn’t Norman Rockwell, but it ended up being really quite fun.

I know that Thanksgiving isn’t about the meal, but about taking the time to be grateful for all that we have. But for me, that kind of backfires. It has always ended up being a day that I’ve reflected on my losses – things I once had. Things that if I still had, life would be perfect. Much better for me, is to spend a bit of time every day focusing on what I appreciate, even if it’s only how nice and thin the deli guy slices my cold cuts, or that I can finally serve a game of tennis without double-faulting. It takes a lot of pressure off of Thanksgiving for me when I live like that every day. It brings Thanksgiving back to being just a big ole meal, which is a little more manageable for me.

So that next year, when my tennis friends asked how my Thanksgiving was, I blurted out something I’d never expected would feel so true, “It was actually really great!” I said. “How was yours?”

Wet Cow/Dry Cow

2010-11-19T20:24:00.001-08:00

Just before tennis yesterday I decided to play some Grateful Dead to settle my mind. I had gotten myself a little worked up about this game for no good reason at all and I don’t know what it is about that music, but it just calms me right down.

This wasn’t a match – it was just my regular Thursday game – although two people were subbing: Debi the Sub, who is from my old, working-person life and whom I’ve recently brought into my tennis web of madness, and Sloane, who used to be in this Thursday group but ditched us this year for better players.

Sloane can be caustic and Debi the Sub can be sensitive and I wanted everyone to be happy, so I was having some pre-game jitters in that way I do when I feel like I need to take care of everyone’s emotional well being. Also, I learned on Wednesday that Laura the Tennis Pro had made the baffling decision to travel home for Thanksgiving next Wednesday, and in so doing cancelled our Wednesday Clinic. So, no clinic next week. No Thursday game because of pesky Thanksgiving. No Friday game because all those women want to spend the day with their families. This was the last time I was going to play for two weeks. As a result, I wanted to play well and leave the game on a high note.

I listened to a few songs from Terrapin Station but still showed up a little frazzled, not even taking the time to tie my shoes before I’d gotten in the car. I laced up, braced up, showed off my new tissues (a gift from Laura the Tennis Pro) which were boldly imprinted – each and every one –with the words You Had Me At Achoo, and stuffed a few tissues into my waistband so when my nose started to run (as it invariably does on Court 5) I would not have to use my shirt sleeve.

I was so pleased with our playing from the very first point. Debi the Sub and I were partners and I felt like we had a good, simpatico thing going on. We were up 5-1 and I was just about to vow to listen to the Grateful Dead every single time I came out to play. But then Sloane and Tracey started getting some games. Several games. And before I knew it we were tied 5-5.

It was warm on Court 5 and we’d already stopped after a few games to take a drink. I would replenish my Achoo tissues. We’d chat a bit. I’m not sure what the score was when we went for that final, fateful water break, but it was after we were all tied up. I had apparently not screwed the top back onto my bottle the time before so when I picked it up the top flew off (which startled me) and I dropped the bottle (which was nearly full) and water (a lot of water) spilled everywhere – all over the little glass table that our waters had been sitting on, all over my warm up shirt and pants that were hanging over the chair back, maybe a bit on my tennis bag, and quite a lot all over the floor. I didn’t act as quickly as I might have – it was, after all, only water. If I’d seen the wet handbag right away I wouldn’t have been so cavalier.

When Tracey reached down to get it, it was the first time I noticed the big water stain on it. Of course, the bag was leather. We all started saying, “Oh no!” and I, of course, was mortified. I think it was Sloane who declared it “ruined,” which was when I chimed in with something completely idiotic.

“It’s going to be okay. Cows get wet all the time and then they dry.” (This is actually the mantra I use when I spill something on our leather sofa.) And it’s true, it does dry. But our leather sofa has kind of a worn-in, distressed look to it. It is not the same effect as this buttery soft leather hobo bag.

Tracey started laughing, but I could tell it was because she really wanted to cry. “You’re not going to believe this, but I just took this bag out of the box for the first time this morning. I’ve never even used it before.”

Ok, now I see what’s happened. It’s not just her handbag I’ve ruined, it’s her brand new handbag. “I’ll buy you a new one,” I blurted out, because I knew that was the right thing to say. I quickly started covering the bag with my Achoo tissues, trying to help the drying process along. Then I got a quick, sick feeling in my gut. “Wait, you probably got this bag from Nordstrom’s,” I said, “not from Payless.”

Tracey was still laughing about cows, but I could tell she was distressed. “I ordered it online,” she said.

“Zappos?” I asked.

“Cole Haan,” she said.

I don’t even know how much a Cole Haan bag is, but I’ll tell you this: once someone told me about what another woman paid for a Fendi bag and I was completely dumbstruck. I don’t even carry a handbag and when I do, it’s from Kohl’s. That’s not because I’m cheap (although I am), it’s because I know that whatever bag I buy is going to fall short in some way. It will be too heavy, or tip over awkwardly in the car. The strap will slide off the shoulder of my favorite coat, or it will be just a little too small to carry a book in. Rather than spend time bemoaning the money I’ve spent on what I thought would be the “perfect” handbag, I get inexpensive bags that I use for special occasions, and the rest of the time I just carry my wallet in my pocket. Before my Fendi education, I thought $200 was a lot for a bag.

Later I found out that Tracey has had the same quest: the hunt for the perfect bag. Although, unlike me, she hadn’t given up. This Cole Haan bag was potentially it. She’d splurged. This was the bag that was going to change her life (as handbags are wont to do).

I spent the day cursing my clumsiness. My forgetfulness around recapping my water. My stupidity around talking about wet cows in the face of tragedy. My ability to wreck damage and destruction every time I leave the house. I cursed the fact that Debi the Sub and I ended up losing 6-8 a set in which we had an early 5-1 lead. And also I cursed the Grateful Dead, who were supposed to bring me good fortune that day, not bad.

In between all that, I went on the Cole Haan website and found the bag (on sale…whew!). I called their customer service department and asked how to antidote a big water mark. The gentleman I spoke to couldn’t have been lovelier, but it was quickly apparent that Cole Haan customers are not typically klutzy, because he had absolutely no experience in dealing with anything like this.

I did a web search, not on Wet Cows/Dry Cows, but on Removing Water Stains From Leather. Fifteen articles came up with the exact same advice (which was, interestingly, sort of based on my “cows dry” theory) and I emailed them all to Tracey.

