365 Memories

Late spring or early summer, before I turned twelve or maybe thirteen. A beautiful day, with the kind of famous Southern California weather that people assume lasts year-round. (It doesn't.) Our house had a pool, and bricked out of one corner was a small jacuzzi—which was common enough for the time and place; it didn't particularly set us apart socially. Still, it was a luxury. I have only three memories in connection with the pool/jacuzzi: two specific and one a composite memory of the pool parties held there for my 10 th , 11 th , 12 th , and 13 th birthdays. Of the specific, one concerns a natural disaster (and will form the basis for a future post). The other—the memory for today, the last day of January 2009—has to do with life planning, decision making, making lists (something I now do very, very well). At the time, in the jacuzzi, I believe the decision facing me was regarding summer camp, where to go for it. I was having a hard time choosing. Blame it on the Libra in m

It was only last night, but already it rates among my most powerful memories—one I know will reverberate down time's lonely corridors, enduring where the daily slush of logistical life (thankfully) does not. Yesterday contained plenty of logistical craziness, but by 8:00 PM I was seated in the last row of the dress circle at Carnegie Hall next to my father, looking down on a stage empty but for a single piano, a bench, and a collection of microphones wired for the live recording of Keith Jarrett's solo improvisational performance. I have always loved these charged moments of anticipation before a performance, and I expected this concert to be something special—that much more so because the tickets came through a friend of a very dear friend in California, a last-minute opportunity to be seized, and because a love of Keith Jarrett was transmitted to me by my father, and this was a great way to thank him for bringing awareness of this man's music into my life. But this is all

It was January 1990 when I found out about the death of a family friend, Morgan R. He was an IT man we knew through a work connection, a "techie" before that designation meant much to the average person—before the dot-com Silicon Alley boom (or bust) became part of public discourse. Morgan was a tall, thin man, and somewhat frail. He had pale skin, brown hair, brown or hazel eyes; he wore glasses. He spoke with a Southern accent, though I don't recall where he was from. Perhaps the Carolinas . He was sweet, intelligent, and was dying from the day I met him. He was the first man I knew personally who was homosexual (until then I'd only known boys who were struggling with the issue), and he was HIV-positive when the AIDS epidemic was ripping mercilessly through that population in the 1980s. I remember Morgan walking the office in his gray suit pants, his white shirt—his employee badge and a tiny red-handled screwdriver in his breast pocket. He wanted to leave his job, I

He was a pip-squeak in a suit—a weak-featured, whey-faced redneck type with the bleached look and moral substance of a slice of Wonder bread: soft, tasteless, mostly air. He was my peer in age (actually, I was a little older, by as much as two years perhaps), but he took himself for my superior. Sadly, in the very corporate, conservative pecking order of Chicago-based Ogilvy, Adams & Rinehart, he was. It was January 1994, and I had recently moved back to Chicago, alone, after what seemed like a lifetime away: after my family had made a couple of cross-country moves, after high school and college and a misfire stint at Washington University Law School, and after a first internship in public relations at a boutique marketing agency in St. Louis. I had interviewed for (and been subsequently "blessed" with) this next internship that could, if the fit were right, lead to a permanent position in OA&R. The person in question (let's call him J.) was a junior account execu

By which I do not mean to call her a vain woman, as the title might suggest; she was no more vain than the least of us who give average attention to hygiene. But I remember that my paternal grandmother, whose wish was to be called "Mimi" instead of anything sounding more grannyish (OK, maybe that pushes the envelope a tiny bit), had the most amazing "vanity," as used to refer to a dressing table, or a woman's personal toilet items. She was a large woman—mostly just by natural stature, big bones—and not particularly delicate. She walked with a heavy step; her movements were brusque. She was in her element in a busy kitchen but not overly careful with pots, pans, or utensils, which she'd toss into the sink from across the room. There was, however, one way in which she was the epitome of Southern grace and beauty, and that was the care she took with her appearance, her makeup, and the preservation of a youthful, glowing, Georgia-peaches-and-cream complexion. Mi

