My Brain Has A Mind Of Its Own

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.”

Laura the Tennis Pro Moves On

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:

Folding Back The Page

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!”

The Day Before

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.

Thank you, Dr. Sarno

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.

Lucky Charms

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.

Old Lady Tennis

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.

"Is That An Anus?"

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

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.

The Hazards of Reading

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

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.

The Good, The Bad and The Keratin

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.

My Pilgrimage to Jericho

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.

Another Hot 100

Maybe it’s because I’m getting up in the years, but I’ve recently taken to celebrating “hundreds” of things. And this week is my 100th week on Weight Watchers.

My “week” starts on a Saturday, so technically I’m already into my 100th week. If you’re wondering how specifically I celebrated on Saturday, it was by eating an entire week’s worth of points between 2 and 11 PM. I don’t think I’d ever actually done that in the entire 100 weeks I’ve been counting points, so it was its own kind of milestone.

One hundred weeks ago, I was in my dining room surrounded by my book group and I was wearing the only thing that fit me at the time: a Kelly green tie-dyed cotton shift that is absolutely the wrong color for me and should never have been bought in the first place.

I declared to that small audience that I was planning on starting Weight Watchers that week. I actually had no intention of doing any such thing and was just trying to add drama to my explanation for wearing such an unflattering outfit. But two of the women said that if I went, they would come with me. So four days later, the three of us found ourselves in a bright loft on a long line, trying to hold our skepticism in check.

That was 100 weeks ago. Fourteen thousand points ago. And God only knows how many vats of popcorn ago.

Not so long before that book group meeting, I had gone running off to my doctor to see if I had some frightful disease. My belly was bloated constantly, taking on a shape it had never been. I’d look at myself in the mirror sideways, aghast. I looked six months pregnant, even though my childbearing years were far behind me.

My doctor is diligent and he is kind. So it was only after a thorough exam and a face filled with apology that he gave me my diagnosis. “That’s just how women your age start to carry their extra weight,” he said.

“Oh my God! I’m fine? I’m fine, and just fat!?” I was elated. Except for the fat part.

Based on his diagnosis, I got the idea in my head that my weight gain was inevitable, and worse, irreversible. I didn’t think there was a thing I could do.

I could write a week’s worth of posts about how a relatively small weight loss completely transformed my life. How I’ve only had one head cold in two years. How I can now easily get to short balls on the tennis court that I used to just let go. Most profound, though, is that with the shedding of pounds, I’ve ended up shedding a lot of negativity that was (sorry for this) really weighing me down.

I know, to a lot of folks I sound like a Weight Watchers huckster. I can’t help it. I’m a point-counter. And I’ve got 100 weekly log books to prove it.

Black Sheep in White Tennies

When I got to the tennis “club” on Friday morning, it was already a few minutes past nine. No one was on Court 5 and no one was in the lounge. Laura had sent me a message earlier saying she may be a few minutes late, so I figured I’d just sit and wait for her. Suddenly I saw Ann’s head pop out of the Pro Shop and then dart back in. I wandered back there and found her and Eileen sitting on the floor trying on tennis shoes. Laura the Tennis Pro was there too, pulling boxes of shoes from the closet.

“Um, it’s after nine,” I said, assuming they were just shopping to kill time.

“Ann forgot her sneakers,” said Eileen.

“And Laura won’t let me play in my Uggs,” said Ann.

Two minutes later, Ann was sauntering out of the Pro Shop with her brand new black tennis shoes.

I’ve mentioned before how we have this unspoken rule that everyone is to wear black on Fridays. I’ve mentioned before that this is because we fancy ourselves a group of badasses. Have I mentioned that now, with Ann’s new purchase, everyone has black sneakers except me?

My sneakers are white leather with pale blue accents. They look like nurses shoes and there’s not a thing badass about them. I just bought them a month ago at a local sneaker store that I like to patronize so it doesn’t go out of business like all the other stores downtown. They had one pair of tennis shoes in my size – white ones – and I bought them.

I tried mightily to do what I usually do when I’m feeling left out – I tried to minimize the importance of the experience in my mind. But the evidence was incontrovertible. Ann became about 75 degrees cooler as soon as she put those shoes on. She ran faster and jumped higher. I think she even hit a better backhand.

Ok, did I just really say that? “…do what I usually do when I’m feeling left out…?” Have I just tossed my “badass” credentials right out the minivan window?

How is Laura going to divide us into teams if only one of us is ever wearing white tennis shoes? Of course this is simply about wanting to have the same sneakers as everyone else.

Of course it is.

Tennis Nazi

I received this note from Shelley this morning.

To Whom It May Concern:

Please excuse Shelley for being late. She had an ice cube freezer malfunction which she had to deal with before leaving. She also had to take her son to school since her parents were in their bathrobes. She will try to do better next time.

Her Mother

The note was a thoughtful gesture, written on proper stationary that folds into it's own envelope. More thoughtful, though, was the salutation. If she'd really been honest, it would have been addressed directly to me: "Dear Tennis Nazi:"... and would have gone on to say: "Please don't make my daughter feel like a pariah for showing up five minutes late for your tennis clinic. Get a life."

It's hard to understand why I'm so militant about tennis. Everyone I play with adores the clinics and games, but I'm the only one standing around tapping my toes about lateness. I'm not like that about anything else in my life, ever.

"Tennis Ladies" have a bit of a reputation for bitchiness. I wonder if this is how it starts.

The Truth About Sex and Food

“The way to want sex more, is to have more sex,” one player said to another during a water break in clinic.

Sex comes up a lot in Friday tennis, but the truth is, we talk about it in a very general way. We’re more detailed in our descriptions of vacuuming or cat feces than we ever are about what goes on behind closed doors.