She wrote me back a note that obviously took her an hour to compose. It was a long, amazing reminiscence of how she had gotten to this bag – the years it had taken her to stop buying cheap bags from which she wasn’t even able to access her ringing cell phone and finally spend some real money on something that would truly make her happy. As I read it, I just felt worse and worse. I knew I was going to be out a couple hundred on the bag – and that it was the right thing to do – but I couldn’t help thinking: Cows Dry.

She ended her note by saying that her family can barely notice the water mark and that if she herself does notice it, it will remind her of how much fun she has playing tennis with me. I don’t even know how someone can get there from where she was. How to go, not from Wet Cow to Dry Cow, but from Wet Cow to I’m Happy To Have The Cow Wet, which is not only the essence of grace, but is surely a Google search that could benefit me a hundred times more than getting in a couple extra games of tennis.

Introducing The Tennis Wench

2010-11-19T03:35:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not, but I've started another blog called The Tennis Wench. It's a place where I'm going to keep ALL my tennis posts. I think I'm going to have them here too. I'm trying to figure it all out. But in the meantime, I wanted to tell you about it in case you want to check it. Below is my first post:

I'm Off Today

I play tennis most Fridays. But not today. I'm off the schedule today and already I can feel the crankiness setting in.

I jumped out of bed early hoping to find a message in my inbox that someone is looking for a sub.

I've been known to take a more active role. I've been known to send out an email to every tennis friend I have, telling them which days I'm free to sub that week in case anyone can't make their game. This technique has paid off well. Women will take me up on my offer for (what I consider) outlandish alternatives. They'll skip tennis for a doctor's appointment, or a hair appointment, or for (heaven forbid) work. I almost understand skipping tennis to tend to a sick child, although there are tables and chairs in the lounge...a television...a snack machine...a bathroom. Really, what more are they going to get at home?

This week I didn't send out an availability email. I decided to just let fate take it's course. And I don't mind telling you I don't like where it's gotten me.

There's a certain amount of shame attached to being a tennis wench. And I feel it now, sitting in the middle of my throat. Like a tennis ball.

My Pilgrimage to Jericho

2010-11-09T03:32:00.000-08:00

No, not that Jericho. The one on Long Island. The teenager had a reunion with his friends from his mountain climbing trip and the event took place in Jericho.

I’ve never been to Jericho, in part because of the Long Island Expressway – a highway whose patrons seems to end up in a complete standstill regularly and for no apparent reason. I pride myself on never driving on Long Island and hoped that this event of the teenager’s would not sully my record. Two days before the gathering, I discovered that the Long Island Railroad was not running any service past Jamaica, Queens all weekend long. My only remaining option was to drive him.

My son had a party back here to attend Saturday evening, so instead of spending my entire Saturday in the car, driving him thither and picking him up six hours hence, I decided to just spend the day in Jericho.

I planned to leave our house at 8 AM Saturday morning, but we didn’t get on the road until close to 8:30. This is because, even though I was up at 6:00, I was wholly incapable of organizing myself for the day. I can’t imagine what I expected from Jericho, but I viewed the day as my being banished to some sort of deserted island, that I suffer greatly if I were left idle and without creature comforts. I had work to do, so I put “library” on my itinerary and packed my laptop. But I also decided I would take a walk, so I wore walking gear and brought my iPod. Then I brought a change of clothes, in case I needed to freshen up.

I brought alternate shoes, in case my feet hurt. A book, in case I finished my work. Several pair of socks in varying thicknesses, in case I wanted to shop for boots. Also, all my notebooks that accumulate all over my desk, so I could organize my to-do lists into one neat place. I brought a bottle of water, a Tupperware container of oatmeal and apples (for breakfast), a granola bar (for lunch) and a separate coat and hat in case the one I was wearing was too warm (or not warm enough) for the library.

I threw an asthma inhaler and a handful of Benadryl in my bag in case my son had a bad reaction to the host’s Collie, but I forgot to give him either. I programmed my Aunt’s number into my cell phone so we could perhaps meet for lunch. I brought another notebook full of column ideas and considered bringing my sewing kit and pile of mending, but was too harried at departure time to collect it.

The back seat of my car was piled high with every imaginable project I could think of to stave off boredom, and once I got there I barely touched any of it. I did go to the library and I did get a lot of work done. But I started my day there with a walk, and simply reveled in how rare it is for me to be someplace unfamiliar. My dad always used to tell us: If you want to learn your way around someplace, walk it. And so I did. First making little concentric circles around blocks so I’d be sure not to lose my way, and eventually branching out to other blocks and relying on my terrible sense of direction and the kindness of strangers to guide me back to my starting point.

I noticed that the sidewalks in Jericho are really well maintained. And nearly everyone has a freestanding basketball hoop at the foot of his or her driveway. Some streets have signage, some don’t. There was not one Halloween decoration up, leading me to believe that either they don’t partake, or they have a communal agreement to pull in all their ghosts and witches immediately after the holiday has passed.

None of these were life-altering revelations, but they were just interesting enough for me to realize that I don’t need to worry so much about how to occupy my waiting time. It’s not like I was spending the day in the Emergency Room or at Jury Duty. There was a whole new town here for me to explore and that brought its own unexpected thrill.

I’m not really adventurous about anything – food, clothing, travel – so it doesn’t take much for me to feel like I’ve conquered something big. I figured out how to access the WiFi in the library – and then taught someone else how. I got myself from the library to a deli and back again on foot. I managed to make it home right on schedule armed only with my wits and my hateful GPS system. Maybe that’s just the nature of Jericho – walls tumbling. My little anti-adventure walls: poof, right down.

My Writing Problem

2010-11-03T16:30:00.000-07:00

There’s been some weird shit going on here, and I’m not even just talking about perimenopause.

I don’t know whether anyone has noticed, but I hardly post here at all anymore. I’d gotten into a groove of maybe 2-3 posts a week and now I feel like I might do 2-3 per month. I’m not sure exactly why. God knows I still have a lot to say.

Part of it started when I got the Patch column. It’s a little unnerving for me to write for a bigger (read: unknown and potentially scary) audience and I find I need a little time to recuperate. I work on my column on Tuesday. My editor posts it on Wednesday. On Thursday and Friday I attend to all the work I blew off early in the week so I could get my column together. And then I sail into the weekend with the intention of writing next week’s Patch column so I don’t feel so under-the-gun on Tuesday. The weekend comes and goes. Monday needs to be productive in other ways. And then I’m right back where I started on Tuesday. Did you notice? There’s no blog writing in that schedule.