When I was five, we were living in Chicago. I went to a kindergarten called Camelot, though I do not particularly remember this as a fairy tale place. Truthfully, I don't remember much about it at all. Only three things: One was that my teacher's name was Miss Kathy. The second thing was that I was not allowed to bring a lunch from home (which pretty much wrecked me, since I was a very picky eater at that age, and "sloppy joe" was definitely not in my culinary repertoire) and the exit from the cafeteria was barred by "lunch monitors," whose job it was to inspect the trays you were returning when the mealtime was over. I don't recall anyone ever forcing me to turn around, sit back down, and eat whatever had displeased me—I don't recall what they actually did about the kids who hadn't eaten whatever the food of the day happened to be—but I do remember dreading that moment of egress, when I could see up the steps leading to freedom outside, but had

They'd move so quickly—hooking, looping, twisting yarn with a crochet hook—your eyes couldn't keep pace with the motion of Yiayia's fingers as they transformed an unbroken strand link by cotton link into a lace doily, a place mat; wool into an afghan. Her hands were always busy, fingers flying, creating an abundance of fabric objects, some functional and others purely decorative, placed under lamps and dishes, serving to cover side tables, the backs or arms of the plastic-coated living room furniture I remember quite well (and thought of as strange). The white lace doilies, several of which I have inherited, are quite delicate, some simple and others intricate; they have in common an elegance that was generally lacking in my grandmother's difficult and often impoverished immigrant life. Because of her circumstances, her culture, her upbringing, her temperament, it should be said that she was not delicate with her children (my mother and her five siblings), and that thi

The crash-and-burn of my ballet career (which was in fact before the actual career part ever got started) may be summed up with two words: thick ankles. Such was the pronouncement about me made to my mother by my principal teacher at North Carolina School of the Arts at the time, whom I'll call (with liberties) Madame S. This was at the end of the Fall 1984 semester, my last at NCSA, which had contained nothing but grueling classes, casting disappointments, and rehearsals for ballets in which I would ultimately not dance. I remember the way "thick ankles" was said, with some disdain and a shrug of hopelessness, as if it didn't matter what other qualities I possessed—fleetness was best among them, as was the passion I felt—the genetic anatomy of a body cannot be helped. My fifteen-year-old dancing self of course translated this as code-speak for "fat," which I most definitely was not. Any photograph of me from that time period will attest to the opposite. Whe

I didn't drink coffee in high school, nor did I drink soda—morning joe straight through until noon, Diet Coke the rest of the day were the fuel of my mid-twenties. But I do remember a caffeine buzz in teen years nonetheless, which took the form of a product called Vivarin, which I'm pretty sure came in a yellow box (the packaging was subsequently given a face-lift) and was sold in drug stores along with a competing brand, NoDoz. Marketing for this OTC stimulant was the key to its true pronunciation: "Revive with Vivarin" . . . but for some reason, I insisted on pronouncing "Viv-" as though it rhymed with "give," a short i sound. Now that I think of it, I'm not sure if the box was yellow, or if it was just the tablets themselves; maybe both. Anyway, the pills tasted horrible, chalky and bitter. I swilled them down with orange juice and cereal for dinner once the scheduled day was done, at least once in a quantity that was close to overdose stren

January 1990. I had been traveling in France, staking out possible foreign study programs; the City of Lights was not yet a firm choice. I began my tour in Paris during the last few days of 1989, spent a plate-smashing New Year's Eve shouting " bonne année !" in the Latin Quarter (but that's another story), subsequently headed to Besançon , and then left colder climates behind as I went south by train to Nice and the sunny Côte d'Azur , where my mom joined me for several days before we made the return trip to New York together. During these days of winter sun, we marveled at the light on the Mediterranean, watched swaying palm trees and brave beach-goers from the Promenade des Anglais (warmer than in the north, it was still too darn cold for bikinis on the beach!); we visited wonderful museums and, venturing to Menton , not far from the Italian border, ate some of the best pesto we've ever had. All that was lovely, but the thing I remember most about this