“I know,” said Player 2, “but I’m always so cold.”

“Sex will make you warmer,” offered Player 3. (We’re very supportive.)

“But I’m just really cold. I’m freezing all the time.”

“If you were doing Weight Watchers, you could use sex as Activity Points,” I said. Activity Points translate into extra Food Points based on a simple slide-rule formula. I know this is a shabby reason to have sex, but true motivation for so many things so often comes from unexpected places. “If you have more sex, you could eat more.”

Someone’s head was shaking. “I don’t know about that,” said Player 3. “It depends who with.”

This got everyone’s attention. Did she have someone specific in mind? Are there particular people named in the Weight Watchers manual that qualify for Activity Points while others do not? Somehow I must have missed that page.

“You need to have sex with a stranger,” she declared. “Sex with your spouse – or a longtime partner – is the same as walking up a flight of stairs. Sex with a stranger is like sprinting up the wall of your garage.”

We all nodded. Not that any of us would know firsthand.

Old Dog/New Tricks

In an effort to help me improve my serve, Laura the Tennis Pro recently offered some suggestions and advice. First, she said, “I have an analogy for you…” and proceeded to spin a tale about an archer and his bow and arrow. She drew the necessary parallels between the two activities – serving a tennis ball and shooting an arrow – and then stood behind me, satisfied that this analogy would transform my wimpy serve into one of power and authority.

Laura knows I love analogies. So, I didn’t tell her at the time that, although she presented the information as an “analogy,” it was still, fundamentally, “physics.” And, as I’ve mentioned, physics is Greek to me.

When my serve didn’t improve immediately upon receipt of the analogy, Laura decided to take a more active role. “You’re bringing your back foot up too early,” she said. “It can’t leave the ground until you’ve hit the ball.”

This was solid, concrete information that I could work with, so I served again – and again and again – trying mightily to keep my foot on the ground longer. It was harder than I expected. Finally, Laura brought over a Teaching Aid. She has these little plastic cones – like miniature traffic cones – and she lay one down at my back foot and instructed me to put my foot inside it. “That will keep you from moving your foot,” she said. And she was right.

The mini cone anchored my foot, it was true, but it also anchored my mind (and not in a good way). All I could think of was the image of a dog recovering from surgery, his head wrapped in on of those white plastic cones. I remember Paula Poundstone doing a joke about them once: “Why do they put cones over the animals’ heads? Is humiliation part of the healing process?”

It is no doubt part of the learning process. Maybe not humiliation per se, but that state of being aware of what you’re doing wrong, what you should be doing instead, and the sheer helplessness of feeling that you can’t make yourself behave in new ways. I am reminded that so much of the way we live is just comfortable habit. We get in the habit of being late, or worried or unhappy and it feels so impossible to change. But we can actually change so much about our lives by just breaking old habits and forging new ones. Which makes it all seem so easy, right?

Except when you realize that sometimes the simplest little changes require suffering the indignation of a cone – that big plastic reminder that things need to be uncomfortable for a little bit while you find your new way.

Golf and Drugs and Rock & Roll?

As a tennis addict, I feel that I more than anyone should understand the insane passion that surrounds the game of golf. But alas, I don’t. Once, a few years ago, while watching The Greatest Game Ever Played, I had an Aha! Moment and believed (erroneously) that I could finally talk to golf enthusiasts with some sort of vague comprehension about their obsession. But, that moment passed.

So the other day, when I was talking to my friend Jeff about sex and about golf (two activities which, for him, had been in lamentably short supply) he made a flip comment about at least wishing it were warm enough to golf so it would take the edge off wanting sex.

“Golf is as good as sex?” I asked. I’d never really considered this before.

“Good golf can sometimes be almost as good as bad sex,” he explained.

Wow.

While I found this proclamation both fascinating and enlightening, I couldn't really tell if it was an actual endorsement of golf. I will say this: It didn't make me want to pick up a nine iron.

Middle-Aged Badass

We all fancy ourselves badasses in Friday Tennis Clinic. We all dress in black. We curse a lot. (Well, I do.) Our conversations start out bawdy and just get bawdier. How hard is it to view yourselves as the NWA of the tennis club when the women playing on the adjacent courts have a median age of 70?

But we come to our senses when, like today, one of us turns to the group and asks, “Who has a tattoo?”

“Not me,” says Shelley.

Kelly shakes her head.

Not even Laura The Tennis Pro, which surprises at least me, as she does have some of the trappings of a tattooed woman. (Namely, that she participates in that Polar Bear Club insanity where you strip down to your bathing suit on New Year’s Day and run into the ocean.)

Eileen finally saunters in and, as far as I’m concerned, no one even has to ask. Of course she’ll have a tattoo. Probably something witty and irreverent in a place where few will ever see it. But I’m wrong.

“Nope,” she says. “No tattoo.”

She’s late, however, because she had to drive to tennis straight from our local precinct, where she had to post her own bail this morning and submit to fingerprinting before she was released on her own recognizance. She had explained the whole ordeal to me the night before, so her tardiness didn’t come as a surprise. “What do you mean you’re in Contempt of Court?” I’d said. Eileen is rarely in contempt of anything!

I don’t know about anyone else, but I was a little envious of her brush with the law. I imagine it feeling dangerously exciting to be fingerprinted, even if it is only for missing a date in traffic court. A completely honorable way to add a little spice into one’s middle aged day, the rest of which is likely to be spent baking cookies, or getting the cat de-wormed, or, like me, working far too long trying to figure out how to download a mug shot from my cell phone onto this [exceedingly foul expletive] computer.