I’ve had other setbacks too. I wrote (what I thought was) a funny, interesting blog post about a month ago, about a woman I know only peripherally. I didn’t use her name, and I didn’t think the piece was at all damning, but I sent it to her before I posted it and she asked me not use it. I found the blogging horse surprisingly difficult to get back onto after that.

Then, a writer-friend asked me to come and speak in her journalism class. She teaches at the local college and often brings in guest speakers so her students can ask questions of and get perspective from people “in the field.” At first I declined. “I don’t really feel qualified to talk to your class. I’m not a journalist,” I wrote to her in an email. She immediately wrote me back that I would be perfect for a lot of reasons and sent me a paragraph of things she hoped I would talk about: “How long does it take you to write a column? Where do you get your ideas? How did your own college experience prepare you for this work?”

Those were all things I could talk about, so I readily accepted and dove into the grueling task of figuring out what I would wear.

A few weeks before I was slated to speak, I was at Back-To-School Night at my younger son’s school. His fifth-grade teacher is passionate about writing and is always the one to volunteer to get additional training and attend educational workshops when the district attempts to better its writing curriculum. She stood in front of a big group of parents (two classes full) and called upon us to volunteer in the classroom. “How many of you in here are writers?” she asked. A ton of hands went up. But mine wasn’t one of them.

I left there a little shaken at my own behavior. I write every single day, I thought. Why can’t I say I’m a writer?

That particular identity-blip (what’s the small, beginning kernel of a crisis called?) catapulted me into the idea of getting an MFA. Maybe if I actually studied writing I would be able to call myself a writer. I started talking to people about it, taking women out to lunch, researching online, getting catalogs. There are a lot of programs to choose from, but they all have one thing in common: They all seem like an enormous amount of work. I would read a description of this or that university’s program and as soon as I came upon the word “rigor” (as in “academic rigor”) my eyes glazed over. I take two spin classes a week. Does that not seem enough rigor for one person’s life?

I haven’t completely abandoned the graduate program idea, but I have cooled on it a bit. I went to my friend’s class and she and her students “interviewed” me. Overall it went ok. (Only one student actually fell asleep.) I heard myself saying things like “I don’t consider myself a good writer as much as a competent writer,” and “I choose subjects I can handle; I’m not really a big thinker.” That’s all true, but it was still troubling to hear it come out of my mouth. I could have just as easily posted a sign on my forehead that said, “I’m a piece of poop.”

One woman asked me how I was able to “write funny,” and I stared at her blankly, wondering if this was the moment that I should recount my countless neuroses and decades of therapy sessions. Do I dare tell her that her chances of “writing funny” are severely limited if she hasn’t grown up fat and insecure? Instead I just said, “Good question. I’m not really sure.” And at that moment, nothing felt more true.

There have been other impediments too, and I think those are perimenopausally induced. Sometimes I just scream at people rather than writing about wishing I could scream at people. Then when I sit down to write, there’s nothing left to say.

Go out more. Stay in more. Read more. Watch more TV. Loosen up. Develop a schedule. I’ve considered all these things. And where I’ve netted out is to just start writing about my writing problem, and see if maybe somehow that might make it go away.

Looking on the Bright Side (of Jury Duty)

2010-10-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

I know I’ve spent some time complaining about jury duty, so I feel compelled to present the other side.

There are things I actually love about being there.

I love how organized it is. I love the language that’s particular to courtrooms and the law. And I love the theater of it all.

I love the movie that they show at the beginning of your first day about how it’s a huge inconvenience to serve, but it really is everyone’s responsibility. I know people who have been wrongly accused of crimes and it’s only through this type of system that they might possibly get a fair crack at justice. I’m not saying it’s a slam-dunk, but as the judge in the orientation movie says, at least they’re not being judged by tyrants, or by “professional jurors.” No one wants to be at jury duty. In that way, a jury pen is the great equalizer.

Well, the first day there was one woman who was happy to be there. I saw her as soon as I arrived and immediately pegged her as The Happiest Juror In Essex County. She couldn’t wipe the smile off her face, even on the long lines, in the cold waiting room, on the uncomfy chairs. During lunch, she happened to sit across the table from me and I started up a conversation right away. “You’re the happiest person in this whole building,” I said. It was a risk, I know. She could have been a nut.

But she wasn’t. She was just a Special Ed teacher from a Vocational School and in all her many years of adulthood she’d never been asked to serve. This was a novelty to her. And an honor. She came to it with Beginner’s Mind (which is a Buddhist term that basically refers to how when you don’t judge things and imbue them with all your residual ca-ca, everything – EVERYTHING – is pretty remarkable and amazing). She was fascinated by the proceedings and her excitement was infectious. It prompted me to start noticing what was lovely about being there as well.

I love how beautiful that courthouse is. From the outside, the old structure is an amazing piece of architecture, and I’ve seen parts of the interior renovation that have taken my breath away. The landscape and grounds are beautiful: marble benches, flowering shrubs, quiet fountains.

I love how they seem to redo the jury pen every few years – keep it from getting run down and shoddy. Flat screen TVs in the waiting rooms. A clean, quiet wireless enclave for computer users. Free coffee and tea (and not just any coffee – they have several of those fancy Keurigs that I like to play with whether I want a cup of coffee or not).

More Beginner’s Mind: There was a judge in the cafeteria that was dressed like Mr. Rogers. The sandwich counter serves whole wheat wraps, which you can get with anything you want in them. And one TV in the café was playing Judge Mathis (which is not nearly as good as Judge Judy, in my humble opinion, but is it’s own special delight nonetheless). Best for me today was the conversation I overheard between three women at the next table about Autism and Asperger’s. A fourth woman within earshot interjected: “I heard you talking about Asperger’s and it caught my attention…I have Asperger’s…” and then the four of them were off on that for an hour.

That’s what I love most about jury duty: that a disparate group of people can come together – I mean really come together, not like on a subway or a post office line, but like at a cocktail party, which is what jury duty always seems like to me toward the end. As the hours tick by, you can see people striking up conversations with strangers. Someone they just sat next to during voir dire, or the folks at the coffee table. People laughing, telling stories, like a big ole block party. I would pass by different groups and think, “They’re having fun. Maybe I should join them.”

Jury duty makes that very act so easy to do. Unlike a party, where I’m afraid I may be imposing on a longtime circle of friends, here I know that no one knows each other. They’re just friendly and having fun.