From 1979 through the early 1980s, when my family lived in Los Angeles and when I was between the ages of ten and fourteen, one of my favorite treats was to go to the Brentwood Country Mart,  which had a quaint, carefully arranged rustic charm, a rather folksy feel to it at the time. We would often go for lunch, which we ordered at the Reddi Chick counter, a fabulous rotisserie and barbecue chicken place that would prepare a basket for you with a side of fries piled high in a red and white patterned paper food tray. (Side note: Reddi Chick opened in 1979, the year we arrived in L.A., and it is apparently still operated by the original owners, Steve and Carol Salita.) We would take our food and find a table at the Mart's open-air patio—preferably a seat near the central fire pit, which was enclosed with a black (or smoke-blackened) mesh. The chicken was fabulous, but the best part about a trip to the Country Mart was the promise of what might come after lunch: a visit to the tiny, m

Today I remember Mr. McCatty, my middle school English teacher. His first name, I believe, was Ed. On a daily basis, he made himself memorable to us kids with his tweedy, uptight, grammarian ways; with his perfect enunciation; with his personal crusade against the interjection "like," which in Southern California in the 1980s was a quixotic endeavor (this was, after all, the time and place of the song "Valley Girl," by Moon Unit Zappa . . . like, gag me with a spoon, fer shure). Mr. McCatty had many other bêtes noirs. When someone raised a hand and asked, "Can I go to the bathroom?" his response was always, "I don't know. Can you?" If you didn't rephrase your question with "May I . . . ?" you may as well have peed in your seat. Mr. McCatty further disapproved of using the pronoun "I" in any kind of an essay. One could not write "I think that . . . ," under any circumstances. It was an egregious redundancy, as

I should have been in lightweight, fine-mesh tulle, pink or white; costumed to evoke a Degas dancer (I did have a black ribbon around my neck), posing among the polished wood furniture featured in the print ad for a fine antique store. If my costume had been white or pale pink, I felt sure, I would have been placed up front in the photograph. (Though maybe it was my olive complexion, too, that was too dark; I loved the sun and did not yet cultivate paleness as a mark of beauty, though at the time, there were still many assumptions about what a ballerina's skin ought to look like: anemic, as if to belie any suggestion of her true athleticism.) As it happened, though, I was in a costume of coarser blue material, and when the ad appeared in Architectural Digest in the mid-1980s, I was in the background, next to a seated violinist, pretending to be more interested in following along with his sheet music than in performing any dance steps. Front and center was another girl, a girl with

Sundays in Chicago, when I was young: elementary school age, Sunday school age. The mornings belonged to me and my father. Often in those years, he traveled for business during the week, and this made "seventh day" mornings all the more precious. On Sundays, we'd leave our family's Lincoln Park apartment early, dressed in church clothes, and head downtown. Occasionally we'd stop at my father's office in the old Playboy (Palmolive) building, which was the art deco, stair-step style skyscraper at the top of Michigan Avenue—the one with the beacon on top, sometimes called the Lindbergh beacon, that is now extinguished but that would, throughout my childhood years in the Windy City, shine like a lighthouse guiding nighttime traffic down Lake Shore Drive. I used to watch the spinning, searching light in the dark and know that this was where my father was; those evenings he worked late, I imagined that beacon of light still connected us and that this was what would

Ireland, 1998. It had been three years since my previous visit to the Emerald Isle. Having crossed the Atlantic, and having endured an additional five hours of northbound transport courtesy of Bus Eireann , the fatigue of travel caught up with me at last in Sligo , drugging me to sleep in my hotel on Douglas Hyde Bridge at 6:00 PM. When I awoke, the light was partial, a hint of sun in an overcast sky—a typical morning; it fit with my memories of Irish weather. I looked at my watch: 8:00. When was the last time I'd slept for fourteen hours? It suited my exhaustion. I still felt groggy, but I got up, showered, changed my clothes. I took my morning medication (daily dose of Synthroid , plus a multivitamin) and headed to the lobby, asking at the reception desk what time breakfast was served. They told me from 8:00 to 10:00. As I rounded a turn that led to the restaurant, I glanced out the glass front doors. The streetlights were still on, and the sidewalks quite populated. The streetli