Sometimes it takes something cataclysmic for a large group of strangers to pull together and make the best of a trying situation. And sometimes it takes nothing more than just donning Beginners Mind and showing up for your civic duty.

Has Justice Really Been "Served"?

2010-10-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

I had lined up a possible sub for myself over the weekend. I couldn’t really bring myself to all out cancel Wednesday tennis, but I did know there was a possibility that I wouldn’t be able to go.

My jury duty was scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, but I’ve been down this road before. You clear your schedule for both days and then, after day one, they tell you that you don’t need to report the next day. So I decided to take a wait and see approach before I locked in and gave up my tennis slot.

Yesterday I showed up with a satchel full of books and projects to amuse myself and really believed that I would not be asked back for my second day of service. I sat in the waiting area all morning, listening as names were called for various courtrooms. Mine never was. Lunch came and went. I used the time to walk around outside. More sitting. Reading made me sleepy and I could feel my mood becoming sour. Three o’clock rolled around and still my name never made a list. Well, I thought, at least this day is almost over. And then I can play tennis tomorrow!

Not so fast.

At 3:15 they rattled off a long list of people and my name was on the list! “Damn it,” I said to the woman next to me. Why are they calling people now? No judge is going to start trial selection at 3:30. This whole place closes down at 4:00.

We all gathered round the front desk and listened to the young man who had been botching names over the loudspeaker all day. “This group has been randomly selected to be dismissed for the day…” he droned. Sad, lifeless faces lit up with beaming smiles. “…but you will all need to report back here tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.”

Are you fucking kidding me? I have tennis!

OK. OK. Regroup.

I emailed my tennis sub and told her she could definitely play. I brought my laptop today so I didn’t have to wade through a single moment of lackluster books. I wore sneakers so I could have a good and proper lunchtime walk. But that’s not all. I also decided not to shower. And to wear my son’s black Volcom hoodie. There is no way anyone is going to pick me for a jury in the state I’ve shown up today.

They can have my body, but…

LOST

2010-10-19T19:29:00.000-07:00

What on earth has happened to me? I used to be able to find my way anywhere. Now I spend most of the time in my car groaning and cursing – as if I’m labor again.

I had to be at the courthouse for jury duty today at 8:15. The trip is less than 10 miles. Still, it’s rush hour and it’s Newark, so I left myself plenty of time: 45 minutes for a 20-minute trip. I walked into the building close to 9 o’clock. Forty-five minutes LATE. I hate being late. Even for jury duty.

I conscientiously followed the directions on the Summons mailer. There was a bit of highway traffic that set me back some, but I was still looking at an 8:30 ETA. Then I got to the parking lots. There was a sign that said Juror Parking with an arrow into a lot and a long, long line of cars waiting to make the turn in. Then there was ANOTHER sign that said Jurors with an arrow pointing straight ahead (and NO line of cars). So I followed THAT sign.

The Summons directions said once I got on a particular road to just follow the Juror Signs. And that’s exactly what I did. The next thing I know I’m passing the courthouse entirely, frantically looking for more Juror Signs. There were none. What there were, though, were signs at every intersection prohibiting me from making a left turn so I could make my way back to the courthouse. Blocks and blocks I went, deeper and deeper into downtown Newark until finally I was able to get myself around a block, facing the other direction, so I could make my way back to the courthouse.

Too late. I was already disoriented. It wasn’t a straight shot, and I soon found myself in new, unfamiliar territory.

This never used to happen to me. I would read directions and get where I needed to go. That now feels like the exception, not the rule.

It probably seems like I’m a good candidate for a GPS system. I have one. I consider it my arch-enemy. It’s a factory-installed system that fails me almost 100% of the time. I’m certain that there’s some default setting deep within the bowels of its programming that first selects The Ghetto Route for every requested destination. I’ve discovered more blighted and decrepit neighborhoods in using my navigator than I’d ever known even existed in North Jersey. And if that’s not bad enough (which, in my opinion, it definitely is) the little bulls-eye on the screen rarely bears any resemblance to the place I’m trying to go. It will get me in the general vicinity, but that’s about it. Once, on a trip to the Boston area, I was trying to get to a hotel and it kept chirping “Destination on left,” when all that was on the left was a trash-strewn lot. We were miles from the hotel. Miles.

So even though I was late and panicked, I resisted the urge to punch in the address of the courthouse. Instead I did what I used to do in the old days: I found a street cop to ask directions. I pulled up just ahead of him and left my car running as I walked back to where he stood. He knew I was lost. He knew I was a loser. I didn’t even get three feet from my car before he yelled to me, “Where are you trying to get to, Ma’am? Jury duty?”

As A Bitch, I’ve Failed.

2010-10-15T12:35:00.000-07:00

Guess what? I’m not a bitch. Or, at least I’m not enough of a bitch.

This most recent discovery took place when a writer who found me on Patch.com asked if I would ever be interested in writing for her blog The Wellness Bitch, which is about living more healthfully but presented in a (shall we say) sometimes brusque manner. I’m not really an ideal candidate for guest blogging there because I don’t live all that healthfully. But I loved the name of the site and I do have at least one “wellness” topic that I’m passionate about, so I agreed to submit a post.

Guess what? It wasn’t bitchy enough.

I had a feeling that would be the case even as I was writing it. I even tried to become a little meaner as the paragraphs unfolded. “You can do this,” I chided myself. “Get your inner bitch on.”

My email to her acknowledged that I’d overpromised. “You don’t need to run this if it’s not bitchy enough,” I’d written. “I guess I thought I was more of a bitch than I actually am.”

The Wellness Bitch did reject my post, on the grounds of insufficient bitchiness. In some ways, I guess that could be considered a compliment. But as The Queen of Seeing the Negative Side of Everything, I immediately felt like a loser because I wasn’t a big enough bitch.

As fate would have it, The Wellness Bitch has another website, far less bitchy, called MindfulLivingNJ.com and it is there that she wanted to run my Neti Pot post. I really like it there, and now I don’t have to feel bad about my underdeveloped levels of bitchosity.

Best of all, I now have something to aspire to.

Have Yourself a Sex-Free Solstice

2010-09-30T17:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve just spent far too many hours planning my son’s birthday party. I know. You think that’s because I’m having 50 people and a petting zoo. No. It’s because his birthday is in September.

In fact, my son’s birthday party will (with any luck at all) consist of six 10-year-old boys, including my son, who will all watch a movie and then make heinous concoctions out of ice-cream and then eat those heinous concoctions and then act like aborigines until the sugar rush subsides or their parents come to get them, whichever comes first. What I can't pin down is when such a gathering will occur.

September is an impossible month to plan a birthday party. Practically everyone who has feet plays soccer and soccer season begins in September. Throw in the Jewish holidays, the fact that a certain amount of time must be given for new alliances to form with the new school year, and my own misfortune of having a son who fancies only a small group of boys at any given time and at this time those boys all seem to have their own autumn birthdays, and you have a situation where there’s only one single date over the span of a month and a half that can accommodate most of the kids. And your job is to spend countless hours figuring out which date that is.

Email seems like it would expedite the task, but today it just seemed to make it worse. Each email I received felt like it brought more bad news. “Sorry, soccer tournament.” “Sorry, that’s my other child’s bar mitzvah.” “Sorry, that day is my son’s birthday.”

“Is it possible to change his birthday?” I wrote back. “Just for this one year?”

Here’s my solution: Everyone…stop having sex in December. If you’re trying to have a baby, there are just some months that should be completely off limits for conception. I’d imagine you could throw March in there as well, because I’m sure the moms of December birthday kids have a similarly hellish time with this whole birthday planning thing.

I’m going to go so far as to say that someone should sit down and plot out which months are good to conceive and which months are going to be a nightmare. We then need to review those dates and JUST SAY NO.

As I write this it’s less than four hours until October. I’m no closer to a party date than I was early this morning, and there seems to be no resolution in sight. It’s too late for me, but some of y’all can still save yourselves. Practice abstinence in December. You’ll thank me for it come party time.

Carpe Doubles

2010-09-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

Doubles is hard. Yes, the game itself is more complicated than singles – less physically demanding, but often more strategic. But the real difficulty with doubles is that it requires four people. Four people who all can be at the same place for the same time for two hours and who know how to play tennis.

When I started playing tennis, this seemed like an almost impossible set of circumstances. It took me years to amass a contact list of players who were at the same level, had the same general sensibility (not too serious, just serious enough), and were smitten enough with the game that they’re willing to squander two precious kid-free hours hitting a ball back and forth over a net.

During the fall and winter, our games are inside. A schedule is set and people show up when they’re supposed to. But in the summer we play outside, on public courts and the roster changes week to week. “Can anyone play on Wednesday?” will be the subject line of my mass tennis email.

I don’t mind setting up games. It’s a little extra work, but well worth it. However the real treat is when I end up on someone else’s email list. When a “Tennis on Sunday?” email shows up in my Inbox. Unfortunately, those games come with their own complications.

Once you play in someone else’s game, you’re “in”. Meaning, at the end of the game, someone will say, “can everyone play next Sunday?” and if the answer is yes, Sunday tennis is all set. No need for an email, we just all show up again next week. The problem comes if you for some reason say no. If you're going to be out of town or you cancel because you're injured. You miss that Sunday game and then you're out of the loop. The following Sunday will automatically be set up at the end of the game you missed. Then you have to wait for someone to fall ill or expire before you can get your slot back. It’s a little like trying to get a Manhattan apartment in the ‘80s.

It took me a while to understand the ramifications of passing on a game. The whole process is so much more delicate and complex than it appears on the surface. (Once I accepted an invitation to a brand new group and I was having a bad day: I hit the ball out as often as I hit it in. That was that. I was never asked back.)

So now I play almost no matter what. Bronchitis. Hemorrhoids. Muscle pulls. I have every imaginable wrap and analgesic in my tennis bag. I only cancel if my kid has a temperature over 104 or I’m on crutches.

It’s absolutely heartbreaking to me to think that a game could go on without me, that fat, juicy doubles is being played whether I show up or not. So I try and seize every opportunity now. Doubles (like life) waits for no one.

Go Team Egan!

2010-09-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

On my way to tennis this morning, I passed Sharon and Kim straddling their bikes, looking like they were about to take off for some multi-mile ride. Tomorrow morning they’ll head north for the ride they’ve been training for for the past five months – H2B: Harbor to the Bay Aids Ride from Boston to Provincetown.

I think their little group began during a spin class. Someone suggested taking their training to the next level. At least one in the group was turning fifty. Preparing for an actual ride (a 125 mile ride) gave them a purpose, gave their workouts more meaning. Early on, they suggested I join them.

“I can’t ride 125 miles,” I said.

“It’ll just be like taking a bunch of spin classes all in one day,” Kim said.

But I can’t take a bunch of spin classes all in one day. Most of the time, I can barely get through one.

It felt good to be asked. And for a fleeting moment I thought, Well…maybe I could try it. But I didn’t have a proper bike. And at the time, my own 50th birthday was far enough away that I wasn’t focusing on how to commemorate it.

I never fully embraced that notion: feeling like turning 50 needed to involve some as yet unmastered physical feat. I remember reading that Oprah decided to run a marathon when she turned 50 (or maybe 40) and I remember thinking, Really? You’re one of the richest women in the United States and one of the most influential celebrities in the world, and that’s not good enough? You have to run on top of that?

And I still don’t think that whole outdoor bike-riding thing is for me. Like my tennis preference, I think I’m partial to biking indoors – no bugs, no glare, no cars. But today, when I saw the two of them in their slick and colorful bike shirts and their wraparound shades, I thought, Wow, look how beautiful and sexy and strong.

They show up in their “team” shirts, they collect donations, they do practice runs – 15 miles, 43 miles, more. But mostly they just keep showing up, week after week, regardless of whatever crap life happens to be flinging their way.

And now, off they go tomorrow. Part of me is a little wistful, but mostly I’m just really proud of those four ladies from Vince’s 8AM spin class – Sharon and Kim and Wendy and Liz – and inspired, because by the end of the weekend they will all have accomplished something that six months ago not one of them was sure she could do. I love witnessing people taking little steps to bring about great things. I’m sure their ride will be amazing. But to me, the steps are the thing.

Spoiled Little Indoor Girl

2010-09-22T13:12:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day of indoor tennis. My Monday group is now meeting on Wednesdays. New day, new time, new court, but the same ladies. And of course, the same club.