January 16, 1991. Eighteen years ago to the day, and I was just a few years beyond eighteen myself. I had spent the fall term of 1990 securing placement in a study-abroad program that combined a semester's coursework with professional work experience in Paris, France. I was excited to be studying in another country, and yet . . . although I was no "innocent abroad," when the new year arrived it became clear that world events were much bigger, more complex and sophisticated, than a college student's adventure in language and culture; what else could I seem in comparison, if not innocent? At this point, Operation Desert Shield was in full swing, following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. With support from the U.N. (at least there was support), U.S. Armed Forces had been deployed to Saudi Arabia by George H. W. Bush (who would eventually be called "Bush père " by the French) in a "wholly defensive" tactic that was impossible to maintain. There were disc

On Thursdays in first or second grade, maybe both—every Thursday, mind you—I donned an olive green calico print dress and asked for my hair to be parted down the middle and braided in two long, low pigtails. There's nothing remarkable about this, but let's not forget the finishing touch: I insisted that my mom use her brown eyeliner to pencil a sprinkling of "freckles" on my cheeks. They looked real enough to me, though I'm sure I was the only one who thought so. What was I playing at? Well . . . Every Thursday evening, beginning on September 11, 1974 (that date now seems to strike hard at the heart of what an innocent life I led then!), the one-hour television drama series  Little House on the Prairie  aired on NBC. My parents were strict about limiting television exposure (hours and content), but this was a show with strong values and good topics for discussion, so we watched it together every week. The morning dress-up routine was just one way to build anticipa

I remember the way we were free with our bodies—as teenage girls, with each other. I don't mean this in a sexual way, though perhaps in some cases there was a subtle undercurrent of flirtation, maybe even of longing (but who does not long for signs of affection?). Here I am remembering an innocent, unconscious pleasure. Among us girls, there was no sense of "personal space" between friends, and I think we were not even aware of our touches, much of the time. If we sat next to each other, we leaned shoulder to shoulder; if we sprawled on the ground with limbs outstretched, one set of legs draped over the other; an arm would curve around someone's back, rest on a shoulder for no reason at all. It must have seemed to anyone looking at us, that we wore each other's bodies like accessories. And how interesting, that this happened at a time in life when girls are so painfully self-conscious about their bodies in general . . . but how much sense this makes! The nagging i

The middle of a Michigan winter. Darkness slipped down around us early, and we would move in a huddle of coats and hats and scarves that, if they covered our faces, would trap our breath and the smell of damp wool next to our mouths. We didn't care how cold it was; we wanted to be outside, where everything seemed still, the silence broken only by our own voices and the sound of our feet crunching across snow, our footsteps and teenage banter made louder in contrast with the surrounding quiet. We would lie down on the tennis courts that were beyond Faculty Lane, on the other side of the highway from the main campus buildings, near the summer camp's "High School Boys" area. During the academic year, there was really no reason for any of us to be on that side of the highway—then again, it seemed we were often where we had no business being. We'd lie on our backs, side by side on the cold clay courts, a chill pushing through our padded layers, reaching up and down our

White expanse of linen; bleached perfect square in front of me on a polished walnut bar. Folding, without too much thought required. Repetitive action draining away the minutes before the doors to the restaurant would open for business. Making my way through graduate school, I covered some measure of expenses by returning to the standby job of many artists: waiting tables. Growing up, it seemed you quickly fell into one camp or the other when it came to the (not necessarily) simple job for money—you were either "restaurant" or "retail." I dislike shopping, dislike salespeople trying to help me shop . . . I'm hardly right for retail. For me, it's always been restaurants, either front or back of house. I have worked at restaurants of varying degrees of size and finesse, from small hash-slinging diner to raw bar (shucking oysters is no mean task!), from bookstore café and espresso bar to the most recent, a more upscale American establishment. The shifts would

For any dancer of a certain generation (or two), there was only ever one "Mr. B," and that was Balanchine. He was ballet master extraordinaire, and before I was double digits in age, I knew enough to know that he was the surrogate father to please; the signposts of my nascent life read "NYCB or bust." Not that I needed another father—mine was wonderful—but Mr. B was the man whose vision shaped the ballet world, and that was the world I wanted to claim. I read biographies of Balanchine and autobiographies of dancers who were lucky enough (they must have been lucky, mustn't they?) to have inspired him to make ballets. I wanted, as did all my peers in the ballet world, to be the next Suzanne Farrell, the next muse, if only time and luck would be on my side. But it was not to be. Turning fifteen, attending NCSA (North Carolina School of the Arts), I already sensed that something about my dreams and my reality were not matching up. I saw the New York City Ballet, and