I love playing tennis indoors. I know it’s meant to be an outdoor game, and I’ve made my peace with that, but I love all that indoor tennis affords you. You’re not thwarted by rain. There are no other pesky elements to contend with. No wind. No sun in your eyes. No gnats buzzing around your sweaty face. There are no lawnmowers, leaf blowers, train whistles, buzzards (yes, once there were buzzards – or maybe they were hawks – but in either case they were circling a little too low for comfort), chipmunks, mosquitoes or bees. There are no young children on the next court rallying with their moms, so you don’t have to worry about stray balls (incoming) or curse words (outgoing). Indoor tennis is a nice, controlled environment where your attention can be placed solely and completely on your game.

Well, except for the funky club conditions.

The club does have air-conditioning, but they don’t ever turn it on. Ditto, it seems, for heat. Today it was much hotter indoors than out, and the club tries to rectify that with these big-ass fans that are built into the walls. The fans are loud – clankity-clank-clank loud – and burst on intermittently and without notice. It’s a small price to pay for indoor comfort.

In the winter the courts are cold. Sometimes women play in fleece and scarves. You can hear the heater now and then, when it comes on it sounds like gunfire, but somehow it never warms up in there.

Occassionally there are inexplicable puddles on the court. Well, not really on the court, but there have been pools of water right outside the sideline and it’s always little curious where those puddles could have come from.

Sometimes the club smells like gas, sometimes it smells like paint, and sometimes it smells like glue – like an industrial strength adhesive that you’d use when installing new carpeting. All smells that give you headaches and that, if you smelled in your own home, might prompt you to evacuate your children and maybe even call 911. But they usually only last a day or so at the club, so we often play through them.

Last year the toilet stall door was locked, leaving only one stall available for all the aging bladders that populate Ladies Tennis. For some reason it took two or three days for someone to get that stall door open. When access was finally gained, it was discovered that the toilet was full of feces and paper. It wasn’t clogged, it’s just that no one had flushed.

“Even more troubling than how long it took to open that stall,” said Laura the Tennis Pro, “is the notion of how that situation came to be. Someone actually pooped and then crawled under the door to leave it there.”

Look, I’m not saying indoor tennis is perfect. But there is something sweet and magical that happens indoors that, for some reason, doesn’t translate for me when there’s sky and birds and cicadas all around. The club sequesters us from the real world. We are removed from it. It’s private. When I'm inside that tennis club, it's like the rest of my life just disappears. Even with the poop and puddles, it’s hard sometimes to walk out the door.

The Night Before

2010-09-11T16:21:00.000-07:00

On the night of September 10th, 2001, I was with my book group. The woman who was hosting had just had a harrowing experience, either that day or over the past weekend. She was in her minivan with her kids and they came to a railroad crossing. She’s a conscientious woman, so it must have been one of those situations where traffic is moving and then all of a sudden it’s not moving, because when the lights began to flash and the gates came down she was trapped in a spot that was either on or too close to the tracks with a gate or a car behind her preventing her from backing up. I don’t remember the details. It was a long time ago. She got her kids out of the car in time and, yes, there was damage to the minivan. But everyone was ok, and that’s what was important.

The book we’d just read was Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. It’s an autobiographical story about a young man and his younger brother, and the way they deal (and don’t deal) with the death of their parents at way too young an age. At least that’s what I think it was about. That’s what it seemed to be about to me.

I remember some details of that night so clearly. Where I sat in the room. That there were cheese sticks served, and that I didn’t eat any. There’s a point in the book where Eggers was justifying some or other unsavory behavior of his, and he says “I am owed.” He means for the loss of his mother. Both his parents, really. And for having to act like a grown up and raise his little brother. And it was that line, that idea, that sent the group off on a discussion about how everything can be going along one way and you can receive a piece of news, or an event can occur, that just changes everything forever. It changes you and how the world seems to you. All of sudden, nothing is the way it was two minutes ago and no matter how much you wish for it, it will never be that way again. How a single event can inform your perception of everything that comes after it.

I was perhaps the most vocal about this idea, because I could really relate to Eggers’ loss and grief and bitterness. Like me, another woman in the group had lost a parent early in life and she didn’t relate to that idea of instant, irrevocable change at all.

I remember someone used the idea of a plane crash as an example of how lives can be dramatically altered in a single moment. We talk like that in book group – about specific events, but also about abstractions.

My book group no longer meets on Mondays. Over the years, we’ve switched nights to accommodate schedules. For the past many years now, we meet on Wednesdays.

I remember Monday, September 10th being a starry night. I remember driving home that night thinking how grateful I was for that group of women in my life. How I wished a little that everyone in the group had shared my feelings about how life can change on a dime. And also how I loved that Eggers book, and loved discussion we’d just had, and loved that I felt safe enough in the world to be able to share how I felt. I thought a lot about how I finally felt safe. Stuff that maybe wouldn’t have seemed eerie or ironic if we'd had our meeting on a Wednesday. On September 12th instead of September 10th.

Although I can’t imagine we would have met that day at all.

Pretty Privilege

2010-09-08T05:09:00.000-07:00

So, I’m sitting in front of the bagel store, waiting for the teenager and his friend to come out with their bacon-and-egg bagels, and I don’t have much to do to entertain myself so I begin to do what I love doing most (besides playing tennis and eating popcorn): people watch. Far and away the most compelling person to watch was the woman in the shift. I’m not sure why they call that style of dress a shift; it’s a decidedly unsexy name for what can often be a very sexy dress. This one was classic: simple, short, sleeveless, black. It looked like something Holly Golightly would wear, but this woman was not having breakfast at Tiffany’s. She was bringing a small bundle into the dry cleaner.

Everything about her was perfect. She had perfectly highlighted blond hair that was pulled up into a perfect chignon. She had perfectly tanned legs, perfectly toned arms. Not too much make-up, not too much jewelry, her watch and shoes were classy but not flashy. It was nine in the morning; she was probably on her way to work. She fished her tasteful wallet out of her tasteful purse and tastefully paid the man for her tasteful, dry-cleaned clothes.

I couldn’t tell how old the woman was, even though she walked right in front of my car on her way into the storefront. She could have been 25, she could have been 45, she could have been anywhere in between. She was young and fit and capable, and her car was only parked a few spots down from the cleaner’s doorway. So I was a little surprised when the proprietor carried her fresh dry cleaning to her car for her and set it down across the back seat. Where does this happen besides Hooterville?

This is Pretty Privilege in action. Beautiful women, endlessly fawned over. I used to spend so much time pitying these women. Poor you, I would think. You were born so beautiful, you never had to cultivate an interesting personality or develop a sense of humor. How sad that you have to go through life shallow and dull.

But you know what? Fuck that. I didn’t realize they were getting their dry cleaning carried to their cars. Come on. You don’t have to carry your own dry cleaning to the car? Really?

Announcing Me on Patch

2010-09-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

When I told my friend John Doe (not his real name) about my new Patch column he seemed a little piqued.

“It’s a weekly column,” I’d said, “and I can write about whatever I want!”

“Anything? Doesn’t it have to be local?” he said.

(Patch is a hyper-local online news magazine put out by AOL.)

“Well, given the fact that I rarely leave the confines of my house or neighborhood, most of the stuff I write ends up being pretty local,” I said. “I asked the editor if I could rework some of my blog posts as submissions.”

“And she said that’s ok?” asked John Doe.

“Yes!” I said. I could barely contain myself.

“She’s paying you to do something that you’re already doing anyway?” he said. “That’s like someone paying me to masturbate.”

“Ew,” I said. “But I guess, sort of, yeah.”

Click here to see PATCH

Yes, Ma'am!

2010-08-29T19:27:00.000-07:00

In my never-ending quest to be the Nicest Mother On Earth, I took the teenager and three of his friends to Six Flags/Great Adventure last week – a destination I had hoped I would live my entire life without ever experiencing. Before leaving, I went on their website to get directions. I discovered that you could buy and print out discounted admission tickets online, saving $20 per person, as well as pre-purchasing parking and food vouchers. I passed on the food, but bought us all admission and parking, printed my directions, loaded up the car with boys and headed south.

The entrance road to Great Adventure is clearly marked with signs and instructions every few feet. There’s a lot to read. That, along with being in completely unfamiliar territory, made me a little tense and when I’m tense I don’t like to read instructions, I like to talk to someone. Fortunately for me there was a gentleman not too far away wearing one of those orange and chartreuse reflective vests that let you know right away this is a person who is here to help. I was slowly approaching a giant line of toll-booths that all seemed to be labeled Credit Cards Only. I had no idea which line to get in, given that I’d already paid for my parking online. I yelled over to my vested friend, stating my predicament in a few short sentences. “Do I actually need to be in one of these lines?” I asked.

“Yes, Ma’am. You need to be in a line. How is anyone going to know you paid already if you don’t show your voucher at the booth, Ma’am?” He had that same exhausted tone my son takes with me whenever I ask him a question.

“He called you ‘Ma’am,’” said one of the boys.

“He called me ‘Ma’am’ twice,” I said. “I hate that.”

The boys all wanted to know why. So I told them the secret of ‘Ma’am.’ My contempt for that term is not really due to what Natalie Angiers refers to in her New York Times piece today: that the honorific implies a middle-aged dowdiness (although it does).

“It’s code for ‘you idiot,’” I explained to the boys. “It may seem like someone is trying to address you respectfully, but here, in this part of the country, 99% of the time someone says ‘ma’am’ they’re really saying ‘you moron.’”

The boys found this very amusing. “It’s often the same with ‘sir,’” I said. “It all depends on the tone of your voice, but most of the time, the speaker is saying ‘you’re stupid.’”

I was very pleased with myself, imparting this bit of wisdom. It’s not often that I can be the successful purveyor of life lessons to my own kids, let alone a car full of teenage boys. I could tell by their small grunts of acknowledgment, the heads nodding in the rear view mirror, that they really heard me – really got what I was saying.

It was confirmed all the more as we made our way through the park, and for the next six hours, my four teenage charges managed to “Ma’am” and “Sir” every living soul they encountered.

Lost and Found

2010-08-27T04:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I lost three things and I found two. Well, I didn’t really lose them all yesterday. Yesterday was just the day I started a running list of all the things I couldn’t find.

The first was not that important. It was my neighbor’s house key, which is usually in the little cup in the cupboard with all my other neighbors’ house keys. My neighbor asked me to walk her dog in the afternoon and she said, “you have the key, don’t you?” I’d answered before I looked. But she always keeps a spare key hidden at her house, so the dog got walked and I was simply left with a key mystery.

Then I was looking for the phone charger. It was in a plastic ziplock bag along with the car charger and I hadn’t seen it in since we got back from vacation. It’s a charger to an old phone, one that I’d bought a temporary usage plan for while we were at the beach, and now that old phone needed a charge.

I was looking in earnest for the phone charger when it dawned on me that another thing was lost, too, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Oh yeah, my neighbor’s house key. I’ll look for both.

“The other thing that’s missing is the Kindle power cord,” said my husband when I asked if he had the neighbor’s key. He bought me a Kindle for my birthday and I’m sure I’ll like it someday but right now I have no interest in it. I already own my next four books as (what do you call real books now?) "corporal entities," so it’s going to be a while before I can delve into a book electronically. The power cord was on the coffee table since I’d opened the Kindle box, so we quickly blamed the cleaning woman for its disappearance and assumed it would never be seen again.

A day passed and I still couldn’t find the phone charger. I began to curse the amount of “things” we have, always assuming that if we simply had less stuff, everything would be easier to keep track of. “What were the other two things I was looking for?” I asked my husband.

“All I can remember is the Kindle cord,” he said.

I stopped my search and sat down to try and think clearly about what the third missing thing was. “Oh right, the house key.”

I found the Kindle wire in the kitchen drawer. The one where I keep all my “charging wires.” I discovered it when I went in there to get my charger for my cell phone. Guess what else was in there? The ziplock with the other phone charger. What is wrong with my brain that I didn’t even consider looking in the Charging Wire Drawer for the missing charging wires?

Neighbor’s house key: still at large.

I'm A Word Nerd

2010-08-24T16:59:00.001-07:00

I went to the pharmacy today and on the counter was a little display container for Snickers bars. I love Snickers. Not as much as M&Ms, which I had a passionate conversation with Nancy about yesterday (during which she defended both the advent of Blue M&Ms and Pretzel M&Ms, two positions which I warned her might jeopardize our friendship). But if I were going to blow an entire day’s worth of Weight Watchers points on candy, and M&Ms were unavailable, Snickers would be my second choice.

Why? I would have to say it’s unequivocally the nougat.

I’m not certain what nougat is beyond sheer caramelly goodness, but it sure does resonate with my tastebuds and is well worth the immediate after-effect of having my teeth feel like they’re covered in fur. So I did give that counter display more than just a furtive glance. I knew I wasn’t going to buy a Snickers bar, but I just wanted to rest my eyes upon the logo-type and have a small, private moment fantasizing about its chocolatey chewiness.