Between seventh and eighth grades (or between eighth and ninth?) the deal was this: if I wanted to take an art class in summer school, I had to take typing. So said Mom. Although I didn't mind being in an art studio soldering bits of stained glass together, the thought of staying inside, seated in front of a typewriter when I could see the sun in its beautiful blue sky out the window, was torture. Still, I sat there. Such is the suffering one will endure for art! I typed the home keys in order, hundreds of times: a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l-;. I stretched my fingers up for T and Y and down for B. I did pages of the prototype sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." Yes, it has every letter of the alphabet in it at least once. I learned to automatically put two spaces after each period. (I have had a hard time undoing this habit, but a copy editor's job these days is often to make sure there is only one space following a complete sentence!) It's fair to say

I don't know who told me this, or why I believed it. I was in high school, and someone said that if you took a regular nickel and pounded around the rim of it long enough, the center would fall out and you would have made a ring. I don't know if the pounding was supposed to be done with a metal spoon, or if that was my own odd touch, but sure enough, I started carrying around a nickel and a metal spoon, pilfered from the school cafeteria; I had them with me everywhere. I would tap, tap, tap on the edge of the nickel whenever I had a spare moment. Did it annoy the people around me? If it did, no one said so. I remember thinking that I was probably falling for some stupid trick, and yet . . . it's true that the rim of the nickel started getting beautifully smooth and nicely raised, definitely a ring in the making. I don't know how long I carried around the nickel and the spoon, and who knows how many taps I must've given it (one good thing: keeping both hands busy me

I cannot call it the MetLife Building, not to save my life. It was, and to me it still is and always will be, the Pan Am Building. Going up the escalators from the main hall of Grand Central Station, you'd reach the top, circulate through the revolving doors, pass a newsstand on your right, the bank of elevators, and eventually you'd reach Zum Zum, the breakfast (or lunch) counter run with efficiency by Edda, the middle-aged Polish waitress who always had a smile for her regulars. For a time, that included my father, and me. We'd perch on the stools and order eggs (him), or French toast (me), and we'd talk to each other and to Edda. I remember her as being short, a little stocky but not plump, and as having short blond hair. I could be wrong. I'm sure she had an accent, but I can no longer hear it in my mind. At Christmastime, she would purchase silk-thread ornaments (the basic globes you could buy in sets in a drug store and that came in bright solid colors of red,

January 1985. At fifteen years old, I was an angry ex-dancer; passion crushed, career shunted. It seemed so true, that statement about not going home again. After being on my own at fourteen, across the country from my parents in order to pursue a dream that didn't work out, there was no question of going back to a "normal" high school, no desire to live at home, despite my parents' support (or maybe because of it—I didn't want sympathy or for anyone to say they'd been afraid this kind of thing would happen). So, I was once again the "new girl" at another boarding school for artists, and that was fine; I could remake myself into anything at all: drama major, costume designer, metalsmith , photographer. Assuming, of course, that my parents and I made it through the whiteout. We had just arrived in Traverse City, Michigan, had found the school some 14 miles away, situated between two frozen lakes, abutting State Park land, and we were heading out to fi

I had just turned sixteen, and the world was a dark, melodramatic place of unrequited love and friendships betrayed. I'll tell you something about boarding school: you don't have anywhere to go to escape a bad social situation; the offenders are always there, not just in classes, but at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It wasn't just some deceitful teenage lothario who plagued me, however; everything was impossibly wretched. Classic teen anger and angst, hormones pounding the shores of my self-esteem. No one was any help, so I thought. It's all quite cliché On one particularly Gothic night—that is, dark and stormy, doom and gloom—I was feeling empty, without much hope. Not suicidal (never had a serious thought about that), but just this side of it. Then, a note from a friend arrived at exactly the right moment. Three words, written in tiny block print with a lot of white space surrounding them. The single imperative was neatly written in pencil on a quarter sheet of white