NOUGATOCITY. That’s what the logotype read. Huh? Am I hallucinating?

Nope. Some genius coined this word and talked the appropriate Mars Brand Manager to print it on the backside of the candy bar.

I love that.

I love when big package-goods companies have fun with language. Like the time I was waiting for my son to come out of Lacrosse practice and out of sheer boredom I started reading the package copy on the bottle of Kiwi-Strawberry Vitamin Water that was sitting beside me in the cup-holder. It was a whole paragraph about a study that had been done which demonstrated that people didn’t need the letters of a word in the right order to be able to read it. Just the first and last letters of the word had to be correct. Everything in between can be willy-nilly, and to prove it, they wrote this assertion in just that manner.

If I wasn’t a die-hard Vitamin Water fan before, I became one then.

It doesn’t take more than a little effort (and a lot of courage) to add some whimsy to your product packaging. That Snickers bar logo made me smile for half an hour. But, that’s me. Word nerd.

Here's Why I Don't Drink Coffee

2010-08-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

I first gave up coffee sometime around 1991 when a chiropractor I was seeing told me that my inexplicable back pain was likely being aggravated by caffeine. (He also told me that childless women my age – 31 at the time – were prone to all sorts of muscular complications, since our bodies were built to reproduce and by not having babies we were bucking our musculoskeletal systems. Pregnancy seemed a rash strategy to combat back pain, so I started my rehabilitation with caffeine removal.)

In 1991 I drank several cups of coffee a day. It was my breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack. Often I didn’t eat solid food at all until after 2PM. My coffee needed to be prepared just so, with real sugar and a generous amount of half-and-half. Enough half-and-half to turn the black coffee a lovely camelhair beige. I would only drink it out of a white mug, in order to make sure it was exactly the right hue. Those cups of coffee, taken in alongside cigarettes, were about as close to heaven on earth as I ever hoped to come.

Quitting coffee was a grim endeavor. It took me months before I could stay awake beyond three in the afternoon. My body was not used to relying on its own energy source and the caffeine withdrawal was long and arduous. But then, after those first few months, I found my own life energy and lived a productive and perhaps less agitated life.

Living caffeine free (no coffee, no chocolate, no coke) left me feeling healthy and virtuous, although my back pain didn’t go away. But I ultimately decided to stay off coffee because, mostly, I felt better.

When I started Weight Watchers two years ago, I quickly discovered that my daily cup of decaf was an enormous four-point indulgence. That’s how many points I had to give myself if my decaf was to turn the appropriate shade of beige. So I gave it up completely, opting for solid, chewable points instead.

Then I discovered fat-free half-and-half. No points. A teaspoon of sugar is only one point. So some days – on special occasions – I might treat myself to a cup of decaf just for fun.

That was the case last night around 9PM, after grocery shopping, a few points to spare for the day, I decided to sit down at my desk with a nice cup of decaf and organize my papers. I’d made a bit of decaf earlier in the week, so the coffee maker was already out. I pulled the Chock Full O Nuts out of the fridge and prepared to scoop. Hmmm. Where’s the little red measuring spoon that’s always in here, I wondered as I pulled back the can’s yellow plastic lid. That’s really odd, I said out loud as I looked in the drawer for another measuring spoon. Oh, well. Whatever. I scooped, brewed, sugared and drank. Yum.

At 11:30 PM I was meticulously uploading vacation photos to Facebook. Tagging. Captioning. How odd that I was so tired at 10 oclock last night. I could go on like this for hours.

I finally went to bed at midnight (late for me) and was up two hours later raring to go. I had a lot of thoughts swimming in my mind and considered that if I wrote them down maybe I could settle back to sleep. No. Still up at 3. Still up at 3:45. My husband used to call this phenomenon “missing the sleep train.” The way you sometimes can’t fall back asleep and have to just lay in bed, like you’re waiting at a train station, an hour, an hour and a half, and when the train shows up, then and only then are you able to again drift off.

But this felt different than missing the sleep train. This felt like there was never going to be another train at this station again. Like they discontinued the line completely and soon the station will be full of graffiti and soon after that it will collapse in decay. And that’s when it occurred to me that perhaps what I drank at 9PM was not decaf after all.

A quick 4 AM trip to the kitchen confirmed my suspicion. My little lost red coffee scoop was nestled right where it always is: in the green-lidded Chock Full O Nuts. The one way at the back of the fridge.

By 6AM I was back on the sleep train. Just in time to wake up at 7 to take my son to Cross Country practice.

How I Turned Fifty

2010-08-19T17:01:00.000-07:00

The actual day – my Friday the 13th birthday – was spent exactly as I had hoped, quietly, under the radar, no pomp whatsoever.

I woke up early and cleaned our beach house for our mandatory 11 a.m. departure. Laundry, sweeping, throwing food down the drain. Activities that were comfortable and familiar – and that I didn’t need to dress for.

I drove half our posse home, my brother drove the other half. Then, a few hours later, I drove him and my niece and nephew to the airport. On the way home I stopped at a bike shop to pick up a gel-filled seat-cover that I can put on the bikes that I ride during my spin classes. I’ve been going for about 9 months without, but I tried one once and it really did make the experience (and my keister) a whole lot happier. I brought the seat cover to the register and, on a lark, told the young man at the register it was my birthday.

“It’s my birthday today. Do I get a birthday discount?” This is exactly the sort of ballsy, obnoxious thing I used to do in my twenties and I was a little surprised to hear the words come out of my mouth these many decades later.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll give you a birthday discount.” (Ten percent.)

The guy standing next to him said, “Would you like us to sing to you?”

“Why not?” They asked my name. Then they serenaded me.

When I got home, I sat down to read and one of my besties showed up with a big pink shopping bag. “It’s silly and frivolous,” she said (which is always a good choice for me). Inside was a Barbie – a new-fangled, B-cup, little-black-dressed Barbie with a bit too much smoky eye shadow and a Jennifer Anniston hair-do. Her hips are smaller than I ever remembered them being. Ditto her breasts. Finally, at 50, I can relate to her.

I really love Barbies, in a way I can’t explain and don’t even care to try. This one came with a lot of very fashionable shoes and accessories and now sits next to my computer to keep me company.

I took a long walk. I ate healthy food. I took a hot shower. And I gave a big boatload of thanks that I have been able to come this far with the good fortune I have been given.